The Given Day

Chapter twenty-six

May Day, Luther had breakfast at Solomon’s Diner before he went to work at the Coughlins’. He left at five-thirty and got as far as Columbus Square before Lieutenant McKenna’s black Hudson detached itself from a curb across the street and did a slow U-turn in front of him. He didn’t feel surprised. He didn’t feel alarmed. He didn’t feel much of anything really.

Luther had read the Standard at the Solomon’s counter, his eyes immediately drawn to the headline — “Reds Plot May Day Assassinations.” He ate his eggs and read about the thirty-four bombs discovered in the U.S. mail. The list of targets was posted in full on the second page of the paper, and Luther, no fan of white judges or white bureaucrats, still felt ice chips flow through his blood. This was followed by a jolt of patriotic fury, the likes of which he’d never suspected could live in his soul for a country that had never treated his people with any welcome or justice. And yet he pictured these Reds, most of them aliens with accents as thick as their mustaches, willing to do violence and wreckage to his country, and he wanted to join any mob that was going to smash them through the teeth, wanted to say to someone, anyone: Just give me a rifle.

According to the paper, the Reds were planning a day of national revolt, and the thirty-four bombs that had been intercepted suggested a hundred more that could be out there primed to explode. In the past week, leaflets had been pasted to lamp poles across the city, all of which bore the same words:

In yesterday’s Traveler, even before news of the thirty-four bombs leaked out, an article had listed some of the recent, inflammatory comments of American subversives, including Jack Reed’s call for “the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism through a proletarian dictatorship” and Emma Goldman’s anticonscription speech last year, in which she’d urged all workers to “Follow Russia’s lead.”

Follow Russia’s lead? Luther thought: You love Russia so much, fucking move there. And take your bombs and your onion-soup breath with you. For a few, strangely joyous hours, Luther didn’t feel like a colored man, didn’t even feel there was such a thing as color, only one thing above all others: He was an American.

That changed, of course, as soon as he saw McKenna. The large man stepped out of his Hudson and smiled. He held up a copy of the Standard and said, “You seen it?”

“I seen it,” Luther said.

“We’re about to have a very serious day ahead of us, Luther.” He slapped the newspaper off Luther’s chest a couple of times. “Where’s my mailing list?”

“My people ain’t Reds,” Luther said.

“Oh, they’re your people now, uh?”

Shit, Luther wanted to say, they always were.

“You build my vault?” McKenna said, almost singing the words.

“Working on it.”

McKenna nodded. “You wouldn’t be lying now?”

Luther shook his head.

“Where’s my fucking list?”

“It’s in a safe.”

McKenna said, “All I asked of you is that you get me one simple list. Why has that been so difficult?”

Luther shrugged. “I don’t know how to bust a safe.”

McKenna nodded, as if that were perfectly reasonable. “You’ll bring it to me after your shift at the Coughlins’. Outside Costello’s. It’s on the waterfront. Six o’clock.”

Luther said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do that. I can’t bust a safe.”

In reality, there was no safe. Mrs. Giddreaux kept the mailing list in her desk drawer. Unlocked.

McKenna tapped the paper lightly off his thigh, as if giving it some thought. “You need to be inspired, I see. That’s okay, Luther. All creative men need a muse.”

Luther had no idea what he was on about now, but he didn’t like his tone — airy, confident.

McKenna draped his arm across Luther’s shoulder. “Congratulations.”

“On?”

That lit a happy fire in McKenna’s face. “Your nuptials. I understand you were married last fall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a woman named Lila Waters, late of Columbus, Ohio. A grand institution, marriage.”

Luther said nothing, though he was sure the hate showed in his eyes. First the Deacon, now Lieutenant Eddie McKenna of the BPD — it seemed no matter where he went the Lord saw fit to place demons in his path.

“Funny thing is, when I started sniffing around back in Columbus, I found that your bride has a warrant out for her arrest.”

Luther laughed.

“You find that funny?”

Luther smiled. “If you knew my wife, McKenna, you’d be laughing, too.”

“I’m sure I would, Luther.” McKenna nodded several times. “Problem is, this warrant is very real. Seems your wife and a boy by the name of Jefferson Reese — that ring a bell? — seems they were stealing from their employers, family by the name of Hammond? Apparently, they’d been doing it for years by the time your beloved took off to Tulsa. But Mr. Reese, he got himself arrested with some silver frames and some petty cash, and he pinned the whole thing on your wife. Apparently he was under the impression that a partner in his enterprise made the difference between hard time and soft time. They slapped the hard charge on him anyway, and he’s in prison now, but the charge is still pending against your wife. Pregnant wife, the way I hear it. So she’s sitting there on, let me see if I remember, Seventeen Elwood Street in Tulsa, and I doubt she’s moving around all that much, what with the loaf in her oven.” McKenna smiled and patted Luther’s face. “Ever see the kind of midwives they hire in a county lockup?”

Luther didn’t trust himself to speak.

McKenna slapped him in the face, still smiling. “They’re not the gentlest of souls, I can tell you that. They merely show the mother the baby’s face and then they take that child — if it’s a Negro child, that is — and they whisk it straightaway to the county orphanage. That wouldn’t be the case, of course, if the father was around, but you’re not around, are you? You’re here.”

Luther said, “Tell me what you want me—”

“I fucking told you, Luther. I fucking told you and told you.” He squeezed the flesh along Luther’s jaw and pulled his face close. “You get that list and you bring it to Costello’s tonight at six. No fucking excuses. Understood?”

Luther closed his eyes and nodded. McKenna let go of his face and stepped back.

“Right now you hate me. I can see that. But today we’re going to settle accounts in this little burg of ours. Today, the Reds — all Reds, even colored Reds — are getting their eviction notices from this fair city.” He held out his arms and shrugged. “And by tomorrow, you’ll thank me, because we’ll have us a nice place to live again.”

He tapped the paper off his thigh again and gave Luther a solemn nod before walking toward his Hudson.

“You’re making a mistake,” Luther said.

McKenna looked back over his shoulder. “What’s that?”

“You’re making a mistake.”

McKenna walked back and punched Luther in the stomach. All the air left his body like it was never coming back. He dropped to his knees and opened his mouth but his throat had collapsed along with his lungs, and for a terrifying length of time he couldn’t get a breath in or out. He was sure he’d die like that, on his knees, his face gone blue like someone with the grippe.

When the air did come, it hurt, going down his windpipe like a spade. His first breath came out sounding like the screech of a train wheel, followed by another and then another, until they began to sound normal, if a little high-pitched.

McKenna stood over him, patient. “What was that?” he said softly.

“NAACP folks ain’t Red,” Luther said. “And if some are, they ain’t the kind going to blow shit up or fire off guns.”

McKenna slapped the side of his head. “I’m not sure I heard you.”

Luther could see twins of himself reflected in McKenna’s irises. “What you think? You think a bunch of coloreds are going to run in these here streets with weapons? Give you and all the other redneck assholes in this country an excuse to kill us all? You think we want to get massacred?” He stared up at the man, saw that his fist was clenched. “You got a bunch of foreign-born sons of bitches trying to stir up a revolution today, McKenna, so I say you go get them. Put ’em down like dogs. I got no love for those people. And neither do any other colored folk. This is our country, too.”

McKenna took a step back and considered him with a wry smile.

“What’d you say?”

Luther spit on the ground and took a breath. “Said this is our country, too.”

“’Tis not, son.” McKenna shook his large head. “Nor will it ever be.”

He left Luther there and climbed into his car and it pulled away from the curb. Luther rose from his knees and sucked a few breaths into his lungs until the nausea had almost passed. “Yes, it is,” he whispered, over and over, until he saw McKenna’s taillights take a right turn on Massachusetts Avenue.

“Yes, it is,” he said one more time and spit into the gutter.

That morning, the reports started coming out of Division 9 in Roxbury that a crowd was gathering in front of the Dudley Opera House. Each of the other station houses was asked to send men, and the Mounted Unit met at the BPD stables and warmed up their horses.

Men from all the city’s precincts were dropped at Division 9 under the command of Lieutenant McKenna. They assembled on the first floor in the wide lobby in front of the desk sergeant’s counter, and McKenna addressed them from the landing of the stairwell that curved up toward the second floor.

“We happy, happy few,” he said, taking them all in with a soft smile. “Gentlemen, the Letts are gathering in an illegal assembly in front of the Opera House. What do you think about that?”

No one knew if the question was rhetorical or not, so no one answered.

“Patrolman Watson?”

“Loo?”

“What do you think of this illegal assembly?”

Watson, whose family had changed their Polish name from something long and unpronounceable, straightened his shoulders. “I’d say they picked the wrong day for it, Loo.”

McKenna raised a hand above them all. “We are sworn to protect and serve Americans in general and Bostonians in particular. The Letts, well” — he chuckled — “the Letts are neither, gents. Heathens and subversives that they are, they have chosen to ignore the city’s strict orders not to march and plan to parade from the Opera House down Dudley Street to Upham’s Corner in Dorchester. From there they plan to turn right on Columbia Road and continue until they reach Franklin Park, where they will hold a rally in support of their comrades — yes, comrades — in Hungary, Bavaria, Greece, and, of course, Russia. Are there any Russians among us here today?”

Someone shouted, “Hell no!” and the other men repeated it in a cheer.

“Any Bolsheviki?”

“Hell no!”

“Any gutless, atheistic, subversive, hook-nosed, cock-smoking, anti-American dog fuckers?”

The men were laughing when they shouted, “Hell no!”

McKenna leaned on the railing and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Three days ago, the mayor of Seattle received a bomb in the mail. Luckily for him, his housekeeper got to it before he did. Poor woman’s in the hospital with no hands. Last night, as I’m sure you all know, the U.S. postal service intercepted thirty-four bombs meant to kill the attorney general of this great nation as well as several learned judges and captains of industry. Today, radicals of every stripe — but mostly heathen Bolsheviki — have promised a national day of revolt to take place in key cities across this fine land. Gentlemen, I ask you — is this the kind of country we wish to live in?”

“Hell no!”

The men were moving around Danny, shifting from foot to foot.

“Would you like to walk out the back door right now and hand it over to a horde of subversives and ask them to please remember to shut the lights out at bedtime?”

“Hell no!” Shoulders jostled off one another and Danny could smell sweat and hangover breath and a strange burnt-hair odor, an acrid scent of fury and fear.

“Or,” McKenna shouted, “would you, instead, like to take this country back?”

The men were so used to saying “Hell no!” that several did so again.

McKenna cocked an eyebrow at them. “I said — Would you like to take this fucking country back?”

“Hell, yes!”

Dozens of the men attended BSC meetings alongside Danny, men who just the other night had been bemoaning the shoddy treatment they received at the hands of their department, men who’d expressed kinship for all the workers of the world in their struggle against Big Money. But all that, for the moment, was swept away by the tonic of unity and a shared purpose.

“We are going down to the Dudley Opera House,” McKenna shouted, “right now and we are going to order these subversives, these Communists and anarchists and bomb throwers, to stand the fuck down!”

The cheer that rose up was unintelligible, a collective roar of the blood.

“We are going to say, in the strictest terms, ‘Not on my watch!’” McKenna leaned over the rail, his neck extended, his jaw thrust forward. “Can you say it with me, gents?”

“Not on my watch!” the men shouted.

“Let me hear it again.”

“Not on my watch!”

“Are you with me?”

“Yes!”

“Are you frightened?”

“Hell no!”

“Are you Boston police?”

“Hell yes!”

“The finest, most respected police force in these forty-eight states?”

“Hell yes!”

McKenna stared at them, his head sweeping slowly from one side of the crowd to the other, and Danny saw no humor in his face, no ironic glint. Just certitude. McKenna let the silence build, the men shuffling from side to side, hands wiping sweat on the sides of pants and the handles of nightsticks.

“Then,” McKenna hissed, “let’s go earn our pay.”

The men turned in several directions at once. They shoved one another gleefully. They barked in one another’s faces, and then someone figured out where the exit was and they turned into the rear corridor and moved in a sea through the door. They poured out the back of the station house and up the alley, some already rapping their billy clubs off the walls and the tops of metal trash cans.

Mark Denton found Danny in the crowd and said, “Just wondering …”

“What’s that?”

“We keeping the peace,” Mark said, “or ending it?”

Danny looked at him. “Fair question.”

When they rounded the corner into Dudley Square, Louis Fraina stood on the top steps of the Opera House, speaking through a bullhorn to a crowd of a couple hundred.

“… they tell us we have the right to—”

He lowered the bullhorn as he saw them enter the street and then raised it again.

“And here they come now, the private army of the ruling class.” Fraina pointed, and the crowd turned to see the blue uniforms coming up the street toward them.

“Comrades, feast your eyes on what a corrupt society does to preserve its illusion of itself. They call it the Land of the Free, but speech is not free, is it? The right to assemble is not free. Not today, not for us. We followed procedure. We filed our applications for the right to parade but those permits were denied to us. And why?” Fraina looked around at the crowd. “Because they fear us.”

The Letts turned fully toward them. On the steps, up by Fraina, Danny saw Nathan Bishop. He seemed smaller than Danny remembered. Bishop’s eyes locked on his, followed by a curious cock of his head. Danny held the look, trying to will a pride he did not feel into his own eyes. Nathan Bishop’s eyes narrowed with recognition. Recognition, followed by bitterness and then, most surprising, a crestfallen despair.

Danny dropped his eyes.

“Look at them in their domed helmets. With their nightsticks and their guns. These are not forces of law. These are forces of oppression. And they are afraid — terrified, comrades — because we hold the moral high ground. We are right. We are the workingmen of this city and we will not be sent to our rooms.”

McKenna raised his own bullhorn as they got within thirty yards of the crowd.

“You are in violation of city ordinances prohibiting assembly without permit.”

Fraina raised his bullhorn. “Your ordinances are a lie. Your city is a lie.”

“I order you to disperse.” McKenna’s voice crackled in the morning air. “If you refuse, you will be removed by force.”

They were fifteen yards away now and spreading out. Their faces were gaunt and determined and Danny searched for fear in their eyes and found very little.

“Force is all they have!” Fraina shouted. “Force is the weapon of choice for all tyrants since the dawn of time. Force is the unreasonable response to a reasonable action. We have broken no law!”

The Letts strolled toward them.

“You are in violation of city ordinance eleven-dash-four—”

“You are in violation of us, sir. You are in violation of our constitutional rights.”

“If you do not disperse, you will be arrested. Come down off those steps.”

“I will no more remove myself from these steps than—”

“I am ordering—”

“I do not recognize your authority.”

“You are breaking the law, sir!”

The two crowds met.

For a moment no one seemed to know what to do. The cops mingled with the Letts, the Letts mingled with the cops, all of them interspersed, and few among them aware of how it had happened. A pigeon cooed from a windowsill and the air still carried a hint of dew. The rooftops along Dudley Square smoked with remnants of the early-morning fog. This close Danny had a hard time telling who was cop and who was Lett, and then a group of bearded Letts walked around from the side of the Opera House wielding ax handles. Big guys, Russians by the look of them, eyes clear of anything that could be confused with doubt.

The first of them reached the throng and swung his ax handle.

Fraina shouted, “No!” but that was lost in the sound of the wood connecting with the domed helmet of James Hinman, a patrolman at the One-Four. The helmet sprang up out of the crowd and hung in the sky. Then it clanged to the street, and Hinman disappeared.

The closest Lett to Danny was a thin Italian with a handlebar mustache and a tweed cap. In the moment it took for the guy to realize how close he stood to a cop, Danny snapped his elbow into his mouth and the guy gave him a look like he’d broken his heart instead of his teeth and hit the pavement. The next Lett charged Danny by stepping on his fallen comrade’s chest. Danny cleared his nightstick but Kevin McRae rose out of the crowd behind the big Lett and grabbed him by the hair, giving Danny a wild smile as he twirled the guy through the crowd and ran him into a brick wall.

Danny traded punches for several minutes with a small, balding Russian. Small as he was, the fucker could jab, and he wore a matching pair of knuckle-clusters over his fists. Danny concentrated so hard on slipping the jabs to his face that it left him open to body shots. The two of them went back and forth along the left flank of the crowd, Danny trying for the knockout punch. The guy was slippery, but then he caught his foot in the cracks between the cobblestones, and his knee buckled. He stumbled and fell on his back and tried to scramble to his feet but Danny stomped on his stomach and kicked him in the face and the guy curled up and vomited out the side of his mouth.

Whistles blew as the mounted police tried to wade into the crowd, but the horses kept backing up. It was all incestuous now, Letts and cops intertwined and the Letts swinging sticks, swinging pipes and blackjacks and, Jesus, fucking ice picks. They threw rocks and threw punches, and the cops started to get savage, too, gouging at eyes, biting ears and noses, banging heads off the pavement. Someone fired a pistol and one of the horses rose up on its hind legs and threw its rider. The horse tipped to its right and toppled, hooves kicking at anything in its way.

Two Letts got Danny by the arms and one of them butted the side of his face. They ran him across the cobblestones into a metal store grate and his nightstick fell from his hands. One of them punched him in the right eye. Danny stomped blindly and hit an ankle, drove his knee up and hit a groin. The breath blew out of the guy and Danny swung him into the grate and pulled one arm free as the other man sank his teeth into his shoulder. Danny spun with the biter draped over him and ran backward into a brick wall, felt the guy’s teeth leave his skin. He took a few steps forward and then ran himself backward again, twice as hard. When the guy fell from his body, Danny turned and scooped up his nightstick and swung it into the guy’s face, heard the cheekbone crack.

He added a final kick to the ribs and turned back to the center of the street. A Lett charged back and forth along the rear of the crowd on one of the police horses, swinging a length of pipe at any domed heads he saw. Several of the other horses roamed riderless. On the far side of the street, two patrolman lifted Francie Stoddard, a sergeant at the One-Oh, onto a loading dock, Stoddard’s mouth wide and gulping, his shirt open at the collar, one palm pressed to the center of his chest.

Shots hit the air and Paul Welch, a sergeant with the Oh-Six, spun and grabbed his hip and then disappeared in the crush of men. Danny heard a scuffle of footsteps and turned in time to duck a Lett charging him with an ice pick. He speared the guy’s solar plexus with his nightstick. The guy gave him a look of self-pity and shame. Spit popped out of his mouth. When he hit the pavement, Danny grabbed his ice pick and hurled it onto the nearest roof.

Someone had gotten a grip on the leg of the Lett on horseback and he vaulted off the animal and into the crowd. The horse galloped up Dudley Street toward the el tracks. Blood poured down Danny’s back and the vision in his right eye blurred as it began to swell. His head felt as if someone had hammered nails through it. The Letts were going to lose the war, Danny had no doubt, but they were winning this battle by a large fucking margin. Cops were down all over the street while burly Letts in their coarse Cossack clothing screamed in triumph as their own heads rose above the throng.

Danny waded into the crowd, swinging his nightstick, trying to tell himself he didn’t love it, he didn’t feel his heart swell because he was bigger and stronger and faster than most and could down a man with one blow from either fist or nightstick. He took out four Letts with six swings and felt the mob turn toward him. He saw a pistol aimed at him, saw the hole in the barrel and the eyes of the young Lett wielding it, a boy really, nineteen, tops. The pistol shook, but he took little comfort from that because the kid was only fifteen feet away, and the crowd opened up a corridor between them to give him a clean shot. Danny didn’t reach for his own revolver; he’d never clear it in time.

The kid’s finger whitened against the trigger. The cylinder turned. Danny considered closing his eyes but then the kid’s arm shot straight up above his head. The pistol discharged into the sky.

