The Given Day

Chapter thirteen

In the late autumn of 1918, Danny Coughlin stopped walking a beat, grew a thick beard, and was reborn as Daniel Sante, a veteran of the 1916 Thomson Lead Miners Strike in western Pennsylvania. The real Daniel Sante had been close to Danny’s height and had the same dark hair. He’d also left behind no family members when he’d been conscripted to fight in the Great War. Shortly after his arrival in Belgium, however, he’d come down with the grippe and died in a field hospital without ever firing a shot.

Of the miners in that ’16 strike, five had been jailed for life when they’d been tied, however circumstantially, to a bomb that had exploded in the home of Thomson Iron & Lead’s president, E. James McLeish. McLeish had been taking his morning bath when his houseman carried in the mail. The houseman tripped crossing the threshold and juggled a cardboard package wrapped in plain brown paper. His left arm was later discovered in the dining room; the rest of him remained in the foyer. An additional fifty strikers were jailed on shorter sentences or beaten so badly by police and Pinkertons that they wouldn’t be traveling anywhere for several years, and the rest had met the fate of the average striker in the Steel Belt — they lost their jobs and drifted over the border into Ohio in hopes of hiring on for companies that hadn’t seen the blackball list of Thomson Iron & Lead.

It was a good story to establish Danny’s credentials in the workers-of-the-world revolution because no well-known labor organizations — not even the fast-moving Wobblies — had been involved. It had been organized by the miners themselves with such speed it probably surprised them. By the time the Wobblies did arrive, the bomb had already exploded and the beatings had commenced. Nothing left to do but visit the men in the hospital while the company hired fresh recruits from the morning cattle calls.

So Danny’s cover as Daniel Sante was expected to hold up fine under the scrutiny of the various radical movements he encountered. And it did. Not a single person, as far as he could tell, had questioned it. The problem was that even if they believed it, his story still didn’t make him stand out.

He went to meetings and wasn’t noticed. He went to the bars afterward and was left alone. When he tried to strike up a conversation, he was met with polite agreement of anything he said and just as politely turned away from. He’d rented rooms in a building in Roxbury, and there, during the day, he brushed up on his radical periodicals—The Revolutionary Age, Cronaca Sovversiva, Proletariat, and The Worker. He reread Marx & Engels, Reed & Larkin, and speeches by Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Trotsky, Lenin, and Galleani himself until he could recite most of it verbatim. Mondays and Wednesdays brought another meeting of the Roxbury Letts followed by a boozy gathering at the Sowbelly Saloon. He spent his nights with them and his mornings with a curl-up-and-cry-for-your-momma hangover, nothing about the Letts being frivolous, including their drinking. Bunch of Sergeis and Borises and Josefs, with the occasional Peter or Pyotr thrown in, the Letts raged through the night with vodka and slogans and wooden buckets of warm beer. Slamming the steins on scarred tables and quoting Marx, quoting Engels, quoting Lenin and Emma Goldman and screeching about the rights of the workingman, all the while treating the barmaid like shit.

They brayed about Debs, whinnied about Big Bill Haywood, thumped their shot glasses to the tables and pledged retribution for the tarred-and-feathered Wobblies in Tulsa, even though the tarring and feathering had taken place two years ago and it wasn’t like any of them were going to go wipe it off. They tugged their watch caps and huffed their cigarettes and railed against Wilson, Palmer, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They crowed about Jack Reed and Jim Larkin and the fall of the house of Nicholas II.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Danny wondered if his hangovers came from the booze or the bullshit. Christ, the Bolshies blabbed until your eyes crossed. Until you dreamed in the harsh chop of Russian consonants and the nasal drag of Latvian vowels. Two nights a week with them and he’d only seen Louis Fraina once, when the man gave a speech and then vanished under heavy security.

He’d crisscrossed the state, looking for Nathan Bishop. At job fairs, in seditionist bars, at Marxist fund-raisers. He’d gone to union meetings, radical gatherings, and get-togethers of utopists so pie-eyed their ideas were an insult to adulthood. He noted the names of the speakers and faded into the background but always introduced himself as “Daniel Sante,” so that the person whose hand he shook would respond in kind — “Andy Thurston” as opposed to just “Andy,” “Comrade Gahn” as opposed to “Phil.” When the opportunity presented itself, he stole a page or two of the sign-in sheets. If cars were parked outside the meeting sites, he copied down the license numbers.

City meetings were held in bowling alleys, pool halls, afternoon boxing clubs, saloons, and cafés. On the South Shore, the groups met in tents, dance halls, or fairgrounds abandoned until summer. On the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley, the preference was for rail yards and tanneries, down by water that boiled with runoff and left a copper froth clinging to the shoreline. In the Berkshires, orchards.

If you went to one meeting, you heard about others. The fishermen in Gloucester spoke of solidarity for their brothers in New Bedford, the Communists in Roxbury for their comrades in Lynn. He never heard anyone discuss bombs or specific plans to overthrow the government. They spoke in vague generalizations. Loud, boastful, as ineffectual as a willful child’s. The same held for talk of corporate sabotage. They spoke of May Day, but only in terms of other cities and other cells. The comrades in New York would shake the city to its foundation. The comrades in Pittsburgh would light the first match to ignite the revolution.

Anarchists’ meetings were usually held on the North Shore and were sparsely attended. Those who used the megaphone spoke dryly, often reading aloud in broken English from the latest tract by Galleani or Tommasino DiPeppe or the jailed Leone Scribano, whose musings were smuggled out of a prison south of Milan. No one shouted or spoke with much emotion or zeal, which made them unsettling. Danny quickly got the sense that they knew he was not of them — too tall, too well fed, too many teeth.

After one meeting in the rear of a cemetery in Gloucester, three men broke away from the crowd to follow him. They walked slow enough not to close the distance and fast enough to not let it widen. They didn’t seem to care that he noticed. At one point, one of them called out in Italian. He wanted to know if Danny had been circumcised.

Danny skirted the edge of the cemetery and crossed a stretch of bone white dunes at the back of a limestone mill. The men, about thirty yards back now, began to whistle sharply through their teeth. “Aww, honey,” it sounded like one of them was calling. “Aww, honey.”

The limestone dunes recalled dreams Danny’d had, ones he’d forgotten about until this moment. Dreams in which he hopelessly crossed vast moonlit deserts with no idea how he’d gotten there, no idea how he’d ever find his way home. And weighing down on him all the heavier with every step was the growing fear that home no longer existed. That his family and everyone he knew was long dead. And only he survived to wander forsaken lands. He climbed the shortest of the dunes, scrabbling and clawing up it in a winter quiet.

“Aww, honey.”

He reached the top of the dune. On the other side was an ink sky. Below it, a few fences with open gates.

He reached a street of disgorged cobblestone where he came upon a pest house. The sign above the door identified it as the Cape Ann Sanatorium, and he opened the door and walked in. He hurried past a nurse at the admitting desk who called after him. She called after him a second time.

He reached a stairwell and looked back down the hall and saw the three men frozen outside, one of them pointing up at the sign. No doubt they’d lost family members to something that waited on the upper floors — TB, smallpox, polio, cholera. In their awkward gesticulating Danny saw that none would dare enter. He found a rear door and let himself out.

The night was moonless, the air so raw it found his gums. He ran full-out back across the white gravel dunes and the cemetery. He found his car where he’d left it by the seawall. He sat in it and fingered the button in his pocket. His thumb ran over the smooth surface and he flashed on Nora swinging the bear at him in the oceanfront room, the pillows scattered all over the floor, her eyes lit with a pale fire. He closed his eyes and he could smell her. He drove back to the city with a windshield grimed by salt and his own fear drying into his scalp.

One morning, he waited for Eddie McKenna and drank cups of bitter black coffee in a café off Harrison Avenue with a checkered tile floor and a dusty ceiling fan that clicked with each revolution. A knife sharpener bumped his cart along the cobblestones outside the window, and his display blades swung from their strings and caught the sun. Darts of light slashed Danny’s pupils and the walls of the café. He turned in his booth and flicked open his watch and got it to stop jumping in his hand long enough to realize McKenna was late, though that wasn’t surprising, and then he took another glance around the café to see if any faces were paying too much or too little attention to him. When he was satisfied it was just the normal collection of small businessmen and colored porters and Statler Building secretaries, he went back to his coffee, near certain that even with a hangover, he could spot a tail.

McKenna filled the doorway with his oversize body and obstinate optimism, that almost beatific sense of purpose that Danny had seen in him all his life, since Eddie’d been a hundred pounds lighter and would drop by to see his father when the Coughlins lived in the North End, always with sticks of licorice for Danny and Connor. Even then, when he’d been just a flatfoot working the Charlestown waterfront with saloons that were judged the city’s bloodiest and a rat population so prodigious the typhus and polio rates were triple those of any other district, the glow around the man had been just as prominent. Part of department lore was that Eddie McKenna had been told early in his career that he’d never work undercover because of his sheer presence. The chief at the time had told him, “You’re the only guy I know who enters a room five minutes before he gets there.”

He hung his coat and slid into the booth across from Danny. He caught the waitress’s eye and mouthed “coffee” to her.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he said to Danny. “You smell like the Armenian who ate the drunken goat.”

Danny shrugged and drank some more coffee.

“And then puked it back up on yourself,” McKenna said.

“Praise from Caesar, sir.”

McKenna lit the stub of a cigar, and the reek of it went straight to Danny’s stomach. The waitress brought a cup of coffee to the table and refilled Danny’s. McKenna watched her ass as she walked away.

He produced a flask and handed it to Danny. “Help yourself.”

Danny poured a few drops into his coffee and handed it back.

McKenna tossed a notepad on the table and placed a fat pencil as stubby as his cigar beside the notepad. “I just came from meeting a few of the other boys. Tell me you’re making better progress than they are.”

The “other boys” on the squad had been picked, to some degree, for their intelligence, but mostly for their ability to pass as ethnics. There were no Jews or Italians in the BPD, but Harold Christian and Larry Benzie were swarthy enough to be taken for Greeks or Italians. Paul Wascon, small and dark-eyed, had grown up on New York’s Lower East Side. He spoke passable Yiddish and had infiltrated a cell of Jack Reed’s and Jim Larkin’s Socialist Left Wing that worked out of a basement in the West End.

None of them had wanted the detail. It meant long hours for no extra pay, no overtime, and no reward, because the official department policy was that terrorist cells were a New York problem, a Chicago problem, a San Francisco problem. So even if the squad had success, they’d never get credit, and they sure wouldn’t get overtime.

But McKenna had pulled them out of their units with his usual combination of bribery, threat, and extortion. Danny had come in through the back door because of Tessa; God knows what Christian and Benzie had been promised, and Wascon’s hand had been caught in the cookie jar back in August, so McKenna owned him for life.

Danny handed McKenna his notes. “License plate numbers from the Fishermen’s Brotherhood meeting in Woods Hole. Sign-in sheet from the West Roxbury Roofers Union, another from the North Shore Socialist Club. Minutes of all the meetings I attended this week, including two of the Roxbury Letts.”

McKenna took the notes and placed them in his satchel. “Good, good. What else?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I got nothing,” Danny said.

McKenna dropped his pencil and sighed. “Jesus’ sakes.”

“What?” Danny said, feeling a hair better with the whiskey in his coffee. “Foreign radicals — surprise — mistrust Americans. And they’re paranoid enough to at least consider that I could be a plant, no matter how solid the Sante cover is. And even if they are sold on the cover? Danny Sante ain’t looked on as management material yet. Least not by the Letts. They’re still feeling me out.”

“You seen Louis Fraina?”

Danny nodded. “Seen him give a speech. But I haven’t met him. He stays away from the rank and file, surrounds himself with higher-ups and goons.”

“You seen your old girlfriend?”

Danny grimaced. “If I’d seen her, she’d be in jail now.”

McKenna took a sip from his flask. “You been looking?”

“I’ve been all over this damn state. I even crossed into Connecticut a few times.”

“Locally?”

“The Justice guys are crawling all over the North End looking for Tessa and Federico. So the whole neighborhood is tense. Closed up. No one is going to talk to me. No one’s going to talk to any Americano.”

McKenna sighed and rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. “Well, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

“Nope.”

“Just keep plugging.”

Jesus, Danny thought. This—this—was detective work? Fishing without a net?

“I’ll get you something.”

“Besides a hangover?”

Danny gave him a weak smile.

McKenna rubbed his face again and yawned. “Fucking terrorists, I swear to Christ.” He yawned again. “Oh, you never came across Nathan Bishop, did you? The doctor.”

“No.”

McKenna winked. “That’s ’cause he just did thirty days in the Chelsea drunk tank. They kicked him loose two days ago. I asked one of the bulls there if he’s known to them and they said he likes the Capitol Tavern. Apparently, they send his mail there.”

“The Capitol Tavern,” Danny said. “That cellar-dive in the West End?”

“The same.” McKenna nodded. “Maybe you can earn a hangover there, serve your country at the same time.”

Danny spent three nights at the Capitol Tavern before Nathan Bishop spoke to him. He’d seen Bishop right off, as he came through the door the very first night and took a seat at the bar. Bishop sat alone at a table lit only by a small candle in the wall above it. He read a small book the first night and from a stack of newspapers the next two. He drank whiskey, the bottle on the table beside the glass, but he nursed his drinks the first two nights, never putting a real dent in the bottle, and walking out as steadily as he’d walked in. Danny began to wonder if Finch and Hoover’s profile had been correct.

The third night, though, he pushed his newspapers aside early and took longer pulls from the glass and chain-smoked. At first he stared at nothing but his own cigarette smoke, and his eyes seemed loose and faraway. Gradually his eyes found the rest of the bar and a smile grew on his face, as if someone had pasted it there too hastily.

When Danny first heard him sing, he couldn’t connect the voice to the man. Bishop was small, wispy, a delicate man with delicate features and delicate bones. His voice, however, was a booming, barreling, train-roar of a thing.

“Here he goes.” The bartender sighed yet didn’t seem dissatisfied.

It was a Joe Hill song, “The Preacher and the Slave,” that Nathan Bishop chose for his first rendition of the night, his deep baritone giving the protest song a distinctly Celtic flavor that went with the tall hearth and dim lighting in the Capitol Tavern, the low baying of the tugboat horns in the harbor.

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,” he sang. “Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right. But when asked how ’bout something to eat, they will answer in voices so sweet: ‘You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky way up high. Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.’ That’s a lie, that’s a lie …”

He smiled sweetly, eyes at half-mast, as the few patrons in the bar clapped lightly. It was Danny who kept it going. He stood from his stool and raised his glass and sang out, “Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out, and they holler, they jump and they shout. ‘Give your money to Jesus,’ they say. ‘He will cure all diseases today.’”

Danny put his arm around the guy beside him, a chimney sweep with a bad hip, and the chimney sweep raised his own glass. Nathan Bishop worked his way out from behind his table, making sure to scoop up both his whiskey bottle and his whiskey glass, and joined them at the bar as two merchant marines jumped in, loud as hell and way off key, but who cared as they all swung their elbows and their drinks from side to side:

The last line came out in shouts and torn laughs, and then the bartender rang the bell behind the bar and promised a free round.

“We’re singing for our supper, boys!” one of the merchant marines cried out.

“You’re getting the free drink to stop singing!” the bartender shouted over the laughter. “Them’s the terms and none other.”

They were all drunk enough to cheer to that and then they bellied up for their free drinks and shook hands all around — Daniel Sante meet Abe Rowley, Abe Rowley meet Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet, Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet meet Nathan Bishop, Nathan Bishop meet Daniel Sante.

“Hell of a voice there, Nathan.”

“Thank you. Good on yours as well, Daniel.”

“Habit of yours, is it, to just start singing out in a bar?”

“Across the pond, where I’m from, it’s quite common. It was getting fairly gloomy in here until I took up the cause, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t argue.”

“Well, then, cheers.”

“Cheers.”

They met their glasses, then threw back their shots.

Seven drinks and four songs later they ate the stew that the bartender kept cooking in the fireplace all day. It was horrid; the meat was brown and unidentifiable and the potatoes were gray and chewy. If Danny had to guess, he’d bet the grit it left on his teeth came from sawdust. But it filled them. After, they sat and drank and Danny told his Daniel Sante lies about western Pennsylvania and Thomson Lead.

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Nathan said, rolling his cigarette from a pouch on his lap. “You ask for anything in this world and the answer is always ‘No.’ Then you’re forced to take from those who themselves took before you — and in much bigger slices, I might add — and they dare call you a thief. It’s fairly absurd.” He offered Danny the cigarette he’d just rolled.

Danny held up a hand. “Thanks, no. I buy ’em in the packs.” He pulled his Murads from his shirt pocket and placed them on the table.

Nathan lit his. “How’d you get that scar?”

“This?” Danny pointed to his neck. “Methane explosion.”

“In the mines?”

Danny nodded.

“My father was a miner,” Nathan said. “Not here.”

“Across the pond?”

“Just so.” He smiled. “Just outside of Manchester in the North. It’s where I grew up.”

“Tough country I’ve always heard.”

“Yes, it is. Sinfully dreary, as well. A palette of grays and the occasional brown. My father died there. In a mine. Can you imagine?”

“Dying in a mine?” Danny said. “Yes.”

“He was strong, my father. That’s the most unfortunate aspect of the whole sordid mess. You see?”

Danny shook his head.

“Well, take me for instance. I’m no physical specimen. Uncoordinated, terrible at sports, nearsighted, bowlegged, and asthmatic.”

Danny laughed. “You leave anything out?”

Nathan laughed and held up a hand. “Several things. But that’s it, you see? I’m physically weak. If a tunnel collapsed and I had several hundred pounds of dirt on me, maybe a half-ton wood beam in the mix, a terribly limited supply of oxygen, well, I’d just succumb. I’d die like a good Englishman, quietly and without complaint.”

“Your father, though,” Danny said.

“Crawled,” Nathan said. “They found his shoes where the walls had collapsed on him. It was three hundred feet from where they found his corpse. He crawled. With a broken back, through hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of dirt and rock while the mining company waited two days to begin excavation. They were worried that rescue attempts could put the walls of the main tunnel at risk. Had my father known that, I wonder if it would have stopped his crawling sooner or pushed him on another fifty feet.”

They sat in silence for a time, the fire spitting and hissing its way along some logs that still held a bit of dampness. Nathan Bishop poured himself another drink and then tilted the bottle over Danny’s glass, poured just as generously.

“It’s wrong,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What men of means demand of men without them. And then they expect the poor to be grateful for the scraps. They have the cheek to act offended — morally offended — if the poor don’t play along. They should all be burned at the stake.”

Danny could feel the liquor in him turning sludgy. “Who?”

“The rich.” He gave Danny a lazy smile. “Burn them all.”

Danny found himself at Fay Hall again for another meeting of the BSC. On tonight’s agenda, the department’s continued refusal to treat influenza-related sickness among the men as work related. Steve Coyle, a little drunker than one would have hoped, spoke of his ongoing fight to get some kind of disability payments from the department he’d served twelve years.

After the flu discussion was exhausted, they moved on to a preliminary proposal for the department to assume part of the expense of replacing damaged or severely worn uniforms.

“It’s the most innocuous salvo we can fire,” Mark Denton said. “If they reject it, then we can point to it later to show their refusal to grant us any concessions at all.”

“Point for who?” Adrian Melkins asked.

“The press,” Mark Denton said. “Sooner or later, this fight will be fought in the papers. I want them on our side.”

After the meeting, as the men milled by the coffee urns or passed their flasks, Danny found himself thinking of his father and then of Nathan Bishop’s.

“Nice beard,” Mark Denton said. “You grow cats in that thing?”

“Undercover work,” Danny said. He pictured Bishop’s father crawling through a collapsed mine. Pictured his son still trying to drink it away. “What do you need?”

“Huh?”

“From me,” Danny said.

Mark took a step back, appraised him. “I’ve been trying to figure out since the first time you showed up here whether you’re a plant or not.”

“Who’d plant me?”

Denton laughed. “That’s rich. Eddie McKenna’s godson, Tommy Coughlin’s son. Who’d plant you? Hilarious.”

“If I was a plant, why’d you ask for my help?”

“To see how fast you jumped at the offer. I’ll admit, you not jumping right away gave me pause. Now here you are, though, asking me how you can help out.”

“That’s right.”

“I guess it’s my turn to say I’ll think about it,” Denton said.

Eddie McKenna sometimes conducted business meetings on his roof. He lived in a Queen Anne atop Telegraph Hill in South Boston. His view — of Thomas Park, Dorchester Heights, the downtown skyline, the Fort Point Channel, and Boston Harbor — was, much like his persona, expansive. The roof was tarred and flat as sheet metal; Eddie kept a small table and two chairs out there, along with a metal shed where he stored his tools and those his wife, Mary Pat, used in the tiny garden behind their house. He was fond of saying that he had the view and he had the roof and he had the love of a good woman so he couldn’t begrudge the good Lord for forsaking him a yard.

It was, like most of the things Eddie McKenna said, as full of the truth as it was full of shit. Yes, Thomas Coughlin, had once told Danny, Eddie’s cellar was barely able to hold its fill of coal, and yes, his yard could support a tomato plant, a basil plant, and possibly a small rosebush but certainly none of the tools needed to tend them. This was of little import, however, because tools weren’t all Eddie McKenna kept in the shed.

“What else?” Danny had asked.

Thomas wagged a finger. “I’m not that drunk, boy.”

Tonight, he stood with his godfather by the shed with a glass of Irish and one of the fine cigars Eddie received monthly from a friend on the Tampa PD. The air smelled damp and smoky the way it did in heavy fog, but the skies were clear. Danny had given Eddie his report on meeting Nathan Bishop, on Bishop’s comment about what should be done to the rich, and Eddie had barely acknowledged he’d heard.

But when Danny handed over yet another list — this one half names/half license plates of a meeting of the Coalition of the Friends of the Southern Italian Peoples, Eddie perked right up. He took the list from Danny and scanned it quickly. He opened the door to his garden shed and removed the cracked leather satchel he carried everywhere and added the piece of paper to it. He put the satchel back in the shed and closed the door.

“No padlock?” Danny said.

Eddie cocked his head. “For tools now?”

“And satchels.”

Eddie smiled. “Who in their right mind would ever so much as approach this abode with less than honest intentions?”

Danny gave that a smile, but a perfunctory one. He smoked his cigar and looked out at the city and breathed in the smell of the harbor. “What are we doing here, Eddie?”

“It’s a nice night.”

“No. I mean with this investigation.”

“We’re hunting radicals. We’re protecting and serving this great land.”

“By compiling lists?”

“You seem a bit off your feed, Dan.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Not yourself. Have you been getting enough sleep?”

“No one’s talking about May Day. Not how you expected them to anyway.”

“Well, it’s not like they’re going to go a galavanting about, shouting their nefarious aims from the rooftops, are they? You’ve barely been on them a month.”

“They’re talkers, the lot of them. But that’s all they are.”

“The anarchists?”

“No,” Danny said. “They’re fucking terrorists. But the rest? You’ve got me checking out plumbers unions, carpenters, every toothless socialist knitting group you can find. For what? Names? I don’t understand.”

“Are we to wait until they do blow us up before we decide to take them seriously?”

“Who? The plumbers?”

“Be serious.”

“The Bolshies?” Danny said. “The socialists? I’m not sure they have the capacity to blow up anything outside of their own chests.”

“They’re terrorists.”

“They’re dissidents.”

“Maybe you need some time off.”

“Maybe I just need a clearer sense of exactly what the hell we’re doing here.”

Eddie put an arm around his shoulder and led him to the roof edge. They looked out at the city — its parks and gray streets, brick buildings, black rooftops, the lights of downtown reflecting off the dark waters that coursed through it.

“We’re protecting this, Dan. This right here. That’s what we’re doing.” He took a pull of his cigar. “Home and hearth. And nothing less than that indeed.”

With Nathan Bishop, another night at the Capitol Tavern, Nathan taciturn until the third drink kicked in and then:

“Has anyone ever hit you?”

“What?”

He held up his fists. “You know.”

“Sure. I used to box,” he said. Then: “In Pennsylvania.”

“But have you ever been physically pushed aside?”

“Pushed aside?” Danny shook his head. “Not that I can remember. Why?”

“I wonder if you know how exceptional that is. To walk through this world without fear of other men.”

Danny had never thought of it like that before. It suddenly embarrassed him that he’d moved through his entire life expecting it to work for him. And it usually had.

“It must be nice,” Nathan said. “That’s all.”

“What do you do?” Danny asked.

“What do you do?”

“I’m looking for work. But you? Your hands aren’t those of a laborer. Your clothes, either.”

Nathan touched the lapel of his coat. “These aren’t expensive clothes.”

“They’re not rags either. They match your shoes.”

Nathan Bishop gave that a crooked smile. “Interesting observation. You a cop?”

“Yes,” Danny said and lit a cigarette.

“I’m a doctor.”

“A copper and a doctor. You can fix whoever I shoot.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“No really.”

“Okay, I’m not a copper. You a doctor, though?”

“I was.” Bishop stubbed his cigarette out. He took a slow pull of his drink.

“Can you quit being a doctor?”

“You can quit anything.” Bishop took another drink and let out a long sigh. “I was a surgeon once. Most of the people I saved didn’t deserve to be saved.”

“They were rich?”

Danny saw an exasperation cross Bishop’s face that he was becoming familiar with. It meant Bishop was heading for the place where his anger would dominate him, where he couldn’t be calmed down until he’d exhausted himself.

“They were oblivious,” he said, his tongue lathering the word with contempt. “If you said to them, ‘People die every day. In the North End, in the West End, in South Boston, in Chelsea. And the thing that’s killing them is one thing. Poverty. That’s all. Simple as that.’” He rolled another cigarette and leaned over the table as he did, slurped his drink from the glass with his hands still in his lap. “You know what people say when you tell them that? They say, ‘What can I do?’ As if that’s an answer. What can you do? You can very well fucking help. That’s what you can do, you bourgeois piece of shit. What can you do? What can’t you do? Roll up your fucking sleeves, get off your fat fucking arse, and move your wife’s fatter fucking arse off the same cushion, and go down to where your mates — your brother and sister fellow fucking human beings — are quite authentically starving to death. And do whatever you need to do to help them. That’s what the bloody fuck you can bloody well fucking do.”

Nathan Bishop slammed back the rest of his drink. He dropped the glass to the scarred wood table and looked around the bar, his eyes red and sharp.

In the heavy air that often followed one of Nathan’s tirades, Danny said nothing. He could feel the men at the nearest table shift in awkwardness. One of them suddenly began talking about Ruth, about the newest trade rumors. Nathan breathed heavily through his nostrils while he reached for the bottle and placed his cigarette between his lips. He got a shaky hand on the bottle. He poured himself another drink. He leaned back in his chair and flicked his thumbnail over a match and lit his cigarette.

“That’s what you can do,” he whispered.

In the Sowbelly Saloon, Danny tried to see through the crowd of Roxbury Letts to the back table where Louis Fraina sat tonight in a dark brown suit and a slim black tie sipping from a small glass of amber liquor. It was only the blaze of his eyes behind a pair of small round spectacles that gave him away as something other than a college professor who’d entered the wrong bar. That, and the deference the others showed him, placing his drink carefully on the table in front of him, asking him questions with the jutting chins of anxious children, checking to see whether he was watching when they expounded on a point. It was said that Fraina, Italian by birth, spoke Russian as close to fluently as could be asked of one not raised in the Motherland, an assessment rumored to have been first delivered by Trotsky himself. Fraina kept a black moleskin notebook open on the table in front of him, and he’d occasionally jot notes in it with a pencil or flip through the pages. He rarely looked up, and when he did, it was only to acknowledge a speaker’s point with a soft flick of his eyelids. Not once had he and Danny exchanged so much as a glance.

The other Letts, though, had finally stopped treating Danny with the amused politeness one reserved for children and the feeble-minded. He wouldn’t say they trusted him yet, but they were getting used to having him around.

Even so, they spoke in accents so thick they’d soon tire of conversation with him and jump ship as soon as another Lett interrupted in the mother tongue. That night, they had a full docket of problems and solutions that had carried over from the meeting into the bar.

Problem: The United States had launched a covert war against the provisional Bolshevik government of the new Russia. Wilson had authorized the detachment of the 339th, who’d joined up with British forces and seized the Russian port of Archangel on the White Sea. Hoping to cut the supplies of Lenin and Trotsky and starve them out during a long winter, the American and British forces were instead facing an early winter freeze and were rumored to be at the mercy of their White Russian allies, a corrupt group of warlords and tribal gangsters. This embarrassing quagmire was just one more instance of Western Capitalism attempting to crush the will of the great people’s movement.

Solution: Workers everywhere should unite and engage in civil unrest until the Americans and the British withdrew their troops.

Problem: The oppressed firemen and policemen of Montreal were being violently devalued by the state and stripped of their rights.

Solution: Until the Canadian government capitulated to the police and firemen and paid them a fair wage, workers everywhere should unite in civil unrest.

