The Given Day

Chapter one

On a wet summer night, Danny Coughlin, a Boston police officer, fought a four-round bout against another cop, Johnny Green, at Mechanics Hall just outside Copley Square. Coughlin-Green was the final fight on a fifteen-bout, all-police card that included flyweights, welterweights, cruiserweights, and heavyweights. Danny Coughlin, at six two, 220, was a heavyweight. A suspect left hook and foot speed that was a few steps shy of blazing kept him from fighting professionally, but his butcher-knife left jab combined with the airmail-your-jaw-to-Georgia explosion of his right cross dwarfed the abilities of just about any other semipro on the East Coast.

The all-day pugilism display was titled Boxing & Badges: Haymakers for Hope. Proceeds were split fifty-fifty between the St. Thomas Asylum for Crippled Orphans and the policemen’s own fraternal organization, the Boston Social Club, which used the donations to bolster a health fund for injured coppers and to defray costs for uniforms and equipment, costs the department refused to pay. While flyers advertising the event were pasted to poles and hung from storefronts in good neighborhoods and thereby elicited donations from people who never intended to actually attend the event, the flyers also saturated the worst of the Boston slums, where one was most likely to find the core of the criminal element — the plug-uglies, the bullyboys, the knuckle-dusters, and, of course, the Gusties, the city’s most powerful and fuck-out-of-their-minds street gang, who headquartered in South Boston but spread their tentacles throughout the city at large.

The logic was simple:

The only thing criminals loved almost as much as beating the shit out of coppers was watching coppers beat the shit out of each other.

Coppers beat the shit out of each other at Mechanics Hall during Boxing & Badges: Haymakers for Hope.

Ergo: criminals would gather at Mechanics Hall to watch them do so.

Danny Coughlin’s godfather, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, had decided to exploit this theory to the fullest for benefit of the BPD in general and the Special Squads Division he lorded over in particular. The men in Eddie McKenna’s squad had spent the day mingling with the crowd, closing outstanding warrant after outstanding warrant with a surprisingly bloodless efficiency. They waited for a target to leave the main hall, usually to relieve himself, before they hit him over the head with a pocket billy and hauled him off to one of the paddy wagons that waited in the alley. By the time Danny stepped into the ring, most of the mugs with outstanding warrants had been scooped up or had slipped out the back, but a few — hopeless and dumb to the last — still milled about in the smoke-laden room on a floor sticky with spilt beer.

Danny’s corner man was Steve Coyle. Steve was also his patrol partner at the Oh-One Station House in the North End. They walked a beat from one end of Hanover Street to the other, from Constitution Wharf to the Crawford House Hotel, and as long as they’d been doing it, Danny had boxed and Steve had been his corner and his cut man.

Danny, a survivor of the 1916 bombing of the Salutation Street Station House, had been held in high regard since his rookie year on the job. He was broad-shouldered, dark-haired and dark-eyed; more than once, women had been noted openly regarding him, and not just immigrant women or those who smoked in public. Steve, on the other hand, was squat and rotund like a church bell, with a great pink bulb of a face and a bow to his walk. Early in the year he’d joined a barbershop quartet in order to attract the fancy of the fairer sex, a decision that had served him in good stead this past spring, though prospects appeared to be dwindling as autumn neared.

Steve, it was said, talked so much he gave aspirin powder a headache. He’d lost his parents at a young age and joined the department without any connections or juice. After nine years on the job, he was still a flatfoot. Danny, on the other hand, was BPD royalty, the son of Captain Thomas Coughlin of Precinct 12 in South Boston and the godson of Special Squads Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. Danny had been on the job less than five years, but every cop in the city knew he wasn’t long for uniform.

“Fuckin’ taking this guy so long?” Steve scanned the back of the hall, hard to ignore in his attire of choice. He claimed he’d read somewhere that Scots were the most feared of all corner men in the fight game. And so, on fight nights, Steve came to the ring in a kilt. An authentic, red tartan kilt, red and black argyle socks, charcoal tweed jacket and matching five-button waistcoat, silver wedding tie, authentic gillie brogues on his feet, and a loose-crowned Balmoral on his head. The real surprise wasn’t how at home he looked in the getup, it was that he wasn’t even Scottish.

The audience, red-faced and drunk, had grown increasingly agitated the last hour or so, more and more actual fights breaking out between the scheduled ones. Danny leaned against the ropes and yawned. Mechanics Hall stank of sweat and booze. Smoke, thick and wet, curled around his arms. By all rights he should have been back in his dressing room, but he didn’t really have a dressing room, just a bench in the maintenance hallway, where they’d sent Woods from the Oh-Nine looking for him five minutes ago, told him it was time to head to the ring.

So he stood there in an empty ring waiting for Johnny Green, the buzz of the crowd growing louder, buzzier. Eight rows back, one guy hit another guy with a folding chair. The hitter was so drunk he fell on top of his victim. A cop waded in, clearing a path with his domed helmet in one hand and his pocket billy in the other.

“Why don’t you see what’s taking Green?” Danny asked Steve.

“Why don’t you climb under my kilt and pucker up?” Steve chin-gestured at the crowd. “Them’s some restless sots. Like as not to tear my kilt or scuff my brogues.”

“Heavens,” Danny said. “And you without your shine box.” He bounced his back off the ropes a few times. Stretched his neck, swiveled his hands on the wrists. “Here comes the fruit.”

Steve said, “What?” and then stepped back when a brown head of lettuce arced over the ropes and splattered in the center of the ring.

“My mistake,” Danny said. “Vegetable.”

“No matter.” Steve pointed. “The pretender appears. Just in time.”

Danny looked down the center aisle and saw Johnny Green framed by a slanted white rectangle of doorway. The crowd sensed him and turned. He came down the aisle with his trainer, a guy Danny recognized as a desk sergeant at the One-Five, but whose name escaped him. About fifteen rows back, one of Eddie McKenna’s Special Squads guys, a goon named Hamilton, grabbed a guy off his feet by his nostrils and dragged him up the aisle, the Special Squads cowboys apparently figuring all pretense could be chucked now that the final fight was about to begin.

Carl Mills, the BPD press spokesman, was calling to Steve from the other side of the ropes. Steve went to one knee to talk to him. Danny watched Johnny Green come, not liking something that floated in the guy’s eyes, something unhooked. Johnny Green saw the crowd, he saw the ring, he saw Danny — but he didn’t. Instead, he looked at everything and looked past everything at the same time. It was a look Danny had seen before, mostly on the faces of three-bottles-to-the-wind drunks or rape victims.

Steve came up behind him and put a hand on his elbow. “Mills just told me this is his third fight in twenty-four hours.”

“What? Whose?”

“Whose? Fucking Green’s. He had one last night over at the Crown in Somerville, fought another this morning down at the rail yards in Brighton, and now here he is.”

“How many rounds?”

“Mills heard he went thirteen last night for sure. And lost by KO.”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“Rent,” Steve said. “Two kids, a pregger wife.”

“Fucking rent?”

The crowd was on its feet — the walls shuddering, the rafters shimmying. If the roof suddenly shot straight up into the sky, Danny doubted he’d feel surprise. Johnny Green entered the ring without a robe. He stood in his corner and banged his gloves together, his eyes staring up at something in his skull.

“He doesn’t even know where he is,” Danny said.

“Yeah, he does,” Steve said, “and he’s coming to the center.”

“Steve, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t ‘Christ’s sake’ me. Get in there.”

In the center of the ring, the referee, Detective Bilky Neal, a former boxer himself, placed a hand on each of their shoulders. “I want a clean fight. Barring that, I want it to look clean. Any questions?”

Danny said, “This guy can’t see.”

Green’s eyes were on his shoes. “See enough to knock your head off.”

“I take my gloves off, could you count my fingers?”

Green raised his head and spit on Danny’s chest.

Danny stepped back. “What the fuck?” He wiped the spittle off on his glove, wiped his glove on his shorts.

Shouts from the crowd. Beer bottles shattered against the base of the ring.

Green met his eyes, Green’s sliding like something on a ship. “You want to quit, you quit. In public, though, so I still get the purse. Just grab the megaphone and quit.”

“I’m not quitting.”

“Then fight.”

Bilky Neal gave them a smile that was nervous and furious at the same time. “They’s getting restless out there, gents.”

Danny pointed with a glove. “Look at him, Neal. Look at him.”

“He looks fine to me.”

“This is bullshit. I—”

Green’s jab caught Danny’s chin. Bilky Neal backed up, top speed, and waved his arm. The bell rang. The crowd roared. Green shot another jab into Danny’s throat.

The crowd went crazy.

Danny stepped into the next punch and wrapped Green up. As Johnny delivered half a dozen rabbit punches into Danny’s neck, Danny said, “Give it up. Okay?”

“Fuck you. I need … I …”

Danny felt warm liquid run down his back. He broke the clinch.

Johnny cocked his head as pink foam spilled over his lower lip and dribbled down his chin. He’d stood like that for five seconds, an eternity in the ring, arms down by his side. Danny noticed how childlike his expression had become, as if he’d just been hatched.

Then his eyes narrowed. His shoulders clenched. His hands rose. The doctor would later tell Danny (when he’d been stupid enough to ask) that a body under extreme duress often acts out of reflex. Had Danny known that at the time, maybe it would have made a difference, though he was hard-pressed to see how. A hand rising in a boxing ring rarely meant anything but what one naturally assumed. Green’s left fist entered the space between their bodies, Danny’s shoulder twitched, and his right cross blew up into the side of Johnny Green’s head.

Instinct. Purely that.

There wasn’t much left of Johnny to count out. He lay on the canvas kicking his heels, spitting white foam, and then gouts of pink. His head swayed left to right, left to right. His mouth kissed the air the way fish kissed the air.

Three fights in the same day? Danny thought. You fucking kidding?

Johnny lived. Johnny was fine. Never to fight again, of course, but after a month he could speak clearly. After two, he’d lost the limp and the left side of his mouth had thawed from its stricture.

Danny was another issue. It wasn’t that he felt responsible — yes, sometimes he did, but most times he understood the stroke had already found Johnny Green before Danny threw his counterpunch. No the issue was one of balance — Danny, in two short years, had gone from the Salutation Street bombing to losing the only woman he’d ever loved, Nora O’Shea, an Irishwoman who worked for his parents as a domestic. Their affair had felt doomed from the start, and it had been Danny who had ended it, but since she’d left his life, he couldn’t think of one good reason to live it. Now he’d almost killed Johnny Green in the ring at Mechanics Hall. All of this in twenty-one months. Twenty-one months that would have led anyone to question whether God held a grudge.

His woman took off,” Steve told Danny two months later. It was early September, and Danny and Steve walked the beat in the North End of Boston. The North End was predominantly Italian and poor, a place where rats grew to the size of butchers’ forearms and infants often died before their first steps. English was rarely spoken; automobile sightings unlikely. Danny and Steve, however, were so fond of the neighborhood that they lived in the heart of it, on different floors of a Salem Street rooming house just blocks from the Oh-One Station House on Hanover.

“Whose woman?”

“Now don’t blame yourself,” Steve said. “Johnny Green’s.”

“Why’d she leave him?”

“Fall’s coming. They got evicted.”

“But he’s back on the job,” Danny said. “A desk, yeah, but back on the job.”

Steve nodded. “Don’t make up for the two months he was out, though.”

Danny stopped, looked at his partner. “They didn’t pay him? He was fighting in a department-sponsored smoker.”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Because the last couple months? A man brings up Johnny Green’s name around you and you shut him down surer than a chastity belt.”

“I want to know,” Danny said.

Steve shrugged. “It was a Boston Social Club — sponsored smoker. So technically, he got hurt off the job. Thus …” He shrugged again. “No sick pay.”

Danny said nothing. He tried to find solace in his surroundings. The North End had been his home until he was seven years old, before the Irish who’d laid its streets and the Jews who’d come after them had been displaced by Italians who populated it so densely that if a picture were taken of Napoli and another of Hanover Street, most would be hard-pressed to identify which had been taken in the United States. Danny had moved back when he was twenty, and planned never to leave.

Danny and Steve walked their beat in sharp air that smelled of chimney smoke and cooked lard. Old women waddled into the streets. Carts and horses made their way along the cobblestone. Coughs rattled from open windows. Babies squawked at so high a pitch Danny could imagine the red of their faces. In most tenements, hens roamed the hallways, goats shit in the stairwells, and sows nestled in torn newspaper and a dull rage of flies. Add an entrenched distrust of all things non-Italian, including the English language, and you had a society no Americano was ever going to comprehend.

So it wasn’t terribly surprising that the North End was the prime recruiting area for every major anarchist, Bolshevik, radical, and subversive organization on the Eastern Seaboard. Which made Danny love it all the more for some perverse reason. Say what you would about the people down here — and most did, loudly and profanely — but you sure couldn’t question their passion. In accordance with the Espionage Act of 1917, most of them could be arrested and deported for speaking out against the government. In many cities they would have been, but arresting someone in the North End for advocating the overthrow of the United States was like arresting people for letting their horses shit on the street — they wouldn’t be hard to find, but you’d better have an awfully large truck.

Danny and Steve entered a café on Richmond Street. The walls were covered with black wool crosses, three dozen of them at least, most the size of a man’s head. The owner’s wife had been knitting them since America had entered the war. Danny and Steve ordered espressos. The owner placed their cups on the glass countertop with a bowl of brown sugar lumps and left them alone. His wife came in and out from the back room with trays of bread and placed them in the shelves below the counter until the glass steamed up below their elbows.

The woman said to Danny, “War end soon, eh?”

“It sounds like it.”

“Is good,” she said. “I sew one more cross. Maybe help.” She gave him a hesitant smile and a bow and returned to the back.

They drank their espressos and when they walked back out of the café, the sun was brighter and caught Danny in the eyes. Soot from the smokestacks along the wharf seesawed through the air and dusted the cobblestone. The neighborhood was quiet except for the occasional roll-up of a shop grate and the clop-and-squeak of a horse-drawn wagon delivering wood. Danny wished it could stay like this, but soon the streets would fill with vendors and livestock and truant kids and soapbox Bolsheviks and soapbox anarchists. Then some of the men would hit the saloons for a late breakfast and some of the musicians would hit the corners not occupied by the soapboxes and someone would hit a wife or a husband or a Bolshevik.

Once the wife beaters and husband beaters and Bolshevik beaters were dealt with, there would be pickpockets, penny-to-nickel extortions, dice games on blankets, card games in the back rooms of cafés and barbershops, and members of the Black Hand selling insurance against everything from fire to plague but mostly from the Black Hand.

“Got another meeting tonight,” Steve said. “Big doings.”

“BSC meeting?” Danny shook his head. “‘Big doings.’ You’re serious?”

Steve twirled his pocket billy on its leather strap. “You ever think if you showed up to union meetings, maybe you’d be bumped to Detective Division by now, we’d all have our raise, and Johnny Green’d still have his wife and kids?”

Danny peered up at a sky with glare but no visible sun. “It’s a social club.”

“It’s a union,” Steve said.

“Then why’s it called the Boston Social Club?” Danny yawned up at the white leather sky.

“A fine point. The point of the matter, in fact. We’re trying to change that.”

“Change it all you want and it’s still just a union in name. We’re cops, Steve — we’ve got no rights. The BSC? Just a boys’ club, a fucking tree house.”

“We’re setting up a meeting with Gompers, Dan. The AF of L.”

Danny stopped. If he told his father or Eddie McKenna about this, he’d get a gold shield and be bumped up out of patrol the day after tomorrow.

“The AF of L is a national union. You crazy? They’ll never let cops join.”

“Who? The mayor? The governor? O’Meara?”

“O’Meara,” Danny said. “He’s the only one that matters.”

Police Commissioner Stephen O’Meara’s bedrock belief was that a policeman’s post was the highest of all civic posts and therefore demanded both the outward and inward reflection of honor. When he’d taken over the BPD, each precinct had been a fiefdom, the private reserve of whichever ward boss or city councilman got his snout into the trough faster and deeper than his competition. The men looked like shit, dressed like shit, and didn’t give shit.

O’Meara purged a lot of that. Not all of it, Lord knows, but he’d fired some deadwood and worked to indict the most egregious of the ward bosses and councilmen. He’d set the rotted system back on its heels and then pushed, in hopes it would fall over. Didn’t happen, but it teetered on occasion. Enough so he could send a good number of the police back out into their communities to get to know the people they served. And that’s what you did in O’Meara’s BPD if you were a smart patrolman (with limited contacts) — you served the people. Not the ward bosses or the midget czars with the gold bars. You looked like a cop and you carried yourself like a cop and you stepped aside for no man and you never bent the basic principle: you were the law.

But even O’Meara, apparently, couldn’t bend City Hall to his will in the latest fight for a raise. They hadn’t had one in six years, and that raise, pushed through by O’Meara himself, had come after eight years of stalemate. So Danny and all the other men on the force were paid the fair wage of 1905. And in his last meeting with the BSC, the mayor had said that was the best they could look forward to for a while.

Twenty-nine cents an hour for a seventy-three-hour week. No overtime. And that was for day patrolmen like Danny and Steve Coyle, the plum assignment. The poor night guys were paid a flat two bits an hour and worked eighty-three hours a week. Danny would have thought it outrageous if it hadn’t been steeped in a truth he’d accepted since he could first walk: the system fucked the workingman. The only realistic decision a man had to make was if he was going to buck the system and starve, or play it with so much pluck and guts that none of its inequities applied to him.

“O’Meara,” Steve said, “sure. I love the old man, too, I do. Love him, Dan. But he’s not giving us what we were promised.”

Danny said, “Maybe they really don’t have the money.”

“That’s what they said last year. Said wait till the war’s over and we’ll reward your loyalty.” Steve held his hands out. “I’m looking, and I don’t see no reward.”

“The war isn’t over.”

Steve Coyle made a face. “For all intents and purposes.”

“So, fine, reopen negotiations.”

“We did. And they turned us down again last week. And cost of living has been climbing since June. We’re fucking starving, Dan. You’d know it if you had kids.”

“You don’t have kids.”

“My brother’s widow, God rest him, she’s got two. I might as well be married. Wench thinks I’m Gilchrist’s on store-credit day.”

Danny knew Steve had been putting it to the Widow Coyle since a month or two after his brother’s body had entered the grave. Rory Coyle’s femoral artery had been sliced by a cattle shear at the Brighton stockyards, and he’d bled out on the floor amid some stunned workers and oblivious cows. When the stockyard refused to pay even a minimal death benefit to his family, the workers had used Rory Coyle’s death as a rallying cry to unionize, but their strike had only lasted three days before the Brighton PD, the Pinkertons, and some out-of-town bat swingers had pushed back and turned Rory Joseph Coyle right quick into Rory Fucking Who.

Across the street, a man with an anarchist’s requisite watch cap and handlebar mustache set up his wood crate under a street pole and consulted the notebook under his arm. He climbed up on the crate. For a moment Danny felt an odd sympathy for the man. He wondered if he had children, a wife.

“The AF of L is national,” he said again. “The department will never — fucking ever—allow it.”

Steve placed a hand on his arm, his eyes losing their usual blithe light. “Come to a meeting, Dan. Fay Hall. Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“What’s the point?” Danny said as the guy across the street started shouting in Italian.

“Just come,” Steve said.

After their shift, Danny had dinner alone and then a few too many drinks in Costello’s, a waterfront saloon favored by police. With every drink, Johnny Green grew smaller, Johnny Green and his three fights in one day, his foaming mouth, his desk job and eviction notice. When Danny left, he took his flask and walked through the North End. Tomorrow would be his first day off in twenty, and as usually happened for some perverse reason, his exhaustion left him wide awake and antsy. The streets were quiet again, the night deepening around them. At the corner of Hanover and Salutation streets, he leaned against a streetlamp pole and looked at the shuttered station house. The lowest windows, those that touched the sidewalk, bore scorch marks, but otherwise you’d be hard-pressed to guess anything violent had ever happened inside.

The Harbor Police had decided to move to another building a few blocks over on Atlantic. They’d told the papers the move had been planned for over a year, but nobody swallowed it. Salutation Street had ceased being a building where anyone felt safe. And illusions of safety were the least a populace demanded of a police station.

One week before Christmas 1916 Steve had been felled by a case of strep. Danny, working solo, had arrested a thief coming off a ship moored amid the ice chunks and gray sea chop of Battery Wharf. This made it a Harbor Police problem and Harbor Police paperwork; all Danny had to do was the drop-off.

It had been an easy pinch. As the thief strolled down the gangplank with a burlap sack over his shoulder, the sack clanked. Danny, yawning into the end of his shift, noticed that this guy had neither the hands, the shoes, nor the walk of a stevedore or a teamster. He told him to halt. The thief shrugged and lowered the sack. The ship he’d robbed was set to depart with food and medical supplies for starving children in Belgium. When some passersby saw the cans of food spill onto the dock, they spread the word, and just as Danny put the cuffs on, the beginnings of a mob congregated at the end of the wharf. Starving Belgian children were the rage that month, the papers filled with accounts of German atrocities against the innocent, God-fearing Flemish. Danny had to draw his pocket billy and hold it above his shoulder in order to pull the thief through the crowd and head up Hanover toward Salutation Street.

Off the wharves, the Sunday streets were cold and quiet, dusted from snow that had been falling all morning, the flakes tiny and dry as ash. The thief was standing beside Danny at the Salutation Street admitting desk, showing him his chapped hands, saying a few nights in the slammer might be just the thing to get the blood circulating again in all this cold, when seventeen sticks of dynamite detonated in the basement.

The exact character of the explosion was something neighborhood people would debate for weeks. Whether the blast was preceded by two muffled thuds or three. Whether the building shook before the doors flew off their hinges or afterward. Every window on the other side of the street blew out, from ground floor to fifth story, one end of the block to the other, and that made its own racket, impossible to distinguish from the original explosion. But to those inside the station house, the seventeen sticks of dynamite made a very distinctive sound, quite different from all those that would follow when the walls split and the floors collapsed.

What Danny heard was thunder. Not the loudest thunder he’d ever heard necessarily, but the deepest. Like a great dark yawn from a great wide god. He would have never questioned it as anything but thunder if he hadn’t recognized immediately that it came from below him. It loosed a baritone yowl that moved the walls and shimmied the floors. All in less than a second. Enough time for the thief to look at Danny and Danny to look at the duty sergeant and the duty sergeant to look at the two patrolmen who’d been arguing over the Belgian war in the corner. Then the rumble and the building-shudder deepened. The wall behind the duty sergeant drizzled plaster. It looked like powdered milk or soap flakes. Danny wanted to point so the sergeant could get a look at it, but the sergeant disappeared, just dropped past the desk like a condemned man through a scaffold. The windows blew out. Danny looked through them and saw a gray film of sky. Then the floor beneath him collapsed.

From thunder to collapse, maybe ten seconds. Danny opened his eyes a minute or two later to the peal of fire alarms. Another sound ringing in his left ear as well, a bit higher-pitched, though not as loud. A kettle’s constant hiss. The duty sergeant lay across from him on his back, a slab of desk over his knees, his eyes closed, nose broken, some teeth, too. Danny had something sharp digging into his back. He had scratches all over his hands and arms. Blood flowed from a hole in his neck, and he dug his handkerchief out of his pocket and placed it to the wound. His greatcoat and uniform were shredded in places. His domed helmet was gone. Men in their underwear, men who’d been sleeping in bunks between shifts, lay in the rubble. One had his eyes open and looked at Danny as if Danny could explain why he’d woken up to this.

Outside, sirens. The heavy slap of fire engine tires. Whistles.

The guy in his underwear had blood on his face. He lifted a chalky hand and wiped some of it off.

“Fucking anarchists,” he said.

That had been Danny’s first thought, too. Wilson had just been reelected on a promise that he’d keep them out of all Belgian affairs, all French and German affairs. But a change of heart had apparently taken place somewhere in the corridors of power. Suddenly it was deemed necessary for the United States to join the war effort. Rockefeller said so. J. P. Morgan said so. Lately the press had said so. Belgian children were being treated poorly. Starving. The Huns had a reputed fondness for atrocity — bombing French hospitals, starving more Belgian children. Always the children, Danny had noticed. A lot of the country smelled a rat, but it was the radicals who started making a ruckus. Two weeks back there’d been a demonstration a few blocks away, anarchists and socialists and the IWW. The police — both city and harbor — had broken it up, made some arrests, cracked some heads. The anarchists mailed threats to the newspapers, promised reprisals.

“Fucking anarchists,” the cop in his underwear repeated. “Fucking terrorist Eye-talians.”

Danny tested his left leg, then his right. When he was pretty sure they’d hold him, he stood. He looked up at the holes in the ceiling. Holes the size of beer casks. From here, all the way down in the basement, he could see the sky.

Someone moaned to his left, and he saw the top of the thief’s red hair sticking out from beneath mortar and wood and a piece of door from one of the cells down the hall. He pulled a blackened plank off the guy’s back, removed a brick from his neck. He knelt by the thief as the guy gave him a tight smile of thanks.

“What’s your name?” Danny asked, because it suddenly seemed important. But the life slid off the thief’s pupils as if falling from a ledge. Danny would have expected it to rise. To flee upward. But instead it sank into itself, an animal retreating into its hole until there was nothing left of it. Just a not-quite-guy where the guy had lain, a distant, cooling thing. He pressed the handkerchief harder against his neck, closed the thief’s eyelids with his thumb, and felt an inexplicable agitation over not knowing the man’s name.

At Mass General, a doctor used tweezers to pull whiskers of metal from Danny’s neck. The metal had come from the piece of bed frame that hit Danny on its way to imbedding itself in a wall. The doctor told Danny the chunk of metal had come so close to his carotid artery that it should have sheared it in half. He studied the trail of it for another minute or so and told Danny that it had, in fact, missed the artery by roughly one — one thousandth of a millimeter. He informed Danny that this was a statistical aberration on a par with getting hit in the head by a flying cow. He then cautioned him against spending any future time in the kinds of buildings that anarchists were fond of bombing.

A few months after he left the hospital, Danny began his dire love affair with Nora O’Shea. On one of the days of their secret courtship, she kissed the scar on his neck and told him he was blessed.

“If I’m blessed,” he said to her, “what was the thief?”

“Not you.”

This was in a room at the Tidewater Hotel that overlooked the boardwalk of Nantasket Beach in Hull. They’d taken the steamboat from downtown and spent the day at Paragon Park, riding the carousel and the teacups. They ate saltwater taffy and fried clams so hot they had to be waved through the sea breeze before they could be swallowed.

Nora bested him in the shooting gallery. One lucky shot, true, but a bull’s-eye and so it was Danny who was handed the stuffed bear by the smirking park vendor. It was a raggedy thing, its split seams already disgorging pale brown stuffing and sawdust. Later, in their room, she used it to defend herself during a pillow fight, and that was the end of the bear. They swept up the sawdust and the stuffing with their hands. Danny, on his knees, found one of the late bear’s button eyes under the brass bed and placed it in his pocket. He hadn’t intended to keep it beyond that day, but now, over a year later, he rarely left his rooming house without it.

Danny and Nora’s affair had begun in April of 1917, the month the United States entered the war against Germany. It was an unseasonably warm month. Flowers bloomed earlier than predicted; near the end of the month their perfume reached windows high above the streets. Lying together in the smell of flowers and the constant threat of a rain that never fell, as the ships left for Europe, as the patriots rallied in the streets, as a new world seemed to sprout beneath them even quicker than the blooming flowers, Danny knew the relationship was doomed. This was even before he’d learned her bleaker secrets, back when the relationship was in the first pink blush of itself. He felt a helplessness that had refused to leave him since he’d woken on the basement floor of Salutation Street. It wasn’t just Salutation (though that would play a large role in his thoughts for the rest of his life), it was the world. The way it gathered speed with every passing day. The way the faster it went, the less it seemed to be steered by any rudder or guided by any constellation. The way it just continued to sail on, regardless of him.

Danny left the boarded-up ruin of Salutation and crossed the city with his flask. Just before dawn, he made his way up onto the Dover Street Bridge and stood looking out at the skyline, at the city caught between dusk and day under a scud of low clouds. It was limestone and brick and glass, its lights darkened for the war effort, a collection of banks and taverns, restaurants and bookstores, jewelers and warehouses and department stores and rooming houses, but he could feel it huddled in the gap between last night and tomorrow morning, as if it had failed to seduce either. At dawn, a city had no finery, no makeup or perfume. It was sawdust on the floors, the overturned tumbler, the lone shoe with a broken strap.

“I’m drunk,” he said to the water, and his foggy face stared back at him from a cup of light in the gray water, the reflection of the sole lamp lit under the bridge. “So drunk.” He spit down at his reflection, but he missed it.

Voices came from his right and he turned and saw them — the first gaggle of the morning migration heading out of South Boston and up onto the bridge: women and children going into the city proper for work.

He walked off the bridge and found a doorway in a failed fruit wholesalers building. He watched them come, first in clumps and then in streams. Always the women and children first, their shifts an hour or two before the men’s so they could return home in time to get dinner ready. Some chatted loudly and gaily, others were quiet or soggy with sleep. The older women moved with palms to their backs or hips or other aches. Many were dressed in the coarse clothing of mill and factory laborers, while others wore the heavily starched, black-and-white uniforms of domestics and hotel cleaners.

He sipped from his flask in the dark doorway, hoping she’d be among them and hoping she wouldn’t.

Some children were herded up Dover by two older women who scolded them for crying, for scuffling their feet, for holding up the crowd, and Danny wondered if they were the eldest of their families, sent out at the earliest age to continue the family tradition, or if they were the youngest, and money for school had already been spent.

He saw Nora then. Her hair was covered by a handkerchief tied off behind her head but he knew it was curly and impossible to tame, so she kept it short. He knew by the thickness of her lower eyelids she hadn’t slept well. He knew she had a blemish at the base of her spine and the blemish was scarlet red against pale white skin and shaped like a dinner bell. He knew she was self-conscious about her Donegal brogue and had been trying to lose it ever since his father had carried her into the Coughlin household five years ago on Christmas Eve after finding her half-starved and frostbitten along the Northern Avenue docks.

She and another girl stepped off the sidewalk to move around the slower children and Danny smiled when the other girl passed a furtive cigarette to Nora and she cupped it in her hand and took a quick puff.

He thought of stepping out of the doorway and calling to her. He pictured himself reflected in her eyes, his eyes swimming with booze and uncertainty. Where others saw bravery, she would see cowardice.

And she’d be right.

Where others saw a tall, strong man, she’d see a weak child.

And she’d be right.

So he stayed in the doorway. He stayed there and fingered the bear’s-eye button in his pants pocket until she was lost in the crowd heading up Dover Street. And he hated himself and hated her, too, for the ruin they’d made of each other.

Chapter two

Luther lost his job at the munitions factory in September. Came in to do a day’s work, found a yellow slip of paper taped to his workbench. It was a Wednesday, and as had become his habit during the week, he’d left his tool bag underneath the bench the night before, each tool tightly wrapped in oilcloth and placed one beside the other. They were his own tools, not the company’s, given to him by his Uncle Cornelius, the old man gone blind before his time. When Luther was a boy, Cornelius would sit on the porch and take a small bottle of oil from the overalls he wore whether it was a hundred in the shade or there was frost on the woodpile, and he’d wipe down his tool set, knowing each one by touch and explaining to Luther how that wasn’t no crescent wrench, boy, was a monkey wrench, get it straight, and how any man didn’t know the difference by touch alone ought just use the monkey wrench, ’cause a monkey what he be. He took to teaching Luther his tools the way he knew them himself. He’d blindfold the boy, Luther giggling on the hot porch, and then he’d hand him a bolt, make him match it to the box points of a socket, make him do it over and over until the blindfold wasn’t fun no more, was stinging Luther’s eyes with his own sweat. But over time, Luther’s hands began to see and smell and taste things to the point where he sometimes suspected his fingers saw colors before his eyes did. Probably why he’d never bobbled a baseball in his life.

Never cut himself on the job neither. Never mashed no thumb working the drill press, never sliced his flesh on a propeller blade by gripping the wrong edge when he went to lift it. And all the while, his eyes remained somewhere else, looking at the tin walls, smelling the world on the other side, knowing someday he’d be out in it, way out in it, and it would be wide.

The yellow slip of paper said “See Bill,” and that was all, but Luther felt something in those words that made him reach below his bench and pick up the beat-on leather tool bag and carry it with him as he crossed the work floor toward the shift supervisor’s office. He was holding it in his hand when he stood before Bill Hackman’s desk, and Bill, sad-eyed and sighing all the time, and not so bad for white folk, said, “Luther, we got to let you go.”

Luther felt himself vanish, go so damn small inside of himself that he could feel himself as a needlepoint with no rest of the needle behind it, a dot of almost-air that hung far back in his skull, and him watching his own body stand in front of Bill’s desk, and he waited for that needlepoint to tell it to move again.

It’s what you had to do with white folk when they talked to you directly, with their eyes on yours. Because they never did that unless they were pretending to ask you for something they planned to just take anyway or, like now, when they were delivering bad news.

“All right,” Luther said.

“Wasn’t my decision,” Bill explained. “All these boys are going to be coming back from the war soon, and they’ll need jobs.”

“War’s still going on,” Luther said.

Bill gave him a sad smile, the kind you’d give a dog you were fond of but couldn’t teach to sit or roll over. “War’s as good as over. Trust me, we know.”

By “we,” Luther knew he meant the company, and Luther figured if anyone knew, it was the company, because they’d been giving Luther a steady paycheck for helping them make weapons since ’15, long before America was supposed to have anything to do with this war.

“All right,” Luther said.

“And, yeah, you did fine work here, and we sure tried to find you a place, a way you could stay on, but them boys’ll be coming back in buckets, and they fought hard over there, and Uncle Sam, he’ll want to say thanks.”