Nathan Bishop stood beside the kid, rubbing his wrist where it had made contact with the kid’s elbow. He looked reasonably untarnished by the fighting, his suit a little rumpled but mostly unstained, which was saying something for a cream-colored suit in a sea of black and blue fabric and swinging fists. One of his eyeglass lenses was cracked. He stared at Danny through the good lens, both of them breathing hard. Danny felt relief, of course. And gratitude. But shame larger than all that. Shame more than anything.

A horse burst between them, its great black body trembling, its smooth flank shuddering in the air. Another horse burst through the throng followed by two more, all in full charge with riders astride them. Behind them was an army of blue uniforms, still crisp and unsoiled, and the wall of people around Danny and Nathan Bishop and the boy with the pistol collapsed. Several of the Letts had fought in guerrilla campaigns back in the motherland and knew the benefits of cut-and-run. In the mad-dash dispersal, Danny lost sight of Nathan Bishop. Within a minute, most of the Letts were running past the Opera House, and Dudley Square was suddenly littered with blue uniforms, Danny and the other men looking at one another as if to say: Did any of that just happen?

But men lay crumpled in the street and against walls as the reinforcements used their nightsticks on the few that weren’t brothers of the badge whether the bodies were moving or not. On the far fringes of the crowd, a small group of demonstrators, the last ones out apparently, were cut off by more reinforcements and more horses. Cops had cut heads and cut knees and holes that leaked from their shoulders and hands and thighs and swelling contusions and black eyes and broken arms and fat lips. Danny saw Mark Denton trying to pull himself to his feet, and he crossed to him and gave him his hand. Mark stood and applied weight to his right foot and winced.

“Broken?” Danny said.

“Twisted, I think.” Mark slung his arm around Danny’s shoulder and they walked to the loading dock on the other side of the street, Mark sucking oxygen from the air with a hiss.

“You sure?”

“Might be sprained,” Mark said. “Fuck, Dan, I lost my helmet.”

He had a cut along his hairline that had dried black and he gripped his ribs with his free arm. Danny leaned him against the loading dock and noticed two cops kneeling over Sergeant Francie Stoddard. One of them met his eyes and shook his head.

“What?” Danny said.

“He’s dead. He’s gone,” the cop said.

“He’s what?” Mark said. “No. How the fuck …?”

“He just grabbed his chest,” the cop said. “Right in the middle of it all. Just grabbed his chest and went all red and starting gasping. We got him over here, but …” The cop shrugged. “Fucking heart attack. You believe that? Here? In this?” The cop looked out at the street.

His partner still held Stoddard’s hand. “Fucking guy had less than a year till his thirty, he goes like this?” The cop was crying. “He goes like this, because of them?”

“Jesus Christ,” Mark whispered and touched the top of Stoddard’s shoe. They’d worked together five years at D-10 in Roxbury Crossing.

“They shot Welch in the thigh,” the first cop said. “Shot Armstrong in the hand. Fuckers were stabbing guys with ice picks?”

“There’s going to be some hell to pay,” Mark said.

“You goddamn got that right,” the crying cop said. “You can make goddamn fucking book on that.”

Danny looked away from Stoddard’s body. Ambulances rolled up Dudley Street. Across the square, a cop rose from the pavement on wobbly feet and wiped at the blood in his eyes and then tipped over again. Danny saw a cop empty a metal trash can on a prone Lett, then drop the can on the body for good measure. It was the cream-colored suit that got Danny moving. He walked toward them as the cop delivered a kick so hard it lifted his other foot off the ground.

Nathan Bishop’s face looked like a crushed plum. His teeth littered the ground near his chin. One ear was torn halfway off. The fingers of both hands pointed in all the wrong directions.

Danny put his hand on the shoulder of the cop. It was Henry Temple, a Special Squads goon.

“I think you got him,” Danny said.

Temple looked at Danny for a bit like he was searching for an apt response. Then he shrugged and walked off.

A pair of paramedics were passing and Danny said, “We got one here.”

One of the paramedics grimaced. “He ain’t wearing a badge? He’ll be lucky we get to him by sundown.” They walked off.

Nathan Bishop opened his left eye. It was startlingly white in the ruin of his face.

Danny opened his mouth. He wanted to say something. He wanted to say, I’m sorry. He wanted to say, Forgive me. Instead, he said nothing.

Nathan’s lips were sectioned into strips, but behind them spread a bitter smile.

“My name’s Nathan Bishop,” he slurred. “What’s yours, eh?”

He closed his eye again, and Danny lowered his head.

Luther had an hour for lunch, and he hustled back across the Dover Street Bridge and over to the Giddreauxs’ house on St. Botolph, which, these days, was the operating headquarters of the Boston NAACP. Mrs. Giddreaux worked there with a dozen other women pretty much every day, and it was in the very basement of the house on St. Botolph where the Crisis was printed and then mailed out to the rest of the country. Luther came home to an empty house, as he knew he would — on fine days, the girls all took their lunch in Union Park a few blocks away, and this was the finest day, thus far, of an often unforgiving spring. He let himself into Mrs. Giddreaux’s office. He sat behind her desk. He opened her drawer. He lifted the ledger out and placed it on the desk and that’s where it was sitting half an hour later when Mrs. Giddreaux came back through the door.

She hung up her coat and her scarf. “Luther, honey, what’re you doing in here?”

Luther tapped the ledger with his finger. “I don’t give this list to a policeman, he’s gonna have my wife arrested, have our baby taken from her soon as it’s born.”

Mrs. Giddreaux’s smile froze and then vanished. “Excuse me?”

Luther repeated himself.

Mrs. Giddreaux sat in the chair across from him. “Tell me all of it.”

Luther told her about everything except the vault he’d built under the kitchen floorboards on Shawmut Avenue. Until he knew what McKenna intended it for, he wasn’t going to speak of it. As he talked, Mrs. Giddreaux’s kind, old face lost its kindness and lost its age, too. It grew as smooth and unmoving as a headstone.

When he finished, she said, “You’ve never given him a thing he could use against us? Never once played the rat?”

Luther stared back at her, his mouth open.

“Answer my question, Luther. This is no child’s game.”

“No,” Luther said. “I never gave him anything.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Luther didn’t say anything.

“He wouldn’t just get you under his thumb and not dirty you up a little bit in his filth with him. The police don’t work that way. He would have sent you in with something to plant here or at the new building, something illegal.”

Luther shook his head.

She looked back at him, her breaths coming soft and measured.

Luther shook his head again.

“Luther.”

Luther told her about the vault.

She looked at him with such pained confusion Luther wanted to jump out the window. “Why didn’t you just come to us the moment he approached you?”

Luther said, “I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “Don’t you trust anyone, son? Anyone?”

Luther kept his mouth shut.

Mrs. Giddreaux reached for the phone on her desk and tapped the cradle once, tucked her hair behind her ear as she placed the receiver to her ear. “Edna? Girl, send every typist you’ve got up to the main floor. Get them all in the parlor and the dining room. You hear? Right now. And tell them to carry those typewriters with them. Oh, and Edna? You have phone directories down there, don’t you? No, I can’t use Boston. You have Philadelphia? Good. Send that up, too.”

She hung up and tapped her fingers lightly off her lips. When she looked at Luther again, the anger was gone from her eyes, replaced by the shine of excitement. Then her face darkened again and those fingers stopped tapping.

“What?” Luther said.

“No matter what you bring him tonight, he may just have you arrested or shot.”

“Why would he do that?” Luther said.

She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Because he can. Let’s start there.” She shook her head slightly. “He’ll do it, Luther, because you got him the list. That’s not something you’ll be able to tell someone about from prison.”

“What if I don’t bring it?”

“Oh, then he’ll just kill you,” she said mildly. “Shoot you in the back. No, you’ll have to bring it.” She sighed.

Luther was still back at the “kill you” part.

“I’m going to have to call some people. Dr. Du Bois for starters.” Her fingers tapped her chin now. “Legal Department in New York, that’s for sure. Legal Department in Tulsa, too.”

“Tulsa?”

She glanced back at him, as if just recalling he was still in the room. “If this blows up, Luther, and some policeman comes to arrest your wife? We’ll have counsel waiting for her on the steps of the county jail before she even arrives. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?”

Luther said, “I … I … I—”

“You, you, you,” Mrs. Giddreaux said and then gave him a small, disappointed smile. “Luther, your heart is good. You never sold your people out and you sat here and waited for me when a lesser man would have been off down the street with that ledger. And, son, I do appreciate it. But you’re still a boy, Luther. A child. If you trusted us four months ago, you wouldn’t be in this mess, and neither would we.” She reached across the desk and patted his hand. “It’s okay. It is. Every bear was once a cub.”

She led him out of the office into the living room as a dozen women entered carrying typewriters, their wrists straining from the weight. Half were colored women, the other half were white, college girls mostly, from money mostly, too, and those ones glanced at Luther with a bit of fear and a bit of something else he didn’t care to think too much about.

“Girls, half stay in here, half of you get in that room yonder. Who has the phone directory?”

One of the girls had it on top of her typewriter and tilted her arms so Mrs. Giddreaux could see it.

“Take it with you, Carol.”

“What we gone do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?”

Mrs. Giddreaux looked up sharply at the girl. “What are we, Regina, going to do with it, Regina.”

“What are we going to do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?” Regina stammered.

Mrs. Giddreaux smiled at Luther. “We’re going to tear it into twelfths, girls, and then we’re going to type it all over again.”

The cops who were able to walk on their own made their way back to the Oh-Nine and were attended to by paramedics in the basement. Before he’d left the Dudley Opera House, Danny had watched the ambulance drivers toss Nathan Bishop and five other damaged radicals into the back of their wagon like fish tossed on ice, before slamming the doors shut and driving off. In the basement, Danny’s shoulder was cleaned and stitched and he was given a bag of ice for his eye, though it was too late to do much about the swelling. Half a dozen men, who’d thought they were okay, weren’t, and they were helped back up the stairs and out onto the street where ambulances took them to Mass General. A team from Department Supply showed up with fresh uniforms that were handed out to the men after Captain Vance reminded them with some embarrassment that the cost of the uniforms, as always, would come out of the men’s pay, but he’d see what he could do about getting a onetime reduction on the cost, given the circumstances.

When they were all assembled in the basement, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna took the podium. He bore a gash on his neck, treated and cleaned but unbandaged, and his white collar was black with blood. When he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, the men leaned forward in their folding chairs.

“We lost one of our own today, men. A true policeman, a copper’s copper. We are lesser men now, and the world is a lesser place as well.” He lowered his head for a moment. “Today they took one of our own, but they didn’t take our honor.” He stared out at them, his eyes gone cold and clear. “They did not take our courage. They did not take our manhood. They just took one of our brothers.

“We’re going back into their territory tonight. Captain Vance and I will lead you. We are looking, specifically, for four men — Louis Fraina, Wychek Olafski, Pyotr Rastorov, and Luigi Broncona. We have photographs of Fraina and Olafski and sketches of the other two. But we won’t stop with them. We will subdue, without quarter, our common enemy. You all know what that enemy looks like. They wear a uniform as obvious as ours. Ours is blue, theirs is of coarse cloth and scraggly beard and watch cap. And they have the fanatics’ fire in their eyes. We are going to go out into those streets and we will take them back. Of this,” he said, and his eyes found the room, “there is no doubt. There is only resolve.” He gripped the podium, his eyes rolling slowly from left to right. “Tonight, my brothers, there is no rank. No difference between a first-year patrolman and a twenty-year gold shield. Because tonight we are all united in the red of our blood and the blue of our professional cloth. Make no mistake, we are soldiers. And as the poet wrote, ‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’ Let that be your benediction, men. Let that be your clarion call.”

He stepped from the podium and snapped a salute and the men rose as one and returned the salute. Danny compared it with this morning’s chaotic mix of fury and fear and found none of that. In accordance with McKenna’s wishes, the men had turned Spartan, utile, so fused to their sense of duty that they were indistinguishable from it.

Chapter twenty-seven

When the first detail of officers showed up at the door of The Revolutionary Age, Louis Fraina was waiting for them with two lawyers in attendance. He was cuffed and led out to the wagon on Humboldt Avenue and his lawyers rode with him.

The evening papers had hit the streets by this time and outrage at the morning attack on police had been growing throughout the dinner hour while the streetlamps grew yellow. Danny and a detail of nineteen other officers were dropped at the corner of Warren and St. James and told by Stan Billups, the sergeant in charge, to spread out, taking the streets in four-man squads. Danny went a few blocks south along Warren with Matt March and Bill Hardy and a guy from the One-Two he’d never met before named Dan Jeffries, Jeffries inexplicably excited that he’d met another guy with the same first name, as if this were a favorable omen. Along the sidewalk stood a half dozen men in their work clothes, men in tweed caps and frayed suspenders, dockworkers probably, who’d apparently read the evening papers and been drinking while they had.

“Give those Bolshie’s hell,” one of them called, and the rest of them cheered. The silence that followed was awkward, the silence of strangers introduced at a party neither had much wished to attend, and then three men walked out of a coffee shop a few doors down. Two wore spectacles and carried books. All three wore the coarse clothing of Slavic immigrants. Danny saw it happening before it actually did:

One of the Slavic men looked over his shoulder. Two of the men on the sidewalk pointed. Matt March called, “Hey, you three!”

That was all it took.

The three men ran, and the dockworkers broke off in pursuit, and Hardy and Jeffries ran after them. A half block down the Slavs were tackled to the pavement.

Hardy and Jeffries reached the pile and Hardy pulled one of the dockworkers back and then his nightstick caught the glow of the streetlamp as he swung it down on the head of one of the Slavs.

Danny said, “Hey!” but Matt March caught him by the arm.

“Dan, wait.”

“What?”

March gave him a level gaze. “This is for Stoddard.”

Danny pulled his arm free. “We don’t know they’re Bolsheviks.”

“We don’t know they’re not.” March twirled his nightstick and smiled at Danny.

Danny shook his head and walked up the street.

March called, “You’re taking the narrow view, Officer.”

By the time he reached the dockworkers, they were already turning away. Two of the victims crawled along the street while the third lay on the cobblestones, his hair black with blood, his broken wrist cradled against his chest.

“Jesus,” Danny said.

“Oops,” Hardy said.

“Hell you guys doing? Get an ambulance.”

“Fuck him,” Jeffries said and spit on the guy. “Fuck his friends, too. You want an ambulance? You find a call box and ask for one yourself.”

Up the street, Sergeant Billups appeared. He talked to March, met Danny’s eyes and then walked up the street toward him. The dockworkers had disappeared. Shouts and breaking glass echoed from a block or two over.

Billups looked at the man on the ground, then at Danny. “Problem, Dan?”

“Just want an ambulance for the guy,” Danny said.

Billups gave the man another glance. “He looks fine to me, Officer.”

“He ain’t.”

Billups stood over the man. “You hurt, sweetheart?”

The man said nothing, just held his broken wrist tighter against his chest.

Billups ground his heel into the man’s ankle. His victim writhed and moaned through cracked teeth. Billups said, “Can’t hear you, Boris. What’s that?”

Danny reached for Billups’s arm and Billups slapped his hand away.

A bone cracked and the man let out a high sigh of disbelief.

“All better now, sweetie?” Billups took his foot off the man’s ankle. The man rolled over and gasped into the cobblestones. Billups put his arm around Danny and walked him a few feet away.

“Look, Sarge, I understand. We’re all looking to knock some heads. Me, too. But the right heads, don’t you think? We don’t even—”

“I heard you were seeking aid and comfort for the enemy this afternoon, too, Dan. So listen,” Billups said with a smile, “you might be Tommy Coughlin’s kid and that gets you some passes, okay? But if you keep acting like a pinko cocksucker? Tommy Coughlin’s kid or no, I’ll take it fucking personal.” He tapped his nightstick lightly off Danny’s tunic. “I’m giving you a direct order — get back up that street and hurt some subversive assholes, or else get out of my sight.”

When Danny turned, Jeffries stood there, giggling softly. He walked past him and then back up the street past Hardy. When he reached March, March shrugged, and Danny kept walking. He turned the corner and saw three paddy wagons at the end of the block, saw fellow officers dragging anyone with a mustache or watch cap down the sidewalk and heaving them into the wagons.

He wandered for several blocks, came across the cops and their newly found working-class brothers going at a dozen men who’d wandered out of a meeting of the Lower Roxbury Socialist Fraternal Organization. The mob had the men pressed back against the doors. The men fought back, but then the doors opened behind them and some of them fell backward and others tried to hold back the mob with nothing more than flailing arms. The left door was wrenched off its hinges and the mob washed over the men and flowed into the building. Danny watched out of his good eye and knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing at all. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.

Luther went to Costello’s on Commercial Wharf and waited outside because it was whites-only. He stood a long time. One hour.

No McKenna.

In his right hand, he held a paper bag with fruit he’d slipped out of the Coughlin household to give to Nora, as long as McKenna didn’t decide to shoot him or arrest him tonight. The “list,” typed up from fifty thousand telephone users in Philadelphia, was tucked under his left arm.

Two hours.

No McKenna.

Luther left the wharf and walked up toward Scollay Square. Maybe McKenna had been hurt in the line of duty. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. Maybe he’d been shot dead by plug-uglies with an ax to grind.

Luther whistled and hoped.

Danny wandered the streets until he found himself heading along Eustis Street toward Washington. He decided he’d take a right when he reached Washington and cross the city until he reached the North End. He had no intention of stopping back at the Oh-One to sign out. He wasn’t changing out of his uniform. He walked through Roxbury in sweet night air that smelled more of summer than spring, and all around him the rule of law was being enforced, as anyone who looked like a Bolshevik or an anarchist, a Slav, an Italian, or a Jew was learning the price of the likeness. They lay against curbs, stoops, sat against lamp poles. On the cement and the tar — their blood, their teeth. A man ran into an intersection a block up and took a police cruiser to his knees. Airborne, he clawed at space. When he landed, the three cops who’d exited the cruiser held his arm to the ground while the cop who’d stayed behind the wheel drove over his hand.

Danny considered going back to his room on Salem Street and sitting alone with the barrel of his service revolver propped over his lower teeth, the metal on his tongue. In the war, they’d died by the millions. For nothing but real estate. And now, in the streets of the world, the same battle continued. Today, Boston. Tomorrow, someplace else. The poor fighting the poor. As they’d always done. As they were encouraged to. And it would never change. He finally realized that. It would never change.

He looked up at the black sky, at the salted splay of dots. That’s all they were. That, and nothing more. And if there was a God inveigled behind them, then He had lied. He’d promised the meek they would inherit the earth. They wouldn’t. They’d only inherit the small piece they fertilized.

That was the joke.

He saw Nathan Bishop staring at him through a kicked-in face and asking his name, the shame he’d felt, the horror at his very self. He leaned against a streetlamp pole. I can’t do this anymore, he told the sky. That man was my brother, if not of blood then of heart and philosophy. He saved my life and I couldn’t even get him proper medical care. I am shit. I can’t take another fucking step.

Across the street, yet another mass of police and workingmen taunted a small group of residents. At least this mob showed some mercy, allowing a pregnant woman to detach from the other victims and walk away without harm. She hurried along the sidewalk, her shoulders hunched, her hair covered by a dark shawl, and Danny’s thoughts returned to his room on Salem Street, to the gun in his holster, the bottle of scotch.

The woman passed him and turned the corner and he noticed that from behind you’d never guess she was pregnant. She had the walk of the young, the unencumbered, not yet weighted down by work or children or graying wishes. She—

Tessa.

Danny was crossing the street before the word had even passed through his head.

