The Given Day

Chapter thirty-three

Danny met with Ralph Raphelson at the headquarters of the Boston Central Labor Union on the first Thursday in August. Raphelson was so tall he was one of the rare men with a face Danny had to look up into as he shook his hand. Thin as a fingernail, with wispy blond hair racing to depart the steep slope of his skull, he motioned Danny to a chair and took his own behind his desk. Beyond the windows, a hot-soup rain fell from beige clouds and the streets smelled like stewed produce.

“Let’s start with the obvious,” Ralph Raphelson said. “If you have an itch to comment on or give me the rough work about my name, please scratch it now.”

Danny let Raphelson see him consider it before he said, “Nope. All set.”

“Much appreciated.” Raphelson opened his hands. “What can we do for the Boston Police Department this morning, Officer Coughlin?”

“I represent the Boston Social Club,” Danny said. “We’re the organized-labor arm of the—”

“I know who you are, Officer.” Raphelson gave his desk blotter a light pat. “And I’m well acquainted with the BSC. Let me put your mind at ease — we want to help.”

Danny nodded. “Mr. Raphelson—”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph, if you know who I am, then you know I’ve talked to several of your member groups.”

“Oh, I do, yes. I hear you’re quite convincing.”

Danny’s first thought: I am? He wiped some rain off his coat. “If our hand is forced and we have no choice but to walk off the job, would the Central Labor Union support us?”

“Verbally? Of course.”

“How about physically?”

“You’re talking about a sympathy strike.”

Danny met his eyes. “Yes, I am.”

Raphelson rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “You understand how many men the Boston Central Labor Union represents?”

“I’ve heard a shade under eighty thousand.”

“A shade over,” Raphelson said. “We just picked up a plumbers local from West Roxbury.”

“A shade over then.”

“You ever known eight men could agree on anything?”

“Rarely.”

“And we’ve got eighty thousand — firemen, plumbers, phone operators, machinists, teamsters, boilermakers, and transit men. And you want me to bring them into agreement to strike on behalf of men who’ve hit them with clubs when they struck?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

That brought a smile to Raphelson’s eyes if not his lips.

“Why not?” Danny repeated. “You know any of those men whose wages have kept up with the cost of living? Any who can keep their families fed and still find the time to read their kids a story at bedtime? They can’t, Ralph. They’re not treated like workers. They’re treated like field hands.”

Raphelson laced his hands behind his head and considered Danny. “You’re pretty swell at the emotional rhetoric, Coughlin. Pretty swell.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment. I have to deal in practicalities. Once all the essential-dignity-of-the-working-class sentiments are dispensed with, who’s to say my eighty thousand men have jobs to come back to? You seen the latest unemployment figures? Why shouldn’t those men take my men’s jobs? What if your strike drags on? Who’s to keep the families fed if the men finally have the time to read those bedtime stories? Their kids’ stomachs are rumbling, but glory hallelujah, they’ve got fairy tales. You say, ‘Why not?’ There are eighty thousand reasons and their families why not.”

It was cool and dark in the office, the blinds only half open to the dark day, the sole light coming from a small desk lamp by Raphelson’s elbow. Danny met Raphelson’s eyes and waited him out, sensing a caged anticipation in the man.

Raphelson sighed. “And yet, I’ll grant you, I’m interested.”

Danny leaned forward in his chair. “Then it’s my turn to ask why.”

Raphelson fiddled with his window blinds until the slats let in just a bit more of the damp day. “Organized labor is nearing a turning point. We’ve made our few strides over the past two decades mostly because we caught Big Money by surprise in some of the larger cities. But lately? Big Money’s gotten smart. They’re framing the debate by taking ownership of the language. You’re no longer a workingman fighting for his rights. You’re Bolsheviki. You’re a ‘subversive.’ Don’t like the eighty-hour week? You’re an anarchist. Only Commies expect disability pay.” He flicked a hand at the window. “It’s not just kids who like bedtime stories, Coughlin. We all do. We like them simple and comforting. And right now that’s what Big Money is doing to Labor — they’re telling a better bedtime story.” He turned his head from the window, gave Danny a smile. “Maybe we finally have an opportunity to rewrite it.”

“That’d be nice,” Danny said.

Raphelson stretched a long arm across the desk. “I’ll be in touch.”

Danny shook the hand. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet, but as you said” — Raphelson glanced at the rain — “‘why not?’”

Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis tipped the printer’s courier a nickel and carried the boxes to his desk. There were four of them, each the size of a brick, and he placed one in the center of his ink blotter and removed the cardboard cover to consider the contents. They reminded him of wedding invitations, and he swallowed a sour and sad reflection of his only daughter, Marie, plump and dull-eyed since the cradle, now fading into spinsterhood with a complacency he found sordid.

He lifted the top slip of paper from the box. The script was quite handsome, utile but bold, the paper a heavy cotton bond the color of flesh. He placed the slip back on the top of the stack and decided to send the printer a personal letter of thanks, a commendation on such a fine job delivered under the stress of a rush order.

Herbert Parker entered from his office next door and said not a word as he crossed to Curtis and joined his friend at the desk, and they stared down at the stack of slips on the ink blotter.

“Who did you use?” Parker said.

“The printer?”

“Yes.”

“Freeman and Sons on School Street.”

“Freeman. Jewish?”

“Scottish, I think.”

“He does fine work.”

“Doesn’t he, though?”

Fay Hall. Packed. Every man in the department who wasn’t on duty and even some who were, the room smelling of the warm rain and several decades’ worth of sweat, body odor, cigar and cigarette smoke so thick it slathered the walls like another coat of paint.

Mark Denton was over in one corner of the stage, talking to Frank McCarthy, the just-arrived organizer of the New England chapter of the American Federation of Labor. Danny was in the other corner talking to Tim Rose, a beat cop from the Oh-Two who pounded the bricks around City Hall and Newspaper Row.

“Who told you this?” Danny said.

“Wes Freeman himself.”

“The father?”

“No, the son. Father’s a sot, a gin junkie. The son does all the work now.”

“One thousand discharge slips?”

Tim shook his head. “Five hundred discharge slips, five hundred suspensions.”

“Already printed.”

Tim nodded. “And delivered to Useless Curtis himself at eight sharp this a.m.”

Danny caught himself tugging on his chin and nodding at the same time, another habit he’d inherited from his father. He stopped and gave Tim what he hoped was a confident smile. “Well, I guess they took their dancing shoes off, uh?”

“I guess they did.” Tim gestured with his chin at Mark Denton and Frank McCarthy. “Who’s the swell with Denton?”

“Organizer with the AFL.”

Tim’s eyes pulsed. “He bring the charter?”

“He brought the charter, Tim.”

“Guess we took off our dancing shoes then, too, eh, Dan?” A smile exploded across Tim’s face.

“We did at that.” Danny clapped his shoulder as Mark Denton picked the megaphone off the floor and stepped to the dais.

Danny crossed to the stage, and Mark Denton knelt at the edge to give Danny his ear and Danny told him about the discharge and suspension slips.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. They got to his office at eight this morning. Solid info.”

Mark shook his hand. “You’re going to make a fine vice president.”

Danny took a step back. “What?”

Denton gave him a sly smile and stepped up to the dais. “Gentlemen, thank you for coming. This man to my left is Frank McCarthy. He’s your New England rep with the AF of L. And he’s come to bring us something.”