Problem: Revolution was in the air in Hungary and Bavaria and Greece and even France. In Germany, the Spartacists were moving on Berlin. In New York, the Harbor Workers Union had refused to report for duty, and across the country unions were warning of “No Beer, No Work” sit-downs if Prohibition became the law of the land.

Solution: In support of all these comrades, the workers of the world should unite in civil unrest.

Should.

Could.

Might.

No actual plans for revolution that Danny could hear. No specific plotting of the insurrectionary deed.

Just more drinking. More talk that turned into drunken shouts and shattered stools. And it wasn’t just the men shattering stools and shouting that night but the women as well, although it was often hard to tell them apart. The workers revolution had no place for the sexist caste system of the United Capitalist States of America — but most women in the bar were hard-faced and industrial-gray, as sexless in their coarse clothes and coarse accents as the men they called comrades. They were without humor (a common affliction among the Letts) and, worse, politically opposed to it — humor was seen as a sentimental disease, a by-product of romanticism, and romantic notions were just one more opiate the ruling class used to keep its masses from seeing the truth.

“Laugh all you want,” Hetta Losivich said that night. “Laugh so that you look like fools, like hyenas. And the industrialists will laugh at you because they have you exactly where they want you. Impotent. Laughing, but impotent.”

A brawny Estonian named Pyotr Glaviach slapped Danny on the shoulder. “Pampoolats, yes? Tomorrow, yes?”

Danny looked up at him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Glaviach had a beard so unruly it looked as if he’d been interrupted swallowing a raccoon. It shook now as he tilted his head back and roared with laughter. He was one of those rare Letts who laughed, as if to make up for the paucity in the rest of the ranks. It wasn’t a laughter Danny particularly trusted, however, since he’d heard that Pyotr Glaviach had been a charter member of the original Letts, men who’d banded together in 1912 to pitch the first guerrilla skirmishes against Nicholas II. These inaugural Letts had waged a campaign of hit-and-hide against czarist soldiers who’d outnumbered them eighty to one. They lived outdoors during the Russian winter on a diet of half-frozen potatoes and massacred whole villages if they suspected a single Romanov sympathizer lived there.

Pyotr Glaviach said, “We go out tomorrow and we hand out pampoolat. For the workers, yes? You see?”

Danny didn’t see. He shook his head. “Pampoo-what?”

Pyotr Glaviach slapped his hands together impatiently. “Pampoolat, you donkey man. Pampoolat.”

“I don’t—”

“Flyers,” a man behind Danny said. “I think he means flyers.”

Danny turned in his booth. Nathan Bishop stood there, one elbow resting on the top of Danny’s seat back.

“Yes, yes,” Pyotr Glaviach said. “We hand out flyers. We spread the news.”

“Tell him ‘okay,’” Nathan Bishop says. “He loves that word.”

“Okay,” Danny said to Glaviach and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Ho-kay! Ho-kay, meester! You meet me here,” Glaviach said. He gave him a big thumbs-up back. “Eight o’clock.”

Danny sighed. “I’ll be here.”

“We have fun,” Glaviach said and slapped Danny on the back. “Maybe meet pretty women.” He roared again and then stumbled away.

Bishop slid into the booth and handed him a mug of beer. “The only way you’ll meet pretty women in this movement is to kidnap the daughters of our enemies.”

Danny said, “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a Lett?”

“Are you?”

“Hoping to be.”

Nathan shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I belong to any one organization. I help out. I’ve known Lou for a long time.”

“Lou?”

“Comrade Fraina,” Nathan said and gestured with his chin. “Would you like to meet him some day?”

“Are you kidding? I’d be honored.”

Bishop gave that a small, private smile. “You have any worthwhile talents?”

“I write.”

“Well?”

“I hope so.”

“Give me some samples, I’ll see what I can do.” He looked around the bar. “God, that’s a depressing thought.”

“What? Me meeting Comrade Fraina?”

“Huh? No. Glaviach got me thinking. There really isn’t a good-looking woman in any of the movements. Not a … Well, there’s one.”

“There’s one?”

He nodded. “How could I have forgotten? There is one.” He whistled. “Bloody gorgeous, she is.”

“She here?”

He laughed. “If she were here, you’d know it.”

“What’s her name?”

Bishop’s head moved so swiftly Danny feared he’d blown his cover. Bishop looked him in the eyes and seemed to be studying his face.

Danny took a sip of his beer.

Bishop looked back out at the crowd. “She has lots of them.”

Chapter fourteen

Luther got off the freight in Boston, where Uncle Hollis’s chicken-scratch map directed him and found Dover Street easily enough. He followed it to Columbus Avenue and followed Columbus through the heart of the South End. When he found St. Botolph Street, he walked down a row of redbrick town houses along a sidewalk carpeted in damp leaves until he found number 121 and he went up the stairs and rang the bell.

The man who lived at 121 was Isaiah Giddreaux, the father of Uncle Hollis’s second wife, Brenda. Hollis had married four times. The first and third had left him, Brenda had died of typhus, and about five years back Hollis and the fourth had kind of mutually misplaced each other. Hollis had told Luther that as much as he missed Brenda, and he missed her something terrible on many a day, he sometimes missed her father just as much. Isaiah Giddreaux had moved east back in ’05 to join up with Dr. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, but he and Hollis had remained in touch.

The door was opened by a small slim man wearing a dark wool three-piece suit and a navy-blue tie speckled with white dots. His hair was speckled with white, too, and cropped close to his skull, and he wore round spectacles that revealed calm, clear eyes behind their panes.

He extended his hand. “You must be Luther Laurence.”

Luther shook the hand. “Isaiah?”

Isaiah said, “Mr. Giddreaux if you please, son.”

“Mr. Giddreaux, yes, sir.”

For a small man Isaiah seemed tall. He stood as straight as any man Luther had ever seen, his hands folded in front of his belt buckle, his eyes so clear it was impossible to read them. They could have been the eyes of a lamb lying down in the last spot of sun on a summer evening. Or those of a lion, waiting for the lamb to get sleepy.

“Your Uncle Hollis is well, I trust?” He led Luther down the front hall.

“He is, sir.”

“How’s that rheumatism of his?”

“His knees ache awful in the afternoons but otherwise he feels in top form.”

Isaiah looked over his shoulder as he led him up a wide staircase. “He’s done marrying I hope.”

“I believe so, sir.”

Luther hadn’t been in a brownstone before. The breadth of it surprised him. He’d have never been able to tell from the street how deep the rooms went or how high the ceilings got. It was as nicely appointed as any of the homes on Detroit Avenue, with heavy chandeliers and dark gumwood beams and French sofas and settees. The Giddreauxs had the master bedroom on the top floor, and there were three more bedrooms on the second, one of which Isaiah led Luther to and opened the door long enough for him to drop his bag on the floor. He got a glimpse of a nice brass bed and walnut dresser with a porcelain wash pot on top before Isaiah ushered him back out again. Isaiah and his wife, Yvette, owned the whole place, three floors and a widow’s walk on top that looked out over the entire neighborhood. The South End, Luther discerned from Isaiah’s description, was a budding Greenwood unto itself, the place where Negroes had carved out a little something for themselves with restaurants served their kind of food and clubs played their kind of music. Isaiah told Luther the neighborhood had been born out of a need for servant housing, the servants being those who attended to the needs of the rich old-money folk on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay, and the reason the buildings were so nice — all red-brick town houses and chocolate bowfront brownstones — was that the servants had taken pains to live in the style of their employers.

They took the stairs back down to the parlor, where a pot of tea waited for them.

“Your uncle speaks highly of you, Mr. Laurence.”

“He does?”

Isaiah nodded. “He says you have some jackrabbit in your blood but sincerely hopes that one day you’ll slow down and find enough peace to be an upstanding man.”

Luther couldn’t think of a reply to that.

Isaiah reached for the pot and poured them each a cup, then handed Luther’s to him. Isaiah poured a single drop of milk into his cup and stirred it slowly. “Did your uncle tell you much about me?”

“Only that you were his wife’s father and you were at Niagara with Du Bois.”

“Doctor Du Bois. I was.”

“You know him?” Luther asked. “Dr. Du Bois?”

Isaiah nodded. “I know him well. When the NAACP decided to open an office here in Boston he asked me to run it.”

“That’s quite an honor, sir.”

Isaiah gave that a tiny nod. He dropped a cube of sugar into his cup and stirred. “Tell me about Tulsa.”

Luther poured some milk into his tea and took a small sip. “Sir?”

“You committed a crime. Yes?” He lifted his cup to his lips. “Hollis deigned not to be specific what that crime was.”

“Then with all due respect, Mr. Giddreaux, I … deign the same.”

Isaiah shifted and tugged his pant leg down until it covered the top of his sock. “I’ve heard folks speak of a shooting in a disreputable nightclub in Greenwood. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Luther met the man’s gaze. He said nothing.

Isaiah took another sip of tea. “Did you feel you had a choice?”

Luther looked at the rug.

“Shall I repeat myself?”

Luther kept his eyes on the rug. It was blue and red and yellow and all the colors swirled together. He supposed it was expensive. The swirls.

“Did you feel you had a choice?” Isaiah’s voice was as calm as his teacup.

Luther raised his eyes to him and still said nothing.

“And yet you killed your own kind.”

“Evil got a way of not caring about kinds, sir.” Luther’s hand shook as he lowered his cup to the coffee table. “Evil just muck things around till things go all sideways.”

“That’s how you define evil?”

Luther looked around this room, as fine as any in the fine houses on Detroit Avenue. “You know it when you see it.”

Isaiah sipped his tea. “Some would say a murderer is evil. Would you agree?”

“I’d agree some would say it.”

“You committed murder.”

Luther said nothing.

“Ergo …” Isaiah held out his hand.

“All due respect? I never said I committed anything, sir.”

They sat silent for a bit, a clock ticking behind Luther. A car horn beeped faintly from a few blocks away. Isaiah finished his tea and placed the cup back on the tray.

“You’ll meet my wife later. Yvette. We’ve just purchased a building to use as the NAACP office here. You’ll volunteer there.”

“I’ll what?”

“You’ll volunteer there. Hollis tells me you’re good with your hands, and we have repairs that need seeing to in the building before we can open for business. You’ll pull your weight here, Luther.”

Pull my weight. Shit. When’s the last time this old man pulled any weight outside of lifting a teacup? Seemed the same shit Luther had left behind in Tulsa — moneyed colored folk acting like their money gave them the right to order you around. And this old fool acting like he could see inside Luther, talking about evil like he’d know it if it sat down beside him and bought him a drink. Man was probably a step or two away from whipping out a Bible. But he reminded himself of the pledge he’d made in the train car to create the New Luther, the better Luther, and promised he would give it time before he made up his mind about Isaiah Giddreaux. This man worked with W.E.B. Du Bois, and Du Bois was one of only two men in this country that Luther felt worthy of his admiration. The other, of course, was Jack Johnson. Jack didn’t take shit from no one, black or white.

“I know of a white family that needs a houseman. Could you handle that work?”

“Can’t see why not.”

“They are good people as far as whites can be.” He spread his hands. “There is one caveat — the household in question is headed by a police captain. If you were to attempt an alias, I suspect he would ferret it out.”

“No need,” Luther said. “Trick is to never mention Tulsa. I’m just Luther Laurence, late of Columbus.” Luther wished he could feel something beyond his own weariness. Spots had started popping in the air between him and Isaiah. “Thank you, sir.”

Isaiah nodded. “Let’s get you upstairs. We’ll wake you for dinner.”

Luther dreamed of playing baseball in floodwaters. Of outfielders washed away in the tide. Of trying to hit above the waterline and men laughing every time his bat head slapped off the muddy water that rose above his waist, up over his ribs, while Babe Ruth and Cully flew past in a crop duster, dropping grenades that failed to explode.

He woke to an older woman pouring hot water into the wash pot on his dresser. She looked back over her shoulder at him, and for a moment he thought she was his mother. They were the same height and had the same light skin speckled with dark freckles over the cheekbones. But this woman’s hair was gray and she was thinner than his mother. Same warmth, though, same kindliness living in the body, like the soul was too good to be kept covered.

“You must be Luther.”

Luther sat up. “I am, ma’am.”

“That’s good. Be a frightful thing if some other man stole up here and took your place.” She lay a straight razor, tub of shaving cream, brush and bowl by the pot. “Mr. Giddreaux expects a man to come to the dinner table clean-shaven, and dinner’s almost served. We’ll work on cleaning up the rest of you afterward. Sound right?”

Luther swung his legs off the bed and suppressed a yawn. “Yes, ma’am.”

She held out a delicate hand, so small it could have been a doll’s. “I’m Yvette Giddreaux, Luther. Welcome to my home.”

While they waited for Isaiah to hear back from the police captain, Luther accompanied Yvette Giddreaux to the proposed NAACP offices on Shawmut Avenue. The building was Second Empire style, a baroque monster of chocolate stone skin with a mansard roof. First time Luther’d seen the style outside of a book. He stepped in close and looked up as he walked along the sidewalk. The lines of the building were straight, no bowing, no humps, either. The structure had shifted with the weight of itself, but no more so than would be expected from a building Luther guessed dated back to the 1830s or so. He took a good look at the tilt of the corners and decided the foundation hadn’t racked, so the shell was in good shape. He stepped off the sidewalk and walked along the edge of the street, looking up at the roof.

“Mrs. Giddreaux?”

“Yes, Luther.”

“Seem to be a piece of this roof missing.”

He looked over at her. She held her purse tight in front of her and gave him a look of such innocence it could only be a front.

She said, “I believe I heard something to that effect, yes.”

Luther continued moving his gaze from the point on the ridgeline where he’d spotted the gap, and he found a dip exactly where he was hoping he wouldn’t — in the center of the spine. Mrs. Giddreaux was still giving him that wide-eyed innocence, and he placed his hand softly under her elbow as he led her inside.

Most of the first-floor ceiling was gone. What remained leaked. The staircase just to his right was black. The walls were missing their plaster in half a dozen places, the lathes and studs exposed, and scorched black in half a dozen more. The floor was so eaten away by fire and water that even the subflooring was damaged. All the windows were boarded.

Luther whistled. “You buy this place at auction?”

“About so,” she said. “What do you think?”

“Any way you can get your money back?”

She slapped his elbow. The first time, but he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. He resisted the urge to hug her to him, the way he’d done with his mother and sister, loving that they’d always fought him, that it had always cost him a shot to the ribs or the hip.

“Let me guess,” Luther said, “George Washington never slept here, but his footman did?”

She bared her teeth at him, little fists placed to little hips. “Can you fix it?”

Luther laughed and heard the echo bounce through the dripping building. “No.”

She looked up at him. Her face was stony. Her eyes were gay. “But of what usefulness does that speak, Luther?”

“Can’t nobody fix this. I’m just amazed the city didn’t condemn it.”

“They tried.”

Luther looked at her and let out a long sigh. “You know how much money it’ll take to make this livable?”

“Don’t you worry about money. Can you fix it?”

“I honestly don’t know.” He whistled again, taking it all in, the months, if not years, of work. “Don’t suppose I’ll be getting much in the way of help?”

“We’ll round up some volunteers every now and then, and when you need something, you just make a list. I can’t promise we’ll get you everything you need or that any of it will arrive in the time you need it, but we’ll try.”

Luther nodded and looked down into her kind face. “You understand, ma’am, that the effort this will take will be biblical?”

Another slap on the elbow. “You best set to it then.”

Luther sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”

Captain Thomas Coughlin opened the door to his study and gave Luther a wide, warm smile. “You must be Mr. Laurence.”

“Yes, sir, Captain Coughlin.”

“Nora, that’ll be all for now.”

“Yes, sir,” the Irish girl Luther’d just met said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Laurence.”

“You, too, Miss O’Shea.”

She bowed and took her leave.

“Come in, come in.” Captain Coughlin swung the door wide, and Luther entered a study that smelled of good tobacco, a recent fire in the hearth, and the dying autumn. Captain Coughlin led him to a leather chair and went around the other side of a large mahogany desk and took his seat by the window.

“Isaiah Giddreaux said you’re from Ohio.”

“Yes, suh.”

“I heard you say ‘sir.’”

“Suh?”

“Just a moment ago. When we met.” His light blue eyes glittered. “You said ‘sir,’ not ‘suh.’ Which will it be, son?”

“Which do you prefer, Captain?”

Captain Coughlin waved an unlit cigar at the question. “Whichever makes you comfortable, Mr. Laurence.”

“Yes, sir.”

Another smile, this one not so much warm as self-satisfied. “Columbus, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what did you do there?”

“I worked for the Anderson Armaments Corporation, sir.”

“And before that?”

“I did carpentry, sir, some masonry work, piping, you name it.”

Captain Coughlin leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on the desk. He lit his cigar and stared through the flame and the smoke at Luther until the tip was fat with red. “You’ve never worked in a household, however.”

“No, sir, I have not.”

Captain Coughlin leaned his head back and blew smoke rings at the ceiling.

Luther said, “But I’m a fast learner, sir. And there’s nothing I can’t fix. And I look right smart, too, in tails and white gloves.”

Captain Coughlin chuckled. “A sense of wit. Bully for you, son. Indeed.” He ran a hand over the back of his head. “It’s not a full-time position that’s being offered. Nor do I offer any lodging.”

“I understand, sir.”

“You would work roughly forty hours a week, and most of it would be driving Mrs. Coughlin to mass, cleaning, maintenance, and the serving of meals. Do you cook?”

“I can, sir.”

“Not a bother. Nora will do most of that.” Captain Coughlin gave another wave of his cigar. “She’s the lass you just met. She lives with us. She does chores as well, but she’s gone most of the day, working at a factory. You’ll meet Mrs. Coughlin soon,” he said, and his eyes glittered again. “I may be the head of the household, but God was remiss in telling her. You follow my meaning? Anything she asks, you hop to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stay on the east side of the neighborhood.”

“Sir?”

Captain Coughlin brought his feet off the desk. “The east side, Mr. Laurence. The west side is fairly infamous for its intolerance of coloreds.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Word will get out, of course, that you work for me and that’s fair warning, sure, to most ruffians, even west-siders, but you can never be too careful.”

“Thank you for the advice, sir.”

The captain’s eyes fell on him through the smoke again. This time they were part of the smoke, swirling in it, swimming around Luther, looking into his eyes, his heart, his soul. Luther had seen hints of this ability in cops before — they didn’t call them copper’s eyes for nothing — but Captain Coughlin’s gaze achieved a level of invasion Luther had never come across in a man before. Hoped to never come across twice.

“Who taught you to read, Luther?” The captain’s voice was soft.

“A Mrs. Murtrey, sir. Hamilton School, just outside of Columbus.”

“What else she teach you?”

“Sir?”

“What else, Luther?” Captain Coughlin took another slow drag from his cigar.

“I don’t understand the question, sir.”

“What else?” the captain said for a third time.

“Sir, I’m not following you.”

“Grew up poor, I imagine?” The captain leaned forward ever so slightly, and Luther resisted the urge to push his chair back.

Luther nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Sharecropping?”

“Not me so much, sir. My mother and father, though, yeah.”

Captain Coughlin nodded, his lips pursed and pained. “Was born into nothing myself. A two-room thatched hut we shared with flies and field rats, it was. No place to be a child. Certainly no place to be an intelligent child. You know what an intelligent child learns in those circumstances, Mr. Laurence?”

“No, sir.”

“Yes, you do, son.” Captain Coughlin smiled a third time since Luther had met him, and this smile snaked into the air like the captain’s gaze and circled. “Don’t muck about with me, son.”

“I’m just not sure what kind of ground I’m standing on, sir.”

Captain Coughlin gave that a cock of his head and then a nod. “An intelligent child born to less than advantageous surroundings, Luther, learns to charm.” He reached across the desk; his fingers twirled through the smoke. “He learns to hide behind that charm so that no one ever sees what he’s really thinking. Or feeling.”

He went to a decanter behind his desk and poured two helpings of amber liquid into crystal scotch glasses. He brought the drinks around the desk and handed one to Luther, the first time Luther’d ever been handed a glass by a white man.

“I’m going to hire you, Luther, because you intrigue me.” The captain sat on the edge of the desk and clinked his glass off Luther’s. He reached behind him and came back with an envelope. He handed it to Luther. “Avery Wallace left that for whoever replaced him. You’ll note its seal has not been tampered with.”

Luther saw a maroon wax seal on the back of the envelope. He turned it back over, saw that it was addressed to: MY REPLACEMENT. FROM AVERY WALLACE.

Luther took a drink of scotch. As good as any he’d ever tasted. “Thank you, sir.”

Captain Coughlin nodded. “I respected Avery’s privacy. I’ll respect yours. But don’t ever think I don’t know you, son. I know you like I know the mirror.”

“Yes, sir.”

“‘Yes, sir,’ what?”

“Yes, sir, you know me.”

“And what do I know?”

“That I’m smarter than I let on.”

The captain said, “And what else?”

Luther met his eyes. “I’m not as smart as you.”

A fourth smile. Cocked up the right side and certain. Another clink of the glasses.

“Welcome to my home, Luther Laurence.”

Luther read the note from Avery Wallace on the streetcar back to the Giddreauxs.

Luther looked up from the letter as the streetcar crossed the Broadway Bridge while the Fort Point Channel ran silver and sluggish below.

So this was his new life. So this was his new city.

Every morning, at six-fifty sharp, Mrs. Ellen Coughlin left the residence at 221 K Street and ventured down the stairs, where Luther waited by the family car, a six-cylinder Auburn. Mrs. Coughlin would acknowledge him with a nod as she accepted his hand and climbed into the passenger seat. Once she was settled, Luther would close the door as softly as Captain Coughlin had instructed and drive Mrs. Coughlin a few short blocks to the seven o’clock mass at Gate of Heaven Church. He would remain outside the car for the duration of the mass and often chat with another houseman, Clayton Tomes, who worked for Mrs. Amy Wagenfeld, a widow who lived on M Street, South Boston’s most prestigious address, in a town house overlooking Independence Square Park.

Mrs. Ellen Coughlin and Mrs. Amy Wagenfeld were not friends — as far as Luther and Clayton could tell, old white women didn’t have friends — but their valets eventually formed a bond. Both were from the Midwest — Clayton grew up in Indiana not far from French Lick — and both were valets for employers who would have had little use for them had they placed just one foot in the twentieth century. Luther’s first job after returning Mrs. Coughlin to her household every morning was to cut wood for the stove, while Clayton’s was to haul coal to the basement.

“This day and age?” Clayton said. “Whole country — ’least what can afford it — is going electrical, but Mrs. Wagenfeld, she want no part of it.”

“Mrs. Coughlin neither,” Luther said. “Enough kerosene in that house to burn down the block, spend half my day cleaning gas soot off the walls, but the captain say she won’t even discuss the subject. Said it took him five years to convince her to get indoor plumbing and stop using a backyard privy.”

“White women,” Clayton would say, then repeat it with a sigh. “White women.”

When Luther took Mrs. Coughlin back to K Street and opened the front door for her, she would give him a soft, “Thank you, Luther,” and after he’d served her breakfast, he’d rarely see her for the rest of the day. In a month, their interactions consisted solely of her “thank you” and his “my pleasure, ma’am.” She never asked where he lived, if he had family, or where he hailed from, and Luther had gleaned enough about the employer-valet relationship to know it was not his place to initiate conversation with her.

“She’s hard to know,” Nora said to him one day when they went to Haymarket Square to purchase the weekly groceries. “I’ve been in that house five years, I have, and I’m not sure I could tell you much more about her than I could the night I arrived.”

“Long as she ain’t finding fault with my work, she can stay silent as a stone.”

Nora placed a dozen potatoes in the sack she carried to market. “Are you getting on well with everyone else?”

Luther nodded. “They seem a nice family.”

She nodded, though Luther couldn’t tell if it was a nod of agreement or if she’d just decided something about the apple she was considering. “Young Joe’s certainly grown a fondness for you.”

“Boy loves his baseball.”

She smiled. “‘Love’ may not be a strong enough word.”

Once Joe had discovered Luther had played some baseball in his time, the after-school hours became games of catch and pitching and fielding instruction in the Coughlins’ small backyard. Dusk coincided with the end of Luther’s shift, so the final three hours of his workday were spent mostly at play, a situation Captain Coughlin had immediately approved. “If it keeps the boy out of his mother’s hair, I’d let you field a team should you ask, Mr. Laurence.”

Joe wasn’t a natural athlete, but he had heart and he listened well for a child his age. Luther showed him how to drop his knee when he fielded grounders and how to follow through on both his throws and the swings of his bat. He taught him to spread and then plant his feet beneath a pop-up and to never catch it below his head. He tried to teach him how to pitch, but the boy didn’t have the arm for it, nor the patience. He just wanted to hit and hit big. So Luther found one more thing to blame Babe Ruth for — turning the game into a smash-ball affair, a circus spectacle, making every white kid in Boston think it was about ooohs and aaahs and the cheap soaring of an ill-timed dinger.

Except for the morning hour with Mrs. Coughlin and the late-day hours with Joe, Luther spent most of his workday with Nora O’Shea.

“And how do you like it so far?”

“Doesn’t seem much for me to do.”

“Would you like some of my work, then?”

“Truth? Yeah. I drive her to and from church. I bring her breakfast. I wax the car. I shine the captain’s and Mr. Connor’s shoes and brush their suits. Sometimes I polish the captain’s medals for dress occasions. Sundays, I serve the captain and his friends drinks in the study. Rest of the time, I dust what don’t need to be dusted, tidy what’s already tidy, and sweep a bunch of clean floors. Cut some wood, shovel some coal, stoke a small furnace. I mean, what’s that all take? Two hours? Rest of the day I spend trying to look busy till either you or Mr. Joe get home. I don’t even know why they hired me.”

She put a hand lightly on his arm. “All the best families have one.”

“A colored?”

Nora nodded, her eyes bright. “In this part of the neighborhood. If the Coughlins didn’t hire you, they’d have to explain why.”

“Why what? Why they haven’t updated to electric?”

“Why they can’t keep up appearances.” They climbed East Broadway toward City Point. “The Irish up here remind me of the English back home, they do. Lace curtains on the windows and trousers tucked into their boots, sure, as if they know from work.”

“Up here maybe,” Luther said. “Rest of this neighborhood …”

“What?”

He shrugged.

“No, what?” She tugged his arm.

He looked down at her hand. “That thing you doing now? You don’t ever do that in the rest of this neighborhood. Please.”

“Ah.”

“Like to get us both killed. Ain’t any lace curtains part of that, I’ll tell you what.”

Every night he wrote to Lila, and every few days the letters came back unopened.

It was near to breaking him — her silence, being in a strange city, his self as unsettled and nameless as it had ever been — when Yvette brought the mail to the table one morning and placed two more returned letters softly by his elbow.

“Your wife?” She took a seat.

Luther nodded.

“You must have done something fierce to her.”

He said, “I did, ma’am. I did.”

“Wasn’t another woman, was it?”

“No.”

“Then I forgive you.” She patted his hand, and Luther felt the warmth of it find his blood.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t worry. She still cares for you.”

He shook his head, the loss of her draining him to his root. “She doesn’t, ma’am.”

Yvette shook her head slowly at him, a smile spread thin across her lips. “Men are fine for many things, Luther, but none of you know the first thing about a woman’s heart.”

“That’s just it,” Luther said, “she don’t want me to know her heart anymore.”

“Doesn’t.”

“Huh?”

“She doesn’t want you to know her heart.”

“Right.” Luther wanted a cloak to hide in, duck in. Cover me, cover me.

“I beg to differ with you, son.” Mrs. Giddreaux held up one of his letters so he could see the back of the envelope. “What’s that along the sides of the flap?”

Luther looked; he couldn’t see anything.

Mrs. Giddreaux traced her finger down the flap. “See that cloud there along the edges? The way the paper is softer underneath it?”

Luther noticed it now. “Yes.”

“That’s from steam, son. Steam.”

Luther reached for the envelope and stared at it.

“She’s opening your letters, Luther, and then sending them back like she hasn’t. I don’t know if I’d call that love,” she squeezed his arm, “but I wouldn’t call it indifference.”

Chapter fifteen

Autumn yielded to winter in a series of wet gales that carved their way across the eastern seaboard, and Danny’s list of names grew larger. What the list told him, or anyone for that matter, about the likelihood of a May Day uprising was a mystery. Mostly he just had the names of ass-fucked workingmen looking to unionize and deluded romantics who actually thought the world welcomed change.

Danny began to suspect, though, that between the Roxbury Letts and the BSC, he’d become addicted to the strangest of things — meetings. The Letts and their talk and their drinking led to nothing he could see but more talk and more drinking. And yet, on the nights there were no meetings, no saloon afterward, he felt at loose ends. He’d sit in the dark of his cover apartment, drinking and rubbing the button between his thumb and index finger with such agitation, it seemed a miracle in retrospect that it never cracked. So he’d find himself at another meeting of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall in Roxbury. And another after that.

It wasn’t much different from a meeting of the Letts. Rhetoric, rage, helplessness. Danny couldn’t help marvel at the irony — these men who’d served as strikebreakers finding themselves backed into the same corners as the men they’d manhandled or beaten outside factories and mills.