Tessa.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He got to the other side of the street and stayed a full block behind her, and the more he watched her walk with that confident languor, the more convinced he became. He passed a call box, then another, but never thought to unlock either of them and phone for help. There was no one in the station houses anyway; they were all out in the streets getting payback. He removed his helmet and coat and tucked them under his right arm, over his gun, and crossed to the other side of the street. As she reached Shawmut Avenue, she looked down the sidewalk, but he wasn’t there, so she learned nothing, but he confirmed everything. It was Tessa. Same dark skin, same etched mouth jutting like a shelf above her chin.

She turned right on Shawmut, and he lagged for a few moments, knowing it was wide there and if he reached the corner too early, she’d have to be blind not to see him. He counted down from five and started walking again. He reached the corner and saw her a block down, turning onto Hammond Street.

Three men in the rear seat of a touring car were looking back at her while the men in the front seat looked at him, slowing, noticing his blue pants, the blue coat under his arm. They were all heavily bearded. They all wore watch caps. The men in back of the open car brandished sticks. The front-seat passenger narrowed his eyes and Danny recognized him: Pyotr Glaviach, the oversize Estonian who could out-drink any saloon’s worth of men and probably outfight them all, too. Pyotr Glaviach, the veteran of the most vicious Lettish warfare in the motherland. The man who’d considered Danny his fellow pamphleteer, his comrade, his brother-in-arms against capitalist oppression.

Danny had found there were times when violence or the threat of it slowed the world down, when everything came at you as if through water. But there were just as many times when violence moved faster than a clock could tick, and this was one of those. As soon as he and Glaviach recognized each other, the car stopped and the men piled out. Danny’s coat got caught on the butt of his pistol as he tried to clear it. Glaviach’s arms closed over his, pinning them to his side. He lifted Danny off his feet and carried him across the sidewalk and rammed his back into a stone wall.

A stick hit his blackened eye.

“Say something.” Glaviach spit in his face and squeezed his body harder.

Danny didn’t have the air to speak so he spit back in the big man’s hairy face, saw that his phlegm already had some blood in it as it landed in the man’s eyes.

Glaviach rammed his skull into Danny’s nose. His head exploded with yellow light and shadows descended on the men around him, as if the sky were dropping. Someone hit his head with a stick again.

“Our comrade, Nathan, you know what happened to him today?” Glaviach shook Danny’s body as if he weighed no more than a child. “He lose his ear. Maybe sight in one eye. He lose that. What you lose?”

Hands grabbed at his gun and there wasn’t much he could do about it because his arms were numb. Fists battered his torso, back, and neck, yet he felt perfectly calm. He felt Death on the street with him and Death’s voice was soft. Death said: It’s okay. It’s time. His front pocket was ripped from his pant leg and loose change fell to the sidewalk. The button, too. Danny watched with an unreasonable sense of loss as it rolled off the curb and fell through a sewer grate.

Nora, he thought. Goddammit. Nora.

When they were done, Pyotr Glaviach found Danny’s service revolver in the gutter. He picked it up and dropped it on top of the unconscious cop’s chest. Pyotr recalled all the men — fourteen — he’d killed, face-to-face, over the years. This number did not include an entire unit of czarist guards they’d trapped in the center of a burning wheat field. He could still smell that odor seven years later, could hear them crying like babies as the flames found their hair, their eyes. You could never lose the smell from your nostrils, the sounds from your ears. You couldn’t undo any of it. Or wash it off. He was tired of the killing. It was why he’d come to America. Because he was so tired. It always led to more.

He spit on the traitor cop a couple more times and then he and his comrades returned to the touring car and drove away.

Luther had gotten good at sneaking in and out of Nora’s rooming house. He’d learned that you made the most noise trying to be quiet, so he did his due diligence when it came to listening from behind her door to the hallway on the other side, but once he was sure there was no one out there, he turned her doorknob quick and smooth and stepped into the hall. He swung the door closed behind him, and even before it clicked against the jamb, he’d already opened the door into the alley. By then, he was in the clear — a black man exiting a building in Scollay Square wasn’t the problem; a black man exiting a white woman’s room in any building whatsoever, that’s what got you killed.

That May Day night, he left the bag of fruit in her room after sitting with her about half an hour, watching her eyelids droop repeatedly until they stayed down. It worried him; now that they’d cut her hours, she was tired more, not less, and he knew that had to be about diet. She wasn’t getting enough of something and he wasn’t no doctor so he didn’t know what that something was. But she was tired all the time. Tired and grayer, her teeth starting to loosen. That’s what made Luther take fruit from the Coughlins this time. Seemed he remembered fruit was good for teeth and complexions. How or why he knew that, he couldn’t say, but it felt right.

He left her sleeping and went up the alley, and when he came to the end of it, he saw Danny lumbering across Green Street toward him. But not Danny, really. A version of him. A Danny who’d been fired from a cannon into a block of ice. A Danny with blood all over himself as he walked. Or tried to. Reeled was more like it.

Luther met him in the middle of the street as Danny fell to one knee.

“Hey, hey,” Luther said softly. “It’s me. Luther.”

Danny looked up at him, his face like something someone had tested hammers on. One eye was black. That was the good one. The other was so swollen shut it looked to have been sutured. His lips were twice their normal size, Luther wanting to make a joke about it but feeling it was definitely the wrong time.

“So.” Danny raised a hand, as if to signal the start of a game. “Still mad at me?”

Well, that was something no one had managed to take away apparently — the man’s ease with himself. Busted all to hell and kneeling in the middle of a shit hole street in shit hole Scollay Square, the man was chatting all casual-like, as if this sort of thing happened to him once a week.

“Not at this exact moment,” Luther said. “In general, though? Yeah.”

“Take a number,” Danny said and vomited blood onto the street.

Luther didn’t like the sight or the sound of it. He got a grip of Danny’s hand and started to tug him to his feet.

“Oh, no, no,” Danny said. “Don’t do that. Let me kneel here a bit. Actually, let me crawl. I’m going to crawl to that curb, Luther. Gonna crawl to it.”

Danny, true to his word, crawled from the center of the street to the sidewalk. When he reached it, he crawled a few more feet over the curb and then lay down. Luther sat beside him. Danny eventually worked himself up to a sitting position. He held on to his knees as if they were the only things keeping him from falling off the earth.

“Fuck,” he said eventually. “I’m busted up pretty good.” He smiled through cracked lips as a high whistle preceded his every breath. “Wouldn’t have a handkerchief, would you?”

Luther dug in his other pocket and came back with one. He handed it to him.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Luther said and something about the phrase struck them both funny at the same time and they laughed together in the soft night.

Danny dabbed at the blood on his face until the handkerchief was destroyed by it. “I came to see Nora. I got things to say to her.”

Luther put an arm around Danny’s shoulder, something he’d never ventured to do with a white man before but which seemed perfectly natural under the circumstances. “She needs her sleep, and you need a hospital.”

“I need to see her.”

“Puke some more blood and tell me again.”

“No, I do.”

Luther leaned in. “You know what your breath sound like?”

Danny shook his head.

“A fucking canary’s,” Luther said. “Canary with buckshot in its chest. You’re dying here.”

Danny shook his head again. Then he bent over and heaved his chest. Nothing came out. He heaved again. Again, nothing came out but a sound, the sound Luther had described, the high-pitched hiss of a desperate bird.

“How far’s Mass General from here?” Danny bent over and vomited some more blood into the gutter. “I’m a little too fucked-up to remember.”

“’Bout six blocks,” Luther said.

“Right. Long blocks.” Danny winced and laughed at the same time and spit some blood onto the sidewalk. “I think my ribs are broken.”

“Which ones?”

“All of ’em,” Danny said. “I’m hurt kinda bad here, Luther.”

“I know.” Luther turned and crawled over behind Danny. “I can push you up.”

“’Preciate that.”

“On three?”

“Fine.”

“One, two, three.” Luther put his shoulder into the big man’s back, pushed hard, and Danny let out a series of loud groans and one sharp yelp, but then he was on his feet. Wavering, but on his feet.

Luther slid under him and draped Danny’s left arm over his shoulder.

“Mass General’s going to be filled,” Danny said. “Fuck. Every hospital. My boys in blue going to be filling emergency rooms all over this city.”

“Filling it with who?”

“Russians, mostly. Jews.”

Luther said, “There’s a colored clinic over on Barton and Chambers. You got any objections to a colored doctor working on you?”

“Take a one-eyed Chinese gal, long as she can make the pain go away.”

“Bet you would,” Luther said and they started walking. “You can sit up in the bed, tell everyone not to call you ‘suh.’ How you just regular-folk like that.”

“You’re some prick.” Danny chuckled, an act that brought fresh blood to his lips. “So what were you doing here?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

Danny swayed so much he almost tipped the two of them to the sidewalk. “Well, I am.” He held up a hand and they both stopped. Danny took a big breath. “She all right?”

“No. She’s not all right. Whatever she did to any of you? She paid her debt.”

“Oh.” Danny tilted his head at him. “You like her?”

Luther caught the look. “Like that?”

“Like that.”

“Hell, no. Most certainly, I do not.”

A bloody smile. “You sure?”

“Want me to drop you? Yeah, I’m sure. You got your tastes, I got mine.”

“And Nora ain’t your taste?”

“White women ain’t. The freckles? The little asses? Them tiny bones and weird hair?” Luther grimaced and shook his head. “Not for me. No, sir.”

Danny looked at Luther through one black eye and one swollen one. “So …?”

“So,” Luther said, exasperated suddenly, “she’s my friend. I look after her.”

“Why?”

He gave Danny a long, careful look. “Ain’t nobody else want the job.”

Danny’s smile spread through cracked, blackened lips. “Okay, then.”

Luther said, “Who got to you? Size you are, had to be a few of ’em.”

“Bolshies. Over in Roxbury, maybe twenty blocks. Long walk. I probably had it coming.” Danny took a few shallow breaths. He leaned his head to the side and vomited. Luther shifted his feet so it wouldn’t hit his shoes or trouser cuffs, and it was a bit awkward, him leaning off to the side, half sprawled over the man’s back. The good news was that it wasn’t half as red as Luther had feared. When Danny finished, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “All right.”

They stumbled another block together before Danny had to rest again. Luther propped him up against a streetlamp and Danny leaned back against it with his eyes closed, his face wet with sweat.

He eventually opened his good eye and stared up at the sky, as if searching for something there. “I’ll tell you, Luther, it’s been one hell of a year.”

Luther thought back to his own year and that got him laughing, laughing hard. He bent over from it. A year ago — shit. That was a whole lifetime away.

“What?” Danny said.

Luther held up a hand. “You and me both.”

“What are you supposed to do,” Danny said, “when everything you built your life on turns out to be a fucking lie?”

“Build a new life, I guess.”

Danny raised an eyebrow at that.

“Oh, because you’re bleeding all over yourself, you want sympathy?” Luther stepped back up to Danny, the big man lying back against the streetlamp pole like it was all he had left of friends in this world. “I ain’t got that for you. Whatever’s wearing you down, shit, throw it off. God don’t care. Ain’t nobody care. Whatever you need to do to make yourself right, get yourself out of pain? I say you do that thing.”

Danny’s smile was cracked, his lips half black. “Easy, huh?”

“Ain’t nothing easy.” Luther shook his head. “Simple, though, yeah.”

“I wish it was that—”

“You walked twenty blocks, puking up your own blood, to get to one place and one person. If you need any more truth in your life, white boy, than that?” Luther’s laugh was hard and quick. “It ain’t showing up on this here earth.”

Danny didn’t say anything. He looked at Luther through his one good eye and Luther looked back. Then he came off the lamp pole and reached out his arm. Luther stepped under it and they walked the rest of the way to the clinic.

Chapter twenty-eight

Danny stayed in the clinic overnight. He barely remembered Luther leaving. He did remember him putting a sheaf of paper on Danny’s bedside table.

“Tried to give that to your uncle. He never showed up for the meet.”

“He was pretty busy today.”

“Yeah, well, you make sure he gets it? Maybe find a way to get him off me like you said you would once?”

“Sure.” Danny held out his hand and Luther shook it, and Danny floated off to a black-and-white world where everyone was covered in bomb debris.

At one point he woke to a colored doctor sitting by his bed. The doctor, a young man with the gentle air and slim fingers of a concert pianist, confirmed that he’d broken seven of his ribs and the others were badly sprained. One of those broken ribs had nicked a blood vessel and they’d had to cut Danny open to repair it. This explained the blood he’d vomited and made it highly likely that Luther had saved his life. They wrapped Danny’s torso tightly with adhesive tape and told him he’d suffered a concussion and would piss blood for a few days from all the shots the Russians had delivered to his kidneys. Danny thanked the doctor, his words slurring from whatever they’d pumped into his IV, and passed out.

In the morning, he woke to his father and Connor sitting by the bed. His father had one of his hands wrapped in both of his and he smiled softly. “Look who’s up.”

Con’ folded the newspaper and smiled at Danny and shook his head.

“Who did this to you, boy?”

Danny sat up a bit in the bed and his ribs screamed. “How’d you even find me?”

“Colored fella — says he’s a doctor here? — he called into headquarters with your badge number, said another colored fella brought you in here all banged to hell. Ah, it’s a sight, you in a place like this.”

In the bed on the other side of his father lay an old man with his foot hanging in a cast. He looked at the ceiling.

“What happened?” Connor asked.

“Got jumped by a bunch of Letts,” Danny said. “That colored fella was Luther. He probably saved my life.”

The old man in the next bed scratched his leg at the top of the cast.

“We’ve got the holding cells filled to the brink with Letts and Commies,” his father said. “You go have a look later. Find the men who did it and we’ll find ourselves a nice dark lot before we book them.”

Danny said, “Water?”

Con’ found a pitcher on the windowsill and filled a glass and brought it to him.

His father said, “We don’t even have to book them, if you follow my meaning.”

“It’s not hard, sir, to follow your meaning.” Danny drank. “I never saw them.”

“What?”

“They came up on me fast, got my coat over my head, and went to work.”

“How could you not see—?”

“I was following Tessa Ficara.”

“She’s here?” his father said.

“She was last night.”

“Jesus, boy, why didn’t you call for backup?”

“You guys were throwing a party in Roxbury, remember?”

His father ran a hand along his chin. “You lose her?”

“Thanks for the water, Con’.” He smiled at his brother.

Connor chuckled. “You’re a piece of work, brother. You really are.”

“Yeah, I lost her. She turned onto Hammond Street, and the Russians showed up. So what do you want to do, Dad?”

“Well, we’ll talk to Finch and the BI. I’ll have some badges canvass Hammond and the rest of the area, hope for the best. But I doubt she’s still hanging around after last night.” His father held up the Morning Standard. “Front-page news, boy.”

Danny sat up fully in the bed and his ribs howled some more. He blinked at the pain and looked at the headline: “Police Wage War on Reds.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Home,” his father said. “You can’t keep putting her through this. First Salutation. Now this. It’s a strain on her heart, it is.”

“How about Nora? She know?”

His father cocked his head. “Why would she know anything? We’ve no contact with her anymore.”

“I’d like her to know.”

Thomas Coughlin looked at Connor and then back at Danny. “Aiden, you don’t say her name. You don’t bring her up in my presence.”

Danny said, “Can’t do that, Dad.”

“What?” This from Connor, coming up behind their father. “She lied to us, Dan. She humiliated me. Jesus.”

Danny sighed. “She was family for how long?”

“We treated her as family,” his father said, “and look how she repaid us. Now it’s the end of this subject, Aiden.”

Danny shook his head. “For you maybe. Me?” He pulled the sheet off his body. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and hoped neither of them could see the price it cost. Jesus! The pain blew up through his chest. “Con’, hand me my pants, would you?”

Con’ brought them to him, his face dark and bewildered.

Danny stepped into his pants and then found his shirt hanging over the foot of the bed. He slid into it, one careful arm at a time, and considered his father and brother. “Look, I’ve played it your way. But I can’t anymore. I just can’t.”

“Can’t what?” his father said. “You’re talking nonsense.” He looked at the old black man with the broken leg as if for a second opinion, but the man’s eyes were closed.

Danny shrugged. “Then I’m talking nonsense. You know what I realized yesterday? What I finally realized? Ain’t a fucking thing made—”

“Ah, the language!”

“—made sense in my life, Dad. Ever. ’Cept her.”

His father’s face drained of color.

Danny said, “Hand me my shoes, would you, Con’?”

Connor shook his head. “Get ’em yourself, Dan.” He held out his hands, a gesture of such helpless pain and betrayal that it pierced Danny.

“Con’.”

Connor shook his head. “No.”

“Con’, listen.”

“Fuck listening. You’d do this? To me? You’d—”

Connor dropped his hands and his eyes filled. He shook his head at Danny again. He shook his head at the whole ward. He turned on his heel and walked out the door.

Danny found his shoes in the silence and placed them on the floor.

“You’re going to break your brother’s heart? Your mother’s?” his father said. “Mine?”

Danny looked at him as he pushed his feet into his shoes. “It’s not about you, Dad. I can’t live my life for you.”

“Oh.” His father placed his hand over his heart. “Well, I wouldn’t want to begrudge you your earthly pleasures, boy, Lord knows.”

Danny smiled.

His father didn’t. “So you’ve taken your stand against the family. You’re an individual, Aiden. Your own man. Does it feel good?”

Danny said nothing.

His father stood and placed his captain’s hat on his head. He straightened it at the sides. “This great romantic notion your generation has about it going its own way? Do you think you’re the first?”

“No. Don’t think I’ll be the last, either.”

“Probably not,” his father said. “What you will be is alone.”

“Then I’ll be alone.”

His father pursed his lips and nodded. “Good-bye, Aiden.”

“Good-bye, sir.”

Danny held out his hand, but his father ignored it.

Danny shrugged and dropped the hand. He reached behind him and found the papers Luther had given him last night. He tossed them at his father and hit him in the chest. His father caught them and looked down at them.

“The list McKenna wanted from the NAACP.”

His father’s eyes widened for a moment. “Why would I want it?”

“Then give it back.”

Thomas allowed himself a small smile and placed the papers under his arm.

“It was always about the mailing lists, wasn’t it?” Danny said.

His father said nothing.

“You’ll sell them,” Danny said. “To companies, I’m assuming?”

His father met his eyes. “A man has a right to know the character of the men working for him.”

“So he can fire them before they unionize?” Danny nodded at the idea. “You sold out your own.”

“I’ll bet my life that not a name on any of the lists is Irish.”

“I wasn’t talking about the Irish,” Danny said.

His father looked up at the ceiling, as if he saw cobwebs there that needed tending. He pursed his lips, then looked at his son, a slight quiver in his chin. He said nothing.

“Who got you the list of the Letts once I was out?”

“As luck would have it,” his father’s voice was barely a whisper, “we took care of that yesterday in the raid.”

Danny nodded. “Ah.”

“Anything else, son?”

Danny said, “Matter of fact, yeah. Luther saved my life.”

“So I should give him a raise?”

“No,” Danny said. “Call off your dog.”

“My dog?”

“Uncle Eddie.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Call him off just the same. He saved my life, Dad.”

His father turned to the old man in the bed. He touched his cast and winked at the man when he opened his eyes. “Ah, you’ll be fit as a fiddle, as God is my judge.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Indeed.” Thomas gave the guy a hearty smile. His eyes swept past Danny and the windows behind him. He nodded once and then walked out the same door as Connor.

Danny found his coat on a hook against the wall and put it on.

“That your pops?” the old man said.

Danny nodded.

“I’d stay clear of him for a while.”

Danny said, “Looks like I don’t have much choice.”