“All right.”

“Look,” Bill said, sounding a bit frustrated, as if Luther were pitching a fight, “you understand, don’t you? You wouldn’t want us to put those boys, those patriots, out on the street. I mean, how would that look, Luther? Wouldn’t look right, I’ll tell you right now. Why you yourself would be unable to hold your head high if you walked the street and saw one of them boys pass you by looking for work while you got a fat paycheck in your pocket.”

Luther didn’t say anything. Didn’t mention that a lot of those patriotic boys who risked their lives for their country were colored boys, but he’d sure bet that wasn’t who was taking his job. Hell, he’d bet if he came back to the factory a year from now, the only colored faces he’d see would belong to the men working the cleanup shift, emptying the office wastebaskets and sweeping the metal shavings off the work floors. And he didn’t wonder aloud how many of those white boys who’d replace all these here coloreds had actually served overseas or got their ribbons for typing or some such in posts down in Georgia or around Kansas way.

Luther didn’t open his mouth, just kept it as closed as the rest of him until Bill got tired of arguing with himself and told Luther where he’d need to go to collect his pay.

So there was Luther, his ear to the ground, hearing there might, just might maybe be some work in Youngstown, and someone else had heard tell of hirings in a mine outside of Ravenswood, just over the other side of the river in West Virginia. Economy was getting tight again, though, they all said. White-tight.

And then Lila start talking about an aunt she had in Greenwood.

Luther said, “Never heard of that place.”

“Ain’t in Ohio, baby. Ain’t in West Virginia or Kentucky neither.”

“Then where’s it at?”

“Tulsa.”

“Oklahoma?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, her voice soft, like she’d been planning it for a while and wanted to be subtle about letting him think he made up his own mind.

“Shit, woman.” Luther rubbed the outsides of her arms. “I ain’t going to no Oklahoma.”

“Where you going to go then? Next door?”

“What’s next door?” He looked over there.

“Ain’t no jobs. That’s all I know about next door.”

Luther gave that some thought, feeling her circling him, like she was more than a few steps ahead.

“Baby,” she said, “Ohio ain’t done nothing for us but keep us poor.”

“Didn’t make us poor.”

“Ain’t going to make us rich.”

They were sitting on the swing he’d built on what remained of the porch where Cornelius had taught him what amounted to his trade. Two-thirds of the porch had washed away in the floods of ’13, and Luther kept meaning to rebuild it, but there’d been so much baseball and so much work the last few years, he hadn’t found the time. And it occurred to him — he was flush. It wouldn’t last forever, Lord knows, but he did have some money put away for the first time in his life. Enough to make a move in any case.

God, he liked Lila. Not so’s he was ready to see the preacher and sell all of his youth quite yet; hell, he was only twenty-three. But he sure liked smelling her and talking to her and he sure liked the way she fit into his bones as she curled alongside of him in the porch swing.

“What’s in this Greenwood ’sides your aunt?”

“Jobs. They got jobs all over the place. A big, hopping town with nothing but coloreds in it, and they all doing right well, baby. Got themselves doctors and lawyers, and the men own their own fine automobiles and the girls dress real nice on Sundays and everyone owns their own home.”

He kissed the top of her head because he didn’t believe her but he loved that she wanted to think something should be so bad that half the time she convinced herself it could be.

“Yeah, uh?” He chuckled. “They got themselves some white folk that work the land for them, too?”

She reached back and slapped his forehead and then bit his wrist.

“Damn, woman, that’s my throwing hand. Watch that shit.”

She lifted his wrist and kissed it and then she laid it between her breasts and said, “Feel my tummy, baby.”

“I can’t reach.”

She slid up his body a bit, and then his hand was on her stomach and he tried to go lower but she gripped his wrist.

“Feel it.”

“I’m feeling it.”

“That’s what else is going to be waiting in Greenwood.”

“Your stomach?”

She kissed his chin.

“No, fool. Your child.”

They took the train from Columbus on the first of October, crossed eight hundred miles of country where the summer fields had traded their gold for furrows of night frost that melted in the morning and dripped over the dirt like cake icing. The sky was the blue of metal that’d just come off the press. Blocks of hay sat in dun-colored fields, and Luther saw a pack of horses in Missouri run for a full mile, their bodies as gray as their breath. And the train streamed through it all, shaking the ground, screaming at the sky, and Luther huffed his breath into the glass and doodled with his finger, drew baseballs, drew bats, drew a child with a head too big for its body.

Lila looked at it and laughed. “That’s what our boy gonna look like? Big old head like his daddy? Long skinny body?”

“Nah,” Luther said, “gonna look like you.”

And he gave the child breasts the size of circus balloons and Lila giggled and swatted his hand and rubbed the child off the window.

The trip took two days and Luther lost some money in a card game with some porters the first night, and Lila stayed mad about that well into the next morning, but otherwise Luther was hard-pressed coming up with a time he’d cherished more in his life. There’d been a few plays here and there on the diamond, and he’d once gone to Memphis when he was seventeen with his cousin, Sweet George, and they’d had themselves a time on Beale Street that he’d never forget, but riding in that train car with Lila, knowing his child lived in her body — her body no longer a singular life, but more like a life-and-a-half — and that they were, as he’d so often dreamed, out in the world, drunk on the speed of their crossing, he felt a lessening of the anxious throb that had lived in his chest since he was a boy. He’d never known where that throb came from, only that it had always been there and he’d tried to work it away and play it away and drink it away and fuck it away and sleep it away his whole life. But now, sitting on a seat with his feet on a floor that was bolted to a steel underbelly that was strapped to wheels that locked onto rails and hurtled through time and distance as if time and distance weren’t nothing at all, he loved his life and he loved Lila and he loved their child and he knew, as he always had, that he loved speed, because things that possessed it could not be tethered, and so, they couldn’t be sold.

They arrived in Tulsa at the Santa Fe rail yard at nine in the morning and were met by Lila’s Aunt Marta and her husband, James. James was as big as Marta was small, both of them dark as dark got, with skin stretched so tight across the bone Luther wondered how they breathed. Big as James was, and he was the height some men only reached on horseback, Marta was, no doubt, the dog who ate first.

Four, maybe five, seconds into the introductions, Marta said, “James, honey, git them bags, would you? Let the poor girl stand there and faint from the weight?”

Lila said, “It’s all right, Auntie, I—”

“James?” Aunt Marta snapped her fingers at James’s hip and the man hopped to. Then she smiled, all pretty and small, and said, “Girl, you as beautiful as you ever was, praise the Lord.”

Lila surrendered her bags to Uncle James and said, “Auntie, this is Luther Laurence, the young man I been writing you about.”

Though he probably should have figured as much, it took Luther by surprise to realize his name had been placed to paper and sent across four state lines to land in Aunt Marta’s hand, the letters touched, however incidentally, by her tiny thumb.

Aunt Marta gave him a smile that had a lot less warmth in it than the one she gave her niece. She took his hand in both of hers. She looked up into his eyes.

“A pleasure to meet you, Luther Laurence. We’re churchgoers here in Greenwood. You a churchgoer?”

“Yes, ma’am. Surely.”

“Well, then,” she said and gave his hand a moist press and a slow shake, “we’re to get along fine, I ’spect.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Luther was prepared for a long walk out of the train station and up through town to Marta and James’s house, but James led them to an Olds Reo as red and shiny as an apple just pulled from a water bucket. Had wood spoke wheels and a black top that James rolled down and latched in the back. They piled the suitcases in the backseat with Marta and Lila, the two of them already talking a mile a minute, and Luther climbed up front with James and they pulled out of the lot, Luther thinking how a colored man driving a car like this in Columbus was just asking to get shot for a thief, but at the Tulsa train station, not even the white folk seemed to notice them.

James explained the Olds had a flathead V8 engine in it, sixty horsepower, and he worked the shift up into third gear and smiled big.

“What you do for work?” Luther asked.

“Own two garages,” James said. “Got four men working under me. Would love to put you to work there, son, but I got all the help I can handle right now. But don’t you worry — one thing Tulsa’s got on either side of the tracks is jobs, plenty of jobs. You in oil country, son. Whole place just sprung up overnight ’cause of the black crude. Shoot. None of this was even here twenty-five years ago. Wasn’t nothing but a trading post back then. Believe that?”

Luther looked out the window at downtown, saw buildings bigger than any he’d seen in Memphis, big as ones he’d seen only in pictures of Chicago and New York, and cars filling the streets, and people, too, and he thought how you would have figured a place like this would take a century to build, but this country just didn’t have time to wait no more, no interest in patience and no reason for it either.

He looked forward as they drove into Greenwood, and James waved to some men building a house and they waved back and he tooted his horn and Marta explained how coming up here was the section of Greenwood Avenue known as the Black Wall Street, lookie here….

And Luther saw a black bank and an ice cream parlor filled with black teenagers and a barbershop and a billiard parlor and a big old grocery store and a bigger department store and a law office and a doctor’s office and a newspaper, and all of it occupied by colored folk. And then they rolled past the movie theater, big bulbs surrounding a huge white marquee, and Luther looked above that marquee to see the name of the place — The Dreamland — and he thought, That’s where we’ve come. Because all this had to be just that indeed.

By the time they drove up Detroit Avenue, where James and Marta Hollaway owned their own home, Luther’s stomach was starting to slide. The homes along Detroit Avenue were red brick or creamy chocolate stone and they were as big as the homes of white folk. And not white folk who were just getting by, but white folk who lived good. The lawns were trimmed to bright green stubble and several of the homes had wraparound porches and bright awnings.

They pulled into the driveway of a dark brown Tudor and James stopped the car, which was good, because Luther was so dizzy he worried he might get sick.

Lila said, “Oh, Luther, couldn’t you just die?”

Yeah, Luther thought, that there is one possibility.

The next morning Luther found himself getting married before he’d had breakfast. In the years that followed, when someone would ask how it was he came to be a married man, Luther always answered:

“Hell if I know.”

He woke that morning in the cellar. Marta had made it plenty clear the evening before that a man and a woman who were not husband and wife didn’t sleep on the same floor in her house, never mind the same room. So Lila got herself a nice pretty bed in a nice pretty room on the second floor and Luther got a sheet thrown over a broke-down couch in the cellar. The couch smelled of dog (they’d had one once; long since dead) and cigars. Uncle James was the culprit on that score. He took his after-dinner stogie in the basement every night because Aunt Marta wouldn’t allow it in her house.

Lot of things Aunt Marta wouldn’t allow in her house — cussing, liquor, taking the Lord’s name in vain, card playing, people of low character, cats — and Luther had a feeling he’d just scratched the surface of the list.

So he went to sleep in the cellar and woke up with a crick in his neck and the smells of long-dead dog and too-recent cigar in his nostrils. Right off, he heard raised voices coming from upstairs. Feminine voices. Luther’d grown up with his mother and one older sister, both of whom had passed on from the fever in ’14, and when he allowed himself to think of them it hurt enough to stop his breath because they’d been proud, strong women of loud laughter who’d loved him fiercely.

But those two women had fought just as fierce. Nothing in the whole world, in Luther’s estimation, was worth entering a room where two women had their claws out.

He crept up the stairs, though, so he could hear the words better and what he heard made him want to trade places with the Hollaway dog.

“I’m just feeling under the weather, Auntie.”

“Don’t you lie to me, girl. Don’t you lie! I know morning sickness when I see it. How long?”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Lila, you my baby sister’s child, yes. My goddaughter, yes. But, girl, I will strap the black straight offa your body from head to toe if you lie to me again. You hear?”

Luther heard Lila break out in a fresh run of sobbing, and it shamed him to picture her.

Marta shrieked, “James!” and Luther heard the large man’s footfalls coming toward the kitchen, and he wondered if the man had grabbed his shotgun for the occasion.

“Git that boy up here.”

Luther opened the door before James could and Marta’s eyes were flashing all over him before he crossed the threshold.

“Well, lookit himself. Mr. Big Man. I done told you we are churchgoers here, did I not, Mr. Big Man?”

Luther thought it best not to say a word.

“Christians is what we are. And we don’t abide no sinning under this here roof. Ain’t that right, James?”

“Amen,” James said, and Luther noticed the Bible in his hand and it scared him a lot more than the shotgun he’d pictured.

“You get this poor, innocent girl impregnated and then you expect to what? I’m talking to you, boy? What?”

Luther tilted a cautious eye down at the little woman, saw a fury in her looked about to take a bite out of him.

“Well, we hadn’t really—”

“You ‘hadn’t really,’ my left foot.” And Marta stomped that left foot of hers into the kitchen floor. “You think for one pretty second that any respectable people are going to rent you a house in Greenwood, you are mistaken. And you won’t be staying under my roof one second longer. No, sir. You think you can get my only niece in the family way and then go off galavanting as you please? I am here to tell you that that will not be happening here today.”

He caught Lila looking at him through a stream of tears.

She said, “What’re we going to do, Luther?”

And James, who in addition to being a businessman and a mechanic, was, it turned out, an ordained minister and justice of the peace, held up his Bible and said, “I believe we have a solution to your dilemma.”

Chapter three

The day the Red Sox played their first World Series home game against the Cubs, First Precinct Duty Sergeant George Strivakis called Danny and Steve into his office and asked them if they had their sea legs.

“Sergeant?”

“Your sea legs. Can you join a couple of Harbor coppers and visit a ship for us?”

Danny and Steve looked at each other and shrugged.

“I’ll be honest,” Strivakis said, “some soldiers are sick out there. Captain Meadows is under orders from the deputy chief who’s under orders from O’Meara himself to deal with the situation as quietly as possible.”

“How sick?” Steve asked.

Strivakis shrugged.

Steve snorted. “How sick, Sarge?”

Another shrug, that shrug making Danny more nervous than anything else, old George Strivakis not wanting to commit to the slightest evidence of knowledge aforethought.

Danny said, “Why us?”

“Because ten men already turned it down. You’re eleven and twelve.”

“Oh,” Steve said.

Strivakis hunched forward. “What we would like is two bright officers to proudly represent the police department of the great city of Boston. You are to go out to this boat, assess the situation, and make a decision in the best interest of your fellow man. Should you successfully complete your mission, you will be rewarded with one half-day off and the everlasting thanks of your beloved department.”

“We’d like a little more than that,” Danny said. He looked over the desk at his duty sergeant. “With all due respect to our beloved department, of course.”

In the end, they struck a deal — paid sick days if they contracted whatever the soldiers had, the next two Saturdays off, and the department had to foot the next three cleaning bills for their uniforms.

Strivakis said, “Mercenaries, the both of you,” and then shook their hands to seal the contract.

The USS McKinley had just arrived from France. It carried soldiers returning from battle in places with names like Saint-Mihiel and Pont-à-Mousson and Verdun. Somewhere between Marseilles and Boston, several of the soldiers had grown ill. The conditions of three of them were now deemed so dire that ship doctors had contacted Camp Devens to tell the colonel in charge that unless these men were evacuated to a military hospital they would die before sundown. And so on a fine September afternoon, when they could have been working a soft detail at the World Series, Danny and Steve joined two officers of the Harbor Police on Commercial Wharf as gulls chased the fog out to sea and the dark waterfront brick steamed.

One of the Harbor cops, an Englishman named Ethan Gray, handed Danny and Steve their surgical masks and white cotton gloves.

“They say it helps.” He smiled into the sharp sun.

“Who’s they?” Danny pulled the surgical mask over his head and down his face until it hung around his neck.

Ethan Gray shrugged. “The all-seeing they.”

“Oh, them,” Steve said. “Never liked them.”

Danny placed the gloves in his back pocket, watched Steve do the same.

The other Harbor cop hadn’t said a word since they’d met on the wharf. He was a small guy, thin and pale, his damp bangs falling over a pimply forehead. Burn scars crept out from the edges of his sleeves. Upon a closer look, Danny noticed he was missing the bottom half of his left ear.

So, then, Salutation Street.

A survivor of the white flash and the yellow flame, the collapsing floors and plaster rain. Danny didn’t remember seeing him during the explosion, but then Danny didn’t remember much after the bomb went off.

The guy sat against a black steel stanchion, long legs stretched out in front of him, and studiously avoided eye contact with Danny. That was one of the traits shared by survivors of Salutation Street — they were embarrassed to acknowledge one another.

The launch approached the dock. Ethan Gray offered Danny a cigarette. He took it with a nod of thanks. Gray pointed the pack at Steve but Steve shook his head.

“And what instructions did your duty sergeant give you, Officers?”

“Pretty simple ones.” Danny leaned in as Gray lit his cigarette. “Make sure every soldier stays on that ship unless we say otherwise.”

Gray nodded as he exhaled a plume of smoke. “Identical to our orders as well.”

“We were also told if they try to override us using some federal-government-at-time-of-war bullshit, we’re to make it very clear that it may be their country but it’s your harbor and our city.”

Gray lifted a tobacco kernel off his tongue and gave it to the sea breeze. “You’re Captain Tommy Coughlin’s son, aren’t you?”

Danny nodded. “What gave it away?”

“Well, for one, I’ve rarely met a patrolman of your age who had so much confidence.” Gray pointed at Danny’s chest. “And the name tag helped.”

Danny tapped some ash from his cigarette as the launch cut its engine. It rotated until the stern replaced the bow and the starboard gunwale bounced off the dock wall. A corporal appeared and tossed a line to Gray’s partner. He tied it off as Danny and Gray finished their cigarettes and then approached the corporal.

“You need to put on a mask,” Steve Coyle said.

The corporal nodded several times and produced a surgical mask from his back pocket. He also saluted twice. Ethan Gray, Steve Coyle, and Danny returned the first one.

“How many aboard?” Gray asked.

The corporal half-saluted, then dropped his hand. “Just me, a doc, and the pilot.”

Danny pulled his mask up from his throat and covered his mouth. He wished he hadn’t just smoked that cigarette. The smell of it bounced off the mask and filled his nostrils, permeated his lips and chin.

They met up with the doctor in the main cabin as the launch pulled away from the dock. The doctor was an old man, gone bald halfway up his scalp with a thick bush of white that stood up like a hedge. He didn’t wear a mask and he waved at theirs.

“You can take them off. None of us have it.”

“How do you know?” Danny said.

The old man shrugged. “Faith?”

It seemed silly to be standing there in their uniforms and masks while still trying to find their sea legs as the launch bounced through the chop. Ridiculous, really. Danny and Steve removed their masks. Gray followed suit. Gray’s partner, though, kept his on, looking at the other three cops like they were insane.

“Peter,” Gray said, “really.”

Peter shook his head at the floor and kept that mask on.

Danny, Steve, and Gray sat across from the doctor at a small table.

“What are your orders?” the doctor said.

Danny told him.

The doctor pinched his nose where his glasses had indented. “So I assumed. Would your superiors object to us moving the sick by way of army ground transport?”

“Move them where?” Danny said.

“Camp Devens.”

Danny looked over at Gray.

Gray smiled. “Once they leave the harbor, they are no longer under my purview.”

Steve Coyle said to the doctor, “Our superiors would like to know what we’re dealing with here.”

“We’re not exactly sure. Could be similar to an influenza strain we saw in Europe. Could be something else.”

“If it is the grippe,” Danny said, “how bad was it in Europe?”

“Bad,” the doctor said quietly, his eyes clear. “We believe that strain may have been related to one that first appeared at Fort Riley, Kansas, about eight months ago.”

“And if I may ask,” Gray said, “how serious was that strain, Doctor?”

“Within two weeks it killed eighty percent of the soldiers who’d contracted it.”

Steve whistled. “Fairly serious, then.”

“And after?” Danny asked.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“It killed the soldiers. Then what did it do?”

The doctor gave them a wry smile and a soft snap of his fingers. “It disappeared.”

“Came back, though,” Steve Coyle said.

“Possibly,” the doctor said. He pinched his nose again. “Men are getting sick on that ship. Packed together like they are? It’s the worst possible environment for preventing transmission. Five will die tonight if we can’t move them.”

“Five?” Ethan Gray said. “We’d been told three.”

The doctor shook his head and held up five fingers.

On the McKinley, they met a group of doctors and majors at the fantail. It had grown overcast. The clouds looked muscular and stone gray, like sculptures of limbs, as they moved slowly over the water and back toward the city and its red brick and glass.

A Major Gideon said, “Why would they send patrolmen?” He pointed at Danny and Steve. “You have no authority to make public health decisions.”

Danny and Steve said nothing.

Gideon repeated himself. “Why send patrolmen?”

“No captains volunteered for the job,” Danny said.

“You find amusement in this?” Gideon said. “My men are sick. They fought a war you couldn’t be bothered to fight, and now they’re dying.”

“I wasn’t making a joke.” Danny gestured at Steve Coyle, at Ethan Gray, at the burn-scarred Peter. “This was a volunteer assignment, Major. No one wanted to come here except us. And we do, by the way, have the authority. We have been given clear orders as to what is acceptable and unacceptable action in this situation.”

“And what is acceptable?” one of the doctors asked.

“As to the harbor,” Ethan Gray said, “you are allowed to transport your men by launch and launch only to Commonwealth Pier. After that, it’s BPD jurisdiction.”

They looked at Danny and Steve.

Danny said, “It’s in the best interest of the governor, the mayor, and every police department in the state that we not have a general panic. So, under cover of night, you are to have military transport trucks meet you at Commonwealth Pier. You can unload the sick there and take them directly to Devens. You can’t stop along that journey. A police car will escort you with its sirens off.” Danny met Major Gideon’s glare. “Fair?”

Gideon eventually nodded.

“The State Guard’s been notified,” Steve Coyle said. “They’ll set up an outpost at Camp Devens and work with your MPs to keep anyone from leaving base until this is contained. That’s by order of the governor.”

Ethan Gray directed a question to the doctors. “How long will it take to contain?”

One of them, a tall, flaxen-haired man, said, “We have no idea. It kills who it kills and then it snuffs itself out. Could be over in a week, could take nine months.”

Danny said, “As long as it’s kept from spreading to the civilian population, our bosses can live with the arrangement.”

The flaxen-haired man chuckled. “The war is winding down. Men have been rotating back in large numbers for the last several weeks. This is a contagion, gentlemen, and a resilient one. Have you considered the possibility that a carrier has already reached your city?” He stared at them. “That it’s too late, gentlemen? Far, far too late?”

Danny watched those muscular clouds slough their way inland. The rest of the sky had cleared. The sun had returned, high and sharp. A beautiful day, the kind you dreamed about during a long winter.

The five gravely ill soldiers rode back on the launch with them even though dusk was still a long way off. Danny, Steve, Ethan Gray, Peter, and two doctors stayed in the main cabin while the sick soldiers lay on the port deck with two other doctors attending. Danny had seen the men get lowered to the launch by line and pulley. With their pinched skulls and caved-in cheeks, their sweat-drenched hair and vomit-encrusted lips, they’d looked dead already. Three of the five bore a blue tint to their flesh, mouths peeled back, eyes wide and glaring. Their breaths came in huffs.

The four police officers stayed down in the cabin. Their jobs had taught them that many dangers could be explained away — if you didn’t want to got shot or stabbed, don’t befriend people who played with guns and knives; you didn’t want to get mugged, don’t leave saloons drunk beyond seeing; didn’t want to lose, don’t gamble.

But this was something else entirely. Could happen to any of them. Could happen to all of them.

Back at the station house, Danny and Steve gave their report to Sergeant Strivakis and separated. Steve went to find his brother’s widow and Danny went to find a drink. A year from now, Steve might still be finding his way to the Widow Coyle, but Danny could have a much harder time finding a drink. While the East Coast and West Coast had been concerned with recession and war, telephones and baseball, anarchists and their bombs, the Progressives and their ole-time-religion allies had risen out of the South and the Midwest. Danny didn’t know a soul who had taken the Prohibition bills seriously, even when they’d made it to the floor of the House. It seemed impossible, with all the other shifts going on in the country’s fabric, that these prim, self-righteous “don’t dos” had a chance. But one morning the whole country woke up to realize that not only did the idiots have a chance, they had a foothold. Gained while everyone else paid attention to what had seemed more important. Now the right of every adult to imbibe hung in the balance of one state: Nebraska. Whichever way it voted on the Volstead ratification in two months would decide whether an entire booze-loving country climbed on the wagon.

Nebraska. When Danny heard the name, about all that came to mind was corn and grain silos, dusk blue skies. Wheat, too, sheaves of it. Did they drink there? Did they have saloons? Or just silos?

They had churches, he was fairly certain. Preachers who struck the air with their fists and railed against the godless Northeast, awash, as it was, in white suds, brown immigrants, and pagan fornication.

Nebraska. Oh, boy.

Danny ordered two shots of Irish and a mug of cold beer. He removed the shirt he wore, unbuttoned, over his undershirt. He leaned into the bar as the bartender brought his drinks. The bartender’s name was Alfonse and he was rumored to run with the hoolies and bullyboys on the city’s east side, though Danny had yet to meet a copper who could pin anything specific on him. Of course, when the suspect in question was a bartender known to have a generous hand, who’d try hard?

“True you stopped the boxing?”

“Not sure,” Danny said.

“Your last fight, I lose money. You both supposed to last to the third.”

Danny held up his palms. “Guy had a fucking stroke.”

“Your fault? I see him lift his arm, too.”

“Yeah?” Danny drained one of his whiskies. “Well, then it’s all fine.”

“You miss it?”

“Not yet.”

“Bad sign.” Alfonse swept Danny’s empty glass off the bar. “A man don’t miss what a man forgot how to love.”

“Jeesh,” Danny said, “what’s your wisdom fee?”

Alfonse spit in a highball glass and walked it back down the bar. It was possible there was something to his theory. Right now, Danny didn’t love hitting things. He loved quiet and the smell of the harbor. He loved drink. Give him a few more and he’d love other things — working girls and the pigs’ feet Alfonse kept down the other end of the bar. The late summer wind, of course, and the mournful music the Italians made in the alleys every evening, a block-by-block journey as flute gave way to violin giving way to clarinet or mandolin. Once Danny got drunk enough, he’d love it all, the whole world.

A meaty hand slapped his back. He turned his head to find Steve looking down at him, eyebrow cocked.

“Still receiving company, I hope.”

“Still.”

“Still buying the first round?”

“The first.” Danny caught Alfonse’s dark eyes and pointed at the bar top. “Where’s the Widow Coyle?”

Steve shrugged off his coat and took a seat. “Praying. Lighting candles.”

“Why?”

“No reason. Love, maybe?”

“You told her,” Danny said.

“I told her.”

Alfonse brought Steve a shot of rye and a bucket of suds. Once he’d walked away, Danny said, “You told her what exactly? About the grippe on the boat?”

“A little bit.”

“A little bit.” Danny threw back his second shot. “We’ve been sworn to silence by state, federal, and maritime authorities. And you tell the widow?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

“All right, it was like that.” Steve downed his own shot. “She grabbed the kids, though, and run right off to church. Only word she’ll say is to Christ Himself.”

“And the pastor. And the two priests. And a few nuns. And her kids.”

Steve said, “It can’t stay hidden long, in either case.”

Danny raised his mug. “Well, you weren’t trying to make detective anyway.”

“Cheers.” Steve met the mug with his bucket and they both drank as Alfonse replenished their shots and left them alone again.

Danny looked at his hands. The doctor on the launch had said the grippe sometimes showed there, even when there were no other signs in the throat or head. It yellowed the flesh along the knuckles, the doctor told them, thickened the fingertips, made the joints throb.

Steve said, “How’s the throat?”

Danny removed his hands from the bar. “Fine. Yours?”

“Tip-top. How long you want to keep doing this?”

“What?” Danny said. “Drinking?”

“Laying our lives on the line for less than a streetcar operator makes.”

“Streetcar operators are important.” Danny raised a glass. “Vital to municipal interests.”

“Stevedores?”

“Them, too.”

“Coughlin,” Steve said. He said it pleasantly, but Danny knew the only time Steve called him by his last name was when he was irate. “Coughlin, we need you. Your voice. Hell, your glamour.”

“My glamour?”

“Fuck off, ya. You know what I mean. False modesty won’t help us a duck’s fart right now and that’s God’s truth.”

“Help who?”

Steve sighed. “It’s us against them. They’ll kill us if they can.”

“Forget the singing.” Danny rolled his eyes. “You need to find an acting troupe.”

“They sent us out to that boat with nothing, Dan.”

Danny scowled. “We get the next two Saturdays off. We get—”

“It fucking kills. And we went out there for what?”

“Duty?”

“Duty.” Steve turned his head away.

Danny chuckled. Anything to lighten the mood, which had grown sober so quickly. “Who would risk us? Steve. On the Blessed Mother? Who? With your arrest record? With my father? My uncle? Who would risk us?”

“They would.”

“Why?”

“Because it’d never occur to them that they couldn’t.”

Danny gave that another dry chuckle, although he felt lost suddenly, a man trying to scoop up coins in a fast current.

Steve said, “Have you ever noticed that when they need us, they talk about duty, but when we need them, they talk about budgets?” He clinked his glass quietly off Danny’s. “If we die from what we did today, Dan, any family we leave behind? They don’t get a fucking dime.”

Danny loosed a weary chuckle on the empty bar. “What are we supposed to do about it?”

“Fight,” Steve said.

Danny shook his head. “Whole world’s fighting right now. France, fucking Belgium, how many dead? No one even has a number. You see progress there?”

Steve shook his head.

“So?” Danny felt like breaking something. Something big, something that would shatter. “The way of the world, Steve. The way of the goddamn world.”

Steve Coyle shook his head. “The way of a world.”

“Hell with it.” Danny tried to shake off the feeling he’d had lately that he was part of some larger canvas, some larger crime. “Let me buy you another.”

“Their world,” Steve said.

Chapter four

On a Sunday afternoon, Danny went to his father’s house in South Boston for a meeting with the Old Men. A Sunday dinner at the Coughlin home was a political affair, and by inviting him to join them in the hour after dinner was served, the Old Men were anointing him in some fashion. Danny held out hope that a detective’s shield — hinted at by both his father and his Uncle Eddie over the past few months — was part of the sacrament. At twenty-seven, he’d be the youngest detective in BPD history.

His father had called him the night before. “Word has it old Georgie Strivakis is losing his faculties.”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Danny said.

“He sent you out on a detail,” his father said. “Did he not?”

“He offered me the detail and I accepted.”

“To a boat filled with plague-ridden soldiers.”

“I wouldn’t call it the plague.”

“What would you call it, boy?”

“Bad cases of pneumonia, maybe. ‘Plague’ just seems a bit dramatic, sir.”

His father sighed. “I don’t know what gets into your head.”

“Steve should have done it alone?”

“If need be.”

“His life’s worth less than mine then.”

“He’s a Coyle, not a Coughlin. I don’t make excuses for protecting my own.”

“Somebody had to do it, Dad.”

“Not a Coughlin,” his father said. “Not you. You weren’t raised to volunteer for suicide missions.”

“‘To protect and serve,’” Danny said.

A soft, barely audible breath. “Supper tomorrow. Four o’clock sharp. Or is that too healthy for you?”

Danny smiled. “I can manage,” he said, but his father had already hung up.

So the next afternoon found him walking up K Street as the sun softened against the brown and red brick and the open windows loosed the smell of boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and boiled ham on the bone. His brother Joe, playing in the street with some other kids, saw him and his face lit up and he came running up the sidewalk.

Joe was dressed in his Sunday best — a chocolate brown knickerbocker suit with button-bottom pants cinched at the knees, white shirt and blue tie, a golf cap set askew on his head that matched the suit. Danny had been there when his mother had bought it, Joe fidgeting the whole time, and his mother and Nora telling him how manly he looked in it, how handsome, a suit like this, of genuine Oregon cassimere, how his father would have dreamed of owning such a suit at his age, and all the while Joe looking at Danny as if he could somehow help him escape.

Danny caught Joe as he leapt off the ground and hugged him, pressing his smooth cheek to Danny’s, his arms digging into his neck, and it surprised Danny that he often forgot how much his baby brother loved him.

Joe was eleven and small for his age, though Danny knew he made up for it by being one of the toughest little kids in a neighborhood of tough little kids. He hooked his legs around Danny’s hips, leaned back, and smiled. “Heard you stopped boxing.”

“That’s the rumor.”

Joe reached out and touched the collar of his uniform. “How come?”

“Thought I’d train you,” Danny said. “First trick is to teach you how to dance.”

“Nobody dances.”

“Sure they do. All the great boxers took dance lessons.”

He took a few steps down the sidewalk with his brother and then whirled, and Joe slapped his shoulders and said, “Stop, stop.”

Danny spun again. “Am I embarrassing you?”

“Stop.” He laughed and slapped his shoulders again.

“In front of all your friends?”

Joe grabbed his ears and tugged. “Cut it out.”

The kids in the street were looking at Danny as if they couldn’t decide whether they should be afraid, and Danny said, “Anyone else want in?”

He lifted Joe off his body, tickling him the whole way down to the pavement, and then Nora opened the door at the top of the stoop and he wanted to run.

“Joey,” she said, “your ma wants you in now. Says you need to clean up.”

“I’m clean.”

Nora arched an eyebrow. “I wasn’t asking, child.”

Joe gave a beleaguered good-bye wave to his friends and trudged up the steps. Nora mussed his hair as he passed and he slapped at her hands and kept going and Nora leaned into the jamb and considered Danny. She and Avery Wallace, an old colored man, were the Coughlins’ domestic help, though Nora’s actual position was a lot more nebulous than Avery’s. She’d come to them by accident or providence five years ago on Christmas Eve, a clacking, shivering gray-fleshed escapee from the northern coast of Ireland. What she’d been escaping from had been anyone’s guess, but ever since Danny’s father had carried her into the home wrapped in his greatcoat, frostbitten and covered in grime, she’d become part of the essential fabric of the Coughlin home. Not quite family, not ever quite that, at least not for Danny, but ingrained and ingratiated nonetheless.

