The Given Day

Chapter twenty-four

At noon on the fifteenth of January, 1919, the United States Industrial Alcohol company’s molasses tank exploded in the North End. A vagrant child, standing beneath the tank, was vaporized, and the molasses flooded into the heart of the slum in waves three stories high. Buildings were heaved to the side as if by a callous hand. The railway trestle that ran along Commercial was hit with a scrap of metal the size of a truck. The center of the trestle collapsed. A firehouse was hurled across a city square and turned on its end. One fireman perished, a dozen were injured. The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear, but Mayor Andrew Peters, the first politician to arrive on the scene, stated that there was little doubt terrorists were to blame.

Babe Ruth read every newspaper account he could lay his mitts on. He skipped any long stretches where words like municipal and infrastructure were commonly used, but otherwise it tickled him to his core. Astounded him. Molasses! Two million gallons! Fifty-foot waves! The streets of the North End, closed off to automobiles, carts, and horses, stole the shoes of those who tried to walk them. Flies battled for pavement in swarms as dark and thick as candied apples. In the plaza behind the city stables, dozens of horses had been maimed by rivets that had flown like bullets from the exploding tank. They’d been found mired in the muck, neighing hideously, unable to rise from the sticky mess. In the middle of that afternoon, forty-five police gunshots punctuated their execution like the last blasts of a fireworks show. The dead horses were lifted by cranes and placed on the flatbeds of trucks and transported to a glue factory in Somerville. By the fourth day, the molasses had turned to black marble and residents walked with their hands pressed to walls and streetlamp poles.

Seventeen confirmed dead now and hundreds injured. Good God — the looks that must have been on their faces when they turned and saw those black waves curl up by the sun. Babe sat at the soda counter in Igoe’s Drugstore and Creamery in Codman Square waiting for his agent, Johnny Igoe. Johnny was in the back, primping for their meeting with A. L. Ulmerton, probably going too heavy on the petroleum jelly, the cologne, the toilet water. A. L. Ulmerton was the big cheese of Old Gold cigarettes (“Not a cough in a carload!”) and he wanted to talk to Babe about possible endorsements. And now Johnny was going to make them late with his showgirl fussing in back.

Babe didn’t really mind, though, because it gave him time to leaf through more stories on the flood and the immediate response to it: the crackdown on all radicals or subversives who might have been involved. Agents of the Bureau of Investigation and officers of the Boston Police Department had kicked down doors at the headquarters of the Lettish Workingman’s Society, the Boston chapter of the IWW, and Reed and Larkin’s Left Wing of the Socialist Party. They filled holding pens across the city and sent the overflow to the Charles Street Jail.

At Suffolk County Superior Court, sixty-five suspected subversives were brought before Judge Wendell Trout. Trout ordered the police to release all who had not been formally charged with a crime, but signed eighteen deportation orders for those who could prove no U.S. citizenship. Dozens more were held pending Justice Department review of their immigration status and criminal history, actions Babe found perfectly reasonable, though some others did not. When the labor lawyer James Vahey, twice a Democratic candidate for governor of the Commonwealth, argued before the federal magistrate that internment of men who had not been charged with a crime was an affront to the Constitution, he was upbraided for his harsh tone and the cases were continued until February.

In this morning’s Traveler, they’d compiled a photo essay that took up pages four through seven. Even though authorities weren’t confirming yet whether their wide net had caught the terrorists responsible, and that made Babe mad, the anger flared only for the briefest moment before it was tamped out by a delicious, itchy trill that thumped the top of his spine as he marveled at the sheer wreckage of it: a whole neighborhood smashed and tossed and smothered in the black-iron slathering of that liquid mass. Pictures of the crumpled firehouse were followed by one of bodies stacked along Commercial like loaves of brown bread and another of two Red Cross workers leaning against an ambulance, one of them with a hand over his face and a cigarette between his lips. There was a shot of the firemen forming a relay line to remove the rubble and get to their men. A dead pig in the middle of a piazza. An old man sitting on a stoop, resting the side of his head on a dripping-brown hand. A dead-end street with the brown current up to the door knockers, stones and wood and glass floating on the surface. And the people — the cops and firemen and Red Cross and doctors and immigrants in their shawls and bowlers, everyone with the same look on their faces: how the fuck did this happen?

Babe saw that look on people’s faces a lot lately. Not for any particular reason, either. Just in general. It was like they were all walking through this crazy world, trying to keep pace but knowing they couldn’t, they just couldn’t. So part of them waited for that world to come back up behind them on a second try and just roll right over them, send them — finally — on into the next one.

A week later, another round of negotiations with Harry Frazee. Frazee’s office smelled like whorehouse perfume and old money. The perfume came from Kat Lawson, an actress starring in one of the half dozen shows Frazee had running in Boston right now. This one was called Laddy, Be Happy and was, like all Harry Frazee productions, a light romantic farce that played to SRO crowds night after night. Ruth had actually seen this one, allowing Helen to drag him to it shortly after the new year began, even though Frazee, true to the rumors of his Jew heritage, had failed to comp the tickets. Ruth had to endure the disconcerting experience of holding his wife’s hand in the fifth row while he watched another woman he’d slept with (three times actually) prance back and forth across the stage in the role of an innocent cleaning woman who dreamed of making it as a chorus girl. The obstacle to those dreams was her no-good Irish blatherskite of a husband, Seamus, the “laddy” of the title. At the end of the play, the cleaning woman contents herself by becoming a chorus girl on the New England stage and her “laddy” makes his peace with her pipe dreams, as long as they remain on a local level, and even lands a job of his own. Helen stood and applauded after the final number, a full-cast reprise of “Shine My Star, I’ll Shine Your Floors,” and Ruth applauded, too, though he was pretty sure Kat Lawson had given him the crabs last year. It seemed wrong that a woman as pure as Helen should be cheering one as corrupt as Kat, and truth be told, he was still plenty sore about not getting the tickets comped.

Kat Lawson sat on a leather couch under a big painting of hunting dogs. She had a magazine on her lap and her compact out as she reapplied her lipstick. Harry Frazee thought he was putting one over on his wife, thought Kat was a possession to be envied by Ruth and the other Sox (most of whom had slept with her at least once). Harry Frazee was an idiot, and Ruth didn’t need any more confirmation than the man leaving his mistress in the room during a contract negotiation.

Ruth and Johnny Igoe sat before Frazee’s desk and waited for him to shoo Kat from the room, but Frazee made it clear she was here to stay when he said, “Can I get you anything, dear, before these gentlemen and I discuss business?”

“Nope.” Kat smacked her lips together and snapped the compact closed.

Frazee nodded and sat behind his desk. He looked across at Ruth and Johnny Igoe and shot his cuffs, ready to get down to business. “So, I understand—”

“Oh, hon’?” Kat said. “Could you get me a lemonade? Thanks, you’re a pip.”

A lemonade. It was early February and the coldest day of the coldest week of the winter thus far. So cold Ruth had heard that kids were skating on frozen molasses in the North End. And she wanted lemonade.

Harry Frazee kept his face stone-still as he pushed the intercom button and said, “Doris, send Chappy out for a lemonade, would you?”

Kat waited until he’d released the intercom button and sat back.