As McCarthy took the dais and the megaphone, Kevin McRae and several other officers of what was about to become the extinct BSC stopped at each row to hand out ballots that the men passed down the rows, their eyes pinwheeling.

“Gentlemen of the Boston Police Department,” McCarthy said, “once you mark those ballots ‘yay’ or ‘nay,’ a decision will have been made as to whether you remain the Boston Social Club or accept this charter I raise before you and become, instead, the Boston Police Union Number sixteen thousand eight hundred and seven of the American Federation of Labor. You will, with some measure of sadness I’m sure, be saying good-bye to the notion and the name of the Boston Social Club, but in return, you will join a brotherhood that is two million strong. Two million strong, gentlemen. Think about that. You will never feel alone again. You will never feel weak or at the mercy of your bosses. Even the mayor, himself, will be afraid to tell you what to do.”

“He already is!” someone shouted, and laughter spread through the room.

Nervous laughter, Danny thought, as the men realized the import of what they were about to do. No going back after today. Leaving a whole other world behind, one in which their rights weren’t respected, yes, but that lack of respect was at least predictable. It made the ground firm underfoot. But this new ground was something else again. Foreign ground. And for all McCarthy’s talk of brotherhood, lonely ground. Lonely because it was strange, because all bearings were unfamiliar. The potential for disgrace and disaster lay ahead everywhere, and every man in the room felt it.

They passed the ballots back down the rows. Don Slatterly rounded up the stacks from the men collecting them like ushers at mass and carried the entire fourteen hundred toward Danny, his steps a bit soggy, his face drained of color.

Danny took the stack from his hands, and Slatterly said, “Heavy, uh?”

Danny gave him a shaky smile and nodded.

“Men,” Frank McCarthy called, “do you all attest that you answered the ballot question truthfully and signed your names? A show of hands.”

Every hand in the room rose.

“So that our young officer to stage left doesn’t have to count them right here and right now, could I get a show of hands as to how many of you voted in favor of accepting this charter and joining the AF of L? If all of you who voted ‘yay,’ would please stand.”

Danny looked up from the stack in his hands as fourteen hundred chairs pushed back and fourteen hundred men rose to their feet.

McCarthy raised his megaphone. “Welcome to the American Federation of Labor, gentlemen.”

The collective scream that exploded in Fay Hall pushed Danny’s spine into the center of his chest and flooded his brain with white light. Mark Denton snatched the stack of ballots from his hands and tossed them high above his head and they hung in the air and then began to float downward as Mark lifted him off his feet and kissed his cheek and hugged him so hard his bones howled.

“We did it!” Tears streamed down Mark’s face. “We fucking did it!”

Danny looked out through the floating ballots at the men toppling their chairs and hugging and howling and crying and he grabbed the top of Mark’s head and sank his fingers into his hair and shook it, howling along with the rest of them.

Once Mark let him down, they were rushed. The men poured onto the stage and some slipped on the ballots and one grabbed the charter from McCarthy’s hand and went running back and forth across the stage with it. Danny was tackled and then lifted and then passed across a sea of hands, bouncing and laughing and helpless, and a thought occurred to him before he could suppress it:

What if we’re wrong?

After the meeting, Steve Coyle found Danny on the street. Even in his euphoria — he’d been unanimously voted vice president of Boston Police Union 16807 less than an hour ago — he felt an all-too-familiar irritation at Steve’s presence. The guy was never sober anymore, and he had this way of looking into your eyes nonstop, as if searching your body for his old life.

“She’s back,” he said to Danny.

“Who?”

“Tessa. In the North End.” He pulled his flask from a tattered coat pocket. He had trouble getting the stopper out. He had to squint and take a deep breath to get a grip.

“You eaten today?” Danny asked.

“You hear me?” Steve said. “Tessa’s back in the North End.”

“I heard. Your source told you?”

“Yeah.”

Danny put his hand on his old friend’s shoulder. “Let me buy you a meal. Some soup.”

“I don’t need fucking soup. She’s come back to her old haunts because of the strike.”

“We’re not striking. We just joined the AF of L.”

Steve went on like he hadn’t heard. “They’re all coming back. Every subversive on the Eastern Seaboard is raising stakes and coming here. When we strike—”

We.

“—they think it’s going to be a free-for-all. St. Petersburg. They’re going to stir the pot and—”

“So where is she?” Danny said, trying to keep his annoyance at bay. “Exactly?”

“My source won’t say.”

“Won’t say? Or won’t say for free?”

“For free, yeah.”

“How much does he want this time? Your source?”

Steve looked at the sidewalk. “Twenty.”

“Just a week’s pay this time, huh?”

Steve cocked his head. “You know, if you don’t want to find her, Coughlin, that’s fine.”

Danny shrugged. “I got other things on my mind right now, Steve. You understand.”

Steve nodded several times.

“Big man,” he said and walked up the street.

The next morning, upon hearing word of the BSC’s unanimous decision to join the American Federation of Labor, Edwin Upton Curtis issued an emergency order canceling all vacations for division commanders, captains, lieutenants, and sergeants.

He summoned Superintendent Crowley to his office and let him stand at attention before his desk for half a minute before he turned from his window to look at him.

“I’m told they elected officers to the new union last night.”

Crowley nodded. “As I understand it, yes, sir.”

“I’ll need their names.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get those immediately.”

“And the men who distributed the sign-up sheets in each of the precincts.”

“Sir?”

Curtis raised his eyebrows, always an effective tool when he’d been Mayor Curtis in the long-ago. “The men, as I understand it, were given sign-up sheets last week to see how many would be interested in accepting an AFL charter. Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want the names of the men who brought those sign-up sheets into the station houses.”

“That may take a little longer, sir.”

“Then it takes longer. Dismissed.”

Crowley snap-turned on his heel and headed for the door.

“Superintendent Crowley.”

“Yes, sir.” Crowley turned back to him.

“You have no sympathies in this area, I trust.”

Crowley’s eyes fixed on a spot a few feet above Edwin Upton Curtis’s head. “None, sir.”

“Look me in the eyes if you please, sir.”

Crowley met his eyes.

“How many abstentions?”

“Sir?”

“In last night’s vote, man.”

“I believe none, sir.”

Curtis nodded. “How many ‘nay’ votes?”

“I believe none, sir.”

Edwin Upton Curtis felt a constricting in his chest, the old angina perhaps, and a great sadness filled him. It never had to come to this. Never. He’d been a friend to these men. He’d offered them a fair raise. He’d appointed committees to study their grievances. But they wanted more. They always wanted more. Children at a birthday party, unimpressed with their gifts.

None. Not a single nay vote.

Spare the rod, spoil the child.

Bolsheviks.

“That’ll be all, Superintendent.”

Nora rolled off Danny in a heap, let loose a loud groan, and pressed her forehead into the pillow, as if she were trying to burrow through it.

Danny ran his palm down her back. “Good, uh?”

She growled a laugh into the pillow and then turned her chin to face him. “Can I say fuck in your presence?”

“I think you just did.”

“You’re not offended?”

“Offended? Let me smoke a cigarette and I’m ready to go again. Look at you. God.”

“What?”

“You’re just …” He ran his hand from her heel, up the back of her calf, over her ass and across her back again. “Fucking gorgeous.”

“Now you said fuck.”

“I always say fuck.” He kissed her shoulder, then the back of her ear. “Why did you want to say fuck, by the way? Or, in your case, fook.”