“What brings you by?” she asked.

“The Old Men,” he said.

“A planning and a plotting, are they, Aiden? And, sure, where do you fit in the plan?”

He leaned in a bit. “Only my mother calls me ‘Aiden’ anymore.”

She leaned back. “You’re calling me your mother now, are you?”

“Not at all, though you would make a fine one.”

“Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”

“You would.”

Her eyes pulsed at that, just for a moment. Pale eyes the color of basil. “You’ll need to go to confession for that one, sure.”

“I don’t need to confess anything to anyone. You go.”

“And why would I go?”

He shrugged.

She leaned into the door, took a sniff of the afternoon breeze, her eyes as pained and unreadable as always. He wanted to squeeze her body until his hands fell off.

“What’d you say to Joe?”

She came off the door, folded her arms. “About what?”

“About my boxing.”

She gave him a small sad smile. “I said you’d never box again. Simple as that.”

“Simple, uh?”

“I can see it in your face, Danny. You’ve no love for it anymore.”

He stopped himself from nodding because she was right and he couldn’t stand that she could see through him so easily. She always had. Always would, he was pretty sure. And what a terrible thing that was. He sometimes considered the pieces of himself he’d left scattered throughout his life, the other Dannys — the child Danny and the Danny who’d once thought of becoming president and the Danny who’d wanted to go to college and the Danny who’d discovered far too late that he was in love with Nora. Crucial pieces of himself, strewn all over, and yet she held the core piece and held it absently, as if it lay at the bottom of her purse with the white specks of talc and the loose change.

“You’re coming in then,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She stepped back from the door. “Well, you best get started.”

The Old Men came out of the study for dinner — florid men, prone to winking, men who treated his mother and Nora with an Old World courtliness that Danny secretly found grating.

Taking their seats first were Claude Mesplede and Patrick Donnegan, alderman and boss of the Sixth Ward, as paired up and cagey as an old married couple playing bridge.

Sitting across from them was Silas Pendergast, district attorney of Suffolk County and the boss of Danny’s brother Connor. Silas had a gift for looking respectable and morally forthright but was, in fact, a lifelong toady to the ward machines that had paid his way through law school and kept him docile and slightly drunk every day since.

Down the end by his father was Bill Madigan, deputy chief of police and, some said, the man closest to Commissioner O’Meara.

Sitting beside Madigan — a man Danny had never met before named Charles Steedman, tall and quiet and the only man to sport a three-dollar haircut in a room full of fifty-centers. Steedman wore a white suit and white tie and two-toned spats. He told Danny’s mother, when she asked, that he was, among other things, vice president of the New England Association of Hotels and Restaurants and president of the Suffolk County Fiduciary Security Union.

Danny could tell by his mother’s wide eyes and hesitant smile that she had no idea what the hell Steedman had just said but she nodded anyway.

“Is that a union like the IWW?” Danny asked.

“The IWW are criminals,” his father said. “Subversives.”

Charles Steedman held up a hand and smiled at Danny, his eyes as clear as glass. “A tad different than the IWW, Danny. I’m a banker.”

“Oh, a banker!” Danny’s mother said. “How wonderful.”

The last man to sit at the table, taking a place between Danny’s brothers, Connor and Joe, was Uncle Eddie McKenna, not an uncle by blood, but family all the same, his father’s best friend since they were teenage boys running the streets of their newfound country. He and Danny’s father certainly made a formidable pair within the BPD. Where Thomas Coughlin was the picture of trim — trim hair, trim body, trim speech — Eddie McKenna was large of appetite and flesh and fondness for tall tales. He oversaw Special Squads, a unit that managed all parades, visits from dignitaries, labor strikes, riots, and civil unrest of any kind. Under Eddie’s stewardship the unit had grown both more nebulous and more powerful, a shadow department within the department that kept crime low, it was said, “by going to the source before the source got going.” Eddie’s ever-revolving unit of cowboy-cops — the kind of cops Commissioner O’Meara had sworn to purge from the force — hit street crews on their way to heists, rousted ex-cons five steps out of the Charlestown Penitentiary, and had a network of stoolies, grifters, and street spies so immense that it would have been a boon to every cop in the city if McKenna hadn’t kept all names and all history of interactions with said names solely in his head.

He looked across the table at Danny and pointed his fork at his chest. “Hear what happened yesterday while you were out in the harbor doing the Lord’s work?”

Danny shook his head carefully. He’d spent the morning sleeping off the drunk he’d earned elbow to elbow with Steve Coyle the night before. Nora brought out the last of the dishes, green beans with garlic that steamed as she placed it on the table.

“They struck,” Eddie McKenna said.

Danny was confused. “Who?”

“The Sox and the Cubs,” Connor said. “We were there, me and Joe.”

“Send them all to fight the Kaiser, I say,” Eddie McKenna said. “A bunch of slackers and Bolsheviks.”

Connor chuckled. “You believe it, Dan? People went bughouse.”

Danny smiled, trying to picture it. “You’re not having me on?”

“Oh, it happened,” Joe said, all excited now. “They were mad at the owners and they wouldn’t come out to play and people started throwing stuff and screaming.”

“So then,” Connor said, “they had to send Honey Fitz out there to calm the crowd. Now the mayor’s at the game, okay? The governor, too.”

“Calvin Coolidge.” His father shook his head, as he did every time the governor’s name came up. “A Republican from Vermont running the Democratic Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” He sighed. “Lord save us.”

“So, they’re at the game,” Connor said, “but Peters, he might be mayor, but no one cares. They’ve got Curley in the stands and Honey Fitz, two ex-mayors who are a hell of a lot more popular, so they send Honey out with a megaphone and he stops the riot before it can really get going. Still, people throwing things, tearing up the bleachers, you name it. Then the players come out to play, but, boy, no one was cheering.”

Eddie McKenna patted his large belly and breathed through his nose. “Well, now, I hope these Bolshies will be stripped of their Series medals. Just the fact that they give them ‘medals’ for playing a game is enough to turn the stomach. And I say, Fine. Baseball’s dead anyway. Bunch of slackers without the guts to fight for their country. And Ruth the worst of them. You hear he wants to hit now, Dan? Read it in this morning’s paper — doesn’t want to pitch anymore, says he’s going to sit out if they don’t pay him more and keep him off the mound at the same time. You believe that?”

“Ah, this world.” His father took a sip of Bordeaux.

“Well,” Danny said, looking around the table, “what was their beef?”

“Hmm?”

“Their complaint? They didn’t strike for nothing.”

Joe said, “They said the owners changed the agreement?” Danny watched him cock his eyes back into his head, trying to remember the specifics. Joe was a fanatic for the sport and the most trustworthy source at the table on all matters baseball. “And they cut them out of money they’d promised and every other team had gotten in other Series. So they struck.” He shrugged, as if to say it all made perfect sense to him, and then he cut into his turkey.

“I agree with Eddie,” his father said. “Baseball’s dead. It’ll never come back.”

“Yes, it will,” Joe said desperately. “Yes, it will.”

“This country,” his father said, with one of the many smiles in his collection, this time the wry one. “Everyone thinks it’s okay to hire on for work but then sit down when that work turns out to be hard.”

He and Connor took their coffee and cigarettes out on the back porch and Joe followed them. He climbed the tree in the backyard because he knew he wasn’t supposed to and knew his brothers wouldn’t call this to his attention.

Connor and Danny looked so little alike people thought they were kidding when they said they were brothers. Where Danny was tall and dark-haired and broad-shouldered, Connor was fair-haired and trim and compact, like their father. Danny had gotten the old man’s blue eyes, though, and his sly sense of humor, where Connor’s brown eyes and disposition — a coiled affability that disguised an obstinate heart — came entirely from their mother.

“Dad said you went out on a warship yesterday?”

Danny nodded. “That I did.”

“Sick soldiers, I heard.”

Danny sighed. “This house leaks like Hudson tires.”

“Well, I do work for the DA.”

Danny chuckled. “Juiced-in, eh, Con’?”

Connor frowned. “How bad were they? The soldiers.”

Danny looked down at his cigarette and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “Pretty bad.”

“What is it?”

“Honestly? Don’t know. Could be influenza, pneumonia, or something no one’s ever heard of.” Danny shrugged. “Hopefully, it sticks to soldiers.”

Connor leaned against the railing. “They say it’ll be over soon.”

“The war?” Danny nodded. “Yeah.”

For a moment, Connor looked uncomfortable. A rising star in the DA’s office, he’d also been a vocal advocate of American entrance into the war. Yet somehow he managed to miss the draft, and both brothers knew who was usually responsible for “somehows” in their family.

Joe said, “Hey down there,” and they looked up to see that he’d managed to reach the second-highest branch.

“You crack your head,” Connor said, “Ma will shoot you.”

“Not going to crack my head,” Joe said, “and Ma doesn’t have a gun.”

“She’ll use Dad’s.”

Joe stayed where he was, as if giving it some thought.

“How’s Nora?” Danny asked, trying to keep his voice loose.

Connor waved his cigarette at the night. “Ask her yourself. She’s a strange bird. She acts all proper around Ma and Dad, you know? But she ever go Bolsheviki on you?”

“Bolsheviki?” Danny smiled. “Ah, no.”

“You should hear her, Dan, talking about the rights of the workers and women’s suffrage and the poor immigrant children in the factories and blah, blah, blah. The old man’d keel over if he heard her sometimes. I’ll tell you that’s going to change, though.”

“Yeah?” Danny chuckled at the idea of Nora changing, Nora so stubborn she’d die of thirst if you ordered her to drink. “How’s that going to happen?”

Connor turned his head, the smile in his eyes. “You didn’t hear?”

“I work eighty hours a week. Apparently I missed some gossip.”

“I’m going to marry her.”

Danny’s mouth went dry. He cleared his throat. “You asked her?”

“Not yet. I’ve talked to Dad about it, though.”

“Talked to Dad, but not to her.”

Connor shrugged and gave him another wide grin. “What’s the shock, brother? She’s beautiful, we go to shows and the flickers together, she learned to cook from Ma. We have a great time. She’ll make a great wife.”

“Con’—” Danny started, but his younger brother held up a hand.

“Dan, Dan, I know something … happened between you two. I’m not blind. The whole family knows.”

This was news to Danny. Above him, Joe scrambled around the tree like a squirrel. The air had cooled, and dusk settled softly against the neighboring row houses.

“Hey, Dan? That’s why I’m telling you this. I want to know if you’re comfortable with it.”

Danny leaned against the rail. “What do you think ‘happened’ between me and Nora?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

Danny nodded, thinking: She’ll never marry him.

“What if she says no?”

“Why would she say that?” Connor tossed his hands up at the absurdity of it.

“You never know with these Bolshies.”

Connor laughed. “Like I said, that’ll change quick. Why wouldn’t she say yes? We spend all our free time together. We—”

“The flickers, like you said. Someone to watch a show with. It’s not the same.”

“Same as what?”

“Love.”

Connor narrowed his eyes. “That is love.” He shook his head at Danny. “Why do you always complicate things, Dan? A man meets a woman, they share common understandings, common heritage. They marry, raise a family, instill those understandings in them. That’s civilization. That’s love.”

Danny shrugged. Connor’s anger was building with his confusion, always a dangerous combination, particularly if Connor was in a bar. Danny might have been the son who’d boxed, but Connor was the true brawler in the family.

Connor was ten months younger than Danny. This made them “Irish twins,” but beyond the bloodline, they’d never had much in common. They’d graduated from high school the same day, Danny by the skin of his teeth, Connor a year early and with honors. Danny had joined the police straightaway, while Connor had accepted a full scholarship to Boston Catholic College in the South End. After two years doubling up on his classes there, he’d graduated summa cum laude and entered Suffolk Law School. There’d never been any question where he’d work once he passed the bar. He’d had a slot waiting for him in the DA’s office since he’d worked there as an office boy in his late teens. Now, with four years on the job, he was starting to get bigger cases, larger prosecutions.

“How’s work?” Danny said.

Connor lit a fresh cigarette. “There’s some very bad people out there.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m not talking about Gusties and garden-variety plug-uglies, brother. I’m talking about radicals, bombers.”

Danny cocked his head and pointed at the shrapnel scar on his own neck.

Connor chuckled. “Right, right. Look who I’m talking to. I guess I just never knew how … how … fucking evil these people are. We’ve got a guy now, we’ll be deporting him when we win, and he actually threatened to blow up the Senate.”

“Just talk?” Danny asked.

Connor gave that an irritated head shake. “No such thing. I went to a hanging a week ago?”

Danny said, “You went to a …?”

Connor nodded. “Part of the job sometimes. Silas wants the people of the Commonwealth to know we represent them all the way to the end.”

“Doesn’t seem to go with your nice suit. What’s that color — yellow?”

Connor swiped at his head. “They call it cream.”

“Oh. Cream.”

“It wasn’t fun, actually.” Connor looked out into the yard. “The hanging.” He gave Danny a thin smile. “Around the office, though, they say you get used to it.”

They said nothing for a bit. Danny could feel the pall of the world out there, with its hangings and diseases, its bombs and its poverty, descend on their little world in here.

“So, you’re gonna marry Nora,” he said eventually.

“That’s the plan.” Connor raised his eyebrows up and down.

He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Best of luck then, Con’.”

“Thanks.” Connor smiled. “Heard you just moved into a new place, by the way.”

“No new place,” Danny said, “just a new floor. Better view.”

“Recently?”

“About a month ago,” Danny said. “Apparently some news travels slow.”

“It does when you don’t visit your mother.”

Danny placed a hand to his heart, adopted a thick brogue. “Ah, ’tis a fierce-terrible son, sure, who doesn’t visit his dear old mudder every day of the week.”

Connor chuckled. “You stayed in the North End, though?”

“It’s home.”

“It’s a shit hole.”

“You grew up there,” Joe said, suddenly dangling from the lowest branch.

“That’s right,” Connor said, “and Dad moved us out as soon as he was able.”

“Traded one slum for another,” Danny said.

“An Irish slum, though,” Connor said. “I’ll take it over a wop slum anytime.”

Joe dropped to the ground. “This isn’t a slum.”

Danny said, “It ain’t up here on K Street, no.”

“Neither’s the rest of it.” Joe walked up on the porch. “I know slums,” he said with complete assurance and opened the door and went inside.

In his father’s study, they lit cigars and asked Danny if he wanted one. He declined but rolled a cigarette and sat by the desk beside Deputy Chief Madigan. Mesplede and Donnegan were over by the decanters, pouring themselves healthy portions of his father’s liquor, and Charles Steedman stood by the tall window behind his father’s desk, lighting his cigar. His father and Eddie McKenna stood talking with Silas Pendergast in the corner, back by the doors. The DA nodded a lot and said very little as Captain Thomas Coughlin and Lieutenant Eddie McKenna spoke to him with their hands on their chins, their foreheads tilted low. Silas Pendergast nodded a final time, picked his hat off the hook, and bade good-bye to everyone.

“He’s a fine man,” his father said, coming around the desk. “He understands the common good.” His father took a cigar from the humidor, snipped the end, and smiled with raised eyebrows at the rest of them. They all smiled back because his father’s humor was infectious that way, even if you didn’t understand the cause of it.

“Thomas,” the deputy chief said, speaking in a tone of deference to a man several ranks his inferior, “I assume you explained the chain of command to him.”

Danny’s father lit his cigar, clenching it in his back teeth as he got it going. “I told him that the man in the back of the cart need never see the horse’s face. I trust he understood my meaning.”

Claude Mesplede came around behind Danny’s chair and patted him on the shoulder. “Still the great communicator, your father.”

His father’s eyes flicked over at Claude as Charles Steedman sat in the window seat behind him and Eddie McKenna took a seat to Danny’s left. Two politicians, one banker, three cops. Interesting.

His father said, “You know why they’ll have so many problems in Chicago? Why their crime rate will go through the roof after Volstead?”

The men waited and his father drew on his cigar and considered the brandy snifter on the desk by his elbow but didn’t lift it.

“Because Chicago is a new city, gentlemen. The fire wiped it clean of history, of values. And New York is too dense, too sprawling, too crowded with the nonnatives. They can’t maintain order, not with what’s coming. But Boston” — he lifted his brandy and took a sip as the light caught the glass — “Boston is small and untainted by the new ways. Boston understands the common good, the way of things.” He raised his glass. “To our fair city, gentlemen. Ah, she’s a grand old broad.”

They met their glasses in toast and Danny caught his father smiling at him, in the eyes if not the mouth. Thomas Coughlin alternated between a variety of demeanors and all coming and going with the speed of a spooked horse that it was easy to forget that they were all aspects of a man who was certain he was doing good. Thomas Coughlin was its servant. The good. Its salesman, its parade marshal, catcher of the dogs who nipped its ankles, pallbearer for its fallen friends, cajoler of its wavering allies.

The question remained, as it had throughout Danny’s life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man’s honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be spoken aloud. It was, purely of necessity, conciliatory to the Brahmins on the outside while remaining firmly anti-Protestant on the inside. It was anticolored, for it was taken as a given that the Irish, for all their struggles and all those still to come, were Northern European and undeniably white, white as last night’s moon, and the idea had never been to seat every race at the table, just to make sure that the last chair would be saved for a Hibernian before the doors to the room were pulled shut. It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private.

His father said, “Heard of the Roxbury Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

“The Letts?” Danny was suddenly aware of Charles Steedman watching him from the window. “Socialist workers group, made up mostly of Russian and Latvian émigrés.”

“How about the People’s Workers Party?” Eddie McKenna asked.

Danny nodded. “They’re over in Mattapan. Communists.”

“Union of Social Justice?”

Danny said, “What’s this, a test?”

None of the men answered, just stared back at him, grave and intent.

He sighed. “Union of Social Justice is, I believe, mostly Eastern European café intellectuals. Very antiwar.”

“Anti-everything,” Eddie McKenna said. “Anti-American most of all. These are all Bolshevik fronts — all of them — funded by Lenin himself to stir unrest in our city.”

“We don’t like unrest,” Danny’s father said.

“How about Galleanists?” Deputy Chief Madigan said. “Heard of them?”

Again, Danny felt the rest of the room watching him.

“Galleanists,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “are followers of Luigi Galleani. They’re anarchists devoted to dismantling all government, all property, all ownership of any kind.”

“How do you feel about them?” Claude Mesplede said.

“Active Galleanists? Bomb throwers?” Danny said. “They’re terrorists.”

“Not just Galleanists,” Eddie McKenna said. “All radicals.”

Danny shrugged. “The Reds don’t bother me much. They seem mostly harmless. They print their propaganda rags and drink too much at night, end up disturbing their neighbors when they start singing too loud about Trotsky and Mother Russia.”

“Things may have changed lately,” Eddie said. “We’re hearing rumors.”

“Of?”

“An insurrectionary act of violence on a major scale.”

“When? What kind?”

His father shook his head. “That information carries with it a need-to-know designation, and you don’t need to know yet.”

“In due time, Dan.” Eddie McKenna gave him a big smile. “In due time.”

“‘The purpose of terrorism,’” his father said, “‘is to inspire terror.’ Know who said that?”

Danny nodded. “Lenin.”

“He reads the papers,” his father said with a soft wink.

McKenna leaned in toward Danny. “We’re planning an operation to counter the radicals’ plans, Dan. And we need to know exactly where your sympathies lie.”

“Uh-huh,” Danny said, not quite seeing the play yet.

Thomas Coughlin had leaned back from the light, his cigar gone dead between his fingers. “We’ll need you to tell us what’s transpiring with the social club.”

“What social club?”

Thomas Coughlin frowned.

“The Boston Social Club?” Danny looked at Eddie McKenna. “Our union?”

“It’s not a union,” Eddie McKenna said. “It just wants to be.”

“And we can’t have that,” his father said. “We’re policemen, Aiden, not common laborers. There’s a principle to be upheld.”

“Which principle is that?” Danny said. “Fuck the workingman?” Danny took another look around the room, at the men gathered here on an innocent Sunday afternoon. His eyes fell on Steedman. “What’s your stake in this?”

Steedman gave him a soft smile. “Stake?”

Danny nodded. “I’m trying to figure out just what it is you’re doing here.”

Steedman reddened at that and looked at his cigar, his jaw moving tightly.

Thomas Coughlin said, “Aiden, you don’t speak to your elders in that tone. You don’t—”

“I’m here,” Steedman said, looking up from his cigar, “because workers in this country have forgotten their place. They have forgotten, young Mr. Coughlin, that they serve at the discretion of those who pay their wages and feed their families. Do you know what a ten-day strike can do? Just ten days.”

Danny shrugged.

“It can cause a medium-size business to default on its loans. When loans are in default, stock plummets. Investors lose money. A lot of money. And they have to cut back their business. Then the bank has to step in. Sometimes, this means the only solution is foreclosure. The bank loses money, the investors lose money, their companies lose money, the original business goes under, and the workers lose their jobs anyway. So while the idea of unions is, on the surface, rather heart-warming, it is also quite unconscionable for reasonable men to so much as discuss it in polite company.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Does that answer your question, son?”

“I’m not exactly sure how your logic applies to the public sector.”

“In triplicate,” Steedman said.

Danny gave him a tight smile and turned to McKenna. “Is Special Squads going after unions, Eddie?”

“We’re going after subversives. Threats to this nation.” He gave Danny a roll of his big shoulders. “I need you to hone your skills somewhere. Might as well start local.”

“In our union.”

“That’s what you call it.”

“What could this possibly have to do with an act of ‘insurrectionary violence’?”

“It’s a milk run,” McKenna said. “You help us figure out who really runs things in there, who the members of the brain trust are, et cetera, we’ll have more confidence to send you after bigger fish.”

Danny nodded. “What’s my end?”

His father cocked his head at that, his eyes diminishing to slits.

Deputy Chief Madigan said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s that—”

“Your end?” his father said. “If you succeed with the BSC and then succeed with the Bolsheviks?”

“Yes.”

“A gold shield.” His father smiled. “That’s what you wanted us to say, yes? Counting on it, were you?”

Danny felt an urge to grind his teeth. “It’s either on the table or it isn’t.”

“If you tell us what we need to know about the infrastructure of that alleged policeman’s union? And if you then infiltrate a radical group of our choosing and then come back with the information necessary to stop any act of concerted violence?” Thomas Coughlin looked over at Deputy Chief Madigan and then back at Danny. “We’ll put you first in line.”

“I don’t want first in line. I want the gold shield. You’ve dangled it long enough.”

The men traded glances, as if they hadn’t counted on his reaction from the outset.

After a time, his father said, “Ah, the boy knows his mind, doesn’t he?”

“He does,” Claude Mesplede said.

“That’s plain as the day, ’tis,” Patrick Donnegan said.

Out beyond the doors, Danny heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen, the words indecipherable, but whatever she said caused Nora to laugh and the sound of it made him picture Nora’s throat, the flesh over her windpipe.

His father lit his cigar. “A gold shield for the man who brings down some radicals and lets us know what’s on the mind of the Boston Social Club to boot.”

Danny held his father’s eyes. He removed a cigarette from his pack of Murads and tapped it off the edge of his brogan before lighting it. “In writing.”

Eddie McKenna chuckled. Claude Mesplede, Patrick Donnegan, and Deputy Chief Madigan looked at their shoes, the rug. Charles Steedman yawned.

Danny’s father raised an eyebrow. It was a slow gesture, meant to suggest he admired Danny. But Danny knew that while Thomas Coughlin had a dizzying array of character traits, admiration wasn’t one of them.

“Is this the test by which you’d choose to define your life?” His father eventually leaned forward, and his face was lit with what many people could mistake for pleasure. “Or would you prefer to save that for another day?”

Danny said nothing.

His father looked around the room again. Eventually he shrugged and met his son’s eyes.

“Deal.”

By the time Danny left the study, his mother and Joe had gone to bed and the house was dark. He went out on the front landing because he could feel the house digging into his shoulders and scratching at his head, and he sat on the stoop and tried to decide what to do next. Along K Street, the windows were dark and the neighborhood was so quiet he could hear the hushed lapping of the bay a few blocks away.

“And what dirty job did they ask of you this time?” Nora stood with her back to the door.

He turned to look at her. It hurt, but he kept doing it. “Wasn’t too dirty.”

“Ah, wasn’t too clean, either.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point?” She sighed. “You’ve not looked happy in a donkey’s age.”

“What’s happy?” he said.

She hugged herself against the cooling night. “The opposite of you.”

It had been more than five years since that Christmas Eve when Danny’s father had brought Nora O’Shea through the front door, carrying her in his arms like firewood. Though his face was pink from the cold, her flesh was gray, her chattering teeth loose from malnutrition. Thomas Coughlin told the family he’d found her on the Northern Avenue docks, beset by ruffians she was when he and Uncle Eddie waded in with their nightsticks as if they were still first-year patrolmen. Sure now, just look at the poor, starving waif with nary an ounce of meat on her bones! And when Uncle Eddie had reminded him that it was Christmas Eve and the poor girl managed to croak out a feeble “Thank ye, sir. Thank ye,” her voice the spitting image of his own, dear departed Ma, God rest her, well wasn’t it a sign from Christ Himself on the eve of His own birthday?

Even Joe, only six at the time and still in thrall to his father’s grandiloquent charms, didn’t buy the story, but it put the family in an extravagantly Christian mood, and Connor went to fill the tub while Danny’s mother gave the gray girl with the wide, sunken eyes a cup of tea. She watched the Coughlins from behind the cup with her bare, dirty shoulders peeking out from under the greatcoat like damp stones.

Then her eyes found Danny’s, and before they passed from his face, a small light appeared in them that seemed uncomfortably familiar. In that moment, one he would turn over in his head dozens of times in the ensuing years, he was sure he’d seen his own cloaked heart looking back at him through a starving girl’s eyes.

Bullshit, he told himself. Bullshit.

He would learn very quickly how fast those eyes could change — how that light that had seemed a mirror of his own thoughts could go dull and alien or falsely gay in an instant. But still, knowing the light was there, waiting to appear again, he became addicted to the highly unlikely possibility of unlocking it at will.

Now she stared at him carefully on the porch and said nothing.

“Where’s Connor?” he said.

“Off to the bar,” she said. “Said he’d be at Henry’s if you were to come looking.”

Her hair was the color of sand and strung in curls that hugged her scalp and ended just below her ears. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t short, and something seemed to move beneath her flesh at all times, as if she were missing a layer and if you looked close enough you’d see her bloodstream.

“You two are courting, I hear.”

“Stop.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Connor’s a boy.”

“He’s twenty-six. Older’n you.”

She shrugged. “Still a boy.”

“Are you courting?” Danny flicked his cigarette into the street and looked at her.

“I don’t know what we’re doing, Danny.” She sounded weary. Not so much of the day, but of him. It made him feel like a child, petulant and easily bruised. “Would you like me to say that I don’t feel some allegiance to this family, some weight for what I could never repay your father? That I know for sure I won’t marry your brother?”

“Yes,” Danny said, “that’s what I’d like to hear.”

“Well, I can’t say that.”

“You’d marry out of gratitude?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I’d do.”

Danny’s throat felt tight, like it might collapse in on itself. “And when Connor finds out you left a husband behind in—”

“He’s dead,” she hissed.

“To you. Not the same as dead, though, is it?”

Her eyes were fire now. “What’s your point, boy?”

“How do you think he’s going to take that news?”

“All I can hope,” she said, her voice weary again, “is that he takes it a fair sight better than you did.”

Danny said nothing for a bit and they both stared over the short distance between them, his eyes, he hoped, as merciless as hers.

“He won’t,” he said and walked down the stairs into the quiet and the dark.

Chapter five

A week after Luther became a husband, he and Lila found a house off Archer Street, on Elwood, little one-bedroom with indoor plumbing, and Luther talked to some boys at the Gold Goose Billiard Parlor on Greenwood Avenue who told him the place to go for a job was the Hotel Tulsa, across the Santa Fe tracks in white Tulsa. Money be falling off trees over there, Country. Luther didn’t mind them calling him Country for the time being, long as they didn’t get too used to it, and he went over to the hotel and talked to the man they’d told him to see, fella by the name of Old Byron Jackon. Old Byron (everyone called him “Old Byron,” even his elders) was the head of the bellmen’s union. He said he’d start Luther as an elevator operator and see where things went from there.

So Luther started in the elevators, and even that was a gold mine, people giving him two bits practically every time he turned the crank or opened the cage. Oh, Tulsa was swimming in oil money! People drove the biggest motorcars and wore the biggest hats and the finest clothes and the men smoked cigars thick as pool cues and the women smelled of perfume and powder. People walked fast in Tulsa. They ate fast from large plates and drank fast from tall glasses. The men clapped one another on the back a lot and leaned in and whispered in each other’s ears and then roared with laughter.

And after work the bellmen and the elevator operators and the doormen all crossed back into Greenwood with plenty of adrenaline still ripping through their veins and they hit the pool halls and the saloons down near First and Admiral and there was some drinking and some dancing and some fighting. Some got themselves drunk on Choctaw and rye; others got higher than kites on opium or, more and more lately, heroin.

Luther was only hanging with them boys two weeks when someone asked if he’d like to make a little something extra on the side, man as fast as he was. And no sooner was the question asked than he was running numbers for the Deacon Skinner Broscious, the man so called because he was known to carefully watch over his flock and call down the wrath of the Almighty if one of them strayed. The Deacon Broscious had once been a Louisiana gambler, the story went, won himself a big pot on the same night he killed a man, the two incidents not necessarily unrelated, and he’d come to Greenwood with a fat pocket and a few girls he’d immediately put up for rent. When those original girls got themselves in a partnership frame of mind he cut them in for a slice each and then sent them out for a whole new string of younger, fresher girls with no partnership frame of mind whatsoever and then the Deacon Broscious branched out into the saloon business and the numbers business and the Choctaw and heroin and opium business and any man who fucked, fixed, boozed, or bet in Greenwood got right familiar with either the Deacon or someone who worked for him.

The Deacon Broscious weighed north of four hundred pounds. With plenty change. More often than not, if he took the night air down around Admiral and First, he did so in a big old wooden rocker that somebody’d strapped wheels to. The Deacon had him two high-boned, high-yellow, knob-jointed, thin-as-death sons of bitches working for him, name of Dandy and Smoke, and they pushed him around town at all hours of the night in that chair, and plenty nights he’d take to singing. He had a beautiful voice, high and sweet and strong, and he’d sing spirituals and chain gang songs and even did a version of “I’m a Twelve O’Clock Fella in a Nine O’Clock Town” that was a hell of a lot better than the white version you heard Byron Harlan singing on the disc record. So there he’d be, rolling up and down First Street, singing with a voice so beautiful some said God had kept it from his favorite angels so as not to encourage covetousness in their ranks entire, and Deacon Broscious would clap his hands, and his face would bead with sweat and his smile would become the size and shine of a trout, and folks would forget for a moment who he was, until one of them remembered because he owed the Deacon something, and that one, he’d get to see behind the sweat and smile and the singing and what he saw there left an imprint on children he hadn’t even sired yet.

Jessie Tell told Luther that the last time a man had seriously fucked with the Deacon Broscious — “I mean lack-of-all-respect type of fucking?” Jessie said — Deacon up and sat on the son of a bitch. Squirmed in place until he couldn’t hear the screams no more, looked down and saw that the dumb nigger’d given up the ghost, just lay in the dirt looking at nothing, mouth wide open, one arm stretched and reaching.

“Mighta told me this before I took a job from the man,” Luther said.

“You running numbers, Country. You think you do that sort of thing for a nice man?”

Luther said, “Told you not to call me Country no more.”

They were in the Gold Goose, getting loose after a long day smiling for white folk across the tracks, and Luther could feel the liquor reaching that level in his blood where everything slowed down right nice and his eyesight sharpened and he felt nothing was impossible.

Luther would soon have ample time to consider how he’d fallen into running numbers for the Deacon, and it would take him a while to realize that it had nothing to do with money — hell, with the tips he made at the Hotel Tulsa he was making nearly twice what he’d made at the munitions factory. And it wasn’t like he hoped to have any future in the rackets. He’d seen enough men back in Columbus who’d thought they could climb that ladder; usually when they fell from it, they fell screaming. So why? It was that house on Elwood, he guessed, the way it crowded him until he felt the eaves dig into his shoulders. And it was Lila, much as he loved her — and he was surprised to realize how much he did sometimes, how much the sight of her blinking awake with one side of her face pressed to the pillow could fire a bolt through his heart. But before he could even get his head around that love, maybe enjoy it a little bit, here she was carrying a child, she only twenty and Luther just twenty-three. A child. A rest-of-your-life responsibility. A thing that grew up while you grew old. Didn’t care if you were tired, didn’t care if you were trying to concentrate on something else, didn’t care if you wanted to make love. A child just was, thrust right into the center of your life and screaming its head off. And Luther, who’d never really known his father, was damn sure certain he’d live up to his responsibility, like it or not, but until then he wanted to live this here life at full tilt, with a little danger thrown in to spice it up, something to remember when he sat on his rocker and played with his grandkids. They’d be looking at an old man smiling like a fool, while he’d be remembering the young buck who’d run through the Tulsa night with Jessie and danced just enough on the other side of the law to say it didn’t own him.