“Oh, and an egg-and-onion.”

Harry Frazee leaned forward again. “Doris? Tell Chappy to pick up an egg-and-onion sandwich, too, please.” He looked over at Kat, but she’d gone back to her magazine. He waited another few seconds. He released the intercom button.

“So,” he said.

“So,” Johnny Igoe said.

Frazee spread his hands, waiting, one eyebrow arched into a question mark.

“Have you given any more thought to our offer?” Johnny said.

Frazee lifted Ruth’s contract off his desk and held it up. “This is something you’re both familiar with, I take it. Mr. Ruth, you are signed for seven thousand dollars this season. That’s it. A bond was forged. I expect you to hold up your end.”

Johnny Igoe said, “Given Gidge’s previous season, his pitching in the Series, and, may I mention, the explosion in cost of living since the war ended, we think it only fair to reconsider this arrangement. In other words, seven thousand’s a bit light.”

Frazee sighed and lay the contract back down. “I gave you a bonus at the end of the season, Mr. Ruth. I did not have to do that and yet I did. And it’s still not enough?”

Johnny Igoe began ticking points off on his fingers. “You sold Lewis and Shore to the Yanks. You unloaded Dutch Leonard on Cleveland. You let Whiteman go.”

Babe sat up straight. “Whiteman’s gone?”

Johnny nodded. “You’re flush, Mr. Frazee. Your shows are all hits, you—”

“And because of that, I’m to renegotiate a signed contract made in good faith by men? What kind of principle is that? What kind of ethic is that, Mr. Igoe? In case you haven’t been following the news, I am locked in a battle with Commissioner Johnson. I am fighting to have our World Series medals rightfully given to us. Those medals are being withheld because your boy there had to strike before game five.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Babe said. “I didn’t even know what was going on.”

Johnny quieted him with a hand to his knee.

Kat piped up from the couch. “Honey, could you ask Chappy to also get me a—”

“Hush,” Frazee said to her. “We’re talking business, bubblehead.” He turned back to Ruth as Kat lit a cigarette and blew the smoke hard through her thick lips. “You’ve got a contract for seven thousand. That makes you one of the highest-paid players in the game. And you want what now?” Frazee held his exasperated hands up to the window, the city beyond it, the bustle of Tremont Street and the Theater District.

“What I’m worth,” Babe said, refusing to back down to this slave driver, this supposed Big Noise, this theater man. Last Thursday in Seattle, thirty-five thousand ship workers had walked out on strike. Just as the city was trying to get its noggin around that, another twenty-five thousand workers walked off the job in a sympathy strike. Seattle stopped dead — no streetcars, no icemen or milkmen, no one to come pick up the garbage, no one cleaning the office buildings or running the elevators.

Babe suspected this was just for starters. This morning the papers had reported that the judge conducting the inquest into the collapse of the USIA molasses tank concluded that the cause of the explosion was not anarchists but company negligence and the poor inspection protocols set up by the city. USIA, in a rush to convert its molasses distillation from industrial purposes to commercial ones, had overfilled the poorly constructed tank, never guessing unseasonably high temperatures in the middle of January would cause the molasses to swell. USIA officials, of course, angrily denounced the preliminary report, charging that the terrorists responsible were still at large and thus the cleanup costs were the responsibility of the city and its taxpayers. Ooooh, it made Babe hot under the collar. These bosses, these slave drivers. Maybe those guys in the bar fight a few months back at the Castle Square Hotel had been right — the workers of the world were tired of saying “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” As Ruth stared across the desk at Harry Frazee, he felt swept up in a rich wave of brotherhood for his fellow workers everywhere, his fellow citizen-victims. It was time for Big Money to be held accountable.

“I want you to pay me what I’m worth,” he repeated.

“And what’s that, exactly?”

It was Babe’s turn to put a hand on Johnny’s leg. “Fifteen for one or thirty for three.”

Frazee laughed. “You want fifteen thousand dollars for one year?”

“Or thirty for three years.” Babe nodded.

“How about I trade you instead?”

That shook something in Babe. A trade? Jesus Christ. Everyone knew how chummy Frazee had become with Colonel Ruppert and Colonel Huston, the owners of the Yankees, but the Yankees were cellar dwellers, a team that had never been near contention in the Series era. And if not the Yanks, then who? Cleveland? Baltimore again? Philadelphia? Babe didn’t want to move. He’d just rented an apartment in Governor’s Square. He had a good thing going — Helen in Sudbury, him downtown. He owned this burg; when he walked its streets, people called his name, children gave chase, women batted their eyes. New York on the other hand — he’d vanish in that sea. But when he thought of his brother workers again, of Seattle, of the poor dead floating in the molasses, he knew the issue was larger than his own fear.

“Then trade me,” he said.

The words surprised him. They definitely surprised Johnny Igoe and Harry Frazee. Babe stared back into Frazee’s face, let him see a resolve that appeared (Babe hoped) twice as strong because of the effort it took to contain the fear that lay behind it.

“Or, you know what?” Babe said. “Maybe I’ll just retire.”

“And do what?” Frazee shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Johnny,” Babe said.

Johnny Igoe cleared his throat again. “Gidge has been approached by various parties who believe he has a big future on the stage or in the flickers.”

“An actor,” Frazee said.

“Or a boxer,” Johnny Igoe said. “We’re fielding a lot of offers from them quarters as well, Mr. Frazee.”

Frazee laughed. Actually laughed. It was a short, donkey-bray of a sound. He rolled his eyes. “If I had a nickel for every time an actor tried to hold me up with stories of other offers during the middle of a show’s run, why, I’d own my own country by now.” His dark eyes glittered. “You’ll honor your contract.” He took a cigar from the humidor on his desk, snipped the end, and pointed the cigar at Ruth. “You work for me.”

“Not for coon wages, I don’t.” Babe stood and took his beaver-fur coat from the hook on the wall by Kat Lawson. He took Johnny’s, too, and tossed it across the room to him. Frazee lit his cigar and watched him. Babe put his coat on. He buttoned it up. Then he bent over Kat Lawson and gave her a loud smooch on the kisser.

“Always good to see you, doll.”

Kat looked shocked, like he’d run his hand over her Hoover or something.

“Let’s go, Johnny.”

Johnny walked toward the door, looking as shocked as Kat.

“You walk out that door,” Frazee said, “and I’ll see you in court, Gidge.”

“Then you’ll see me in court.” Babe shrugged. “Where you won’t see me, Harry? Is in a fucking Red Sox uniform.”

In Manhattan, on February 22, officers of the NYPD Bomb Squad and agents of the Secret Service raided an apartment on Lexington Avenue where they arrested fourteen Spanish radicals of Grupo Pro Prensa and charged them with plotting the assassination of the president of the United States. The assassination had been planned for the following day in Boston, where President Wilson would arrive from Paris.

Mayor Peters had called for a city holiday to celebrate the president’s arrival and taken the necessary steps to hold a parade, even though the president’s route from Commonwealth Pier to the Copley Plaza Hotel was classified by the Secret Service. After the arrests in New York, every window in the city was ordered closed and federal agents armed with rifles lined the rooftops along Summer Street, Beacon, Charles, Arlington, Commonwealth Avenue, and Dartmouth Street.