“Oh, he’ll be back. His kind always comes back. Sure as time,” the old man said. “Always wins, too.”

Danny finished buttoning his coat. “Ain’t nothing to win anymore,” he said.

“That ain’t the way he sees it.” The old man gave him a sad smile. He closed his eyes. “Which is why he’ll keep winning. Yes, sir.”

After he left the hospital, he visited four more before he found the one where they’d taken Nathan Bishop. Bishop, like Danny, had declined to stay, though Nathan had slipped two armed policemen to do it.

The doctor who’d worked on him before his escape looked at Danny’s tattered uniform, its black splotches of blood, and said, “If you’ve come for your second licks, they should have told you—”

“He’s gone. I know.”

“Lost an ear,” the doctor said.

“Heard that, too. How about his eye?”

“I don’t know. He left before I could hazard an informed diagnosis.”

“Where to?”

The doctor glanced at his watch and slipped it back into his pocket. “I’ve got patients.”

“Where’d he go?”

A sigh. “Far from this city, I suspect. I already told this to the two officers who were supposed to be guarding him. After he climbed out the bathroom window, he could have gone anywhere, but from the time I spent with him, I gathered he saw no point sacrificing five or six years of his life to a Boston prison.”

The doctor’s hands were in his pocket when he turned without another word and walked away.

Danny left the hospital. He was still in a fair amount of pain and made slow progress up Huntington Avenue toward the trolley stop.

He found Nora that night, when she returned to her rooming house from work. He stood with his back against her stoop, not because sitting down was too painful but because getting back up again was. She walked up the street in dusk yellowed by weak streetlamps and every time her face passed from dark into gauzy light, he took a breath.

Then she saw him. “Holy Mary Mother of God, what happened to you?”

“Which part?” A thick bandage jutted off his forehead, and both eyes were black.

“All of you.” She appraised him with something that might have been humor, might have been horror.

“You didn’t hear?” He cocked his head, noticing she didn’t look too good herself, her face drawn and sagging at the same time, her eyes too wide and empty.

“I heard there was a fight between policemen and the Bolsheviks, but I …” She stopped in front of him and raised her hand, as if to touch his swollen eye, but she paused and her hand hung in the air. She took a step back.

“I lost the button,” he said.

“What button?”

“The bear’s eye.”

She cocked her head in confusion.

“From Nantasket. That time?”

“The stuffed bear? The one from the room?”

He nodded.

“You kept its eye?”

“Well, it was a button, but yeah. I still had it. Never left my pocket.”

He could see she had no idea what to do with that information.

He said, “That night you came to see me …”

She crossed her arms.

“I let you go because …”

She waited.

“Because I was weak,” he said.

“And that kept you now, did it, from caring for a friend?”

“We’re not friends, Nora.”

“Then what are we, Danny?” She stood on the sidewalk, her eyes on the pavement, so tense he could see goose bumps in her flesh and the cords in her neck.

Danny said, “Look at me. Please.”

She kept her head down.

“Look at me,” he said again.

Her eyes found his.

“When we look at each other like this, right now, I don’t know what that is, but ‘friendship’ seems kind of watery, don’t you think?”

“Oh, you,” she said and shook her head, “you were always the talker now. They’d have called the Blarney Stone the Danny Stone if they could have—”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t make it small. It’s not small, Nora.”

“What are you doing here?” she whispered. “Jesus, Danny. What? I already have one husband, or haven’t you heard? And you’ve always been a boy in a man’s body. You run from thing to thing. You—”

“You have a husband?” He chuckled.

“He laughs,” she said to the street with a loud sigh.

“I do.” He stood. He placed a hand to her chest just below her throat. He kept his fingers there, lightly, and tried to get the smile off his face as he saw her anger rise. “I just … Nora, I’m just … I mean, the two of us? Trying to be so respectable? Wasn’t that our word?”

“After you broke with me” — her face remained a stone, but he could see the light finding her eyes — “I needed stability. I needed …”

That brought a roar from him, an explosion he couldn’t stop that erupted out of the center of his body and, even as it punched its way along his ribs, felt better than anything he’d felt in a long time. “Stability?”

“Yes.” She hit his chest with her fist. “I wanted to be a good American girl, an upstanding citizen.”

“Well, that worked out tremendously well.”

“Stop laughing.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?” And the laugh finally reached her voice.

“Because, because …” He held her shoulders and the waves finally passed. He moved his palms down her arms and took her hands in his and this time she let him. “Because all this time you were with Connor, you wanted to be with me.”

“Ah, you’re a cocky man, you are, Danny Coughlin.”

He tugged on her hands and stooped until their faces were at the same level. “And I wanted to be with you. And the two of us lost so much time, Nora, trying to be” — he looked up at the sky in frustration — “whatever the fuck we were trying to be.”

“I’m married.”

“I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit about anything anymore, Nora, except this. Right here. Right now.”

She shook her head. “Your family will disown you just like they disowned me.”

“So?”

“So you love them.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Danny shrugged. “But I need you, Nora.” He touched her forehead with his own. “I need you.” He repeated it in a whisper, his head against hers.

“You’ll throw away your whole world,” she whispered and her voice was wet.

“I was done with it anyway.”

Her laugh came out strangled and damp.

“We can never marry in the Church.”

“I’m done with that, too,” he said.

They stood there for a long time, and the streets smelled of the early-evening rain.

“You’re crying,” she said. “I can feel the tears.”

He removed his forehead from hers and tried to speak, but he couldn’t, so he smiled, and the tears rolled off his chin.

She leaned back and caught one on her finger.

“This is not pain?” she said and put it in her mouth.

“No,” Danny said and lowered his forehead to hers again. “This is not pain.”

Luther came home after a day at the Coughlin household in which, for the second time since he’d been there, the captain had invited him into his study.

“Take a seat, take a seat,” the captain said as he removed his uniform coat and hung it on the coat tree behind his desk.

Luther sat.

The captain came around to the front of the desk with two glasses of whiskey and handed one to Luther. “I heard what you did for Aiden. I’d like to thank you for saving my son’s life.” He clinked his heavy glass off Luther’s.

Luther said, “It was nothing, sir.”

“Scollay Square.”

“Sir?”

“Scollay Square. That’s where you ran into Aiden, yes?”

“Uh, yes, sir, I did.”

“What brought you over there? You’ve no friends in the West End, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“And you live in the South End. As we know, you work over here, so …”

The captain rolled the glass between his hands and waited.

Luther said, “Well, you know why most men go to Scollay Square, sir.” He tried for a conspiratorial smile.

“I do,” Captain Coughlin said. “I do, Luther. But even Scollay Square has its racial principles. I’m to assume you were at Mama Hennigan’s, then? ’Tis the only place I know in the square that services coloreds.”

“Yes, sir,” Luther said, although by now he knew he’d walked into a trap.

The captain reached into his humidor. He removed two cigars and snipped the ends and handed one to Luther. He lit it for him and then lit his own.

“I understand my friend Eddie was giving you a bit of a hard time.”

Luther said, “Uh, sir, I don’t know that I would—”

“Aiden told me,” the captain said.

“Oh.”

“I’ve spoken to Eddie on your behalf. I owe you that for saving my son.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I promise he’ll be a bother to you no longer.”

“I really do appreciate that, sir. Thank you again.”

The captain raised his glass and Luther did the same and they both took a drink of the fine Irish whiskey.

The captain reached behind him again and came back with a white envelope that he tapped against his thigh. “And Helen Grady, she’s working out as a house woman, she is?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“No doubts to her competency or her work ethic?”

“Absolutely none, sir.”

Helen was as cold and distant to Luther as the day she’d arrived five months ago, but that woman could work, boy.

“I’m glad to hear that.” The captain handed Luther the envelope. “Because she’ll be doing the job of two now.”

Luther opened the envelope and saw the small sheaf of money inside.

“There’s two weeks’ severance in there, Luther. We closed Mama Hennigan’s a week ago for code violations. The only person you know in Scollay Square is one who used to be in my employ. It explains the food that’s gone missing from my pantry these past few months, a theft that Helen Grady began to report to me weeks ago.” He considered Luther over his scotch glass as he drained it. “Stealing food from my home, Luther? You’re aware I’d be well within my rights to shoot you where you sit?”

Luther didn’t respond to that. He reached over and placed his glass on the edge of the desk. He stood. He held out his hand. The captain considered it for a moment, then placed his cigar in the ashtray and shook the hand.

“Good-bye, Luther,” he said pleasantly.

“Good-bye, Captain, sir.”

When he returned to the house on St. Botolph, it was empty. A note waited on the kitchen table.

Underneath the note was a tall yellow envelope with his name scrawled on it in his wife’s hand. Given what had just happened the last time he opened an envelope, he took a moment before reaching for it. Then he said, “Ah, fuck it,” finding it strangely guilt-inducing to cuss in Yvette’s kitchen.

He opened it carefully and pulled out two pieces of cardboard that were pressed together and tied off with string. There was a note folded underneath the string and Luther read it and his hands trembled as he placed it on the table and undid the knot to remove the top piece of cardboard and look at what lay underneath.

He sat there a long time. At some point he wept even though he’d never, not in his whole life, known this kind of joy.

Off Scollay Square, he went down the alley that ran alongside Nora’s building and let himself in the green door at the back, which was only locked about 25 percent of the time, this night not being one of them. He stepped quickly to her door and knocked and heard the last sound he would have expected on the other side: giggling.

He heard whispers and “Sssh, sssh,” and he knocked again.

“Who is it?”

“Luther,” he said and cleared his throat.

The door opened, and Danny stood there, his dark hair falling in tangles over his forehead, one suspender undone, the first three buttons of his undershirt open. Nora stood behind him, touching her hair and then smoothing her dress, and her cheeks were flushed.

Danny had a wide grin on his face, and Luther didn’t have to guess what he’d interrupted.

“I’ll come back,” he said.

“What? No, no.” Danny looked back to make sure Nora was sufficiently covered and then he opened the door wide. “Come on in.”

Luther stepped into the tiny room, feeling foolish suddenly. He couldn’t explain what he was doing here, why he’d just gotten up from the kitchen table in the South End and hurried all the way over here, the large envelope under his arm.

Nora came toward him, her arm extended, her feet bare. She had the flush of interrupted sex on her face, but a deeper flush as well, one of openness and love.

“Thank you,” she said, taking his hand and then leaning in and placing her cheek to his. “Thank you for saving him. Thank you for saving me.”

And in that moment he felt like he was home for the first time since he’d left it.

Danny said, “Drink?”

“Sure, sure,” Luther said.

Danny went to the tiny table where Luther had left the fruit just yesterday. There was a bottle there now and four cheap glasses. He poured all three of them a glass of whiskey and then handed Luther his.

“We just fell in love,” Danny said and raised his glass.

“Yeah?” Luther chuckled. “Finally figured it out, uh?”

“We’ve been in love,” Nora said to Danny. “We finally faced it.”

“Well,” Luther said, “ain’t that a pip?”

Nora laughed and Danny’s smile broadened. They raised their glasses and drank.

“What you got under your arm there?” Danny said.

“Oh, oh, this, yeah.” Luther placed his drink down on the tiny table and opened the envelope. Just pulling out the cardboard, his hands trembled again. He held the cardboard in his hands and offered it to Nora. “I can’t explain why I came here. Why I wanted you to see it. I just …” He shrugged.

Nora reached out and squeezed his arm. “It’s all right.”

“It seemed important to show someone. To show you.”

Danny placed his drink down and came over beside Nora. She lifted off the top piece of cardboard, and their eyes widened. Nora slid her arm under Danny’s and placed her cheek to his arm.

“He’s beautiful,” Danny said softly.

Luther nodded. “That’s my son,” he said while his face filled with warm blood. “That’s my baby boy.”

Chapter twenty-nine

Steve Coyle was drunk but freshly bathed when, as a licensed justice of the peace, he officiated over the marriage of Danny Coughlin and Nora O’Shea on June 3, 1919.

The night before, a bomb had exploded outside the home of Attorney General Palmer in Washington, D.C. The detonation came as a surprise to the bomber, who’d still been several yards short of Palmer’s front door. Though his head was eventually recovered from a rooftop four blocks away, the man’s legs and arms were never found. Attempts to identify him using only his head met with failure. The explosion destroyed the facade of Palmer’s building and shattered the windows that faced the street. His living room, sitting room, foyer, and dining room were obliterated. Palmer had been in the kitchen at the back of the house, and he was discovered under the rubble, remarkably unscathed, by the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Roosevelt, who lived across the street. While the bomber’s charred head wasn’t sufficient to identify him, it was clear he’d been an anarchist by the pamphlets he’d been carrying, which floated over R Street in the moments after the attack and soon adhered themselves to the streets and buildings of a three-block area. Under the heading “Plain Words,” the message was nearly identical to those plastered to street poles in Boston seven weeks before:

Attorney General Palmer, described in the Washington Post as “shaken but uncowed,” promised to redouble his efforts and entrench his resolve. He warned all Reds on U.S. soil to consider themselves on notice. “This will be a summer of discontent,” Palmer promised, “but not for this country. Only her enemies.”

Danny and Nora’s wedding reception was held on the rooftop of Danny’s rooming house. The cops who attended were of low rank. Most were acting members of the BSC. Some brought their wives, others their girlfriends. Danny introduced Luther to them as “the man who saved my life.” That seemed good enough for most of them, though Luther noted a few who seemed disinclined to leave their wallets or their women out of sight as long as Luther was in proximity to either.

But it was a fine time. One of the tenants, a young Italian man, played violin until Luther expected his arm to fall off, and later in the evening he was joined by a cop with an accordion. There were heaps of food and wine and whiskey and buckets of Pickwick Ale on ice. The white folk danced and laughed and toasted and toasted until they were toasting the sky above and the earth below as both grew blue with the night.

Near midnight, Danny found him sitting along the parapet and sat beside him, drunk and smiling. “The bride’s in a bit of a snit that you haven’t asked for a dance.”

Luther laughed.

“What?”

“A black man dancing with a white woman on a roof. Yeah. I’ll bet.”

“Bet nothing,” Danny said, a bit of a slur in the words. “Nora asked me herself. You want to make the bride sad on her wedding day, you go right ahead.”

Luther looked at him. “There’s lines, Danny. Lines you don’t cross even here.”

“Fuck lines,” Danny said.

“Easy for you to say,” Luther said. “So easy.”

“Fine, fine.”

They looked at each other for some time.

Eventually, Danny said, “What?”

“You’re asking a lot,” Luther said.

Danny pulled out a pack of Murads, offered one to Luther. Luther took it and Danny lit it, then lit his own. Danny blew out a slow plume of blue smoke. “I hear the majority of the executive office positions of the NAACP are filled by white women.”

Luther had no idea where he was going with this. “There’s some truth to that, yeah, but Dr. Du Bois, he’s looking to change that. Change comes slow.”

“Uh-huh,” Danny said. He took a swig from the whiskey bottle at his feet and handed it to Luther. “You think I’m like them white women?”

Luther noticed one of Danny’s cop friends watching him raise the bottle to his lips, the guy making note which whiskey he wouldn’t be drinking the rest of the night.

“Do you, Luther? You think I’m trying to prove something? Show what a free-minded white man I am?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing.” Luther handed the bottle back.

Danny took another swig. “Ain’t doing shit, except trying to get my friend to dance with my wife on her wedding day because she asked me to.”

“Danny.” Luther could feel the liquor riding in him, itching. “Things is.”

“Things is?” Danny cocked an eyebrow.

Luther nodded. “As they’ve always been. And they don’t change just because you want them to.”

Nora crossed the roof toward them, a little tipsy herself judging by the sway of her, a champagne glass held loosely in one hand, cigarette in the other.

Before Luther could speak, Danny said, “He don’t want to dance.”

Nora turned her lower lip down at that. She wore a pearl-colored gown of satin messaline and silver tinsel. The drop skirt was wrinkled and the whole outfit a hair on the sloppy side now, but she still had those eyes, and that face made Luther think of peace, think of home.

“I think I’ll cry.” Her eyes were gay and shiny with alcohol. “Boo hoo.”

Luther chuckled. He noticed a lot of people looking at them, just as he’d feared.

He took Nora’s hand with a roll of his eyes and she tugged him to his feet and the violinist and the accordionist began to play, and she led him out to the center of the roof under the half moon and her hand was warm in his. His other hand found the small of her back and he could feel the heat coming off the skin there and off her jaw and the pulse of her throat. She smelled of alcohol and jasmine and that undeniable whiteness he’d noticed the first time he’d ever put his arms around her, as if her flesh had never been touched by dew. A papery smell, starchy.

“It’s an odd world, is it not?” she said.

“Most certainly.”

Her brogue was thicker with the alcohol. “I’m sorry you lost your job.”

“I’m not. I got another one.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “Stockyards. Start day after next.”

Luther raised his arm and she swirled under it and then turned back into his chest.

“You are the truest friend I’ve ever had.” She spun again, as light as summer.

Luther laughed. “You’re drunk, girl.”

“I am,” she said gleefully. “But you’re still family, Luther. To me.” She nodded at Danny. “To him, too. Are we your family yet, Luther?”

Luther looked into her face and the rest of the roof evaporated. What a strange woman. Strange man. Strange world.

“Sure, sister,” he said. “Sure.”

The day of his eldest son’s wedding, Thomas came to work to find Agent Rayme Finch waiting for him in the anteroom outside the desk sergeant’s counter.

“Come to register a complaint, have we?”

Finch stood, straw boater in hand. “If I may have a word.”

Thomas ushered him through the squad room and back to his office. He removed his coat and hat and hung them on the tree by the file cabinets and asked Finch if he wanted coffee.

“Thank you.”

Thomas pressed the intercom button. “Stan, two coffees, please.” He looked over at Finch. “Welcome back. Staying long?”

Finch gave that a noncommittal twitch of the shoulders.

Thomas removed his scarf and placed it on the tree over his coat and then moved last night’s stack of incident reports from his ink blotter to the left side of his desk. Stan Beck brought the coffee and left. Thomas handed a cup across the desk to Finch.

“Cream or sugar?”

“Neither.” Finch took the cup with a nod.

Thomas added cream to his own cup. “What brings you by?”

“I understand that you do, in fact, have quite a network of men attending meetings of the various radical groups in your city, that you even have some who’ve infiltrated a few groups under deep cover.” Finch blew on his coffee and took a tiny sip, then licked the sting from his lips. “As I understand it, and quite the contrary to what you led me to believe, you’re compiling lists.”

Thomas took his seat and sipped his coffee. “Your ambition might exceed your ‘understanding,’ lad.”

Finch gave that thin smile. “I’d like access to those lists.”

“Access?”

“Copies.”

“Ah.”

“Is that a problem?”

Thomas leaned back and propped his heels on the desk. “At the moment, I fail to see how interagency cooperation is advantageous to the Boston Police Department.”

“Maybe you’re taking the narrow view.”

“I don’t believe I am.” Thomas smiled. “But I’m always open to fresh perspectives.”

Finch struck a match off the edge of Thomas’s desk and lit a cigarette. “Let’s consider the reaction if word leaked that a rogue contingent of the Boston Police Department was selling the member rolls and mailing lists of known radical organizations to corporations instead of sharing them with the federal government.”

“Allow me to correct one wee mistake.”

“My information is solid.”

Thomas folded his hands over his abdomen. “The mistake you made, son, was in use of the word rogue. We’re hardly that. In fact, were you to point a finger at myself or any of the people I’m in congress with in this city? Why, Agent Finch, you’d surely find a dozen fingers pointing back at you, Mr. Hoover, Attorney General Palmer, and that fledgling, underfunded agency of yours.” Thomas reached for his coffee cup. “So I’d advise caution when making threats in my fair city.”