Jessie was the first and best friend Luther had made in Greenwood, and this would soon become the problem. His given name was Clarence, but his middle name was Jessup, so everyone called him Jessie when they weren’t calling him Jessie Tell, and he had a way about him that drew men to him as much as women. He was a bellhop and fill-in elevator operator at the Hotel Tulsa, and he had a gift for keeping everyone’s spirits up on his own high level and that could sure make a day fly. Much as Jessie’d been given a couple nicknames himself, it was only fair, since he’d done the same to everyone he met (it was Jessie who, at the Gold Goose, had first called Luther “Country”), and those names left his tongue with so much speed and certainty that usually a man started going by Jessie’s nickname no matter how long he’d been called by any other on this earth. Jessie would move through the lobby of the Hotel Tulsa pushing a brass cart or lugging some bags and calling out, “Happening, Slim?” and “You know it’s the truth, Typhoon,” and following that with a soft “heh heh right,” and before suppertime people were calling Bobby Slim and Gerald Typhoon and most felt better for the trade-off.

Luther and Jessie Tell had them some elevator races when times were slow and they bet on bag totals every day they worked the bell stand, hustled like mad with smile and shine for the white folk who called ’em both George even though they wore brass name tags clear as day, and after they’d crossed back over the Frisco tracks into Greenwood and retired to the saloons or the galleries down around Admiral, they kept their raps up, because they were both fast in the mouth and fast on their feet and Luther felt that between the two of them lay the kinship he’d been missing, the one he’d left behind in Columbus with Sticky Joe Beam and Aeneus James and some of the other men he’d played ball with and drank with and, in pre-Lila days, chased women with. Life—life—was lived here, in the Greenwood that sprung up at night with its snap of pool balls and its three-string guitars and saxophones and liquor and men unwinding after so many hours of being called George, called son, called boy, called whatever white folk felt a mind to call them. And a man could not only be forgiven, he could be expected to unwind with other men after days like they had, saying their “Yes, suhs” and their “How dos” and their “Sho ’nuffs.”

Fast as Jessie Tell was — and he and Luther both ran the same numbers territory and ran it fast — he was big too. Not near as big as Deacon Broscious but a man of girth, nonetheless, and he loved him his heroin. Loved him his chicken and his rye and his fat-bottomed women and his talk and his Choctaw and his song, but, man, his heroin he loved above all else.

“Shit,” he said, “nigger like me got to have something slow him down, else whitey’d shoot him ’fore he could take over the world. Say I’m right, Country. Say it. ’Cause it’s so and y’ know it.”

Problem was, a habit like Jessie had — and his habit was like the rest of him, large — got expensive, and even though he cleared more tips than any man at the Hotel Tulsa, it didn’t mean much because tips were pooled and then dealt out evenly to each man at the end of a shift. And even though he was running numbers for the Deacon and that was most definitely a paying proposition, the runners getting two cents on every dollar the customers lost and Greenwood customers lost about as much as they played and they played at a fearsome rate, Jessie still couldn’t keep up by playing straight.

So he skimmed.

The way running numbers worked in Deacon Broscious’s town was straight simple: ain’t no such thing as credit. You wanted to put a dime on the number, you paid the runner eleven cents before he left your house, the extra penny to cover the vig. You played for four bits, you paid fifty-five. And so on.

Deacon Broscious didn’t believe in chasing down country niggers for their money after they’d lost, just couldn’t see the sense in that. He had real collectors for real debt, he couldn’t bother fucking up niggers’ limbs for pennies. Those pennies, though, you added it up and you could fill some mail bags with it, boy, could fill a barn come those special days when folks thought luck was in the air.

Since the runners carried that cash around with them, it stood to reason that Deacon Broscious had to pick boys he trusted, but the Deacon didn’t get to be the Deacon by trusting anybody, so Luther had always assumed he was being watched. Not every run, mind you, just every third or so. He’d never actually seen someone doing the watching, but it sure couldn’t hurt matters none to work from that assumption.

Jessie said, “You give Deacon too much credit, boy. Man can’t have eyes everywhere. ’Sides, even if he did, those eyes are human, too. They can’t tell if you went into the house and just Daddy played or if Mama and Grandpa and Uncle Jim all played, too. And you sure don’t pocket all four of them dollars. But if you pocket one? Who’s the wiser? God? Maybe if He’s looking. But the Deacon ain’t God.”

He surely wasn’t that. He was some other thing.

Jessie took a shot at the six ball and missed it clean. He gave Luther a lazy shrug. His buttery eyes told Luther he’d been hitting the spike again, probably in the alley while Luther’d used the bathroom a while back.

Luther sank the twelve.

Jessie gripped his stick to keep him up, then felt behind him for his chair. When he was sure he’d found it and centered it under his ass, he lowered himself into it and smacked his lips, tried to get some wet into that big tongue of his.

Luther couldn’t help himself. “Shit going to kill you, boy.”

Jessie smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Ain’t going to do nothing right now but make me feel right, so shush your mouth and shoot your pool.”

That was the problem with Jessie — much as the boy could talk at you, weren’t no one could talk to him. There was some part of him — the core, most likely — that got plumb irritated by reason. Common sense insulted Jessie.

“Just ’cause folks be doing a thing,” he said to Luther once, “don’t make that thing a good fucking idea all to itself, do it?”

“Don’t make it bad.”

Jessie smiled that smile of his got him women and a free drink more often than not. “Sure it do, Country. Sure it do.”

Oh, the women loved him. Dogs rolled over at the sight of him and peed all over their bellies, and children followed him when he walked Greenwood Avenue, as if gold-plated jumping jacks would spring from his trouser cuffs.

Because there was something unbroken in the man. And people followed him, maybe, just to see it break.

Luther sank the six and then the five, and when he looked up again, Jessie had gone into a nod, a bit of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth, his arms and legs wrapped around that pool stick like he’d decided it would make him a right fine wife.

They’d look after him here. Maybe set him up in the back room if the place got busy. Else, just leave him where he sat. So Luther put his stick back in the rack and took his hat from the wall and walked out into the Greenwood dusk. He thought of finding himself a game, just sit in for a few hands. There was one going on right now upstairs in the back room of Po’s Gas Station, and just picturing it put an itch in his head. But he’d played in a few too many games already during his short time in Greenwood and it was all he could do hustling for tips at the hotel and running for the Deacon to keep Lila from getting any idea how much he’d lost.

Lila. He’d promised her he’d come home tonight before sunset and it was well past that now, the sky a deep dark blue and the Arkansas River gone silver and black, and while it was just about the last thing he wanted to do, what with the night filling up around him with music and loud, happy catcalls and such, Luther took a deep breath and headed home to be a husband.

Lila didn’t care much for Jessie, no surprise, and she didn’t care much for any of Luther’s friends or his nights on the town or his moonlighting for Deacon Broscious, so the small house on Elwood Avenue had been getting smaller every day since.

A week ago when Luther had said, “Where the money going to come from then?” Lila said she’d get a job, too. Luther laughed, knowing that no white folk was going to want a pregnant colored scrubbing their pots and cleaning their floors because white women wouldn’t want their husbands thinking about how that baby got in there and white men wouldn’t like thinking about it either. Might have to explain to the children how come they’d never seen a black stork.

After supper tonight, she said, “You a man now, Luther. A husband. You got responsibilities.”

“And I’m keeping ’em up, ain’t I?” Luther said. “Ain’t I?”

“Well, you are, I’ll grant you.”

“Okay, then.”

“But still, baby, you can spend some nights at home. You can get to fixing those things you said.”

“What things?”

She cleared the table and Luther stood, went to the coat he’d placed on the hook when he’d come in, fished for his cigarettes.

“Things,” Lila said. “You said you’d build a crib for the baby and fix the sag in the steps and—”

“And, and, and,” Luther said. “Shit, woman, I work hard all day.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” It came out a lot harder than he’d intended.

Lila said, “Why you so cross all the time?”

Luther hated these conversations. Seemed like it was the only kind they had anymore. He lit a cigarette. “I ain’t cross,” he said, even though he was.

“You cross all the time.” She rubbed her belly where it had already begun to show.

“Well why the fuck not?” Luther said. He hadn’t meant to cuss in front of her, but he could feel the liquor in him, liquor he barely noticed drinking when he was around Jessie because Jessie and his heroin made a little whiskey seem as dangerous as lemonade. “Two months ago, I wasn’t a father-to-be.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Lila placed the dishes in the sink and came back into the small living room.

“Shit mean what I said,” Luther said. “A month ago—”

“What?” She stared at him, waiting.

“A month ago I wasn’t in Tulsa and I wasn’t shotgun-wed and I wasn’t living in some shit little house on some shit little avenue in some shit little town, Lila. Now was I?”

“This ain’t no shit town.” Lila’s voice went up with her back. “And you weren’t shotgun-wed.”

“May as well.”

She got up into him, staring with stoked-coal eyes and curled fists. “You don’t want me? You don’t want your child?”

“I wanted a fucking choice,” Luther said.

“You have your choice and you take it every night out on the streets. You ain’t ever come home like a man should, and when you do, you drunk or high or both.”

“Got to be,” Luther said.

Her lips were trembling when she said, “And why’s that?”

“’Cause it’s the only way I can put up with—” He stopped himself, but it was too late.

“With what, Luther? With me?”

“I’m going out.”

She grabbed his arm. “With me, Luther? That it?”

“Go on over to your auntie’s now,” Luther said. “Ya’ll can talk about what an un-Christian man I am. Tell yourselves how you gonna God me up.”

“With me?” she said a third time, and her voice was small and soul sick.

Luther left before he could get the mind to bust something.

They spent Sundays at Aunt Marta and Uncle James’s grand house on Detroit Avenue in what Luther’d come to think of as the Second Greenwood.

No one else wanted to think of it that way, but Luther knew there were two Greenwoods, just like there were two Tulsas. Which one you found yourself in depended on whether you were north or south of the Frisco depot. He was sure white Tulsa was several different Tulsas when you got under the surface, but he wasn’t privy to any of that, since his interactions with it never got much past “Which floor, ma’am?”

But in Greenwood, the division had become a whole lot clearer. You had “bad” Greenwood, which was the alleys off Greenwood Avenue, well north of the intersection with Archer, and you had the several blocks down around First and Admiral, where guns were fired on Friday nights and passersby could still catch a whiff of opium smoke in the Sunday-morning streets.

But “good” Greenwood, folks liked to believe, made up the other 99 percent of the community. It was Standpipe Hill and Detroit Avenue and the central business district of Greenwood Avenue. It was the First Baptist Church and the Bell & Little Restaurant and the Dreamland Theater where the Little Tramp or America’s Sweetheart ambled across the screen for a fifteen-cent ticket. It was the Tulsa Star and a black deputy sheriff walking the streets with a polished badge. It was Dr. Lewis T. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, and John and Loula Williams who owned the Williams Confectionery and the Williams One-Stop Garage and the Dreamland itself. It was O. W. Gurley, who owned the grocery store, the mercantile store, and the Gurley Hotel to boot. It was Sunday-morning services and these Sunday-afternoon dinners with the fine china and the whitest linen and something classical and delicate tinkling from the Victrola, like the sounds from a past none of them could point to.

That’s where the other Greenwood got to Luther most — in that music. You only had to hear but a few bars to know it was white. Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms. Luther could just picture them sitting at their pianos, tapping away in some big room with polished floors and high windows while the servants tiptoed around outside. This was music by and for men who whipped their stable boys and fucked their maids and went on weekend hunts to kill small animals they’d never eat. Men who loved the sound of baying hounds and sudden flight. They’d come back home, weary from lack of work, and compose or listen to music just like this, stare up at paintings of ancestors as hopeless and empty as they were, and preach to their children about right and wrong.

Uncle Cornelius had spent his life working for men like those before he’d gone blind, and Luther had met more than a few himself in his day, and he was content to step out of their path and leave them to themselves. But he couldn’t stand the idea that here, in James and Marta Hollaway’s dining room on Detroit Avenue, the dark faces assembled seemed determined to drink, eat, and money themselves white.

He’d much rather be down around First and Admiral right now with the bell boys and the liverymen and the men who toted shine boxes and toolboxes. Men who worked and played with equal effort. Men who wanted nothing more, as the saying went, than a little whiskey, a little dice, a little pussy to make things nice.

Not that they’d know a saying like that up here on Detroit Avenue. Hell no. Their sayings fell more along the lines of “The Lord hates a …” and “The Lord don’t …” and “The Lord won’t …” and “The Lord shall not abide a …” Making God sound like one irritable master, quick with the whip.

He and Lila sat at the large table and Luther listened to them talk about the white man as if he and his would soon be sitting here on Sundays alongside them.

“Mr. Paul Stewart himself,” James was saying, “come into my garage the other day with his Daimler, says, ‘James, sir, I don’t trust no one on the other side of them tracks the way I trust you with this here car.’”

Lionel Garrity, Esquire, piped up a little later with, “It’s all just a matter of time ’fore folks understand what our boys did in the war and say, It’s time. Time to put all this silliness behind us. We all people. Bleed the same, think the same.”

And Luther watched Lila smile and nod at that and he wanted to rip that disc record off the Victrola and break it over his knee.

Because what Luther hated most was that behind all this — all this finery, all this newfound nobility, all the wing collars and preaching and handsome furniture and new-mown lawns and fancy cars — lay fear. Terror.

If I play ball, they asked, will you let me be?

Luther thought of Babe Ruth and those boys from Boston and Chicago this summer and he wanted to say, No. They won’t let you be. Comes the time they want something, they will take whatever they fucking please just to teach you.

And he imagined Marta and James and Dr. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, looking back at him, gape jawed and hands out in pleading:

Teach us what?

Your place.

Chapter six

Danny met Tessa Abruzze the same week people started to get sick. At first the newspapers said it was confined to soldiers at Camp Devens, but then two civilians dropped dead on the same day in the streets of Quincy, and across the city people began to stay inside.

Danny arrived on his floor with an armful of parcels he’d carried up the tight stairwell. They contained his clothes, freshly laundered, wrapped in brown paper, and tied off with a ribbon by a laundress from Prince Street, a widow who did a dozen loads a day in the tub in her kitchen. He tried maneuvering the key into the door with the parcels still in his arms, but after a couple of failed attempts, he stepped back and placed them on the floor, and a young woman came out of her room at the other end of the hall and let out a yelp.

She said, “Signore, signore,” and it came out tentatively, as if she weren’t sure she was worth the trouble. She leaned one hand against the wall and pink water ran down her legs and dripped off her ankles.

Danny wondered why he’d never seen her before. Then he wondered if she had the grippe. Then he noticed she was pregnant. His lock disengaged and the door popped open, and he kicked his parcels inside because nothing left behind in a hallway in the North End would stay there long. He shut the door and came down the hall toward the woman and saw that the lower part of her dress was soaked through.

She kept her hand on the wall and lowered her head and her dark hair fell over her mouth and her teeth were clenched into a grimace tighter than Danny had seen on some dead people. She said, “Dio aiutami. Dio aiutami.”

Danny said, “Where’s your husband? Where’s the midwife?”

He took her free hand in his and she squeezed so tight a bolt of pain ran up to his elbow. Her eyes rolled up at him and she babbled something in Italian so fast he didn’t catch any of it, and he realized she didn’t speak a word of English.

“Mrs. DiMassi.” Danny’s holler echoed down the stairwell. “Mrs. DiMassi!”

The woman squeezed his hand even harder and screamed through her teeth.

“Dove e il vostro marito?” Danny said.

The woman shook her head several times, though Danny had no idea if that meant she had no husband or if he just wasn’t here.

“The … la …” Danny searched for the word for “midwife.” He caressed the back of her hand and said, “Ssssh. It’s okay.” He looked into her wide, wild eyes. “Look … look, you … the … la ostetrica!” Danny was so excited that he’d finally remembered the word he immediately reverted to English. “Yes? Where is …? Dove e? Dove e la ostetrica?”

The woman pounded her fist against the wall. She dug her fingers into Danny’s palm and screamed so loudly that he yelled, “Mrs. Di-Massi!” feeling a kind of panic he hadn’t felt since his first day as a policeman, when it had sunk in that he was all the answer the world saw fit to give to someone else’s problems.

The woman shoved her face into his and said, “Faccia qualcosa, uomo insensato! Mi aiuti!” and Danny didn’t get all of it, but he picked up “foolish man” and “help” so he pulled her toward the stairs.

Her hand remained in his, her arm wrapped around his abdomen, the rest of her clenched against his back as they made their way down the staircase to the street. Mass General was too far to make on foot and he couldn’t see any taxis or even any trucks in the streets, just people, filling it on market day, Danny thinking if it was market day there should be some fucking trucks, shouldn’t there, but no, just throngs of people and fruit and vegetables and restless pigs snuffling in their straw along the cobblestone.

“Haymarket Relief Station,” he said. “It’s closest. You understand?”

She nodded quickly and he knew it was his tone she was responding to and they pushed their way through the crowds and people began to make way. Danny tried a few times, calling out, “Cerco un’ ostetrica! Un’ ostetrica! Cè qualcuno che conosce un’ ostetrica?” but all he got were sympathetic shakes of the head.

When they broke out on the other side of the mob, the woman arched her back and her moan was small and sharp and Danny thought she was going to drop the child onto the street, two blocks from Haymarket Relief, but she fell back into him instead. He scooped her up in his arms and started walking and staggering, walking and staggering, the woman not terribly heavy, but squirming and clawing the air and slapping his chest.

They walked several blocks, time enough for Danny to find her beautiful in her agony. In spite of or because of, he wasn’t sure, but beautiful nevertheless. The final block, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her wrists pressing against the muscle there, and whispered, “Dio, aiutami. Dio, aiutami,” over and over in his ear.

At the relief station, Danny pushed them through the first door he saw and they ended up in a brown hallway of dark oak floors and dim yellow lights and a single bench. A doctor sat on the bench, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He looked at them as they came up the corridor. “What are you doing here?”

Danny, still holding the woman in his arms, said, “You serious?”

“You came in the wrong door.” The doctor stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood. He got a good look at the woman. “How long’s she been in labor?”

“Her water broke about ten minutes ago. That’s all I know.”

The doctor placed one hand under the woman’s belly and another to her head. He gave Danny a look, calm and unreachable. “This woman’s going into labor.”

“I know.”

“In your arms,” the doctor said, and Danny almost dropped her.

“Wait here,” the doctor said and went through some double doors halfway up the corridor. Something banged around back there and then the doctor came back through the doors with an iron gurney, one of its wheels rusted and squeaking.

Danny placed the woman on the gurney. Her eyes were closed now, her breath still puffing out through her lips in short bursts, and Danny looked down at the wetness he’d been feeling on his arms and waist, a wetness he’d thought was mostly water but now saw was blood, and he showed his arms to the doctor.

The doctor nodded and said, “What’s her name?”

Danny said, “I don’t know.”

The doctor frowned at that and then he pushed the gurney past Danny and back through the double doors and Danny heard him calling for a nurse.

Danny found a bathroom at the end of the hall. He washed his hands and arms with brown soap and watched the blood swirl pink in the basin. The woman’s face hung in his mind. Her nose was slightly crooked with a bump halfway down the bridge, and her upper lip was thicker than her lower, and she had a small mole on the underside of her jaw, barely noticeable because her skin was so dark, almost as dark as her hair. He could hear her voice in his chest and feel her thighs and lower back in his palms, see the arch of her neck as she’d ground her head into the gurney mattress.

He found the waiting area at the far end of the hall. He entered from behind the admitting desk and came around to sit among the bandaged and the sniffling. One guy removed a black bowler from his head and vomited into it. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He peered into the bowler, and then he looked at the other people in the waiting room; he seemed embarrassed. He carefully placed the bowler under the wooden bench and wiped his mouth again with the handkerchief and sat back and closed his eyes. A few people had surgical masks over their faces, and when they coughed the coughs were wet. The admitting nurse wore a mask as well. No one spoke English except for a teamster whose foot had been run over by a horse-drawn cart. He told Danny the accident had happened right out front, else he’d have walked to a real hospital, the kind fit for Americans. Several times he glanced at the dried blood covering Danny’s belt and groin, but he didn’t ask how it had gotten there.

A woman came in with her teenage daughter. The woman was thick-waisted and dark but her daughter was thin and almost yellow and she coughed without stopping, the sound of it like metal gears grinding under water. The teamster was the first of them to ask the nurse for a surgical mask, but by the time Mrs. DiMassi found Danny in the waiting area, he wore one, too, feeling sheepish and ashamed, but they could still hear the girl, down another corridor and behind another set of double doors, those gears grinding.

“Why you wear that, Officer Danny?” Mrs. DiMassi sat beside him.

Danny took it off. “A very sick woman was here.”

She said, “Lot of people sick today. I say fresh air. I say go up on the roofs. Everyone say I crazy. They stay inside.”

“You heard about …”

“Tessa, yes.”

“Tessa?”

Mrs. DiMassi nodded. “Tessa Abruzze. You carry her here?”

Danny nodded.

Mrs. DiMassi chuckled. “Whole neighborhood talking. Say you not as strong as you look.”

Danny smiled. “That so?”

She said, “Yes. So. They say your knees buckle and Tessa not heavy woman.”

“You notify her husband?”

“Bah.” Mrs. DiMassi swatted the air. “She have no husband. Only father. Father a good man. Daughter?” She swatted the air again.

“So you don’t hold her in high regard,” Danny said.

“I would spit,” she said, “but this clean floor.”

“Then why are you here?”

“She my tenant,” she said simply.

Danny placed a hand to the little old woman’s back and she rocked in place, her feet swinging above the floor.

By the time the doctor entered the waiting room, Danny had put his mask back on and Mrs. DiMassi wore one as well. It had been a man this time, midtwenties, a freight yard worker by the looks of his clothes. He’d dropped to a knee in front of the admitting desk. He held up a hand as if to say he was fine, he was fine. He didn’t cough, but his lips and the flesh under his jaw were purple. He remained in that position, his breath rattling, until the nurse came around to get him. She helped the man to his feet. He reeled in her grip. His eyes were red and wet and saw nothing of the world in front of him.

So Danny put his mask back on and went behind the admitting desk and got one for Mrs. DiMassi and a few others in the waiting room. He handed them out and sat back down, feeling each breath he exhaled press back against his lips and nose.

Mrs. DiMassi said, “Paper say only soldiers get it.”

Danny said, “Soldiers breathe the same air.”

“You?”

Danny patted her hand. “Not so far.”

He started to remove his hand, but she closed hers over it. “Nothing get you, I think.”

“Okay.”

“So I stay close.” Mrs. DiMassi moved in against him until their legs touched.

The doctor came out into the waiting room and, though he wore one himself, seemed surprised by all the masks.

“It’s a boy,” he said and squatted in front of them. “Healthy.”

“How is Tessa?” Mrs. DiMassi said.

“That’s her name?”

Mrs. DiMassi nodded.

“She had a complication,” the doctor said. “There’s some bleeding I’m concerned about. Are you her mother?”

Mrs. DiMassi shook her head.

“Landlady,” Danny said.

“Ah,” the doctor said. “She have family?”

“A father,” Danny said. “He’s still being located.”

“I can’t let anyone but immediate family in to see her. I hope you understand.”

Danny kept his voice light. “Serious, Doctor?”

The doctor’s eyes remained weary. “We’re trying, Officer.”

Danny nodded.

“If you hadn’t carried her here, though?” the doctor said. “The world would, without question, be a hundred ten pounds lighter. Choose to look at it that way.”

“Sure.”

The doctor gave Mrs. DiMassi a courtly nod and rose from his haunches.

“Dr….,” Danny said.

“Rosen,” the doctor said.

“Dr. Rosen,” Danny said, “how long are we going to be wearing masks, you think?”

Dr. Rosen took a long look around the waiting room. “Until it stops.”

“And it isn’t stopping?”

“It’s barely started,” the doctor said and left them there.

Tessa’s father, Federico Abruzze, found Danny that night on the roof of their building. After the hospital, Mrs. DiMassi had berated and harangued all her tenants into moving their mattresses up onto the roof not long after the sun went down. And so they assembled four stories above the North End under the stars and the thick smoke from the Portland Meat Factory and the sticky wafts from the USIA molasses tank.

Mrs. DiMassi brought her best friend, Denise Ruddy-Cugini, from Prince Street. She also brought her niece, Arabella and Arabella’s husband, Adam, a bricklayer recently arrived from Palermo sans passport. They were joined by Claudio and Sophia Mosca and their three children, the oldest only five and Sophia already showing with the fourth. Shortly after their arrival, Lou and Patricia Imbriano dragged their mattresses up the fire escape and were followed by the newlyweds, Joseph and Concetta Limone, and finally, Steve Coyle.

Danny, Claudio, Adam, and Steve Coyle played craps on the black tar, their backs against the parapet, and Claudio’s homemade wine went down easier with every roll. Danny could hear coughing and fever-shouts from the streets and buildings, but he could also hear mothers calling their children home and the squeak of laundry being drawn across the lines between the tenements and a man’s sharp, sudden laughter and an organ grinder in one of the alleys, his instrument slightly out of tune in the warm night air.

No one on the roof was sick yet. No one coughed or felt flushed or nauseated. No one suffered from what were rumored to be the telltale early signs of infection — headache or pains in the legs — even though most of the men were exhausted from twelve-hour workdays and weren’t sure their bodies would notice the difference. Joe Limone, a baker’s assistant, worked fifteen-hour days and scoffed at the lazy twelve-hour men, and Concetta Limone, in an apparent effort to keep up with her husband, reported for work at Patriot Wool at five in the morning and left at six-thirty in the evening. Their first night on the rooftop was like the nights during the Feasts of the Saints, when Hanover Street was laureled in lights and flowers and the priests led parades up the street and the air smelled of incense and red sauce. Claudio had made a kite for his son, Bernardo Thomas, and the boy stood with the other children in the center of the roof and the yellow kite looked like a fin against the dark blue sky.

Danny recognized Federico as soon as he stepped out on the roof. He’d passed him on the stairs once when his arms were filled with boxes — a courtly old man dressed in tan linen. His hair and thin mustache were white and clipped tight to his skin and he carried a walking stick the way landed gentry did, not as an aid, but as a totem. He removed his fedora as he spoke to Mrs. DiMassi and then looked over at Danny sitting against the parapet with the other men. Danny rose as Federico Abruzze crossed to him.

“Mr. Coughlin?” he said with a small bow and perfect English.

“Mr. Abruzze,” Danny said and stuck out his hand. “How’s your daughter?”

Federico shook the hand with both of his and gave Danny a curt nod. “She is fine. Thank you very much for asking.”

“And your grandson?”

“He is strong,” Federico said. “May I speak with you?”

Danny stepped over the dice and loose change and he and Federico walked to the eastern edge of the roof. Federico removed a white handkerchief from his pocket and placed it on the parapet. He said, “Please, sit.”

Danny took a seat on the handkerchief, feeling the waterfront at his back and the wine in his blood.

“A pretty night,” Federico said. “Even with so much coughing.”

“Yes.”

“So many stars.”

Danny looked up at the bright splay of them. He looked back at Federico Abruzze, getting the impression of tribal leader from the man. A small-town country mayor, perhaps, a dispenser of wisdom in the town piazza on summer nights.

Federico said, “You are well known around the neighborhood.”

Danny said, “Really?”

He nodded. “They say you are an Irish policeman who holds no prejudice against the Italians. They say you grew up here and even after a bomb exploded in your station house, even after you’ve worked these streets and seen the worst of our people, you treat everyone as a brother. And now you have saved my daughter’s life and the life of my grandson. I thank you, sir.”

Danny said, “You’re welcome.”

Federico placed a cigarette to his lips and snapped a match off his thumbnail to light it, staring at Danny through the flame. In the flare of light, he looked younger suddenly, his face smooth, and Danny guessed him to be in his late fifties, ten years younger than he looked from a distance.

He waved his cigarette at the night. “I never leave a debt unpaid.”

“You don’t owe a debt to me,” Danny said.

“But I do, sir,” he said. “I do.” His voice was softly musical. “But the cost of immigrating to this country has left me of modest means. Would you, at the very least, sir, allow my daughter and I to cook for you some night?” He placed a hand to Danny’s shoulder. “Once she is well enough, of course.”

Danny looked into the man’s smile and wondered about Tessa’s missing husband. Was he dead? Had there ever been one? From what Danny understood of Italian customs, he couldn’t imagine a man of Federico’s stature and upbringing allowing an unwed, pregnant daughter to remain in his sight, let alone his home. And now it seemed the man was trying to engineer a courtship between Danny and Tessa.

How strange.

“I’d be honored, sir.”

“Then it’s done.” Federico leaned back. “And the honor is all mine. I will leave word once Tessa is well.”

“I look forward to it.”

Federico and Danny walked back across the roof toward the fire escape.

“This sickness.” Federico’s arm spanned the roofs around them. “It will pass?”

“I hope so.”

“I do as well. So much hope in this country, so much possibility. It would be a tragedy to learn to suffer as Europe has.” He turned at the fire escape and took Danny’s shoulders in his hands. “I thank you again, sir. Good night.”

“Good night,” Danny said.

Federico descended through the black iron, the walking stick tucked under one arm, his movements fluid and assured, as if he’d grown up with mountains nearby, rocky hills to climb. Once he was gone, Danny found himself still staring down, trying to give a name to the odd sense he had that something else had transpired between them, something that got lost in the wine in his blood. Maybe it was the way he’d said debt, or suffer, as if the words had different meanings in Italian. Danny tried to snatch at the threads, but the wine was too strong; the thought slipped off into the breeze and he gave up trying to catch it and returned to his craps game.

A little later in the night, they launched the kite again at Bernardo Thomas’s insistence, but the twine slipped from the boy’s fingers. Before he could cry, Claudio let out a whoop of triumph, as if the point of any kite were to eventually set it free. The boy wasn’t immediately convinced and stared after it with a tremble in his chin, so the other adults joined in at the edge of the roof. They raised their fists and shouted. Bernardo Thomas began to laugh and clap, and the other children joined in, and soon they all stood in celebration and urged the yellow kite onward into the deep, dark sky.

By the end of the week, the undertakers had hired men to guard the coffins. The men varied in appearance — some had come from private security companies and knew how to bathe and shave, others had the look of washed-up footballers or boxers, a few in the North End were low-rung members of the Black Hand — but all carried shotguns or rifles. Among the afflicted were carpenters, and even if they’d been healthy, it was doubtful they could have kept up with the demand. At Camp Devens, the grippe killed sixty-three soldiers in one day. It rooted its way into tenements in the North End and South Boston and the rooming houses of Scollay Square and tore through the shipyards of Quincy and Weymouth. Then it caught the train lines, and the papers reported outbreaks in Hartford and New York City.

It reached Philadelphia on the weekend during fine weather. People filled the streets for parades that supported the troops and the buying of Liberty Bonds, the Waking Up of America, and the strengthening of moral purity and fortitude best exemplified by the Boy Scouts. By the following week, death carts roamed the streets for bodies placed on porches the night before and morgue tents sprang up all over eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. In Chicago it took hold first on the South Side, then on the East, and the rails carried it out across the Plains.

There were rumors. Of an imminent vaccine. Of a German submarine that had been sighted three miles out in Boston Harbor in August; some claimed to have seen it rise out of the sea and exhale a plume of orange smoke that had drifted toward shore. Preachers cited passages in Revelations and Ezekiel that prophesied an airborne poison as punishment for a new century’s promiscuity and immigrant mores. The Last Times, they said, had arrived.

Word spread through the underclass that the only cure was garlic. Or turpentine on sugar cubes. Or kerosene on sugar cubes if turpentine wasn’t available. So the tenements reeked. They reeked of sweat and bodily discharges and the dead and the dying and garlic and turpentine. Danny’s throat clogged with it and his nostrils burned, and some days, woozy from kerosene vapors and stuffed up from the garlic, his tonsils scraped raw, he’d think he’d finally come down with it. But he hadn’t. He’d seen it fell doctors and nurses and coroners and ambulance drivers and two cops from the First Precinct and six more from other precincts. And even as it blasted a hole through the neighborhood he’d come to love with a passion he couldn’t even explain to himself, he knew it wouldn’t stick to him.

Death had missed him at Salutation Street, and now it circled him and winked at him but then settled on someone else. So he went into the tenements where several cops refused to go, and he went into the boardinghouses and rooming houses and gave what comfort he could to those gone yellow and gray with it, those whose sweat darkened the mattresses.

Days off vanished in the precinct. Lungs rattled like tin walls in high wind and vomit was dark green, and in the North End slums, they took to painting Xs on the doors of the contagious, and more and more people slept on the roofs. Some mornings, Danny and the other cops of the Oh-One stacked the bodies on the sidewalk like shipyard piping and waited into the afternoon sun for the meat wagons to arrive. He continued to wear a mask but only because it was illegal not to. Masks were bullshit. Plenty of people who never took them off got the grippe all the same and died with their heads on fire.

He and Steve Coyle and another half-dozen cops responded to a suspicion-of-murder call off Portland Street. As Steve knocked on the door, Danny could see the adrenaline flare in the eyes of the other men in the hallway. The guy who eventually opened the door wore a mask, but his eyes were red with it and his breaths were liquid. Steve and Danny looked at the knife haft sticking out of the center of his chest for twenty seconds before they realized what they were seeing.

The guy said, “Fuck you fellas bothering me for?”

Steve had his hand on his revolver but it remained holstered. He held out his palm to get the guy to take a step back. “Who stabbed you, sir?”

The other cops in the hall moved on that, spreading out behind Danny and Steve.

“I did,” the guy said.

“You stabbed yourself?”

The guy nodded, and Danny noticed a woman sitting on the couch behind the guy. She wore a mask, too, and her skin was the blue of the infected and her throat was cut.

The guy leaned against the door, and the movement brought a fresh darkening to his shirt.

“Let me see your hands,” Steve said.

The guy raised his hands and his lungs rattled with the effort. “Could one of you fellas pull this out of my chest?”

Steve said, “Sir, step away from the door.”