Various reports had placed the location of Peters’s “secret” parade at City Hall, Pemberton Square, Sudbury Square, and Washington Street, but Ruth strolled up to the State House because that’s where everyone else seemed to be going. It wasn’t every day you got a chance to see a president, but he hoped if anyone ever tried to kill him someday, the powers that be would do a better job keeping his movements private. Wilson’s motorcade rolled up Park Street at the stroke of twelve and turned left onto Beacon at the State House. Across the street on the lawn of the Common, a bunch of bughouse suffragette dames burned their girdles and their corsets and even a few bras and shouted, “No vote, no citizenship! No vote, no citizenship!” as the smoke rose from the pyre and Wilson kept his eyes straight ahead. He was smaller than Ruth would have expected, thinner, too, as he rode in the back of an open-air sedan and waved stiffly to the crowd — one flick of the wrist to the left side of the street, one to the right, back to the left again, his eyes never making contact with anything but high windows and treetops. Which was probably good for him, because Ruth saw a dense mob of rough-looking, grimy men being held back by police along the Joy Street entrance to the Common. Had to be thousands of these guys. They held up banners that identified them as the Lawrence Strike Parade and shouted obscenities at the president and the police as the coppers tried to push them back. Ruth chuckled as the suffragettes rushed behind the motorcade, still screaming about the vote, their legs bare and raw in the cold because they’d torched their bloomers, too. He crossed the street and passed their burning pile of clothing as the motorcade rode down Beacon. Halfway across the Common, he heard fearful shouts from the crowd and turned to see the Lawrence strikers going at it with the cops, lots of stumbling and awkward punches and voices pitched high with outrage.

I’ll be damned, Ruth thought. The whole world’s on strike.

The motorcade appeared in front of him, rolling slowly down Charles Street. He kept a leisurely pace as he followed it through the throngs while it snaked around the Public Garden and then along Commonwealth. He signed a few autographs as he went, shook a few hands, but it was nice how his celebrity diminished in light of much larger star power. Folks were less clamorous and clingy with him that afternoon, as if, in the bright sun cast by Wilson’s fame, Babe was just one of the common folk. He might be famous, but he wasn’t the reason rifles were pointing down at their heads. That was a mean kind of famous. His was a friendly kind of famous, a regular famous.

By the time Wilson climbed a podium in Copley Square, Babe had grown bored, though. The president might have been powerful and book-smart and all, but he sure didn’t know much about public speaking. You had to give them a show, a little razzle here and some dazzle there, tell a few jokes, make them think you took as much pleasure in their company as they did in yours. But Wilson looked tired up there, old, his voice a thin, reedy thing as he droned on about League-of-Nations this and new-world-order that and the great responsibilities that come with great might and great freedom. For all the big words and big ideas, he smelled of defeat, of something stale and weary and broken beyond fixing. Ruth worked his way out of the crowd and signed two more autographs on the fringe of it and then walked up Tremont and went looking for a steak.

He came home to his apartment a few hours later and found Harry Frazee waiting for him in the lobby. The doorman went back outside and Ruth pushed the button and stood by the brass doors of the elevator.

“I saw you at the president’s speech,” Frazee said. “I couldn’t reach you through the crowd.”

“Sure was thick,” Ruth said.

“If only our dear president knew how to play the press like you do, Mr. Ruth.”

Babe swallowed the smile that threatened to creep up his face. He had to hand it to Johnny Igoe on that one — Johnny had sent Babe out to orphanages and hospitals and old-lady homes, and the papers ate it up. Men had flown in from Los Angeles to give Babe screen tests, and Johnny talked up the offers he’d told Babe were coming in from the flickers business. Actually, just about the only thing that could have pushed Babe off the front pages this week was Wilson. Even the shooting of the Bavarian prime minister went under the fold when Babe’s deal to star in a short flicker called The Dough Kiss was announced. When reporters asked if he’d be going to spring training or not, Ruth kept saying the same thing, “If Mr. Frazee thinks I’m worthy of a fair wage, I’ll be there.”

Spring training was three weeks off.

Frazee cleared his throat. “I’ll meet your price.”

Babe turned and met Frazee’s eyes. Frazee gave him a curt nod.

“The papers have been drawn up. You can sign them at my office tomorrow morning.” Frazee gave him a thin smile. “You won this round, Mr. Ruth. Enjoy it.”

“Okay, Harry.”

Frazee stepped in close. He smelled good in a way that Ruth associated with the very rich, the ones who knew things he’d never know in a way that went beyond secret handshakes. They ran the world, men like Frazee, because they understood something that would always escape Babe and men like him: money. They planned its movements. They could predict its moment of passage from one hand to another. They also knew other things Babe didn’t, about books and art and the history of the earth. But money most importantly — they had that down cold.

Every now and then, though, you got the better of them.

“Have fun at spring training,” Harry Frazee said to Babe as the elevator doors opened. “Enjoy Tampa.”

“I will now,” Babe said, picturing it. The waves of heat, the languid women.

The elevator man waited.

Harry Frazee produced a money roll held fast by a gold clip. He peeled off several twenties as the doorman opened the door and a woman who lived on six, a pretty dame with no shortage of suitors, came down the marble floor, her heels clicking.

“I understand you need money.”

“Mr. Frazee,” Babe said, “I can wait until the new contract’s signed.”

“Wouldn’t hear of it, son. If one of my men is in arrears, I aim to help him out.”

Babe held up a hand. “I’ve got plenty of cash right now, Mr. Frazee.”

Babe tried to step back, but he was too slow. Harry Frazee stuffed the money into the inside pocket of Babe’s coat as the elevator man watched and the doorman and the pretty woman on six saw it, too.

“You’re worth every penny,” Harry Frazee said, “and I’d hate to see you miss a meal.”

Babe’s face burned and he reached into his coat to give the money back.

Frazee walked away. The doorman trotted to catch up. He held the door for him, and Frazee tipped his hat and walked out into the night.

Ruth caught the woman’s eye. She lowered her head and got in the elevator.

“A joke,” Ruth said as he joined her and the elevator man shut the cage door and worked the crank. “Just a joke.”

She smiled and nodded, but he could see she pitied him.

When he got up to his apartment, Ruth put in a call to Kat Lawson. He convinced her to meet him for a drink at the Hotel Buckminster, and after they’d had their fourth round he took her to a room upstairs and fucked her silly. Half an hour later, he fucked her again, doggie-style, and whispered the foulest language he could imagine into her ear. After, she lay on her stomach, asleep, her lips speaking softly to someone in her dreams. He got up and dressed. Out the window lay the Charles River and the lights of Cambridge beyond, winking and watching. Kat snored softly as he put on his coat. He reached into it and placed Harry Frazee’s money down on the dresser and left the room.

West Camden Street. Baltimore.

Ruth stood on the sidewalk outside what had been his father’s saloon. Closed now, distressed, a tin Pabst sign hanging askew behind a dusty window. Above the saloon was the apartment he’d shared with his parents and his sister Mamie, who’d been barely toddling when Ruth was shipped off to Saint Mary’s.

Home, you could say.