Finch crossed his legs and flicked ash into the tray beside his chair. “I get the gist.”

“Consider my soul appropriately comforted.”

“Your son, the one who killed the terrorist, I understand he’s lost to my cause.”

Thomas nodded. “A union man now, he is, through and through.”

“But you’ve another son. A lawyer as I understand it.”

“Careful with talk of family, Agent Finch.” Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re treading a tightrope in a circus fire about now.”

Finch held up a hand. “Just hear me out. Share your lists with us. I’m not saying you can’t make all the profit you want on the side. But if you share them with us, I’ll make sure your son the lawyer gets plum work in the coming months.”

Thomas shook his head. “He’s DA property.”

“Silas Pendergast?” Finch shook his head. “He’s a whore for the wards and everyone knows you run him, Captain.”

Thomas held out his hands. “Make your case.”

“The preliminary suspicions that the molasses tank explosion was a terrorist act have been a boon for us. Simply put, this country is sick of terror.”

“But the explosion wasn’t a terrorist act.”

“The rage remains.” Finch chuckled. “No one is more surprised than us. We thought the rush to judgment over the molasses flood had killed us. Quite the opposite. People don’t want truth, they want certainty.” He shrugged. “Or the illusion of it.”

“And you and Mr. Palmer are more than happy to ride the tide of this need.”

Finch stubbed out his cigarette. “My current mandate is the deportation of every radical plotting against my country. The conventional wisdom on the subject is that deportation falls solely under federal jurisdiction. However, Attorney General Palmer, Mr. Hoover, and myself have recently come to the realization that state and local authorities can get more actively involved in deportation. Would you care to know how?”

Thomas stared at the ceiling. “I’d assume under the state antisyndicalist laws.”

Finch stared at him. “How’d you arrive at that conclusion?”

“I didn’t arrive anywhere. Basic common sense, man. The laws are on the books, have been for years.”

Finch asked, “You wouldn’t ever consider working in Washington, would you?”

Thomas rapped the window with his knuckles. “See out there, Agent Finch? Can you see the street? The people?”

“Yes.”

“Took me fifteen years in Ireland and a month at sea to find it. My home. And a man who’d abandon his home is a man who’d abandon anything.”

Finch tapped his boater off his knee. “You’re an odd duck.”

“Just so.” He opened a palm in Finch’s direction. “So the antisyndicalist laws?”

“Have opened a door in the deportation process that we’d long assumed closed.”

“Local.”

“And state, yes.”

“So you’re marshaling your forces.”

Finch nodded. “And we’d like your son to be a part of it.”

“Connor?”

“Yes.”

Thomas took a drink of coffee. “How much a part?”

“Well, we’d have him work with a lawyer from Justice or local—”

“No. He works the cases as the point man in Boston or he doesn’t work at all.”

“He’s young.”

“Older than your Mr. Hoover.”

Finch looked around the office, indecisive. “Your son catches this train? I promise you the track won’t run out in his lifetime.”

“Ah,” Thomas said, “but I’d like him to board at the front as opposed to the rear. The view would be all the finer, wouldn’t you say?”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. You call him to Washington to hire him. You make sure a photographer’s in attendance.”

“And in exchange, Attorney General Palmer’s team will have access to the lists your men are compiling.”

Thomas said, “Per specific requests that would be subject to my review, yes.”

Thomas watched Finch give it some thought, as if he had a choice in the matter.

“Acceptable.”

Thomas stood. He reached across the desk.

Finch stood and shook his hand. “So we have a deal.”

“We have a contract, Agent Finch.” Thomas gripped Finch’s hand fast. “Do consider it inviolate.”

Luther had noticed that Boston might have been different from the Midwest in a lot of ways — the people talked funny for one and everyone dressed in this city, dressed like they were going out to dinner and a show every day, even the children — but a stockyard was a stockyard. Same mud, same stench, same noise. And same job for coloreds — on the bottom rung. Isaiah’s friend Walter Grange had been there fifteen years and he’d risen to the post of key man for the pens, but any white man with fifteen years on the job would have made yard manager by now.

Walter met Luther when he exited the streetcar at the top of Market Street in Brighton. Walter was a small man with huge white muttonchop sideburns to compensate, Luther guessed, for all the hair he’d lost up top. He had a chest like an apple barrel and short wishbone legs and as he led Luther down Market Street, his thick arms swung in concert with his hips. “Mr. Giddreaux said you were from the Midwest?”

Luther nodded.

“So you seen this before, then.”

Luther said, “Worked the yards in Cincinnati.”

“Well, I don’t know what Cincinnati’s like, but Brighton’s a whole stock town. Pretty much everything you see along Market here, that’s cattle business.”

He pointed out the Cattlemen’s Hotel at the corner of Market and Washington and the rival Stockyard Arms across the street and gestured in the direction of packing companies and canneries and three butchers and the various rooming houses and flophouses for workers and salesmen.

“You get used to the stench,” he said. “Me, I don’t even smell it no more.”

Luther had stopped noticing it in Cincinnati, but now it was hard to recall how he’d accomplished that. The smokestacks emptied black spirals into the sky and the sky huffed it back down again and the oily air smelled of blood and fat and charred meat. Of chemicals and manure and hay and mud. Market Street flattened as it crossed Faneuil Street and it was here that the stockyards began, stretching for blocks on either side of the street with the train tracks cutting through their centers. The smell of manure grew worse, rising in a thick tide, and high fences with Cyclone wire up top sprouted out of the ground and the world was suddenly filled with dust and the sound of whistles and the neighing, mooing, and bleating of livestock. Walter Grange unlocked a wooden gate and led Luther through and the ground below grew dark and muddy.

“Lot of people got their interests tied up in the yards,” Walter said. “You got small ranchers and big cattle outfits. You got order buyers and dealer buyers and commission agents and loan officers. You got railroad reps and telegraph operators and market analysts and ropers and handlers and teamsters to transport the livestock once it’s been sold. You got packers ready to buy in the morning and walk those cows right back out the yard and up to the slaughterhouses, have ’em sold for steaks by noon tomorrow. You got people work for the market news services and you got gatemen and yardmen and pen men and weigh-masters and more commission firms than you can shake a fist at. And we ain’t even talking about the unskilled labor yet.” He cocked one eyebrow at Luther. “That’d be you.”

Luther looked around. Cincinnati all over again, but he must have forgotten a lot of Cincinnati, blocked it out. The yards were enormous. Miles of muddy aisles cut between wooden pens filled with snorting animals. Cows, hogs, sheep, lambs. Men ran every which way, some in the rubber boots and dungarees of yard workers, but others in suits and bow ties and straw boaters and still others in checked shirts and cowboy hats. Cowboy hats in Boston! He passed a scale the height of his house in Columbus, practically the width of it, too, and watched a man lead a dazed-looking heifer up there and hold up his hand to a man standing beside the scale with a pencil poised over a piece of paper. “Doing a whole draft, George.”

“My apologies, Lionel. You go ahead.”

The man led another cow and then a third and still another up onto that scale, and Luther wondered just how much weight that scale could take, if it could weigh a ship and the people on it.

He’d fallen back of Walter and hurried to catch up as the man took a right turn down a path between yet more pens, and when Luther reached him, Walter said, “The key man takes responsibility for all the livestock comes off the trains on his shift. That’s me. I lead them to their catch pens and we keep ’em there, feed ’em, clean up after ’em until they get sold, and then a man shows up with a bill of sale and we release them to him.”

He stopped at the next corner and handed Luther a shovel.

Luther gave it a bitter smile. “Yeah, I remember this.”

“Then I can save me some breath. We in charge of pens nineteen through fifty-seven. Got that?”

Luther nodded.

“Every time I empty one, you clean it and restock it with hay and water. End of the day, three times a week, you go there” — he pointed — “and you clean that, too.”

Luther followed his finger and saw the squat brown building at the west end of the yard. You didn’t have to know what it was to sense its mean purpose. Nothing that squat and unadorned and functional-looking could ever put a smile on anyone’s face.

“The killing floor,” Luther said.

“You got a problem with that, son?”

Luther shook his head. “It’s a job.”

Walter Grange agreed with a sigh and a pat on the back. “It’s a job.”

Two days after Danny and Nora’s wedding, Connor met with Attorney General Palmer at his home in Washington, D.C. The windows were boarded up, the front rooms had been obliterated, their ceilings caved in; the staircase just past the entrance hall was shorn in half, with the bottom half indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble and the top half dangling above the entranceway. D.C. police and federal agents had set up a command post in what had once been the parlor, and they moved freely through the house as Mitchell Palmer’s valet led Connor to the office in the rear.

Three men waited for him there. The eldest and fleshiest of them he recognized instantly as Mitchell Palmer. He was round without being quite portly and his lips were the thickest part of him; they sprouted from his face like a rose. He shook Connor’s hand, thanked him for coming, and introduced him to a thin BI agent named Rayme Finch and a dark-eyed, dark-haired Justice Department lawyer named John Hoover.

Connor had to step over some books in order to take his seat. The explosion had shaken them from their shelves, and the built-in bookcases sported great cracks. Plaster and paint had fallen from the ceiling, and the window behind Mitchell Palmer bore two small fissures in the panes.

Palmer caught his eye. “You see what they can do, these radicals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I won’t give them the satisfaction of moving out, I assure you.”

“Very brave of you, sir.”

Palmer swiveled his chair slightly from side to side as Hoover and Finch took theirs on either side of him.

“Mr. Coughlin, are you happy with the direction in which our country is heading?”

Connor pictured Danny and his whore dancing on their wedding day, sleeping in their soiled bed. “No, sir.”

“And why is that?”

“We seem to be giving away the keys to it.”

“Well said, young Coughlin. Would you help us stop this habit?”

“With pleasure, sir.”

Palmer swiveled his chair until he was looking at the cracks in his window. “Ordinary times call for ordinary law. Would you call these times ordinary?”

Connor shook his head. “I would not, sir.”

“Extraordinary times, then …?”

“Call for extraordinary measures.”

“Just so. Mr. Hoover?”

John Hoover hitched his pants at the knee and leaned forward. “The attorney general is determined to rout the evil from our midst. To this end, he has asked me to head a new section of the Bureau of Investigation to be known from here on as the General Intelligence Division or G-I-D. Our mandate, as the name suggests, is to gather intelligence against the radicals, the Communists and Bolsheviki, the anarchists and the Galleanists. In short, the enemies of a free and just society. You?”

“Mr. Hoover?”

“You?” Hoover’s eyes bulged. “You?”

Connor said, “I’m not sure I—”

“You, Coughlin? You, sir. Which are you?”

“I’m none of those,” Connor said and the hardness of his own voice surprised him.

“Then join us, Mr. Coughlin.” Mitchell Palmer turned back from his window and extended his hand across the desk.

Connor stood and shook the hand. “I’d be honored, sir.”

“Welcome to our table, son.”

Luther was plastering walls on the first floor of the Shawmut Avenue building with Clayton Tomes when they heard three car doors slam outside and saw McKenna and two plainclothes cops exit the black Hudson and climb the stairs into the building.

In McKenna’s eyes, as soon as he entered the room, Luther saw something far beyond the normal corruption, the normal disdain. He saw something so unhinged by rage it belonged in a pit, chained and caged.

The two cops he’d brought with him spread out into the room. One of them carried a toolbox for some reason. Judging by the way it pulled his shoulder down, it was heavy. He placed it on the floor near the kitchen doorway.

McKenna removed his hat and waved with it toward Clayton. “Good to see you again, son.”

“Sir.”

McKenna stopped by Luther and looked down at the bucket of plaster between them. “Luther, would you be offended if I asked you a rather arcane question?”

Luther thought: So much for Danny or the captain taking care of this problem.

“Nah, suh.”

“I’m curious as to where you trace your ancestry,” McKenna said. “Africa? Haiti? Or Australia, eh? You could be one of the aboriginals, yeah? Do you know, son?”

“What’s that, suh?”

“Where you come from?”

“I come from America. These here United States.”

McKenna shook his head. “You live here now. But where’d your people come from, son? I ask ya — do you know?”

Luther gave up. “I don’t, suh.”

“I do.” He squeezed Luther’s shoulder. “Once you know what to look for, you can always tell where someone hails from. Your great-grandfather, Luther, based on that nose of yours and that kinky, tight hair and those truck-tire lips — he was from sub-Saharan Africa. Probably around Rhodesia’d be my guess. But your lighter skin and those freckles ’round your cheekbones are, God’s truth as I’m standing here, West Indian. So your great-grandfather was from the monkey tree and your great-grandmother from the island tree and they found their place as slaves in the New World and produced your grandfather who produced your father who produced you. But that New World, it isn’t exactly America now, is it? You’re like a country within the country, I’ll surely grant you, but hardly the country itself. You’re a non-American who was born in America and can never, ever become an American.”

“Why’s that?” Luther stared back into the man’s soulless eyes.

“Because you’re ebon, son. Negroid. Black honey in the land of white milk. In other words, Luther? You should have stayed home.”

“No one asked.”

“Then you should have fought harder,” McKenna said. “Because your true place in this world, Luther? Is back where you fucking came from.”

“Mr. Marcus Garvey says pretty much the same thing,” Luther said.

“Comparing me to Garvey, are we?” McKenna said with a slightly dreamy smile and a shrug. “’Tis no bother. Do you like working for the Coughlins?”

“I did.”

One of the cops sauntered over until he was directly behind Luther.

“That’s right,” McKenna said. “I’d forgotten — you were let go. Killed a bunch of people in Tulsa, ran from your wife and child, came here to work for a police captain, and still you fucked that up. If you were a cat, I’d say you were near down to your last life.”

Luther could feel Clayton’s eyes. Clayton would have heard about Tulsa through the grapevine. He would have never guessed, though, that his new friend could have been involved. Luther wanted to explain it, but all he could do was look back at McKenna.

“What you want me to do now?” Luther said. “That’s the point here — get me to do something for you?”

McKenna toasted that with a flask. “Coming along?”

“What?” Luther said.

“This building. Your remodeling.” McKenna lifted a crowbar off the floor.

“I guess.”

“Almost there, I’d say. ’Least on this floor.” He smashed out two windowpanes with the crowbar. “That help?”

Some glass tinkled to the floor, and Luther wondered what it was in some people made feeding hate so pleasant.

The cop behind Luther chuckled softly. He stepped alongside him and caressed his chest with his nightstick. His cheeks were burned by the wind and his face reminded Luther of a turnip left too long in the fields. He smelled of whiskey.

The other cop carried the toolbox across the room and placed it between Luther and McKenna.

“We were men with an agreement. Men,” McKenna said, leaning in close enough for Luther to smell his whiskey-tongue and drugstore aftershave. “And you went running to Tommy Coughlin and his over-privileged whelp of a son? You thought that would save you, but, Lord, all it did was curse you.”

He slapped Luther so hard Luther spun in place and fell to his hip.

“Get up!”

Luther stood.

“You spoke out of turn about me?” McKenna kicked Luther in the shin so hard Luther had to replant his other leg so as not to fall. “You asked the royal Coughlins for special dispensation with me?”

McKenna pulled his service revolver and placed it to Luther’s forehead. “I am Edward McKenna of the Boston Police Department. I am not someone else. I am not some lackey! I am Edward McKenna, Lieutenant, and you are remiss!”

Luther tilted his eyes up. That black barrel fed from Luther’s head to McKenna’s hand like a growth.

“Yes, suh.”

“Don’t you ‘yes, suh’ me.” McKenna hit Luther’s head with the butt of the pistol.

Luther’s knees dropped halfway to the floor but he snapped back up before his knees could make contact. “Yes, suh,” he said again.

McKenna extended his arm and placed the barrel between Luther’s eyes again. He cocked the hammer. He uncocked it. He cocked it again. He gave Luther a wide, amber-toothed smile.

Luther was dog-tired, bone-tired, heart-tired. He could see the fear covering Clayton’s face in a sweat, and he understood it, he could identify with it. But he couldn’t touch it. Not right now. Fear wasn’t his problem now. Sick was. He was sick of running and sick of this whole game he’d been playing since he could stand on two feet. Sick of cops, sick of power, sick of this world.

“Whatever you’re gonna do, McKenna? Shit. Just fucking do it.”

McKenna nodded. McKenna smiled. McKenna holstered his weapon.

The barrel had left a mark on Luther’s forehead, an indentation he could feel. It itched. He took a step back and resisted the urge to touch the spot.

“Ah, son, you embarrassed me with the Coughlins, and embarrassment is not something a man of my ambitions can abide.” He spread his arms wide. “I just can’t.”

“Okay.”

“Ah, if only it were as easy as ‘okay.’ But it’s not. You’ll need to be taxed.” McKenna gestured at the toolbox. “You’ll put that in the vault you built, if you please.”

Luther pictured his mother watching him from above, a pain in her heart at what her only son had allowed his life to become.

“What’s in it?”

“Bad things,” McKenna said. “Bad, bad things. I want you to know that, Luther. I want you to know that what you’re doing is a terrible thing that will immeasurably hurt the people you care about. I want you to realize that you brought this on yourself and that there is, I assure you, no way out for you or your wife.”

When McKenna had the gun to his head, Luther had realized one truth beyond any: McKenna was going to kill him before this was over. Kill him and forget all about this. He’d leave Lila untouched simply because getting involved in a nigger prosecution over a thousand miles away was pointless if the source of his rage was already dead. So Luther knew this as well: no Luther, no danger to those he loved.

“I ain’t selling out my people,” he told McKenna. “Ain’t planting anything in the NAACP offices. Fuck that and fuck you.”

Clayton let loose a hiss of disbelief.

McKenna, though, looked like he’d been expecting it. “Is that right?”

“That’s right.” Luther looked down at the toolbox. He looked back up at McKenna. “I ain’t—”

McKenna put a hand behind his ear, as if to hear better, pulled the revolver from his belt, and shot Clayton Tomes in the chest.

Clayton held up a hand, palm turned outward. He looked down at the smoke curling from the hole in his overalls. The smoke gave way to a stream of thick, dark fluid, and Clayton cupped his hand under it. He turned and walked carefully over to one of the cans of plaster he and Luther had just been sitting on while they ate and smoked and jawed. He touched the can with his hand before taking a seat.

He said, “What the …?” and leaned his head back against the wall.

McKenna crossed his hands over his groin and tapped the barrel of the pistol against his thigh. “You were saying, Luther?”

Luther’s lips trembled, hot tears pouring down his face. The air smelled of cordite. The walls shook from the winter wind.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Luther whispered. “What the fuck is—”

McKenna fired again. Clayton’s eyes widened, and a small wet pop of disbelief left his mouth. The bullet hole appeared then, just below his Adam’s apple. He grimaced, as if he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him and reached his hand toward Luther. Then his eyes rolled back from the effort and he lowered the hand to his lap. He closed his eyes. He took several shallow gulps of air and then the sound of him stopped.

McKenna took another sip from his flask. “Luther? Look at me.”

Luther stared at Clayton. They’d just been talking about the finish-work that lay ahead. They’d just been eating sandwiches. Tears slid into Luther’s mouth.

“Why would you do that? He didn’t mean anyone harm. He never—”

“Because you don’t run this monkey show. I do.” McKenna tilted his head and bored his eyes into Luther’s. “You’re the monkey. Clear?”