He stepped out of their way and fell on his ass and sat looking at his thighs. They entered the room. No one wanted to touch the guy, so Steve trained his revolver on him.

The guy placed both hands on the haft and tugged, but it didn’t budge, and Steve said, “Put your hands down, sir.”

The guy gave Steve a loose smile. He lowered his hands and sighed.

Danny looked at the dead woman. “You kill your wife, sir?”

A slight shake of his head. “Cured her. Nothing else I could do, fellas. This thing?”

Leo West called from the back of the apartment. “We got kids in here.”

“Alive?” Steve called.

The guy on the floor shook his head again. “Cured them, too.”

“Three of ’em,” Leo West called. “Jesus.” He stepped back out of the room. His face was pale and he’d unbuttoned his collar. “Jesus,” he said again. “Shit.”

Danny said, “We need to get an ambulance down here.”

Rusty Aborn gave that a bitter chuckle. “Sure, Dan. What’s it taking them these days — five, six hours?”

Steve cleared his throat. “This guy just left Ambulance Country.” He put his foot on the guy’s shoulder and gently tipped the corpse to the floor.

Two days later, Danny carried Tessa’s infant out of her apartment in a towel. Federico was nowhere to be found, and Mrs. DiMassi sat by Tessa as she lay in bed with a wet towel on her forehead and stared at the ceiling. Her skin had yellowed with it, but she was conscious. Danny held the infant as she glanced first at him and then at the bundle in his arms, the child’s skin the color and texture of stone, and then she turned her eyes to the ceiling again and Danny carried the child down the stairs and outside, just as he and Steve Coyle had carried Claudio’s body out the day before.

Danny made sure to call his parents most every night and managed to make one trip home during the pandemic. He sat with his family and Nora in the parlor on K Street and they drank tea, slipping the cups under the masks Ellen Coughlin demanded the family wear everywhere but in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Nora served the tea. Normally Avery Wallace would have performed that duty, but Avery hadn’t shown up for work in three days. Had it bad, he’d told Danny’s father over the phone, had it deep. Danny had known Avery since he and Connor were boys, and it only now occurred to him that he’d never visited the man’s home or met his family. Because he was colored?

There it was.

Because he was colored.

He looked up from his teacup at the rest of the family and the sight of them all — uncommonly silent and stiff in their gestures as they lifted their masks to sip their tea — struck him and Connor as absurd at the same time. It was as if they were still altar boys serving mass at Gate of Heaven and one look from either brother could cause the other to laugh at the least appropriate moment. No matter how many whacks on the ass they took from the old man, they just couldn’t help it. It got so bad the decision was made to separate them, and after sixth grade, they never served mass together again.

The same feeling gripped them now and the laugh burst through Danny’s lips first and Connor was a half step behind. Then they were both possessed by it, placing their teacups on the floor and giving in.

“What?” their father said. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Connor managed, and it came out muffled through the mask, which only made Danny laugh harder.

Their mother, sounding cross and confused, said, “What? What?”

“Jeeze, Dan,” Connor said, “get a load of himself.”

Danny knew he was talking about Joe. He tried not to look, he did, but then he looked over and saw the little kid sitting in a chair so big his shoes barely reached the edge of the cushion. Joe, sitting there with his big wide eyes and the ridiculous mask and the teacup resting on the lap of his plaid knickerbockers, looking at his brothers like they’d provide an answer to him. But there wasn’t any answer. It was all so silly and ridiculous and Danny noticed his little brother’s argyle socks and his eyes watered as his laughter boomed even harder.

Joe decided to join in and Nora followed, both of them uncertain at first but gathering in strength because Danny’s laughter had always been so infectious and neither could remember the last time they’d seen Connor laugh so freely or helplessly and then Connor sneezed and everyone stopped laughing.

A fine spray of red dots peppered the inside of his mask and bled through to the outside.

Their mother said, “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus,” and blessed herself.

“What?” Connor said. “It was a sneeze.”

“Connor,” Nora said. “Oh God, dear Connor.”

“What?”

“Con’,” Danny said and came out of his chair, “take off your mask.”

“Oh no oh no oh no,” their mother whispered.

Connor took off the mask, and when he got a good look at it, he gave it a small nod and took a breath.

Danny said, “Let’s me and you have a look in the bathroom.”

No one else moved at first, and Danny got Connor into the bathroom and locked the door as they heard the whole family find their legs and assemble out in the hall.

“Tilt your head,” Danny said.

Connor tilted his head. “Dan.”

“Shut up. Let me look.”

Someone turned the knob from the outside and his father said, “Open up.”

“Give us a second, will ya?”

“Dan,” Connor said, and his voice was still tremulous with laughter.

“Will you keep your head back? It’s not funny.”

“Well, you’re looking up my nose.”

“I know I am. Shut up.”

“You see any boogers?”

“A few.” Danny felt a smile trying to push through the muscles in his face. Leave it to Connor — serious as the grave on a normal day and now, possibly facing that grave, he couldn’t keep serious.

Someone rattled the door again and knocked.

“I picked it,” Connor said.

“What?”

“Just before Ma brought out the tea. I was in here. Had half my hand up there, Dan. Had one of those sharp rocks in there, you know the ones?”

Danny stopped looking in his brother’s nose. “You what?”

“Picked it,” Connor said. “I guess I need to cut my nails.”

Danny stared at him and Connor laughed. Danny slapped the side of his head and Connor rabbit-punched him. By the time they opened the door to the rest of the family, standing pale and angry in the hall, they were laughing again like bad altar boys.

“He’s fine.”

“I’m fine. Just a nosebleed. Look, Ma, it stopped.”

“Get a fresh mask from the kitchen,” their father said and walked back into the parlor with a wave of disgust.

Danny caught Joe looking at them with something akin to wonder.

“A nosebleed,” he said to Joe, drawing the word out.

“It’s not funny,” their mother said, and her voice was brittle.

“I know, Ma,” Connor said, “I know.”

“I do, too,” Danny said, catching a look from Nora now that nearly matched their mother’s, and then remembering her calling his brother “dear” Connor.

When did that start?

“No, you don’t,” their mother said. “You don’t at all. The two of you never did.” And she went into her bedroom and closed the door.

By the time Danny heard, Steve Coyle had been sick for five hours. He’d woken that morning, thighs turned to plaster, ankles swollen, calves twitching, head throbbing. He didn’t waste time pretending it was something else. He slipped out of the bedroom he’d shared last night with the Widow Coyle and grabbed his clothes and went out the door. Never paused, not even with his legs the way they were, dragging under the rest of him like they might just decide to stay put even if his torso kept going. After a few blocks, he told Danny, fucking legs screamed so much it was like they belonged to someone else. Fucking wailed, every step. He’d tried walking to the streetcar stop then realized he could infect the whole car. Then he remembered the streetcars had stopped running anyway. So a walk, then. Eleven blocks from the Widow Coyle’s cold-water flat at the top of Mission Hill all the way down to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Damn near crawling by the time he reached it, folded over like a broken match, cramps ballooning up through his stomach, his chest, his throat for Christ’s sake. And his head, Jesus. By the time he reached the admitting desk, it was like someone hammered pipe through his eyes.

He told all this to Danny from behind a pair of muslin curtains in the infectious disease ward of the intensive care unit at the Peter Bent. There was no one else in the ward the afternoon Danny came to see him, just the lumpen shape of a body beneath a sheet across the aisle. The rest of the beds were empty, the curtains pulled back. Somehow that was worse.

They’d given Danny a mask and gloves; the gloves were in his coat pocket; the mask hung at his throat. And yet he kept the muslin between him and Steve. Catching it didn’t scare him. These past few weeks? If you hadn’t made peace with your maker, then you didn’t believe you’d been made. But watching it drain Steve to the ground powder of himself — that would be something else. Something Danny would pass the cup on if Steve allowed him. Not the dying, just the witnessing.

Steve spoke like he was trying to gargle at the same time. The words pushed up through phlegm and the ends of sentences often drowned. “No Widow. Believe that?”

Danny said nothing. He’d only met the Widow Coyle once, and his sole impression was one of fussiness and anxious self-regard.

“Can’t see you.” Steve cleared his throat.

Danny said, “I can see you, pal.”

“Pull it back, would ya?”

Danny didn’t move right away.

“You scared? I don’t blame ya. Forget it.”

Danny leaned forward a few times. He hitched his pants at the knees. He leaned forward again. He pulled back the curtain.

His friend sat upright, the pillow dark from his head. His face was swollen and skeletal at the same time, like dozens of the infected, living and dead, that he and Danny had run across this month. His eyes bulged from their sockets, as if trying to escape, and ran with a milky film that pooled in the corners. But he wasn’t purple. Or black. He wasn’t hacking his lungs up through his mouth or defecating where he lay. So, all in all, not as sick as one feared. Not yet anyway.

He gave Danny an arched eyebrow, an exhausted grin.

“Remember those girls I courted this summer?”

Danny nodded. “Did more than court some of them.”

He coughed. A small one, into his fist. “I wrote a song. In my head. ‘Summer Girls.’”

Danny could suddenly feel the heat coming off him. If he leaned within a foot of him, the waves found his face.

“‘Summer Girls,’ eh?”

“‘Summer Girls.’” Steve’s eyes closed. “Sing it for you someday.”

Danny found a bucket of water on the bedside table. He reached in and pulled out a cloth and squeezed it. He placed the cloth on Steve’s forehead. Steve’s eyes snapped up to him, wild and grateful. Danny moved down his forehead and wiped his cheeks. He dropped the hot cloth back into the cooler water and squeezed again. He wiped his partner’s ears, the sides of his neck, his throat and chin.

“Dan.”

“Yeah?”

Steve grimaced. “Like a horse is sitting on my chest.”

Danny kept his eyes clear. He didn’t remove them from Steve’s face when he dropped the cloth back in the bucket. “Sharp?”

“Yeah. Sharp.”

“Can you breathe?”

“Not too good.”

“Probably I should get a doctor, then.”

Steve flicked his eyes at the suggestion.

Danny patted his hand and called for the doctor.

“Stay here,” Steve said. His lips were white.

Danny smiled and nodded. He swiveled on the small stool they’d wheeled over to the bed when he arrived. Called for a doctor again.

Avery Wallace, seventeen years the houseman for the Coughlin family, succumbed to the grippe and was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in a plot Thomas Coughlin had bought for him a decade ago. Only Thomas, Danny, and Nora attended the short funeral. No one else.

Thomas said, “His wife died twenty years ago. Children scattered, most to Chicago, one to Canada. They never wrote. He lost track. He was a good man. Hard to know, but a good man, nonetheless.”

Danny was surprised to hear a soft, subdued grief in his father’s voice.

His father picked up a handful of dirt as Avery Wallace’s coffin was lowered into the grave. He tossed the dirt on the wood. “Lord have mercy on your soul.”

Nora kept her head down, but the tears fell from her chin. Danny was stunned. How was it that he’d known this man most of his life and yet somehow had never really seen him?

He tossed his own handful of dirt on the coffin.

Because he was colored. That’s why.

Steve walked out of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital ten days after he’d walked in. Like thousands of others infected in the city, he’d survived, even as the grippe made its steady way across the rest of the country, crossing into California and New Mexico the same weekend he walked with Danny to a taxi.

He walked with a cane. Always would, the doctors promised. The influenza had weakened his heart, damaged his brain. The headaches would never leave him. Simple speech would sometimes be a problem, strenuous activity of any kind would probably kill him. A week ago he’d joked about that, but today he was quiet.

It was a short walk to the taxi stand but it took a long time.

“Not even a desk job,” he said as they reached the front taxicab in the line.

“I know,” Danny said. “I’m sorry.”

“‘Too strenuous,’ they said.”

Steve worked his way into the cab and Danny handed him his cane. He came around the other side and got in.

“Where to?” the cabdriver asked.

Steve looked at Danny. Danny looked back, waiting.

“You guys deaf? Where to?”

“Keep your knickers cinched.” Steve gave him the address of the rooming house on Salem Street. As the driver pulled off the curb, Steve looked over at Danny. “You help me pack up my room?”

“You don’t have to leave.”

“I can’t afford it. No job.”

“The Widow Coyle?” Danny said.

Steve shrugged. “Ain’t seen her since I got it.”

“Where you going to go?”

Another shrug. “Got to be somebody looking to hire a heartsick cripple.”

Danny didn’t say anything for a minute. They bumped along Huntington.

“There’s got to be some way to—”

Steve put a hand on his arm. “Coughlin, I love ya, but there’s not always ‘some way.’ Most people fall? No net. None. We just go off.”

“Where?”

Steve was quiet for a bit. He looked out the window. He pursed his lips. “Where the people with no nets end up. That place.”

Chapter seven

Luther was shooting pool alone in the Gold Goose when Jessie came around to tell him the Deacon wanted to see them. It was empty in the Goose because it was empty all over Greenwood, all over Tulsa, the flu having come in like a dust storm until at least one member of most families had gotten it and half of those had died. It was against the law right now to go outside without a mask, and most businesses in the sinners’ end of Greenwood had closed up shop, though old Calvin, who ran the Goose, said he’d stay open no matter what, said if the Lord wanted his tired old ass, He could just come get it for all the good it would do Him. So Luther came by and practiced his pool, loving how crisp the balls snapped in all that quiet.

The Hotel Tulsa was closed until people stopped turning blue, and nobody was betting numbers, so there wasn’t no money to be made right now. Luther forbade Lila to go out, said they couldn’t risk it for her or the baby, but this had meant he’d been expected to stay home with her. He had, and it was mostly better than he would have imagined. They fixed up the place a bit and gave every room a fresh coat of paint and hung the curtains Aunt Marta had given them as a wedding present. They found time to make love most every afternoon, slower than ever before, gentler, soft smiles and chuckles replacing the hungry grunts and groans of summer. He remembered in those weeks how deeply he loved this woman and that loving her and having her love him back made him a worthy man. They built dreams of their future and their baby’s future, and Luther, for the first time, could picture a life in Greenwood, had formed a loose ten-year plan in which he’d work as hard as a man could and keep socking away the money until he could start his own business, maybe as a carpenter, maybe as the owner/operator of a repair shop for all the different gadgets that seemed to sprout out from the heart of this country damn near every day. Luther knew if you built something mechanical, sooner or later it broke, and when it did most wouldn’t know how to fix it, but a man with Luther’s gifts could have it back in your house and good as new by nightfall.

Yeah, for a couple weeks there, he could see it, but then the house started closing in on him again and those dreams went dark when he pictured growing old in some house on Detroit Avenue, surrounded by people like Aunt Marta and her ilk, going to church, laying off the liquor and the billiards and the fun until one day he woke up and his hair was speckled white and his speed was gone and he’d never done nothing with his life but chase someone else’s version of it.

So he went down to the Goose to keep the itching in his head from coming out through his eyes and when Jessie came in, that itch spread into a warm smile in his head because, boy, he’d missed their days together — just two weeks ago, but it felt like a couple years — when they’d all poured over the tracks from White Town and had them some play, had them some times.

“I went by your house,” Jessie said, pulling off his mask.

“Fuck you taking that thing off for?” Luther said.

Jessie looked over at Calvin, then at Luther. “You both wearing yours, so what’s I got to worry about?”

Luther just stared at him because for once Jessie made a bit of sense and it annoyed him that he hadn’t thought of it first.

Jessie said, “Lila told me you might be here. I ’spect that woman don’t like me, Country.”

“You keep your mask on?”

“What?”

“With my wife? You keep your mask on when you talked to her?”

“Hell, yeah. ’Course, boy.”

“All right then.”

Jessie took a sip from his hip flask. “Deacon needs to see us.”

“Us?”

Jessie nodded.

“What for?”

Jessie shrugged.

“When?”

“’Bout half an hour ago.”

“Shit,” Luther said. “Whyn’t you get here sooner?”

“’Cause I went to your house first.”

Luther placed his cue in the rack. “We in trouble?”

“Nah, nah. Ain’t like that. He just want to see us.”

“What for?”

“I told you,” Jessie said, “I don’t know.”

“Then how you know it ain’t bad?” Luther said as they walked out of the place.

Jessie looked back at him as he tied the mask off behind his head. “Tighten your corset, woman. Show some grit.”

“Put some grit up your ass.”

“Talking it ain’t walking it, Negro,” Jessie said and shook his big ass at him as they ran up the empty street.

Ya’ll take a seat over here by me now,” the Deacon Broscious said when they entered the Club Almighty. “Right over here now, boys. Come on.”

He wore a broad smile and a white suit over a white shirt and a red tie the same color as his velvet hat. He sat at a round table at the back of the club near the stage and he waved them over through the dim light as Smoke snapped the lock on the door behind them. Luther felt that snap vibrate in his Adam’s apple. He’d never been in the club when it wasn’t open for business, and its tan leather booths and red walls and cherrywood banquettes felt less sinful but more threatening at noon.

The Deacon kept waving his arm until Luther took the chair on the left and Jessie the one on the right, and the Deacon poured them each a tall glass of bonded, prewar Canadian whiskey and slid the glasses across the table and said, “My boys. Yes, indeed. How ya’ll doing now?”

Jessie said, “Right fine, sir.”

Luther managed, “Very good, sir, thanks for asking.”

The Deacon wasn’t wearing his mask, though Smoke and Dandy were, and his smile was big and white. “Aw, that’s music to my ears, I do swear.” He reached across the table and managed to clap both of them on a shoulder. “Ya’ll making the money, right? Heh heh heh. Yeah. You liking that, right? Making them greenbacks?”

Jessie said, “We trying, sir.”

“Trying, hell. Doing is what I see. Ya’ll the best runners I got.”

“Thank you, sir. Things been a little tight of late because a that flu. So many people sick, sir, they ain’t got no heart for the numbers right now.”

The Deacon waved that away. “People get sick. What you gone do? Am I right? They sick and their loved ones be dying? Bless us, Heavenly Father, it tries the heart to see so much suffering. Everyone walking the streets with masks on and the undertakers running out of coffins? Lord. Times like these, you puts the bidness aside. You just puts it up on a shelf and pray for the misery to end. And when it do? When it do, then you go right back to bidness. Damn sure you do. But not” — he pointed his finger at them — “until then. Can I get an ‘amen’ on that, my brothers?”

“Amen,” Jessie said, then lifted his mask and ducked his glass under there and slammed back his whiskey.

“Amen,” Luther said and took a small drink from his glass.

“Shit, child,” the Deacon said. “You supposed to drink that not romance it.”

Jessie laughed and crossed his legs, getting comfy.

Luther said, “Yes, sir,” and threw the whole thing back and the Deacon refilled their glasses and Luther realized that Dandy and Smoke now stood behind them, no more than a step away, though Luther couldn’t have said when it was they’d arrived in that spot.

The Deacon took a long slow drink from his own glass and said, “Ahhh,” and licked his lips. He folded his hands and leaned into the table. “Jessie.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Clarence Jessup Tell,” Deacon Broscious said, turning those words into song.

“In the flesh, sir.”

The Deacon’s smile returned, brighter than ever. “Jessie, let me ask you something. What’s the most memorable moment of your life?”

“Sir?”

The Deacon raised his eyebrows. “You ain’t got one?”

“I’m not sure I understand, sir.”

“The most memorable moment of your life,” the Deacon repeated.

Luther felt sweat bathe his thighs.

“Everyone’s got one,” the Deacon said. “Could be a happy experience, could be sad. Could be a night with a girl. Am I right? Am I right?” He laughed, his face folding all over his nose with the effort. “Could be a night with a boy. You like boys, Jessie? In my profession, we don’t cast aspersions on what I like to call specified taste.”

“No, sir.”

“No sir what?”

“No, sir, I don’t like boys,” Jessie said. “No, sir.”

The Deacon showed them his palms in apology. “A girl, then, yeah? Young, though, am I right? You never forget ’em when you were young and they were, too. Nice piece of chocolate with a ass you could pound all night and it still don’t lose its shape?”

“No, sir.”

“No sir you don’t like a fine young woman’s ass?”

“No, sir, that’s not my memorable moment.” Jessie coughed and took another slug of whiskey.

“Then what is, boy? Shit.”

Jessie looked away from the table, and Luther could feel him composing himself. “My most memorable moment, sir?”

The Deacon clapped the table. “Most memorable,” he thundered and then winked at Luther, as if, whatever this con was, Luther was somehow in on it with him.

Jessie lifted his mask and took another swig. “Night my pops died, sir.”

The Deacon’s face strained with the weight of compassion. He dabbed his face with a napkin. He sucked air through pursed lips and his eyes grew large. “I am so sorry, Jessie. How did the good man pass?”

Jessie looked at the table, then back into the Deacon’s face. “Some white boys in Missouri, sir, where I was reared?”

“Yes, son.”

“They come and said he’d snuck onto their farm and killed their mule. Said he’d meant to cut it up for food but they’d caught him at it and run him off. These boys, sir? They showed up at our house next day and dragged my pops out the house and beat him something fierce, all in front of my mama and me and my two sisters.” Jessie drained the rest of his glass and then sucked back a great wet hunk of air. “Aw, shit.”

“They lynch your pops?”

“No, sir. They done left him there and he died in the house two days later from a busted-up skull. I was ten year old.”

Jessie lowered his head.

The Deacon Broscious reached across the table and patted his hand. “Sweet Jesus,” the Deacon whispered. “Sweet sweet sweet sweet Jesus.” He took the bottle and refilled Jessie’s glass and gave Luther a sad smile.

“In my experience,” the Deacon Broscious said, “the most memorable thing in a man’s life is rarely pleasant. Pleasure doesn’t teach us anything but that pleasure is pleasurable. And what sort of lesson is that? Monkey jacking his own penis know that. Nah, nah,” he said. “The nature of learning, my brothers? Is pain. Ya’ll think on this — we hardly ever know how happy we are as children, for example, until our childhood is taken from us. We usually can’t recognize true love until it’s passed us by. And then, then we say, My that was the thing. That was the truth, ya’ll. But in the moment?” He shrugged his enormous shoulders and patted his forehead with his handkerchief. “What molds us,” he said, “is what maims us. A high price, I agree. But” — he spread his arms and gave them his most glorious smile — “what we learn from that is priceless.”

Luther never saw Dandy and Smoke move, but when he turned at the sound of Jessie’s grunt, they’d already clamped his wrists to the table and Smoke had Jessie’s head held fast in his hands.

Luther said, “Hey, ya’ll wait a—”

The Deacon’s slap connected with Luther’s cheekbone and busted up through his teeth and his nose and eyes like shards of broken pipe. The Deacon’s hand didn’t leave his head, either. He clenched Luther’s hair and held his head in place as Dandy produced a knife and sliced it along Jessie’s jawbone from his chin up to the base of his ear.

Jessie screamed long after the knife had left his flesh. The blood climbed out of the wound like it had been waiting its whole life to do so, and Jessie howled through his mask and Dandy and Smoke held his head in place as the blood poured onto the table and Deacon Broscious yanked on Luther’s hair and said, “You close your eyes, Country, I’ll take them home with me.”

Luther blinked from the sweat, but he didn’t shut his eyes, and he saw the blood flow over the lip of the wound and off Jessie’s flesh and spill all over the table, and he could tell by a fleeting glimpse of Jessie’s eyes that his friend had exited the place where he was worried about the wound to his jaw and had realized these could be the first moments of a long, last day on earth.

“Give that pussy a towel,” the Deacon said and pushed Luther’s head away.

Dandy dropped a towel on the table in front of Jessie, and then he and Smoke stepped back. Jessie grabbed the towel and pressed it to his chin and sucked through his teeth and wept softly and rocked in his chair, his mask gone red up the left side, and that went on for some time, no one saying anything and the Deacon looking bored, and when the towel was redder than the Deacon’s hat, Smoke handed Jessie another one to replace it and tossed the bloody one behind him to the floor.

“Your thieving old man getting killed?” the Deacon said. “Nigger, that’s now the second most memorable moment of your life.”

Jessie clenched his eyes shut and pressed the towel so hard against his jaw Luther could see his fingers turn white.

“Can I get an ‘amen’ on that, brother?”

Jessie opened his eyes and stared.

The Deacon repeated his question.

“Amen,” Jessie whispered.

“Amen,” the Deacon said and clapped his hands. “Way I figure it, you been skimming ten dollars a week from me for two years now. What that add up to, Smoke?”

“One thousand forty dollar, Deacon, sir.”

“A thousand forty.” The Deacon turned his gaze on Luther. “And you, Country, you either in on it or known about it and didn’t tell me, which make it your debt, too.”

Luther didn’t know what else to do so he nodded.

“You don’t need to nod like you confirming something. You ain’t confirming shit to me. I say something is, and it very much is.” He took a sip of whiskey. “Now, Jessie Tell, can you pay me my money or it all done got shot up your arm?”

Jessie hissed, “I can get it, sir, I can get it.”

“Get what?”

“Your thousand forty dollars, sir.”

The Deacon widened his eyes at Smoke and Dandy and all three of them chuckled at the same time and stopped chuckling just as fast.

“You don’t understand, dope ho’, do you? The only reason you alive is because, in my beneficence, I kindly decided to call what you took a loan. I loaned you the thousand forty. You didn’t steal it. If I was to have decided you stole it, that knife be in your throat right now and your dick be in your mouth. So say it.”

“Say what, sir?”

“Say it was a loan.”

“It was a loan, sir.”

“Indeed,” the Deacon said. “So, as to the terms of that loan, let me enlighten you. Smoke, what we charge a week for vig?”

Luther felt his head spin and he swallowed hard to keep his vomit down.

“Five percent,” Smoke said.

“Five percent,” the Deacon told Jessie. “Compounded weekly.”

Jessie’s eyes, which had gone hooded with the pain, snapped open.

“What’s the weekly vig on a thousand forty?” the Deacon said.

Smoke said, “I believe it work out to fifty-two dollars, Deacon, sir.”

“Fifty-two dollars,” the Deacon said slowly. “Don’t sound like much.”

“No, Deacon, sir, it don’t.”

The Deacon stroked his chin. “But shit, wait, what’s that per month?”

“Two hundred eight, sir,” Dandy chimed in.

The Deacon showed his real smile, a tiny one, having himself a time now. “Per year?”

“Two thousand four hundred ninety-six,” Smoke said.

“And doubled?”

“Ah,” Dandy said, sounding desperate to win the game, “that be, um, that be—”

“Four thousand nine hundred ninety-two,” Luther said, not even sure he was speaking or why until the words left his mouth.

Dandy slapped the back of his head. “I had it, nigger.”

The Deacon turned his full gaze on Luther and Luther saw his grave in there, could hear the shovels in the dirt.

“You ain’t dumb at all, Country. I knew that first time I saw you. Knew the only way you’d get dumb is hanging around fools like this one bleeding all over my table. It was my mistake to allow your fraternization with said Negro, and that’s to my everlasting regret.” He sighed and stretched his great bulk in his chair. “But it’s all spilt milk now. So that four thousand nine hundred ninety-two added to the original loan come out to …?” He held up a hand to stop anyone else from answering and pointed at Luther.

“Six thousand thirty-two.”

The Deacon slapped the table. “It do. Dang. And before ya’ll think I’m a merciless man, ya’ll need to understand that even in this, I was more than kind because ya’ll need to consider what you’d owe if, like Dandy and Smoke suggested, I’d added the vig into the principal every week as I did my computations. You see?”

No one said anything.

“I said,” the Deacon said, “do you see?”

“Yes, sir,” Luther said.

“Yes, sir,” Jessie said.

The Deacon nodded. “Now how you gone pay back six thousand thirty-two dollars of my money?”

Jessie said, “Somehow we’ll—”

“You’ll what?” The Deacon laughed. “You stick up a bank?”

Jessie said nothing.

“You go over to White Town maybe, rob every third man you see all day and all night?”

Jessie said nothing. Luther said nothing.

“You can’t,” the Deacon said softly, his hands spread out on the table. “You just can’t. Dream all you want, but some things ain’t in the realm of possibility. No, boys, there’s no way you can come up with my — oh, shit, it’s a new week, I almost forgot — my six thousand eighty-four dollars.”

Jessie’s eyes slid to the side and then forced their way back to the center. “Sir, I need a doctor, I think.”

“Need you a fucking mortician if’n we don’t figure your way out this mess, so shut the fuck up.”

Luther said, “Sir, just tell us what you want us to do and we’ll sure do it.”

It was Smoke who slapped him in the back of the head this time, but the Deacon held up a hand.

“All right, Country. All right. You cut to the chase, boy, and I respect that. So I will respect you in kind.”

He straightened the lapels of his white jacket and leaned into the table. “I got a few folks owe me large change. Some of them in the country, some of them right here downtown. Smoke, give me the list.”

Smoke came around the table and handed the Deacon a sheet of paper and the Deacon looked at it and then placed it on the table so Luther and Jessie could see it.

“There’s five names on that list. Each one is into me for at least five hundred a week. You boys gone go get it today. And I know what you’re thinking in your whiny-assed head-voices. You thinking, ‘But, Deacon, sir, we ain’t muscle. Smoke and Dandy supposed to handle the hard cases.’ You thinking that, Country?”

Luther nodded.

“Well, normally Smoke and Dandy or some other hardheaded, can’t-fucking-scare-’em sons a bitches would be handling this. But this ain’t normal times. Every name on that list has someone in their house with the grippe. And I ain’t losing no important niggers like Smoke or Dandy here to that plague.”

Luther said, “But two unimportant niggers like us …”

Deacon reared his head back. “This boy is finding his voice. I was right about you, Country — you got talent.” He chuckled and drank some more whiskey. “So, yeah, that’s the size of it. You gone go out and collect from these five. You don’t collect it all, you better be able to make up the difference. You bring it on back to me and keep going out and bringing it on back until this flu is over, I’ll wipe your debt back to the principal. Now,” he said, with that big broad smile of his, “what you think of that?”

“Sir,” Jessie said, “that grippe be killing people in one day.”

“That’s true,” the Deacon said. “So, if you catch it, you surely could be dead this time tomorrow. But if you don’t get my money? Nigger, you surely will be dead tonight.”

The Deacon gave them the name of a doctor to see in the back room of a shooting gallery off Second and they went there after they got sick in the alley behind the Deacon’s club. The doctor, a drunken old high-yellow with his hair dyed rust-colored, stitched Jessie’s jaw as Jessie sucked air and the tears ran quietly down his face.

In the street, Jessie said, “I need something for the pain.”

Luther said, “You even think about the spike, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Fine,” Jessie said. “But I can’t think with this pain, so what you suggest?”

They went up into the back of a drugstore on Second, and Luther got them a bag of cocaine. He cut two lines for himself to keep his nerve up and four for Jessie. Jessie snorted his lines one after the other and took a shot of whiskey.

Luther said, “We going to need some guns.”

“I got guns,” Jessie said. “Shit.”

They went back to his apartment and he handed the long-barreled.38 to Luther and slid the.45 Colt behind his back and said, “You know how to use that?”

Luther shook his head. “I know if some nigger try to beat me out his house I’ll point this in his face.”

“What if that ain’t enough to stop him?”

“I ain’t dying today,” Luther said.

“Then let me hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“If it ain’t enough to stop him, you going to do what?”

Luther put the.38 in his coat pocket. “I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch.”

“Then shit, Negro,” Jessie said, still talking through gritted teeth, although now it was probably more from the cocaine than the pain, “let’s get working.”

They were a scary sight. Luther would admit that much as he caught their reflection in the window of Arthur Smalley’s living room as they walked up the steps to his house — two wound-up colored men with masks that covered their noses and mouths, one of them with a row of black stitches sticking out of his jaw like a spiked fence. Time was, the look of them would have been enough to terror the money out of any God-fearing Greenwood man, but these days it didn’t mean much; most folks were scary sights. The high windows of the small house had white Xs painted on them, but Luther and Jessie had no choice but to walk right up on the old porch and ring the bell.

By the looks of the place, Arthur Smalley had at one time tried to have a go at farming. Off to his left, Luther could see a barn in need of painting and a field with a skinny horse and a pair of knobby-looking cows wandering in it. But nothing had been tilled or reaped out there in some time and the weeds stood tall in midautumn.

Jessie went to ring the bell again and the door opened and they looked through the screen at a man about Luther’s size but near twice his age. He wore suspenders over an undershirt yellowed by old sweat, the mask over his face yellowed with it, too, and his eyes were red from exhaustion or grief or the flu.

“Who you-all?” he said, and the words came out airless, as if whatever they answered wouldn’t make no difference to him.

“You Arthur Smalley, sir?” Luther said.

The man slid his thumbs under his suspenders. “What you think?”

“I had to guess?” Luther said. “I’d say yeah.”

“Then you’d guess right, boy.” He leaned into the screen. “What ya’ll want?”

“The Deacon sent us,” Jessie said.

“Did he now?”

In the house behind him someone moaned, and Luther got a whiff of the other side of that door. Sharp and sour at the same time, as if someone had left the eggs, the milk, and the meat out of the icebox since July.

Arthur Smalley saw that smell hit Luther in the eyes and he opened the screen door wide. “Ya’ll want to come in? Maybe set a spell?”

“Nah, sir,” Jessie said. “What say you just bring us the Deacon’s money?”

“The money, uh?” He patted his pockets. “Yeah, I got some, drew it fresh this morning from the money well. It’s still a little damp, but—”

“We ain’t joking here, sir,” Jessie said and adjusted his hat back off his forehead.

Arthur Smalley leaned over the threshold and they both leaned back. “I look like I been working of late?”

“No, you don’t.”

“No, I don’t,” Arthur Smalley said. “Know what I been doing?”

He whispered the words and Luther took another half-step back from the whisper because something about the sound of it was obscene.