She sank her teeth into his neck. “I wanted to say I’ve never fucked a vice president before.”

“You’ve limited yourself to treasurers?”

She slapped his chest. “Aren’t you proud of yourself, boy?”

He sat up and took his pack of Murads from the nightstand and lit one. “Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“I’m … honored,” he said. “When they called my name out on the ballot — I mean, honey, I had no idea it was going to be there.”

“Yeah?” She ran her tongue across his abdomen. She took the cigarette from his hand and took a puff before handing it back to him.

“No idea,” he said. “Until Denton tipped me just before the first ballot. But, shit, I won an office I didn’t even know I was running for. It was crazy.”

She slid back on top of him and he loved the weight of her there. “So you’re honored but not proud?”

“I’m scared,” he said.

She laughed and took his cigarette again. “Aiden, Aiden,” she whispered, “you’re not afraid of anything.”

“Sure, I am. I’m afraid all the time. Afraid of you.”

She placed the cigarette back in his mouth. “Afraid of me now, are you?”

“Terrified.” He ran a hand along the side of her face and through her hair. “Scared I’ll let you down.”

She kissed his hand. “You’ll never let me down.”

“That’s what the men think, too.”

“So what is it you’re afraid of again?”

“That you’re all wrong.”

On August 11, with warm rain sluicing against the window in his office, Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis composed an amendment to the rules and regulations of the Boston Police Department. That amendment to Rule 35, Section 19, read in part:

No member of the force shall belong to any organization, club or body composed of present and past members of the force which is affiliated with or part of any organization, club or body outside of the department.

Commissioner Curtis, upon finishing what would become commonly known as Rule 35, turned to Herbert Parker and showed him the draft.

Parker read it and wished that it could be harsher. But these were upside-down days in the country. Even unions, those Bolsheviki sworn enemies of free trade, had to be coddled. For a time. For a time.

“Sign it, Edwin.”

Curtis had been hoping for a bit more effusive reaction, but he signed it anyway and then sighed at the condensation on his windows.

“I hate rain.”

“Summer rain’s the worst, Edwin, yes.”

An hour later, Curtis released the newly signed amendment to the press.

Thomas and the seventeen other captains met in the anteroom outside Superintendent Crowley’s office in Pemberton Square. They stood in a loose circle and brushed the beads of water off their coats and hats. They coughed and complained about their drivers and the traffic and the miserable weather.

Thomas found himself standing beside Don Eastman, who ran Division 3 on Beacon Hill. Eastman concentrated on straightening his damp shirt cuffs and spoke in a low voice. “I hear they’ll be running an ad in the papers.”

“Don’t believe every rumor you hear.”

“For replacements, Thomas. A standing militia of armed volunteers.”

“As I said, rumors.”

“Rumors or no, Thomas, if the men strike, we’ll see fecal gravity at work like never before. Ain’t a man in this room who won’t be covered in shit.”

“If he ain’t been run out of town on rails,” Bernard King, the captain of Division 14, said, stubbing out his cigarette on the marble floor.

“Everyone keep calm,” Thomas said quietly.

The door to Crowley’s office opened and the big man himself walked out and gave only a desultory wave to let them know they should follow him down the hall.

They did so, some men still sniffling from the rain, and Crowley turned into a conference room at the end of the hall and the phalanx of captains followed suit and took seats at the long table in the center. There were no coffee urns or pots of tea on the sideboards, no slices of cake or trays of sweets, none of the amenities they’d become accustomed to as their due at meetings such as these. In fact, there were no waiters or junior staff of any kind in the room. Just Superintendent Michael Crowley and his eighteen captains. Not even a secretary to record the minutes.

Crowley stood with the great window behind him, steamed over from the rain and humidity. The shapes of tall buildings rose indistinct and tremulous behind him, as if they might vanish. Crowley had cut short his annual vacation to Hyannis, and his face was ruddy with the sun, which made his teeth seem all the whiter when he spoke.

“Rule Thirty-five, which was just added to the department code, outlaws affiliation with any national union. That means that all fourteen hundred men who joined the AF of L could be terminated.” He pinched the skin between his eyes and the bridge of his nose and held up a hand to staunch their questions. “Three years ago, we switched from nightsticks to the pocket billies. Most of those nightsticks, however, are still in the possession of the officers for dress occasions. All precinct captains will confiscate those nightsticks starting today. We expect all of them in our possession by week’s end.”

Jesus, Thomas thought. They’re preparing to arm the militia.

“In each of the eighteen precincts, an AFL sign-up sheet was distributed. You are to identify the officer who was in charge of collecting those signatures.” Crowley turned his back to them and looked at the window, now opaque with moisture. “The commissioner will be sending me a list at day’s end of patrolmen I’m to personally interview in regards to dereliction of duty. I’m told there could be as many as twenty names on that list.”

He turned back and placed his hands on his chair. A large man with a soft face that could not hide the exhaustion that bulged from under his eyes, it was said of Michael Crowley that he was a patrolman mistakenly readorned in upper brass finery. A cop’s cop who’d come up through the ranks and knew the names not only of every man in all eighteen precincts but also the names of the janitors who emptied the wastebaskets and mopped the floors. As a young sergeant, he’d broken the Trunk Murder Case, a front-pager if ever one existed, and the publicity that followed sent him shooting — quite helplessly, it was noted — to the top ranks of the department. Even Thomas, cynical as he could be about the motives of the human animal, fully acknowledged that Michael Crowley loved his men and none more so than the least of them.

His eyes found theirs. “I’m the first to acknowledge that the men have legitimate grievances. But a moving object cannot pass through a wall of greater mass and density. It cannot. And, as of this point, Commissioner Curtis is that wall. If they continue to lay down gauntlets, we will pass a point of no return.”

“With all due respect, Michael,” Don Eastman said, “what would you expect us to do about it?”

“Talk to them,” Crowley said. “To your men. Eye to eye. Convince them that not even pyrrhic victory awaits if they put the commissioner in a position he finds untenable. This is not about Boston any longer.”

Billy Coogan, a clueless flunky if ever there was one, waved a hand at that. “Ah, Michael, it ’tis, sure. This will all blow over.”

Crowley gave him a bitter smile. “I’m afraid you’re wrong, Billy. The police in London and Liverpool were said to take cues from our unrest. Liverpool burned, or did you not hear? It took warships of the English fleet — warships, Billy — to quell the mob. We’ve reports that in Jersey City and D.C., negotiations are afoot with the AFL. And right here — in Brockton, in Springfield and New Bedford, Lawrence and Worcester — the police departments wait to see what we will do. So, with all due respect as well, Billy, it’s far more than a Boston problem. The whole sodding world is watching.” He slumped in his chair. “There have been over two thousand labor strikes in this country so far this year, gentlemen. Put your heads into that number — that’s ten a day. Would you like to know how many of those turned out well for the men who struck?”

No one answered.

Crowley nodded at their silence and kneaded his forehead with his fingers. “Talk to your men, gentlemen. Stop this train before the brakes have burned off. Stop it before nobody can stop it and we’re all trapped inside.”

In Washington, Rayme Finch and John Hoover met for breakfast at The White Palace Café on the corner of Ninth and D, not far from Pennsylvania Avenue. They met there once a week unless Finch was out of town on Bureau business, and as long as they’d been doing so, Hoover always found something wrong with the food or the drink and sent it back. This time it was his tea. Not steeped enough for his liking. When the waitress returned with a fresh pot, he made her wait while he poured it into his cup, stirred in just enough milk to muddy the waters, and then took a small sip.