McKenna slid the barrel of the gun into Luther’s mouth. It was still hot enough to burn his tongue. He gagged on it. McKenna pulled back the hammer. “He was no American. He was not a member of any acceptable definition of the human race. He was labor. He was a footrest. He was a beast of burden, sure, nothing more. I disposed of him to prove a point, Luther: I would sooner mourn a footrest than the death of one of yours. Do you think I’m going to stand idly by while Isaiah Giddreaux and that clothed orangutan Du Bois attempt to mongrelize my race? Are you insane, lad?” He pulled the pistol from Luther’s mouth and swung it at the walls. “This building is an affront to every value worth dying for in this country. Twenty years from now people will be stunned to hear we allowed you to live as freemen. That we paid you a wage. That we allowed you to converse with us or touch our food.” He holstered the pistol and grabbed Luther by the shoulders and squeezed. “I will happily die for my ideals. You?”

Luther said nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He wanted to go to Clayton and hold his hand. Even though he was dead, Luther thought he could somehow make him feel less alone.

“If you speak to anyone about this, I will kill Yvette Giddreaux after she takes her lunch in Union Park some afternoon. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you — whatever I tell you and whenever I tell you it — I will kill one nigger every week in this city. You’ll know it’s me because I will shoot them through the left eye so they will go to their nigger god half blind. And their deaths will be on your head, Luther Laurence. Yours and yours alone. Do we have an understanding?”

He let go of Luther and stepped back.

“Do we?”

Luther nodded.

“Good Negro.” McKenna nodded. “Now Officer Hamilton and Officer Temple and myself, we’re going to stay with you until — Are you listening?”

Clayton’s body fell off the plaster can. It lay on the floor, one arm pointed at the door. Luther turned his head away.

“We’re going to stay here with you until dusk. Say you understand, Luther.”

“I understand,” Luther said.

“Isn’t that ducky?” McKenna put his arm around Luther. “Isn’t that grand?” He steered Luther around until they were both facing Clayton’s body.

“We’re going to bury him in the backyard,” McKenna said. “And we’re going to put the toolbox in the vault. And we’re going to come up with an acceptable story for you to tell Miss Amy Wagenfeld when she sends an investigator your way, which surely she will, as you will be the last person to have seen our Mr. Tomes before he absconded from our fair city, probably with an underage white girl. And once we’ve done all that, we’ll wait for the announcement of the ribbon cutting. And you will call me the moment you know that date or …?”

“You’ll … you’ll—”

“Kill a nigger,” McKenna said, pushing Luther’s head back and forth in a nod. “Is there any part of this I need to repeat for you?”

Luther looked into the man’s eyes. “No.”

“Magnificent.” He let go of Luther and removed his coat. “Boys, take off your coats, the both of you. Let’s give Luther a hand with this plaster, shall we? Man shouldn’t have to do everything by himself, sure.”

Chapter thirty

The house on K Street shriveled into itself. The rooms narrowed and the ceilings seemed to droop and the quiet that replaced Nora was spiteful. It remained that way through the spring and then deepened when word reached the Coughlins that Danny had taken Nora for a wife. Joe’s mother went to her room with migraines, and the few times Connor wasn’t working — and he worked around the clock lately — his breath stank of alcohol and his temper was so short that Joe gave him a wide berth whenever they found themselves in the same room. His father was even worse — Joe would look up to see the old man staring at him with a glaze in his eyes that suggested he’d been doing it for some time. The third time this happened, in the kitchen, Joe said, “What?”

His father’s eyelids snapped. “Excuse me, boy?”

“You’re staring, sir.”

“Don’t get lippy with me, son.”

Joe dropped his eyes. It may have been the longest he’d dared hold his father’s gaze in his life. “Yes, sir.”

“Ah, you’re just like him,” his father said and opened his morning paper with a loud crackling of the pages.

Joe didn’t bother asking who his father was referring to. Since the wedding, Danny’s name had joined Nora’s on the list of things you couldn’t speak aloud. Even at twelve, Joe was all too aware that this list, which had been in place long before he was born, held the key to most mysteries of the Coughlin bloodline. The list was never discussed because one of the items on the list was the list itself, but Joe understood that first and foremost on the list was anything that could cause embarrassment to the family — relatives who’d engaged in repeated public drunkenness (Uncle Mike), who’d married outside of the Church (Cousin Ed), who’d committed crimes (Cousin Eoin, out in California), committed suicide (Cousin Eoin again), or given birth out of wedlock (Aunt Somebody in Vancouver; she’d been so completely banished from the family that Joe didn’t know her name; she existed like a small stream of smoke that curled into the room before someone thought to shut the door). Sex, Joe understood, was stamped in bold at the top of the list. Anything to do with it. Any hint that people even thought about it, never mind had it.

Money was never discussed. Nor were the vagaries of public opinion and the new modern mores, both of which were deemed anti-Catholic and anti-Hibernian as a matter of course. There were dozens of other items on the list, but you never knew what they were until you mentioned one and then you saw from a single look that you’d wandered out into the minefield.

What Joe missed most about Danny’s absence was that Danny couldn’t have given a shit about the list. He didn’t believe in it. He’d bring up women’s suffrage at the dinner table, talk about the latest debate over the length of a woman’s skirt, ask his father what he thought of the rise of Negro lynchings in the South, wonder aloud why it took the Catholic Church eighteen hundred years to decide Mary was a virgin.

“That’s enough,” his mother had cried to that one, her eyes welling.

“Now look what you did,” his father said.

It was quite a feat — managing to hit two of the biggest, boldest items on the list, sex and the failings of the Church, at the same time.

“Sorry, Ma,” Danny said and winked at Joe.

Christ, Joe missed that wink.

Danny had shown up at Gate of Heaven two days after the wedding. Joe saw him as he exited the building with his classmates, Danny out of uniform and leaning against the wrought-iron fence. Joe kept his composure, though heat flushed from his throat to his ankles in one long wet wave. He walked through the gate with his friends and turned as casually as he could toward his brother.

“Buy you a frankfurter, brother?”

Danny had never called him “brother” before. It had always been “little brother.” It changed everything, made Joe feel a foot taller, and yet part of him immediately wished they could go back to how it had been.

“Sure.”

They walked up West Broadway to Sol’s Dining Car at the corner of C Street. Sol had just recently added the frankfurter to his menu. He’d refused to do so during the war because the meat sounded too German and he had, like most restaurants during the war, taken great pains to change the name of frankfurters to “Liberty Sausages” on his menu board. But now the Germans were beaten, and there were no hard feelings about it in South Boston, and most of the diners in the city were trying hard to catch up with this new fad that Joe & Nemo’s had helped popularize in the city, even if, at the time, it had called their patriotism into question.

Danny bought two for each of them and they sat atop the stone picnic bench out in front of the diner and ate them with bottles of root beer as cars navigated horses and horses navigated cars out on West Broadway and the air smelled of the coming summer.

“You heard,” Danny said.

Joe nodded. “You married Nora.”

“Sure did.” He bit into his frankfurter and raised his eyebrows and laughed suddenly before he chewed. “Wish you could have been there.”

“Yeah?”

“We both did.”

“Yeah.”

“But the folks would never have allowed it.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

Joe shrugged. “They’ll get over it.”

Danny shook his head. “No they won’t, brother. No they won’t.”

Joe felt like crying, but he smiled instead and swallowed some meat and took a sip of root beer. “They will. You’ll see.”

Danny placed his hand softly to the side of Joe’s face. Joe didn’t know what to do, because this had never happened. You slugged each other on the shoulder. You jabbed each other in the ribs. You didn’t do this. Danny looked down at him with soft eyes.

“You’re on your own in that house for a while, brother.”

“Can I come visit?” Joe heard his own voice crack, and he looked down at his frankfurter and was pleased to see no tears fell on it. “You and Nora?”

“Of course. But that’ll put you in the doghouse with the folks if you get caught.”

“Been in the doghouse before,” Joe said. “Plenty. Might start barking soon.”

Danny laughed at that, a bark unto itself. “You’re a great kid, Joe.”

Joe nodded and felt the heat in his face. “How come you’re leaving me, then?”

Danny tipped his chin up with his finger. “I’m not leaving you. What’d I say? You can come by anytime.”

“Sure.”

“Joe, Joe, I’m fucking serious. You’re my brother. I didn’t leave the family. The family left me. Because of Nora.”

“Dad and Con’ said you’re a Bolshevik.”

“What? To you?”

Joe shook his head. “I heard them talking one night.” He smiled. “I hear everything in there. It’s an old house. They said you went native. They said you were a wop-lover and a nigger-lover and you lost your way. They were really drunk.”

“How could you tell?”

“They started singing near the end.”

“No shit? ‘Danny Boy’?”

Joe nodded. “And ‘Kilgary Mountain’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”

“You don’t hear that one a lot.”

“Only when Dad’s really snockered.”

Danny laughed and put his arm around him and Joe rocked against it.

“You go native, Dan?”

Danny kissed his forehead. Actually kissed it. Joe wondered if he was drunk.

Danny said, “Yeah, I guess so, brother.”

“You love Italians?”

Danny shrugged. “I got nothing against ’em. You?”

“I like them. I like the North End. Just like you do.”

Danny bounced a fist lightly off his knee. “Well, good then.”

“Con’ hates ’em, though.”

“Yeah, well, Con’s got a lot of hate in him.”

Joe ate the rest of his second frankfurter. “Why?”

Danny shrugged. “Maybe because when he sees something that confuses him, he feels like he needs an answer right then. And if the answer ain’t right in front of him, he grabs onto whatever is and makes it the answer.” He shrugged again. “I honestly don’t know, though. Con’s had something eating him up since the day he was born.”

They sat in silence for a bit, Joe swinging his legs off the edge of the stone table. A street vendor coming home from a day at Haymarket Square pulled over to the curb. He climbed off his cart, breathing wearily through his nostrils, and went to the front of his horse and lifted its left leg. The horse snuffled softly and twitched at the flies on its tail and the man shushed it as he pulled a pebble from its hoof and tossed it out onto West Broadway. He lowered the leg and caressed the horse’s ear and whispered into it. The horse snuffled some more as the man climbed back up onto his cart, its eyes dark and sleepy. The vendor whistled softly and the horse clopped back into the street. When it dropped a clump of shit from between its flanks and cocked its head proudly at the creation, Joe felt a smile spread across his face he couldn’t explain.

Danny, watching, too, said, “Damn. Size of a hat.”

Joe said, “Size of a breadbasket.”

“I believe you’re right,” Danny said, and they both laughed.

They sat as the light turned rusty behind the tenements along the Fort Point Channel and the air smelled of the tide and the clogging stench of the American Sugar Refining Company and the gases of the Boston Beer Company. Men crossed back over the Broadway Bridge in clusters and other groups wandered up from the Gillette Company and Boston Ice and the Cotton Waste Factory and most entered the saloons. Soon the boys who ran numbers for the neighborhood were dashing in and out of those same saloons, and from across the channel another whistle blew to signal the end of another working day. Joe wished he could stay here forever, even in his school clothes, with his brother, on a stone bench along West Broadway as the day faded around them.

Danny said, “You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you’re born to and the one you build.”

“Two families,” Joe said, eyeing him.

He nodded. “Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.”

“So you and Luther, you chose each other?”

Danny cocked his head. “I was thinking more of me and Nora, but now that you mention it, I guess me and Luther did, too.”

“Two families,” Joe said.

“If you’re lucky.”

Joe thought about that for a bit and the inside of his body felt splashy and ungrounded, as if he might float away.

“Which are we?” Joe said.

“The best kind.” Danny smiled. “We’re both, Joe.”

At home, it got worse. Connor, when he talked, ranted about the anarchists, the Bolsheviks, the Galleanists, and the mud races who constituted their core. Jews financed them, he said, and Slavs and wops did their dirty work. They were riling up the niggers down South and poisoning the minds of the working whites back east. They’d tried to kill his boss, the attorney general of the United States of America, twice. They talked of unionization and rights for the workingman, but what they really wanted was violence on a national scale and despotism. Once turned onto the subject, he couldn’t be turned off, and he’d just about combust when talk turned to the possibility of a police strike.

It was a rumor in the Coughlin home all summer, and even though Danny’s name was never said, Joe knew that he was somehow involved. The Boston Social Club, his father told Connor, was talking to the AFL, to Samuel Gompers about an impending charter. They would be the first policemen in the country with national affiliation to a labor union. They could alter history, his father said and ran a hand over his eyes.

His father aged five years that summer. Ran down. Shadowed pockets grew below his eyes as dark as ink. His colorless hair turned gray.

Joe knew he’d been stripped of some of his power and that the culprit was Commissioner Curtis, a man whose name his father uttered with hopeless venom. He knew that his father seemed weary of fighting and that Danny’s break from the family had hit him far harder than he let on.

The last day of school, Joe returned to the house to find his father and Connor in the kitchen. Connor, just back from Washington, was already well into his cups, the whiskey bottle on the table, the cork lying beside it.

“It’s sedition if they do it.”

“Oh, come on, boy, let’s not be overly dramatic.”

“They’re officers of the law, Dad, the first line of national defense. If they even talk about walking off the job, that’s treason. No different than a platoon that walks away from the field of battle.”

“It’s a little different.” Joe’s father sounded exhausted.

Connor looked up when Joe entered the room and this was usually where such conversation ended, but this time Connor kept going, his eyes loose and dark.

“They should all be arrested. Right now. Just go down to the next BSC meeting and throw a chain around the building.”

“And what? Execute them?” His father’s smile, so rare these days, returned for a moment, but it was thin.

Connor shrugged and poured more whiskey into his glass.

“You’re half serious.” His father noticed Joe now, too, as Joe placed his book sack up on the counter.

“We execute soldiers who walk away from the front,” Connor said.

His father eyed the whiskey bottle but didn’t reach for it. “While I may disagree with the men’s plan of action, they have a legitimate beef. They’re underpaid—”

“So let them go out and get another job.”

“—the state of their quarters is unhygienic to say the least and they’re dangerously overworked.”

“You sympathize with them.”

“I can see their point.”

“They’re not garment workers,” Connor said. “They’re emergency personnel.”

“He’s your brother.”

“Not anymore. He’s a Bolshevik and a traitor.”

“Ah, Jaysus H,” his father said. “You’re talking crazy talk.”

“If Danny is one of the ringleaders of this and they do strike? He deserves whatever’s coming to him.”

He looked over at Joe when he said this and swirled the liquor in his glass and Joe saw contempt and fear and an embittered pride in his brother’s face.

“You got something to say, little tough guy?” Connor took a swig from his glass.

Joe thought about it. He wanted to say something eloquent in defense of Danny. Something memorable. But the words wouldn’t come, so he finally said the ones that did.

“You’re a piece of shit.”

No one moved. It was as if they’d all turned to porcelain, the whole kitchen, too.

Then Connor threw his glass in the sink and charged. Their father got a hand on his chest, but Connor got past him long enough to reach for Joe’s hair and Joe twisted away but fell to the floor and Connor got one kick in before his father pushed him back.

“No,” Connor said. “No! Did you hear what he called me?”

Joe, on the ground, could feel where his brother’s fingers had touched his hair.

Connor pointed over his father’s shoulder at him. “You little puke, he’s got to go to work sometime, and you got to sleep here!”

Joe got up off the floor and stared at his brother’s rage, stared it straight in the face and found himself unimpressed and unafraid.

“You think Danny should be executed?” he said.

His father pointed back at him. “Shut up, Joe.”

“You really think that, Con’?”

“I said shut up!”

“Listen to your father, boy.” Connor was starting to smile.

“Fuck you,” Joe said.

Joe had time to see Connor’s eyes widen, but he never saw his father spin toward him, his father always a man of startling speed, faster than Danny, faster than Con’, and a hell of a lot faster than Joe, because Joe didn’t even have time to lean back before the back of his father’s hand connected with Joe’s mouth and Joe’s feet left the floor. When he landed, his father was already on him, both hands on his shoulders. He hoisted him up from the floor and slammed his back into the wall so that they were face-to-face, Joe’s shoes dangling a good two feet off the floor.

His father’s eyes bulged in their sockets and Joe noticed how red they were. He gritted his teeth and exhaled through his nostrils and a lock of his newly gray hair fell to his forehead. His fingers dug into Joe’s shoulders and he pressed his back into the wall as if he were trying to press him straight through it.

“You say that word in my house? In my house?”

Joe knew better than to answer.

“In my house?” his father repeated in a high whisper. “I feed you, I clothe you, I send you to a good school, and you talk like that in here? Like you’re from trash?” He slammed his shoulders back into the wall. “Like you’re common?” He loosened his grip just long enough for Joe’s body to slacken and then slammed him into the wall again. “I should cut out your tongue.”

“Dad,” Connor said. “Dad.”

“In your mother’s house?”

“Dad,” Connor said again.

His father cocked his head, eyeballing Joe with those red eyes. He removed one hand from Joe’s shoulder and closed it around his throat.

“Jesus, Dad.”

His father raised him higher, so that Joe had to look down into his red face.

“You’re going to be sucking on brown soap for the rest of the day,” his father said, “but before you do, let me make one thing clear, Joseph — I brought you into this world and I can damn sure take you out of it. Say ‘Yes, sir.’”

It was hard with a hand around his throat, but Joe managed: “Yes, sir.”

Connor reached toward his father’s shoulder and then paused, his hand hovering in the air. Joe, looking in his father’s eyes, could tell his father felt the hand in the air behind him and he willed Connor to please step back. No telling what his father would do if that hand landed.

Connor lowered the hand. He put it in his pocket and took a step back.

His father blinked and sucked some air through his nose. “And you,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Connor, “don’t let me ever hear you talk about treason and my police department ever again. Ever. Am I quite clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Connor looked down at his shoes.

“You … lawyer.” He turned back to Joe. “How’s the breathing, boy?”

Joe felt the tears streaming down his face and croaked, “Fine, sir.”

His father finally lowered him down the wall until they were face-to-face. “If you ever use that word in this house, it’ll not get this good again. Not even close, Joseph. Do you have any trouble comprehending my meaning, son?”

“No, sir.”

His father raised his free arm and cocked it into a fist and Joe saw that fist hovering six inches from his face. His father let him look at it, at the ring there, at the faded white scars, at the one knuckle that had never fully healed and was twice the size of the others. His father nodded at him once and then dropped him to the floor.

“The two of you make me sick.” He went over to the table, slammed the cork back into the whiskey bottle, and left the room with it under his arm.

His mouth still tasted of soap and his ass still smarted from the calm, emotionless whipping his father had given it after he’d returned from his study half an hour later, when Joe climbed out his bedroom window with some clothes in a pillowcase and walked off into the South Boston night. It was warm, and he could smell the ocean at the end of the street, and the streetlamps glowed yellow. He’d never been out on the streets this late by himself. It was so quiet he could hear his footsteps and he imagined their echoes as a living thing, slipping away from the family home, the last thing anyone remembered hearing before they became part of a legend.

What do you mean, he’s gone?” Danny said. “Since when?”

“Last night,” his father said. “He took off … I don’t know what time.”

His father had been waiting on his stoop when Danny returned home, and the first thing Danny noticed was that he’d lost weight, and the second was that his hair was gray.

“You don’t report into your precinct anymore, boy?”

“I don’t really have a precinct these days, Dad. Curtis shitcanned me to every cold-piss strike detail he could find. I spent my day in Malden.”

“Cobblers?”

Danny nodded.

His father gave that a rueful smile. “Is there one man who isn’t on strike these days?”

“You have no reason to think he was snatched or something,” Danny said.

“No, no.”

“So there was a reason he ran.”

His father shrugged. “In his head, I’m sure.”

Danny placed a foot on the stoop and unbuttoned his coat. He’d been frying in it all day. “Let me guess, you didn’t spare the rod.”