“I buried my youngest in the yard night before last,” Arthur Smalley whispered, his neck extended. “Under an elm tree. She liked that tree, so …” He shrugged. “She was thirteen. My other daughter, she in bed with it. And my wife? She ain’t been awake in two days. Her head as hot as a kettle just come to boil. She gone die,” he said and nodded. “Tonight most likely. Else tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come in?”

Luther and Jessie shook their heads.

“I got sheets covered in sweat and shit need washing. Sure could use a hand.”

“The money, Mr. Smalley.” Luther wanted off this porch and away from this sickness and he hated Arthur Smalley for not washing that undershirt.

“I don’t—”

“The money,” Jessie said, and the.45 was in his hand, dangling beside his leg. “No more bullshit, old-timer. Get the fucking money.”

Another moan from inside, this one low and long and huffing, and Arthur Smalley stared at them so long Luther started to think he’d fallen into some sort of trance.

“Ya’ll got no decency at all?” he said and looked first at Jessie and then at Luther.

And Luther told the truth. “None.”

Arthur Smalley’s eyes widened. “My wife and child are—”

“The Deacon don’t care about your domestic responsibilities,” Jessie said.

“But you-all? What you care about?”

Luther didn’t look at Jessie and he knew Jessie wasn’t looking at him. Luther pulled the.38 from his belt and pointed it at Arthur Smalley’s forehead.

“Care about the money,” he said.

Arthur Smalley looked into that barrel and then he looked in Luther’s eyes. “Boy, how does your mama walk the street knowing she birthed such a creature?”

“The money,” Jessie said.

“Or what?” Arthur said, which is exactly what Luther had been afraid he’d say. “You gone shoot me? Shit, I’m fine with that. You want to shoot my family? Do me the favor. Please. You ain’t gone do—”

“I’ll make you dig her up,” Jessie said.

“You what?”

“You heard me.”

Arthur Smalley sagged into the doorjamb. “You didn’t just say that.”

“I damn well did, old man,” Jessie said. “I will make you dig your daughter out her grave. Else I’ll tie your ass up, make you watch me do it. Then I’ll fill it back in, while she lying beside it, so you’ll have to bury her twice.”

We’re going to hell, Luther thought. Head of the line.

“What you think about that, old man?” Jessie put his.45 behind his back again.

Arthur Smalley’s eyes filled with tears and Luther prayed they wouldn’t fall. Please don’t fall. Please.

Arthur said, “I ain’t got no money,” and Luther knew the fight was gone from him.

“What you got then?” Jessie said.

Jessie followed in his Model T as Luther drove Arthur Smalley’s Hudson out from behind the barn and crossed in front of the house as the man stood on his porch and watched. Luther shifted into second gear and put some juice into it as he passed the small fence at the edge of the dirt yard, and he told himself he didn’t see the freshly turned dirt under the elm. He didn’t see the shovel that stuck upright from the dark brown mound. Or the cross made from thin planks of pine and painted a pale white.

By the time they’d finished with the men on the list, they had several pieces of jewelry, fourteen hundred dollars in cash, and a mahogany hope chest strapped to the back of what had once been Arthur Smalley’s car.

They’d seen a child gone blue as twilight and a woman no older than Lila who lay on a cot on a front porch with her bones and her teeth and her eyes lunging toward heaven. Saw a dead man sitting against a barn, blacker than black could ever get, as if he’d been struck by lightning through his skull, his flesh all bumpy with welts.

Judgment Day, Luther knew. It was coming for all of them. And he and Jessie were going to go up and stand before the Lord and have to account for what they’d done this day. And there was no possible accounting for that. Not in ten lives.

“Let’s give it back,” he said after the third house.

“What?”

“Give it back and run.”

“And spend the rest of our short fucking lives looking over our shoulders for Dandy or Smoke or some other broke-down nigger with a gun and nothing left to lose? Where you think we’d hide, Country? Two colored bucks on the run?”

Luther knew he was right, but he also knew it was eating Jessie up as awful as it was eating him.

“We worry about that later. We—”

Jessie laughed, and it was the ugliest laugh Luther’d ever heard from him. “We do this or we dead, Country.” He gave him an open-armed, wide-shouldered shrug. “And you know that. Less you want to kill that whale, sign you and your wife’s death warrant in the process.”

Luther got in the car.

The last one, Owen Tice, paid them in cash, said he wouldn’t be around to spend it no way anyhow. Soon as his Bess passed, he was going to get his shotgun and ride that river with her. He’d had him a raw throat since noon and it was starting to burn and without Bess there wasn’t no fucking point to it anyway. He wished them well. He said, sure he understood. He did. Man had to make a living. Wasn’t no shame in that.

Said, My whole fucking family, you believe that shit? A week ago we all in the pink, eating dinner ’round the table — my son and daughter-in-law, my daughter and son-in-law, three grandchildren, and Bess. Just sitting and eating and jawing. And then, then, it was like God Hisself reached through the roof and into their house and closed his hand ’round the whole family and squeezed.

Like we was flies on the table, he said. Like that.

They drove up an empty Greenwood Avenue at midnight and Luther counted twenty-four windows marked by Xs and they parked the cars in the alley behind the Club Almighty. There was no light coming from any of the buildings along the alley and the fire escapes hung above them and Luther wondered if there was anything left of the world or if it had all gone black and blue and seized up with the grippe.

Jessie put his foot on the running board of his Model T and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in a stream toward the back door of the Club Almighty, nodding his head every now and then, as if he heard music Luther couldn’t and then he looked over at Luther and said, “I walk.”

“You walk?”

“I do,” Jessie said. “I walk and the road is long and the Lord ain’t with me. Ain’t with you neither, Luther.”

In the time they’d known each other, Jessie had never, not once, called Luther by his Christian name.

“Let’s unload this shit,” Luther said. “Yeah, Jessie?” He reached for the straps that held Tug and Ervina Irvine’s hope chest to the back of Arthur Smalley’s car. “Come on now. Let’s get this shit done.”

“Ain’t with me,” Jessie said. “Ain’t with you. Ain’t in this alley. I think He done left this world. Found Hisself another one to be more concerned with.” He chuckled and took a long drag on his cigarette. “How old you think that blue child was?”

“Two,” Luther said.

“’Bout what I guessed, too,” Jessie said. “Took his mama’s jewelry, though, didn’t we? Got her wedding ring right here in my pocket.” He patted his chest and smiled and said, “Heh heh yeah.”

“Why don’t we just—”

“I tell you what,” Jessie said and tugged his jacket, then shot his cuffs. “Tell you what,” he said and pointed at the back door of the club, “if that door be unlocked, you can forget what I said. That door open, though? God be in this alley. Yes indeed.”

And he walked to it and turned the knob and the door opened.

Luther said, “Don’t mean shit, Jessie. Don’t mean nothing but someone forgot to lock the door.”

“You say,” Jessie said. “You say. Let me ask you — You think I’d a forced that man to dig up his girl’s grave?”

Luther said, “’Course not. We were hot. That’s all. Hot and scared. Got crazy.”

Jessie said, “Let go of them straps, brother. We ain’t lifting nothing right now.”

Luther stepped away from the car. He said, “Jessie.”

Jessie reached out so fast his hand could have slapped Luther’s head off his neck but instead it landed soft on Luther’s ear, barely touching. “You good kin, Country.”

And Jessie went into the Club Almighty and Luther followed and they walked through a foul back hallway that stank of piss and came out near the stage through a black velvet curtain. The Deacon Broscious sat just where they’d left him at the table at the base of the stage. He sipped milky white tea from a clear glass, and he gave them the kind of smile told Luther there was more than milk in the tea.

“Stroke of twelve,” the Deacon said and waved at the darkness all around him. “Ya’ll done come at the stroke of twelve itself. Should I put my mask on?”

“Nah, sir,” Jessie said. “Ya’ll don’t need to worry.”

The Deacon reached beside himself, as if he was looking for his mask anyway. His movements were thick and jumbled and then he waved his hands at the whole idea and beamed at them with the sweat beading on his face thick as hail.

“Haw,” he said. “You niggers look tired.”

“Feel tired,” Jessie said.

“Well, come on over here and sit, then. Tell the Deacon about your travails.”

Dandy came out of the shadows on the Deacon’s left, carrying a teapot on a tray and his mask flapping from the overhead fan, and he took one look at them and said, “What ya’ll doing coming through the back door?”

Jessie said, “Just where our feets took us, Mr. Dandy,” and cleared the.45 from his belt and shot Dandy in his mask and Dandy’s face disappeared in a puff of red.

Luther crouched and said, “Wait!” and the Deacon held up his hands and said, “Now—” but Jessie fired and the fingers of the Deacon’s left hand came free and hit the wall behind him and the Deacon shouted something Luther couldn’t understand and then the Deacon said, “Hold it, okay?” Jessie fired again and the Deacon didn’t seem to have any reaction for a moment and Luther figured the shot had hit the wall until he noticed the Deacon’s red tie widening. The blood bloomed across his white shirt and the Deacon got a look at it for himself and a single wet breath popped out of his mouth.

Jessie turned to Luther and gave him that big Jessie-smile of his and said, “Shit. Kinda fun, ain’t it?”

Luther saw something he barely knew he saw, something move from the stage, and he started to say “Jessie,” but the word never left his mouth before Smoke stepped out between the drums and the base stand with his arm extended. Jessie was only half turned toward him when the air popped white and the air popped yellow-and-red and Smoke fired two bullets into Jessie’s head and one into his throat and Jessie went all bouncy.

He toppled into Luther’s shoulder, and Luther reached for him and got his gun instead and Smoke kept shooting, and Luther raised an arm across his face, as if it could stop the bullets, and he fired Jessie’s.45 and felt the gun jumping in his hand and saw all the dead and blackened and blue from today and heard his own voice yelling, “No please no please,” and pictured a bullet hitting each of his eyes and then he heard a scream — high-pitched and shocked — and he stopped firing and lowered his arm from his face.

He squinted and saw Smoke curled on the stage. His arms were wrapped around his stomach and his mouth was open wide. He gurgled. His left foot twitched.

Luther stood in the middle of the four bodies and checked himself for wounds. He had blood all over his shoulder, but once he unbuttoned his shirt and felt around in there, he knew that the blood was Jessie’s. He had a cut under his eye, but it was shallow and he figured that whatever had ricocheted off his cheek hadn’t been a bullet. His body, though, did not feel like his own. It felt borrowed, as if he shouldn’t be in it, and whoever it might belong to sure shouldn’t have walked it into the back of the Club Almighty.

He looked down at Jessie and felt a part of him that just wanted to cry but another part that felt nothing at all, not even relief at being alive. The back of Jessie’s head looked as if an animal had taken bites from it, and the hole in his throat still pumped blood. Luther knelt on a spot of floor the blood hadn’t reached yet and cocked his head to look into his friend’s eyes. They looked a little surprised, as if Old Byron had just told him the night’s tip pool had turned out bigger than expected.

Luther whispered, “Oh, Jessie,” and used his thumb to close his eyes, and then he placed his hand to Jessie’s cheek. The flesh had begun to cool, and Luther asked the Lord to please forgive his friend for his actions earlier today because he’d been desperate, he’d been compromised, but he was, Lord, a good man at heart who’d never before caused anyone but himself any pain.

“You can … make this … right.”

Luther turned at the sound of the voice.

“Sm-smart boy like … like you.” The Deacon sucked at the air. “Smart boy …”

He rose from Jessie’s body with the gun in his hand and walked over to the table, coming around to stand on the Deacon’s right so the fat fool had to roll that big head of his in order to see him.

“You go get that doctor you … you … saw this afternoon.” The Deacon took another breath and his chest whistled. “Go get him.”

“And you’ll just forgive and forget, uh?” Luther said.

“As … as God is my witness.”

Luther removed his mask and coughed in the Deacon’s face three times. “How about I fucking cough on you till we see if I got me the plague today?”

The Deacon used his good hand to reach for Luther’s arm, but Luther pulled it away.

“Don’t you touch me, demon.”

“Please …”

“Please what?”

The Deacon wheezed and his chest whistled again and he licked his lips.

“Please,” he said again.

“Please what?”

“Make … this right.”

“Okay,” Luther said and put the gun into the folds under the Deacon’s chin and pulled the trigger with the man looking in his eyes.

“That fucking do?” Luther shouted and watched the man tip to his left and slide down the back of the booth. “Kill my friend?” Luther said and shot him again, though he knew he was dead.

“Fuck!” Luther screamed at the ceiling, and he grabbed his own head with the gun clutched against it and screamed it again. Then he noticed Smoke trying to pull himself across the stage in his own blood and Luther kicked a chair out of his way and crossed to the stage with his arm extended and Smoke turned his head and lay there, looking up at Luther with no more life in his eyes than Jessie’s.

For what felt like an hour — and Luther would never know how long he stood there exactly — they stared at each other.

Then Luther felt a new version of himself he wasn’t even sure he liked say, “If you live, you’ll have to come kill me, sure as sin.”

Smoke blinked his eyelids once, real slow, in the affirmative.

Luther stared down the gun at him. He saw all those bullets he’d scored in Columbus, saw his Uncle Cornelius’s black satchel, saw the rain that had fallen, warm and soft as sleep, the afternoon he’d sat on his porch, willing his father to come home when his father was already four years five hundred miles away and not coming back. He lowered the gun.

He watched the surprise flash across Smoke’s pupils. Smoke’s eyes rolled and he burped a thimbleful of blood down his chin and onto his shirt. He fell back to the stage and the blood flowed from his stomach.

Luther raised the gun again. It should have been easier, the man’s eyes no longer on him, the man probably slipping across the river right at this moment, climbing the dark shore into another world. All it would take was one more pull of the trigger to be sure. He’d had no hesitation with the Deacon. So why now?

The gun shook in his hand and he lowered it again.

Wouldn’t take the people the Deacon associated with long to put all this together, to put him in this room. Whether Smoke lived or died, Luther and Lila’s time in Tulsa was done.

Still …

He raised the gun again, gripped his forearm to stop the shakes and stared down the barrel at Smoke. He stood there a good minute before he finally faced the fact that he could stand there for an hour and he’d still never pull that trigger.

“Ain’t you,” he said.

Luther looked at the blood still leaking out of the man. He took one last look behind him at Jessie. He sighed. He stepped over Dandy’s corpse.

“You simple sons of bitches,” Luther said as he headed for the door. “You brought this on yourselves.”

Chapter eight

After the flu had passed on, Danny returned to walking the beat by day and studying to impersonate a radical at night. In terms of the latter duty, Eddie McKenna left packages at his door at least once a week. He’d unwrap them to find stacks of the latest socialist and Communist propaganda rags, as well as copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, speeches given by Jack Reed, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Jim Larkin, Joe Hill, and Pancho Villa. He read thickets of propaganda so dense with rhetoric it may as well have been a structural engineering manual for all it spoke to any common man Danny could imagine. He came across certain words so often — tyranny, imperialism, capitalist oppression, brotherhood, insurrection — that he suspected a knee-jerk vocabulary had become necessary to ensure a dependable shorthand among the workers of the world. But as the words lost individuality, so they lost their power and gradually their meaning. Once the meaning was gone, Danny wondered, how would these noodle heads — and among the Bolshie and anarchist literature, he had yet to find someone who wasn’t a noodle head — as one unified body, successfully cross a street, never mind overthrow a country?

When he wasn’t reading speeches, he read missives from what was commonly referred to as the “front line of the workers’ revolution.” He read about striking coal miners burned in their homes alongside their families, IWW workers tarred and feathered, labor organizers assassinated on the dark streets of small towns, unions broken, unions outlawed, workingmen jailed, beaten, and deported. And always it was they who were painted as the enemies of the great American Way.

To his surprise, Danny felt occasional stirrings of empathy. Not for everyone, of course — he’d always thought anarchists were morons, offering the world nothing but steel-eyed bloodlust, and little in his reading changed his opinion. Communists, too, struck him as hopelessly naïve, pursuing a utopia that failed to take into consideration the most elemental characteristic of the human animal: covetousness. The Bolshies believed it could be cured like an illness, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and to remove it would kill the host. The socialists were the smartest — they acknowledged greed — but their message was constantly entwined with the Communists’ and it was impossible, at least in this country, for it to be heard above the red din.

But for the life of him Danny couldn’t understand why most of the outlawed or targeted unions deserved their fate. Time and again what was renounced as treasonous rhetoric was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.

He mentioned this to McKenna over coffee in the South End one night and McKenna wagged a finger at him. “It’s not those men you need to concern yourself with, young protégé. Ask yourself instead, ‘Who’s funding those men? And to what end?’”

Danny yawned, tired all the time now, unable to remember the last time he’d had a true night’s sleep. “Let me guess — Bolsheviks.”

“You’re goddamned right. From Mother Russia herself.” He widened his eyes at Danny. “You think this is mildly amusing, yeah? Lenin himself said that the people of Russia will not rest until all the peoples of the world join their revolution. That’s not idle talk, boyo. That’s a clear fucking threat against these shores.” He thumped his index finger off the table. “My shores.”

Danny suppressed another yawn with his fist. “How’s my cover coming?”

“Almost there,” McKenna said. “You join that thing they call a policemen’s union yet?”

“Going to a meeting Tuesday.”

“What took so long?”

“If Danny Coughlin, son of Captain Coughlin and no stranger himself to the selfish, politically motivated act, were to suddenly ask to join the Boston Social Club, people might be a bit suspicious.”

“You’ve a point. Fair enough.”

“My old partner, Steve Coyle?”

“The one who caught the grippe, yeah. A shame.”

“He was a vocal supporter of the union. I’m letting some time pass so it’ll seem I passed a few long dark nights of the soul over him getting sick. Finally my conscience caught up, so I had to check out a meeting. Let them think I have a soft heart.”

McKenna lit the blackened stub of a cigar. “You’ve always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most.”

Danny shrugged. “Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess.”

“Always the danger, that.” McKenna nodded, as if he were intimate with the dilemma. “Then one day, sure, you can’t remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on to. Or why you worked so hard at the holding.”

Danny joined Tessa and her father for dinner on a night when the cool air smelled of burning leaves. Their apartment was larger than his. His came with a hot plate atop an icebox, but the Abruzzes’ had a small kitchen with a Raven stove. Tessa cooked, her long dark hair tied back, limp and shiny from the heat. Federico uncorked the wine Danny had brought and set it on a windowsill to breathe while he and Danny sat at the small dining table in the parlor and sipped anisette.

Federico said, “I have not seen you around the building lately.”

Danny said, “I work a lot.”

“Even now that the grippe has passed on?”

Danny nodded. It was just one more of the beefs cops had with the department. The Boston police officer got one day off for every twenty. And on that day off, he wasn’t allowed to leave city limits in case an emergency arose. So most of the single guys lived near their stations in rooming houses because what was the point in getting settled when you had to be at work in a few hours anyway? In addition, three nights a week, you were required to sleep at the station house, in the fetid beds on the top floor, which were lice- or bug-ridden and had just been slept in by the poor slob who would take your place on the next patrol.

“You work too much, I think.”

“Tell my boss, would you?”

Federico smiled, and it was a hell of a smile, the kind that could warm a winter room. It occurred to Danny that one of the reasons it was so impressive was that you could feel so much heartbreak behind it. Maybe that’s what he’d been trying to put his finger on that night on the roof — the way Federico’s smile didn’t mask the great pain that lay undoubtedly in his past; it embraced it. And in that embracing, triumphed. A soft version of the smile remained in place as he leaned in and thanked Danny in a low whisper for “that unfortunate business,” of removing Tessa’s dead newborn from the apartment. He assured Danny that were it not for his own work, they would have had him to dinner as soon as Tessa had recovered from the grippe.

Danny looked over at Tessa, caught her looking at him. She lowered her head, and a strand of hair fell from behind her ear and hung over her eye. She was not an American girl, he reminded himself, one for whom sex with a virtual stranger could be tricky but not out of the question. She was Italian. Old World. Mind your manners.

He looked back at her father. “What is it that you do, sir?”

“Federico,” the old man said and patted his hand. “We drink anisette, we break bread, it must be Federico.”

Danny acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. “Federico, what is it you do?”

“I give the breath of angels to mere men.” The old man swept his hand behind him like an impresario. Back against the wall between two windows sat a phonograph cabinet. It had seemed out of place to Danny as soon as he’d entered. It was made of fine-grain mahogany, designed with ornate carvings that made Danny think of European royalty. The open top exposed a turntable perched on purple velvet inlay, and below, a two-door cabinet looked to be hand carved and had nine shelves, enough to hold several dozen disc records.

The metal hand crank was gold plated, and while the disc record played, you could barely hear the motor. It produced a richness of sound unlike anything Danny had ever heard in his life. They were listening to the intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and Danny knew if he’d entered the apartment blind he would have assumed the soprano stood in the parlor with them. He took another look at the cabinet and felt pretty sure it cost three or four times what the stove had.

“The Silvertone B-Twelve,” Federico said, his voice, always melodious, suddenly more so. “I sell them. I sell the B-Eleven as well, but I prefer the look of the Twelve. Louis the Sixteenth is far superior in design to Louis the Fifteenth. You agree?”

“Of course,” Danny said, though if he’d been told it was Louis the Third or Ivan the Eighth, he’d have had to take it on faith.

“No other phonograph on the market can equal it,” Federico said with the gleaming eyes of the evangelical. “No other phonograph can play every type of disc record — Edison, Pathé, Victor, Columbia, and Silvertone? No, my friend, this is the only one so capable. You pay your eight dollars for the table model because it is less expensive” — he crinkled his nose downward — “and light—bah! — convenient—bah! — space saving. But will it sound like this? Will you hear angels? Hardly. And then your cheap needle will wear out and the discs will skip and soon you will hear crackles and whispers. And where will you be then, except eight dollars the poorer?” He spread his arm toward the phonograph cabinet again, as proud as a first-time father. “Sometimes quality costs. It is only reasonable.”

Danny suppressed a chuckle at the little old man and his fervent capitalism.

“Papa,” Tessa said from the stove, “do not get yourself so …” She waved her hands, searching for the word. “… eccitato.”

“Excited,” Danny said.

She frowned at him. “Eggs-y-sigh …?”

“Ex,” he said. “Ex-ci-ted.”

“Eck-cited.”

“Close enough.”

She raised her wooden spoon. “English!” she barked at the ceiling.

Danny thought of what her neck, so honey-brown, would taste like. Women — his weakness since he’d been old enough to notice them and see that they, in turn, noticed him. Looking at Tessa’s neck, her throat, he felt beset by it. The awful, delicious need to possess. To own — for a night — another’s eyes, sweat, heartbeat. And here, right in front of her father. Jesus!

He turned back to the old man, whose eyes were half closed to the music. Oblivious. Sweet and oblivious to the New World ways.

“I love music,” Federico said and opened his eyes. “When I was a boy, minstrels and troubadours would visit our village from the spring through the summer. I would sit until my mother shooed me from the square — sometimes with a switch, yes? — and watch them play. The sounds. Ah, the sounds! Language is such a poor substitute. You see?”

Danny shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

Federico pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in. “Men’s tongues fork at birth. It has always been so. The bird cannot lie. The lion is a hunter, to be feared, yes, but he is true to his nature. The tree and rock are true — they are a tree and rock. Nothing more, but nothing less. But man, the only creature who can make words — uses this great gift to betray truth, to betray himself, to betray nature and God. He will point to a tree and tell you it is not a tree, stand over your dead body and say he did not kill you. Words, you see, speak for the brain, and the brain is a machine. Music” — he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger — “music speaks for the soul because words are too small.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

Federico pointed at his prized possession. “That is made of wood. It is a tree, but it is not a tree. And the wood is wood, yes, but what it does to the music that comes from it? What is that? Do we have a word for that kind of wood? That kind of tree?”

Danny gave him a small shrug, figuring the old man was getting a bit tipsy.

Federico closed his eyes again and his hands floated up by his ears, as if he were conducting the music himself, willing it forth into the room.

Danny caught Tessa looking at him again and this time she did not drop his gaze. He gave her his best smile, the slightly confused, slightly embarrassed one, the small boy’s smile. A flush spread under her chin, and still she didn’t look away.

He turned back to her father. His eyes remained closed, his hands conducting, even though the disc record had ended and the needle popped back and forth over its innermost grooves.

Steve Coyle smiled broadly when he saw Danny enter Fay Hall, the meeting place of the Boston Social Club. He worked his way down a row of folding chairs, one leg dragging noticeably after the other. He shook Danny’s hand. “Thanks for coming.”

Danny hadn’t counted on this. It made him feel twice as guilty, infiltrating the BSC under false pretenses while his old partner, sick and unemployed, showed up to support a fight he wasn’t even part of anymore.

Danny managed a smile. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Steve looked back over his shoulder at the men setting up the stage. “They let me help out. I’m a living example of what happens when you don’t have a union with negotiating power, you know?” He clapped Danny’s shoulder. “How are you?”

“Fine,” Danny said. For five years he’d known every detail of his partner’s life, often on a minute-to-minute basis. It was suddenly odd to realize he hadn’t checked in on Steve in two weeks. Odd and shameful. “How you feeling?”

Steve shrugged. “I’d complain, but who’d listen?” He laughed loud and clapped Danny’s shoulder again. His beard stubble was white. He looked lost inside his newly damaged body. As if he’d been turned upside down and shaken.

“You look good,” Danny said.

“Liar.” Again the awkward laugh followed by an awkward solemnity, a look of dewy earnestness. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

Danny said, “Don’t mention it.”

“Turn you into a union man yet,” Steve said.

“Don’t bet on it.”

Steve clapped him on the back a third time and introduced him around. Danny knew about half of the men on a surface level, their paths having crossed on various calls over the years. They all seemed nervous around Steve, as if they hoped he’d take whatever afflicted him to another policemen’s union in another city. As if bad fortune were as contagious as the grippe. Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve’s hand — they’d have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.

The head of the BSC, a patrolman named Mark Denton, strode toward the stage. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Danny, and rail thin. He had pale skin, as hard and shiny as piano keys, and his black hair was slicked back tight against his skull.

Danny and the other men took their chairs as Mark Denton crossed the stage and placed his hands on the edges of the dais. He gave the room a tired smile.

“Mayor Peters canceled the meeting we had scheduled at the end of the week.”

Groans broke out in the room, a few catcalls.

Denton held up a hand to quiet them. “There’re rumors of a streetcar workers strike, and the mayor believes that’s of more pressing importance right now. We have to go to the back of the line.”

“Maybe we should strike,” someone said.

Denton’s dark eyes flashed. “We don’t talk of strike, men. That’s just what they want. You know how that would play in the papers? Do you really want to give them that kind of ammunition, Timmy?”

“No, I don’t, Mark, but what are our options? We’re fucking starving out here.”

Denton acknowledged that with a firm nod. “I know we are. But even whispering the word strike is heresy, men. You know it and I know it. Our best chance right now is to appear patient and open up talks with Samuel Gompers and the AFL.”

“That really happening?” someone behind Danny asked.

Denton nodded. “In fact, I was planning to put a motion to the floor. Later tonight, I’ll grant you, but why wait?” He shrugged. “All those in favor of the BSC opening up charter talks with the American Federation of Labor, say aye.”

Danny felt it then, an almost tactile stirring of the blood throughout the room, a sense of collective purpose. He couldn’t deny his blood jumped along with everyone else’s. A charter in the most powerful union in the country. Jesus.

“Aye,” the crowd shouted.

“All against?”

No one spoke.

“Motion accepted,” Denton said.

Was it actually possible? No police department in the nation had ever pulled this off. Few had dared try. And yet, they could be the first. They could — quite literally — change history.

Danny reminded himself he wasn’t part of this.

Because this was a joke. This was a pack of naïve, overly dramatic men who thought with enough talk they could bend the world to their needs. It didn’t work that way, Danny could have told them. It worked the other way.

After Denton, the cops felled by the flu paraded onstage. They talked of themselves as the lucky ones; unlike nine other officers from the city’s eighteen station houses, they’d survived. Of twenty onstage, twelve had returned to duty. Eight never would. Danny lowered his eyes when Steve took the dais. Steve, just two months ago singing in the barbershop quartet, had trouble keeping his words straight. He kept stuttering. He asked them not to forget him, not to forget the flu. He asked that they remember their brotherhood and fellowship to all who’d sworn to protect and to serve.

He and the other nineteen survivors left the stage to loud applause.

The men mingled by the coffee urns or stood in circles and passed around flasks. Danny quickly got a feel for the basic personality breakdown of the membership. You had the Talkers — loud men, like Roper from the Oh-Seven, who rattled off statistics, then got into high-pitched disagreements over semantics and minutiae. Then there were the Bolshies and the Socies, like Coogan from the One-Three and Shaw who worked Warrants out of headquarters, no different from all the radicals and alleged radicals Danny had been reading up on lately, always quick to spout the most fashionable rhetoric, to reach for the toothless slogan. There were also the Emotionals — men like Hannity from the One-One, who had never been able to hold his liquor in the first place and whose eyes welled up too quickly with mention of “fellowship” or “justice.” So, for the most part, what Danny’s old high school English teacher, Father Twohy, used to call men of “prattle, not practice.”

But there were also men like Don Slatterly, a Robbery detective, Kevin McRae, a flatfoot at the Oh-Six, and Emmett Strack, a twenty-five-year warhorse from the Oh-Three, who said very little but who watched — and saw — everything. They moved through the crowd and dispensed words of caution or restraint here, slivers of hope there, but mostly they just listened and assessed. The men watched their wake the way dogs watched the space their masters had just vacated. It would be these men and a few others like them, Danny decided, who the police brass should worry about if they wanted to avert a strike.

At the coffee urns, Mark Denton suddenly stood beside him and held out his hand.

“Tommy Coughlin’s son, right?”

“Danny.” He shook Denton’s hand.

“You were at Salutation when it was bombed, right?”

Danny nodded.

“But that’s Harbor Division.” Denton stirred sugar into his coffee.

“The accident of my life,” Danny said. “I’d pinched a thief on the docks and was dropping him off at Salutation when, you know …”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Coughlin — you’re pretty well known in this department. They say the only thing Captain Tommy can’t control is his own son. That makes you pretty popular, I’d say. We could use guys like you.”

“Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

Denton’s eyes swept the room. He leaned in closer. “Think quickly, would you?”

Tessa liked to take to the stoop on mild nights when her father was on the road selling his Silvertone B-XIIs. She smoked small black cigarettes that smelled as harsh as they looked, and some nights Danny sat with her. Something in Tessa made him nervous. His limbs felt cumbersome around her, as if there were no casual way to rest them. They spoke of the weather and they spoke of food and they spoke of tobacco, but they never spoke of the flu or her child or the day Danny had carried her to Haymarket Relief.

Soon they left the stoop for the roof. No one came up on the roof.

He learned that Tessa was twenty. That she’d grown up in the Sicilian village of Altofonte. When she was sixteen, a powerful man named Primo Alieveri, had seen her bicycling past the café where he sat with his associates. He’d made inquiries and then arranged to meet with her father. Federico was a music teacher in their village, famous for speaking three languages but also rumored to be going pazzo, having married so late in life. Tessa’s mother had passed on when she was ten, and her father raised her alone, with no brothers or money to protect her. And so a deal was struck.

Tessa and her father made the trip to Collesano at the base of the Madonie Mountains on the Tyrrhenian coast, arriving the day after Tessa’s seventeenth birthday. Federico had hired guards to protect Tessa’s dowry, mostly jewels and coins passed down from her mother’s side of the family, and their first night in the guesthouse of Primo Alieveri’s estate, the throats of the guards were cut as they slept in the barn and the dowry was taken. Primo Alieveri was mortified. He scoured the village for the bandits. At nightfall, over a fine dinner in the main hall, he assured his guests he and his men were closing in on the suspects. The dowry would be returned and the wedding would take place, as planned, that weekend.

When Federico passed out at the table, a dreamy smile plastered to his face, Primo’s men helped him out to the guesthouse, and Primo raped Tessa on the table and then again on the stone floor by the hearth. He sent her back to the guesthouse where she tried to rouse Federico, but he continued to sleep the sleep of the dead. She lay on the floor beside the bed with the blood sticky between her thighs and eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, they were awakened by a racket in the courtyard and the sound of Primo calling their names. They came out of the guesthouse where Primo stood with two of his men, their shotguns slung behind their backs. Tessa’s and Federico’s horses and their wagon were gathered on the courtyard stones. Primo glared at them.

“A great friend from your village has written to inform me that your daughter is no virgin. She is a puttana and no suitable bride for a man of my stature. Be gone from my sight, little man.”

In that moment and several that followed, Federico was still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He seemed bewildered.

Then he saw the blood that had soaked his daughter’s fine white dress while they slept. Tessa never saw how he got to the whip, if it came from his own horse or from a hook in the courtyard, but when he snapped it, he caught one of Primo Alieveri’s men in the eyes and spooked the horses. As the second man bent to his comrade, Tessa’s horse, a tired, orange mare, broke from her grasp and kicked the man in the chest. The horse’s reins raced through her fingers and the beast ran out of the courtyard. Tessa would have given chase, but she was too entranced by her father, her sweet, gentle, slightly pazzo father as he whipped Primo Alieveri to the ground, whipped him until strips of his flesh lay in the courtyard. With one of the guards (and his shotgun), Federico got her dowry back. The chest sat in plain view in the master bedroom, and from there, he and Tessa tracked down her mare and left the village before dusk.

Two days later, after using half the dowry for bribes, they boarded a ship in Cefalu and came to America.

Danny heard this story in halting English, not because Tessa could not grasp the language yet, but because she tried to be precise.

Danny chuckled. “So that day I carried you? That day I was losing my mind trying to speak my broken Italian, you could understand me?”

Tessa gave him arched eyebrows and a faint smile. “I could not understand anything that day except pain. You would expect me to remember English? This … crazy language of yours. Four words you use when one would do. Every time you do this. Remember English that day?” She waved a hand at him. “Stupid boy.”