Into another bar one night, and more talk about workers’ rights, but this time with the BSC — brother policemen, patrolmen, foot stampers and beat walkers and nightstick maestros filled with the stunted rage of the perpetually pushed-aside. Still no negotiations, still no decent talk of decent hours and a decent wage, still no raise. And word was that across the border in Montreal, just 350 miles north, the city had broken off negotiations with police and firemen and a strike was unavoidable.

And why not? the men in the bar said. Fucking starving, they said. Ass-fucked and broke-down and handcuffed to a job that gives us no way to feed our families and no way to see them properly either.

“My youngest,” Francie Deegan said, “my youngest, boys, is wearing clothes he got from his brothers and I’m shocked to discover the older ones ain’t wearing ’em still because I’m working so much I think they’re in second grade, but they’re in fifth. I think they’re at my hip, but they’re at me fuckin’ nipple, boys.”

And when he sat back down amid the hear-hears, Sean Gale piped up with:

“Fucking dockworkers, boys, are making three times as much as us coppers who bust them on drunk-and-disorderlies on Friday nights. So somebody better start thinking of how to pay us what’s right.”

More shouts of “Hear! Hear!” Someone nudged someone and that someone nudged someone else and they all looked over to see Boston police commissioner Stephen O’Meara standing at the bar, waiting for his pint. Once the pint had been drawn and the quiet had fallen over the bar, the great man waited for the tender to shave off the foam with a straight razor. He paid for the pint and waited for his change, his back to the room. The bartender rang up the sale and handed the coins back to Stephen O’Meara. O’Meara left one of those coins on the bar, pocketed the rest, and turned to the room.

Deegan and Gale lowered their heads, awaiting execution.

O’Meara made his way carefully through the men, holding his pint aloft to keep it from spilling, and took a seat by the hearth between Marty Leary and Denny Toole. He looked at the assembled men with a soft sweep of his kind eyes before he sipped at his beer, and the foam crept into his mustache like a silkworm.

“Cold out there.” He took another sip of his beer and the logs crackled behind him. “A fine fire in here, though.” He nodded just once but seemed to encompass each of them with the gesture. “I’ve no answer for you, men. You aren’t getting right-paid and that’s a fact.”

No one dared speak. The men, who just moments before had been the loudest, the most profane, the angriest and most publicly injured, averted their eyes.

O’Meara gave them all a grim smile and even nudged Denny Toole’s knee with his own. “It’s a fine spot, isn’t it?” His eyes swept them again, searching for something or someone. “Young Coughlin, is that you under that beard?”

Danny found those kind eyes meeting his and his chest tightened. “Yes, sir.”

“I’ll take it you’re working undercover.”

“Yes, sir.”

“As a bear?”

The room broke out in laughter.

“Not quite, sir. Close.”

O’Meara’s gaze softened and was so stripped of pride Danny felt as if they were the only two men in the room. “I’ve known your father a long time, son. How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine, sir.” Danny could feel the eyes of the other men now.

“As gracious a woman as any who ever lived. Tell her I said hello, would you?”

“I will, sir.”

“If I may inquire — what is your position on this economic stalemate?”

The men turned in his direction while O’Meara took another sip of his beer, his eyes never leaving Danny’s.

“I understand,” Danny began, and then his throat went dry. He wished the room would go dark, pitch-black, so that he could stop feeling their eyes. Christ.

He took a sip from his own pint and tried again. “I understand, sir, that cost of living is affecting the city and funds are tight. I do.”

O’Meara nodded.

“And I understand, sir, that we are not private citizens but public servants, sworn to do our duty. And that there is no higher calling than that of the public servant.”

“None,” O’Meara agreed.

Danny nodded.

O’Meara watched him. The men watched him.

“But …” Danny kept his voice level. “There was a promise made, sir. A promise that our wages would freeze for the duration of the war, but that we would be rewarded for our patience with a two-hundred-a-year increase as soon as the war ended.” Danny dared look around the room now, at all the eyes fixed upon him. He hoped they couldn’t see the tremors that rippled down the backs of his legs.

“I sympathize,” O’Meara said. “I do, Officer Coughlin. But that cost-of-living increase is a very real thing. And the city is strapped. It’s not simple. I wish it were.”

Danny nodded and went to sit back down and then found he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t let him. He looked back at O’Meara and could feel the decency that lived in the man like a vital organ. He caught Mark Denton’s eye, and Denton nodded.

“Sir,” Danny said, “we have no doubt that you sympathize. None whatsoever. And we know the city is strapped. Yes. Yes.” Danny took a breath. “But a promise, sir, is a promise. Maybe that’s what all this is about in the end. And you said it wasn’t simple, but it is, sir. I would respectfully submit that it is. Not easy. Quite hard. But simple. A lot of fine, brave men can’t make ends meet. And a promise is a promise.”

No one spoke. No one moved. It was as if a grenade had been lobbed into the center of the room and had failed to go off.

O’Meara stood. The men hastily cleared a path as he crossed in front of the hearth until he’d reached Danny. He held out his hand. Danny had to place his beer on the mantel above the hearth and then he placed his own shaky hand in the older man’s grip.

The old man held it fast, not moving his arm up or down.

“A promise is a promise,” O’Meara said.

“Yes, sir,” Danny managed.

O’Meara nodded and let go of his hand and turned to the room. Danny felt the moment freeze in time, as if woven by gods into the mural of history — Danny Coughlin and the Great Man standing side by side with the fire crackling behind them.

O’Meara raised his pint. “You are the pride of this great city, men. And I am proud to call myself one of you. And a promise is a promise.”

Danny felt the fire at his back. Felt O’Meara’s hand against his spine.

“Do you trust me?” O’Meara shouted. “Do I have your faith?”

A chorus rose up: “Yes, sir!”

“I will not let you down. I will not.”

Danny saw it rise in their faces: love. Simply that.

“A little more patience, men, that’s all I ask. I know that’s a tall order, sure. I do. But will you indulge an old man just a little longer?”

“Yes, sir!”

O’Meara took a great breath through his nose and raised his glass higher. “To the men of the Boston Police Department — you have no peers in this nation.”

O’Meara drained his pint in one long swallow. The men erupted and followed suit. Marty Leary called for another round, and Danny noticed that they had somehow become children again, boys, unconditional in their brotherhood.

O’Meara leaned in. “You’re not your father, son.”

Danny stared back at him, unsure.

“Your heart is purer than his.”

Danny couldn’t speak.

O’Meara squeezed his arm just above the elbow. “Don’t sell that, son. You can’t ever buy it back in the same condition.”

“Yes, sir.”

O’Meara held him with his gaze for one more long moment and then Mark Denton handed them each a pint and O’Meara’s hand dropped from Danny’s arm.

After he’d finished his second pint, O’Meara bade the men good-bye and Danny and Mark Denton walked him out into a thick rain that fell from the black sky.

His driver, Sergeant Reid Harper, exited the car and covered his boss with an umbrella. He acknowledged Danny and Denton with a nod as he opened the rear door for O’Meara. The commissioner rested an arm on the door and turned to them.

“I’ll speak to Mayor Peters first thing in the morning. I’ll convey to him my sense of urgency and arrange a meeting at City Hall for negotiations with the Boston Social Club. Do either of you have any objections to representing the men at that meeting?”

Danny looked over at Denton, wondering if O’Meara could hear the thumps of their hearts.

“No, sir.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then.” O’Meara held out his hand. “Allow me to thank you both. Sincerely.”

They each shook the hand.

“You’re the future of the Boston policemen’s union, gentlemen.” He gave them a gentle smile. “I hope you’re up to the task. Now get out of the rain.”

He climbed in the car. “To home, Reid, else the missus will think I’ve turned tomcat.”

Reid Harper pulled away from the curb as O’Meara gave them a small wave through the window.

The rain soaked their hair and fell down the backs of their necks.

“Jesus Christ,” Mark Denton said. “Jesus Christ, Coughlin.”

“I know.”

“You know? Do you understand what you just did in there? You saved us.”

“I didn’t—”

Denton wrapped him in a bear hug and lifted him off the sidewalk. “You fucking saved us!”

He spun Danny over the sidewalk and hooted at the street and Danny struggled to break free but he was laughing now, too, the both of them laughing like lunatics on the street as the rain fell into Danny’s eyes, and he wondered if he’d ever, in his life, felt this good.

He met Eddie McKenna one night in Governor’s Square, at the bar of the Hotel Buckminster.

“What have you got?”

“I’m getting closer to Bishop. But he’s cagey.”

McKenna spread his arms in the booth. “They suspect you of being a plant, you think?”

“Like I said before, it’s definitely crossed their minds.”

“Any ideas?”

Danny nodded. “One. It’s risky.”

“How risky?”

He produced a moleskin notebook, identical to the one he’d seen Fraina use. He’d been to four stationers before he’d found it. He handed it to McKenna.

“I’ve been working on that for two weeks.”

McKenna leafed through it, his eyebrows going up a few times.

“I stained a few pages with coffee, even put a cigarette hole in one.”

McKenna whistled softly. “I noticed.”

“It’s the political musings of Daniel Sante. What do you think?”

McKenna thumbed through it. “You covered Montreal and the Spartacists. Nice. Oooh — Seattle and Ole Hanson. Good, good. You got Archangel in here?”

“Of course.”

“The Versailles Conference?”

“You mean as a world-domination conspiracy?” Danny rolled his eyes. “You think I’d miss that one?”

“Careful,” Eddie said without looking up. “Cocky gets undercover men hurt.”

“I’ve gotten nowhere in weeks, Eddie. How could I possibly be cocky? I got the notebook and Bishop said he’ll show it to Fraina, no promises. That’s it.”

Eddie handed it back. “That’s good stuff. You’d almost think you believed it.”

Danny let the comment pass and put the notebook back in his coat pocket.

Eddie flicked open his watch. “Stay away from union meetings for a while.”

“I can’t.”

Eddie closed his watch and returned it to his vest. “Oh, that’s right. You are the BSC these days.”

“Bullshit.”

“After the meeting you had with O’Meara the other night, that is the rumor, trust me.” He smiled softly. “Almost thirty years on this force and I’ll bet our dear commissioner doesn’t even know my name.”

Danny said, “Right place at the right time, I guess.”

“Wrong place.” He frowned. “You better watch yourself, boy. Because others have started watching you. Take some advice from Uncle Eddie — step back. There are storms imminent everywhere. Everywhere. On the streets, in the factory yards, and now in our own department. Power? That’s ephemeral, Dan. More so now than ever before. You keep your head down.”

“It’s already up.”

Eddie slapped the table.

Danny leaned back. He’d never seen Eddie McKenna lose his slippery calm.

“If you get your face in the paper meeting with the commissioner? The mayor? Have you thought of what that means to my investigation? I can’t use you if Daniel Sante, apprentice-Bolshevik, becomes Aiden Coughlin, face of the BSC. I need Fraina’s mailing list.”

Danny stared across at this man he’d known his whole life. Seeing a new side to him, a side he’d suspected was there all along but had never actually witnessed.

“Why the mailing lists, Eddie? I thought we were looking for evidence of May Day uprising plans.”

“We’re looking for both,” Eddie said. “But if they’re as tight-lipped as you say, Dan, and if your detecting capabilities are a little less substantial than I’d hoped, then you just get me that mailing list before your face is all over the front page. Could you do that for your uncle, pal?” He stepped out of the booth and shrugged into his coat, tossed some coins on the table. “That should do it.”

“We just got here,” Danny said.

Eddie worked his face back into the mask it had always been around Danny — impish and benign. “City never sleeps, boy. I’ve got business in Brighton.”

“Brighton?”

Eddie nodded. “Stockyards. Hate that place.”

Danny followed Eddie toward the door. “Bracing cows now, Eddie?”

“Better.” Eddie pushed open the door into the cold. “Coloreds. Crazy dinges are meeting right now, after hours, to discuss their rights. You believe that? Where does it end? Next thing, the chinks’ll be holding our laundry hostage.”

Eddie’s driver pulled to the curb in his black Hudson. Eddie said, “Give you a lift?”

“I’ll walk.”

“Walk off that booze. Good idea,” he said. “Know anyone by the name of Finn by the bye?” Eddie’s face was blithe, open.

Danny kept his the same way. “In Brighton?”

Eddie frowned. “I said I was going to Brighton on a coon hunt. ‘Finn’ sound like a colored name to you?”

“Sounds Irish.”

“’Tis indeed. Know any?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Eddie said. “You’re sure?”

“Just what I said, Eddie.” Danny turned up his collar against the wind. “Nope.”

Eddie nodded and reached for the car door.

“What he do?” Danny said.

“Huh?”

“This Finn you’re looking for,” Danny said. “What’d he do?”

Eddie stared into his face for a long time. “Good night, Dan.”

“’Night, Eddie.”

Eddie’s car drove up Beacon Street and Danny thought of going back in and calling Nora from the phone booth in the hotel lobby. Let her know that McKenna could be sniffing around her life. But then he pictured her with Connor — holding his hand, kissing him, maybe sitting on his lap when no one else was in the house to see — and he decided there were a lot of Finns in the world. And half of them were either in Ireland or Boston. McKenna could have been talking about any one of them. Any at all.

Chapter sixteen

The first thing Luther had to do at the building on Shawmut Avenue was make it weather-tight. That meant starting with the roof. A slate beauty, she was, fallen on ill fortune and neglect. He worked his way across her spine one fine cold morning when the air smelled of mill smoke and the sky was clean and blade-blue. He collected shards of slate the firemen’s axes had sent to the gutters and added them to those he’d retrieved from the floor below. He ripped sodden or scorched wood from their lathes and hammered fresh planks of oak in their places and covered it all with the slate he’d salvaged. When he ran out of that he used the slate Mrs. Giddreaux had somehow managed to procure from a company in Cleveland. He started on a Saturday at first light and finished up late of that Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the ridgeline of the roof, slick with sweat in the cold, he wiped his brow and gazed up at the clean sky. He turned his head and looked at the city spread out around him. He smelled the coming dusk in the air, though his eyes could see no evidence of it yet. As smells went, though, few were finer.

Luther’s weekday schedule was such that by the time the Coughlins sat for dinner, Luther, who’d set the table and helped Nora prepare the food, had already left. But on Sundays, dinners were all-day affairs, ones that occasionally reminded Luther of the ones at Aunt Marta and Uncle James’s on Standpipe Hill. Something about recent church attendance and Sunday finery brought out an inclination for pronouncements, he noticed, in white folk as well as black.

Serving drinks in the captain’s study, he sometimes got the feeling they were pronouncing for him. He’d catch sidelong glances from one of the captain’s associates as he pontificated about eugenics or proven intellectual disparities in the races or some similar bullshit only the truly indolent had time to discuss.

The one who spoke the least but had the most fire in his eyes was the one Avery Wallace had warned him about, the captain’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. A fat man, given to breathing heavily through nostrils clogged with hair, he had a smile as bright as the full moon on a river, and one of those loud, jolly natures Luther believed could never be trusted. Men like that always hid the part of themselves that wasn’t smiling and hid it so deep it got all the hungrier, like a bear just come out of hibernation, lumbering out of that cave with a scent in its nose so focused it couldn’t ever be reasoned with.

Of all the men who joined the captain in the study on those Sundays — and the roster changed from week to week — it was McKenna who paid Luther the most attention. At first glance, it seemed welcome enough. He always thanked Luther when Luther brought him either a drink or a refill, whereas most of the men simply acted as if his servitude was their due and rarely acknowledged him at all. Upon entering the study, McKenna usually asked after Luther’s health, his week, how he was adapting to the cold weather. “You ever need an extra coat, son, you let us know. We usually have a few spares down at the station house. Can’t promise they’ll smell too fine, though.” He clapped Luther on the back.

He seemed to assume Luther was from the South and Luther saw no reason to dissuade him from the impression until it came up one late afternoon at Sunday dinner.

“Kentucky?” McKenna said.

At first Luther didn’t realize he was being addressed. He stood by the sideboard, filling a small bowl with sugar cubes.

“Louisville, I’m guessing. Am I right?” McKenna gazed openly at him as he placed a slice of pork in his mouth.

“Where I hail from, sir?”

McKenna’s eyes glimmered. “That’s the question, son.”

The captain took a sip of wine. “The lieutenant prides himself on his grasp of accents, he does.”

Danny said, “Can’t lose his own, though, uh?”

Connor and Joe laughed. McKenna wagged his fork at Danny. “A wiseacre since diapers, this one.” He turned his head. “So which is it, Luther?”

Before Luther could answer, Captain Coughlin raised a hand to him. “Make him guess, Mr. Laurence.”

“I did guess, Tom.”

“You guessed wrong.”

“Ah.” Eddie McKenna dabbed his lips with his napkin. “So, not Louisville?”

Luther shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Lexington?”

Luther shook his head again, felt the whole family looking at him.

McKenna leaned back, one hand caressing his belly. “Well, let’s see. You don’t have a deep enough drawl for Mis’sipi, tha’s fo’ sho’. And Gawgia is right out. Too deep for Virginia, though, and too fast, I think, for Alabama.”

“I’m guessing Bermuda,” Danny said.

Luther caught his eye and smiled. Of all the Coughlins, he had the least experience with Danny, but Avery had been right — you felt no lying in the man.

“Cuba,” Luther said to Danny.

“Too far south,” Danny said.

They both chuckled.

The gamesmanship left McKenna’s eyes. His flesh pinkened. “Ah, a bit a sport the lads are having now.” He smiled at Ellen Coughlin down the other end of the table. “A bit of sport,” he repeated and cut into his roast pork.

“So what’s the guess, Eddie?” Captain Coughlin speared a potato slice.

Eddie McKenna looked up. “I’ll have to give Mr. Laurence a bit more thought before I hazard any more idle conjecture on that point.”

Luther turned back to the coffee tray, but not before he caught another look from Danny. Not an entirely pleasant look, one bearing a hint of pity.

Luther shrugged into his topcoat as he came out onto the stoop and saw Danny leaning against the hood of a nut-brown Oakland 49. Danny raised a bottle of something in Luther’s direction, and when Luther reached the street he saw that it was whiskey, the good stuff, prewar.

“A drink, Mr. Laurence?”

Luther took the bottle from Danny and raised it to his lips. He paused, looking at him, making sure sharing a bottle with a colored was what the man wanted. Danny gave him a quizzical arch of his eyebrow, and Luther tilted the bottle to his lips and drank.

When Luther handed it back, the big cop didn’t wipe the bottle with his sleeve, just tilted it to his own lips and took himself a healthy snort. “Good stuff, uh?”

Luther remembered how Avery Wallace had said this Coughlin was a strange who did his own thinking. He nodded.

“Nice night.”

“Yeah.” Crisp but windless, the air a bit chalky with the dust of dead leaves.

“Another?” Danny handed the bottle back.

Luther took a drink, eyeing the big white man and his open, handsome face. A lady-killer, Luther bet, but not the kind to make it his life’s work. Something going on behind those eyes that told Luther this man heard music others didn’t, took direction from who knew where.

“You like working here?”

Luther nodded. “I do. You’ve a nice family, suh.”

Danny rolled his eyes and took another swig. “Think you could drop the ‘suh’ shit with me, Mr. Laurence? Think that’s possible?”

Luther took a step back. “What do you want me to call you then?”

“Out here? Danny’ll do. In there?” He gestured with his chin at the house. “I guess Mr. Coughlin.”

“What’s your complaint against ‘suh’?”

Danny shrugged. “It sounds like bullshit.”

“Fair enough. You call me Luther, then.”

Danny nodded. “Drink to it.”

Luther chuckled as he lifted the bottle. “Avery warned me you were different.”

“Avery came back from the grave to tell you I was different?”

Luther shook his head. “He wrote a note to his ‘replacement.’”

“Ah.” Danny took the bottle back. “Whatta you think about my Uncle Eddie?”

“Seems nice enough.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Danny’s voice was soft.

Luther leaned against the car beside Danny. “No, he doesn’t.”

“You feel him circling you in there?”

“I felt it.”

“You got a nice clean past, Luther?”

“Clean as most, I guess.”

“That ain’t too clean.”

Luther smiled. “Fair point.”

Danny handed the bottle over again. “My Uncle Eddie? He reads people better than any man alive. Stares right through their heads and sees whatever it is they don’t want the world to find out. They got a suspect in one of the station houses nobody can break? They call in my uncle. He gets a confession every time. Uses whatever it takes to get one, too.”

Luther rolled the bottle between his palms. “Why you telling me this?”

“He smells something he doesn’t like about you — I can see it in his eyes — and we took that joke in there too far for his comfort. He started thinking we were laughing at him and that’s not good.”

“I appreciate the liquor.” Luther stepped away from the car. “Never shared a bottle with a white man before.” He shrugged. “But I best be getting home.”

“I’m not working you.”

“You ain’t, uh?” Luther looked at him. “How do I know that?”

Danny held out his hands. “Only two types of men in this world worth talking about — a man who is as he appears and the other kind. Which do you think I am?”

Luther felt the whiskey swimming beneath his flesh. “You about the strangest kind I’ve come across in this city.”

Danny took a drink, looked up at the stars. “Eddie might circle you for a year, even two. He’ll take all the time in the world, believe me. But when he finally does come for you? He’ll have left you no way out.” He met Luther’s eyes. “I’ve made my peace with whatever Eddie and my father do to achieve their ends with plug-uglies and grifters and gunsels, but I don’t like it when they go after civilians. You understand?”

Luther placed his hands in his pockets as the crisp air grew darker, colder. “So you’re saying you can call off this dog?”

Danny shrugged. “Maybe. Won’t know until the time comes.”

Luther nodded. “And what’s your end?”

Danny smiled. “My end?”

Luther found himself smiling in return, feeling both of them circling now, but having fun with it. “Ain’t nothing free in this world but bad luck.”

“Nora,” Danny said.

Luther stepped back to the car and took the bottle from Danny. “What about her?”

“I’d like to know how things progress with her and my brother.”

Luther drank, eyeing Danny, then let loose a laugh.

“What?”

“Man’s in love with his brother’s girl and he says ‘what’ to me.” Luther laughed some more.

Danny joined him. “Let’s say Nora and I have a history.”

“That ain’t news,” Luther said. “I only been in the same room with you both this one time but my blind, dead uncle could have seen it.”

“That obvious, uh?”

“To most. Can’t figure out why Mr. Connor can’t see it. He can’t see a lot when it comes to her.”

“No, he can’t.”

“Why don’t you just ask the woman for her hand? She’ll jump at it.”

“No, she won’t. Believe me.”

“She will. That rope? Shit. That’s love.”

Danny shook his head. “You ever known a woman acted logically when it came to love?”

“No.”

“Well, then.” Danny looked up at the house. “I don’t know the first thing about them. Can’t tell you what they’re thinking from minute to minute.”

Luther smiled and shook his head. “I ’spect you get along just fine all the same.”

Danny held up the bottle. “We got about two fingers left. Last swig?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Luther took a snort and handed the bottle back, watched Danny drain it. “I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. How’s that?”

“Fair. Eddie makes a run at you, you keep me informed.”

Luther held out his hand. “Deal.”

Danny shook his hand. “Glad we could get to know each other, Luther.”

“The same, Danny.”

Back at the building on Shawmut Avenue, Luther checked and re-checked for leaks, but nothing came down through the ceilings, and he found no moisture in the walls. He ripped all the plaster out, first thing, and saw that plenty of the wood behind it could be salvaged, some with little more than hope and tenderness, but hope and tenderness would have to do. Same with the flooring and the staircase. Normally a place that had been this fucked-up by neglect and then fire and water damage, the first thing you’d do would be to gut it to its skin. But given their limited finances and beg-borrow-steal approach, the only solution in this case was to salvage what could be salvaged, right down to the nails themselves. He and Clayton Tomes, the Wagenfelds’ houseman, worked similar hours in their South Boston households and even had the same day off. After one dinner with Yvette Giddreaux, Clayton had been enlisted into the project before he knew what hit him, and that weekend, Luther finally had some help. They spent the day carrying the salvageable wood and metal and brass fixtures up to the third floor so they could get to work on installing the plumbing and electrical next week.

It was hard work. Dusty and sweaty and chalky. The pull of pry bars and the tear of wood and the wrench of the hammer’s claw. Kind of work made your shoulders tighten hard against your neck, the cartilage under your kneecaps feel like rock salt, dug hot stones into the small of your back and bit the edges of your spine. Kind of work made a man sit down in the middle of a dusty floor and lower his head to his knees and whisper, “Whew,” and keep his head down and his eyes closed a bit longer.

After weeks in the Coughlin house doing almost nothing, though, Luther wouldn’t have traded it for anything. This was work of the hand and of the mind and of muscle. Work that left some hint of itself and yourself behind after you were gone.

Craftsmanship, his Uncle Cornelius had once told him, was just a fancy word for what happened when labor met love.

“Shit.” Clayton, lying on his back in the entrance hallway, stared up at the ceiling two stories above. “You realize that if she’s committed to indoor plumbing—”

“She is.”

“—then the waste pipe, Luther — the waste pipe alone—that going to have to climb up from the basement to a roof vent? That’s four stories, boy.”

“Five-inch pipe, too.” Luther chuckled. “Cast iron.”

“And we got to run more pipes off that pipe on every floor? Two maybe off the bathrooms?” Clayton’s eyes widened to saucers. “Luther, this shit’s crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“Then why you smiling?”

“Why you?” Luther said.

What about Danny?” Luther asked Nora as they walked through Haymarket.

“What about him?”

“He doesn’t seem to fit that family somehow.”

“I’m not sure Aiden fits anything.”

“How come sometimes you-all call him Danny and other times Aiden?”

She shrugged. “It just happened. You don’t call him Mister Danny, I’ve noticed.”

“So?”

“You call Connor ‘Mister.’ You even do it with Joe.”

“Danny told me not to call him ‘Mister,’ ’less we were in company.”

“Fast friends you are, yeah?”

Shit. Luther hoped he hadn’t tipped his hand. “Don’t know I’d call us friends.”

“But you like him. It’s clear on your face.”

“He’s different. Not sure I ever met a white man quite like him. Never met a white woman quite like you, though.”

“I’m not white, Luther. I’m Irish.”

“Yeah? What color they?”

She smiled. “Potato-gray.”

Luther laughed and pointed at himself. “Sandpaper-brown. Pleased to meet you.”

Nora gave him a quick curtsy. “A pleasure, sir.”

After one of the Sunday dinners, McKenna insisted on driving Luther home, and Luther, shrugging into his coat in the hall, couldn’t think of a reply quick enough.

“’Tis awful cold,” McKenna said, “and I promised Mary Pat I’d be home before the cows.” He stood from the table and kissed Mrs. Coughlin on the cheek. “Would you pull my coat from the hook, Luther? There’s a fine lad.”

Danny wasn’t at this dinner and Luther looked around the room, saw that no one else was paying much attention.

“Ah, we’ll see you soon, folks.”

“’Night, Eddie,” Thomas Coughlin said. “’Night, Luther.”

“’Night, sir,” Luther said.

Eddie drove down East Broadway and turned right on West Broadway where, even on a cold Sunday night, the atmosphere was as raucous and unpredictable as anything in Greenwood had been on a Friday night. Dice games being played out in the open, whores leaning out of windowsills, loud music from every saloon, and there were so many saloons you couldn’t count them all. Progress, even in a big, heavy car, was slow.

“Ohio?” McKenna said.

Luther smiled. “Yes, sir. You were close with Kentucky. I figured you’d get it that night, but …”

“Ah, I knew it.” McKenna snapped his fingers. “Just the wrong side of the river. Which town?”

Outside, the noise of West Broadway dunned the car and the lights of it melted across the windshield like ice cream. “Just outside Columbus, sir.”

“Ever been in a police car before?”

“Never, suh.”

McKenna chuckled loud, as if he were spitting rocks. “Ah, Luther, you may find this hard to believe but before Tom Coughlin and I became brothers of the badge, we spent a fair amount of time on the wrong side of the law. Saw us some paddy wagons we did and, sure, no small amount of Friday-night drunk tanks.” He waved his hand. “It’s the way of things for the immigrant class, this oat sowing, this figuring out of the mores. I just assumed you’d taken part in the same rituals.”

“I’m not an immigrant, suh.”

McKenna looked over at him. “What’s that?”

“I was born here, suh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just … you said it was the way of things for immigrants, and that may be so, but I was saying that I’m not—”

“What may be so?”

“Sir?”

“What may be so?” McKenna smiled at him as they rolled under a streetlight.

“Suh, I don’t know what you—”

“You said.”

“Suh?”

“You said. You said jail may be the way of things for immigrants.”

“No, suh, I didn’t.”

McKenna tugged on his earlobe. “Me head must be filled with the wax then.”

Luther said nothing, just stared out the windshield as they stopped at a light at the corner of D and West Broadway.

“Do you have something against immigrants?” Eddie McKenna said.

“No, suh. No.”

“Think we haven’t earned our seat at the table yet?”

“No.”