Babe’s memories of it as such, however, were dim. He remembered the exterior wall as the place he’d learned to throw dice. He recalled how the smell of beer never left the saloon or the apartment above it; it rose through the toilet and the bathtub drain, lived in the floor cracks and in the wall.

Home, in truth, was St. Mary’s. West Camden Street was an idea. An on-deck circle.

I came here, Babe thought, to tell you I’ve made it. I’m Big Noise. I’ll earn ten thousand dollars this year, and Johnny says he can get me another ten in endorsements. My face will be on the kind of tin plate you’d have hung in the window. But you wouldn’t have hung it, would you? You would have been too proud. Too proud to admit you had a son who makes more money in a year than you could make in ten. The son you sent away and tried to forget. George Junior. Remember him?

No, I don’t. I’m dead. So’s your mother. Leave us alone.

Babe nodded.

I’m going to Tampa, George Senior. Spring training. Just thought I’d stop by and let you see I’d made something of myself.

Made something of yourself? You can barely read. You fuck whores. You get paid whore’s wages to play a whore’s game. A game. Not man’s work. Play.

I’m Babe Ruth.

You’re George Herman Ruth Junior, and I still wouldn’t trust you to work behind the bar. You’d drink the profits, forget to lock up. No one wants to hear your bragging here, boy, your stories. Go play your games. This is not your home anymore.

When was it?

Babe looked up at the building. He thought of spitting on the sidewalk, the same sidewalk where his father had died from a busted melon. But he didn’t. He rolled it all up — his father, his mother, his sister Mamie, who he hadn’t talked to in six months, his dead brothers, his life here — rolled it all up like a carpet and tossed it over his shoulder.

Good-bye.

Don’t let the door hit your fat ass on the way out.

I’m going.

So go then.

I am.

Start walking.

He did. He put his hands in his pocket and walked up the street toward the taxi he’d left idling at the corner. He felt as if he wasn’t just leaving West Camden Street or even Baltimore. He was steaming away from a whole country, the motherland that had given him his name and his nature, now wholly unfamiliar, now foreign ash.

Plant Field in Tampa was surrounded by a racetrack that had been out of use for years but still smelled of horseshit when the Giants came to town to play an exhibition game against the Red Sox and the white-ball rule went into effect for the first time.

The implementation of the white-ball rule was a big surprise. Even Coach Barrow hadn’t known it was coming this early. Rumors floating through the leagues had held that the new rule wouldn’t be employed until opening day, but the home plate umpire, Xavier Long, came into the dugout just before the game to tell them today was the day.

“By order of Mr. Ban Johnson, no less. Even provided the first bag, he did.”

When the umps emptied that bag in the on-deck circle, half the boys, Babe included, came out of the dugout to marvel at the creamy brightness of the leather, the sharp red stitching. Christ’s sake, it was like looking at a pile of new eyes. They were so alive, so clean, so white.

Major league baseball had previously dictated that the home team provide the balls for every game, but it was never stated what condition those balls had to be in. As long as they possessed no divots of marked depth, those balls could, and were, played until they passed over a wall or someone tore the cover off.

White balls, then, were something Ruth had seen on opening day in the first few innings, but by the end of the first game, that ball was usually brown. By the end of a three-game series, that ball could disappear in the fur of a squirrel.

But those gray balls had almost killed two guys last year. Honus Sukalowski had taken one to the temple and never talked right again. Bobby Kestler had also taken one to the bean and hadn’t swung a bat since. Whit Owens, the pitcher who’d hit Sukalowski, had left the game altogether out of guilt. That was three guys gone in one year, and during the war year to boot.

Standing in left, Ruth watched the third out of the game arc toward him like a Roman candle, a victim of its own brilliance. He was whistling when he caught it. As he jogged back in toward the dugout, God’s fingertips found his chest.

It’s a new game.

You can say that twice.

It’s your game now, Babe. All yours.

I know. Did you see how white it is? It’s so … white.

A blind man could hit it, Babe.

I know. A blind kid. A blind girl kid.

It’s not Cobb’s game anymore, Babe. It’s a slugger’s game.

Slugger. That’s a swell word, boss. Always been fond of it, myself.

Change the game, Babe. Change the game and free yourself.

From what?

You know.

Babe didn’t, but he kind of did, so he said, “Okay.”

“Who you talking to?” Stuffy McInnis asked as he reached the dugout.

“God.”

Stuffy spit some tobacco into the dirt. “Tell Him I want Mary Pickford at the Belleview Hotel.”

Babe picked up his bat. “See what I can do.”

“Tuesday night.”

Babe wiped down his bat. “Well, it is an off day.”

Stuffy nodded. “Say around six.”

Babe walked toward the batter’s box.

“Gidge.”

Babe looked back at him. “Call me ‘Babe,’ okay?”

“Sure, sure. Tell God to tell Mary to bring a friend.”

Babe walked into the batter’s box.

“And beer!” Stuffy called.

Columbia George Smith was on the mound for the Giants, and his first pitch was low and inside and Babe suppressed a giggle as it passed over the toe of his left foot. Jesus, you could count the stitches! Lew McCarty threw the ball back to his pitcher and Columbia George threw a curveball next that hissed past Babe’s thighs for a strike. Babe had been watching for that pitch because it meant Columbia George was stair climbing. The next pitch would be belt high and a hair inside, and Babe would have to swing but miss if he wanted Columbia George to throw the high heat. So he swung, and even trying to miss, he foul-tipped the ball over McCarty’s head. Babe stepped out of the box for a moment, and Xavier Long took the ball from McCarty and examined it. He wiped at it with his hand and then his sleeve and he found something there he didn’t like because he placed it in the pouch over his groin and came back out with a brand-spanking new ball. He handed it to McCarty, and McCarty rifled it back to Columbia George.

What a country!

Babe stepped back into the box. He tried to keep the glee from his eyes. Columbia George went into his windup, and, yup, his face corked into that telltale grimace it got whenever he brought the fire, and Babe gave it all a sleepy smile.

It was not cheers he heard when he scorched that fresh white ball toward the Tampa sun. Not cheers or oohs or aahs.

Silence. Silence so total that the only sound that could fill it was the echo of his bat against cowhide. Every head in Plant Field turned to watch that miraculous ball soar so fast and so far that it never had time to cast its shadow.

When it landed on the other side of the right field wall, five hundred feet from home plate, it bounced high off the racetrack and continued to roll.

After the game, one of the sports scribes would tell Babe and Coach Barrow that they’d taken measurements, and the final tally was 579 feet before it came to a full stop in the grass. Five hundred and seventy-nine. Damn near two football fields.

But in that moment, as it soared without shadow into a blue sky and a white sun and he dropped his bat and trotted slowly down the first base line, tracking it, willing it to go farther and faster than anything ever could or ever had or maybe ever would in so short a time, Babe saw the damnedest thing he’d ever seen in his life — his father sitting atop the ball. Riding it really, hands clenched to the seams, knees pressed to the leather, his father tumbling over and over in space with that ball. He howled, his father did. He clenched his face from the fear. Tears fell from his eyes, fat ones, and hot, Babe assumed. Until, like the ball, he disappeared from view.

Five hundred and seventy nine feet, they told Ruth.

Ruth smiled, picturing his father, not the ball. All gone now. Buried in the saw grass. Buried in Plant Field, Tampa.