Danny said, “Boy? I got a few years on you, sweetheart.”

“Yes, yes.” She lit another of her harsh cigarettes. “But you a boy. You a country of boys. And girls. None of you grow up yet. You have too much fun, I think.”

“Fun with what?”

“This.” She waved her hand at the sky. “This silly big country. You Americans — there is no history. There is only now. Now, now, now. I want this now. I want that now.”

Danny felt a sudden rise of irritation. “And yet everyone seems in a hell of a hurry to leave their country to get here.”

“Ah, yes. Streets paved with gold. The great America where every man can make his fortune. But what of those who don’t? What of the workers, Officer Danny? Yes? They work and work and work and if they get sick from the work, the company says, ‘Bah. Go home and no come back.’ And if they hurt themselves on the work? Same thing. You Americans talk of your freedom, but I see slaves who think they are free. I see companies that use children and families like hogs and—”

Danny waved it away. “And yet you’re here.”

She considered him with her large, dark eyes. It was a careful look he’d grown used to. Tessa never did anything carelessly. She approached each day as if it required study before she’d form an opinion of it.

“You are right.” She tapped her ash against the parapet. “You are a much more … abbondante country than Italia. You have these big — whoosh — cities. You have more automobiles in one block than all of Palermo. But you are a very young country, Officer Danny. You are like the child who believes he is smarter than his father or his uncles who came before.”

Danny shrugged. He caught Tessa looking at him, as calm and cautious as always. He bounced his knee off hers and looked out at the night.

One night in Fay Hall, he sat in back before the start of another union meeting and realized he had all the information his father, Eddie McKenna, and the Old Men could possibly expect from him. He knew that Mark Denton, as leader of the BSC, was just what they feared — smart, calm, fearless, and prudent. He knew that the most trusted men under him — Emmett Strack, Kevin McRae, Don Slatterly, and Stephen Kearns — were cut from the same cloth. And he knew who the deadwood and the empty shirts were as well, those who would be most easily compromised, easily swayed, easily bribed.

At that moment, as Mark Denton once again strode across the stage to the dais to start the meeting, Danny realized that he’d known all he needed to know since the first meeting he’d attended. That was seven meetings ago.

All he had left to do was to sit down with McKenna or his father and give them his impressions, the few notes he’d taken, and a concise list of the leadership of the Boston Social Club. After that, he’d be halfway to his gold shield. Hell, maybe more than halfway. A fingertip’s reach away.

So why was he still here?

That was the question of the month.

Mark Denton said, “Gents,” and his voice was softer than normal, almost hushed. “Gents, if I could have your attention.”

There was something to the hush of his voice that reached every man in the room. The room grew quiet in blocks of four or five rows until the silence reached the back. Mark Denton nodded his thanks. He gave them a weak smile and blinked several times.

“As many of you know,” Denton said, “I was schooled on this job by John Temple of the Oh-Nine Station House. He used to say if he could make a copper out of me there’d be no reason left not to hire dames.”

Chuckles rippled through the room as Denton lowered his head for a moment.

“Officer John Temple passed this afternoon from complications connected to the grippe. He was fifty-one years old.”

Anyone wearing a hat removed it. A thousand men lowered their heads in the smoky hall. Denton spoke again: “If we could also give the same respect to Officer Marvin Tarleton of the One-Five, who died last night of the same cause.”

“Marvin’s dead?” someone called. “He was getting better.”

Denton shook his head. “His heart quit last night at eleven o’clock.” He leaned into the dais. “The preliminary ruling from the department is that the families of neither man receive death benefits because the city has already ruled on similar claims—”

Boos and jeers and overturned chairs temporarily drowned him out.

“—because,” he shouted, “because, because—”

Several men were pulled back down into their seats. Others closed their mouths.

“—because,” Mark Denton said, “the city says the men did not die in the line.”

“How’d they get the fucking flu, then?” Bob Reming shouted. “Their dogs?”

Denton said, “The city would say yes. Their dogs. They’re dogs. The city believes they could have contracted the grippe on any number of occasions unrelated to the job. Thus? They did not die in the line. That’s all we need to know. That’s what we have to accept.”

He stepped back from the dais as a chair went airborne. Within seconds, the first fistfight broke out. Then the second. A third started in front of Danny and he stood back from it as shouts filled the hall, as the building shook from anger and despair.

“Are you angry?” Mark Denton shouted.

Danny watched Kevin McRae wade into the mob and break up one of the fights by pulling both men off their feet by their hair.

“Are you angry?” Denton shouted again. “Go ahead — fucking hit one another.”

The room began to quiet. Half the men turned back toward the stage.

“That’s what they want you to do,” Denton called. “Beat yourselves to a pulp. Go ahead. The mayor? The governor? The city council? They laugh at you.”

The last of the men stopped fighting. They sat.

“Are you angry enough to do something?” Mark Denton asked.

No one spoke.

“Are you?” Denton shouted.

“Yes!” a thousand men shouted back.

“We’re a union, men. That means we come together as one body with one purpose and we take it to them where they live. And we demand our rights as men. Any of you want to sit this out? Then fucking sit. The rest of you — show me what we are.”

They rose as one — a thousand men, some with blood on their faces, some with tears of rage bubbling in their eyes. And Danny rose, too, a Judas no longer.

He met his father as his father was leaving the Oh-Six in South Boston.

“I’m out.”

His father paused on the station house steps. “You’re out of what?”

“The union-rat job, the radicals, the whole thing.”

His father came down the stairs and stepped in close. “Those radicals could make you a captain by forty, son.”

“Don’t care.”

“You don’t care?” His father gave him a withered smile. “You turn this chance down, you’ll not get another shot at that gold shield for five years. If ever.”

Fear at that prospect filled Danny’s chest, but he jammed his hands deeper in his pockets and shook his head. “I won’t rat on my own men.”

“They’re subversives, Aiden. Subversives within our own department.”

“They’re cops, Dad. And by the way, what kind of father are you to send me into that kinda job? You couldn’t find someone else?”

His father’s face grew gray. “It’s the price of the ticket.”

“What ticket?”

“For the train that never runs out of track.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Your grandchildren would have ridden it.”

Danny waved it off. “I’m going home, Dad.”

“Your home’s here, Aiden.”

Danny looked up at the white limestone building with its Grecian columns. He shook his head. “Your home is.”

That night he went to Tessa’s door. He knocked softly, looking up and down the hall, but she didn’t answer. So he turned and walked toward his room, feeling like a kid carrying stolen food under his coat. Just as he reached his door, he heard hers unlatch.

He turned in the corridor and she was coming down the hallway toward him with a coat thrown over her shift, barefoot, her expression one of alarm and curiosity. When she reached him, he tried to think of something to say.

“I still felt like talking,” he said.

She looked back at him, her eyes large and dark. “More stories of the Old Country?”

He thought of her on the floor of Primo Alieveri’s great hall, the way her flesh would have looked against the marble as the light of the fire played on her dark hair. A shameful image, really, in which to find lust.

“No,” he said. “Not those stories.”

“New ones, then?”

Danny opened his door. It was a reflexive gesture, but then he looked in Tessa’s eyes and saw that the effect had been anything but casual.

“You want to come in and talk?” he said.

She stood there in her coat and the threadbare white shift underneath, looking at him for a long time. He could see her body underneath the shift. A light sheen of perspiration dotted the brown flesh below the hollow of her throat.

“I want to come in,” she said.

Chapter nine

The first time Lila ever laid eyes on Luther was at a picnic on the outskirts of Minerva Park in a green field along the banks of the Big Walnut River. It was supposed to be a gathering of just the folks who worked for the Buchanan family at the mansion in Columbus, while the Buchanans themselves were on vacation in Saginaw Bay. But someone had mentioned it to someone and that someone mentioned it to someone else and by the time Lila arrived in the late morning of that hot August day there were at least sixty people going full-out for high times down along the water. It was a month after the massacre of coloreds in East St. Louis, and that month had passed slow and winter-bleak among the workers at the Buchanan house, pieces of gossip trickling in here and there that contradicted the newspaper accounts and, of course, the conversation among the white folk around the Buchanan dinner table. To hear the stories — of white women stabbing colored women with kitchen knives while white men burned the neighborhood down and strung their ropes and shot the colored men — was plenty reason to have a dark cloud drift down into the heads of everyone Lila knew, but four weeks later, it seemed folks had decided to retire that cloud for a day, to have fun while there was fun to be had.

Some men had cut an oil drum in half and covered the halves in cattle wire and started barbecuing and folks had brought tables and chairs and the tables were covered with plates of fried catfish and creamy potato salad and deep brown drumsticks and fat purple grapes and heaps and heaps of greens. Children ran and folks danced and some men played baseball in the wilting grass. Two men had brought their guitars and were cutting heads against each other like they were standing on a street corner in Helena, and the sounds of those guitars was as sharp as the sky.

Lila sat with her girlfriends, housemaids all — ’Ginia and CC and Darla Blue — and they drank sweet tea and watched the men and the children play and it wasn’t no trick at all to figure out which men were single because they acted more childish than the children, prancing and bowing up and getting loud. They reminded Lila of ponies before a race, pawing the dirt, rearing their heads.

Darla Blue, who had all the sense of a barn door, said, “I like that one there.”

They all looked. They all shrieked.

“The snaggle-toothed one with the big ol’ bush for a head?”

“He cute.”

“For a dog.”

“No, he—”

“Look at that big spilly belly on him,” ’Ginia said. “Go all the way to his knees. And that butt look like a hundred pounds of warm taffy.”

“I like a little roundness in a man.”

“Well, that be your true love, then, ’cause he all round all the time. Round as a harvest moon. Ain’t nothing hard in that man. Ain’t nothing going to get hard neither.”

They shrieked some more and clapped their thighs and CC said, “What about you, Miss Lila Waters? You see your Mr. Right?”

Lila shook her head, but the girls were having none of it.

Yet no matter how much shrieking and jawing they did to get it out of her, she kept her lips sealed and her eyes from wandering because she’d seen him, she’d seen him just fine, could see him now out of the corner of her eye as he moved across the grass like the breeze itself and snatched a ball from the air with a flick of his glove so effortless it was almost cruel. A slim man. Looked like he had cat in his blood the way he moved, as if where other men had joints, he had springs. And they were oiled to a shine. Even when he threw the ball, you didn’t notice his arm, the piece of him that had done it, so much as you saw every square inch of him moving as a whole.

Music, Lila decided. The man’s body was nothing less than music.

She’d heard the other men call his name — Luther. When he came running in to take his turn at bat, a small boy ran alongside him in the grass and tripped as they reached the dirt. The child landed on his chin and opened his mouth to wail, but Luther scooped him up without breaking stride and said, “Hear now, boy, ain’t no crying on Saturday.”

The child’s mouth hung open and Luther smiled wide at him. The child let loose a yelp and then laughed like he might never stop.

Luther swung the boy in the air and then looked straight at Lila, taking her breath on a ride down to her knees with how fast his eyes locked on hers. “Yours, ma’am?”

Lila tuned her eyes in to his and didn’t blink. “I don’t have no children.”

“Yet,” CC said and laughed loud.

That stopped whatever was about to come out of his mouth. He placed the child’s feet on the ground. He dropped his eyes from hers and gave a smile to the air, his jaw slanted to the right. Then he turned back and looked right at her again, cool as you please.

“Well, that’s some pretty news,” he said. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty as this here day itself, ma’am.”

And he tipped his hat to her and walked over to pick up the bat.

By the end of the day, she was praying. Lying against Luther’s chest under an oak tree a hundred yards upriver from the party with the Big Walnut dark and sparkling in front of them, she told the Lord that she feared she could love this man too much one day. Even if she were struck blind in her sleep, she would know him in a crowd by his voice, by his smell, by the way air parted around him. She knew his heart was wild and thumping, but his soul was gentle. As he ran his thumb along the inside of her arm, she asked the Lord to forgive her for all she was about to do. Because for this wild, gentle man, she was fit to do whatever would keep him burning inside of her.

So the Lord, in His provenance, forgave her or condemned her, she could never be sure, because He gave her Luther Laurence. He gave him to her, in the first year of their knowing each other, about twice a month. And the rest of the time, she worked at the Buchanan house and Luther worked at the munitions factory and ran through life as if he were being clocked at it.

Oh, he was wild. Yet, unlike so many men, wildness wasn’t a choice for Luther, and he meant no harm by it. He’d have corrected it if you could have explained to him what it was. But that was like explaining stone to water, sand to air. Luther worked at the factory and when he wasn’t working he was playing ball and when he wasn’t playing ball he was fixing something and when he wasn’t fixing something he was running with his boys through the Columbus night and when he wasn’t doing that he was with Lila, and she had the full force of his attention because whatever Luther focused on, he focused on it to the exclusion of all else, so that when it was Lila he was charming, he was making laugh, he was pouring his full self at, she felt that nothing, not even the warmth of the Lord, projected such light.

Then Jefferson Reese gave him the beating that put him in the hospital for a week and took something from him. You couldn’t right say exactly what that something was, but you noticed the lack of it. Lila hated to picture what her man must have looked like curled in the dirt trying to protect himself while Reese pounded him and kicked him and unloosed all his long-bottled savagery. She’d tried to warn Luther off Reese, but Luther hadn’t listened because some part of him needed to buck against things. What he’d found out, lying in the dirt while those fists and feet rained down on him, was that if you bucked certain things — the mean things — they didn’t just buck back. No, no, that wasn’t enough. They crushed you and kept crushing and the only way you escaped alive was through pure luck, nothing else. The mean things of this world had only one lesson — we are meaner than you’d ever imagine.

She loved Luther because that kind of mean was not in him. She loved Luther because what made him wild was the same thing that made him kind — he loved the world. Loved it the way you loved an apple so sweet you had to keep taking bites from it. Loved it whether it loved him back or not.

But in Greenwood, that love and that light of Luther’s had started to dim. She couldn’t understand it at first. Yes, there were better ways to get married than the way they did, and the house on Archer was small, and then the plague had come to town, and all of this in a short eight weeks — but still, still they were in paradise. They were in one of the few places in the whole world where a black man and a black woman walked tall. The whites not only left them alone, they respected them, and Lila agreed with Brother Garrity when he declared that Greenwood would be a model for the rest of the country and that ten to twenty years from now there’d be Greenwoods in Mobile and Columbus and Chicago and New Orleans and Detroit. Because the blacks and whites had figured out how to leave one another be in Tulsa, and the peace and prosperity that came with that was too good for the rest of the country not to sit up and take notice.

Luther saw something else, though. Something that ate away at his gentleness and his light, and Lila had begun to fear that their child would not reach the world in time to save its father. For on her more optimistic days, she knew that’s all it would take — for Luther to hold his child so he’d realize once and for all that it was time to be a man.

She ran a hand over her belly and told the child to grow faster, grow faster, and she heard a car door slam and knew by the sound of it that it was that fool Jessie Tell’s car and that Luther must have brung that sorry man home with him, the two of them probably high as balloons that had lost their strings, and she got up from her chair and put her mask on and tied it behind her head as Luther came through the door.

It wasn’t the blood she noticed first, even though it covered his shirt and was splashed up along his neck. What she noticed first was that his face was all wrong. He didn’t live behind it no more, not the Luther she’d first seen on the ball field, not the Luther who smiled down into her face and brushed back her hair as he moved in and out of her on a cold Ohio night, not the Luther who’d tickle her until she screamed herself hoarse, not the Luther who drew pictures of his child in the window of a speeding train. That man did not live in this body anymore.

Then she noticed the blood and came toward him, saying, “Luther, baby, you need a doctor. What happened? What happened?”

Luther held her back. He gripped her shoulders as if she were a chair he needed to find a place for and he looked around the room and said, “You need to pack.”

“What?”

“Blood ain’t mine. I ain’t hurt. You need to pack.”

“Luther, Luther, look at me, Luther.”

He looked at her.

“What happened?”

“Jessie’s dead,” he said. “Jessie’s dead and Dandy, too.”

“Who’s Dandy?”

“Worked for the Deacon. Deacon’s dead. Deacon’s brains all over a wall.”

She stepped back from him. She touched her hands to her throat because she didn’t know where else to put them. She said, “What have you done?”

Luther said, “You got to pack, Lila. We got to run.”

“I ain’t running,” she said.

“What?” He cocked his head at her, only a few inches away, but she felt as if he was a thousand miles on the other side of the world.

“I ain’t leaving here,” she said.

“Yes you are, woman.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Lila, I’m serious. Pack a fucking bag.”

She shook her head.

Luther clenched his fists and his eyes were hooded. He crossed the room and put his fist through the clock hanging above the couch. “We are leaving.”

She watched the glass fall to the top of the couch, saw that the second hand still ticked. So she’d repair it. She could do that.

“Jessie’s dead,” she said. “That’s what you come home to tell me? Man got himself killed, near got you killed, and you expect me to say you my man and I’m’a pack a bag right quick and leave my home because I love you?”

“Yes,” he said and took her shoulders in his hands again. “Yes.”

“Well, I ain’t,” she said. “You a fool. I told you what running with that boy and running with the Deacon would get you and now you come in here covered in the wages of your sin, covered in other men’s blood, and you want what?”

“Want you to leave with me.”

“You kill tonight, Luther?”

His eyes were lost and his voice a whisper. “I killed the Deacon. I shot him straight up through his head.”

“Why?” she said, her voice a whisper now, too.

“Because he the reason Jessie dead.”

“And who’d Jessie kill?”

“Jessie killed Dandy. Smoke killed Jessie and I shot Smoke. He probably die, too.”

She could feel the anger building in her, washing over the fear and the pity and the love. “So Jessie Tell kill a man and then a man shoot him and then you shoot that man and then kill the Deacon? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yes. Now—”

“Is that what you’re telling me?” she yelled and beat his shoulders and his chest with her fists and then slapped him hard across the side of the head and would have kept on going if he didn’t grab her wrists in his.

“Lila, listen—”

“Get out of my house. Get out of my house! You’ve taken life. You are foul in the eyes of the Lord, Luther. And He will punish you.”

Luther stepped back from her.

She stayed where she was and felt their child kick inside her womb. It wasn’t much of a kick. It was soft, hesitant.

“I have to change these clothes and pack some things.”

“Then pack,” she said and turned her back on him.

As he tied his belongings to the back of Jessie’s car, she stayed inside, listening to him out there, and thinking how a love like theirs couldn’t possibly end no other way because it had always burned too bright. And she apologized to the Lord for what she now saw so clearly was their greatest sin: They had searched for heaven in this world. A search of that kind was steeped in pride, the worst of the seven deadly sins. Worse than greed, worse than wrath.

When Luther came back, she remained sitting on her side of the room.

“This is it?” he said softly.

“I guess it is.”

“This is how we end?”

“I believe so.”

“I …” He held out his hand.

“What?”

“I love you, woman.”

She nodded.

“I said I love you.”

She nodded again. “I know that. But you love other things more.”

He shook his head, his hand still hanging in the air, waiting for her to take it.

“Oh, yes, you do. You’re a child, Luther. And now all your playing brought this bloodshed home to roost. That was you, Luther. It wasn’t Jessie and it wasn’t the Deacon. It was you. All you. You. You, with your child in my womb.”

He lowered his hand. He stood in the doorway a long time. Several times he opened his mouth, as if to say something, but the words wouldn’t come.

“I love you,” he said again, and his voice was hoarse.

“I love you, too,” she said, though she did not feel it in her heart at that moment. “But you need to go before someone comes here looking for you.”

He walked out the door so fast she’d never be able to say she’d seen him move. One moment he was there, the next his shoes were hard against the wooden planks and then she heard the engine turn over and the car idled for a short time.

When he depressed the clutch and shifted into first the car made a loud clanking and she stood but didn’t move toward the door.

When she finally stepped out on the porch, he was gone. She looked up the road for his taillights, and she could just make them out, far off down the road in the dust the tires raised in the night.

Luther left Arthur Smalley’s car keys on his front porch on top of a note that said “Club Almighty alley.” He left another note saying the same thing to let the Irvines know where to find their hope chest, and he deposited jewelry and cash and most everything else they’d taken on the porches of the sick. When he got to Owen Tice’s house, he could see the man through his screen door, sitting dead at the table. After he’d pulled the trigger, the shotgun had bounced back in his hands. It stood straight up between his thighs, his hands still gripping it.

Luther drove back through the graying night and let himself into the house on Elwood. He stood in the living room and watched his wife sleep in the chair where he’d left her. He went into the bedroom and lifted the mattress. He placed most of Owen Tice’s money under there and then he went back out into the parlor and stood and looked at his wife some more. She snored softly and groaned once and pulled her knees closer to her belly.

She’d been right in everything she’d said.

But, oh, she’d been cold. She’d seen to breaking his heart as much as he, he now realized, had broken hers these last months. This house he’d feared and bristled at was something he now wished he could wrap his arms around and carry out to Jessie’s car and take with him wherever he was going.

“I do so love you, Lila Waters Laurence,” he said and kissed the tip of his index finger and touched it to her forehead.

She didn’t stir, so Luther leaned over and kissed her belly and then he left his home and went back to Jessie’s car and drove north with the dawn rising over Tulsa and the birds waking from their sleep.

Chapter ten

For two weeks, if her father wasn’t home, Tessa came to Danny’s door. They rarely slept, but Danny wouldn’t call what they did making love. A bit too raw for that. On several occasions, she gave the orders — slower, faster, harder, put it there, no there, roll over, stand up, lie down. It seemed hopeless to Danny, the way they clawed and chewed and squeezed each other’s bones. And yet he kept returning for more. Sometimes, walking the beat, he’d find himself wishing the uniform weren’t so coarse; it rubbed parts of him that had already been scratched to the last layer of flesh. His bedroom on those nights gave off the feel of a lair. They entered and tore at each other. And while the sounds of the neighborhood did reach them — an occasional car horn, the shouts of children kicking a ball in the alleys, the neighs and huffs from the stables behind their building, even the clank of footsteps on the fire escape of some other tenants who’d discovered the attraction of the roof he and Tessa had abandoned — they seemed the sounds of an alien life.

For all her abandon in the bedroom, Tessa withheld herself when the sex was finished. She would sneak back to her room without a word and never once fell asleep in his bed. He didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it this way — heated yet cold. He wondered if his part in all of this unleashing of unnameable fury was tied into his feelings for Nora, his urge to punish her for loving him and leaving him and continuing to live.

There was no danger he would fall in love with Tessa. Or she with him. In all their snakelike commingling he sensed contempt above all, not just she for him, or he for her, but both of them for their barren addiction to this act. Once, when she was on top, her hands clenched against his chest, she whispered, “So young,” like a condemnation.

When Federico was in town, he invited Danny over for some anisette and they sat listening to opera on the Silvertone while Tessa sat on the davenport, working on her English in primers that Federico brought back from his trips across New England and the Tri-States. At first Danny worried that Federico would sense the intimacy between his drinking companion and his daughter, but Tessa sat on the davenport, a stranger, her legs tucked under her petticoat, her crepe blouse cinched at the throat, and whenever her eyes found Danny’s they were blank of anything but linguistic curiosity.

“Dee-fine avar-iss,” she said once.

Those nights, Danny would return to his rooms feeling both the betrayer and the betrayed, and he’d sit by his window and read from the stacks provided by Eddie McKenna until late into the evening.

He went to another BSC meeting and still another, and little about the men’s situation or prospects had changed. The mayor still refused to meet with them, while Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor seemed to be having second thoughts about granting a charter.

“Keep the faith,” he heard Mark Denton say to a flatfoot one night. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“But it was built,” the guy said.

Then one night, when he returned after two solid days of duty, he found Mrs. DiMassi dragging Tessa and Federico’s rug down the stairs. Danny tried to help her, but the old woman shrugged him off and dropped the rug into the foyer and let loose a loud sigh before looking at him.

“She’s gone,” the old woman said, and Danny saw that she knew what he and Tessa had been up to and it colored how she would look at him as long as he lived here. “They go without a word. Owe me rent, too. You look for her, you will not find her, I think. Women of her village are known for their black hearts. Yes? Witches, some think. Tessa have black heart. Baby die, make it blacker. You,” she said as she pushed past him to her own apartment, “you probably make it blacker still.”

She opened her door and looked back at him. “They waiting for you.”

“Who?”

“The men in your room,” she said and entered her apartment.

He unsnapped the leather guard on his holster as he walked up the stairs, half of him still thinking of Tessa, of how it might not be too late to find her if the trail wasn’t too cold. He thought she owed him an explanation. He was convinced there was one.

At the top of the stairs, he heard his father’s voice coming from his apartment and snapped the guard back on his holster. Instead of going toward the voice, though, he went to Tessa and Federico’s apartment. He found the door ajar. He pushed it open. The rug was gone, but otherwise the parlor looked the same. Yet as he walked around it, he saw that all the photographs had been removed. In the bedroom, the closets were empty and the bed was stripped. The top of the dresser where Tessa had kept her powders and perfumes was bare. The hat tree in the corner sprouted empty pegs. He walked back into the parlor and felt a cold drop of sweat roll behind his ear and then down the back of his neck: they’d left behind the Silvertone.

The top was open and he went to it, smelling it suddenly. Someone had poured acid onto the turntable, and the velvet inlay had been eaten down to nothing. He opened the cabinet to find all of Federico’s beloved record discs smashed into shards. His first instinct was that they must have been murdered; the old man would have never left this behind or allowed anyone to vandalize it so obscenely.

Then he noticed the note. It was glued to the right cabinet door. The handwriting was Federico’s, identical to that on the note he’d left inviting Danny to dinner that first night; Danny suddenly felt nauseated.

“Aiden,” his father said from the doorway. “Good to see you, boy.”

Danny looked over at him. “What the hell?”

His father stepped into the apartment. “The other tenants say he seemed like such a sweet old man. Your opinion of him as well, I assume?”

Danny shrugged. He felt numb.

“Well, he isn’t sweet and he isn’t old. What’s the note he left you all about?”

“Private joke,” Danny said.

His father frowned. “Nothing about this is private, boy.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

His father smiled. “Elucidation awaits in your room.”

Danny followed him down the hall to find two men waiting in his apartment. They wore bow ties and heavy rust-colored suits with dark pinstripes. Their hair was plastered to their skulls by petroleum jelly and parted down the middle. Their shoes were a flat brown and polished. Justice Department. They couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d worn their badges pinned to their foreheads.

The taller of the two looked over at him. The shorter one sat on the edge of Danny’s coffee table.

“Officer Coughlin?” the tall man said.

“Who’re you?”

“I asked first,” the tall man said.

“I don’t care,” Danny said. “I live here.”

Danny’s father folded his arms and leaned against the window, content to watch the show.

The tall man looked over his shoulder at the other man and then back at Danny. “My name’s Finch. Rayme Finch. Rayme. No ‘ond.’ Just Rayme. You can call me Agent Finch.” He had the look of an athlete, loose-limbed and strong of bone.

Danny lit a cigarette and leaned against the doorjamb. “You got a badge?”

“I already showed it to your father.”

Danny shrugged. “Didn’t show it to me.”

As Finch reached into his back pocket, Danny caught the little man on the coffee table watching him with the kind of delicate contempt he’d normally associate with bishops or showgirls. He was a few years younger than Danny, maybe twenty-three at the most, and a good ten years younger than Agent Finch, but the pockets beneath his bulging eyes were pendulous and darkly pooled like those of a man twice his age. He crossed his legs and picked at something on his knee.

Finch produced his badge and a federal ID card stamped with the seal of the United States government: Bureau of Investigation.

Danny took a quick glance at it. “You’re BI?”

“Try saying it without a smirk.”

Danny jerked his thumb at the other guy. “And who’s this exactly?”

Finch opened his mouth but the other man wiped his hand with a handkerchief before extending the hand to Danny. “John Hoover, Mr. Coughlin,” the man said, and Danny’s hand came away with sweat from the handshake. “I work with the antiradical department at Justice. You don’t cotton to radicals, do you, Mr. Coughlin?”

“There’re no Germans in the building. Isn’t that what Justice handles?” He looked back at Finch. “And the BI is all about bankruptcy fraud. Yeah?”

The doughy lump on the coffee table looked at Danny like he wanted to bite the tip of his nose. “Our purview has expanded a bit since the war started, Officer Coughlin.”

Danny nodded. “Well, good luck.” He stepped over the threshold. “Mind getting the fuck out of my apartment?”

“We also deal with draft dodgers,” Agent Finch said, “agitators, seditionists, people who would make war on the United States.”

“It’s a living, I’d guess.”

“A good one. Anarchists in particular,” Finch said. “Those bastards are tops on our lists. You know — bomb throwers, Officer Coughlin. Like the one you were fucking.”

Danny squared his shoulders to Finch’s. “I’m fucking who?”

Agent Finch took a turn leaning against the doorjamb. “You were fucking Tessa Abruzze. At least that’s how she called herself. Am I correct?”

“I know Miss Abruzze. What of it?”

Finch gave him a thin smile. “You don’t know shit.”

“Her father’s a phonograph salesman,” Danny said. “They had some trouble back in Italy but—”

“Her father,” Finch said, “is her husband.” He raised his eyebrows. “You heard me right. And he couldn’t give a damn about phonographs. Federico Abruzze is not even his real name. He’s an anarchist, and more particularly he’s a Galleanist. You know what that term means or should I provide help?”

Danny said, “I know.”

“His real name is Federico Ficara and while you’ve been fucking his wife? He’s been making bombs.”

“Where?” Danny said.

“Right here.” Rayme Finch jerked his thumb back down the hall.

John Hoover crossed one hand over the other and rested them on his belt buckle. “I ask you again, Officer, are you the kind of man who cottons to radicals?”

“I think my son answered the question,” Thomas Coughlin said.

John Hoover shook his head. “Not that I heard, sir.”

Danny looked down at him. His skin had the look of bread pulled too early from the oven and his pupils were so tiny and dark they seemed meant for the head of another animal entirely.

“The reason I ask is because we are closing the barn door. After the horses have left it, I’ll grant you, but before the barn has burned to the ground. What the war showed us? Is that the enemy is not just in Germany. The enemy came over on ships and availed himself of our wanton immigration policies and he set up shop. He lectures to mine workers and factory workers and disguises himself as the friend of the worker and the downtrodden. But what he really is? What he really is is a prevaricator, an inveigler, a foreign disease, a man bent on the destruction of our democracy. He must be ground into dust.” Hoover wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief; the top of his collar had darkened with sweat. “So I’m going to ask you a third time — are you a coddler of the radical element? Are you in effect, sir, an enemy of my Uncle Samuel?”

Danny said, “Is he serious?”

Finch said, “Oh yes.”

Danny said, “John, right?”

The round man gave him a small nod.

“You fight in the war?”

Hoover shook his large head. “I did not have the honor.”

“The honor,” Danny said. “Well, I didn’t have the honor either, but that’s because I was deemed essential personnel on the home front. What’s your excuse?”

Hoover’s face reddened and he pocketed his handkerchief. “There are many ways to serve your country, Mr. Coughlin.”

“Yes, there are,” Danny said. “I’ve got a hole in my neck from serving mine. So if you question my patriotism again, John? I’ll have my father duck and throw you out that fucking window.”

Danny’s father fluttered a hand over his heart and stepped away from the window.

Hoover, though, stared back at Danny with the coal-blue clarity of the unexamined conscience. The moral fortitude of a knee-high boy who played at battle with sticks. Who grew older, but not up.

Finch cleared his throat. “The business at hand, gents, is bombs. Could we return to that?”

“How would you have known about my association with Tessa?” Danny said. “Were you tailing me?”

Finch shook his head. “Her. Her and her husband, Federico, were last seen ten months ago in Oregon. Beat the holy shit out of a railroad porter who tried to inspect Tessa’s bag. Had to jump off the train while it was going a good head of steam. Thing was, they had to leave the bag behind. Portland PD met the train, found blasting caps, dynamite, a couple of pistols. A real anarchist’s toolbox. The porter, poor suspicious bastard, died from his injuries.”

“Still haven’t answered my question,” Danny said.

“We tracked them here about a month ago. This is Galleani’s home base, after all. We’d heard rumors she was pregnant. The flu was running the show then, though, so that slowed us up. Last night a guy, let’s say, we count on in the anarchist underground coughed up Tessa’s address. She must have got word, though, because she got into the wind before we could get here. You? You were easy. We asked all the tenants in the building if Tessa had been acting suspicious lately. To a man or woman they all said, ‘Outside of fucking the cop on the fifth floor? Why no.’”

“Tessa a bomber?” Danny shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”

“No?” Finch said. “Back in her room an hour ago, John found metal shavings in the floor cracks and burn marks that could have only come from acid. You want a look? They’re making bombs, Officer Coughlin. No, correct that — they’ve made bombs. Probably used the manual Galleani wrote himself.”

Danny went to the window and opened it. He sucked in the cold air and looked out at the harbor lights. Luigi Galleani was the father of anarchism in America, publicly devoted to the overthrow of the federal government. Name a major terrorist act in the last five years and he’d been fingered as the architect.

“As for your girlfriend,” Finch said, “her real name is Tessa, but that’s probably the only true thing you know about her.” Finch came over to the window beside Danny and his father. He produced a folded handkerchief and opened it. “See this?”

Danny looked into the handkerchief and saw white powder.

“That’s fulminate of mercury. Looks just like table salt, doesn’t it? Put it on a rock and hit the rock with a hammer, though, and both the rock and the hammer will explode. Probably your arm, too. Your girlfriend was born Tessa Valparo in Naples. She grew up in a slum, lost her parents to cholera, and started working in a bordello at twelve. She killed a client when she was thirteen. With a razor and an impressive imagination. Fell in with Federico shortly after that and they came here.”