“Supposed to wait for our children’s children to achieve that honor on our behalf, are we?”

“Suh, I never meant to—”

McKenna wagged a finger at Luther and laughed loudly. “I got you there, Luther. I pulled your leg there, I did.” He slapped Luther’s knee and let loose another hearty laugh as the light turned green. He continued up Broadway.

“Good one, suh. You sure had me.”

“I sho’ did!” McKenna said and slapped the dashboard. They drove over the Broadway Bridge. “Do you like working for the Coughlins?”

“I do, suh, yes.”

“And the Giddreauxs?”

“Suh?”

“The Giddreauxs, son. You don’t think I know of them? Isaiah’s quite the high-toned-Negroid-celebrity up in these parts. Has the ear of Du Bois, they say. Has a vision of colored equality, of all things, in our fair city. Won’t that be something?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Sure, that’d be grand stuff indeed.” He smiled the warmest of smiles. “Of course, you’d find some folk who would argue the Giddreauxs are not friends to your people. That they are, in fact, enemies. That they will push this dream of equality to a dire conclusion, and the blood of your race will flood these streets. That’s what some would say.” He placed a hand to his own chest. “Some. Not all, not all. ’Tis a shame there has to be so much discord in this world. Don’t you think?”

“Yes, suh.”

“A tragic shame.” McKenna shook his head and tsk-tsked as he turned onto St. Botolph Street. “Your family?”

“Suh?”

McKenna peered at the doors of the homes as he rolled slowly up the street. “Did you leave family behind in Canton?”

“Columbus, suh.”

“Columbus, right.”

“No, suh. Just me.”

“What brought you all the way to Boston, then?”

“That’s the one.”

“Huh?”

“The Giddreauxs’ house, suh, you just passed it.”

McKenna applied the brakes. “Well, then,” he said. “Another time.”

“I look forward to it, suh.”

“Stay warm, Luther! Bundle up!”

“I will. Thank you, suh.” Luther climbed out of the car. He walked around behind it and reached the sidewalk, hearing McKenna’s window roll down as he did.

“You read about it,” McKenna said.

Luther turned. “Which, suh?”

“Boston!” McKenna’s eyebrows were raised happily.

“Not really, sir.”

McKenna nodded, as if it all made perfect sense to him. “Eight hundred miles.”

“Suh?”

“The distance,” McKenna said, “between Boston and Columbus.” He patted his car door. “Good night to you, Luther.”

“Good night, suh.”

Luther stood on the sidewalk and watched McKenna drive off. He raised his arms and got a look at his hands — shaking, but not too bad. Not too bad at all. Considering.

Chapter seventeen

Danny met Steve Coyle for a drink at the Warren Tavern in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, the day more winter than autumn. Steve made several jokes about Danny’s beard and asked him about his case, even though Danny had to repeat, with apologies, that he couldn’t discuss an open investigation with a civilian.

“But it’s me,” Steve said, then held up a hand. “Just kidding, just kidding. I understand.” He gave Danny a smile that was huge and weak at the same time. “I do.”

So they talked about old cases, old days, old times. Danny had one drink for every three Steve had. Steve lived in the West End these days in a windowless room of a rooming-house basement that had been partitioned into six sections, all of which smelled thickly of coal.

“No indoor plumbing still,” Steve said. “Believe that? Out to the shed in the backyard like it was 1910. Like we’re in western Mass., or jigaboos.” He shook his head. “And if you’re not in the house by eleven? The old geezer locks you out for the night. Some way to live.” He gave Danny his big weak smile again and drank some more. “Soon as I get my cart, though? Things’ll change, I’ll tell you that.”

Steve’s latest employment plan involved setting up a fruit cart outside Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The fact that there were already a dozen such carts owned by some very violent, if not outright vicious, men didn’t seem to dissuade him. The fact that the fruit wholesalers were so leery toward new operators they charged “inaugural” rates for the first six months, which made it impossible to break even, was something Steve dismissed as “hearsay.” The fact that City Hall had stopped giving out merchant medallions for that area two years ago didn’t trouble him either. “All the people I know at the Hall?” he’d said to Danny. “Hell, they’ll pay me to set up shop.”

Danny didn’t point out that two weeks earlier Steve had told Danny he was the only person from the old days who answered his calls. He just nodded and smiled his encouragement. What else could you do?

“Another?” Steve said.

Danny looked at his watch. He was meeting Nathan Bishop for dinner at seven. He shook his head. “Can’t do it.”

Steve, who’d already signaled the bartender, covered the dejection that flashed across his eyes with his too-big smile and a laugh-bark. “All set, Kevin.”

The bartender scowled and removed his hand from the tap. “You owe me a dollar twenty, Coyle. And you best have it this time, rummy.”

Steve patted his pockets but Danny said, “I got it.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.” Danny slid out of the booth and approached the bar. “Hey, Kevin. Got a sec’?”

The bartender came over like he was doing a favor. “What?”

Danny placed the dollar and four nickels on the bar. “For you.”

“Must be my birthday.”

When he reached for the money, Danny caught his wrist and pulled it toward him.

“Smile or I break it.”

“What?”

“Smile like we’re chatting about the Sox or I’ll break your fucking wrist.”

Kevin smiled, his jaw clenched, eyes starting to bulge.

“I ever hear you call my friend ‘rummy’ again, you fucking bartender, I’ll knock out all your teeth and feed them back to you through your ass.”

“I—”

Danny twisted the flesh in his hand. “Don’t you do a fucking thing but nod.”

Kevin bit his lower lip and nodded four times.

“And his next round’s on the house,” Danny said and let go of his wrist.

They walked up Hanover in the fading of the day’s light. Danny planned to slip into his rooming house and grab a few pieces of warmer clothing to bring back to his cover apartment. Steve said he just wanted to wander through his old neighborhood. They’d reached Prince Street when crowds ran past them toward Salem Street. When they reached the corner where Danny’s building stood, they saw a sea of people surrounding a black Hudson Super Six, a few men and several boys jumping on and off the running boards and the hood.

“What the hell?” Steve said.

“Officer Danny! Officer Danny!” Mrs. DiMassi waved frantically at him from the stoop. Danny lowered his head for a moment — weeks of undercover work possibly blown because an old woman recognized him, beard and all, from twenty yards away. Through the throng, Danny saw that the driver of the car had a straw hat, as did the passenger.

“They try and take my niece,” Mrs. DiMassi said when he and Steve reached her. “They try and take Arabella.”

Danny, with a fresh angle on the car, could see Rayme Finch behind the wheel, tooting the horn as he tried to move the car forward.

The crowd wasn’t having it. They weren’t throwing anything yet, but they were yelling and clenching their fists and shouting curses in Italian. Danny saw two members of the Black Hand moving along the edges of the mob.

“She’s in the car?” Danny said.

“In back,” Mrs. DiMassi cried. “They take her.”

Danny gave her hand a tug of encouragement and began pushing his way through the crowd. Finch’s eyes met his and narrowed. After about ten seconds, recognition found Finch’s face. It was quickly replaced, though. Not with fear of the crowd, just stubborn determination as he kept the car in gear and tried to inch forward.

Someone pushed Danny, and he almost lost his balance but was buffeted by a pair of middle-aged women with beefy arms. A kid climbed a streetlamp pole with an orange in his hand. If the kid had a decent throwing arm this would get scary fast.

Danny reached the car, and Finch cracked the window. Arabella was curled up on the backseat, her eyes wide, her fingers grasping her crucifix, her lips moving in prayer.

“Get her out,” Danny said.

“Move the crowd.”

“You want a riot?” Danny said.

“You want some dead Italians in the street?” Finch banged on the horn with his fist. “Get them the fuck out of the way, Coughlin.”

“This girl knows nothing about anarchists,” Danny said.

“She was seen with Federico Ficara.”

Danny looked in at Arabella. She looked back at him with eyes that comprehended nothing except the growing fury of the mob. An elbow pushed off Danny’s lower back and he was pressed hard against the car.

“Steve!” he called. “You back there?”

“About ten feet.”

“Can you get me some room?”

“Have to use my cane.”

“Fine with me.” Danny turned back, pressed his face into the crack of window Rayme Finch had afforded him, and said, “You saw her with Federico?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“About half an hour ago. Down by the bread factory.”

“You personally?”

“No. Another agent. Federico ducked him, but we got a positive ID on this girl.”

The top of someone’s head drove itself into Danny’s back. He swatted at it, tagged a chin.

He pressed his lips to the window crack. “If you leave with her, and then return her to the neighborhood, Finch? She will be assassinated. You hear me? You’re killing her. Let her out. Let me handle it.” Another body jostled his back and a man climbed up on the hood. “I can barely breathe out here.”

Finch said, “We can’t back down now.”

A second guy climbed on the hood and the car began to rock.

“Finch! You’ve already fucked her by putting her in the car. Some people are going to think she is an informant, no matter what. But we can save this situation if you let her out now. Otherwise …” Another body slammed into Danny’s. “Jesus, Finch! Unlock the fucking door.”

“You and me are going to have a talk.”

“Fine. We’ll talk. Open the door.”

Finch gave him one last long look to let him know this wasn’t over, not by a damn sight, and then he reached back and unlocked the rear door and Danny got his hand on the handle and turned to the crowd. “There’s been a mistake. Ci è stato un errore. Back up. Sostegno! Sostegno! She’s coming out. Sta uscendo. Back up. Sostegno!”

To his surprise, the crowd took a few steps back and Danny opened the door and pulled the shaking girl across the seat. Several people let out whoops and claps, and Danny hugged Arabella to his body and headed for the sidewalk. She clutched her hands to her chest and Danny could feel something hard and square under her arms. He looked in her eyes, but all he saw there was fear.

Danny held tight to Arabella and nodded his thanks to the people he passed. He gave Finch one last look and gestured up the street with his head. Another smattering of cheers broke out and the crowd began to thin around the car. Finch nudged the car forward a few feet and the mob backed up farther and the tires rolled. Then the first orange hit. The fruit was cold and sounded more like a rock. That was followed by an apple, then a potato, and then the car was pelted with fruit and vegetables. But it made steady progress up Salem Street. Some urchins ran alongside, shouting at it, but there were smiles on their faces and the jeers from the crowd had a festive air to them.

Danny reached the sidewalk and Mrs. DiMassi took her niece from him and led her toward the stairs. Danny watched the taillights of Finch’s Hudson reach the corner. Steve Coyle stood beside him, wiping his head with a handkerchief and looking out at the street littered with half-frozen fruit.

“Calls for a drink, uh?” He handed Danny his flask.

Danny took a drink but said nothing. He looked at Arabella Mosca huddled in her aunt’s arms. He wondered whose side he was on anymore.

“I’m going to need to talk to her, Mrs. DiMassi.”

Mrs. DiMassi looked up into his face.

“Now,” he said.

Arabella Mosca was a small woman with wide almond eyes and short blue-black hair. She didn’t speak a word of English outside of hello, good-bye, and thank you. She sat on the couch in her aunt’s sitting room, her hands still clenched within Mrs. DiMassi’s, and she had yet to remove her coat.

Danny said to Mrs. DiMassi, “Could you ask her what she’s hiding beneath her coat?”

Mrs. DiMassi glanced at her niece’s coat and frowned. She pointed and asked her to open her coat.

Arabella tilted her chin down toward her chest and shook her head vehemently.

“Please,” Danny said.

Mrs. DiMassi wasn’t the type to say “please” to a younger relative. Instead, she slapped her. Arabella barely reacted. She lowered her head farther and shook it again. Mrs. DiMassi reared back on the couch and cocked her arm.

Danny stuck his upper body between them. “Arabella,” he said in halting Italian, “they will deport your husband.”

Her chin came off her chest.

He nodded. “The men in straw hats. They will.”

A torrent of Italian flew from Arabella’s mouth and Mrs. DiMassi held up a hand, Arabella talking so fast even she seemed to be having trouble following. She turned to Danny.

“She said they can’t do this. He has job.”

“He’s an illegal,” Danny said.

“Bah,” she said. “Half this neighborhood illegal. They deport everyone?”

Danny shook his head. “Just the ones who annoy them. Tell her.”

Mrs. DiMassi held her hand out below Arabella’s chin. “Dammi quel che tieni sotto il cappotto, o tuo marito passera’il prossimo Natale a Palermo.”

Arabella said, “No, no, no.”

Mrs. DiMassi cocked her arm again and spoke as fast as Arabella. “Questi Americani ci trattano come cani. Non ti permettero’di umiliarmi dinanzi ad uno di loro. Apri il cappotto, o te lo strappo di dosso!”

Whatever she said — Danny caught “American dogs” and “don’t disgrace me” — it worked. Arabella opened her coat and removed a white paper bag. She handed it to Mrs. DiMassi who handed it to Danny.

Danny looked inside and saw a stack of paper. He pulled out the top sheet:

Danny showed the note to Steve and said to Mrs. DiMassi, “When was she supposed to distribute these?”

Mrs. DiMassi spoke to her niece. Arabella started to shake her head, then stopped. She whispered a word to Mrs. DiMassi who turned back to Danny. “Sundown.”

He turned back to Steve. “How many churches have a late mass?”

“In the North End? Two, maybe three. Why?”

Danny pointed at the note. “‘While you rest and kneel.’ Yeah?”

Steve shook his head. “No.”

“You rest on the Sabbath,” Danny said. “You kneel in church. And at the end — your blood runs to the sea. Gotta be a church near the waterfront.”

Steve went to Mrs. DiMassi’s phone. “I’m calling it in. What’s your guess?”

“There’s only two churches that fit. Saint Teresa’s and Saint Thomas’s.”

“Saint Thomas doesn’t have an evening mass.”

Danny headed for the door. “You’ll catch up?”

Steve smiled, phone to his ear. “Me and my cane, sure.” He waved Danny off. “Go, go. And, Dan?”

Danny paused at the door. “Yeah?”

“Shoot first,” he said. “And shoot often.”

St. Teresa’s stood at the corner of Fleet and Atlantic across from Lewis Wharf. One of the oldest churches in the North End, it was small and starting to crumble. Danny bent to catch his breath, his shirt drenched in sweat from his run. He pulled his watch from his pocket: five-forty-eight. Mass would end soon. If, like Salutation, the bomb was in the basement, about the only thing to do would be to rush into the church and order everyone out. Steve had made the call, so the bomb squad couldn’t be far off. But if the bomb was in the basement, why hadn’t it detonated? Parishioners had been in there for over forty-five minutes. Ample time to blow out the floor beneath them….

Danny heard it then, off in the distance, the first siren, the first patrol car leaving the Oh-One, surely followed by others.

The intersection was quiet, empty — a few jalopies parked in front of the church, none of them more than a step removed from a horse-drawn cart, though a couple had been maintained with pride. He scanned the rooftops across the street, thinking: Why a church? Even for anarchists, it seemed political suicide, especially in the North End. Then he remembered that the only reason any churches in the neighborhood offered early-evening mass had been to cater to workers deemed so “essential” during the war they couldn’t be afforded a day off on the Sabbath. “Essential” meant some connection, however broad, to the military — men and women who worked with arms, steel, rubber, or industrial alcohol. So this church wasn’t just a church, it was a military target.

Inside the church, dozens of voices rose in hymn. He had no choice — get the people out. Why the bomb hadn’t gone off yet, he couldn’t say. Maybe he was a week early. Maybe the bomber was having trouble with the detonation — anarchists often did. There were dozens of plausible reasons for the lack of an explosion, but none of them would mean shit if he let the worshippers die. Get them to safety, then worry about questions or possible egg on his face. For now, just get them the fuck out.

He started across the street and noticed that one of the jalopies was double-parked.

There was no need for it. There were plenty of spaces on both sides of the street. The only stretch of curb that wasn’t free was directly in front of the church. And that’s where the car was double-parked. It was an old Rambler 63 coupe, probably 1911 or ’12. Danny paused in the middle of the street, just froze as the skin along his throat and under his arms grew clammy. He expelled a breath and moved again, quicker now. As he drew closer to the car, he could see the driver slouched low behind the wheel, a dark hat pulled down his forehead. The sound of the siren grew sharper and was joined by several more. The driver sat up. His left hand was on the wheel. Danny couldn’t see his right.

Inside the church, the hymn ended.

The driver cocked his head and turned his face toward the street.

Federico. No gray in his hair anymore, and he’d shaved his mustache, his features somehow leaner because of the changes, hungrier.

He saw Danny but his eyes didn’t display recognition, just a vague curiosity at this large Bolshevik with the beastly beard crossing a street in the North End.

The doors to the church opened.

The lead siren sounded like it was a block away. A boy came out of a shop four doors down, a tweed scally cap on his head, something under his arm.

Danny reached into his coat. Federico’s eyes locked on Danny’s.

Danny pulled his gun from his coat as Federico reached for something on the car seat.

The first parishioners reached the church steps.

Danny waved his gun. He shouted, “Get back inside!”

No one seemed to realize he was talking to them. Danny stepped to his left, swung his arm, and fired a round into Federico’s windshield.

On the church steps, several people screamed.

Danny fired a second time and the windshield shattered.

“Back inside!”

Something hot hissed just beneath his earlobe. He saw a white muzzle flash off to his left — the boy, firing a pistol at him. Federico’s door popped open; he held up a stick of dynamite, the wick sparking. Danny cupped his elbow in his hand and shot Federico in the left kneecap. Federico yelped and fell against the car. The stick of dynamite dropped onto the front seat.

Danny was close enough now to see the other sticks piled in the backseat, two or three bundles of them.

A chunk of cobblestone spit off the street. He ducked and fired back at the boy. The boy hit the ground and his cap fell off and long caramel hair cascaded out from under it as the boy rolled under a car. No boy. Tessa. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement from the Rambler and he fired again. The bullet hit the running board, an embarrassing shot, and then his revolver clicked on empty. He found bullets in his pocket and emptied his shells onto the street. He ran in a crouch over to a streetlamp pole and placed his shoulder to it and tried to reload his revolver with shaking hands as bullets thunked off the cars nearest to him and hit the lamp pole.

In a plaintive, despairing voice, Tessa called Federico’s name and then shouted, “Scappa, scappa, amore mio! Mettiti in salvo! Scappa!”

Federico twisted his way off the front seat, his good knee hitting the street, and Danny stepped from behind the lamp pole and fired. The first shot hit the door, but the second caught Federico in the ass. Again, the strange yelp as the blood sprouted and darkened the back of his pants. He flopped against the seat and crawled back inside. Danny got a sudden flash of the two of them in Federico’s apartment, Federico smiling that warm and glorious smile of his. He pushed the image away as Tessa screamed, a guttural wail of broken hope. She had both hands on the pistol when she fired. Danny dove to his left and rolled on the street. The rounds ripped up the cobblestone, and he kept rolling until he reached a car on the other side of the street and heard Tessa’s revolver dry-fire. Federico lunged out of the Rambler. He arched his back and turned. He pushed off the car door, and Danny shot him in the stomach. Federico fell back into the Rambler. The door closed against his legs.

Danny fired where he’d last seen Tessa, but she wasn’t there anymore. She’d run several doors down from the church, and she pressed a hand to her hip and the hand was red. Tears poured down her face, and her mouth was open in a noiseless howl. As the first prowl car came around the corner, Danny gave her one last look and ran toward the cruiser with his hands raised, trying to wave it off before it got too close.

The blast bubbled outward as if it came from under water. The first wave knocked Danny’s legs out from under him and he landed in the gutter and watched the Rambler jump four feet in the air. It came back to earth almost exactly where it had left it. The windows blew out, and the wheels collapsed, and a portion of the roof peeled back like a can. The front steps of the church splintered and disgorged limestone. The heavy wooden doors fell off their hinges. The stained glass windows collapsed. Debris and white dust floated in the air. Flames poured out of the car. Flames and oily black smoke. Danny stood. He could feel blood dripping out of his ears.

A face loomed in front of his. The face was familiar. The face mouthed his name. Danny held up his hands, one of them still holding his revolver. The cop — Danny remembered his name now, Officer Glen Something, Glen Patchett — shook his head: No, you keep your gun.

Danny lowered the gun and placed it in his coat. The heat of the flames found his face. He could see Federico in there, blackened and afire, leaning against the passenger door, as if sleeping, a guy along for a drive. With his eyes closed, he reminded Danny of that first night they’d broken bread together, when Federico, seemingly enraptured by music, had closed his eyes and mock-conducted the music spilling from his phonograph. People began to exit the church, coming around from the sides, and Danny could hear them suddenly, as if from the bottom of a hole a mile deep.

He turned to Glen, “If you can hear me, nod.”

Patchett gave him a curious look but nodded.

“Put out an APB on a Tessa Ficara. Twenty years old. Italian. Five five, long brown hair. She’s bleeding from the right hip. Glen? She’s dressed as a boy. Tweed knickers, plaid shirt, suspenders, brown work shoes. You got that?”

Patchett scribbled in his notebook. He nodded.

“Armed and dangerous,” Danny said.

More scribbling.

His left ear canal opened with a pop, and more blood sluiced down his neck, but now he could hear and the sounds were sudden and painful. He placed a hand to the ear. “Fuck!”

“You hear me now?”

“Yeah, Glen. Yeah.”

“Who’s the crisper in the car?”

“Federico Ficara. He’s got federal warrants out on him. You probably heard about him at roll call about a month ago. Bomber.”

“Dead bomber. You shoot him?”

“Three times,” Danny said.

Glen looked at all the white dust and debris as it fell into their hair, onto their faces. “Hell of a way to fuck up a Sunday.”

Eddie McKenna arrived on-scene about ten minutes after the explosion. Danny sat amid the rubble on what remained of the church steps and listened as his godfather talked to Fenton, the Bomb Squad sergeant.

“Best we can figure, Eddie? The plan was to detonate the dynamite in the car once all the people were out front, you know, milling about for ten minutes afterward, the way these people do. But when the wops start coming out of the church, Coughlin’s kid over there yells at them to go back inside. Makes his point by discharging his weapon. So the people run back inside and Coughlin starts firing at the asshole in the Rambler. Someone else comes into play around then — I’m hearing from Tactical that it’s a woman, believe that? — and he’s drawing her fire, too, but hell if he’s letting that asshole out of the car. Makes him blow up with his own bombs.”

“A delicious irony, that,” McKenna said. “Special Squads will take over from here, Sergeant.”

“Tell that to Tactical.”

“Oh, I will. Rest assured.” He placed a hand on Fenton’s shoulder before he could walk off. “In your professional opinion, Sergeant, what would have happened if that bomb had gone off while the parishioners congregated on the street?”

“Twenty dead minimum. Maybe thirty. The rest wounded, maimed, what have you.”

“What have you, indeed,” McKenna said. He walked over to Danny, shaking his head with a smile. “You have so much as a scratch?”

“Doesn’t appear so,” Danny said. “Fucking ears hurt like hell, though.”

“First Salutation, then working the flu like you did, and now this?” McKenna sat on the church steps and hitched his pant legs at the knee. “How many near misses can one man have, boy?”

“Apparently, I’m putting the question to the test.”

“Rumor is you winged her. This Tessa cunt.”

Danny nodded. “Caught her in the right hip. Mighta been my bullet, mighta been ricochet.”

“You got dinner in an hour, don’t you?” McKenna said.

Danny cocked his head. “You don’t honestly expect me to go, do you?”

“Why not?”

“The guy I’m supposed to meet for dinner is probably sewing Tessa up as we speak.”

McKenna shook his head. “She’s a soldier, she is. She shan’t panic and cross the city before full dark while she’s bleeding. She’s holed up somewhere right now.” His eyes scanned the buildings around them. “Probably still in this neighborhood. I’ll put a major presence on the street tonight; it should pin her in. At least it’ll keep her from traveling far. Also, your friend Nathan is hardly the only dirty doctor in the game. So I think the dinner should go ahead as planned. Sure now, it’s a calculated risk, but one worth taking.”

Danny searched his face for the joke.

“You’re this close,” McKenna said. “Bishop asked for your writing. You gave it to him. Now he’s asked you to dinner. Fraina, I bet you all the gold in Ireland, will be there.”

“We don’t know that for—”

“We do,” McKenna said. “We can infer it. And if all the stars align and Fraina takes you up to the offices of Revolutionary Age?”

“What? You want me to just say, ‘Hey, while we’re all chummy, mind giving me the mailing list of your entire organization?’ Something like that?”

“Steal it,” McKenna said.

“What?”

“If you get inside the offices, fucking steal it, lad.”

Danny stood, his balance still a little off, one of his ears still plugged up. “What is so all-important about these lists?”

“They’re a way to keep tabs.”

“Tabs.”

McKenna nodded.

“You’re so full of shit you could fill a barn.” Danny walked down the steps. “And I’m not going to be anywhere near the offices. We’re meeting in a restaurant.”

McKenna smiled. “All right, all right. Special Squads will give you some insurance, make sure these Bolshies don’t even think of looking at you funny for a couple of days. Will that make you happy?”

“What kind of insurance?”

“You know Hamilton from my squad, yes?”

Danny nodded. Jerry Hamilton. Jersey Jerry. A goon; all that separated him from a prison cell was a badge.

“I know Hamilton.”

“Good. Keep your eyes peeled tonight and be on the ready.”

“For what?”

“You’ll know it when it happens, believe you me.” McKenna stood and slapped at the white dust on his pants. It had been falling steadily since the explosion. “Now go and clean yourself up. You’ve got tracks of blood running down your neck. You’ve got this dust all over you, you do. Covering your hair, your face. Look like one of them Bushmen I’ve seen in the picture books.”

Chapter eighteen

When Danny arrived at the restaurant, he found the door locked and the windows shuttered.

“It’s closed on Sundays.” Nathan Bishop stepped out of a darkened doorway into the weak yellow light cast by the nearest streetlamp. “My mistake.”

Danny looked up and down the empty street. “Where’s Comrade Fraina?”

“At the other place.”

“What other place?”

Nathan frowned. “The other place we’re going.”

“Oh.”

“Because this place was closed.”

“Right.”

“Have you always suffered Mongoloidism, or did you just come down with it?”

“Always.”

Nathan held out his hand. “Car’s across the street.”

Danny saw it now — an Olds Model M, Pyotr Glaviach behind the wheel looking straight ahead. He turned the key, and the rumble of the heavy engine echoed up the street.

Nathan, walking toward the car, looked back over his shoulder. “You coming?”

Danny hoped McKenna’s men were somewhere he couldn’t see, watching, not boozing it up in a bar around the corner until they decided to stroll on over to the restaurant and make whatever move they had planned. He could picture it — Jersey Jerry and some other thug with a tin shield, both of them standing outside the darkened restaurant, one of them looking at the address he’d written on his own hand, then shaking his head with a five-year-old’s befuddlement.

Danny stepped off the curb and walked toward the car.

They drove a few blocks and then turned onto Harrison as a light rain fell. Pyotr Glaviach turned on his wipers. Like the rest of the car, they were heavy things, and the back-and-forth slap of them found Danny’s chest.

“Quiet tonight,” Nathan said.

Danny looked out at Harrison Avenue, its empty sidewalks. “Yeah. Well, it’s Sunday.”

“I was talking about you.”

The restaurant was called Oktober, the name appearing solely on the door in red lettering so small that Danny had passed it several times over the last couple of months without ever knowing it was there. Three tables inside, and only one of them was set. Nathan led Danny to it.

Pyotr threw the lock on the front door and then took a seat by it, his large hands lying in his lap like sleeping dogs.

Louis Fraina stood at the tiny bar, speaking rapidly on the phone in Russian. He nodded a lot and scribbled furiously in a notepad as the barmaid, a heavyset woman in her sixties, brought Nathan and Danny a bottle of vodka and a basket of brown bread. Nathan poured them each a drink and then raised his in toast. Danny did the same.

“Cheers,” Nathan said.

“What? No Russian?”

“Good Lord, no. You know what Russians call Westerners who can speak Russian?”

Danny shook his head.

“Spies.” Nathan poured them a refill and seemed to read Danny’s thoughts. “You know why Louis is an exception?”

“Why?”

“Because he’s Louis. Try the bread. It’s good.”

From the bar, an explosion of Russian, followed by a surprisingly hearty laugh, and then Louis Fraina hung up the phone. He came to the table and poured himself a drink.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Glad you could make it.”

“Evening, Comrade,” Danny said.

“The writer.” Louis Fraina held out his hand.

Danny shook it. Fraina’s grip was firm but not to the point of trying to prove anything. “Pleased to meet you, Comrade.”

Fraina sat and poured himself another vodka. “Let’s dispense with the ‘Comrade’ for now. I’ve read your work, so I don’t doubt your ideological commitment.”

“Okay.”

Fraina smiled. This close, he gave off a warmth that wasn’t even hinted at in his speeches or the few times Danny had seen him holding court at the back of the Sowbelly. “Western Pennsylvania, yes?”

“Yes,” Danny said.

“What brought you all the way to Boston?” He tore a piece of dark bread from the loaf and popped it in his mouth.

“I had an uncle who lived here. By the time I arrived, he was long gone. I’m not sure where.”

“Was he a revolutionary?”

Danny shook his head. “He was a cobbler.”