Never coming back.

Chapter twenty-five

If Danny could say nothing else positive about the new commissioner, he could at least say the man was true to his word. When the molasses flood tore through the heart of his neighborhood, Danny was spending the week keeping the peace forty miles away at a box factory strike in Haverhill. Once the workers there were brought to heel, he moved on to ten days at a fishery strike in Charlestown. That whimpered to an end when the AFL refused to grant a charter because they didn’t deem the workers skilled labor. Danny was loaned out next to the Lawrence PD for a textile workers’ strike that had been going on for three months and could already claim two dead, including a labor organizer who’d been shot through the mouth as he left a barbershop.

Through these strikes and those that followed throughout the late winter and into early spring — at a clock factory in Waltham, among machinists in Roslindale, a mill in Framingham — Danny was spat at, screamed at, called a goon and a whore and a lackey and pus. He was scratched, punched, hit with eggs, hit with sticks, and once, in Framingham, caught a hurled brick with his shoulder. In Roslindale, the machinists got their raise but not their health benefits. In Everett, the shoe workers got half their raise, but no pension. The Framingham strike was crushed by the arrival of truckloads of new workers and the onslaught of police. After they’d made the final push and the scabs had gone through the gates, Danny looked around at the men they’d left in their wake, some still curled on the ground, others sitting up, a few raising ineffectual fists and pointless shouts. They faced a sudden new day with far less than they’d asked for and much less than they’d had. Time to go home to their families and figure out what to do next.

He came upon a Framingham cop he’d never met before kicking a striker who offered no resistance. The cop wasn’t putting much into the kicks anymore, and the striker probably wasn’t even conscious. Danny put his hand on the guy’s shoulder and the guy raised his nightstick before he recognized the uniform.

“What?”

“You’ve made your point,” Danny said. “Enough.”

“Ain’t no enough,” the cop said and walked away.

Danny rode back to Boston in a bus with the other city cops. The sky hung low and gray. Scraps of frozen snow gripped the scalp of the earth like crabs.

“Meeting tonight, Dan?” Kenny Trescott asked him.

Danny had almost forgotten. Now that Mark Denton was rarely available to attend a BSC meeting, Danny had become the de facto head of the union. But it wasn’t really a union anymore. It was, true to its original roots and its given name, a social club.

“Sure,” Danny said, knowing it would be a waste of time. They were powerless again and they knew it, but some child’s hope kept them coming back, kept them talking, kept them acting as if they had a voice that mattered.

Either that, or there was no place else to go.

He looked in Trescott’s eyes and patted his arm. “Sure,” he said again.

One afternoon on K Street, Captain Coughlin returned home early with a cold and sent Luther home.

“I have it from here,” he said. “Go enjoy what’s left of the day.”

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land. The gutters gurgled with a stream of melted snow; sun prisms and small rainbows formed in windows and on slick black tar. But Luther didn’t give himself over to the idle stroll. He walked straightaway into the South End and made it to Nora’s shoe factory just as her shift ended. She walked out sharing a cigarette with another girl, and Luther was immediately shocked at how gray she looked. Gray and bony.

“Well, look at himself,” she said with a broad smile. “Molly, this is Luther, the one I used to work with.”

Molly gave Luther a small wave and took a drag off her cigarette.

“How are you?” Nora asked.

“I’m fine, girl.” Luther felt desperate to apologize. “I couldn’t get here before now. I really couldn’t. The shifts, you know? They didn’t—”

“Luther.”

“And I didn’t know where you lived. And I—”

“Luther.” This time her hand found his arm. “Sure, it’s fine. I understand, I do.” She took the cigarette from Molly’s hand, a practiced gesture between friends, and took a quick drag before handing it back. “Would you walk me home, Mr. Laurence?”

Luther gave her a small bow. “Be my pleasure, Miss O’Shea.”

She didn’t live on the worst street in the city, but it was close. Her rooming house was on Green Street in the West End, just off Scollay Square, in a block of buildings that catered primarily to sailors, where rooms could often be rented by the half hour.

When they reached her building, she said, “Go ’round back. It’s a green door in the alley. I’ll meet you there.”

She went inside and Luther cut down the alley, all his wits about him, all senses turned up as high and awake as they got. Only four in the afternoon, but already Scollay Square was banging and bouncing, shouts echoing along the rooflines, a bottle breaking, a sudden burst of cackling followed by off-key piano playing. Luther reached the green door and she was waiting for him. He stepped in quickly, and she shut it behind him and he followed her back down the hallway to her room.

It must have been a closet once. Literally. The only thing that fit in it was a child’s bed and a table fit for holding a single potted plant. In place of a plant, she had an old kerosene lamp and she lit it before closing the door. She sat up at the head of the bed, and Luther took a seat at the foot. Her clothes were neatly folded and placed on the floor across from his feet and he had to be careful not to step on them.

“Ah now,” she said, raising her hands to the room as if to a mansion, “we’re in the lap of luxury, we are, Luther.”

Luther tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He’d grown up poor, but this? This was fucking grim. “I heard the factories never pay the women enough to support themselves.”

“No,” she said. “And they’ll be cutting our hours, we hear.”

“When?”

“Soon.” She shrugged.

“What’ll you do?”

She chewed a thumbnail and gave him another shrug, her eyes strangely gay, as if this was some lark she was trying out. “Don’t know.”

Luther looked around for a hot plate. “Where do you cook?”

She shook her head. “We gather at our landlady’s table every night — promptly, mind you — at five sharp. Usually it’s beets. Sometimes potatoes. Last Tuesday, we even had meat. I don’t know what kind of meat it ’twas exactly, but I assure you it was meat.”

Outside, someone screamed. Impossible to tell if it was from pain or enjoyment.

“I won’t allow this here,” Luther said.

“What?”

He said it again. “I won’t allow this. You and Clayton the only friends I made in this town. I won’t abide this.” He shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Luther, you can’t—”

“Know I killed a man?”

She stopped chewing her thumb and looked at him with big eyes.

“That’s what brought me here, missy-thing. Shot a man straight up through his head. Had to leave behind my wife and she’s pregnant with my child. So I’ve been doing some hard things, some hard time since I got here. And damned if anyone — you included — is gonna tell me what I can and can’t do. I can damn well get you some food. Put some meat back on you. That I can do.”

She stared at him. Outside, catcalls, the honking of horns.

She said, “‘Missy-thing’?” and the tears came with her laughter, and Luther hugged the first white woman he’d ever hugged in his life. She smelled white, he thought, starchy. He could feel her bones as she wept into his shirt, and he hated the Coughlins. Hated them outright. Hated them wholesale.

In early spring, Danny followed Nora home from work. He kept a city block behind her the whole way, and she never once looked back. He watched her enter a rooming house off Scollay Square, maybe the worst section of the city in which a woman could live. Also the cheapest.

He walked back toward the North End. It wasn’t his fault. If she ended up destitute and a ghost of herself, well, she shouldn’t have lied, should she?

Luther received a letter from Lila in March. It came in an eight-by-eleven envelope and there was another envelope, a small white one, that had already been opened, in there alongside a newspaper clipping.

