"War ain't over til it's over, mate."
There was a moment of silence between the men, both of them staring each other down.
"You were in the war," Alfie continued. "I once carried out my own personal form of stigmata on an Italian. I pushed his face up against the trench and shoved a six-inch nail up his fucking nose and I hammered it home with a duckboard. It was fucking biblical, mate. So don't come in here and sit there, in my chair, and tell me that I'm losing a war to a fucking wop."
"That war was a long time ago. You need to be more realistic."
"Realistic, yeah? Realistic?"
"Well, if you weren't losing the war, then you wouldn't have sent me the telegram."
"Really? You forget your fucking telegram. The telegram just said, 'Hello'. It's very simple. You want to sell me something. What?"
"We join forces."
Alfie's reply was instant, "Fuck off! No! Categorical. Fucking ridiculous."
Tommy sighed, leaning forward on Alfie's desk.
"Mr. Solomons, your distillery provides one-tenth of your income. Protection is another ten percent, and the rest you make from the race tracks. I know you keep a gun in the drawer, and I know you keep it beside the whiskey. I know you offer a deal, or death." Tommy sighed, already growing weary of the ordeal. "Now, I have a wife. A pretty little thing; prettiest little thing in the whole world. And before our first meeting, she told me to be kind to the Jews. She's a teacher, see, and she teaches a little Jewish girl. Only Jewish child in the entire school, might be from the only Jewish family in all of Birmingham. They have it hard, she told me. So, I listened. I've been nothing but kind to you, Mr. Solomons, have I not?"
Alfie stared at him with intrigue, and let him continue without an answer.
"That being said, you using that gun would make my pretty little wife quite upset, and if I happened to become more injured than I am already, she'll have the both of our necks. I don't want that any more than you do. I know what I'm saying makes you angry, but I'm offering you a solution. You see, Mr. Sabini is running all your bookies off your courses. And he's closing down the premises that take your rum. And people don't trust your protection anymore."
"You're the bloke who shot Billy Kimber, right?" he asked, pointing a finger at Tommy. "You did, you fucking shot him. That's you. You fucking betrayed him, mate. So it'll be entirely appropriate to do what I'm thinking in my head to you right now; pretty fucking wife be damned."
"I can offer you a hundred good men. All with weapons. A new relationship with the police."
"Intelligence." Alfie spoke with a wide gesture of his hands. "Intelligence is a very valuable thing, isn't it, my friend? But usually it comes far too fucking late."
Drawing a gun on Tommy, Tommy sighed and shut his eyes in annoyance, thanking God that his wife weren't there to witness it. He saw what she had done with the inspector, he couldn't imagine what she would do to Alfie.
"Let's say I shot you already, right in the fucking face. And the bullet goes bone, mush, bone, cabinet over there. Which is a shame, isn't it? Because that cabinet's fucked now and I got to get shit out of it. So, what I do is this. It's fucking simple, mate."
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devil's backbone 🗝 tommy shelby
Fanfiction"Don't care if he's guilty, Don't care if he's not; He's good and he's bad, And he's all that I've got." She grew up watching them, fearing them. A young girl in Birmingham, being told to stay away from the Shelby family at whatever cost. Whispe...
chapter 39
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