“So he could run from the fight in good shoes.”

Danny tipped his head to that and smiled.

Fraina leaned back in his chair and waved at the barmaid. She nodded and disappeared into the back.

“Let’s eat,” Fraina said. “We’ll talk revolution after dessert.”

They ate a salad in vinegar and oil that Fraina called svejie ovoshy. That was followed by draniki, a potato dish, and zharkoye, a meal of beef and still more potatoes. Danny’d had no idea what to expect, but it was quite good, far better than the gruel served nightly in the Sowbelly would have led him to believe. Still, throughout dinner, he had trouble concentrating. Some of it was due to the ringing in his ears. He only heard half of what was said and dealt with the other half by smiling or shaking his head where it seemed appropriate. But it wasn’t the hearing loss, ultimately, that pulled his interest away from the table. It was the feeling, all too familiar lately, that his job was the wrong fit for his heart.

He had woken up this morning, and because of that, a man was now dead. Whether the man deserved to die or not — and he did, he did — wasn’t what concerned Danny at the moment. It was that he’d killed him. Two hours ago. He’d stood in the street and shot him like an animal. He could hear those high-pitched yelps. Could see each of the bullets enter Federico Ficara — the first through the knee, the second through the ass, the third into the stomach. All painful, the first and the third, however, exceptionally so.

Two hours ago, and now he was back on the job and the job was sitting with two men who seemed, at best, overimpassioned but hardly criminal.

When he’d shot Federico in the ass (and that was the one that bothered him the most, the indignity of it, Federico trying to scramble out of that car like forest prey) he’d wondered what created a situation like this — three people shooting it out on a city street near a car laden with dynamite. No god had ever designed such a scenario, even for the lowest of his animals. What created a Federico? A Tessa? Not god. Man.

I killed you, Danny thought. But I didn’t kill it.

He realized Fraina was speaking to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said for a writer of such impassioned polemic, you’re quite taciturn in person.”

Danny smiled. “I like to leave it all on the page.”

Fraina nodded and glanced his glass off Danny’s. “Fair enough.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match as a child would blow out a candle, with pursed lips and an air of purpose. “Why the Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

“I’m not sure I understand your question.”

“You’re an American,” Fraina said. “You need only to walk half a mile across the city to find Comrade Reed’s American Communist Party. And yet you chose to be among Eastern Europeans. Are you uncomfortable with your own kind?”

“No.”

Fraina tilted one palm in Danny’s direction. “Then?”

“I want to write,” Danny said. “Comrade Reed and Comrade Larkin are not known for letting newcomers break in on their paper.”

“But I am?”

“That’s the rumor,” Danny said.

“Candor,” Fraina said. “I like it. Some of them are quite good, by the way. Your musings.”

“Thank you.”

“Some are, well, a bit overwrought. Turgid, one could say.”

Danny shrugged. “I speak from the heart, Comrade Fraina.”

“The revolution needs people who speak from the head. Intelligence, precision — these are what are most valued in the party.”

Danny nodded.

“So you would like to help out with the newspaper. Yes?”

“Very much so.”

“It is not glamorous work. You’d write occasionally, yes, but you’d be expected to work the press and to stuff envelopes and type names and addresses onto those envelopes. This is something you can do?”

“Certainly,” Danny said.

Fraina pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue and dropped it in the ashtray. “Come by the offices next Friday. We’ll see how you take to it.”

Just like that, Danny thought. Just like that.

Leaving the Oktober, he found himself behind Louis Fraina and Pyotr Glaviach as Nathan Bishop trotted across the sidewalk to open the back of the Olds Model M. Fraina stumbled and a gunshot report echoed in the empty street. Pyotr Glaviach knocked Fraina to the ground and covered his body. The smaller man’s glasses fell off the curb and into the gutter. The gunman stepped out of the building next door, one arm extended, and Danny took the lid off a trash can and knocked the pistol out of his hand and the gun went off again and Danny hit him in the forehead. Sirens rang out. They were drawing closer. Danny hit the gunman another time with the metal lid and the man fell on his ass.

He turned back as Glaviach shoved Fraina into the backseat of the Model M and stood on the running board. Nathan Bishop hopped up front. Bishop waved his arm frantically at Danny. “Come on!”

The shooter grabbed Danny by his ankles and pulled his legs out from under him. Danny hit the sidewalk so hard he bounced.

A police cruiser turned onto Columbus.

“Go!” Danny called.

The Model M squealed as it pulled away from the curb.

“Find out if he a White!” Glaviach shouted from the running board as the cruiser drove over the curb in front of the restaurant and the Model M took a sharp left out of sight.

The first two coppers on the scene ran into the restaurant. They pushed back the barmaid and two men who’d ventured out. They shut the door behind them. The next cruiser arrived on their heels and banged to a stop halfway up the curb. McKenna climbed out, already chuckling at the absurdity of it all, as Jersey Jerry Hamilton let go of Danny’s ankles. They got to their feet. The two patrolmen with McKenna came over and manhandled them over to the cruiser.

“Realistic enough, you think?” McKenna said.

Hamilton rubbed his forehead several times and then he punched Danny’s arm. “I’m bleeding, you fuck.”

Danny said, “I kept away from the face.”

“Kept away from the …?” Hamilton spit blood onto the street. “I should ram your—”

Danny stepped in close. “I could hospitalize you right fucking here, right now. You want that, mug?”

“Hey, why’s he think he can talk to me like this?”

“Because he can.” McKenna clapped their shoulders. “Assume the positions, gents.”

“No, I’m serious,” Danny said. “You want to two-step with me?”

Hamilton looked away. “I was just saying.”

“You were just saying,” Danny said.

“Gents,” McKenna said.

Danny and Jersey Jerry placed their palms on the hood of the cruiser and McKenna made a show of frisking them.

“This is bullshit,” Danny whispered. “They’ll see through it.”

“Nonsense,” McKenna said. “Ye of little faith.”

McKenna placed loose cuffs on their hands and pushed them into the back of the cruiser. He got behind the wheel and drove them all back down Harrison.

In the car, Hamilton said, “You know? If I ever see you off the job—”

“You’ll what?” Danny said. “Cry yourself stupider?”

McKenna drove Danny back to his cover apartment in Roxbury and pulled to the curb a half block up from the building.

“How you feeling?”

Truth was, Danny felt like weeping. Not for any particular reason, just a general and all-consuming exhaustion. He rubbed his hands over his face.

“I’m okay.”

“You shot the bejesus out of an Eye-tie terrorist under extraordinary duress just four hours ago, then went right into an undercover meeting with another possible terrorist and—”

“Fucking Eddie, they’re not—”

“What’d you say?”

“—fucking terrorists. They’re Communists. And they’d love to see us fail, yes, see this whole government collapse and cascade into the ocean. I grant you that. But they’re not bomb throwers.”

“You’re naïve, lad.”

“So be it.” Danny reached for the door handle.

“Dan.” McKenna put a hand on his shoulder.

Danny waited.

“Too much has been asked of you this last couple of months. I agree, as God is my judge. But it won’t be much longer ’til you’ll have your gold shield. And all, all will be perfectly brilliant then.”

Danny nodded so Eddie would let go of his shoulder. Eddie dropped his hand.

“No, it won’t,” Danny said and got out of the car.

The next afternoon, in the confessional of a church he’d never entered before, Danny knelt and blessed himself.

The priest said, “You smell like liquor.”

“That’s because I’ve been drinking, Father. I’d share, but I left the bottle back at my apartment.”

“Have you come to confess, son?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You either sinned or you didn’t.”

“I shot a man to death yesterday. Outside a church. I figure you’ve heard about it by now.”

“I have, yes. The man was an anarchist. You …?”

“Yes. I shot him three times. Tried five times,” Danny said, “but I missed twice. Thing is, Father? You’ll tell me I did right. Yeah?”

“That’s for God to—”

“He was going to blow up a church. One of yours.”

“Correct. You did right.”

“But he’s dead. I removed him from this earth. And I can’t shake the feeling …”

A long silence followed, made all the longer by the fact that it was church silence; it smelled of incense and oil soap and was hemmed in by thick velvet and dark wood.

“What feeling?”

“The feeling that we — me and the guy I shot? — we’re just living in the same barrel? See?”

“No. You’re being obtuse.”

“Forgive me,” Danny said. “There’s this big barrel of shit. See? And it’s—”

“Watch your language.”

“—where the ruling class and all the Haves don’t live, right? It’s where they fucking throw every consequence they don’t want to think about. And the idea—”

“You are in a house of God.”

“—the idea is, Father? The idea is that we’re supposed to play nice and go away when they’re done with us. Accept what they give us and drink it and eat it and clap for it and say, ‘Mmmm, more, please. Thanks.’ And, Father, I gotta tell you, I’ve about had my fucking fill.”

“Leave this church at once.”

“Sure. You coming?”

“I think you need to sober up.”

“And I think you need to leave this mausoleum you’re hiding in and see how your parishioners really live. Done that lately, Father?”

“I—”

“Ever?”

Please,” Louis Fraina said, “take a seat.”

It was just past midnight. Three days since the manufactured assassination attempt. At around eleven, Pyotr Glaviach had called Danny and given him the address of a bakery in Mattapan. When Danny arrived, Pyotr Glaviach stepped from the Olds Model M and waved Danny into an alley that ran between the bakery and a tailor. Danny followed him around to the back and into the storeroom. Louis Fraina waited in a hard-backed wooden chair with its twin directly across from him.

Danny took that seat, close enough to the small, dark-eyed man to reach out and stroke the whiskers of his neatly trimmed beard. Fraina’s eyes never left Danny’s face. They were not the blazing eyes of a fanatic. They were the eyes of an animal so used to being hunted that some boredom had settled in. He crossed his legs at the ankles and leaned back in his chair. “Tell me what happened after we left.”

Danny jerked a thumb behind him. “I’ve told Nathan and Comrade Glaviach.”

Fraina nodded. “Tell me.”

“Where is Nathan, by the way?”

Fraina said, “Tell me what happened. Who was this man who tried to kill me?”

“I never got his name. Never even spoke with him.”

“Yes, he seems quite the ghost.”

Danny said, “I tried to. The police attacked immediately. They hit me, they hit him, they hit me some more. Then they threw us both in the back of the car and drove us to the station house.”

“Which one?”

“Roxbury Crossing.”

“And you exchanged no pleasantries with my assailant on the ride there?”

“I tried. He didn’t respond. Then the copper told me to shut my hole.”

“He said that? Shut your hole?”

Danny nodded. “Threatened to run his nightstick through it.”

Fraina’s eyes sparkled. “Vivid.”

The floor was caked with old flour. The room smelled of yeast and sweat and sugar and mold. Large brown tins, some the height of a man, stood against the walls, and bags of flour and grain were stacked between them. A bare lightbulb dangled from a chain in the center of the room and left pools of shadow where rodents squeaked. The ovens had probably been shut off since noon, but the room was thick with heat.

Fraina said, “A matter of feet, wouldn’t you say?”

Danny put a hand in his pocket and found the button among some coins. He pressed it to his palm and leaned forward. “Comrade?”

“The would-be assassin.” He waved at the air around him. “This man no one can find a record of. This man who went unseen, even by a comrade I know who was in the holding cell at Roxbury Crossing that night. A veteran of the first czarist revolution, this man, a true Lett like our comrade, Pyotr.”

The big Estonian leaned against the large cooler door, his arms crossed, and gave no indication he’d heard his name.

“He didn’t see you there, either,” Fraina said.

“They never put me in the holding pen,” Danny said. “They had their fun and shipped me in a paddy wagon to Charlestown. I told Comrade Bishop as much.”

Fraina smiled. “Well, it’s settled, then. Everything is fine.” He clapped his hands. “Eh, Pyotr? What did I tell you?”

Glaviach kept his eyes on the shelving behind Danny’s head. “Everything fine.”

“Everything is fine,” Fraina said.

Danny sat there, the heat of the place finding his feet, the underside of his scalp.

Fraina leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Except, well, this man was only seven or eight feet away when he fired. How do you miss at that range?”

Danny said, “Nerves?”

Fraina stroked his beard and nodded. “That’s what I thought at first. But then I began to wonder. There were three of us clustered together. Four, if we count you bringing up the rear. And beyond us? A big, heavy touring car. So, I put it to you, Comrade Sante, where did the bullets go?”

“The sidewalk, I’d guess.”

Fraina clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. We checked there. We checked everywhere within a two-block radius. This was easy to do, because the police never checked. They never looked. A gun fired within city limits. Two shots discharged? And the police treated it as if it were no more than a hurled insult.”

“Hmm,” Danny said. “That is—”

“Are you federal?”

“Comrade?”

Fraina removed his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “Justice Department? Immigration? Bureau of Investigation?”

“I don’t—”

He stood and placed his glasses back on. He looked down at Danny. “Or local, perhaps? Part of this undercover dragnet we hear is sweeping the city? I understand the anarchists in Revere have a new member who claims to be from the north of Italy but speaks with the accent and cadence of one from the south.” He strolled around to the back of Danny’s chair. “And you, Daniel? Which are you?”

“I’m Daniel Sante, a machinist from Harlansburg, Pennsylvania. I’m no bull, Comrade. I’m no government slug. I am exactly who I say I am.”

Fraina crouched behind him. He leaned in and whispered in Danny’s ear, “What other response would you give?”

“None.” Danny tilted his head until he could see Fraina’s lean profile. “Because it’s the truth.”

Fraina placed his hands on the back of the chair. “A man tries to assassinate me and just happens to be a terrible shot. You come to my rescue because you just happen to be exiting at the same time as I. The police just happen to arrive within seconds of the gunshot. Everyone in the restaurant is detained and yet none are questioned. The assassin vanishes from police custody. You are released without charge and, in the height of providence, just happen to be a writer of some talent.” He strolled around to the front of the chair again and tapped his temple. “You see how fortunate all these events are?”

“Then they’re fortunate.”

“I don’t believe in luck, Comrade. I believe in logic. And this story of yours has none.” He crouched in front of Danny. “Go now. Tell your bourgeois bosses that the Lettish Workingman’s Society is above reproach and violates no law. Tell them not to send a second rube to prove otherwise.”

Danny heard footsteps enter the storeroom behind him. More than a pair. Maybe three pair, all told.

“I am exactly who I say,” Danny said. “I am dedicated to the cause and to the revolution. I’m not leaving. I refuse to deny who I am for any man.”

Fraina raised himself from his haunches. “Go.”

“No, Comrade.”

Pyotr Glaviach used one elbow to push himself away from the cooler door. His other arm was behind his back.

“One last time,” Fraina said. “Go.”

“I can’t, Comrade. I—”

Four pistols cocked their hammers. Three came from behind him, the fourth from Pyotr Glaviach.

“Stand!” Glaviach shouted, the echo pinging off the tight stone walls.

Danny stood.

Pyotr Glaviach stepped up behind him. His shadow spilled onto the floor in front of Danny, and that shadow extended one arm.

Fraina gave Danny a mournful smile. “This is the only option left for you and it could expire at a moment’s notice.” He swept his arm toward the door.

“You’re wrong.”

“No,” Fraina said. “I am not. Good night.”

Danny didn’t reply. He walked past him. The four men in the rear of the room cast their shadows on the wall in front of him. He opened the door with a fiery itch at the base of his skull and exited the bakery into the night.

The last thing Danny did in the Daniel Sante rooming house was shave off his beard in the second-floor bathroom. He used shears to cut away the majority of it, placing the thick tufts in a paper bag, and then soaked it with hot water and applied the shaving cream in a thick lather. With each stroke of the straight razor, he felt leaner, lighter. When he wiped off the last stray spot of cream and the final errant hair, he smiled.

Danny and Mark Denton met with Commissioner O’Meara and Mayor Andrew Peters in the mayor’s office on a Saturday afternoon.

The mayor struck Danny as a misplaced man, as if he didn’t fit in his office, his big desk, his stiff, high-collared shirt and tweed suit. He played with the phone on his desk a lot and aligned and realigned his desk blotter.

He smiled at them once they’d taken their seats. “The BPD’s finest, I suspect, eh, gents?”

Danny smiled back.

Stephen O’Meara stood behind the desk. Before he’d said a word, he commanded the room. “Mayor Peters and I have looked into the budget for this coming year and we see places we could move a dollar here, a dollar there. It won’t, I assure you, be enough. But it’s a start, gentlemen, and it’s a little more than that — it’s a public acknowledgment that we take your grievances seriously. Isn’t that right, Mr. Mayor?”

Peters looked up from his pencil holder. “Oh, absolutely, yes.”

“We’ve consulted with city sanitation crews about launching an investigation into the health conditions of each and every station house. They’ve agreed to commence within the first month of the new year.” O’Meara met Danny’s eyes. “Is that a satisfactory start?”

Danny looked over at Mark and then back at the commissioner. “Absolutely, sir.”

Mayor Peters said, “We’re still paying back loans on the Commonwealth Avenue sewer project, gentlemen, not to mention the streetcar route expansions, the home fuel crisis during the war, and a substantial operating deficit for the public schools in the white districts. Our bond rating is low and sinking further. And now cost of living has exploded at an unprecedented rate. So we do — we very much do — appreciate your concerns. We do. But we need time.”

“And faith,” O’Meara said. “Just a bit more of that. Would you gentlemen be willing to poll your fellow officers? Get a list of their grievances and personal accounts of their day-to-day experiences on the job? Personal testimonials as to how this fiscal imbalance is affecting their home lives? Would you be willing to fully document the sanitation conditions at the station houses and list what you believe are repeated abuses of power at the upper chains of command?”

“Without fear of reprisal?” Danny said.

“Without a one,” O’Meara said. “I assure you.”

“Then certainly,” Mark Denton said.

O’Meara nodded. “Let’s meet back here in one month. In that time, let’s refrain from voicing complaints in the press or stirring up the bees’ nest in any way. Is that acceptable?”

Danny and Mark nodded.

Mayor Peters stood and shook their hands. “I may be new to the post, gentlemen, but I hope to reward your confidence.”

O’Meara came from around the desk and pointed at the office doors. “When we open those doors, the press will be there. Camera flashes, shouted questions, the like. Are any of you undercover at the moment?”

Danny couldn’t believe how quick the smile broke across his face or how inexplicably proud he felt to say, “Not anymore, sir.”

In a rear booth at the Warren Tavern, Danny handed Eddie McKenna a box that contained his Daniel Sante clothes and rooming-house key, various notes he’d taken that hadn’t been included in his reports, and all the literature he’d studied to inform his cover.

Eddie pointed at Danny’s clean-shaven face. “So, you’re done.”

“I am done.”

McKenna picked through the box, then pushed it aside. “There’s no chance he could change his mind? Wake up after a good night’s sleep and—?”

Danny gave him a look that cut him off.

“Think they would have killed you?”

“No. Logically? No. But when you hear four hammers cock at your back?”

McKenna nodded. “Sure that’d make Christ Himself revisit the wisdom of His convictions.”

They sat in silence for a while, each to his own drink and his own thoughts.

“I could build you a new cover, move you to a new cell. There’s one in—”

“Stop. Please. I’m done. I don’t even know what the fuck we were doing. I don’t know why—”

“Ours is not to reason why.”

“Mine is not to reason why. This is your baby.”

McKenna shrugged.

“What did I do here?” Danny’s gaze fell on his open palms. “What was accomplished? Outside of making lists of union guys and harmless Bolsheviki—”

“There are no harmless Reds.”

“—what the fuck was the point?”

Eddie McKenna drank from his brown bucket of beer and then relit his cigar, one eye squinting through the smoke. “We’ve lost you.”

“What?” Danny said.

“We have, we have,” Eddie said softly.

“I don’t know what you’re on about. It’s me. Danny.”

McKenna looked up at the ceiling tiles. “When I was a boy, I stayed with an uncle for a time. Can’t remember if he was on me mother’s side or me da’s, but he was gray Irish trash just the same. No music to him a’tall, no love, no light. But he had a dog, yeah? Mangy mutt, he was, and dumb as peat, but he had love, he had light. Sure he’d dance in place when he saw me coming up the hill, his tail awagging, dance for the sheer joy of knowing I’d pet him, I’d run with him, I’d rub his patchy belly.” Eddie drew on his cigar and exhaled slowly. “Became sick, he did. Worms. Started sneezing blood. Time comes, me uncle tells me to take him to the ocean. Cuffs me when I refuse. Cuffs me worse when I cry. So I carry the cur to the ocean. I carry him out to a point just above me chin and I let him go. I’m supposed to hold him down for a count of sixty, but there’s little point. He’s weak and feeble and sad and he sinks without a noise. I walk back into shore, and me uncle cuffs me again. ‘For what?’ I shout. He points. And there he is, that feeble brick-headed mutt, swimming back in. Swimming toward me. Eventually, he makes it to shore. He’s shivering, he’s heaving, he’s sopping wet. A marvel, this dog, a romantic, a hero. And he looks at me just in time for me uncle to bring the axe down on his spine and cut him in half.”

He sat back. He lifted his cigar from the ashtray. A barmaid removed half a dozen mugs from the next table over. She walked back to the bar, and the room was quiet.

“Fuck you tell a story like that for?” Danny said. “Fuck’s wrong with you?”

“It’s what’s wrong with you, boy. You’ve got ‘fair’ in your head now. Don’t deny it. You think it’s attainable. You do. I can see it.”

Danny leaned in, his beer sloshing down the side of his bucket as he lowered it from his mouth. “I’m supposed to fucking learn something from the dog story? What — that life is hard? That the game is rigged? You think this is news? You think I believe the unions or the Bolshies or the BSC stand a spit of a chance of getting their due?”

“Then why are you doing it? Your father, your brother, me — we’re worried, Dan. Worried sick. You blew your cover with Fraina because some part of you wanted to blow it.”

“No.”

“And yet you sit there and tell me you know that no reasonable or sensible government — local, state, or federal — will ever allow the Sovietizing of this country. Not ever. But you continue to get deeper and deeper into the BSC muck and further and further from those who hold you dear. Why? You’re me godson, Dan? Why?”

“Change hurts.”

“That’s your answer?”

Danny stood. “Change hurts, Eddie, but believe me, it’s coming.”

“It isn’t.”

“It’s got to.”

Eddie shook his head. “There are fights, m’ boy, and there is folly. And I fear you’ll soon learn the difference.”

Chapter nineteen

In the kitchen with Nora late of a Tuesday afternoon, Nora just back from her job at the shoe factory, Luther chopping vegetables for the soup, Nora peeling potatoes, when Nora said, “You’ve a girl?”

“Hmm?”

She gave him those pale eyes of hers, the sparkle of them like a flickering match. “You heard what I said. Have you a girl somewhere?”

Luther shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“Sure, you’re lying.”

“Uh? What makes you say that?”

“I can hear it in your voice, I can.”

“Hear what?”

She gave him a throaty laugh. “Love.”

“Just ’cause I love someone don’t mean she’s mine.”

“Now that’s the truest thing you’ve said all week. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean …” She trailed off and went back to humming softly as she peeled the potatoes, the humming a habit of hers Luther was fairly certain she was unaware of.

Luther used the flat of the knife to push the chopped celery off the cutting board and into the pot. He sidestepped Nora to pull some carrots from the colander in the sink and took them back down the counter with him, chopped off their tops before lining them up and slicing them four at a time.

“She pretty?” Nora asked.

“She’s pretty,” Luther said.

“Tall? Short?”

“She kinda small,” Luther said. “Like you.”

“I’m small, am I?” She gave Luther a look over her shoulder, one hand holding the peeler, and Luther, as he had before, got the sense of the volcanic from her in the most innocent of moments. He didn’t know too many other white women and no Irishwomen, but he’d long had the feeling that Nora was a woman worth treading very carefully around.

“You ain’t big,” he said.

She looked over at him for a long time. “We’ve been acquainted for months, Mr. Laurence, and it occurred to me at the factory today that I know next to nothing, I do, about you.”

Luther chuckled. “Pot calling the kettle black if ever I did hear it.”

“You’ve some meaning you’re keeping to yourself over there?”

“Me?” Luther shook his head. “I know you’re from Ireland but not where exactly.”

“Do you know Ireland?”

“Not a whit.”

“Then what difference would it make?”

“I know you came here five years ago. I know you are courting Mr. Connor but don’t seem to think about it much. I—”

“Excuse me, boy?”

Luther had discovered that when the Irish said “boy” to a colored man it didn’t mean what it meant when a white American said it. He chuckled again. “Hit a nerve there, I did, lass?”

Nora laughed. She held the back of her wet hand to her lips, the peeler sticking out. “Do that again.”

“What?”

“The brogue, the brogue.”

“Ah, sure, I don’t know what you’re on about.”

She leaned against the side of the sink and stared at him. “That is Eddie McKenna’s voice, right down to the timbre itself, it ’tis.”

Luther shrugged. “Not bad, uh?”

Nora’s face sobered. “Don’t ever let him hear you do that.”

“You think I’m out my mind?”

She placed the peeler on the counter. “You miss her. I can see it in your eyes.”

“I miss her.”

“What’s her name?”

Luther shook his head. “I’d just as soon hold on to that for the moment, Miss O’Shea.”

Nora wiped her hands on her apron. “What’re you running from, Luther?”

“What’re you?”

She smiled and her eyes sparkled again but this time from the wet in them. “Danny.”

He nodded. “I seen that. Something else, though, too. Something further back.”

She turned back to the sink, lifted out the pot filled with water and potatoes. She carried it to the sink. “Ah, we’re an interesting pair, Mr. Laurence. Are we not? All our intuition used for others, never ourselves.”

“Lotta good it does us, then,” Luther said.

She said that?” Danny said from the phone in his rooming house. “She was running from me?”

“She did.” Luther sat at the phone table in the Giddreauxs’ foyer.

“She say it like she was tired of running?”

“No,” Luther said. “She said it like she was right used to it.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

“No. Thanks, really. Eddie come at you yet?”

“He let me know he’s on his way. Not how or what yet, though.”

“Okay. Well, when he does …”

“I’ll let you know.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Nora?”

“Yeah.”

“I think she’s too much woman for you.”

Danny’s laugh was a booming thing. Could make you feel like a bomb went off at your feet. “You do, uh?”

“Just an opinion.”

“’Night, Luther.”

“’Night, Danny.”

One of Nora’s secrets was that she smoked. Luther had caught her at it early in his time at the Coughlin house, and it had since become their habit to sneak out for one together while Mrs. Ellen Coughlin prepared herself for dinner in the bathroom but long before Mr. Connor or Captain Coughlin had returned from work.

One of those times, on a high-sun-deep-chill afternoon, Luther asked her about Danny again.

“What of him?”

“You said you were running from him.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

“I was sober?”

“In the kitchen that time.”

“Ah.” She shrugged and exhaled at the same time, her cigarette held up in front of her face. “Well, maybe he ran from me.”

“Oh?”

Her eyes flashed, that danger you sensed in her getting closer to the surface. “You want to know something about your friend Aiden? Something you’d never guess?”

Luther knew it was one of those times silence was your best friend.

Nora blew out another stream of smoke, this one coming out fast and bitter. “He seems very much the rebel, yeah? Very independent and free-thinking, he does, yeah?” She shook her head, took another hard drag off her cigarette. “He’s not. In the end, he’s not a’tall.” She looked at Luther, a smile forcing its way onto her face. “In the end, he couldn’t live with my past, that past you’re so curious about. He wanted to be, I believe the word was, ‘respectable.’ And I, sure, I couldn’t give him that.”

“But Mr. Connor, he don’t strike me as the type who—”

She shook her head repeatedly. “Mr. Connor knows nothing of my past. Only Danny. And look how the knowledge tossed us in the fire.” She gave him another tight smile and stubbed out her cigarette with her toe. She lifted the dead butt off the frozen porch and placed it in the pocket of her apron. “Are we done with the questions for the day, Mr. Laurence?”

He nodded.

“What’s her name?” she said.

He met her gaze. “Lila.”

“Lila,” she said, her voice softening. “A fine name, that.”

Luther and Clayton Tomes were doing structural demolition in the Shawmut Avenue building on a Saturday so cold they could see their breath. Even so, the demo was such hard work — crowbar and sledgehammer work — that within the first hour they’d stripped down to their undershirts.

Close to noon, they took a break and ate the sandwiches Mrs. Giddreaux had prepared for them and drank a couple beers.

“After this,” Clayton said, “we — what? — patch up that subflooring?”

Luther nodded and lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke in a long, weary exhale. “Next week, week after, we can run the electrical up back of them walls, maybe get around to some of them pipes you so excited about.”

“Shit.” Clayton shook his head and let out a loud yawn. “All this work for nothing but a higher ideal? Place for us in Nigger Heaven, sure.”

Luther gave him a soft smile but didn’t say anything. He’d lost comfort with saying “nigger,” even though the only time he’d ever used it was around other colored men. But both Jessie and the Deacon Broscious had used it constantly, and some part of Luther felt he’d entombed it with them back at the Club Almighty. He couldn’t explain it any better than that, just that it didn’t feel right coming off his tongue any longer. Like most things, he assumed, the feeling would pass, but for now….