“Where,” Hoover said, “they quickly made the acquaintance of Luigi Galleani just north of here in Lynn. They helped him plan attacks in New York and Chicago and play sob sister to all those poor helpless workers from Cape Cod to Seattle. They worked on that disgraceful propaganda rag Cronaca Sovversiva as well. You’re familiar with it?”

Danny said, “You can’t work in the North End and not see it. People wrap their fish in it, for Christ’s sake.”

“And yet it’s illegal,” Hoover said.

“Well, it’s illegal to distribute through the mail,” Rayme Finch said. “I’m the reason it’s so actually. I raided their offices. I’ve arrested Galleani twice. I guarantee you, I’ll deport him before the year’s out.”

“Why haven’t you deported him already?”

“The law thus far favors subversives,” Hoover said. “Thus far.”

Danny chuckled. “Eugene Debs is in jail for giving a fucking speech.”

“One that advocated violence,” Hoover said, and his voice was loud and strained, “against this country.”

Danny rolled his eyes at the chunky little peacock. “My point is, if you can jail a former presidential candidate for giving a speech, why can’t you deport the most dangerous anarchist in the country?”

Finch sighed. “American kids and an American wife. That’s what got him his sympathy votes last time. He’s going, though. Trust me. He’s fucking going next time.”

“They’re all going,” Hoover said. “Every last unwashed one of them.”

Danny turned to his father. “Say something.”

“Say what?” his father said mildly.

“Say what you’re doing here.”

“I told you,” his father said, “these gentlemen informed me that my own son was shacking up with a subversive. A bomb maker, Aiden.”

“Danny.”

His father pulled a pack of Black Jack from his pocket and offered it to the room. John Hoover took a piece, but Danny and Finch declined. His father and Hoover unwrapped their sticks of gum and popped them in their mouths.

His father sighed. “If it hit the papers, Danny, that my son was taking the favors, shall we say, of a violent radical while her husband built bombs right under his nose — what would that say about my beloved department?”

Danny turned to Finch. “So find ’em and deport ’em. That’s your plan, right?”

“Bet your ass. But until I find them and until they go,” Finch said, “they’re planning on making some noise. Now we know they’ve got some things planned for May. I understand your father already briefed you on that. We don’t know where or who they’re going to hit. We have some ideas, but still, radicals aren’t predictable. They’ll go after the usual list of judges and politicians, but it’s the industrial targets we have trouble protecting. Which industry will they choose? Coal, iron, lead, sugar, steel, rubber, textiles? Will they hit a factory? Or a distillery? Or an oil derrick? We don’t know. But what we do know is that they’re going to hit something big right here in your town.”

“When?”

“Could be tomorrow. Could be three months from now.” Finch shrugged. “Or they might wait until May. Can’t tell.”

“But we assure you,” Hoover said, “their insurrectionary act will be loud.”

Finch reached into his jacket, unfolded a piece of paper, and handed it to Danny. “We found this in her closet. I think it’s a first draft.”

Danny unfolded the page. The note was composed of letters cut from the newspaper and glued to the page:

Danny handed the note back.

“It’s a press release,” Finch said. “I’d bank on it. They just haven’t sent it out yet. But when it does hit the streets, you can be sure a boom is going to follow.”

Danny said, “And you’re telling me all this, why?”

“To see if you have an interest in stopping them.”

“My son is a proud man,” Thomas Coughlin said. “He wouldn’t stand for word to get out on something like this and sully his reputation.”

Danny ignored him. “Anyone in their right mind would want to stop them.”

“But you’re not just anyone,” Hoover said. “Galleani tried to blow you up once.”

Danny said, “What?”

“Who do you think ordered the bombing of Salutation Street?” Finch said. “You think that was random? It was revenge for the arrest of three of theirs in an antiwar protest the month before. Who do you think was behind those ten cops got blown up in Chicago last year? Galleani, that’s who. And his minions. They’ve tried to kill Rockefeller. They’ve tried to kill judges. They’ve blown up parades. Hell, they exploded a bomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Galleani and his Galleanists. At the turn of the century people of this exact same philosophy killed President McKinley, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, the empress of Austria, and the king of Italy. All in a six-year span. They may blow themselves up occasionally, but they’re not comical. They’re murderers. And they were making bombs right here under your nose while you were fucking one of them. Oh, no, let me amend that — while she was fucking you. So how personal does it have to get, Officer Coughlin, before you wake up?”

Danny thought of Tessa in his bed, of the guttural sounds they’d made, of her eyes widening as he’d pushed into her, of her nails tearing his skin, her mouth spreading into a smile, and outside, the clank of the fire escape as people moved up and down it.

“You’ve seen them up close,” Finch said. “If you saw them again, you’d have a second or two’s advantage over anyone who was going off a faded photograph.”

“I can’t find them here,” Danny said. “Not here. I’m an American.”

“This is America,” Hoover said.

Danny pointed at the floorboards and shook his head. “This is Italy.”

“But what if we can get you close?”

“How?”

Finch handed Danny a photograph. The quality was poor, as if it had been reproduced several times. The man in it looked to be about thirty with a thin, patrician nose and eyes narrowed to slits. He was clean-shaven. His hair was fair, and his skin appeared pale, though that was more of a guess on Danny’s part.

“Doesn’t look like a card-carrying Bolshie.”

“And yet he is,” Finch said.

Danny handed the photograph back. “Who is he?”

“Name’s Nathan Bishop. He’s a real beaut’. A British doctor and radical. These terrorists accidentally blow off a hand or slip away from a riot with wounds? They can’t just stroll into an emergency room. They go to see our friend here. Nathan Bishop’s the company quack for the Massachusetts radical movement. Radicals don’t tend to fraternize outside their individual cells, but Nathan’s the connective tissue. He knows all the players.”

“And he drinks,” Hoover said. “Quite copiously.”

“So get one of your own men to cozy up to him.”

Finch shook his head. “Won’t work.”

“Why?”

“Honestly? We don’t have the budget.” Finch looked embarrassed. “So we came to your father, and he told us you’ve already begun the prep work to go after a radical cell. We want you to circle the entire movement. Get us license plate numbers, membership counts. All the while, you keep your eyes peeled for Bishop. Your paths will cross sooner or later. You get close to him, you get close to the rest of these sons-a-bitches. You heard of the Roxbury Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

Danny nodded. “’Round here they’re just called the Letts.”

Finch cocked his head, as if this were news to him. “For whatever bullshit sentimental reason, they seem to be Bishop’s favorite group. He’s friends with the guy who runs it, a Hebe name of Louis Fraina with documented ties to Mother Russia. We’re hearing rumors Fraina might be the lead plotter in all this.”

“All what?” Danny said. “I was kept in the dark on a need-to-know basis.”

Finch looked over at Thomas Coughlin. Danny’s father raised his hands, palms up, and shrugged.

“They may be planning something big in the spring.”

“What exactly?”

“A national May Day revolt.”

Danny laughed. No one else did.

“You’re serious.”

His father nodded. “A bomb campaign followed by armed revolt, coordinated among all the radical cells in all the major cities across the country.”

“To what end? It’s not like they can storm Washington.”

“That’s what Nicholas said about St. Petersburg,” Finch said.

Danny removed his greatcoat and the blue coat underneath, stood there in his T-shirt as he unbuckled his gun belt and hung it on the closet door. He poured himself a glass of rye and didn’t offer anyone else the bottle. “So this Bishop fella, he’s connected to the Letts?”

A nod from Finch. “Sometimes. The Letts have no ostensible connection to the Galleanists, but they’re all radicals, so Bishop has connections to both of them.”

“Bolsheviks on one hand,” Danny said, “anarchists on the other.”

“And Nathan Bishop linking them together.”

“So I infiltrate the Letts and see if they’re making bombs for May Day or — what — if they’re connected to Galleani in some way?”

“If not him, then his followers,” Hoover said.

“And if they’re not?” Danny said.

“Get their mailing list,” Finch said.

Danny poured himself another drink. “What?”

“Their mailing list. It’s the key to breaking any group of subversives. When I raided the offices of Cronaca last year? They’d just finished printing their latest issue. I got the names of every single person they were sending it to. Based on that list, the Justice Department managed to deport sixty of them.”

“Uh-huh. I heard Justice once deported a guy for calling Wilson a cocksucker.”

“We tried,” Hoover said. “Unfortunately the judge decided jail was more fitting.”

Even Danny’s father was incredulous. “For calling a man a cocksucker?”

“For calling the president of the United States a cocksucker,” Finch said.

“And if I see Tessa or Federico?” Danny caught a whiff of her scent suddenly.

“Shoot ’em in the face,” Finch said. “Then say, ‘Halt.’”

“I’m missing a link here,” Danny said.

His father said, “No, you’re fine.”

“The Bolsheviks are talkers. The Galleanists are terrorists. One doesn’t necessarily equal the other.”

“Nor do they necessarily cancel one another out,” Hoover said.

“Be that as it may, they—”

“Hey.” Finch’s tone was sharp, his eyes too clear. “You say ‘Bolsheviks’ or ‘Communists’ like there are nuances here the rest of us are too thick to grasp. They’re not different — they’re fucking terrorists. Every last one. This country’s heading for one hell of a showdown, Officer. We think that showdown will happen on May Day. That you won’t be able to swing a cat without hitting some revolutionary with a bomb or a rifle. And if that occurs, this country will tear itself apart. Picture it — the bodies of innocent Americans strewn all over our streets. Thousands of kids, mothers, workingmen. And for what? Because these cocksuckers hate the life we have. Because it’s better than theirs. Because we’re better than them. We’re richer, we’re freer, we’ve got a lot of the best real estate in a world that’s mostly desert or undrinkable ocean. But we don’t hoard that, we share. Do they thank us for sharing? For welcoming them to our shores? No. They try to kill us. They try to tear down our government like we’re the fucking Romanovs. Well, we’re not the fucking Romanovs. We’re the only successful democracy in the world. And we’re done apologizing for it.”

Danny waited a moment and then clapped.

Hoover looked ready to bite him again, but Finch took a bow.

Danny saw Salutation Street again, the wall transformed into a white drizzle, the floor vanishing underfoot. He’d never talked about it to anyone, not even Nora. How did you put words to helplessness? You didn’t. You couldn’t. Falling from the first floor straight through to the basement, he’d felt seized with the utter certainty that he’d never eat again, walk a street again, feel a pillow against his cheek.

You own me, he’d thought. To God. To chance. To his own helplessness.

“I’ll do it,” Danny said.

“Patriotism or pride?” Finch arched one eyebrow.

“One of the two,” Danny said.

After Finch and Hoover left, Danny and his father sat at the small table and took turns with the bottle of rye.

“Since when did you let federal cops shoehorn in on BPD business?”

“Since the war changed this country.” His father gave him a distant smile and took a sip from the bottle. “If we’d come out on the losing side, maybe we’d still be the same, but we didn’t. Volstead” — he held up the bottle and sighed — “will change it further. Shrink it, I think. The future is federal, not local.”

“Your future?”

“Mine?” His father chuckled. “I’m an old man from an even older time. No, not my future.”

“Con’s?”

His father nodded. “And yours. If you can keep your penis at home where it belongs.” He corked the bottle and slid it across to Danny. “How long will it take you to grow a beard fit for a Red?”

Danny pointed at the thick stubble already sprouting from his cheeks. “Guess.”

His father rose from the table. “Give your uniform a good brushing before putting it away. You won’t be needing it for a while.”

“You saying I’m a detective?”

“What do you think?”

“Say it, Dad.”

His father stared across the room at him, his face blank. Eventually, he nodded. “You do this, you’ll have your gold shield.”

“All right.”

“I hear you showed up at a BSC meeting the other night. After you told me you wouldn’t rat on your own.”

Danny nodded.

“So you’re a union man now?”

Danny shook his head. “Just like their coffee.”

His father gave him another long look, his hand on the doorknob. “You might want to strip that bed of yours, give those sheets a good washing.” He gave Danny a firm nod and left.

Danny stood by the table and uncorked the rye. He took a sip as his father’s footsteps faded in the stairwell. He looked at his unmade bed and took another drink.

Chapter eleven

Jessie’s car only got Luther as far as central Missouri before one of the tires blew out just past Waynesville. He’d been sticking to back roads, driving at night as much as possible, but the tire blew out close to dawn. Jessie, of course, hadn’t packed a spare, so Luther had no choice but to drive on it. He crawled along the side of the road in first gear, never getting above the speed an ox pulled a plow, and just as the sun entered the valley, he found a filling station and pulled in.

Two white men came out of the mechanic’s shed, one of them wiping his hands on a rag, the other pulling from a bottle of sassafras. It was that one who said it sure was a nice car and asked Luther how he’d come by it.

Luther watched them spread out on either side of the hood, and the one with the rag wiped his brow with it and spit some chaw into the dirt.

“I saved up,” Luther said.

“Saved up?” the one with the bottle said. He was lean and lanky and wore a sheepskin coat against the cold. He had a thick head of red hair but up top he had a bald spot the size of a fist. “What kind of work you do?” He had a pleasant voice.

“Work in a munitions factory for the war effort,” Luther said.

“Uh-huh.” The man walked around the car, taking a good look, squatting from time to time to check the body lines for dents that might have been hammered out and painted over. “You were in a war once, weren’t you, Bernard?”

Bernard spit again and wiped his mouth and ran his stubby fingers along the edge of the hood looking for the latch.

“I was,” Bernard said. “Haiti.” He looked at Luther for the first time. “They dropped us off in this one town, said kill any natives give you a funny look.”

“You get a lot of funny looks?” the redheaded man asked.

Bernard popped the hood. “Not once we started shooting.”

“What’s your name?” the other man asked Luther.

“I’m just looking to fix this here flat.”

“That’s a long name,” the man said. “Wouldn’t you say, Bernard?”

Bernard stuck his head out from behind the hood. “It’s a mouthful.”

“My name’s Cully,” the man said, and reached out his hand.

Luther shook the hand. “Jessie.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jessie.” Cully walked around the back of the car and hitched his pants to squat by the tire. “Oh, sure, there it is, Jessie. You want to look?”

Luther walked down the car and followed Cully’s finger, saw a jagged tear the width of a nickel in the tire right by the rim.

“Probably just a sharp stone,” Cully said.

“Can you fix it?”

“Yeah, we can fix it. How far’d you drive on it?”

“Couple miles,” Luther said. “But real slow.”

Cully took a close look at the wheel and nodded. “Don’t seem to be any damage to the rim. How far you come, Jessie?”

The whole time he’d been driving, Luther kept telling himself he needed to come up with a story, but as soon as he’d start trying, his thoughts would drift to Jessie lying on the floor in his own blood or the Deacon trying to reach for his arm or Arthur Smalley inviting them into his home or Lila looking at him in the living room with her heart closed to him.

He said, “Columbus, Ohio,” because he couldn’t say Tulsa.

“But you came from the east,” Cully said.

Luther could feel the cold wind biting the edges of his ears and he reached in and took his coat from the front seat. “I went to visit a friend in Waynesville,” Luther said. “Now I’m heading back.”

“Took a drive through the cold from Columbus to Waynesville,” Cully said as Bernard closed the hood with a hard clank.

“That’ll happen,” Bernard said, coming down the side of the car. “Nice coat.”

Luther looked at it. It had been Jessie’s, a fine wool cheviot carovette overcoat with a convertible collar. For a man who loved to dress, he’d been prouder of this coat than anything he owned.

“Thank you,” Luther said.

“Might roomy,” Bernard said.

“What’s that?”

“A bit big for you is all,” Cully said with a helpful smile as he straightened to his full height. “What you think, Bern’? Can we fix this man’s tire?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“How’s that engine looking?”

Bernard said, “Man takes care of his car. Everything under that hood is cherry. Yes, sir.”

Cully nodded. “Well, Jessie, we’re happy to oblige you then. We’ll get you up and running in no time.” He took a stroll around the car again. “But we got some funny laws in this county. One says I can’t work on a colored man’s car until I check his license against the registration. You got a license?”

The man smiled all pleasant and logical.

“I misplaced it.”

Cully looked over at Bernard, then out at the empty road, then back at Luther. “That’s unfortunate.”

“It’s just a flat.”

“Oh, I know, Jessie, I do. Hell, it was up to me we’d have you fixed up and on the road five minutes from last Tuesday. We surely would. If it was up to me, I’ll tell you true, there’d be a whole lot less laws in this county. But they got their ways of doing things and it’s not my place to tell them different. I tell you what — it’s a slow day. Why don’t we let Bernard get to working on the car and I’ll drive you down to the county courthouse and you can just fill out an application and see if Ethel will make you up a new license on the spot?”

Bernard ran his rag down along the hood. “This car ever been in an accident?”

“No, suh,” Luther said.

“First time he said ‘suh,’” Bernard said. “You notice that?”

Cully said, “It did catch my attention.” He spread his hands to Luther. “It’s okay, Jessie. We’re just used to our Missouri coloreds showing a bit more deference. Again, makes no difference to me, you see. Just the way of things.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Twice!” Bernard said.

“Whyn’t you grab your things,” Cully said, “and we’ll take that ride?”

Luther took his suitcase from the backseat and a minute later he was in Cully’s pickup truck and they were driving west.

After about ten minutes of silence, Cully said, “You know I fought in the war. You?”

Luther shook his head.

“Damnedest thing, Jessie, but I couldn’t tell you now what it was exactly we were fighting about. Seems like back in ’fourteen, that Serbian fella shot that Austrian fella? And next thing you know, in ’bout a minute, Germany was threatening Belgium and France was saying, well, you can’t threaten Belgium and then Russia — ’member when they were in it? — they’re saying you can’t threaten France and before you know it, everyone’s shooting. Now you, you say you worked in a munitions factory, so I’m wondering — did they tell you what it was about?”

Luther said, “No. To them I think it was just about munitions.”

“Hell,” Cully said with a hearty laugh, “maybe that’s what it was about for all of us. Maybe that’s all indeed. Wouldn’t that be something?” He laughed again and nudged Luther’s thigh with his fist and Luther smiled in agreement because if the whole world were that stupid then it truly was something indeed.

“Yes, suh,” he said.

“I read a bunch,” Cully said. “I hear at Versailles that they’re going to make Germany surrender something like fifteen percent of her coal production and near fifty percent of her steel. Fifty percent. Now how’s that dumb country supposed to ever get back on its feet? You wonder that, Jessie?”

“I’m wondering it now,” he said, and Cully chuckled.

“They supposed to give up, like, another fifteen percent of their territory. And all this for backing the play of a friend. All that. And the thing is, who amongst us picks our friends?”

Luther thought of Jessie and wondered who Cully was thinking of as he stared at the window, his eyes gone wistful or rueful, Luther couldn’t tell.

“No one,” Luther said.

“Exactly. You don’t pick friends. You find each other. And any man don’t back a friend gives up the right to call himself a man in my opinion. And I understand, you gots to pay if you back a bad play by your friend, but do you have to be ground into the dirt? I don’t think so. World apparently thinks different, though.”

He settled back in his seat, his arm loose against the wheel, and Luther wondered if he was expected to say something.

“When I was in the war,” Cully said, “a plane flies over this field one day, starts dropping grenades? Whew. That’s a sight I try to forget. Grenades start hitting the trenches and everyone’s jumping out and the Germans start firing from their trenches and I’ll tell you, Jessie, wasn’t no way to tell hell from hell that day. What would you do?”

“Suh?”

Cully’s fingers rested lightly on the wheel. He looked over. “Stay in the trench with grenades falling on you or jump out into a field where boys were shooting at you?”

“I can’t imagine, suh.”

“I suspect you can’t. Hideous really, the cries boys make when they’re dying. Just hideous.” Cully shuddered and yawned at the same time. “Yes, sir. Sometimes life don’t give you a choice but between the hard thing and the harder thing. Times like that, man can’t afford to lose much time thinking. Just got to get doing.”

Cully yawned again and went silent and they drove that way for another ten miles, the plains spread out around them, frozen stiff under a hard white sky. The cold gave everything the look of metal that had been rubbed with steel wool. Gray wisps of frost swirled along the edges of the road and kicked up in front of the grille. They reached a railroad crossing and Cully stopped the truck in the middle of the tracks, the engine giving off a low chug as he turned in his seat and looked over at Luther. He smelled of tobacco, though Luther had yet to see him smoke, and small pink veins sprouted from the corners of his eyes.

“They string coloreds up here, Jessie, for doing a lot less than stealing a car.”

“I didn’t steal it,” Luther said and immediately thought about the gun in his suitcase.

“They string ’em up just for driving cars. You in Missouri, son.” His voice was soft and kind. He shifted and placed an arm up on the seat back. “Now it’s like a lot of things have to do with the law, Jessie. I might not like it. Then again maybe I do. But even if I don’t, it ain’t for me to say. I just go along to get along. You understand?”

Luther said nothing.

“You see that tower?”

Luther followed the jut of Cully’s chin, saw a water tower about two hundred yards down the track.

“Yeah.”

“Dropping the ‘suh’ again,” Cully said with a small lift of his eyebrows. “I like that. Well, boy, in about three minutes, a freight train is going to come down these tracks. It’ll stop and take on water for a couple minutes and then head toward St. Louis. I recommend you get on it.”

Luther felt the same coldness he’d felt when he’d pressed the gun under Deacon Broscious’s chin. He felt ready to die in Cully’s truck if he could take the man with him.

“That’s my car,” Luther said. “I own it.”

Cully chuckled. “Not in Missouri you don’t. Maybe in Columbus or wherever bullshit place you claim to come from. But not in Missouri, boy. You know what Bernard started doing soon as I pulled out of my station?”

Luther had the suitcase on his lap and his thumbs found the latches.

“He got on the horn, started calling around, telling folks about this here colored fella we met. Man driving a car he can’t afford. Man wearing a nice coat too big for him. Ol’ Bernard, he killed him some darkies in his time and he’d like to kill more, and right about now, he’s organizing a party. Not a party you’d cotton to much, Jessie. Now I ain’t Bernard. I got no fight with you and lynching a man ain’t something I’ve ever seen and not something I ever want to see. Stains the heart, I suspect.”

“It’s my car,” Luther said. “Mine.”

Cully went on like Luther hadn’t spoken. “So you can avail yourself of my kindness or you can get plumb stupid and stick around. But what you—”

“I own—”

“—can’t do, Jessie,” Cully said, his voice suddenly loud in the truck. “What you can’t do is stay in my truck one more second.”

Luther met his eyes. They were bland and unblinking.

“So get out, boy.”

Luther smiled. “You just a good man who steals cars, that it, Mr. Cully, suh?”

Cully smiled, too. “Ain’t going to be a second train today, Jessie. You try the third box car from the back. Hear?”

He reached across Luther and opened the door.

“You got a family?” Luther asked. “Kids?”

Cully leaned his head back and chuckled. “Oh ho. Don’t push it, boy.” He waved his hand. “Just get out my truck.”

Luther sat there for a bit and Cully turned his head and stared out the windshield and a crow cawed from somewhere above them. Luther reached for the door handle.

He climbed out and stepped onto the gravel and his eyes fell on a stand of dark trees on the other side of the tracks, thinned by winter, the pale morning light passing between the trunks. Cully reached across and pulled the door shut and Luther looked back at him as he spun the truck around, crunching the gravel. He waved out the window and drove back the way he’d come.

The train went beyond St. Louis, crossing over the Mississippi and into Illinois. It turned out to be the first stroke of good luck Luther’d had in some time — he’d been heading for East St. Louis in the first place. It was where his father’s brother, Hollis, lived, and Luther had hoped to sell the car here and maybe lie low for a while.

Luther’s father, a man he couldn’t remember knowing in the flesh, had left the family for East St. Louis when Luther was two. He’d run off with a woman named Velma Standish, and they’d settled here and Timon Laurence had eventually set up a shop that sold and repaired watches. There had been three Laurence brothers — Cornelius, the eldest, and then Hollis, and lastly, Timon. Uncle Cornelius had often told Luther he wasn’t missing out on much growing up without Tim around, said his youngest brother had been a man born feckless and weak for women and liquor since about the time he learned what the two were. Threw away a fine woman like Luther’s mother for nothing more than junk pussy. (Uncle Cornelius had pined throughout Luther’s life for Luther’s mother with a love so chaste and patient it couldn’t help but be taken for granted and grow, through the years, entirely unremarkable. It was his lot in life, he’d told Luther not long after he’d gone fully blind, to have a heart no one wanted except in pieces and never as a whole, while his youngest brother, a man of no definable principles, culled love to him as easily as if it fell through the rain.)

Luther grew up with a single tin-plated photograph of his father. He’d touched it so many times with his thumbs that his father’s features had softened and blurred. By the time Luther grew to manhood there was no way to tell if his own features bore a resemblance. Luther had never told anyone, not his mother or his sister or even Lila, how deep it cut to grow up knowing his father never gave him a thought. That the man had glanced at this life he’d brought into the world and said to himself: I’m happier without it. Luther had long imagined he’d meet him one day and stand before him a proud young man of great promise and watch regret fill his father’s face. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

His father had died sixteen months ago, along with near a hundred other colored folk while East St. Louis burned around them. Luther got the word from Hollis, the man’s block letters looking pained and cramped on a sheet of yellow paper:

Luther walked out of the freight yard and into downtown as the sky was beginning to darken. He had the envelope Uncle Hollis had sent his letter in with his address scrawled on the back, and he pulled it from his coat and held it in his hand as he walked. The deeper he traveled into the colored section the less he could believe what he saw. The streets were empty, and much of the reason, Luther knew, had to do with the flu, but it was also because there wouldn’t seem to be much point to walk streets where all the buildings were either blackened or crumbled or lost forever beneath rubble and ash. It reminded Luther of an old man’s mouth, where most of the teeth were missing, a couple broken in half, and the few that remained leaning to the side and useless. Whole blocks were nothing but ash, great piles of it that the early-evening breeze blew from one side of the street to the other, just trading it back and forth. So much ash that not even a tornado could have erased it all. Over a year since the neighborhood had burned, and those piles stood tall. On those blown-out streets, Luther felt as if he were surely the last man alive, and he figured that if the Kaiser had managed to send his army across the ocean, with all their planes and bombs and rifles, they couldn’t have done more damage.

It had been over jobs, Luther knew, the white working-class folks getting more and more convinced that the reason they were poor was because the colored working-class folks were stealing their jobs and the food off their tables. So they’d come down here, white men and white women and white children, too, and they’d started with the colored men, shooting them and lynching them and setting them afire and even driving several into the Cahokia River and then stoning them to death when they tried to swim back, a job they’d left mostly to the children. The white women pulled colored women off the streetcars and stoned them and stabbed them with kitchen knives, and when the National Guard came, they just stood around and watched it go on.

“Your daddy,” Uncle Hollis said, after Luther showed up at the door of his juke joint and Uncle Hollis took him into the back office and poured him a drink, “was trying to protect that little shop of his never made him a dime. They lit it on fire and called for him to come out and once all four walls were burning down around him, he and Velma came out. Someone shot him in the knee and he lay there on the street for a while. They handed Velma over to some women, and they beat her with rolling pins. Just beat her about the head and face and hips and she die after crawling into an alley, like a dog gone under a porch. Someone come up to your father, and the way I was told, he try to get to his knees, but he can’t even do that and he keep tipping over and pleading and finally a couple white men just stand there and shoot him until they run out of bullets.”

“Where’s he buried?” Luther said.

Uncle Hollis shook his head. “Wasn’t nothing to bury, son. They got done shooting him, they picked him up, one on each end, and they tossed him back into his own store.”

Luther got up from the table and went over to a small sink and got sick. It went on for some time, and he felt as if he were puking up soot and yellow fire and ash. His head eddied with flashes of white women swinging rolling pins onto black heads and white faces shrieking with joy and fury and then the Deacon singing in his wheelchair-rocker and his father trying to kneel in the street and Aunt Marta and the Honorable Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, clapping their hands and beaming big smiles and someone chanting, “Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!” and the whole world burning with fire as far as the eye could see until the blue skies were painted half black and the white sun vanished behind the smoke.

When he finished, he rinsed his mouth and Hollis gave him a small towel and he dried his lips on it and wiped the sweat from his brow.

“You hot, boy.”

“No, I’m okay now.”

Uncle Hollis gave him another slow shake of the head and poured him another drink. “No, I said you are hot. There’s people looking for you, sending word up and down and across this here Midwest. You kill a bunch of coloreds in a Tulsa joint? You kill Deacon Broscious? You fucking out your mind?”

“How’d you hear?”

“Shit. It’s burning up the wires, boy.”

“Police?”

Uncle Hollis shook his head. “Police think some other fool did it. Clarence Somebody.”

“Tell,” Luther said. “Clarence Tell.”

“That’s the name.” Uncle Hollis stared across the table at him, breathing heavy through his flat nose. “’Parently you left one of them alive. One they call Smoke?”

Luther nodded.

“He in a hospital. Ain’t nobody sure if he gone get well or not, but he told people. He fingered you. Gunners from here to New York looking for your head.”

“What’s the price on it?”

“This Smoke say he pay five hundred dollars for a photograph of your corpse.”

“What if Smoke dies?”

Uncle Hollis shrugged. “Whoever take over the Deacon’s business, he going to have to make sure you dead.”

Luther said, “I ain’t got no place to go.”

“You got to go east, boy. ’Cause you can’t stay here. And stay the fuck out of Harlem, that’s for sure. Look, I know a boy up in Boston can take you in.”

“Boston?”

Luther gave that some thought and quickly realized that thinking about it was a waste of time because there wasn’t any choice in the matter. If Boston was all that was left of “safe” in this country, then Boston it would have to be.

“What about you?” he asked. “You staying here?”

“Me?” Uncle Hollis said. “I didn’t shoot nobody.”

“Yeah, but what’s here anymore? Place been burned to nothing. I hear all the coloreds are leaving or trying to.”

“To go where? Problem with our people, Luther, is they bite into hope and keep their teeth clenched to it the rest of their lives. You think any place is going to be better than here? Just different cages, boy. Some prettier than others but cages just the same.” He sighed. “Fuck it. I’m too old to move and this right here, this right here is as much home as I know.”

They sat in silence and finished their drinks.

Uncle Hollis pushed back his chair and stretched his arms above his head. “Well, I got a room upstairs. We’ll get you situated for a night while I make some calls. In the morning …” He shrugged.

“Boston,” Luther said.

Uncle Hollis nodded. “Boston. Best I can do.”

In the boxcar, with Jessie’s fine coat covered in hay to ward off the cold, Luther promised the Lord he would atone. No more card games. No more whiskey or cocaine. No more associating with gamblers or gangsters or anyone who even thought of doing heroin. No more giving himself over to the thrill of the night. He would keep his head down and call no attention to himself and wait this out. And if word ever came that he could return to Tulsa, then he would return a changed man. A humble penitent.

Luther had never considered himself a religious man, but that had less to do with his feelings about God than it did with his feelings about religion. His grandmother and his mother had both tried to drum the Baptist faith into him, and he had done what he could to please them, to make them believe he believed, but it had taken no more hold of him than any of the other homework he claimed to be doing. In Tulsa he’d grown even less inclined toward Jesus, if only because Aunt Marta and Uncle James and all their friends spent so much time praising Him that Luther figured if Jesus was, in fact, hearing all those voices He’d just as soon prefer silence every now and then, maybe catch Himself up on some sleep.

And Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their “Amens” and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

So Luther’s arrangement with the Lord had long stood along the lines of You go Your way and I’ll go mine. But in the boxcar, something took hold of him, a need to make sense of his own life, to give it a meaning lest he pass from the face of the earth having left behind no heavier footprint than that of a dung beetle.

He rode the rails across the Midwest and back through Ohio and then on into the Northeast. Although the companions he met in the boxcars weren’t as hostile or dangerous as he’d often heard and the railway bulls never rousted or hassled them, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the train ride he’d taken to Tulsa with Lila and he grew sad to the point where he felt swollen with it, as if there were no space for anything else in his body. He kept to himself in the corners of the boxcars, and he rarely trusted himself to speak unless one of the other men fairly demanded it of him.

He wasn’t the only man on the train running from something. They ran from court dates and policemen and debts and wives. Some ran toward the same things. Some just needed a change. They all needed a job. But the papers, of late, had been promising a new recession. The boom times, they said, were over. War industries were shutting down and seven million men were about to hit the streets. Four million more were returning from overseas. Eleven million men about to enter a job market that was tapped out.

One of those eleven million, a huge white guy named BB, with a left hand mashed by a drill press into a pancake-flap of useless flesh, woke Luther his final morning on the train by throwing open the door so that the wind blew into Luther’s face. Luther opened his eyes and saw BB standing by the open door as the countryside raced past him. It was dawn, and the moon still hung in the sky like a ghost of itself.

“Now that’s a sweet picture, isn’t it?” BB said, his large head tilting up toward the moon.

Luther nodded and caught his yawn in his fist. He shook the sleep from his legs and joined BB in the doorway. The sky was clear and blue and hard. The air was cold but smelled so clean Luther wished he could put it on a plate and eat it. The fields they passed were frozen and the trees were mostly bare, and it felt as if he and BB had caught the world at sleep, as if no one else, anywhere, bore witness to this dawn. Against that hard blue sky, as blue as anything Luther had ever seen, it all looked so beautiful that Luther wished he could show it to Lila. Wrap his arms around her belly and tuck his chin into her shoulder and ask her if she’d ever seen anything so blue. In your life, Lila? Have you ever?

He stepped back from the doorway.

I let it all go, he thought. I let it all go.

He found the fading moon in the sky and he kept his eyes on it. He kept his eyes on it until it had faded altogether and the wind had bitten clear through his coat.