Even as he felt dread at the rest of the letter and fear of the newspaper clippings, still folded, that he held in his hand, Luther stared at one word above all others — love.

He closed his eyes. Thank you, Lila. Thank you, Lord.

He unfolded the first clipping. A small article from the Tulsa Star:

So Smoke was a free man. And a reasonably healthy one. Luther played it back in his head for the umpteenth time — Smoke lying in a growing pool of blood on the stage. His arm outstretched, the back of his head to Luther. Even now, knowing what he knew would come of it, he still doubted he could have pulled that trigger. Deacon Broscious was a different thing, a different circumstance — looking Luther in the eye, talking his bullshit talk. But could Luther have shot what he’d believed was a dying man in the back of the head? No. And yet he knew he probably should have. He turned over the envelope and saw his name and nothing else written across it in a male’s blocky handwriting. He opened the envelope and looked at the second clipping and decided to remove “probably” from his thoughts. Should have. Without question or regret.

A photo clipping reprinted in the January 22 issue of the Tulsa Sun described the great molasses flood under the headline “Boston Slum Disaster.”

There was nothing special about the article — just one more on the North End disaster that the rest of the country seemed humored by. The only thing that made this clipping special was that every time the word Boston was used — a total of nine times — it had been circled in red.

Rayme Finch was carrying a box to his car when he found Thomas Coughlin waiting for him. The car was government issue and was, as befit a government department that was underfunded and undervalued, a heap of shit. He’d left the engine idling, not only because the ignition often refused to engage but also because he secretly hoped someone would steal it. If that wish were granted this morning, however, he’d regret it — the car, shit heap or no, was his only transport back to Washington.

No one would be stealing it for the moment, though, not with a police captain leaning against the hood. Finch acknowledged Captain Coughlin with a flick of his head as he placed the box of office supplies in the trunk.

“Shoving off, are we?”

Finch closed the trunk. “’Fraid so.”

“A shame,” Thomas Coughlin said.

Finch shrugged. “Boston radicals turned out to be a bit more docile than we’d heard.”

“Except for the one my son killed.”

“Federico, yes. He was a believer. And you?”

“Sorry?”

“How’s your investigation going? We never did hear much from the BPD.”

“There wasn’t much to tell. They’re hard nuts to crack, these groups.”

Finch nodded. “You told me a few months ago they’d be easy.”

“History’s ledger will judge me overconfident on that entry, I admit.”

“Not one of your men has gathered any evidence?”

“None substantial.”

“Hard to believe.”

“I can’t see why. It’s no secret we’re a police department caught in a regime change. Had O’Meara, God rest him, not perished, why, you and I, Rayme? We’d be having this lovely conversation while watching a ship depart for Italy with Galleani himself shackled in her bowels.”

Finch smiled in spite of himself. “I’d heard you were the slipperiest sheriff in this slippery one-horse town. Seems my sources weren’t embellishing.”

Thomas Coughlin cocked his head, his face narrowed in confusion. “I think you have been misinformed, Agent Finch. Sure, we’ve more than one horse in this town. Dozens actually.” He tipped his hat. “Safe travels.”

Finch stood by the car and watched the captain walk back up the street. He decided he was one of those men whose greatest gift lay in the inability of others to ever guess what he was truly thinking. That made him a dangerous man, to be sure, but valuable, too, pricelessly so.

We’ll meet again, Captain. Finch entered the building and climbed the stairs toward his last box in an otherwise empty office. No doubt in my mind, we will definitely meet again.

Danny, Mark Denton, and Kevin McRae were called into the police commissioner’s office in the middle of April. They were led into the office, which was empty, by Stuart Nichols, the commissioner’s secretary, who promptly left them alone.

They sat in stiff chairs in front of Commissioner Curtis’s vast desk and waited. It was nine o’clock at night. A raw night of occasional hail.

After ten minutes, they left their chairs. McRae walked over to a window. Mark stretched with a soft yawn. Danny paced from one end of the office to the other.

By nine-twenty, Danny and Mark stood at the window while Kevin paced. Every now and then the three of them exchanged a look of suppressed exasperation, but no one said anything.

At nine-twenty-five, they took their seats again. As they did, the door to their left opened and Edwin Upton Curtis entered, followed by Herbert Parker, his chief counsel. As the commissioner took up a post behind his desk, Herbert Parker briskly passed in front of the three officers and placed a sheet of paper on each of their laps.

Danny looked down at it.

“Sign it,” Curtis said.

“What is it?” Kevin McRae said.

“That should be evident,” Herbert Parker said and came around the desk behind Curtis and folded his arms across his chest.

“It’s your raise,” Curtis said and took his seat. “As you wished.”

Danny scanned the page. “Two hundred a year?”

Curtis nodded. “As to your other wishes, we’ll take them into consideration, but I wouldn’t hold out hope. Most were for luxuries, not necessities.”

Mark Denton seemed stricken of the power of speech for a moment. He raised the paper up by his ear, then slowly lowered it back to his knee. “It’s not enough anymore.”

“Excuse me, Patrolman?”

“It’s not enough,” Mark said. “You know that. Two hundred a year was a 1913 figure.”

“It’s what you asked for,” Parker said.

Danny shook his head. “It’s what the BSC coppers in the 1916 negotiations asked for. Cost of living has gone up—”

“Oh cost of living, my eye!” Curtis said.

“—seventy-three percent,” Danny said. “In seven months, sir. So two hundred a year? Without health benefits? Without sanitary conditions changing at the station houses?”

“As you well know, I’ve created committees to look into those issues. Now—”

“Those committees,” Danny said, “are made up of precinct captains, sir.”

“So?”

“So they have a vested interest in not finding anything wrong with the station houses they command.”

“Are you questioning the honor of your superiors?”

“No.”

“Are you questioning the honor of this department’s chain of command?”

Mark Denton spoke before Danny could. “This offer is not going to do, sir.”

“It very well will do,” Curtis said.

“No,” Mark Denton said. “I think we need to look into—”

“Tonight,” Herbert Parker said, “is the only night this offer will be on the table. If you don’t take it, you’ll be back out in the cold where you’ll find the doors locked and the knobs removed.”

“We can’t agree to this.” Danny flapped the page in the air. “It’s far too little and far too late.”

Curtis shook his head. “I say it’s not. Mr. Parker says it’s not. So it’s not.”

“Because you say?” Kevin McRae said.

“Precisely,” Herbert Parker said.

Curtis ran his palms over his desktop. “We’ll kill you in the press.”

Parker nodded. “We gave you what you asked for and you turned it down.”

“That’s not how it is,” Danny said.

“But that’s how it’ll play, son.”

Now it was Danny, Kevin, and Mark’s turn to trade glances.

Eventually, Mark turned back to Commissioner Curtis. “No fucking deal.”

Curtis leaned back in his chair. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

Luther came down the Coughlins’ steps on his way to the streetcar when he noticed Eddie McKenna about ten yards up the sidewalk, leaning against the hood of his Hudson.

“And how’s that fine building restoration going? Coming along, she is?” McKenna came off the car and walked toward him.

Luther forced a smile. “Coming along right well, Lieutenant, sir. Right well.”