“Well, I guess we might as well—”

He stopped talking when he saw McKenna stroll through the front door like he owned the damn building. He stood in the foyer, looking up at the dilapidated staircase.

“Damn,” Clayton whispered. “Police.”

“I know it. He’s a friend of my boss. And he act all friendly, but he ain’t. Ain’t no friend of ours, nohow.”

Clayton nodded because they’d both met plenty of white men that fit that description in their lives. McKenna entered the room where they’d been working, a big room, nearest to the kitchen, probably had been a dining room fifty years ago.

The first words out of McKenna’s mouth: “Canton?”

“Columbus,” Luther said.

“Ah, right enough.” McKenna smiled at Luther, then turned to Clayton. “I don’t believe we’ve met.” He held out a meaty hand. “Lieutenant McKenna, BPD.”

“Clayton Tomes.” Clayton shook the hand.

McKenna gripped his hand, kept shaking it, his smile frozen to his face, his eyes searching Clayton’s and then Luther’s, seeming to look right into his heart.

“You work for the widow on M Street. Mrs. Wagenfeld. Correct?”

Clayton nodded. “Uh, yes, suh.”

“Just so.” McKenna dropped Clayton’s hand. “She’s rumored to keep a small fortune in Spanish doubloons beneath her coal bin. Any truth to this, Clayton?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.”

“Wouldn’t tell anyone anyway if you did!” McKenna laughed and slapped Clayton on the back so hard Clayton stumbled forward a couple of steps.

McKenna stepped close to Luther. “What brought you here?”

“Suh?” Luther said. “You know I live with the Giddreauxs. This is going to be the headquarters.”

McKenna shot his eyebrows at Clayton. “The headquarters? Of what?”

“The NAACP,” Luther said.

“Ah, grand stuff,” McKenna said. “I remodeled me own house once. A constant headache, that.” He moved a crowbar to the side with his foot. “You’re in the demolition phase, I see.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Coming along?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Almost there, I’d say. ’Least on this floor. My original question, Luther, however, did not pertain to your working in this building. No. When I asked what brought you here, the ‘here’ I referred to was Boston herself. For instance, Clayton Tomes, where do you hail from, son?”

“The West End, sir. Born and raised.”

“Exactly,” McKenna said. “Our coloreds tend to be homegrown, Luther. Few come here without a good reason when they could find much more of their kind in New York or, Lord knows, Chicago or Detroit. So what brought you here?”

“A job,” Luther said.

McKenna nodded. “To come eight hundred miles just to drive Ellen Coughlin to church? Seems funny.”

Luther shrugged. “Well, then, I guess it’s funny, suh.”

“’Tis, ’tis,” McKenna said. “A girl?”

“Suh?”

“You got yourself a girl up these parts?”

“No.”

McKenna rubbed the stubble along his jaw, looked over at Clayton again, as if they played this game together. “See, I’d believe you came eight hundred miles for cunny. Now that’s a valid story. But, as it is?”

He stared at Luther for a long time with that blithe, open face of his.

Once the silence had gone on into its second minute, Clayton said, “We best get back at it, Luther.”

McKenna’s head turned, as if on a slow swivel, and he gave the open gaze to Clayton Tomes who quickly looked away.

McKenna turned back to Luther. “Don’t let me hold you up, Luther. I’d best be getting back to work myself. Thank you for the reminder, Clayton.”

Clayton shook his head at his own stupidity.

“Back out to the world,” McKenna said with a weary sigh. “These days? People who make a good wage think it’s okay to bite the hand that feeds them. Do you know what the bedrock of capitalism is, gents?”

“No, suh.”

“Sure don’t, sir.”

“The bedrock of capitalism, gentlemen, is the manufacture or mining of goods for the purpose of sale. That’s it. That’s what this country is built on. And so the heroes of this country are not soldiers or athletes or even presidents. The heroes are the men who built our railroads and our automobiles and our cotton mills and factories. They keep this country running. The men who work for them, therefore, should be grateful to be a part of the process that forms the freest society in the known world.” He reached out and clapped Luther on both shoulders. “But lately they’re not. Can you believe that?”

“There isn’t much of a subversive movement among us colored, Lieutenant, suh.”

McKenna’s eyes widened. “Where have you lived, Luther? There’s quite the lefty movement going on in Harlem right now. Your high-toned colored got himself some education and started reading his Marx and his Booker T. and his Frederick Douglass and now you got men like Du Bois and Garvey and some would argue they’re just as dangerous as Goldman and Reed and the atheistic Wobblies.” He held up a finger. “Some would argue. Some would even claim that the NAACP is just a front, Luther, for subversive and seditionist ideas.” He patted Luther’s cheek softly with a gloved hand. “Some.”

He turned and looked up at the scorched ceiling.

“Well, you’ve your work cut out for you, lads. I’ll leave you to it.”

He placed his hands behind his back and strolled across the floor, and neither Luther nor Clayton took a breath until he’d exited the foyer and descended the front steps.

“Oh, Luther,” Clayton said.

“I know it.”

“Whatever you did to that man, you got to undo it.”

“I didn’t do nothing. He just that way.”

“What way? White?”

Luther nodded.

“And mean,” Luther said. “Kinda mean just keeps eating till the day it dies.”

Chapter twenty

After leaving Special Squads, Danny returned to foot patrol in his old precinct, the Oh-One on Hanover Street. He was assigned to walk his beat with Ned Wilson, who at two months shy of his twenty, had stopped giving a shit five years ago. Ned spent most of their shift drinking or playing craps at Costello’s. Most days, he and Danny saw each other for about twenty minutes after they punched in and five minutes before they punched out. The rest of the time Danny was free to do as he chose. If he made a hard bust, he called Costello’s from a call box and Ned met up with him in time to march the perp up the stairs of the station house. Otherwise, Danny roamed. He walked the entire city, dropping in on as many station houses as he could reach in a day — the Oh-Two in Court Square, down to the Oh-Four on LaGrange, across to the Oh-Five in the South End and as far up the line as he could go on foot in the eighteen station houses of the BPD. The three in West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Jamaica Plain were left for Emmett Strack; the Oh-Seven in Eastie, for Kevin McRae; Mark Denton covered Dorchester, Southie, and the One-Four in Brighton. Danny worked the rest — downtown, the North and South Ends, and Roxbury.

The job was recruitment and testimony. Danny glad-handed, cajoled, harangued, and persuaded a solid one-third of all the cops he approached into writing down an accurate account of his workweek, his debts versus his income, and the conditions of the station house in which he worked. In his first three weeks back on the beat, he roped in sixty-eight men to meetings of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall.

Whereas his time in Special Squads had been marked by a self-loathing so acute he now wondered how he’d managed to do any of it, his time doing BSC work in hopes of forming a union with true bargaining power made him feel a sense of purpose that bordered on the evangelical.

This, he decided one afternoon as he returned to the station house with three more testimonials from patrolmen in the One-Oh, was what he’d been looking for since Salutation Street: a reason why he’d been spared.

In his box, he found a message from his father asking him to come by the house that night after his shift. Danny knew few good things had ever come from one of his father’s summonses, but he caught the streetcar out to South Boston just the same and rode across the city through a soft snow.

Nora answered the door, and Danny could tell she hadn’t expected him to be on the other side of it. She pulled her house sweater tight across her body and took a sudden step back.

“Danny.”

“Evening.”

He’d barely seen her since the flu, barely seen anyone in the family except for the Sunday dinner several weeks back when he’d met Luther Laurence.

“Come in, come in.”

He stepped over the threshold and removed his scarf. “Where’s Ma and Joe?”

“Gone to bed,” she said. “Turn around.”

He did and she brushed the snow off the shoulders and back of his coat.

“Here. Give it to me now.”

He removed the coat and caught a faint whiff of the perfume she wore ever so sparingly. It smelled of roses and a hint of orange.

“How are you?” Danny looked in her pale eyes, thinking: I could die.

“Just fine. Yourself?”

“Good, good.”

She hung his coat on the tree in the hallway and carefully smoothed his scarf with her hand. It was a curious gesture, and Danny stopped breathing for a moment as he watched her. She placed the scarf on a separate hook and turned back to him and just as quickly dropped her eyes, as if she’d been caught at something, which, in a way, she had.

I would do anything, Danny wanted to say. Anything. I’ve been a fool. First with you, then after you, and now as I stand here before you. A fool.

He said, “I—”

“Hmm?”

“You look great,” he said.

Her eyes met his again and they were clear and almost warm. “Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“You know what I mean.” She looked at the floor, hugging her elbows.

“I’m …”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“I know.” She nodded. “You’ve apologized enough. More than enough. You wanted to be” — she looked up at him — “respectable. Yes?”

Christ — not that word again, thrown back in his face. If he could remove one word from his vocabulary, erase it so that it had never taken hold and thus he never could have used it, it would be that one. He’d been drunk when he said it. Drunk and taken aback by her sudden and sordid revelations about Ireland. About Quentin Finn.

Respectable. Shit.

He held out his hands, at a loss for words.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said. “I’ll be the respectable one.”

He shook his head. “No.”

And he could tell by the fury that sprang into her face that she’d misinterpreted his meaning yet again. He had meant to imply that respectability was a goal unworthy of her. But she took it to mean it was something she could never attain.

Before he could explain, she said, “Your brother’s asked me to marry him.”

His heart stopped. His lungs. His brain. The circumnavigation of his blood.

“And?” The word came out as if strangled by vines.

“I told him I’m thinking about it,” she said.

“Nora.” He reached for her arm but she stepped away.

“Your father’s in the study.”

She walked away down the hall, and Danny knew, yet again, that he’d failed her. He was supposed to have responded differently. Faster? Slower? Less predictably? What? If he’d dropped to his knees and made his own proposal, would she have done anything but run? Yet he felt he was supposed to have made some kind of grand gesture, if only so she could have turned it down. And that would have somehow balanced the scales.

The door to his father’s study opened as he stood there. “Aiden.”

“Danny,” he corrected him through gritted teeth.

In his father’s study, the snow falling through the black beyond the windows, Danny sat in one of the leather armchairs that faced the desk. His father had a fire going and it reflected off the hearth and gave the room a glow the color of whiskey.

Thomas Coughlin still wore his uniform, the tunic open at the neck, his captain’s bars sitting atop the blue shoulders while Danny wore street clothes and felt those bars smirking at him. His father handed him a scotch and sat on the corner of the desk.

His blue eyes cut through his glass as he drained it. He poured a refill from the decanter. He rolled the glass back and forth between his palms and considered his son.

“Eddie tells me you went native.”

Danny caught himself rolling his own glass between his palms and dropped his left hand to his thigh. “Eddie over-dramatizes.”

“Really? Because I’ve been given cause to wonder lately, Aiden, if these Bolshies didn’t rub off on you.” His father gave the room a soft smile and sipped his drink. “Mark Denton is a Bolshevik, you know. Half the BSC members are.”

“Gosh, Dad, they just seem like cops to me.”

“They’re Bolsheviks. Talking of a strike, Aiden? A strike?”

“No one’s said that word in my presence, sir.”

“There’s a principle to be honored here, boy. Can you appreciate that?”

“And which one is that, sir?”

“Public safety above all other ideals for men who hold the badge.”

“Putting food on the table, sir, that’s another ideal.”

His father waved at the sentence like it was smoke. “Did you see the paper today? They’re rioting in Montreal, trying to burn the city wholesale right to the ground. And there’s no police to protect the property or the people and there’s no firemen to put out the fires because they’re all out on strike. It might as well be St. Petersburg.”

“Maybe it’s just Montreal,” Danny said. “Maybe it’s just Boston.”

“We’re not employees, Aiden. We’re civil servants. We protect and we serve.”

Danny allowed himself a smile. It was rare he could watch the old man get worked up needlessly and be the one holding the key to his release. He stubbed out his cigarette and a chuckle escaped his lips.

“You laugh?”

He held up a hand. “Dad, Dad. It’s not going to be Montreal. Really.”

His father’s eyes narrowed and he shifted on the edge of the desk. “How so?”

“You heard what, exactly?”

His father reached into his humidor and removed a cigar. “You confronted Stephen O’Meara. My son. A Coughlin. Speaking out of turn. Now you’re going from station house to station house, collecting affidavits regarding substandard working conditions? You’re recruiting for your purported ‘union’ on city time?”

“He thanked me.”

His father paused, the cigar cutter wrapped around the base of the cigar. “Who?”

“Commissioner O’Meara. He thanked me, Dad, and he asked Mark Denton and me to get those affidavits. He seems to think we’ll resolve the situation very soon.”

“O’Meara?”

Danny nodded. His father’s strong face drained of color. He’d never seen this coming. In a million years, he couldn’t have guessed it. Danny chewed on the inside of his mouth to keep a smile from breaking wide across his face.

Got you, he wanted to say. Twenty-seven years on this planet and I finally got you.

His father surprised him even further when he came off the desk and held out his hand. Danny stood and took it and his father’s grip was strong and he pulled Danny to him and clapped him once on the back.

“God, you made us proud, then, son. Damn proud.” He let go of his hand and clapped his shoulders and then sat back on the desk. “Damn proud,” his father repeated with a sigh. “I’m just relieved it’s all over, this whole mess.”

Danny sat down. “Me, too, sir.”

His father fingered the blotter on his desktop and Danny watched the strength and guile return to his face like a second layer of skin. A new order of business in the offing. His father already beginning to circle.

“How do you feel about Nora and Connor’s impending nuptials?”

Danny held his father’s gaze and kept his voice steady. “Fine, sir. Just fine. They’re a handsome couple.”

“They are, they are,” his father said. “I can’t tell you what a trial it’s been for your mother and me to keep him from sneaking up to her room at night. Like children, they are.” He walked around to the back of the desk and looked out at the snow. Danny could see both their faces reflected in the window. His father noticed it, too, and smiled.

“You’re the spitting image of my Uncle Paudric. Have I ever told you that?”

Danny shook his head.

“Biggest man in Clonakilty,” his father said. “Oh, he could drink something fierce and he’d get a sight unreasonable when he did. A publican once refused him service? Why, Paudric tore out the bar between them. Heavy oak, Aiden, this bar. And he just tore a piece of it out and went and poured himself another pint. A legendary man, really. Oh, and the ladies loved him. Much like you in that regard. Everyone loved Paudric when he was sober. And you? Everyone loves you, don’t they, son? Women, children, mangy Italians and mangy dogs. Nora.”

Danny put his drink on the desk. “What did you say?”

His father turned from the window. “I’m not blind, boy. You two may have told yourselves one thing, and she may very well love Con’ in a different way. And maybe it’s the better way.” His father shrugged. “But you—”

“You’re on thin fucking ice, sir.”

His father looked at him, his mouth half-open.

“Just so you know,” Danny said and could hear the tightness in his own voice.

Eventually his father nodded. It was the sage nod, that one that let you know he was acknowledging one aspect of your character while pondering flaws in another. He took Danny’s glass. He carried it to the decanter with his own and refilled them.

He handed Danny his glass. “Do you know why I allowed you to box?”

Danny said, “Because you couldn’t have stopped me.”

His father clinked his glass with his own. “Exactly. I’ve known since you were a boy that you could occasionally be prodded or smoothed, but you could never be molded. It’s anathema to you. Has been since you could walk. Do you know I love you, boy?”

Danny met his father’s eyes and nodded. He did. He always had. Strip away all the many faces and many hearts his father showed the world when it suited him, and that face and that heart were always evident.

“I love Con’, of course,” his father said. “I love all my children. But I love you differently because I love you in defeat.”

“Defeat?”

His father nodded. “I can’t rely on you, Aiden. I can’t shape you. This thing with O’Meara is a perfect example. This time it worked out. But it was imprudent. It could have cost you your career. And it’s a move I never would have made or allowed you to make. And that’s the difference with you, of all my children — I can’t predict your fate.”

“But Con’s?”

His father said, “Con’ will be district attorney someday. Without a doubt. Mayor, definitely. Governor, possibly. I’d hoped you’d be chief of police, but it’s not in you.”

“No,” Danny agreed.

“And the thought of you as mayor is one of the more comical ideas I’ve ever imagined.”

Danny smiled.

“So,” Thomas Coughlin said, “your future is something you’re hell-bent on writing with your own pen. Fine. I accept defeat.” He smiled to let Danny know he was only half serious. “But your brother’s future is something I tend to like a garden.” He hoisted himself up on the desk. His eyes were bright and liquid, a sure sign that doom was on the way. “Did Nora ever talk much about Ireland, about what led her here?”

“To me?”

“To you, yes.”

He knows something.

“No, sir.”

“Never mentioned anything about her past life?”

Maybe all of it.

Danny shook his head. “Not to me.”

“Funny,” his father said.

“Funny?”

His father shrugged. “Apparently you two had a less intimate relationship than I’d imagined.”

“Thin ice, sir. Very thin.”

His father gave that an airy smile. “Normally people talk about their pasts. Particularly with close … friends. And yet Nora never does. Have you noticed?”

Danny tried to formulate a reply but the phone in the hall rang. Shrill and loud. His father looked at the clock on the mantel. Almost ten o’clock.

“Calling this home after nine o’clock?” his father said. “Who just signed his own death warrant? Sweet Jesus.”

“Dad?” Danny heard Nora pick up the phone in the hall. “Why do you—?”

Nora knocked softly on the door and Thomas Coughlin said, “It’s open.”

Nora pushed open the doors. “It’s Eddie McKenna, sir. He says it’s urgent.”

Thomas scowled and pushed himself off the desk and walked out into the hall.

Danny, his back to Nora, said, “Wait.”

He came out of the chair and met her in the doorway as they heard his father pick up the phone in the alcove off the kitchen at the other end of the hall and say, “Eddie?”

“What?” Nora said. “Jesus, Danny, I’m tired.”

“He knows,” Danny said.

“What? Who?”

“My father. He knows.”

“What? What does he know? Danny?”

“About you and Quentin Finn, I think. Maybe not all of it, but something. Eddie asked me last month if I knew any Finns. I just chalked it up to coincidence. It’s a common enough name. But the old man, he just—”

He never saw the slap coming. He was in too close and when it connected with his jaw, he actually felt his feet move beneath him. All five foot five of her, and she nearly knocked him to the floor.

“You told him.” She practically spit the words into his face.

She started to turn and he grabbed her wrist. “Are you fucking crazy?” It came out a harsh whisper. “Do you think I would ever—ever, Nora — sell you down the river? Ever? Don’t look away. Look at me. Ever?”

She stared back into his eyes and hers were those of a hunted animal, darting around the room, searching for safety. One more night alive.

“Danny,” she whispered. “Danny.”

“I can’t have you believe that,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Nora, I can’t.”

“I don’t,” she said. She pressed her face to his chest for a moment. “I don’t, I don’t.” She pulled back and looked up at him. “What do I do, Danny? What?”

“I don’t know.” He heard his father replace the receiver in the cradle.

“He knows?”

“He knows something,” Danny said.

His father’s footfalls came down the hall toward them and Nora broke away from him. She gave him one last wild, lost look and then turned into the hall.

“Sir.”

“Nora,” her father said.

“Will you need anything, sir? Tea?”

“No, dear.” His father’s voice sounded shaky as he turned into the room. His face was ashen and his lips trembled. “Good night, dear.”

“Good night, sir.”

Thomas Coughlin closed the pocket doors behind him. He walked to the desk in three long strides and drained his drink and immediately poured himself another. He mumbled something to himself.

“What?” Danny said.

His father turned, as if surprised to find him there. “Cerebral hemorrhage. Went off in his head like a bomb.”

“Sir?”

He held out his glass, his eyes wide. “Struck him to the floor of his parlor and he was off to see the angels before his wife could even get to the phone. Jesus H.”

“Sir, you’re not making sense. Who are you—?”

“He’s dead. Commissioner Stephen O’Meara is dead, Aiden.”

Danny put his hand on the back of a chair.

His father stared out at the walls of his study as if they held answers. “God help this department now.”

Chapter twenty-one

Stephen O’Meara was laid to rest at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline on a white, windless morning. When Danny searched the sky he found neither birds nor sun. Frozen snow covered the ground and the treetops in a marble white cast that matched the sky and the breath of the mourners gathered around the grave. In the sharp air, the echo of Honor Guard’s twenty-one-gun salute sounded less like an echo and more like a second volley of gunfire from another, lesser burial on the other side of the frozen trees.

O’Meara’s widow, Isabella, sat with her three daughters and Mayor Peters. The daughters were all in their thirties and their husbands sat to their left followed by O’Meara’s grandchildren, who shivered and fidgeted. At the end of that long line sat the new commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis. He was a short man with a face the color and texture of a long-discarded orange peel and eyes as dull as his brown shirt. Back when Danny was just out of diapers, Curtis had been mayor, the youngest in the history of the city. He was neither now — young nor mayor — but in 1896 he’d been a fair-haired Republican naïf who’d been fed to the rabid Democratic ward bosses while the Brahmins searched for a longer-term solution of more substantial timber. He’d left the highest office in City Hall one year after he entered it and the appointments that followed for him had so diminished in stature that two decades later, he’d been working as a customs clerk when outgoing Governor McCall appointed him to replace O’Meara.

“I can’t believe he had the guff to show up,” Steve Coyle said later at Fay Hall. “Man hates the Irish. Hates police. Hates Catholics. How’re we going to get a fair shake from him?”

Steve still called himself “police.” He still attended meetings. He had nowhere else to go. Still, his was the question at Fay Hall that morning. A megaphone had been placed on a stand in front of the stage for the men to give testimonials to their late commissioner, while the rest of the rank and file milled among the coffee urns and beer kegs. The captains and lieutenants and inspectors were holding their own memorial across town with fine china and French cuisine at Locke-Ober, but the foot soldiers were here in Roxbury, trying to voice their sense of loss for a man they’d barely known. So the testimonials had begun to fade as each man told a story about a chance meeting with the Great Man, a leader who was “tough but fair.” Milty McElone was up there now, recounting O’Meara’s obsession with uniforms, his ability to spot a tarnished button from ten yards out in a crowded squad room.

On the floor, the men sought out Danny and Mark Denton. The price of coal had jumped another penny in the last month. Men returned from work to icy bedrooms puffed with vapor clouds from their children’s mouths. Christmas was just around the corner. Their wives were sick of darning, sick of serving thinner and thinner soup, angry that they couldn’t shop the Christmas sales at Raymond’s, at Gilchrist’s, at Houghton & Dutton. Other wives could — the wives of trolley drivers, of teamsters, of stevedores and dockworkers — but not the wives of policemen?

“I’m fed up being put out of my own bed,” one patrolman said. “I only sleep there twice a week as it is.”

“They’re our wives,” someone else said, “and they’re only poor because they married us.”

The men who took the megaphone began to express similar sentiments. The testimonials to O’Meara faded away. They could hear the wind pick up outside, see the frost on the windows.

Dom Furst was up at the megaphone now, rolling up the sleeve of his dress blues so they could all see his arm. “These are the bug bites I got at the station just last night, boys. They jump to our beds when they’re tired of riding the backs of the rats. And they answer our gripes with Curtis? He’s one of them!” He pointed off in the general direction of Beacon Hill, his bare arm peppered with red bites. “There’s a lot of men they could have picked to replace Stephen O’Meara and send the message ‘We don’t care.’ But picking Edwin Up-Your-Arse Curtis? That’s saying, ‘Fuck you!’”

Some men banged chairs off the walls. Some threw their coffee cups at the windows.

“We better do something here,” Danny said to Mark Denton.

“Be my guest,” Denton said.

“Fuck you?” Furst shouted. “I say, ‘Fuck them.’ You hear me? Fuck them!”

Danny was still working his way through the crowd toward the megaphone when the whole room picked up the chant:

Fuck them! Fuck them! Fuck them! Fuck them!

He gave Dom a smile and a nod and stepped behind him to the megaphone.

“Gentlemen,” Danny tried but was drowned out by the continuous chant.

“Gentlemen!” he tried again. He saw Mark Denton in the crowd giving him a cocked eyebrow and a cocked smile.

One more time. “Gentlemen!”

A few looked his way. The rest chanted and slashed their fists through the air and spilled beer and coffee on one another.

“Shut. The fuck. Up!” Danny screamed it into the megaphone. Danny took a breath and looked out at the room. “We are your union reps. Yes? Me, Mark Denton, Kevin McRae, Doolie Ford. Let us negotiate with Curtis before you go off half-crazed.”

“When?” someone shouted from the crowd.

Danny looked out at Mark Denton.

“Christmas Day,” Denton said. “We’ve a meeting at the mayor’s office.”

Danny said, “He can’t be taking us lightly, he wants to meet on Christmas morn, can he, boys?”

“Could be he’s half-kike,” someone shouted, and the men broke up laughing.

“Could be,” Danny said. “But it’s a solid step in the right direction, boys. An act of good faith. Let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt until then, yeah?”

Danny looked out at the several hundred faces; they were only half-sold on the idea. A few shouted “Fuck them!” again from the back of the hall and Danny pointed at the photograph of O’Meara that hung on the wall to his left. As dozens of eyes followed his fingers, he realized something terrifying and exhilarating at the same time:

They wanted him to lead them.

Somewhere. Anywhere.

“That man!” he shouted. “That great man was laid to rest today!”

The room quieted, no more shouts. They all looked to Danny, wondering where he was going with this, where he was taking them. He wondered himself.

He lowered his voice. “He died with a dream still unfulfilled.”

Several men lowered their heads.

Jesus, where was he coming up with this stuff?

“That dream was our dream.” Danny craned his head, looked out at the crowd. “Where’s Sean Moore? Sean, I saw you earlier. Raise a hand.”

Sean Moore raised one sheepish hand in the air.

Danny locked eyes with him. “You were there that night, Sean. In the bar, the night before he died. You were with me. You met the man. And what did he say?”

Sean looked at the men around him and shifted on his feet. He gave Danny a weak smile and shook his head.

“He said …” Danny’s eyes swept the room. “He said, ‘A promise is a promise.’”

Half the room clapped. A few whistled.

“A promise is a promise,” Danny repeated.

More clapping, a few shouts.

“He asked whether we had faith in him. Do we? Because it was his dream as much as it was ours.”

Bullshit, Danny knew, but it was working. Chins lifted all over the room. Pride replaced anger.

“He raised his glass—” And here Danny raised his own glass. He could feel his father working through him: the blarney, the appeal to sentiment, the sense of the dramatic. “And he said, ‘To the men of the Boston Police Department, you have no peers in this nation.’ Will you drink to that, boys?”

They drank. They cheered.

Danny dropped his voice several octaves. “If Stephen O’Meara knew we were without peer, Edwin Upton Curtis will know it soon enough.”

They started chanting again, and it took Danny several moments to recognize the word they chanted because they’d broken it into two syllables so it sounded like two words, and he felt blood rush up his face so quickly it felt cold and newly born:

“Cough-lin! Cough-lin! Cough-lin!”

He found Mark Denton’s face in the crowd and saw a grim smile there, a confirmation of something, of previously held suspicions maybe, of fate.

“Cough-lin! Cough-lin! Cough-lin!”

“To Stephen O’Meara!” Danny shouted, raising his glass again to a ghost, to an idea. “And to his dream!”

When he stepped away from the megaphone, the men besieged him. Several even tried to lift him above the fray. It took him ten minutes to reach Mark Denton, who placed a fresh beer in his hand and leaned in to shout into his ear above the crowd noise. “You set a hell of a table.”

“Thanks,” Danny shouted back.

“You’re welcome.” Mark’s smile was taut. He leaned in again. “What happens if we don’t deliver, Dan? You thought of that? What happens?”

Danny looked out at the men, their faces sheened with sweat, several reaching past Mark to slap at Danny’s shoulder, to raise their glasses to him. Exhilarating? Hell, it made him feel like kings must feel. Kings and generals and lions.

“We’ll deliver,” he shouted back at Mark.

“I sure as hell hope so.”

Danny had a drink with Eddie McKenna at the Parker House a few days later, the two of them lucky to find chairs by the hearth on a bitter evening of black gusts and shuddering window frames. “Any news on the new commissioner?”

McKenna fingered his coaster. “Ah, he’s a lackey for the fucking Brahmins, through and through. A purple-veined whore wearing virgin’s clothes, he is. You know he went after Cardinal O’Connell himself last year?”

“What?”

McKenna nodded. “Sponsored a bill at the last Republican Convention to pull all public funding from parochial schools.” He raised his eyebrows. “They can’t take our heritage, they go after our religion. Nothing’s sacred to these Haves. Nothing.”

“So the likelihood of a raise …”

“The raise is not something I’d concern myself with for a bit.”

Danny thought of all the men in Fay Hall the other morning chanting his name and he resisted the urge to punch something. They’d been so close. So close.

Danny said, “I got a meeting with Curtis and the mayor in three days.”

McKenna shook his head. “There’s only one thing to do during regime change — keep your head down.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Ready it for a new hole.”

Danny and Mark Denton met to discuss strategy for their morning meeting with Mayor Peters and Commissioner Curtis. They sat at one of the tables in the back of the Blackstone Saloon on Congress Street. It was a dive, a well-known cops’ bar where the other men, sensing that Mark and Danny held keys to their fate, left them alone.