“Acceptable.” Hoover flicked the back of his hand at her and she gave him a look of hate and walked away.

Finch was pretty sure Hoover was a fag. Drank with one pinky extended, finicky and fussy in general, lived with his mother — all the signs. Of course with Hoover, you could never be sure. If Finch had discovered he fucked ponies in the mouth while painting himself in blackface and singing spirituals, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing surprised Finch anymore. In his time with the Bureau, he’d learned one thing about men above all others: we were all sick. Sick in our heads. Sick in our hearts. Sick to our souls.

“Boston,” Hoover said and stirred his tea.

“What about it, John?”

“The police have learned nothing from Montreal, from Liverpool.”

“Apparently not. You really think they’ll strike?”

“They’re predominantly Hibernian,” Hoover said with a delicate shrug, “a race that never let prudence or reason cloud its judgment. Time and again, throughout history, the Irish have boasted their way into apocalypse. I find no cause to think they’ll do any different in Boston.”

Finch sipped his coffee. “Nice opportunity for Galleani to stir the pot, if they do.”

Hoover nodded. “Galleani and every other dime-store subversive in the area. Not to mention the garden variety criminal element will have a field day.”

“Should we involve ourselves?”

Hoover stared at him with those keen, depthless eyes. “To what end? This could be worse than Seattle. Worse than anything this country’s seen thus far. And if the public is forced to question whether this nation can police itself at local and state levels, who will they turn to?”

Finch allowed himself a smile. Say what you would about John, that sleek ugly mind of his was gorgeous. If he didn’t step on the wrong toes during his rise, there’d be no stopping him.

“The federal government,” Finch said.

Hoover nodded. “They’re tarring the road for us, Mr. Finch. All we have to do is wait for it to dry and then drive straight up it.”

Chapter thirty-four

Danny was on the phone in the squad room, talking to Dipsy Figgis of the One-Two about getting extra chairs for tonight’s meeting, when Kevin McRae wandered in, a piece of paper in his hand, a dazed look on his face, the kind a man got when he saw something he’d never expected, a long-dead relative, perhaps, or a kangaroo in his basement.

“Kev’?”

Kevin looked over at Danny as if he were trying to place him.

“What’s wrong?” Danny said.

McRae crossed to him, extending his hand, the paper between his fingers. “I’ve been suspended, Dan.” His eyes widened and he ran the piece of paper over his head, as if it were a towel. “Fucking suspended. You believe that? Curtis says we all have to attend a trial on charges of dereliction.”

“All?” Danny said. “How many men were suspended?”

“Nineteen, I heard. Nineteen.” He looked at Danny with the face of a child lost at Saturday market. “What the fuck am I going to do?” He waved the piece of paper at the squad room and his voice grew soft, almost a whisper. “This was my life.”

All the chief officers of the nascent AFL — Boston Police Union were suspended except for Danny. All the men who’d distributed and collected sign-up sheets for the AFL charter were suspended as well. Except for Danny.

He called his father. “Why not me?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you, Dad.”

He heard the rattle of ice cubes in a glass as his father sighed and then took a drink. “I’ve been after you your whole life to take up chess.”

“You were after me my whole life to take up piano, too.”

“That was your mother. I just enforced the idea. Chess, however, Aiden, that would have helped about now.” Another sigh. “Far more than your ability to play a rag. What do the men think?”

“About?”

“About why you were given an exemption? They’re all about to stand before Curtis for dismissal, and you, the vice president of your union, you’re free as a lark. If you were in their shoes, what would you suspect?”

Danny, standing at the phone Mrs. DiMassi kept on a table in the foyer, wished he had his own drink as he heard his father pour a refill and add a few cubes to his glass.

“If I were in their shoes? I’d think I still had my job because I was your son.”

“Which is exactly what Curtis wants them to think.”

Danny placed the side of his head to the wall and closed his eyes, heard his father fire up a cigar and suck and puff, suck and puff, until he got it going.

“So that’s the play,” Danny said. “Dissension in the ranks. Divide and conquer.”

His father barked a laugh. “No, boy, that’s not the play. That’s the opening act. Aiden, you silly, silly child. I do love you, but apparently I didn’t raise you proper. How do you think the press is going to respond when they discover that only one of the elected union officials wasn’t suspended? First, they’ll report that it’s proof the commissioner is a reasonable man and the city is obviously impartial and that the nineteen suspended men must have done something because the vice president himself wasn’t suspended.”

“But then,” Danny said, seeing hope for the first time on this black day, “they’ll see that it’s a ruse, that I’m just a token symbol of impartiality, and they’ll—”

“You idiot,” his father said, and Danny heard the thump of his heels as they came off the edge of his desk. “You idiot. The press will get curious, Aiden. They’ll dig. And fairly quickly they’ll unearth the fact that you are the son of a precinct captain. And they’ll spend a day talking about that before they decide to investigate further, and sooner or later, one honest scribe will run into one seemingly innocuous desk sergeant who mentions, quite casually, something along the lines of ‘the incident.’ And the reporter will say, ‘What incident?’ To which the desk sergeant will respond, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Then that reporter will really dig, my boy. And we all know that your recent affairs will stand up dimly to scrutiny. Curtis designated you the staked goat, son, and the beasts in the woods have already started sniffing your scent.”

“So what’s this idiot supposed to do, Dad?”

“Capitulate.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. You just don’t see the angles yet. The opportunity will come, I promise. They’re not as afraid of your union as you think, but they are, trust me, afraid. Use that. They will never yield, Aiden, on the affiliation with the AF of L. They can’t. But if you play that chip correctly, they will yield on other issues.”

“Dad, if we give up the AFL affiliation we’ll have corrupted everything we—”

“Take what you will from my musings,” his father said. “Good night, son, and the gods be with you.”

Mayor Andrew J. Peters believed implicitly in the primacy of a single principle: Things had a way of working themselves out.

So many men wasted so much valuable time and energy placing faith in the canard that they could control their destinies when, in fact, the world would continue to entangle and disentangle itself whether they were part of it or not. Why, one just had to look back at that terrible foreign war to see the folly of making rash decisions. Any decisions, really. Think, Andrew Peters would say to Starr on late afternoons like these, what a different outcome would have been accomplished if, after the death of Franz Ferdinand, the Austrians had refrained from rattling their sabers and the Serbians had done the same. Think, too, how pointless it was for Gavrilo Princip, that hopeless fool, to assassinate the archduke in the first place. Just think! All those lives lost, all that earth scorched, and to what end? If cooler heads had prevailed, if men had had the temperance to refrain from acting until their countrymen forgot all about it and went on to other thoughts and other things? What a nice world we’d have today.

For it was the war that had poisoned so many young men’s minds with thoughts of self-determination. This summer, colored men who’d fought overseas had been the main agitators behind the civil disorder that had resulted in the slaughter of their own people in Washington, Omaha, and most terribly in Chicago. Not that Peters was justifying the behavior of the whites who had killed them. Hardly. But you could see how it had happened, the coloreds trying to upset the applecart like that. People didn’t like change. They didn’t want to be upset. They wanted cool drinks on hot days and their meals served on time.