That was, in fact, the truth. He and Clayton had been on a tear lately. Aided on several occasions by men in NAACP chapters all over New England, men Mrs. Giddreaux found a way to get up or down to Boston on weekends and occasional weeknights, they finished the demo weeks ago, ran the electrical through the open walls and throughout the house, and were working on the water pipes that branched off the kitchen and the bathrooms to the main water pipe, a clay beauty they’d run from the basement to the roof a month back.

“When do you suppose she’ll open?”

Luther’d been wondering that himself lately. He still had plenty of pipe to run and was waiting on a shipment of horsehair plaster before he could start sealing the walls. “Hard to say, sir.”

“Not ‘suh’? Usually you get a bit more southern for my benefit, Luther, something I noticed back in the early days of winter.”

“I guess it’s ‘sir,’ tonight,” Luther said, feeling a different edge in the man than he’d felt before.

McKenna shrugged. “So how long you think?”

“Till I’m done? A few months. Depends on a lot of things, sir.”

“I’m sure. But the Giddreauxs must be planning a ribbon cutting, that sort of thing, a gathering of their ilk.”

“Again, sir, I’m hoping to be done summer’s end, somewhere thereabouts.”

McKenna placed his arm on the wrought-iron railing that curved out from the Coughlin stoop. “I need you to dig a hole.”

“A hole?”

McKenna nodded, his trench coat flapping around his legs in the warm spring breeze. “A vault, really. I’ll want you to be sure to make it weather-tight. I’d recommend poured concrete, if I could be so bold.”

Luther said, “And where do you want me to build this vault? Your house, sir?”

McKenna leaned back from the suggestion, an odd smile on his face. “I’d never let your kind in my home, Luther. Good Lord.” He exhaled a small whoop at the entire idea, and Luther could see the weight of carrying a fake self for Luther’s benefit leave him, the man finally ready to show Luther his depths. With pride. “An ebon on Telegraph Hill? Ha. So, no, Luther, the vault is not for my home. It’s for these ‘headquarters’ you’re so nobly aspiring to build.”

“You want me to put a vault in the NAACP?”

“Yes. Under the floor. I believe last time I was over there, you’d yet to lay in the floor of the rear room in the east corner. Used to be a kitchen, I believe?”

Last time he was over there?

“What of it?” Luther said.

“Dig the hole there. The size of a man, we’ll say. Weatherproof it, then cover it with the flooring of your choice, but make sure that flooring is easy to lift. I don’t presume to tell you how to do your job, but you may consider hinges in that regard, an inconspicuous handle of some sort.”

Luther, standing on the sidewalk by now, waited for the punch line. “I don’t understand, Lieutenant, sir.”

“You know who’s proven my most irreplaceable intelligence source these last couple of years? Do you?”

“No,” Luther said.

“Edison. They’re grand ones for tracking the movements of a person.” McKenna lit a half-smoked cigar and waved at the air between them once he got it going. “You, for example, terminated your electric service in Columbus in September. Took my Edison friends some time to discover where you started it up again, but eventually we got it. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October. It’s still being supplied to your Tulsa address, so I can only assume you left a woman there. Maybe a family? You’re on the run, Luther. Knew it the moment I laid eyes on you, but it was nice to have it confirmed. When I asked the Tulsa PD if they had any unsolved crimes of note, they mentioned a nightclub in niggertown that someone shot the hell out of, left three dead. A full day’s labor someone did.”

Luther said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”

“Of course, of course.” McKenna nodded. “Tulsa PD said folks there don’t get too riled up when their niggers start shooting each other, ’specially when they can put the blame on one of the dead niggers. Far as they’re concerned, it’s a closed case with three coons in the grave no one’ll miss. So on that score, you are in the clear.” McKenna raised his index finger. “Unless I were to call Tulsa PD back and ask them, as a professional courtesy, to question the sole survivor of said bloodbath and in the course of questioning mention that a certain Luther Laurence, late of Tulsa, was living up here in Boston.” His eyes glittered. “Then I’d have to wonder how many places you’ve got left to hide.”

Luther felt all the fight in him just roll up and die. Just lie down. Just wither away. “What do you want?”

“I want a vault.” McKenna’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, I want the Crisis mailing list.”

“What?”

“The Crisis. The newsletter of the National Association for the Advancement of Chimpanzees.”

“I know what it is. Where would I get the mailing list?”

“Well, Isaiah Giddreaux must have access to it. There must be a copy of it somewhere in that nigger-bourgeoisie palace you call home. Find it.”

“And if I build your vault and find your mailing list?”

“Don’t adopt the tone of someone who has options, Luther.”

“Fine. What do you want me to put in this vault?” Luther asked.

“You keep asking questions?” McKenna draped his arm over Luther’s shoulders. “Maybe it’ll be you.”

Leaving another ineffectual BSC meeting, Danny was exhausted as he headed for the el stop at Roxbury Crossing, and Steve Coyle fell in beside him as Danny knew he would. Steve was still coming to meetings, still making people wish he’d go away, still talking about grander and grander fool-ambitions. Danny had to report for duty in four hours and wished only to lay his head to his pillow and sleep for a day or so.

“She’s still here,” Steve said as they walked up the stairs to the el.

“Who?”

“Tessa Ficara,” Steve said. “Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten her.”

“I’m not pretending anything,” Danny said, and it came out too sharp.

“I’ve been talking to people,” Steve said quickly. “People who owe me from when I worked the streets.”

Danny wondered just who these people could be. Cops were always under the misguided impression that people felt gratitude or indebtedness toward them when nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you were saving their lives or their wallets, people resented cops. They did not want you around.

“Talking to people is a bit dangerous,” he said. “In the North End particularly.”

“I told you,” Steve said, “my sources owe me. They trust me. Anyway, she’s not in the North End. She’s over here in Roxbury.”

The train entered the station with screaming brakes, and they boarded it and took seats on the empty car. “Roxbury, uh?”

“Yeah. Somewhere between Columbus and Warren, and she’s working with Galleani himself on something big.”

“Something bigger than the landmass between Columbus and Warren?”

“Look,” Steve said as they burst from a tunnel and the lights of the city suddenly dipped below them as the track rose, “this one guy told me he’ll get me an exact address for fifty bucks.”

“Fifty bucks?”

“Why do you keep repeating what I say?”

Danny held up a hand. “I’m tired. Sorry. Steve, I don’t have fifty bucks.”

“I know, I know.”

“That’s over two weeks’ pay.”

“I said I know. Jesus.”

“I could lay my hands on three. Maybe four?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, whatever you can do. I mean, we want to get this bitch, right?”

Truth was, ever since he’d shot Federico, Danny hadn’t given Tessa a sole thought. He couldn’t explain why that was, just that it was.

“If we don’t get her,” he said, “someone else will, Steve. She’s a federal problem. You understand.”

“I’ll be careful. Don’t you worry.”

That wasn’t the point, but Danny’d grown used to Steve missing the point lately. He closed his eyes, head back against the window, as the el car bumped and rattled along.

“You think you can get me the four bucks soon?” Steve asked.

Danny kept his eyes closed because he feared Steve would see the contempt in them if he opened them. He kept them closed and nodded once.

At Batterymarch station, he declined Steve’s offer of a drink, and they went their separate ways. By the time Danny reached Salem Street, he was starting to see spots. He could picture his bed, the white sheets, the cool pillow….