“A raise of two hundred a year is no longer enough,” Mark said.

“I know,” Danny said. Cost of living had risen so dramatically in the last six months that all that prewar figure would do was restore the men to the poverty level. “What if we come in asking for three hundred?”

Mark rubbed his forehead. “It’s tricky. They could get to the press before us and say we’re greedy. And Montreal definitely hasn’t helped our bargaining position.”

Danny reached through the stack of papers Denton had fanned across the table. “But the numbers bear us out.” He lifted the article he’d clipped from last week’s Traveler on the leaps in the prices of coal, oil, milk, and public transportation.

“But if we ask for three hundred when they’re still digging in their heels on two?”

Danny sighed and rubbed his own forehead. “Let’s just throw it on the table. When they balk, we can come down to two-fifty for veterans, two-ten for new recruits, start building a scale.”

Mark took a sip of his beer, the worst in the city, but also the cheapest. He rubbed the foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand and glanced at the Traveler clipping again. “Might work, might work. What if they flat out rebuff us? They say there’s no money, none, zip?”

“Then we have to come at them on the company-store issue. Ask if they think it’s right that policemen have to pay for their own uniforms and greatcoats and guns and bullets. Ask them how they expect a first-year patrolman working for the 1905 wage and paying for his own equipment to feed his children.”

“I like the children.” Mark gave him a wry smile. “Be ready to play that up if we meet any reporters on the way out and it hasn’t gone our way.”

Danny nodded. “Another thing? We’ve got to bring the average workweek down by ten hours and get time-and-a-half for all special details. The president’s coming back through here in a month, right? Getting off the boat from France and parading right through these streets. You know they’re going to put every cop on that regardless of what he’s already worked that week. Let’s demand time-and-a-half starting there.”

“We’re going to put their backs up with that.”

“Exactly. And once their backs are up, we say we’ll forgo all these demands if they just give us the raise they promised plus the cost-of-living increase.”

Mark stewed on that, sipping his beer, looking out at the snow falling past the graying windows of late afternoon. “We’ve got to hit them with the health-code violations, too,” he said. “I saw rats at the Oh-Nine the other night looked like bullets wouldn’t stun them. We hit them with that, the company-store thing, and the special details?” He sat back. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He clinked his glass off Danny’s. “Now remember something — they will not say yes tomorrow. They’ll hem and haw. When we meet the press afterward, we act conciliatory. We say some progress has been made. But we also call attention to the issues. We mention that Peters and Curtis are fine men who are honestly trying to help us with the company-store problem. To which the reporters will say …?”

“What company-store problem?” Danny smiled, seeing it now.

“Precisely. Same thing on the cost of living. ‘Well, we know Mayor Peters surely hopes to address the disparity between what the men earn and the high price of coal.’”

“Coal’s good,” Danny said, “but it’s still a bit abstract. The children are our aces.”

Mark chuckled. “You’re getting a real feel for this.”

“Lest we forget” — Danny raised his glass — “I am my father’s son.”

In the morning he dressed in his only suit, one Nora had picked out during their secret days of courting in ’17. It was dark blue, a French-back, double-breasted pinstripe and, given the weight he’d lost trying to look like a hungry Bolshevik, too big for him. Still, once he added his hat and ran his fingers along the welt-edge brim to get the curl the way he wanted it, he looked smart, dapper even. As he fiddled with his high collar and made the knot in his tie a little wider to compensate for the gap between the collar and his throat, he practiced somber looks in the mirror, serious looks. He worried he looked too dapper, too much the young rake. Would Curtis and Peters take him seriously? He removed the hat and furrowed his brow. He opened and closed his suit jacket several times. He decided it looked best closed. He practiced the brow-furrow again. He added more Macassar oil to his hair and put the hat back on.

He walked to headquarters at Pemberton Square. It was a beautiful morning, cold but windless, the sky a bright band of steel and the air smelling of chimney smoke, melting snow, hot brick, and roast fowl.

He ran into Mark Denton coming along School Street. They smiled. They nodded. They walked up onto Beacon Hill together.

“Nervous?” Danny asked.

“A bit,” Mark said. “I left Emma and the kids home alone on Christmas morning, so it better be for something. How about you?”

“I choose not to think about it.”

“Wise.”

The front of headquarters was empty, no reporters on the steps. No one at all. They would have expected to see the mayor’s driver, at least, or Curtis’s.

“Around back,” Mark Denton said with an emphatic nod. “Everyone’s around back, probably already nipping from Christmas flasks.”

“That’s it,” Danny said.

They went through the front door and removed their hats and topcoats. They found a small man in a dark suit and red bow tie waiting for them, a slim valise on his lap. His eyes were too big for his small face and gave him a demeanor of perpetual surprise. He was no older than Danny, but his hairline had receded halfway up his head, and the exposed skin was still a bit pink, as if the balding had all occurred last night.

“Stuart Nichols, personal secretary to Commissioner Curtis. If you’ll follow me.”

He didn’t offer his hand or meet their eyes. He rose from the bench and climbed the wide marble stairs and they fell into place behind him.

“Merry Christmas,” Mark Denton said to his back.

Stuart Nichols looked quickly over his shoulder, then straight ahead.

Mark looked over at Danny. Danny shrugged.

“Merry Christmas to you, too,” Danny said.

“Why, thank you, Officer.” Denton barely suppressed a smile, reminding Danny of his and Connor’s days as altar boys. “And a Happy New Year to you, sir.”

Stuart Nichols was either oblivious or didn’t care. At the top of the stairs he led them down a corridor and then stopped outside a frosted glass door with the words BPD COMMISSIONER stenciled in gold leaf. He opened the door and led them into a small anteroom and went behind the desk and lifted the phone.

“They’re here, Commissioner. Yes, sir.”

He hung up the phone. “Take a seat, gentlemen.”

Mark and Danny sat on the leather couch across from the desk and Danny tried to ignore the feeling that something was askew. They sat there for five minutes as Nichols opened his valise, removed a leather-bound notebook, and jotted in it with a silver fountain pen, the nib scratching across the page.

“Is the mayor here yet?” Mark asked, but the phone rang.

Nichols picked it up, listened, and replaced it in the cradle. “He’ll see you now.”

He went back to his notebook and Danny and Mark stood facing the oak door that led into the office. Mark reached for the brass knob and turned it and Danny followed him over the threshold into Curtis’s office.

Curtis sat behind his desk. His ears seemed half as big as his head, the lobes hanging down like flaps. His flesh was florid and splotchy and breath exited his nose with an audible rasp. He flicked his eyes at them. He said, “Captain Coughlin’s son, yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The one who killed the bomber last month.” He nodded, as if the killing were something he’d planned himself. He looked at some papers spread across his desk. “It’s Daniel, is that right?”

“Aiden, sir. But people call me Danny.”

Curtis gave that a small grimace.

“Take a seat, gentlemen.” Behind him an oval window took up most of the wall. The city lay beyond, sharp and still on Christmas morning, white fields and red brick and cobblestone, the harbor stretching off the end of the landmass like a pale blue pan as fingers of chimney smoke climbed and quivered through the sky.

“Patrolman Denton,” Curtis said. “You’re with the Ninth Precinct. Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

Curtis scribbled something on a notepad and kept his eyes there as Danny took his seat beside Mark. “And Patrolman Coughlin — the First Precinct?”

“Yes, sir.”

Another scratch of the pen.

“Is the mayor on his way, sir?” Denton draped his coat across his knee and the right arm of the chair.

“The mayor is in Maine.” Curtis consulted a piece of paper before writing again in his notepad. “It’s Christmas. He’s with his family.”

“Then, sir …” Mark looked over at Danny. He looked back at Curtis. “Sir, we had a meeting scheduled for ten o’clock with yourself and Mayor Peters.”

“It’s Christmas,” Curtis repeated and opened a drawer. He rummaged for a bit and came out with another piece of paper which he placed to his left. “A Christian holiday. Mayor Peters deserves a day off, I would think, on our Lord’s birthday.”

“But the meeting was scheduled for—”

“Patrolman Denton, it’s come to my attention that you’ve missed several roll calls on the night shift at the Ninth Precinct.”

“Sir?”

Curtis lifted the piece of paper to his left. “This is your watch commander’s duty report. You’ve missed or been tardy for nine roll calls in as many weeks.”

He met their eyes for the first time.

Mark shifted in his chair. “Sir, I’m not here as a patrolman. I’m here as the chief officer of the Boston Social Club. And in that capacity, I respectfully submit that—”

“This is a clear dereliction of duty.” Curtis waved the paper in the air. “It’s in black and white, Patrolman. The Commonwealth expects its peace officers to earn their pay. And yet you haven’t. Where have you been that you couldn’t attend nine roll calls?”

“Sir, I don’t think this is the issue at hand. We’re going down a—”

“It very much is the issue at hand, Patrolman. You signed a contract. You swore to protect and serve the people of this great Commonwealth. You swore, Patrolman, to abide by and fulfill the duties assigned to you by the Boston Police Department. One of those duties, expressly stated in Article Seven of that contract, is attendance at roll call. And yet I have sworn affidavits from both the watch commander and the duty sergeant at the Ninth Precinct that you have elected not to perform this essential duty.”

“Sir, I respectfully submit that there were a few occasions when I was unable to attend roll call due to my duties with the BSC but that—”

“You don’t have duties with the BSC. You elect to perform labor on its behalf.”

“—but that … In all cases, sir, I was given clearance by both the watch commander and the duty sergeant.”

Curtis nodded. “May I finish?” he said.

Mark looked at him, the muscles in his cheek and jaw gone taut.

“May I finish?” Curtis repeated. “May I speak without fear of interruption? Because I find it rude, Patrolman. Do you find it rude to be interrupted?”

“I do, sir. That’s why I—”

Curtis held up a hand. “Let me dispel the notion that you hold some moral high ground, Patrolman, because you most certainly do not. Your watch commander and your duty sergeant both admitted that they overlooked your tardiness or outright absence from roll call because they themselves are both members of this social club. However, they did not possess the right to make such a decision.” He spread his hands. “It’s not within their purview. Only a rank of captain or higher can make such allowances.”

“Sir, I—”

“So, Patrolman Denton—”

“Sir, if I—”

“I am not finished, sir. Would you please allow me to finish?” Curtis propped his elbow on the desk and pointed at Mark. His splotchy face shook. “Did you or did you not show gross indifference to your duties as a patrol officer?”

“Sir, I was under the impress—”

“Answer the question.”

“Sir, I believe—”

“Yes or no, Patrolman. Do you think the people of this city want excuses? I’ve talked to them, sir, and they do not. Did you, or did you not, fail to appear at roll call?”

He hunched his shoulder forward, the finger still pointed. Danny would have thought it comical if it had come from any other source, on any other day, in any other country. But Curtis had come to the table with something they’d never expected, something they would have thought outmoded and out-lived in the modern age: a kind of fundamental righteousness that only the fundamental possessed. Unfettered by doubt, it achieved the appearance of moral intelligence and a resolute conscience. The terrible thing was how small it made you feel, how weaponless. How could you fight righteous rage if the only arms you bore were logic and sanity?

Denton opened up his attaché case and pulled out the pages he’d been working on for weeks. “Sir, if I could turn your attention to the raise we were promised in—”

“We?” Curtis said.

“Yes, the Boston Police Department, sir.”

“You dare claim to represent these fine men?” Curtis scowled. “I’ve spoken to many a man since taking office, and I can tell you that they do not elect to call you ‘Leader,’ Patrolman Denton. They are tired of you putting words in their mouths and painting them as malcontents. Why, I spoke to a flatfoot at the Twelfth just yesterday and you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Commissioner Curtis, we police at the One-Two are proud to serve our city in a time of need, sir. You tell the folks out there in the neighborhoods that we won’t go Bolsheviki. We’re police officers.’”

Mark removed his own pen and notebook. “If I could have his name, sir, I’d be happy to speak with him regarding any grievances he may have with me.”

Curtis waved it away. “I have talked to several dozen men, Patrolman Denton, from all over the city. Several dozen. And none of them, I promise you, is Bolsheviki.”

“Nor am I, sir.”

“Patrolman Coughlin.” Curtis turned over another sheet of paper. “You were on special duty of late, as I understand it. Investigating terrorist cells in the city?”

Danny nodded.

“And how did that progress?”

“Fine, sir.”

“Fine?” Curtis tugged at the flesh over his wing collar. “I’ve read Lieutenant McKenna’s duty reports. They’re padded with ambiguous projections with no basis in any reality. That led me to study the files of his previous Special Squads and once again I’m at a loss to discern any return on the public’s trust. Now this, Officer Coughlin, is exactly the kind of busywork that I find detracts from a police officer’s sworn duties. Could you describe for me specifically what kind of progress you feel you made with these — what are their names? — Lettish Workers before your cover was blown?”

“Lettish Workingman’s Society, sir,” Danny said. “And the progress is a bit difficult to ascertain. I was undercover, attempting to get closer to Louis Fraina, the leader of the group, a known subversive, and the editor of Revolutionary Age.”

“To what end?”

“We have reason to believe they’re planning an attack in this city.”

“When?”

“May Day seems a likely target date, but there have been whispers that—”

“Whispers,” Curtis said. “I question whether we have a terrorist problem at all.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I—”

Curtis nodded half a dozen times. “Yes, you shot one. I am quite aware of it, as I’m sure your great-great-grandchildren will be. But he was one man. The only one, in my opinion, operating in this city. Are you trying to scare businesses away from this city? Do you think if it becomes common knowledge that we’re engaged in some far-flung operation designated to expose dozens of terrorist sects within our city limits that any reasonable-minded company would set up shop here. Why, they’ll run to New York, men! To Philadelphia! Providence!”

“Lieutenant McKenna and several members of the Justice Department,” Danny said, “believe that May Day is a target date for national revolt.”

Curtis’s gaze remained on his desktop and in the silence that followed Danny wondered if he’d heard anything he’d said.

“You had a pair of anarchists making bombs right under your nose. Yes?”

Mark looked over at him. Danny nodded.

“And so you took this assignment to atone and managed to kill one of them.”

Danny said, “Something like that, sir.”

“Do you have a blood thirst for subversives, Officer?”

Danny said, “I don’t like the violent ones, sir, but I wouldn’t call it a blood thirst.”

Curtis nodded. “And what of subversives right now within our own department, men who are spreading discontent among the ranks, men who would Russianize this honorable protectorate of the public interest? Men who gather and talk of striking, of putting their petty interests before the common good?”

Mark stood. “Let’s go, Dan.”

Curtis narrowed his eyes and they were dark marbles of wasted promise. “If you do not sit, I will suspend you — right here and right now — and you can fight your battle for reinstatement through a judge.”

Mark sat. “You are making a grave mistake, sir. When the press hear about—”

“They stayed home today,” Curtis said.

“What?”

“Once they were informed late last night that Mayor Peters would not be in attendance and that the main order of business would have very little to do with this ‘union’ you call a social club, they decided to spend time with their families. Do you know any well enough to possess their home telephone numbers, Patrolman Denton?”

Danny felt numb and sickly warm as Curtis turned his attention back to him.

“Patrolman Coughlin, I feel you are wasted in street patrol. I would like you to join Detective Sergeant Steven Harris in Internal Affairs.”

Danny felt the numbness leave him. He shook his head. “No, sir.”

“You’re refusing a request from your commissioner? You, who slept with a bomb thrower? A bomb thrower who, as far as we know, is still lurking in our streets?”

“I am, sir, but respectfully.”

“There is no respect in the denial of a superior’s request.”

“I’m sorry you see it that way, sir.”

Curtis leaned back in his chair. “So you’re a friend of the workingman, of the Bolsheviki, of the subversive who masquerades as the ‘common man.’”

“I believe the Boston Social Club represents the men of the BPD, sir.”

“I do not,” Curtis said. He drummed his hand on the desktop.

“That’s clear, sir.” This time Danny stood up.

Curtis allowed himself a pinched smile as Mark stood as well. Danny and Mark donned their topcoats and Curtis leaned back in his chair.

“The days of this department being run, sub rosa, by men like Edward McKenna and your father are over. The days the department capitulates to the demands of Bolsheviki are long gone as well. Patrolman Denton, stand at attention if you please, sir.”

Mark turned his shoulders and placed his hands behind his back.

“You are reassigned to Precinct Fifteen in Charlestown. You are to report there immediately. That means this afternoon, Patrolman, and begin your duties on the split shift from noon to midnight.”

Mark knew exactly what that meant: There’d be no way to hold meetings at Fay Hall if he was locked down in Charlestown from twelve to twelve.

“Officer Coughlin, at attention. You are reassigned as well.”

“To, sir?”

“A special detail. You’re familiar with those as a matter of record.”

“Yes, sir.”

The commissioner leaned back in his chair and ran his hand over his belly. “You’re on strike detail until further notice. Anytime the workingman walks out on the good men who deem to pay him, you will be there to ensure that no violence takes place. You’ll be loaned out on an as-needed basis to police departments across the state. Until further notice, Officer Coughlin, you’re a strike breaker.”

Curtis placed his elbows on the desk and peered at Danny, waiting for a reaction.

“As you say, sir,” Danny said.

“Welcome to the new Boston Police Department,” Curtis said. “You’re dismissed, gentlemen.”

Walking out of the office, Danny was in such a state of shock that he assumed nothing else could add to it, but then he saw the men waiting their turn in the anteroom:

Trescott, recording secretary for the BSC.

McRae, treasurer.

Slatterly, vice president.

Fenton, press secretary.

It was McRae who stood and said, “What the hell’s going on? I got a call half an hour ago telling me to report to Pemberton immediately. Dan? Mark?”

Mark looked shell-shocked. He placed a hand on McRae’s arm. “It’s a bloodbath,” he whispered.

Outside, on the stairs, they lit cigarettes and tried to regain their composure.

“They can’t do this,” Mark said.

“They just did.”

“Temporary,” Mark said. “Temporary. I’ll call our lawyer, Clarence Rowley. He’ll scream bloody murder. He’ll get an injunction.”

“What injunction?” Danny said. “He didn’t suspend us, Mark. He just reassigned us. It’s within his power. There’s nothing to sue over.”

“When the press hears, they’ll …” His voice drifted off and he took a drag off his cigarette.

“Maybe,” Danny said. “If it’s a slow news day.”

“Jesus,” Mark said softly. “Jesus.”

Danny stared out at the empty streets and then up at the empty sky. Such a beautiful day, crisp and windless and clear.

Chapter twenty-two

Danny, his father, and Eddie McKenna met in the study before Christmas dinner. Eddie wouldn’t be staying; he had his own family to join at home on Telegraph Hill a few blocks away. He took a long gulp from his brandy snifter. “Tom, the man’s on a crusade. And he thinks we’re the infidels. He sent an order to my office last night that I’m to retrain all my men on crowd control and riot procedure. He wants them requalified for mounted duty as well. And now he’s going after the social club?”

Thomas Coughlin came to him with the brandy decanter and refilled his glass. “We’ll ride it out, Eddie. We’ve ridden out worse.”

Eddie nodded, bolstered by the pat of Thomas Coughlin’s hand on his back.

Thomas said to Danny, “Your man, Denton, he’s contacting the BSC lawyer?”

Danny said, “Rowley, yeah.”

Thomas sat back against the desk and rubbed his palm over the back of his head and frowned, a sign he was thinking furiously. “He played it smart. If he’d suspended you, that’s one thing, but reassignment — while it may look bad — is a card he can play very well if you buck back against him. And lest we forget — he’s got you on that terrorist you shacked up with.”

Danny refilled his own drink, noticing the last one had gone down rather quickly. “And how’s he know about that? I thought it was suppressed.”

His father’s eyes widened. “It didn’t come from me, if that’s what you’re implying. You, Eddie?”

Eddie said, “You had some kind of dustup, I heard, with some Justice agents a few weeks back. On Salem Street? Pulled some girl out of a car?”

Danny nodded. “It’s how I found Federico Ficara.”

McKenna shrugged. “Justice leaks like a freshly failed virgin, Dan. Always has.”

“Fuck.” Danny slapped the side of a leather chair.

“As far as Commissioner Curtis sees it right now,” Thomas said, “it’s vendetta hour. Payback, gentlemen. For every time he took it up the behind from Lomasney and the ward bosses when he was mayor. For every lowly position he was farmed out to across the Commonwealth since 1897. For all the dinners he wasn’t invited to, all the parties he found out about after the fact. For every time his missus looked embarrassed to be seen with him. He is a Brahmin, gents, through and through. And until a week ago, he was a Brahmin in disgrace.” His father swirled the brandy in his glass and reached into the ashtray for his cigar. “That would give any man an unfortunate sense of the epic when it came to settling his accounts.”

“So what do we do, Thomas?”

“You bide your time. Keep your head down.”

“Same advice I gave the boy just last week.” Eddie smiled at Danny.

“I’m serious. You, Eddie, you will have to swallow a lot of pride in the coming months. I’m a captain — he can call me on the carpet for a few things but my ship is tight and my precinct has seen a six percent drop in violent crime since I took over. That’s here,” he said and pointed at the floor, “at the Twelfth, historically the most crime-ridden nonwop district in the city. He can’t do much to me unless I give him ammunition, and I will be resolute in my refusal to do so. But you’re a lieutenant and you don’t keep open books. He’s going to put the screws to you, boy, something hard. Twist them tight, he will.”

“So …?”

“So, if he wants you warming up the horses and keeping your men standing at parade rest until the return of the Christ, you hop to. And you,” he said to Danny, “you steer clear of the BSC.”

“No.” Danny drained his drink and stood to refill it.

“Did you just hear what I—”

“I’ll do his strikebreaking for him and I won’t complain. I’ll polish my buttons and shine my shoes, but I’m not turning tail on the BSC.”

“He’ll crucify you then.”

There was a soft knock on the door. “Thomas?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Dinner in five minutes.”

“Thank you, love.”

Ellen Coughlin’s footfalls receded as Eddie took his coat from the stand. “Looks to be a hell of a New Year, gents.”

“Buck up, Eddie,” Thomas said. “We are the wards and the wards control this city. Don’t forget it.”

“I won’t, Tom, thanks. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“To you as well, Dan.”

“Merry Christmas, Eddie. Our best to Mary Pat.”

“Sure, she’ll be glad to hear that, she will.”

He let himself out of the office and Danny found his father’s gaze on him again as he took another pull from his drink.

“Curtis really took the wind out of you, didn’t he, boy?”

“I’ll get it back.”

Neither said anything for a moment. They could hear the scrape of chairs and the bump of heavy bowls and plates on the dining room table.

“Von Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means.” Thomas smiled softly and took a drink. “I’ve always felt he got it backward.”

Connor had returned from work less than an hour ago. He’d been detached to a suspected arson and still smelled of soot and smoke. A four-alarm fire, he said, passing the potatoes to Joe, two dead. And obviously for the insurance which added up to a few hundred more than the owners could have gotten in a legitimate sale. The Polish, he said with a roll of his eyes.

“You have to be more careful,” his mother said. “You’re not just living for yourself anymore.”

Danny saw Nora blush at that, saw Connor throw her a wink and a smile.

“I know, Ma. I know. I will. I promise.”

Danny looked at his father, sitting to his right at the head of the table. His father met his eyes and his were flat.

“Did I miss an announcement?” Danny said.

“Oh, sh—” Connor looked at their mother. “Shoot,” he said and looked at Nora, then back at Danny. “She said yes, Dan. Nora. She said yes.”

Nora lifted her head and her eyes met Danny’s. They were charged with a pride and vanity that he found repulsive.

It was her smile that was weak.

Danny took a sip of the drink he’d carried with him out of his father’s office. He cut into his slice of ham. He felt the eyes of the whole table on him. He was expected to say something. Connor watched him, waiting with an open mouth. His mother looked at him curiously. Joe’s fork froze above his plate.

Danny put down his fork and knife. He plastered a smile on his face that felt big and bright. Hell, it felt huge. He saw Joe relax and his mother’s eyes lose their confusion. He willed the smile into his eyes, felt them widen in their sockets. He raised his glass.

“That’s just great!” He raised his glass higher. “Congratulations to the both of you. I’m so happy for you.”

Connor laughed and raised his own glass.

“To Connor and Nora!” Danny boomed.

“To Connor and Nora!” The rest of the family raised their glasses and met them in the center of the table.

It was between dinner and dessert that Nora found him as he was coming back out of his father’s study with another refill of scotch.

“I tried to tell you,” she said. “I called the rooming house three times yesterday.”

“I didn’t get home till after six.”

“Oh.”

He clapped one hand on her shoulder. “No, it’s great. It’s terrific. I couldn’t be more pleased.”

She rubbed her shoulder. “I’m glad.”

“When’s the date?”

“We thought March seventeenth.”

“Saint Patrick’s Day. Perfect. This time next year? Heck, you might have a child for Christmas.”

“I might.”

“Hey — twins!” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

He drained his glass. She stared up into his face as if searching. Searching for what, he had no idea. What was left to search for? Decisions, clearly, had been made.

“Do you—”

“What?”

“Want to, I don’t know what to say …”

“So, don’t.”

“Ask anything? Know anything?”

“Nope,” he said. “I’m going to get another drink. You?”

He walked into the study and found the decanter and noticed how much less was in it than when he’d arrived earlier in the afternoon.

“Danny.”

“Don’t.” He turned to her with a smile.

“Don’t what?”

“Say my name.”

“Why can’t I—?”

“Like it means anything,” he said. “Change the tone. All right? Just do that. When you say it.”

She twisted her wrist in one hand and then dropped both hands to her sides. “I …”

“What?” He took a strong pull from his glass.

“I can’t abide a man feels sorry for himself.”

He shrugged. “Heavens. How Irish of you.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Just getting started.”

“I’m sorry.”

He laughed.

“I am.”

“Let me ask you something — you know the old man is looking into things back in the Old Sod. I told you that.”

She nodded, her eyes on the carpet.

“Is that why you’re rushing the wedding?”

She raised her head, met his eyes, said nothing.

“You really think it’ll save you if the family finds out you’re already married?”

“I think …” Her voice was so soft he could barely hear it. “I think if I’m wed to Connor, your father will never disown me. He’ll do what he does best — whatever is necessary.”

“You’re that afraid of being disowned.”

“I’m that afraid of being alone,” she said. “Of going hungry again. Of being …” She shook her head.

“What?”

Her eyes found the rug again. “Helpless.”

“My, my, Nora, quite the survivor, eh?” He chuckled. “You make me want to puke.”

She said, “I what?”

“All over the carpet,” he said.

Her petticoat swished as she crossed the study and poured herself an Irish whiskey. She threw back half of it and turned to him. “Who the fuck are you, then, boy?”

“Pretty mouth,” he said. “Gorgeous.”

“I make you want to vomit, Danny?”

“At the moment.”

“And why’s that, then?”

He crossed to her. He thought of lifting her up by her smooth white throat. He thought of eating her heart so it could never look back through her eyes at him.

“You don’t love him,” he said.

“I do.”

“Not the way you loved me.”

“Who says I did?”

“You did.”

“You say.”

“You say.” He took her shoulders in his hands.

“Off me now.”

“You say.”

“Off me now. Unhand me.”

He dropped his forehead to the flesh just below her throat. He felt more alone than when the bomb landed on the floor of Salutation Street Precinct, more alone and more sick of his very self than he’d ever expected to feel.

“I love you.”

She pushed his head back. “You love yourself, boy. You—”

“No—”

She gripped his ears, stared into him. “Yes. You love yourself. The grand music of it. I’m tone-deaf, Danny. I couldn’t keep up.”

He straightened and sucked air in through his nostrils, cleared his eyes. “Do you love him? Do you?”

“I’ll learn,” she said and drained the rest of her glass.

“You didn’t have to learn with me.”

“And look where that got us,” she said and walked out of his father’s study.

They had just sat down again for dessert when the doorbell rang.

Danny could feel the booze darkening his blood, growing thick in his limbs, perched dire and vengeful in his brain.

Joe answered the bell. After the front door had been open long enough for the night air to have reached the dining room, Thomas called, “Joe, who is it? Shut the door.”

They heard the door shut, heard a soft muffled exchange between Joe and a voice Danny didn’t recognize. It was low and thick, the words unintelligible from where he sat.

“Dad?” Joe stood in the doorway.

A man came through the doorway behind him. He was tall but stoop-shouldered, with a long, hungry face covered in a dark, matted beard shot through with tangles of gray over the chin. His eyes were dark and small but somehow managed to protrude from their sockets. The hair on the top of his head was shaven to a white stubble. His clothes were cheap and tattered; Danny could smell them from the other side of the room.

He gave them all a smile, his few remaining teeth the yellow of a damp cigarette left drying in the sun.

“How are you God-fearing folk tonight? Well, I trust?”

Thomas Coughlin stood. “What’s this?”

The man’s eyes found Nora.

“And how are you, then, luv?”

Nora seemed struck dead where she sat, with one hand on her teacup, her eyes blank and unmoving.