“Self-determination,” he muttered on the deck as Starr, lying beside him, tummy down on a chaise, stirred slightly.

“What’s that, Poppa?”

He leaned over from his own chaise and kissed her shoulder and considered unbuttoning his trousers. But the clouds were massing and the sky was low and the sea had darkened, as if from wine and grief.

“Nothing, darling.”

Starr closed her eyes. A beautiful child. Beautiful! Cheeks that reminded him of apples so ripe they might burst. An ass to match. And everything in between so lush and firm that Andrew J. Peters, mayor of the great city of Boston, occasionally imagined himself an ancient Greek or Roman when he was inside her. Starr Faithful — what an apt name. His lover, his cousin. Fourteen years old this summer, and yet more mature and lascivious than Martha would ever be.

She lay nude before him, Edenic, and when the first raindrop hit her spine and splattered, he removed his boater and placed it on her ass and she giggled and said she liked rain. She turned her head and reached for his waistband and said, in point of fact, she loved rain. In that moment, he saw something as dark and stricken as the sea pass through her eyes. A thought. No, more than a thought, a doubt. It unsettled him — she was not supposed to feel doubt; the concubines of Roman emperors, he was reasonably sure, hadn’t — and as he allowed her to unbuckle his belt, he felt visited by an ill-defined but acute sense of loss. His pants fell to his ankles and he decided it might be best to get back to the city and see if he could talk some sense into everyone.

He looked out at the sea. So endless. He said, “I am the mayor, after all.”

Starr smiled up at him. “I know you are, Poppa, and you’re the bestus at it.”

The hearing for the nineteen suspended officers occurred on the twenty-sixth of August in the Pemberton Square office of Police Commissioner Curtis. Danny was in attendance, as was Curtis’s right-hand man, Herbert Parker. Clarence Rowley and James Vahey stood before Curtis as the attorneys-of-record for all nineteen defendants. One reporter each from the Globe, Transcript, Herald, and the Standard was allowed inside. And that was it. In previous administrations, three captains and the commissioner made up the trial board, but under Curtis’s regime, Curtis himself was the sole judge.

“You will note,” Curtis said to the reporters, “that I have allowed the one nonsuspended officer of the illegal AF of L policemen’s union to attend so that no one can claim this ‘union’ was underrepresented. You will also note that the defendants are represented by two esteemed counsel, Mr. Vahey and Mr. Rowley, both with prodigious experience representing the interests of labor. I have brought no counsel on my behalf.”

“With all due respect, Commissioner,” Danny said, “you’re not on trial, sir.”

One of the reporters nodded furiously at the comment and scribbled on his notepad. Curtis flicked a pair of dead eyes at Danny and then looked out at the nineteen men seated before him in rickety wooden chairs.

“You men have been charged with dereliction of duty, the worst offense a peace officer can commit. You have, more specifically, been charged with violation of Rule Thirty-five of the Boston Police Code of Conduct, which states that no officer may affiliate with any organization that is not part of the Boston Police Department.”

Clarence Rowley said, “By that yardstick, Commissioner, none of these men could belong to a veterans’ group, say, or the Fraternal Order of Elks.”

Two reporters and one patrolman snickered.

Curtis reached for a glass of water. “I’m not finished yet, Mr. Rowley. If you please, sir, this is not a criminal court. This is an internal trial of the Boston Police Department, and if you are going to argue the legality of Rule Thirty-five, you’ll have to bring a case before the Suffolk Superior Court. The only question to be answered here today is whether these men violated Rule Thirty-five, not the soundness of the rule itself, sir.” Curtis looked out at the room. “Patrolman Denton, stand at attention.”

Mark Denton stood in his dress blues and tucked his domed hat under his arm.

“Patrolman Denton, are you affiliated with Boston Police Union Number Sixteen Thousand Eight Hundred and Seven of the American Federation of Labor?”

“I am, sir.”

“Are you not, in fact, the president of said union?”

“I am, sir. Proudly.”

“Your pride is of no relevance to this board.”

“Board?” Mark Denton said, looking to the left and right of Curtis.

Curtis took a sip of water. “And did you not distribute sign-up sheets within your station house for affiliation with the aforementioned American Federation of Labor?”

“With the same aforementioned pride, sir,” Denton said.

“You may sit back down, Patrolman,” Curtis said. “Patrolman Kevin McRae, stand at attention …”

It went on for over two hours, Curtis asking the same monotonous questions in the same monotonous tone and each cop answering with varying degrees of petulance, contempt, or fatalism.

When it was time for defense counsel to take the floor, James Vahey did the talking. Long the general counsel for the Street and Electric Railway Employees of America, he’d been famous since before Danny was born, and it was Mark Denton’s coup to bring him into this fight just two weeks ago at the urging of Samuel Gompers. He moved with an athlete’s fluidity as he strode from the back and flashed a slim, confident smile at the nineteen men before turning to face Curtis.

“While I agree that we are not here today to argue the legality of Rule Thirty-five, I find it telling that the commissioner himself, the author of said rule, admits its nebulous status. If the commissioner himself does not believe firmly in the soundness of his own rule, what are we to make of it? Why, we are to make of it what it is — quite simply the greatest invasion of a man’s personal liberty—”

Curtis banged his gavel several times.

“—and the most far-reaching attempt to restrict his freedom of action I have ever known.”

Curtis raised the gavel again, but Vahey pointed directly at his face.

“You, sir, have denied these men their most basic human rights as workers. You have consistently refused to raise their pay to a level above the poverty line, provide them with safe and hygienic quarters in which to work and sleep, and have demanded they work hours of such duration that not only is their safety jeopardized but that of the public as well. And now you sit before us, as sole judge, and attempt to obfuscate the sworn responsibility you had toward these men. It is a low action, sir. A low action. Nothing you have said today has called into question these men’s commitment to the populace of this great city. These men have not abandoned their posts, have not failed to answer the call of duty, have never, not a sole time, failed to uphold the law and protect and serve the people of Boston. Had you evidence to the contrary, I trust you would have produced it by now. Instead, the only failure — and, for the record, I use that term ironically — that these men are guilty of is that they have failed to capitulate to your desire that they not affiliate themselves with a national labor union. That is all. And given that a simple calendar will show that your insertion of Rule Thirty-five to be of rather dubious urgency, I am quite confident any judge in the land will deem that rule the naked gambit to restrict these men’s rights that we all see it as here today.” He turned to the men and the reporters beyond, resplendent in his suit and his grace and his white-white hair. “I am not going to defend these men because there is nothing to defend. It is not they who should have their patriotism or Americanism questioned in this room today,” Vahey thundered. “It is you, sir!”

Curtis banged his gavel repeatedly as Parker shouted for order and the men hooted and applauded and rose to their feet.

Danny was reminded of what Ralph Raphelson had said about emotional rhetoric, and he wondered — even as he was as swept up in and stirred by Vahey’s speech as the rest of the men — if it had accomplished anything other than a fanning of the flames.

When Vahey returned to his seat, the men sat. Now it was Danny’s turn. He took the floor in front of a red-faced Curtis.

“I’m going to keep it simple. The issue before us, it seems to me, is whether affiliation with the American Federation of Labor will lessen the efficiency of the police force. Commissioner Curtis, I say with full confidence that it hasn’t thus far. A simple study of arrest records, citations given, and overall crime rate in the eighteen districts will bear this out. And I further state, with utter confidence, that it will remain so. We are policemen, first and foremost, and sworn to uphold the law and uphold the peace. That, I assure you, will never change. Not on our watch.”