His father looked up at him, squinting into the setting sun. “I didn’t spare it with you and you turned out none the worse for wear.”

Danny waited.

His father threw up his hand. “I admit I was a little more impassioned than usual.”

“What’d the kid do?”

“He said fuck.”

“In front of Ma?”

His father shook his head. “In front of me.”

Danny shook his head. “It’s a word, Dad.”

“It’s the word, Aiden. The word of the streets, of the common poor. A man builds his home to be a sanctuary, and you damn well don’t drag the streets into a sanctuary.”

Danny sighed. “What did you do?”

Now it was his father’s turn to shake his head. “Your brother’s out on these streets somewhere. I’ve put men on it, good men, men who work runaways and truants, but it’s harder in the summer, so many boys on the streets, so many working jobs at all hours, you can’t tell one from the other.”

“Why come to me?”

“You damn well know why,” his father said. “The boy worships you. I suspect he may have come here.”

Danny shook his head. “If he did, I haven’t been around. I’ve been working a seventy-two on. You’re looking at my first hour off.”

“What about …?” His father tilted his head and looked up at the building.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“Say her name.”

“Don’t be a child.”

“Say her name.”

His father rolled his eyes. “Nora. Happy? Has Nora seen him?”

“Let’s go ask her.”

His father stiffened and didn’t move as Danny came up the steps past him and went to the front door. He turned his key in the lock and looked back at the old man.

“We going to find Joe, or not?”

His father rose from the steps and brushed off the seat of his pants and straightened the creases of his trousers. He turned with his captain’s hat under his arm.

“This changes nothing between us,” he said.

“Perish the thought.” Danny fluttered a hand over his heart, which brought a grimace to his father’s face, then he pushed open the door into the front hall. The stairs were sticky with heat and they climbed them slowly, Danny feeling like he could easily lie down on one of the landings and take a nap after three straight days of strike patrol.

“You ever hear from Finch anymore?” he asked.

“I get the occasional call,” his father said. “He’s back in Washington.”

“You tell him I saw Tessa?”

“I mentioned it. He didn’t seem terribly interested. It’s Galleani he wants and that old dago is smart enough to train ’em here, but he sends them out of state to do most of their mischief.”

Danny felt the bitterness in his own grin. “She’s a terrorist. She’s making bombs in our city. Who knows what else. But they’ve got bigger fish to fry?”

His father shrugged. “It’s the way of things, boy. If they hadn’t bet the house on terrorists being responsible for that molasses tank explosion, things would probably be different. But they did bet the house, and it blew that molasses all over their faces. Boston’s an embarrassment now, and you and your BSC boys aren’t making it better.”

“Oh, right. It’s us.”

“Don’t play the martyr. I didn’t say it was all you. I just said there’s a taint to our beloved department in certain corridors of federal law enforcement. And some of that’s because of the half-cocked hysteria surrounding the tank explosion, and some of it’s due to the fear that you’ll embarrass the nation by going on strike.”

“No one’s talking strike yet, Dad.”

“Yet.” His father paused at the third-floor landing. “Jesus, it’s hotter than the arse of a swamp rat.” He looked at the hall window, its thick glass covered in soot and a greasy residue. “I’m three stories up, but I can’t even see my city.”

“Your city.” Danny chuckled.

His father gave him a soft smile. “It is my city, Aiden. It was men like me and Eddie who built this department. Not the commissioners, not O’Meara much as I respected him, and certainly not Curtis. Me. And as goes the police, so goes the city.” He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Oh, your old man might be back on his heels temporarily, but I’m getting my second wind, boy. Don’t you doubt it.”

They climbed the last two flights in silence. At Danny’s room, his father took a series of breaths as Danny inserted his key in the lock.

Nora opened the door before he could turn the key. She smiled. Then she saw who stood beside him, and her pale eyes turned to ash.

“And what’s this?” she said.

“I’m looking for Joe,” his father said.

She kept her eyes on Danny, as if she hadn’t heard him. “You bring him here?”

“He showed up,” Danny said.

His father said, “I have no more desire to be here than you—”

“Whore,” Nora said to Danny. “I believe that was the last word I heard from this man’s mouth. I believe he spit on his own floor to emphasize the point.”

“Joe’s missing,” Danny said.

That didn’t move her at first. She stared at Danny with a cold rage that, while it encompassed his father, was just as much directed at him for bringing the man to their door. She flicked her gaze off his face and onto his father’s.

“What’d you call him to make him run?” she said.

“I just want to know if the boy came by.”

“And I want to know why he ran.”

“We had a moment of discord,” his father said.

“Ah.” She tilted her head back at that. “I know all about how you resolve moments of discord with young Joe. Was the switch involved?”

His father turned to Danny. “There’s a limit to how long I’ll stand for a situation I deem undignified.”

“Jesus,” Danny said. “The two of you. Joe’s missing. Nora?”

Her jaw tightened and her eyes remained ash, but she stepped back from the door enough so Danny and his father could enter the room.

Danny took off his coat straightaway and stripped the suspenders from his shoulders. His father took in the room, the fresh curtains, the new bedspread, the flowers in the vase on the table by the window.

Nora stood by the foot of the bed in her factory uniform — Ladlassie stripe overalls with a beige blouse underneath. She gripped her left wrist with her right hand. Danny poured three whiskeys and gave a glass to each of them, and his father’s eyebrows rose slightly at the sight of Nora drinking hard liquor.

“I smoke, too,” she said, and Danny saw a tightening of his father’s lips that he recognized as a suppressed smile.

The two of them raced each other on the drink, Danny’s father draining his glass one drop ahead of Nora, and then they each held out their glasses again and Danny refilled them. His father took his to the table by the window and placed his hat on the table and sat and Nora said, “Mrs. DiMassi said a boy was by this afternoon.”

“What?” his father said.

“He didn’t leave a name. She said he was ringing our bell and looking up at our window and when she came out on the stoop, he ran away.”

“Anything else?”

Nora drank more whiskey. “She said he was the spitting image of Danny.”

Danny could see the tension drain from his father’s shoulders and neck as he took a sip of his drink.

Eventually, he cleared his throat. “Thank you, Nora.”

“You’ve no need to thank me, Mr. Coughlin. I love the boy. But you could do me a courtesy in return.”

His father reached for his handkerchief and pulled it from his coat. “Certainly. Name it.”

“Finish up your drink, if you please, and be on your way.”

Chapter thirty-one

Two days later, on a Saturday in June, Thomas Coughlin walked from his home on K Street to Carson Beach for a meeting regarding the future of his city. Even though he was dressed in the lightest suit he owned, a blue and white seersucker, and his sleeves were short, the heat soaked through to his skin. He carried a brown leather satchel that grew heavier every couple of hundred yards. He was a little too old to be playing the bag man, but he wasn’t trusting this particular bag to anyone else. These were sensitive days in the wards, where the wind could shift at a moment’s notice. His beloved Commonwealth was currently under the stewardship of a Republican governor, a transplant from Vermont with no love of, nor appreciation for, local mores or local history. The police commissioner was a bitter man of tiny mind who hated the Irish, hated Catholics, and therefore hated the wards, the great Democratic wards that had built this city. He only understood his hate; he did not understand compromise, patronage, the way of doing things that had been established in this town over seventy years ago and had defined it ever since. Mayor Peters was the picture of ineffectuality, a man who won the vote only because the ward bosses had fallen asleep at the switch and the rivalry between the two main and two true mayoral candidates, Curley and Gallivan, had grown so bitter that a third flank had opened up, and Peters had reaped the November rewards. Since his election, he had done nothing, absolutely nothing of note, while his cabinet had pillaged the till with such shamelessness that it was only a matter of time before the looting hit the front pages and gave birth to the sworn enemy of politics since the dawn of man: illumination.

Thomas removed his coat and loosened his tie and placed the satchel at his feet as he came to the end of K Street and paused in the shade of a great elm. The sea lay only forty feet away, the beach filled, but the breeze was desultory, the air clammy. He could feel eyes on him, the gazes of those who recognized him but dared not approach. This filled him with enough satisfaction to close his eyes in the shade for a moment, to imagine a cooler breeze. He had made it clear many years ago in the neighborhood that he was their benefactor, their friend, their patron. You needed something, you put the touch on Tommy Coughlin and sure he’d take care of it, he would. But never — ever — on a Saturday. On Saturdays, you left Tommy Coughlin alone so he could attend to his family, his beloved sons and beloved wife.

They’d called him Four Hands Tommy back then, an appellation some believed bespoke a man who had his hands in a lot of pockets, but one which actually took root after he’d apprehended Boxy Russo and three other plug-uglies of the Tips Moran gang after he’d caught them coming out the back of a Jew furrier’s place off Washington Street. He’d been a beat cop then and after he’d subdued them (“Sure it must have taken four hands to fight four men!” Butter O’Malley had said when he’d finished booking them), he’d tied them together in twos and waited for the wagons. They hadn’t put up much of a struggle after he’d snuck up and slapped his billy club off the back of Boxy Russo’s noggin. The galoot had dropped his end of the safe, and so the others had been forced to do the same, and the end result was four mashed feet and two broken ankles.

He smiled to remember it now. Those were simpler times. Fine times. He was young and powerful-strong, and sure, wasn’t he just the fastest man on the force? He and Eddie McKenna worked the docks in Charlestown and the North End and South Boston and there was no more violent place for a copper to be. No richer either, once the big boys figured out they weren’t going to scare these two off, so they might as well all come to an accommodation. Boston was, after all, a port city, and anything that disrupted the entry to those ports was bad for business. And the soul of business, as Thomas Coughlin had known since he was a lad in Clonakilty, County Cork, was accommodation.

He opened his eyes and they filled with the blue glitter of the sea and he shoved off again, making his way along the seawall toward Carson Beach. Even without the heat, this summer was already taking on the feel of a nightmare. Dissension within the ranks that could lead to a strike on his beloved force. Danny in the midst of it. Danny, too, lost to him as a son. Over a harlot who, in his good graces, he’d taken in when she was little more than a shivering puddle of gray flesh and loose teeth. Of course, she’d been from Donegal, which should have been fair warning; you could never trust a Donegalan; they were known liars and fomenters of dissent. And now Joe, missing for a second day, out there somewhere in the city, eluding all attempts to recover him. He had too much Danny in him, that was plain to see, too much of Thomas’s own brother, Liam, a man who’d tried to break the world open, only to see it do the very same to him. He’d died, Liam had, gone now these twenty-eight years, bled out in an alley behind a pub in Cork City, his assailant unknown, his pockets picked clean. The motive had been an argument over a woman or a gambling debt, both, in Thomas’s mind, pretty much the same thing in terms of risk versus reward. He’d loved Liam, his twin brother, the way he loved Danny, the way he loved Joe — in confusion and admiration and futility. They were windmill tilters who scoffed at reason, who lived through their hearts. As had Liam, as had Thomas’s father, a man who’d drank the bottle until the bottle drank him back.

Thomas saw Patrick Donnegan and Claude Mesplede sitting in the small gazebo that looked out on the sea. Just beyond it was a dark green fishing pier, mostly empty at midday. He raised a hand and they raised theirs as he began the trudge across the sand through families trying to escape the heat of their homes for the heat of this sand. He would never understand this phenomenon of lying by the water, of taking the entire family to engage in the mass indulgence of idleness. It seemed like something Romans would have done, baking under their sun gods. Men were no more meant to be idle than horses were. It fostered a restlessness of thinking, an acceptance of amoral possibilities and the philosophy of relativism. Thomas would kick the men if he could, kick them from the sand and send them out to work.

Patrick Donnegan and Claude Mesplede watched him come with smiles on their faces. They were always smiling, these two, a pair if ever there was one. Donnegan was the ward boss for the Sixth and Mesplede was its alderman, and they had held these positions for eighteen years, through mayors, through governors, through police captains and police commissioners, through presidents. Nestled deep in the bosom of the city where no one ever thought to look, they ran it, along with a few other ward bosses and aldermen and congressmen and councilors who’d been smart enough to secure positions on the key committees that controlled the wharves and the saloons and the building contracts and the zoning variances. If you controlled these, you controlled crime and you controlled the enforcement of law and, thus, you controlled everything that swam in the same sea, which was to say, everything that made a city run — the courts, the precincts, the wards, the gambling, the women, the businesses, the unions, the vote. The last, of course, was the procreative engine, the egg that hatched the chicken that hatched more eggs that hatched more chickens and would do so ad infinitum.

As childishly simple as this process was, most men, given a hundred years on earth, would never understand it because most men didn’t want to.

Thomas entered the gazebo and leaned against the inner wall. The wood was hot and the white sun found the center of his forehead as a bullet to a hawk.

“How’s the family, Thomas?”

Thomas handed him the satchel. “Tops, Patrick. Just tops. And the missus?”

“She’s fit, Thomas. Picking out architects for the house we’re building in Marblehead, she is.” Donnegan opened the satchel, peered inside.

“And yours, Claude?”

“My eldest, Andre, has passed the bar.”

“Grand stuff. Here?”

“In New York. He graduated Columbia.”

“You must be fierce-proud.”

“I am, Thomas, thank you.”

Donnegan stopped rummaging in the satchel. “Every list we asked for?”

“And more.” Thomas nodded. “We threw in the NAACP as a bonus.”

“Ah, you’re a miracle worker.”

Thomas shrugged. “It was Eddie mostly.”

Claude handed Thomas a small valise. Thomas opened it and looked at the two bricks of money inside, both wrapped tightly in paper and taped. He had a practiced eye when it came to such transactions, and he knew by the thickness that his and Eddie’s payments were even larger than promised. He raised an eyebrow at Claude.

“Another company joined us,” Claude said. “Profit participation rose accordingly.”

“Shall we walk, Thomas?” Patrick said. “’Tis diabolical heat.”

“A sound suggestion.”

They removed their jackets and strolled to the pier. At midday it was empty of fishermen, save for a few who seemed far more interested in the buckets of beer at their feet than any fish they could jerk over the rail.

They leaned against the rail and looked out at the Atlantic and Claude Mesplede rolled his own cigarette and lit it with a cupped match that he flicked into the ocean. “We’ve compiled that list of saloons that will be converting to rooming houses.”

Thomas Coughlin nodded. “There’s no weak link?”

“Not a one.”

“No criminal histories to worry about?”

“None at all.”

He nodded. He reached into his jacket and removed his cigar from the inside pocket. He snipped the end and put his match to it.

“And they all have basements?”

“As a matter of course.”

“I see no problem then.” He puffed slowly on the cigar.

“There’s an issue with the wharves.”

“Not in my districts.”

“The Canadian wharves.”

He looked at Donnegan, then at Mesplede.

“We’re working on it,” Donnegan said.

“Work faster.”

“Thomas.”

He turned to Mesplede. “Do you know what will happen if we don’t control point of entry and point of contact?”

“I do.”

“Do you?”

“I said I do.”

“The lunatic Irish and the lunatic dagos will organize. They won’t be mad dogs in the street anymore, Claude. They’ll be units. They’ll control the stevedores and the teamsters, which means they’ll control transport. They’ll be able to set terms.”

“That will never happen.”

Thomas considered the ash at the end of his cigar. He held it out to the wind and watched the wind eat the ash until the flame glowed underneath. He waited until it had turned from blue to red before he spoke again.

“If they take control of this, they’ll tip the balance. They’ll control us. At their leisure, gents, not ours. You’re our man with the friends in Canada, Claude.”

“And you’re our man in the BPD, Thomas, and I’m hearing talk of a strike.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“It is the subject.”

Thomas looked over at him and Claude flicked his ash into the sea and took another hungry puff. He shook his head at his own anger and turned his back to the sea. “Are you telling me there won’t be a strike? Can you guarantee that? Because from what I saw on May Day, you have a rogue police department out there. They engage in a gang fight, and you’re telling us you can control them?”

“I was after you all last year to get the mayor’s ear on this one, and what happened?”

“Don’t put this on my door, Tommy.”

“I’m not putting it on your door, Claude. I’m asking about the mayor.”

Claude looked over at Donnegan and said, “Ach,” and flipped his cigarette into the sea. “Peters is no mayor. You know that. He spends all his time shacked up with his fourteen-year-old concubine. Who is, I might add, his cousin. Meanwhile, his men, carpetbaggers all, could make Ulysses Grant’s gangster-cabinet blush. Now there might be some sympathy for your men’s plight, but they pissed that all away, didn’t they?”

“When?”

“In April. They were offered their two-hundred-a-year increase and they declined.”

“Jesus,” Thomas said, “cost of living has risen seventy-three percent. Seventy-three.”

“I know the number.”

“That two hundred a year was a prewar figure. The poverty level is fifteen hundred a year, and most coppers make far less than that. They’re the police, Claude, and they’re working for less wages than niggers and women.”

Claude nodded and placed a hand on Thomas’s shoulder, gave it a soft squeeze. “I can’t argue with you. But the thinking in City Hall and in the commissioner’s office is that the men can be put on the Pay No Heed list because they’re emergency personnel. They can’t affiliate with a union and they sure can’t strike.”

“But they can.”

“No, Thomas,” he said, his eyes clear and cold. “They can’t. Patrick’s been out in the wards, taking an informal poll, if you will. Patrick?”

Patrick spread his hands over the rail. “Tom, it’s like this — I’ve talked to our constituents, and if the police dare strike, this city will vent all its rage — at unemployment, the high cost of living, the war, the niggers coming from down South to take jobs, at the price of getting up in the damn morning — and send it straight at the city.”

“This city will riot,” Claude said. “Just like Montreal. And you know what happens when people are forced to see the mob that lives within them? They don’t like it. They want someone to pay. At the polls, Tom. Always at the polls.”

Thomas sighed and puffed his cigar. Out in the sea, a small yacht floated into his field of vision. He could make out three figures on the deck as thick dark clouds began to mass just to their south and march toward the sun.

Patrick Donnegan said, “Your boys strike? Big Business wins. They’ll use that strike as a cudgel to fuck organized labor, Irishmen, Democrats, fuck anyone who ever thought of a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work in this country. You let them turn this into what they’ll turn it into? You’ll set the working class back thirty years.”

Thomas gave that a smile. “It’s not all on me, boys. Maybe if O’Meara, God rest him, was still with us, I’d have more say in the outcome, but with Curtis? That toad’ll blow this city down to its foundations to stick it to the wards and the men who run them.”

“Your son,” Claude said.

Thomas turned, the cigar between his teeth pointing at Claude’s nose. “What?”

“Your son is in league with the BSC. Quite an orator, we hear, like his father.”

Thomas removed his cigar. “We stay away from family, Claude. That’s a rule.”

“Maybe in fairer days,” Claude said. “But your son is in this, Tommy. Deep. And the way I hear it, he’s growing in popularity by the day and his rhetoric grows exponentially more inflammatory. If you could talk to him, maybe …” Claude shrugged.

“We don’t have that kind of relationship anymore. There’s been a rift.”

Claude took that information in, his small eyes tilting up in his head for a moment as he sucked softly on his lower lip. “You’ll have to repair it then. Someone has to talk these boys out of doing anything stupid. I’ll work on the mayor and his hoodlums. Patrick will work on the public sentiment. I’ll even see what I can do about a favorable article or two in the press. But, Thomas, you’ve got to work on your son.”

Thomas looked over at Patrick. Patrick nodded.

“We don’t want to take the gloves off, sure now, do we, Thomas?”

Thomas declined to respond to that. He placed his cigar back in his mouth, and the three of them leaned on the rail again and looked out at the ocean.

Patrick Donnegan looked out at the yacht as the clouds reached it and covered it in shadow. “I’ve been thinking about one of those for myself. Smaller, of course.”