The man held up a hand. “Sorry to disturb you folks, I am. You must be Captain Coughlin, sir.”

Joe moved carefully away from the man, sliding along the wall until he reached the far end of the table near his mother and Connor.

“I’m Thomas Coughlin,” he said. “And you’re in my home on Christmas, man, so you best get to telling me your business.”

The man held up two soiled palms. “My name’s Quentin Finn. I believe that’s my wife sitting at your table there, sir.”

Connor’s chair hit the floor when he stood. “Who the—?”

“Connor,” their father said. “Hold your temper, boy.”

“Aye,” Quentin Finn said, “that’s her sure as it’s Christmas, it is. Miss me, luv?”

Nora opened her mouth but no words left it. Danny watched parts of her grow small and covered up and hopeless. She kept moving her mouth, and still no words would come. The lie she’d given birth to when she’d arrived in this city, the lie she’d first told when she’d been sitting naked and gray with her teeth clacking from the cold in their kitchen five years before, the lie she’d built every day of her life on since, spilled. Spilled all over the room until the mess of it was reconstituted and reborn as its opposite: truth.

A hideous truth, Danny noted. At least twice her age. She’d kissed that mouth? Slid her tongue through those teeth?

“I said — you miss me, luv?”

Thomas Coughlin held up a hand. “You’ll need to be clearer, Mr. Finn.”

Quentin Finn narrowed his eyes at him. “Clearer about what, sir? I married this woman. Gave her me name. Shared title to me land in Donegal. She’s my wife, sir. And I’ve come to take her home.”

Nora had gone too long without speaking. Danny could see that clearly — in his mother’s eyes, in Connor’s. If she’d ever held hope of denial, the moment had passed.

Connor said, “Nora.”

Nora closed her eyes. She said, “Ssshh,” and held up her hand.

“‘Ssshh’?” Connor repeated.

“Is this true?” Danny’s mother said. “Nora? Look at me. Is this true?”

But Nora wouldn’t look. She wouldn’t open her eyes. She kept waving her hand back and forth, as if it could ward off time.

Danny couldn’t help but be perversely fascinated by the man in the doorway. This, he wanted to say? You fucked this? He could feel the liquor sledding through his blood and he knew some better part of himself waited behind it, but now the only part he could reach was the one who’d placed his head to her chest and told her he loved her.

To which she’d replied: You love yourself.

His father said, “Mr. Finn, take a seat, sir.”

“I’ll stand, sure, Captain, if it’s all the same to ya.”

“What do you expect is going to happen here tonight?” Thomas said.

“I expect to walk back out that door with my wife in tow, I do.” He nodded.

Thomas looked at Nora. “Raise your head, girl.”

Nora opened her eyes, looked at him.

“Is it true. Is this man your husband?”

Nora’s eyes found Danny’s. What had she said in the study? I can’t abide a man feels sorry for himself. Who’s feeling sorry now?

Danny dropped his eyes.

“Nora,” his father said. “Answer the question, please. Is he your husband?”

She reached for her teacup but it tottered in her grip and she let it go.

“He was.”

Danny’s mother blessed herself.

“Jesus Christ!” Connor kicked the baseboard.

“Joe,” their father said quietly, “go to your room. And don’t dare argue, son.”

Joe opened his mouth, thought better of it, and left the dining room.

Danny realized he was shaking his head and stopped himself. This? He wanted to shout the word. You married this grim, grisly joke? And you dared talk down to me?

He took another drink as Quentin Finn took two sideways steps into the room.

“Nora,” Thomas Coughlin said, “you said was your husband. So I can assume there was an annulment, yes?”

Nora looked at Danny again. Her eyes had a shine that could have been mistaken, under different circumstances, for happiness.

Danny looked over at Quentin again, the man scratching at his beard.

“Nora,” Thomas said, “did you get an annulment? Answer me, girl.”

Nora shook her head.

Danny rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Quentin.”

Quentin Finn looked over at him. He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, young sir?”

“How’d you find us?”

“A man has ways,” Quentin Finn said. “I’ve been searching for this lass for some time now.”

Danny nodded. “You’re a man of means then.”

“Aiden.”

Danny lolled his head to look at his father, then lolled it back to Quentin. “To track a woman across an ocean, Mr. Finn, that’s quite a feat. Quite a costly feat.”

Quentin smiled at Danny’s father. “I see the boy’s been in his cups, yah?”

Danny lit a cigarette with the candle. “Call me ‘boy’ again, Paddy, and I’ll—”

“Aiden!” his father said. “Enough.” He turned back to Nora. “Have you any defense, girl? Is he telling a lie?”

Nora said, “He is not my husband.”

“He says he is.”

“Anymore.”

Thomas leaned into the table. “They don’t grant divorces in Catholic Ireland.”

“I didn’t say I got me a divorce, sir. I just said he was my husband no longer.”

Quentin Finn laughed at that, a loud haw that tore the air in the room.

“Jesus,” Connor whispered over and over again. “Jesus.”

“Pack your things now, luv.”

Nora looked at him. There was hate in her eyes. And fear. Disgust. Disgrace.

“He bought me,” she said, “when I was thirteen. Man’s my cousin. Yeah?” She looked at each of the Coughlins. “Thirteen. The way you buy a cow.”

Thomas extended his hands across the table toward her. “A tragic state,” he said softly. “But he is your husband, Nora.”

“Fookin’ right on that, Cap’n.”

Ellen Coughlin blessed herself and placed a hand to her chest.

Thomas kept his eyes on Nora. “Mr. Finn, if you use profanity in my home again? In front of my wife, sir?” He turned his head, gave Quentin Finn a smile. “Your path home will, I promise, become far less predictable.”

Quentin Finn scratched his beard some more.

Thomas tugged Nora’s hands gently until he covered them, and then he looked over at Connor. Connor had the heels of his hands pressed to his lower eyelids. Thomas turned next to his wife, who shook her head. Thomas nodded. He looked at Danny.

Danny looked back into his father’s eyes, so clear and blue. The eyes of a child with irreproachable intelligence and irreproachable intent.

Nora whispered, “Please don’t make me leave with him.”

Connor made a noise that could have been a laugh.

“Please, sir.”

Thomas ran his palms over the backs of her hands. “But you will have to leave.”

She nodded and one tear fell from her cheekbone. “Just not now? Not with him?”

Thomas said, “All right, dear.” He turned his head. “Mr. Finn.”

“Yes, Cap’n.”

“Your rights as a husband have been noted. And respected, sir.”

“Thank ye.”

“You’ll leave now and meet me tomorrow morning at the Twelfth Precinct on East Fourth Street. We’ll properly adjudicate the issue then.”

Quentin Finn was shaking his head before Thomas had half finished. “I didn’t cross the bloody ocean to be put off, man. No. I’ll be taking me wife now, thank ye.”

“Aiden.”

Danny pushed back his chair and stood.

Quentin said, “I have rights as a husband, Cap’n. I do.”

“And those will be respected. But for tonight, I—”

“And what of her child, sir? What’s he to think of—”

“She has a kid?” Connor raised his head from his hands.

Ellen Coughlin blessed herself again. “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus.”

Thomas let go of Nora’s hands.

“Aye, she has a little nipper back at home, she does,” Quentin Finn said.

“You abandoned your own child?” Thomas said.

Danny watched her eyes dart, her shoulders hunch. She pulled her arms in tight against her body — prey, always prey, searching, plotting, tensing for the mad dash.

A child? She’d never said a word.

“He’s not mine,” she said. “He’s his.”

“You left a child behind?” Danny’s mother said. “A child?”

“Not mine,” Nora said and reached for her but Ellen Coughlin pulled her arms back into her lap. “Not mine, not mine, not mine.”

Quentin allowed himself a smile. “The lad’s lost, he is, without his mother. Lost.”

“He’s not mine,” she said to Danny. Then to Connor: “He’s not.”

“Don’t,” Connor said.

Danny’s father stood and ran his hand through his hair, scratched the back of his head, and let out a heavy sigh. “We trusted you,” he said. “With our son. With Joe. How could you have put us in that position? How could you have misled us? Our child, Nora. We trusted you with our child.”

“And I did well by him,” Nora said, finding something in herself that Danny had seen in fighters, usually the smaller ones, in the late rounds of a bout, something that went far deeper than size and physical strength. “I did well by him and well by you, sir, and well by your family.”

Thomas looked at her, then at Quentin Finn, then back at her, and finally at Connor. “You were going to marry my son. You would have embarrassed us. Besmirched my name? This name of this house that gave you shelter, gave you food, treated you like family? How dare you, woman? How dare you?”

Nora looked right back at him, the tears finally coming now. “How dare I? This home is a coffin to that boy.” She pointed back in the direction of Joe’s room. “He feels it every day. I took care of him because he doesn’t even know his own mother. She—”

Ellen Coughlin stood from the table but moved no farther. She placed her hand on the back of her chair.

“Close your mouth,” Thomas Coughlin said. “Close it, you banshee.”

“You whore,” Connor said. “You filthy whore.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Ellen Coughlin said. “Stop. Stop!”

Joe walked into the dining room. He looked up at them all. “What?” he said. “What?”

Thomas said to Nora, “Leave this house at once.”

Quentin Finn smiled.

Danny said, “Dad.”

But his father had reached a place most sensed in him but few ever saw. He pointed at Danny without looking at him. “You’re drunk. Go home.”

“What?” Joe said, his voice thick. “Why’s everyone yelling?”

“Go to bed,” Connor said.

Ellen Coughlin held out a hand for Joe, but he ignored it. He looked to Nora. “Why’s everyone yelling?”

“Come now, woman,” Quentin Finn said.

Nora said to Thomas, “Don’t do this.”

“I said close that mouth.”

“Dad,” Joe said, “why’s everyone yelling?”

Danny said, “Look—”

Quentin Finn crossed to Nora’s chair and pulled her out of it by her hair.

Joe let out a wail and Ellen Coughlin screamed and Thomas said, “Everyone just calm down.”

“She’s my wife.” Quentin dragged her along the floor.

Joe took a run at him, but Connor scooped him up in his arms and Joe batted his fists against Connor’s chest and shoulders. Danny’s mother fell back into her chair and wept loudly and prayed to the Holy Mother.

Quentin pulled Nora tight to him so that her cheek was pressed against his and said, “If someone would gather her effects, yah?”

Danny’s father held out his hand and shouted, “No!” because Danny’s arm was already cocked as he came around the table and smashed his scotch glass into the back of Quentin Finn’s head.

Someone else screamed, “Danny!” — maybe his mother, maybe Nora, could have even been Joe — but by that point he’d hooked his fingers into the socket-bones above Quentin Finn’s eyes and used them to ram the back of his head into the dining room doorway. A hand grabbed at his back but fell away as he spun Quentin Finn into the hallway and ran him down the length of it. Joe must have left the front door unlatched because Quentin’s head popped the door wide as he went through it and out into the night. When his chest hit the stairs, it pushed through a fresh inch of snow and he landed on the sidewalk where the flakes fell fast and fat. He bounced on the cement and Danny was surprised to see him stumble to his feet for a few steps, his arms pinwheeling, before he slipped in the snow and fell with his left leg folded under him against the curb.

Danny came down the steps gingerly because the stoop was built of iron and the snow was soft and slick. The sidewalk had some slush in the places Quentin had slid through and Danny caught his eye as Quentin made it to his feet.

“Make it fun,” Danny said. “Run.”

His father grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him halfway around, and Danny saw something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before — uncertainty, maybe even fear.

“Leave him be,” his father said.

His mother reached the doorway just as Danny lifted his father by his shirt lapels and carried him back to a tree.

“Jesus, Danny!” This from Connor, on top of the stoop now as Danny heard Quentin Finn’s shoes slap through the slush in the middle of K Street.

Danny looked into his father’s face, pressed his back gently against the tree. “You let her pack,” he said.

“Aiden, you need to calm yourself.”

“Let her take whatever she needs. This is not a negotiation, sir. We firm on that?”

His father stared back into his eyes for a long time and then eventually gave him a flick of his eyelids that Danny took for assent.

He placed his father back on the ground. Nora appeared in the doorway, her temple scraped from Quentin Finn’s nails. She met his eyes and he turned away.

He let out a laugh that surprised even him and took off running up K Street. Quentin had a two-block head start, but Danny cut off through the backyards of K Street and then I Street and then J, vaulting fences like he was still altar-boy age, knowing that Quentin’s only possible destination was the streetcar stop. He came barreling out of an alley between J and H and hit Quentin Finn up at the shoulders and brought him sliding down into the snow in the middle of East Fifth Street.

Christmas lights had been strung up in garlands above the street, and candles lit the windows of half the homes along the block as Quentin tried to box with Danny before Danny ended a series of light jabs to both sides of his face with a torrent of body blows that finished with the one-two snap of a right and left rib. Quentin tried to run again, but Danny caught him by his coat and swung him around in the snow a few times before releasing him into a streetlamp pole. Then he climbed on top of him and broke bones in his face and broke his nose and snapped a few more ribs.

Quentin wept. Quentin begged. Quentin said, “No more, no more.” With each syllable he spat another fine spray of blood up into the air and back down onto his face.

When Danny felt the ache bite into his hands, he stopped. He sat back on Quentin’s midsection and then wiped his knuckles off on the man’s coat. He rubbed snow into the man’s face until his eyes snapped open.

Danny took a few gulps of air. “I haven’t lost my temper since I was eighteen years old. You believe that? True. Eight years. Almost nine …” He sighed and looked out at the street, the snow, the lights.

“I won’t … be a … bother to ya,” Quentin said.

Danny laughed. “You don’t say?”

“I … just want … me … w-wife.”

Danny took Quentin’s ears in his hands and softly banged his head off the cobblestone for a bit.

“As soon as you’re released from the charity ward, you get on a boat and leave my country,” Danny said. “Or you stay and I call this assault on a police officer. See all these windows? Half of them belong to cops. You want to pick a fight with the Boston Police Department, Quentin? Spend ten years in an American prison?”

Quentin’s eyes rolled to the left.

“Look at me.”

Quentin’s eyes fixed in place and then he vomited on the collar of his coat.

Danny waved at the fumes. “Yes or no? Do you want the assault charge?”

Quentin said, “No.”

“Are you going home as soon as you get out of a hospital?”

“Yah, yah.”

“Good lad.” Danny stood. “Because if you don’t, God is my witness, Quentin?” He looked down at him. “I’ll send you back to the Old Sod a fucking cripple.”

Thomas was out on the stoop when Danny returned. The taillights of his father’s car glowed red as his driver, Marty Kenneally, braked at an intersection two blocks up.

“So Marty’s driving her someplace?”

His father nodded. “I told him I don’t want to know where.”

Danny looked at the windows of their home. “What’s it like in there?”

His father appraised the blood on Danny’s shirt, his torn knuckles. “You leave anything for the ambulance driver?”

Danny rested his hip against the black iron railing. “Plenty. I already called it in from the call box on J.”

“Put the fear of God into him, I’m sure.”

“Worse than God.” He fished in his pockets and found his Murads and shook one out of the pack. He offered one to his father and his father took it and Danny lit both with his lighter and leaned back against the railing.

“Haven’t seen you get like that, boy, since I had you locked up in your teens.”

Danny blew a stream of smoke into the cold air, feeling the sweat beginning to dry on his upper chest and neck. “Yeah, it’s been a while.”

“Would you have honestly hit me?” his father said. “When you had me against the tree?”

Danny shrugged. “Might have. We’ll never know.”

“Your own father.”

Danny chuckled. “You had no problem hitting me when I was a kid.”

“That was discipline.”

“So was this.” Danny looked over at his father.

Thomas shook his head softly and exhaled a blue stream of smoke into the night.

“I didn’t know she left a child behind back there, Dad. Had no idea.”

His father nodded.

“But you did,” Danny said.

His father looked over, the smoke sliding out of the corner of his mouth.

“You brought Quentin here. Left a trail of bread crumbs and he found our door.”

Thomas Coughlin said, “You give me too much credit.”

Danny rolled his dice and told the lie. “He told me you did, Dad.”

His father sucked the night air through his nostrils and looked up at the sky. “You’d have never stopped loving her. Connor either.”

“What about Joe? What about what he just saw in there?”

“Everyone has to grow up sometime.” His father shrugged. “It’s not Joe’s maturing I worry about, you infant. It’s yours.”

Danny nodded and flicked his cigarette into the street.

“You can stop worrying,” he said.

Chapter twenty-three

Late Christmas afternoon, before the Coughlins had sat for dinner, Luther took the streetcar back to the South End. The day had started with a bright sky and clear air, but by the time Luther boarded the streetcar, the air had turned indistinct and the sky had folded back and fallen into the ground. Somehow the streets, so gray and quiet, were pretty, a sense that the city had gone privately festive. Soon the snow began to fall, the flakes small and listing like kites at first, riding the sudden wind, but then as the streetcar bucked its way over the hump of the Broadway Bridge, the flakes grew thick as flower heads and shot past the windows in the black wind. Luther, the only person sitting in the colored section, accidentally caught the eye of a white man sitting with his girlfriend two rows up. The man looked weary in a satisfied way, and his cheap wool flat cap was tilted down just so over his right eye, giving a little bit of nothing a little bit of style. He nodded, as if he and Luther shared the same thought, his girlfriend curled against his chest with her eyes closed.

“Looks like Christmas should, don’t it?” The man slid his chin over his girl’s head and his nostrils widened as he smelled her hair.

“Sure does,” Luther said, surprised it didn’t come out “Sure do” in an all-white car.

“Heading home?”

“Yeah.”

“To family?” The white guy lowered his cigarette to his girl’s lips and she opened her mouth to take a drag.

“Wife and child,” Luther said.

The man closed his eyes for a second and nodded. “That’s good.”

“Yes, sir, it is.” Luther swallowed against the wave of solitude that tried to rise in him.

“Merry Christmas,” the man said and took his cigarette from his girl’s lips and put it between his own.

“Same to you, sir.”

In the Giddreauxs’ foyer, he removed his coat and scarf and hung them, wet and steaming, on the radiator. He could hear voices coming from the dining room and he smoothed the snow into his hair with his palms and then wiped his palms on his coat.

When he opened the door into the main house, he heard the overlapping laughter and overlapping chatter of several conversations. Silverware and glasses clinked and he smelled roast turkey and maybe a deep-fried one as well and some kind of cinnamon scent that might have come from hot cider. Four children came running down the stairs toward him, three colored, one white, and they laughed maniacally in his face when they reached the first floor and then ran full-out down the hall toward the kitchen.

He opened the pocket doors to the dining room and the guests turned to look at him, women mostly, a few older men and two about Luther’s age whom he took to be the sons of Mrs. Grouse, the Giddreauxs’ housekeeper. Just over a dozen people, all told, and half of them white, and Luther recognized the females who helped out at the NAACP and assumed the males were their husbands.

“Franklin Grouse,” a younger colored man said and shook Luther’s hand. He extended a glass of eggnog. “You must be Luther. My mother told me about you.”

“Nice to meet you, Franklin. Merry Christmas.” Luther raised his glass of eggnog and took a drink.

It was a wonderful dinner. Isaiah had returned from Washington the night before and promised he wouldn’t talk politics until after dessert, so they ate and drank and chided the children when they got a little too boisterous and the talk jumped from the latest picture shows to popular books and songs and then to the rumor that war radios would become a consumer item that would broadcast news and voices and plays and songs from all over the world, and Luther tried to picture how a play could be performed through a box, but Isaiah said it was to be expected. Between phone lines and telegraphs and Sopwith Camels, the future of the world was air. Air travel, air communication, air ideas. Soil was played out, ocean, too; but air was like a train track that never met the sea. Soon we’d be speaking Spanish and they’d be speaking English.

“That a good thing, Mr. Giddreaux?” Franklin Grouse said.

Isaiah tilted his hand from left-to-right, left-to-right. “It’s what man makes of it.”

“White man or black man?” Luther asked, and the table broke out laughing.

The happier and more comfortable he became, the sadder he felt. This could be his life — should be his life — with Lila, right now, not as a guest at the table but as the head of it and maybe some of those children would have been his, too. He caught Mrs. Giddreaux smiling at him, and when he met her smile with his own, she gave him a wink, and he could see her soul again, the supple grace of it, and it was lit with blue light.

At the end of the evening, after most of the guests had left and Isaiah and Yvette were taking their brandy with the Parthans, two old friends since his days at Morehouse and hers at Atlanta Baptist, Luther excused himself and went up to the roof with his own glass of brandy and let himself out onto the widow’s walk. The snow had stopped falling, but all the roofs were thick with it. Horns bayed from the harbor and the lights of the city spread a yellow band across the lowest reaches of the sky. He closed his eyes and sucked in the smell of the night and the snow and cold, the smoke and soot and brick dust. He felt as if he were snorting the sky right off the outermost curve of the earth. He kept his eyes shut tight and blocked out the death of Jessie and the stone-ache in his heart that had only one name: Lila. He asked only for this moment, this air that he held in his lungs, that filled his body and swelled in his head.

But it didn’t work — Jessie came crashing through, turning to Luther to say, “Kinda fun, huh?” and less than a second later pieces of his head went popping off and he fell to the floor. The Deacon, too, the Deacon of all people, surfaced in the wave that followed Jessie, and Luther saw him clutching at him, heard him saying, “Make this right,” and his eyes bulged with the universal plea not to be extinguished, not today, as Luther shoved the gun under his chin, and those bulging eyes said I’m not ready to go. Wait.

But Luther hadn’t waited. And now the Deacon was somewhere with Jessie and Luther was up here, aboveground. It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.

“Why won’t you write me, woman?” Luther whispered it to the starless sky. “You carrying my child, and I don’t want him growing up without me. Don’t want him knowing that feeling. No, no, girl,” he whispered, “there’s only you. Only you.”

He lifted his brandy off the brick ledge and took a drink that singed his throat and warmed his chest and widened his eyes.

“Lila,” he whispered and took another drink.

“Lila.” He said it to the yellow slice of moon, to the black sky, to the smell of the night and the roofs covered in snow.

“Lila.” He put it on the wind, like a fly he didn’t have the heart to kill, and willed it to carry itself to Tulsa.

Luther Laurence, meet Helen Grady.”

Luther shook the older woman’s hand. Helen Grady had a grip as firm as Captain Coughlin’s and a similar trim build, gunmetal hair, and a fearless gaze.

“She’ll be working with you from here on out,” the captain said.

Luther nodded, noticing she wiped her hand on her pristine apron as soon as she took it back from his grip.

“Captain, sir, where’s—?”

“Nora has left our employ, Luther. I noted a fondness between the two of you, and so I inform you of her dismissal with a measure of empathy for the bond you shared, but she is never to be spoken of in this home again.” The captain placed a firm hand on Luther’s shoulder and gave him a smile just as firm. “Clear?”

“Clear,” Luther said.

Luther found Danny as Danny was returning to his rooming house one night. He stepped out from the building and said, “Fuck did you do?”

Danny’s right hand drifted toward his coat, and then he recognized Luther. He dropped his hand.

“No ‘Hi’?” Danny said. “‘Happy New Year’? Anything like that?”

Luther said nothing.

“Okay.” Danny shrugged. “First, this ain’t the best neighborhood to be a colored in, or haven’t you noticed?”

“I’ve been out here an hour. I noticed.”

“Second,” Danny said, “are you fucking crazy talking to a white man like that? A cop?”

Luther took a step back. “She was right.”

“What? Who?”

“Nora. She said you were an act. You play the rebel. Play the man who says he don’t believe in being called ‘suh,’ but now you tell me where it’s okay for a nigger like me to go in this city, tell me how I’s supposed to talk to your whiteness in public. Where’s Nora?”

Danny held out his arms. “How do I know? Why don’t you go see her at the shoe factory? You know where it is, don’t you?”

“’Cause our hours conflict.” Luther stepped to Danny, realizing people were starting to notice them. It would hardly be unreasonable for someone to whack him in the back of the head with a stick or just flat out shoot him for stepping up to a white man like this in an Italian neighborhood. In any neighborhood.

“Why do you think I had anything to do with Nora leaving the house?”

“Because she loved you and you couldn’t live with it.”

“Luther, step back.”

“You step back.”

“Luther.”

Luther cocked his head.

“I’m serious.”

“You’re serious? Anyone in the world looked close at that girl, they saw a whole country of pain had already paid its respects to her. And you, you — what? — you added to it? You and your whole family?”

“My family?”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t like my family, Luther, take it up with my father.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I need the fucking job.”

“Then I guess you should go home now. Hope you still have it in the morning.”

Luther took another couple of steps back. “How’s your union going?”

“What?”

“Your dream of a workers brotherhood? How’s that?”

Danny’s face flattened, as if it had been run over. “Go home, Luther.”

Luther nodded. He gulped some air. He turned and started walking.

“Hey!” Danny called.

Luther looked back at him standing by his building in the early evening cold.

“Why’d you come all the way out here? To dress down a white man in public?”

Luther shook his head. He turned to start walking again.

“Hey! I asked you a question.”

“Because she’s better than your whole fucking family!” Luther took a bow in the middle of the sidewalk. “Got that, white boy? Go grab your noose, string me up, whatever the fuck you Yankees do up here. And you do? I’ll know I died speaking truth to your fucking lie. She is better than your whole family.” He pointed at Danny. “Better than you, especially.”

Danny’s lips moved.

Luther took a step toward him. “What? What’s that?”

Danny put a hand on his doorknob. “I said you’re probably right.”

He turned the knob and entered his building and Luther stood alone on the steadily darkening street, raggedy Italians stabbing him with their almond eyes as they passed.

He chuckled. “Shit,” he said. “I got him and his horseshit where it lived.” He smiled at an angry old lady trying to slide past him. “Don’t that beat all, ma’am?”

Yvette called to him soon as he entered the house. He came into the parlor with his coat still on because her voice sounded fearful. But as he entered, he saw that she was smiling, as if she’d been touched by a divine joy.

“Luther!”

“Ma’am?” Luther used one hand to unbutton his topcoat.

She stood there, beaming. Isaiah came through the dining room and entered the parlor behind her. He said, “Evening, Luther.”

“Evening, Mr. Giddreaux, sir.”

Isaiah wore a small private smile as he took a seat in the armchair by his teacup.

“What?” Luther said. “What?”

“Did you have a good 1918?” Isaiah said.

Luther looked away from Yvette’s bursting smile and met Isaiah’s tiny one. “Uh, sir, in point of fact, no, I did not have a good 1918. Bit troublesome if you need to know the truth, sir.”

Isaiah nodded. “Well, it’s over.” He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece: ten-forty-three. “Almost twenty-four-hours over.” He looked over at his wife. “Oh, stop your teasing, Yvette. It’s starting to torture me.” He gave Luther a look—women—and then he said, “Come on now. Give it to the boy.”

Yvette crossed the floor to him and for the first time Luther noticed that she’d kept her hands behind her back since he’d entered the room. Her body was rippling, and her smile kept sliding, topsy-turvy, all over her face.

“This is for you.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek and placed an envelope in his hand. She stepped back.

Luther looked down at the envelope — simple, cream-colored, standard in every way. He saw his name in the center. Saw the Giddreauxs’ address below it. He recognized the lettering — the way it managed to be tight and looping at the same time. He recognized the postmark over the stamp: Tulsa, Okla. His hands shook.

He looked in Yvette’s eyes.

“What if it’s good-bye?” He felt his lips tighten hard against his teeth.

“No, no,” she said. “She already said good-bye, son. You said she’d closed her heart. Closed hearts don’t write letters to men who love them, Luther. They just don’t.”

Luther nodded, his head as shaky as the rest of him. He thought of Christmas night, of putting her name on the breeze.

“I—”

They watched him.

“I’m going to read it upstairs,” he said.

Yvette patted his hand. “Just promise me you won’t jump.”

Luther laughed, the sound coming out high, like something that had been popped. “I … I won’t, ma’am.”

As he climbed the stairs, terror struck him. Terror that Yvette was wrong, that plenty of women wrote to say good-bye. He thought of folding the letter and putting it into his pocket and not reading it for a while. Until he was stronger, say. But even as the thought occurred to him he knew he had a better chance of waking up white tomorrow than waking up with that envelope still sealed.

He stepped out onto the roof and stood with his head down for a moment. He didn’t pray, but he didn’t quite not-pray either. He kept his head lowered and closed his eyes and let his fear wash over him, his horror at being without her for life.

Please don’t hurt me, he thought, and opened the envelope carefully and just as carefully pulled out her letter. Please don’t. He held it between the thumb and index finger of each hand, letting the night breeze dry his eyes, and then he unfolded it:

Luther read it six more times before he could say for sure that he took a breath. No matter how many times he closed his eyes and opened them in hopes she had signed it “Love,” that word did not appear on the page.

And yet … You have to find your way home and he will need you to be his daddy and Dear Luther and most important … Your wife.

Your wife.

He looked back at the letter. He unfolded it again. Held it taut between his fingers.

You have to find your way home.

Yes, ma’am.

Dear Luther.

Dear Lila.

Your wife.

Your husband.