The men clapped as Danny took his seat. Curtis rose from his desk. He looked shaky, impossibly pale, his tie loosened at the throat, strands of hair pointing askew.

“I will take all remarks and testimony under consideration,” he said, his hands gripping the edge of his desk. “Good day, gentlemen.”

And with that, he and Herbert Parker walked out of the room.

Luther placed the newspaper on the bench where he’d found it. A volunteer police force. Sounded like arming a bunch of white men either too dumb to hold on to a regular job or so desperate to prove their manhood they’d leave the good jobs they had. Either way, a bad combination. He imagined the same ad soliciting black men to fill those jobs and laughed out loud, a sound that surprised him. He wasn’t the only one — a white man one bench over stiffened, stood, and walked away.

Luther had spent a rare day off wandering the city because he was about to come out of his skin. A child he’d never seen waited for him in Tulsa. His child. Lila, softening toward him by the day (he hoped), waited there, too. He’d once believed the world was a sprawling party just waiting for him to join it and that party would be filled with interesting men and beautiful women and they’d all fill the empty parts of him somehow, each in their own way, until there was nothing left to fill and Luther would feel whole for the first time since his father had left the family. But now he realized that wasn’t the case. He’d met Danny and Nora and felt for them a fondness so piercing it continued to surprise him. And, Lord knows, he loved the Giddreauxs, had found in them a pair of grandparents he’d often dreamed were out there. Yet ultimately it didn’t make no difference because his hopes and his heart and his loves lay in Greenwood. That party? Never going to happen. Because even if it did, Luther’d just as soon be home. With his woman. With his son.

Desmond.

That was the name Lila’d given him, one Luther remembered half agreeing on back before he’d run afoul of the Deacon. Desmond Laurence, after Lila’s grandfather, a man who’d taught her the Bible while she sat on his knee, probably gave her that steel in her spine, too, for all Luther knew, because it had to have come from somewhere.

Desmond.

A good firm name. Luther’d taken to loving it over the summer months, loving it in a way that brought tears to his eyes. He’d brought Desmond into the world and Desmond would do fine things someday.

If Luther could get back to him. To her. To them.

If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life. He was building a life, working for a white man, yes, but working for his wife, for his children, for his dream that their life would be better because he’d been part of it. That, Luther finally understood, was what he’d failed to remember in Tulsa and what his father had never known at all. Men were supposed to do for those they loved. Simple as that. Clean and pure as that.

Luther had gotten so sucked up, so turned around by the simple need to move — anywhere, anytime, anyhow — that he’d forgotten that the motion had to be put in service of a purpose.

Now he knew. Now he knew.

And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Even if he took care of McKenna (one hell of an if), he still couldn’t move toward his family because Smoke was waiting. And he couldn’t convince Lila to move toward him (he’d tried several times since Christmas) because she felt Greenwood was home and also suspected — quite understandably — that if she did pick up and move, Smoke would send someone to follow.

Going to come out of my skin, Luther thought for the fiftieth time that day, right fucking out.

He picked the paper up off the bench and stood. Across Washington Street, in front of Kresge’s Five & Dime, two men watched him. They wore pale hats and seersucker suits, and they were both small and scared-looking and they might have been comical — stock clerks dressed up to look respectable — if it weren’t for the wide brown holsters they wore over their hips, the pistol butts exposed to the world. Stock clerks with guns. Other stores had hired private detectives, and the banks were demanding U.S. marshals, but the smaller businesses had to make do by training their everyday employees in the handling of weaponry. More volatile than that volunteer police force, in a way, because Luther assumed — or hoped anyway — that the volunteer coppers would at least receive a bit more training, be afforded a bit more leadership. These hired help, though — these clerks and bag boys and sons and sons-in-law of jewelers and furriers and bakers and livery operators — you saw them all over the city now, and they were scared. Terrified. Jumpy. And armed.

Luther couldn’t help himself — he saw them eyeing him, so he walked toward them, crossing the street even though that hadn’t been his original intention, giving his steps just a bit of saunter, a dash of colored man’s edge to it, throwing the glint of a smile into his eyes. The two little men exchanged looks, and one of them wiped his hand off the side of his pants just below his pistol.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” Luther reached the sidewalk.

Neither of the men said a word.

“Big blue sky,” Luther said. “First clean air in about a week? Ya’ll should enjoy it.”

The pair remained silent and Luther tipped his hat to them and continued on up the sidewalk. It had been a foolish act, particularly since he’d just been thinking about Desmond, about Lila, about becoming a more responsible man. But something about white men with guns, he was sure, would always bring out the devil in him.

And judging by the mood in the city, there was about to be a whole lot more of them. He passed his third Emergency Relief tent of the day, saw some nurses inside setting up tables and wheeling beds around. Earlier that afternoon, he’d walked through the West End and up through Scollay Square, and just about every third block, it seemed, he stumbled upon ambulances grouped together, waiting for what was starting to feel like the unavoidable. He looked down at the Herald in his hand, at the front-page editorial they’d run above the fold:

Seldom has the feeling in this community been more tense than it is today over the conditions in the police department. We are at a turning of the ways. We shall take a long step toward “Russianizing” ourselves, or toward submitting to soviet rule if we, by any pretext, admit an agency of the law to become the servant of a special interest.

Poor Danny, Luther thought. Poor honest, outmatched son of a bitch.

James Jackson Storrow was the wealthiest man in Boston. When he’d become president of General Motors, he’d reorganized it from top to bottom without costing a single worker his job or a sole stockholder his confidence. He founded the Boston Chamber of Commerce and had chaired the Cost of Living Commission in the days leading up to the Great War. During that conflict of waste and despair, he’d been appointed federal fuel administrator by Woodrow Wilson and had seen to it that New England homes never wanted for coal or oil, sometimes using his own personal credit to ensure the shipments left their depots on time.

He’d heard others say he was a man who wore his power lightly, but the truth was, he’d never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion of the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they thus wielded “power” barbarically so the world would not find them out.

Terrible days, these, between the “powerful” and the “powerless,” the whole absurd battle opening up a new front here in this city, the city he loved more than any other, and this front possibly the worst anywhere since October of ’17.

Storrow received Mayor Peters in the billiards room of his Louisburg Square home, noting as the mayor entered that he was well tanned. This confirmed for Storrow the suspicion he’d long held that Peters was a frivolous man, one ill-suited to his job in normal circumstances, but in the current climate, egregiously so.

An affable chap, of course, as so many frivolous men were, crossing to Storrow with a bright, eager smile and a spring in his step.

“Mr. Storrow, so kind of you to see me.”

“The honor is mine, Mr. Mayor.”

The mayor’s handshake was unexpectedly firm, and Storrow noted a clarity in the man’s blue eyes that made him wonder if there was more to him than he’d initially assumed. Surprise me, Mr. Mayor, surprise me.

“You know why I’ve come,” Peters said.

“I presume to discuss the situation with the police.”

“Exactly so, sir.”

Storrow led the mayor to two cherry leather armchairs. Between them sat a table with two decanters and two glasses. One decanter held brandy. The other, water. He waved his hand at the decanters as a way of offering them to the mayor.

Peters nodded his thanks and poured a glass of water.

Storrow crossed one leg over the other and reconsidered the man yet again. He pointed at his own glass, and Peters filled it with water and they both sat back.