Claude laughed.

“What?”

“You’re building a house on the water. What would you want with a boat?”

“So I could look back in at my house,” Patrick said.

Thomas grinned in spite of his dark mood and Claude chuckled.

“He’s addicted to the trough, I’m afraid.”

Patrick shrugged. “I’m fond of the trough, boys, I admit it. Believe in the trough, I do. But it’s a small trough. It’s a big-house trough. Them? They want troughs the size of countries. They don’t know where to stop.”

On the yacht, the three figures suddenly moved with quick jerky motions as the cloud above them opened.

Claude clapped his hands together and then rubbed them off each other. “Well, we don’t want to be caught out,” he said. “There’s rain coming, gentlemen.”

“God’s truth,” Patrick said as they walked off the pier. “You can smell it, sure.”

By the time he got home it was pouring, a fine black unleashing of the heavens. A man who’d never been fond of a strong sun, he found himself invigorated, even though the drops were as warm as sweat and only added to the thickness of the humidity. The last few blocks, he slowed his pace to a fairgrounds stroll and tilted his face up into it. When he reached the house, he went in through the back, taking the path along the side so he could check on his flowers, and they seemed as pleased as he to finally have some water. The back door opened onto the kitchen and he gave Ellen a start as he came through it looking like something that had escaped the ark.

“Mercy, Thomas!”

“Mercy indeed, my love.” He smiled at her, trying to remember the last time he’d done so. She returned the smile, and he tried to remember the last time he’d seen that as well.

“You’re soaked to the bone.”

“I needed it.”

“Here, sit. Let me get you a towel.”

“I’m fine, love.”

She came back from the linen closet with a towel. “I’ve news of Joe,” she said, her eyes bright and wet.

“For the love of Pete,” he said, “out with it, Ellen.”

She draped the towel over his head and rubbed vigorously. She spoke as if she were discussing a lost cat. “He’s turned up at Aiden’s.”

Before Joe ran away, she’d been locked in her room, incapacitated by Danny’s nuptials. Once Joe had gone on the run, she’d emerged and launched into a cleaning frenzy, telling Thomas she was back to her old self, she was, and would he please be so kind as to find their son? When she wasn’t cleaning, she was pacing. Or knitting. And all the while, she asked him, over and over, what he was doing about Joe. She’d say it the way a worried mother would, yes, but the way a worried mother would to a boarder. He’d lost all connection with her over the years, made his peace with a warmth that lived occasionally in her voice but rarely in her eyes, because the eyes alit on nothing, seemed instead to always be tilted slightly up, as if she were conversing with her own mind and nothing else. He didn’t know this woman. He was reasonably sure he loved her, because of time, because of attrition, but time had also robbed them of each other, fostered within a relationship based on itself and nothing more, no different from that of a saloon keeper and his most frequent patron. You loved out of habit and lack of brighter options.

He had the blood on his hands where their marriage was concerned, however. He was reasonably certain of that. She’d been a girl when they wed, and he’d treated her as a girl only to wake one morning, who knew how many years ago, wishing for a woman to take her place. But it was far too late for that now. Far too late. So he loved her in memory. He loved her with a version of himself he’d long outgrown because she hadn’t. And she loved him, he supposed (if in fact she did, he didn’t know anymore) because he indulged her illusions.

I’m so tired, he thought as she removed the towel from his head, but what he said was, “He’s at Aiden’s?”

“He is. Aiden telephoned.”

“When?”

“Not long ago.” She kissed his forehead, another rarity that defied recent recollection. “He’s safe, Thomas.” She rose from her haunches. “Tea?”

“Is Aiden bringing him by, Ellen? Our son?”

“He said Joe wished to spend the night and Aiden had a meeting to go to.”

“A meeting.”

She opened the cabinet for teacups. “He said he’d bring him ’round in the morning.”

Thomas went to the phone in the entrance hall and dialed Marty Kenneally’s house on West Fourth. He placed the valise under the phone table. Marty answered on the third ring, shouting into the phone as he always did.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?”

“Marty, it’s Captain Coughlin.”

“Is that you, sir?” Marty shouted even though, to the best of Thomas’s knowledge, no one else ever called him.

“It’s me, Marty. I need you to bring the car around.”

“She’ll be slipping in this rain, sir.”

“I didn’t ask you if she’d be slipping, Marty, now did I? Bring her ’round in ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” Marty shouted and Thomas hung up.

When he came back into the kitchen, the kettle was nearing the boil. He stripped off his shirt and used the towel on his arms and torso. He noticed how white the hairs had gotten on his chest, and that gave him a quick, mournful vision of his own headstone, but he vanquished the sentiment by noting the flatness of his belly and the hard cords in his biceps. With the possible exception of his eldest son, he couldn’t picture a man he’d fear to go against in a fistfight, even today, in his golden years.

You’re in the grave, Liam, almost three decades, but I’m still standing strong.

Ellen turned from the stove and saw his bare chest. She averted her gaze and Thomas sighed and rolled his eyes. “Jesus, woman, it’s me. Your husband.”

“Cover yourself, Thomas. The neighbors.”

The neighbors? She barely knew any of them. And, of those she did, most failed to measure up to whatever standards she clung to these days.

Christ, he thought as he went into the bedroom and changed into a fresh shirt and trousers, how did two people vanish from each other’s sight in the same house?

He’d kept a woman once. For about six years, she’d lived in the Parker House and spent his money freely but she’d always greeted him with a drink when he came through the door and she’d looked in his eyes when they talked and even when they made love. Then in the fall of ’09, she’d fallen in love with a bellhop and they left the city to start a new life in Baltimore. Her name was Dee Dee Goodwin, and when he’d placed his head to her bare chest he’d felt he could say anything, close his eyes and be anything.

His wife handed him his tea when he came back into the kitchen and he drank it standing up.

“You’re going back out? On a Saturday?”

He nodded.

“But I thought you’d stay home today. We’d stay home together, Thomas.”

And do what? he wanted to ask. You’ll talk about the latest news you’ve heard from relatives back in the Old Sod who we haven’t seen in years, and then when I begin to talk, you’ll jump up and start cleaning. And then we’ll have a silent supper and you’ll disappear to your room.

He said, “I’m going to get Joe.”

“But Aiden said—”

“I don’t care what Aiden said. He’s my son. I’m bringing him home.”

“I’ll clean his sheets,” she said.

He nodded and knotted his tie. Outside, the rain had stopped. The house smelled of it and it ticked off the leaves in the backyard, but he could see the sky brightening.

He leaned in and kissed his wife’s cheek. “I’ll be back with our boy.”

She nodded. “You haven’t finished your tea.”

He lifted the cup and drained it. He placed it back on the table. He took his straw boater from the hat rack and placed it on his head.

“You look handsome,” she said.

“And you’re still the prettiest girl ever to come out of County Kerry.”

She gave him a smile and a sad nod.

He was almost out of the kitchen when she called to him.

“Thomas.”

He turned back. “Hmm?”

“Don’t be too hard on the boy.”

He felt his eyes narrow so he compensated with a smile. “I’m just glad he’s safe.”

She nodded and he could see a clear and sudden recognition in her eyes, as if she knew him again, as if they could heal. He held her eyes and broadened his smile and felt hope stir in his chest.

“Just don’t hurt him,” she said brightly and turned back to her teacup.

It was Nora who thwarted him. She raised the window on the fifth floor and called down to him as he stood on the stoop. “He wants to stay here for the night, Mr. Coughlin.”

Thomas felt ridiculous calling up from the stoop as streams of dagos filled the sidewalk and street behind him, the air smelling of shit and rotten fruit and sewage. “I want my son.”

“And I told you, he’s wants to stay here for the night.”

“Let me talk to him.”

She shook her head and he pictured wrenching her out of that window by her hair.

“Nora.”

“I’m going to close the window.”

“I’m a police captain.”

“I know what you are.”

“I can come up.”

“Won’t that be a sight?” she said. “Sure, everyone will be talking about the ruckus you’ll make.”

Oh, she was a righteous cunt, she was.

“Where’s Aiden?”

“A meeting.”

“What kind?”

“What kind do you think?” she said. “Good day, Mr. Coughlin.”

She slammed the window closed.

Thomas walked off the stoop through the throng of reeking dagos and Marty opened the car door for him. Marty came around and got behind the wheel. “Where to now, Captain? Home, is it?”

Thomas shook his head. “Roxbury.”

“Yes, sir. The Oh-Nine, sir?”

Thomas shook his head again. “Intercolonial Hall, Marty.”

Marty came off the clutch and the car lurched and then died. He pumped the gas and started it again. “That’s BSC headquarters, sir.”

“I know right well what it is, Marty. Now hush up and take me there.”

A show of hands,” Danny said, “for any man in this room who’s ever heard us discuss, or even say, the word strike.”

There were over a thousand men in the hall and not one raised his hand.

“So where did the word come from?” Danny said. “How is it suddenly that the papers are hinting that this is our plan?” He looked out at the sea of people and his eyes found Thomas’s in the back of the hall. “Who has the motive to make the entire city think we’re going to strike?”

Several men looked back at Thomas Coughlin. He smiled and waved, and a collective laugh rumbled through the room.

Danny wasn’t laughing, though. Danny was on fire up there. Thomas couldn’t help but feel a great swell of pride as he watched his son on that podium. Danny, as Thomas had always known he would, had found his place in the world as a leader of men. It just wasn’t the battleground Thomas would’ve chosen for him.

“They don’t want to pay us,” Danny said. “They don’t want to feed our families. They don’t want us to be able to provide reasonable shelter or education for our children. And when we complain? Do they treat us like men? Do they negotiate with us? No. They start a whisper campaign to paint us as Communists and subversives. They scare the public into thinking we’ll strike so that if it ever does come to that, they can say, ‘We told you so.’ They ask us to bleed for them, gentlemen, and when we do so, they give us penny bandages and dock our pay a nickel.”

That caused a roar in the hall, and Thomas noted that no one was laughing now.

He looked at his son and thought: check.

“The only way they win,” Danny said, “is if we fall into their traps. If we begin to believe, even for a second, their lies. That we are somehow in error. That asking for basic human rights is somehow subversive. We are paid below the poverty level, gentlemen. Not at it or slightly above it, but below it. They say we can’t form a union or affiliate with the AFL because we are ‘indispensable’ city personnel. But if we’re indispensable, how come they treat us as if we’re not? A streetcar driver, for example, must be twice as indispensable, because he makes twice what we do. He can feed his family and he doesn’t work fifteen days in a row. He doesn’t work seventy-two-hour shifts. He doesn’t get shot at either, last time I checked.”

Now the men laughed, and Danny allowed himself a smile.

“He doesn’t get stabbed or punched or beaten down by hooligans like Carl McClary did last week in Fields Corner. Does he? He doesn’t get shot like Paul Welch did during the May Day riot. He doesn’t risk his life every minute, like we all did in the flu epidemic. Does he?”

The men were shouting, “No!” and pumping their fists.

“We do every dirty job in this city, gentlemen, and we don’t ask for special treatment. We don’t ask for anything but fairness, parity.” Danny looked around the room. “Decency. To be treated as men. Not horses, not dogs. Men.”

The men were quiet now, not a sound in the room, not a cough.

“As you all know, the American Federation of Labor has a long-standing policy of not granting charters to police unions. As you also know, our own Mark Denton has made overtures to Samuel Gompers of the AFL and has been — several times in the last year, I’m afraid — rebuffed.” Danny looked back at Denton sitting on the stage behind him and smiled. He turned back to the men. “Until today.”

It took some time for the words to sink in. Thomas, himself, had to replay them several times in his head before the enormity of them took hold. The men began to look at one another, they began to chatter. The buzz circled the room.

“Did you hear me?” Danny smiled big. “The AFL has reversed its policy for the BPD, gentlemen. They are granting us a charter. Sign-up petitions will be distributed in every station house by Monday morning.” Danny’s voice thundered across the room. “We are now affiliated with the biggest national union in the United States of America!”

The men rose, and the chairs fell and the hall exploded with cheers.

Thomas saw his son up on the stage embracing Mark Denton, saw them both turn to the crowd and try to accept the outstretched hands of hundreds of men, saw the big, bold smile on Danny’s face, caught up in the thrall of himself a bit, as it would be near impossible not to be, given the circumstances. And Thomas thought:

I have given birth to a dangerous man.

Out on the street, the rain had returned, but it was soft, caught somewhere between a mist and light drizzle. As the men exited the hall, Danny and Mark Denton accepted their congratulations and handshakes and shoulder pats.

Some men winked at Thomas or tipped their hats and he returned the gestures because he knew they didn’t see him as The Enemy, knowing he was far too slippery to be caught holding fast to either side of a fence. They mistrusted him as a matter of course, that was a given, but he caught the glint of admiration in their eyes, admiration and some fear, but no hate.

He was a giant in the BPD, yes, but he wore it lightly. Displays of vanity, after all, were the province of minor gods.

Danny, of course, refused to ride in a chauffeured car with him, so Thomas sent Marty on to the North End alone and he and Danny took the el back across the city. They had to get out at Batterymarch Station because the trestle that had been destroyed in the molasses flood was still under repair.

As they walked back toward the rooming house, Thomas said, “How is he? Did he tell you anything?”

“Somebody banged him up a bit. He told me he got mugged.” Danny lit a cigarette and held out the pack to his father. His father helped himself to one as they walked in the soft mist. “I don’t know if I believe him, but what are you going to do? He’s sticking to the story.” Danny looked over at him. “He spent a couple nights sleeping on the streets. That’d rattle any kid.”

They walked another block. Thomas said, “So you’re quite the young Seneca. You cut a fine figure up there, if I do say so.”

Danny gave him a wry smile. “Thanks.”

“Affiliated with a national union now, are you?”

“Let’s not.”

“What?”

“Discuss this,” Danny said.

“The AFL’s left many a fledgling union hanging out to dry when the pressure got upped.”

“Dad? I said let’s leave it.”

“Fine, fine,” his father said.

“Thanks.”

“Far be it from me to change your mind after such a triumphant night.”

“Dad, I said quit it.”

“What am I doing?” Thomas said.

“You know damn well.”

“I don’t, boy. Do tell me.”

His son turned his head and his eyes were filled with an exasperation that gradually gave way to humor. Danny was the only one of his three sons who’d picked up his father’s sense of irony. All three boys could be funny — it was a family trait that probably went back several generations — but Joe’s humor was the humor of a smart-aleck boy and Connor’s was broader and borderline vaudevillian on the rare occasions he indulged it. Danny was capable of those kinds of humor as well, but more important, he shared Thomas’s appreciation for the quietly absurd. He could, in effect, laugh at himself. Particularly in the most dire hours. And that was the bond between them that no difference of opinion could ever break. Thomas had often heard fathers or mothers over the years claim they didn’t favor any of their children. What a load of bollocks. Pure bollocks. Your heart was your heart and it chose its loves regardless of your head. The son Thomas favored would surprise no one: Aiden. Of course. Because the boy understood him, to his core, and always had. Which wasn’t always to Thomas’s advantage, but then he’d always understood Aiden, and that kept the ledger balanced now, didn’t it?

“I’d shoot you, old man, if I had my gun.”

“You’d miss,” Thomas said. “I’ve seen you shoot, boy.”

For the second time in as many days, he found himself in the hostile presence of Nora. She didn’t offer him a drink or a place to sit. She and Danny went over to one corner of the room by themselves and Thomas crossed to his youngest son, who sat at the table by the window.

The boy watched him come, and Thomas was immediately shaken to see a new blankness in Joe’s eyes, as if something had been hollowed out of him. He had a black eye and a dark scab over his right ear and, Thomas noted with no small regret, that his throat still bore a circle of red from Thomas’s own hand and his lip was still swollen from Thomas’s ring.

“Joseph,” he said when he reached him.

Joe stared back at him.

Thomas went to one knee by his son and put his hands on his face and kissed his forehead and kissed his hair and pressed him to his chest. “Oh, Jesus, Joseph,” he said and closed his eyes and felt all the fear he’d trapped behind his heart these last two days burst through his blood and his muscles and his bones. He tilted his lips to his son’s ear and whispered, “I love you, Joe.”

Joe stiffened in his arms.

Thomas released his grip and leaned back and ran his hands over his son’s cheeks. “I’ve been worried sick.”

Joe whispered, “Yes, sir.”

Thomas searched for signs of the boy he’d always known, but a stranger stared back at him.

“What happened to you, boy? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, sir. I got mugged is all. Some boys near the rail yards.”

The thought of his flesh and blood being pummeled spiked his rage for a moment, and Thomas almost slapped the boy for giving him such fright and lack of sleep these past few nights. But he caught himself, and the impulse passed.

“That’s it? Mugged?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jesus, the chill that came off the child! It was the chill of his mother during one of her “moods.” The chill of Connor when things didn’t go his way. It wasn’t part of the Coughlin bloodline, that was for certain.

“Did you know any of the boys?”

Joe shook his head.

“And that’s it? That’s all that happened.”

Joe nodded.

“I’ve come to take you home, Joseph.”

“Yes, sir.”

Joe stood and walked past him to the door. There was no child’s self-pity, no sense of anguish or joy or emotion of any kind.

Something’s died in him.

Thomas felt the chill of his own son again and wondered if he was to blame, if this was what he did to those he loved — protected their bodies while deadening their hearts.

He gave Danny and Nora a confident smile. “Well, we’ll be off then.”

Nora shot him a look of such hatred and contempt, Thomas himself wouldn’t have cast it on the worst jungle-bunny rapist in his precinct. It seared the organs in his body.

She smoothed Joe’s face and hair and kissed his forehead. “Good-bye, Joey.”

“Bye.”

“Come on,” Danny said softly. “I’ll walk you both down.”

When they reached the street, Marty Kenneally got out of the car and opened Thomas’s door, and Joe climbed in. Danny stuck his head into the car and said good-bye and then stood on the sidewalk with Thomas. Thomas felt the soft night around them. Summer in the city and the streets smelled of this afternoon’s rain. He loved that smell. He reached out his hand.

Danny shook it.

“They’re going to come after you.”

“Who?” Danny said.

“The ones you never see,” his father said.

“Over the union?”

His father nodded. “What else?”

Danny dropped his hand and chuckled. “Let ’em come.”

Thomas shook his head. “Don’t ever say that. Don’t ever tempt the gods like that. Ever, Aiden. Ever, boy.”

Danny shrugged. “Fuck ’em. What can they do to me?”

Thomas placed his foot on the edge of the step. “You think because you’ve a good heart and a good cause that it’ll be enough? Give me a fight against a man with a good heart any day, Aiden, because that man doesn’t see the angles.”

“What angles?”

“You’ve proved my point.”

“If you’re trying to scare me, you—”

“I’m trying to save you, you foolish boy. Are you so naïve as to still believe in a fair fight? Did you learn anything as my son? They know your name. Your presence has been noted.”

“So let them bring the fight. And when they come, I’ll—”

“You won’t see them come,” his father said. “No one ever does. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You pick a fight with these boys? Jesus, son, you best be prepared to bleed all night.”

He waved his hand in exasperation and left his son on the stoop.

“’Night, Dad.”

Marty came around to open his door and Thomas leaned on it for a moment and looked back up at his son. So strong. So proud. So unaware.

“Tessa.”

“What?” Danny said.

He leaned on the door and stared at his son. “They’ll come after you with Tessa.”

Danny said nothing for a bit.

“Tessa?”

Thomas patted the door. “That’s what I’d do.”

He tipped his hat to his son and climbed into the car with Joe and told Marty to take them straight home.