“And how’ve you been keeping then, Danny?”

Nora crossed the street toward him, stepping between a horse-drawn wagon and a sputtering tin lizzy that chucked great bursts of ink-colored smoke from its tailpipe. When she reached the curb, he stopped and turned fully toward her. Her eyes were false and bright and she wore a pale gray blouse he’d always liked and a blue skirt that left her ankles exposed. Her coat looked thin, even for the warming air, and her cheekbones were too pronounced. Her eyes sat back in her head.

“Nora.”

She held out a hand to him in a manner he found comically formal and he shook it as if it were a man’s.

“So?” she said, still working the brightness into her eyes.

“So?” Danny said.

“How’ve you been keeping?” she said a second time.

“I’ve been fair,” he said. “You?”

“Tip-top,” she said.

“Swell news.”

“Aye.”

Even at eight in the evening, the North End sidewalks were thick with people. Danny, tired of being jostled, took Nora by the elbow and led her to a café that was nearly empty. They took a seat by the small window that overlooked the street.

She removed her coat as the proprietor came out of the back, tying his apron on, and caught Danny’s eye.

“Due caffè, per favore.”

“Sì, signore. Venire a destra in su.”

“Grazie.”

Nora gave him a hesitant smile. “I forgot how much pleasure that gave me.”

“What’s that?”

“Your Italian. The sound of it, yeah?” She looked around the café and then out at the street. “You seem at home here, Danny.”

“It is home.” Danny suppressed a yawn. “Always has been.”

“And now how about that molasses flood?” She removed her hat and placed it on a chair. She smoothed her hair. “They’re saying it was definitely the company’s fault?”

Danny nodded. “Looks to be the case.”

“The stench is awful still.”

It was. Every brick and gutter and cobblestone crack in the North End held some residual evidence of the flood. The warmer it got, the worse it smelled. Insects and rodents had tripled in number, and the disease rate among children erupted.

The proprietor returned from the back and placed their coffees in front of them. “Qui andate, signore, signora.”

“Grazie così tanto, signore.”

“Siete benvenuti. Siete per avere così bello fortunato una moglie, signore.” The man clapped his hands and gave them a broad smile and went back behind the counter.

“What did he say?” Nora said.

“He said it was a nice night out.” Danny stirred a lump of sugar into his coffee. “What brings you here?”

“I was out for a walk.”

“Long walk,” he said.

She reached for the cup of sugar between them. “How would you know how long a walk it is? That would mean you know where I live.”

He placed his pack of Murads on the table. Christ, he was fucking exhausted. “Let’s not.”

“What?”

“Do this back-and-forth.”

She added two lumps to her own coffee and followed it with cream. “How’s Joe?”

“He’s fine,” Danny said, wondering if he was. It had been so long since he’d been by the house. Work kept him away mostly, meetings at the social club, but something more, too, something he didn’t want to put his finger on.

She sipped her coffee and stared across the table with her too-happy face and her sunken eyes. “I half thought you’d have paid me a visit by now.”

“Really?”

She nodded, her face beginning to soften from its cast of false gaiety.

“Why would I do that, Nora?”

Her face grew gay again, constricted. “Oh, I don’t know. I just hoped, I guess.”

“Hoped.” He nodded. “What’s your son’s name by the way?”

She played with her spoon, ran her fingers over the checkered tablecloth. “His name’s Gabriel,” she said softly, “and he’s not my son. I told you that.”

“You told me a lot of things,” Danny said. “And you never mentioned this son who’s not a son until Quentin Finn brought it up for you.”

She raised her eyes and they were no longer bright, nor were they angry or wounded. She seemed to have reached a place beyond expectation.

“I don’t know whose child Gabriel is. He was simply there the day Quentin brought me to the hovel he calls a home. Gabriel was about eight then, and a wolf would have been better tamed. A mindless, heartless child, our Gabriel. Quentin is a lesser creature among men, of that you’ve seen, but Gabriel? Sure now the child was molded from devil’s clay. He’d crouch for hours by the hearth, watching the fire, as if the flames had voice, and then he’d leave the house without a word and blind a goat. That was Gabriel at nine. Would you like me to tell you what he was like at twelve?”

Danny didn’t want to know anything more about Gabriel or Quentin or Nora’s past. Her sullied, embarrassing (and that was it, wasn’t it?) past. She was tainted now, a woman he could never acknowledge as his and look the rest of the world in the eye.

Nora sipped some more coffee and looked at him and he could feel it all dying between them. They were both lost, he realized, both floating away toward new lives that had nothing to do with one another. They would pass each other one day in a crowd and each would pretend not to have seen the other.

She put on her coat, not a word spoken between them, but both understanding what had transpired. She lifted her hat off the chair. The hat was as threadbare as the coat, and he noticed that her collarbone pressed up hard against her flesh.

He looked down at the table. “You need money?”

“What?” Her whisper was high-pitched, squeaky.

He raised his head. Her eyes had filled. Her lips were clamped tightly against her teeth and she shook her head softly.

“Do you—”

“You didn’t say that,” she said. “You didn’t. You couldn’t have.”

“I just meant—”

“You … Danny? My God, you didn’t.”

He reached for her, but she stepped back. She continued shaking her head at him and then she rushed out of the café and into the crowded streets.

He let her go. He let her go. He’d told his father after he’d beaten Quentin Finn that he was ready to grow up now. And that was the truth. He was tired of bucking against the way things were. Curtis had taught him the futility of that in a single afternoon. The world was built and maintained by men like his father and his cronies, and Danny looked out the window at the streets of the North End and decided it was, most times, a good world. It seemed to work in spite of itself. Let other men fight the small and bitter battles against the hardness of it. He was done. Nora, with her lies and sordid history, was just another foolish child’s fantasy. She would go off and lie to some other man, and maybe it would be a rich man and she’d live out her lies until they faded and were replaced by a matron’s respectability.

Danny would find a woman without a past. A woman fit to be seen in public with him. It was a good world. He would be worthy of it. A grown-up, a citizen.

His fingers searched his pocket for the button, but it wasn’t there. For a moment, he was seized with a panic so severe it seemed to demand physical action of him. He straightened in his chair and set his feet, as if preparing to lunge. Then he recalled seeing the button this morning amid some change scattered atop his dresser. So it was there. Safe. He sat back and sipped his coffee, though it had gone cold.

On April 29, in the Baltimore distribution annex of the U.S. Post Office, a postal inspector noticed fluid leaking from a brown cardboard package addressed to Judge Wilfred Enniston of the Fifth District U.S. Appellate Court. When closer inspection of the package revealed that the fluid had burned a hole in the corner of the box, the inspector notified Baltimore police, who dispatched their bomb squad and contacted the Justice Department.

By the end of the evening, authorities discovered thirty-four bombs. They were in packages addressed to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, John Rockefeller, and thirty-one others. All thirty-four targets worked in either industry or in government agencies whose policies affected immigration standards.

On the same evening in Boston, Louis Fraina and the Lettish Workingman’s Society applied for a parade permit to march from the Dudley Square Opera House to Franklin Park in recognition of May Day.

The application for a permit was denied.