Storrow said, “How do you envision I can be of assistance?”

“You’re the most respected man in the city,” Peters said. “You are also beloved, sir, for all that you did to keep homes warm during the war. I need you and as many men as you choose from the Chamber of Commerce to form a commission to study the issues the policemen have raised and the counterarguments of Police Commissioner Curtis to decide which have wisdom and which, ultimately, should win the day.”

“Would this commission have the power to rule or merely to recommend?”

“City bylaws state that unless there is evidence of reckless misconduct on the part of the police commissioner, he has final say in all issues regarding police matters. He can’t be overruled by either myself or Governor Coolidge.”

“So we’d have limited power.”

“Power to recommend only, yes, sir. But with the esteem in which you are held, not only in this state, but in this region, and at a national level as well, I feel confident that your recommendation would be taken to heart with the appropriate respect.”

“When would I form such a commission?”

“Without delay. Tomorrow.”

Storrow finished his water and uncorked the brandy decanter. He pointed it at Peters, and the mayor tilted his empty glass in his direction and Storrow poured.

“As far as the policemen’s union, I see no way we can ever allow the affiliation with the American Federation of Labor to stand.”

“As you say then, sir.”

“I’ll want to meet with the union representatives immediately. Tomorrow afternoon. Can you arrange it?”

“Done.”

“As to Commissioner Curtis, what’s your sense of the man, Mr. Mayor?”

“Angry,” Peters said.

Storrow nodded. “That’s the man I remember. He served his term as mayor when I was overseer at Harvard. We met on a few occasions. I remember only the anger. Suppressed though it may have been, it was of the most dire, self-loathing tenor. When a man like that regains authority after so long in the wilderness, I worry, Mr. Mayor.”

“I do, too,” Peters said.

“Such men fiddle while cities burn.” Storrow felt a long sigh leave him, heard it exit his mouth and enter the room as if it had spent so many decades bearing witness to waste and folly that it would still be circling the room when he reentered on the morrow. “Such men love ash.”

The next afternoon, Danny, Mark Denton, and Kevin McRae met with James J. Storrow in a suite at the Parker House. They brought with them detailed reports on the health and sanitation conditions of all eighteen precinct houses, signed accounts from over twenty patrolmen that detailed their average workday or week, and analyses of the pay rates of thirty other local professions — including city hall janitors, streetcar operators, and dockworkers — that dwarfed their own pay scale. They spread it all before James J. Storrow and three other businessmen who formed his commission and sat back while they went over it, passing particular sheets of interest among them and engaging in nods of surprise and grumps of consternation and eye rolls of apathy that had Danny worried he may have overloaded their hand.

Storrow went to lift another patrolman’s account off the stack and then pushed the whole thing away from him. “I’ve seen enough,” he said quietly. “Quite enough. No wonder you gentlemen feel abandoned by the very city you protect.” He looked at the other three men, all of whom took his lead and nodded at Danny and Mark Denton and Kevin McRae in sudden commiseration. “This is shameful, gentlemen, and not all the blame falls on Commissioner Curtis. This happened on Commissioner O’Meara’s watch, as well as under the eyes of Mayors Curley and Fitzgerald.” Storrow came around from behind the table and extended his hand, shaking first Mark Denton’s, then Danny’s, then Kevin McRae’s. “My profoundest apologies.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Storrow leaned back against the table. “What are we to do, gentlemen?”

“We just want our fair lot, sir,” Mark Denton said.

“And what is your fair lot?”

Danny said, “Well, sir, it’s a three-hundred-a-year increase in pay for starters. An end to overtime and special detail work without compensation comparative to those thirty other professions we brought up in our analysis.”

“And?”

“And,” Kevin McRae said, “it’s an end to the company-store policy of paying for our uniforms and our equipment. It’s also about clean stations, sir, clean beds, usable toilets, a sweeping out of the vermin and the lice.”

Storrow nodded. He turned and looked back at the other men, though it was clear his was the only word that really counted. He turned back to the policemen. “I concur.”

“Excuse me?” Danny said.

A smile found Storrow’s eyes. “I said I concur, Officer. In fact, I’ll champion your point of view and recommend your grievances be settled in the manner you’ve put forth.”

Danny’s first thought: It was this easy?

His second thought: Wait for the “but.”

“But,” Storrow said, “I only have the power to recommend. I cannot implement change. Only Commissioner Curtis can.”

“Sir,” Mark Denton said, “with all due respect, Commissioner Curtis is deciding whether to fire nineteen of us.”

“I’m aware of that,” Storrow said, “but I don’t think he will. It would be the height of imprudence. The city, believe it or not, is for you, gentlemen. They’re just very clearly not for a strike. If you allow me to handle this, you may well get everything you require. The ultimate decision rests with the commissioner, but he is a reasonable man.”

Danny shook his head. “I’ve yet to see evidence of it, sir.”

Storrow gave that a smile so distant it was almost shy. “Be that as it may, the city and the mayor and governor and every fair-minded man will, I promise you, see the light and the logic just as clearly as I’ve seen it today. As soon as I am capable of compiling and releasing my report, you’ll have justice. I ask patience, gentlemen. I ask prudence.”

“You’ll have it, sir,” Mark Denton said.

Storrow walked around to the back of the table and began shuffling up the papers. “But you’ll have to give up your association with the American Federation of Labor.”

So there it was. Danny wanted to throw the table through the window. Throw everyone in the room after it. “And put ourselves upon whose mercy this time, sir?”

“I don’t follow.”

Danny stood. “Mr. Storrow, we all respect you. But we’ve accepted half-measures before, and they’ve all come to naught. We work at the pay scale of 1903 because the men before us took the carrot on the stick for twelve years before demanding their rights in 1915. We accepted the city’s oath that while it could not compensate us fairly during the war, it would make amends afterward. And yet? We are still being paid the 1903 wage. And yet? We never got fittingly compensated after the war. And our precincts are still cesspools and our men are still overworked. Commissioner Curtis tells the press he is forming ‘committees,’ never mentioning that those ‘committees’ are stocked with his own men and those men have prejudicial opinions. We have put our faith in this city before, Mr. Storrow, countless times, and been jilted. And now you want us to forswear the one organization that has given us real hope and real bargaining power?”

Storrow placed both hands on the table and stared across at Danny. “Yes, Officer, I do. You can use the AFL as a bargaining chip. I’ll tell you that fact baldly right here and now. It’s the smart move, so don’t give it up just yet. But, son, I assure you, you will have to give it up. And if you choose to strike, I will be the strongest advocate in this city for breaking you and making certain you never wear a badge again.” He leaned forward. “I believe in your cause, Officer. I will fight for you. But don’t back me or this commission into a corner, because you will not survive the response.”

Behind him, the windows looked out on a sky of the purest blue. A perfect summer day in the first week of September, enough to make everyone forget the dark rains of August, the feeling they’d once had that they would never be dry again.

The three policemen stood and saluted James J. Storrow and the men of his commission and took their leave.

Danny, Nora, and Luther played hearts on an old sheet placed between two iron smokestacks on the roof of Danny’s building. Late evening, all three of them tired — Luther smelling of the stockyard, Nora of the factory — and yet they were up here with two bottles of wine and a deck of cards because there were few places a black man and a white man could congregate in public and fewer still where a woman could join those men and partake of too much wine. It felt to Danny, when the three of them were together like this, that they were beating the world at something.

Luther said, “Who’s that?” and his voice was lazy with the wine.

Danny followed his eyes and saw James Jackson Storrow crossing the roof toward him. He started to stand and Nora caught his wrist when he wavered.

“I was told by a kind Italian woman to search for you here,” Storrow said. He glanced at the three of them, at the tattered sheet with the cards spread across it, at the bottles of wine. “I apologize for intruding.”

“Not at all,” Danny said as Luther made it to his feet and held out a hand to Nora. Nora grasped his hand and Luther tugged her upright and she smoothed her dress.

“Mr. Storrow, this is my wife, Nora, and my friend, Luther.”

Storrow shook each of their hands as if this kind of gathering occurred every day on Beacon Hill.

“An honor to meet you both.” He gave them each a nod. “Could I abscond with your husband for just a moment, Mrs. Coughlin?”

“Of course, sir. Careful with him, though — he’s a bit spongy on his feet.”

Storrow gave her a wide smile. “I can see that, ma’am. It’s no bother.”

He tipped his hat to her and followed Danny across the roof to the eastern edge and they looked out at the harbor.

“You count coloreds among your equals, Officer Coughlin?”

“Long as they don’t complain,” Danny said, “I don’t either.”

“And public drunkenness in your wife is no cause for your concern either?”

Danny kept his eyes on the harbor. “We’re not in public, sir, and if we were, I wouldn’t give much of a fuck. She’s my wife. Means a hell of a lot more to me than the public.” He turned his gaze on Storrow. “Or anyone else for that matter.”

“Fair enough.” Storrow placed a pipe to his lips and took a minute to light it.

“How’d you find me, Mr. Storrow?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“So what brings you?”

“Your president, Mr. Denton, wasn’t home.”

“Ah.”

Storrow puffed on his pipe. “Your wife possesses a spirit of the flesh that fairly leaps off her.”

“A ‘spirit of the flesh’?”

He nodded. “Quite so. It’s easy to see how you became enraptured with her.” He sucked on the pipe again. “The colored man I’m still trying to figure out.”

“Your reason for coming, sir?”

Storrow turned so that they were face-to-face. “Mark Denton may very well have been at home. I never checked. I came directly to you, Officer Coughlin, because you have both passion and temperance, and your men, I can only assume, feel that. Officer Denton struck me as quite intelligent, but his gifts for persuasion are less than yours.”

“Who would you like me to persuade, Mr. Storrow, and what am I selling?”

“The same thing I’m selling, Officer — peaceful resolution.” He placed a hand on Danny’s arm. “Talk to your men. We can end this, son. You and I. I’m going to release my report to the papers tomorrow night. I will be recommending full acquiescence to your demands. All but one.”

Danny nodded. “AFL affiliation.”

“Exactly.”

“So we’re left with nothing again, nothing but promises.”

“But they’re my promises, son. With the full weight of the mayor and governor and the Chamber of Commerce behind them.”

Nora let out a high laugh, and Danny looked across the roof to see her flicking cards at Luther and Luther holding up his hands in mock defense. Danny smiled. He’d learned over the last few months how much Luther’s preferred method of displaying affection for Nora was through teasing, an affection she gladly returned in kind.

Danny kept his eyes on them. “Every day in this country they’re breaking unions, Mr. Storrow. Telling us who we have a right to associate with and who we don’t. When they need us, they speak of family. When we need them, they speak of business. My wife over there? My friend? Myself? We’re outcasts, sir, and alone we’d probably drown. But together, we’re a union. How long before Big Money gets that in their head?”

“They will never get it in their heads,” Storrow said. “You think you’re fighting a larger fight, Officer, and maybe you are. But it’s a fight as old as time, and it will never end. No one will wave a white flag, nor ever concede defeat. Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J. P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?”

“No, sir.”

“Gods don’t think they can become men.”

Danny turned and met the man’s eyes, said nothing.

“If you remain adamant on AFL affiliation, every hope you ever held for a better lot will be ground into dust.”

Danny looked back at Nora and Luther again. “Do I have your word that if I sell my men on withdrawal from the AFL, the city will grant us our due?”

“You have my word and the mayor’s and the governor’s.”

“It’s your word I care about.” Danny held out his hand. “I’ll sell it to my men.”

Storrow shook his hand, then held it firm. “Smile, young Coughlin — we’re going to save this city, you and I.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Danny sold it to them. In Fay Hall, at nine the next morning. After the vote, which was a shaky 406 to 377, Sid Polk asked, “What if they shaft us again?”

“They won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” Danny said. “But at this point, I don’t see any logic to it.”

“What if this was never about logic?” someone called.

Danny held up his hands because no answer occurred to him.

Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Peters, and James Storrow made the drive to Commissioner Curtis’s house in Nahant late Sunday afternoon. They met the commissioner out on his back deck which overlooked the Atlantic under a sallow sky.

Several things were clear to Storrow within moments of their assemblage. The first was that Coolidge had no respect for Peters and Peters hated him for it. Every time Peters opened his mouth to make a point, Coolidge cut him off.

The second thing, and the more worrisome, was that time had done nothing to remove from Edwin Upton Curtis the air of self-loathing and misanthropy that lived in him so fully it colored his flesh like a virus.

Peters said, “Commissioner Curtis, we have—”

“—come,” Coolidge said, “to inform you that Mr. Storrow may have found a resolution to our crisis.”

Peters said, “And that—”

“—if you were to hear our reasoning, I’m sure you would conclude we have all reached an acceptable compromise.” Coolidge sat back in his deck chair.

“Mr. Storrow,” Curtis said, “how have you been faring since last we met?”

“Well, Edwin. Yourself?”

Curtis said to Coolidge, “Mr. Storrow and I last met at a fabulous fete thrown by Lady Dewar in Louisburg Square. A legendary night, that, wouldn’t you say, James?”

Storrow couldn’t recall the night for the life of him. Lady Dewar had been dead more than a decade. As socialites went, she’d been presentable, but hardly elite. “Yes, Edwin, it was a memorable occasion.”

“I was mayor then, of course,” Curtis said to Peters.

“And a fine one you were, Commissioner.” Peters looked over at Coolidge as if surprised the governor had let him finish a thought.

It was the wrong thought, though. A dark squall passed through Curtis’s small eyes, taking the blithe compliment Peters had delivered and twisting it into an insult. By calling him “Commissioner,” the current mayor had reminded him of what he no longer was.

Dear Lord, Storrow thought, this city could burn to its bricks because of narcissism and a meaningless faux pas.

Curtis stared at him. “Do you think the men have a grievance, James?”

Storrow took his time searching for his pipe. He used three matches to get it lit in the ocean breeze and then crossed his legs. “I think they do, Edwin, yes, but let’s be clear that you inherited those grievances from the previous administration. No one believes that you are the cause of those grievances or that you have done anything but attempt to deal with them honorably.”

Curtis nodded. “I offered them a raise. They turned it down flat.”

Because it was sixteen years too late, Storrow thought.

“I initiated several committees to study their work conditions.”

Cherry-picked with toadies, Storrow thought.

“It’s an issue of respect now. Respect for the office. Respect for this country.”

“Only if you make it thus, Edwin.” Storrow uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “The men respect you, Commissioner. They do. And they respect this Commonwealth. I believe my report will bear that out.”

“Your report,” Curtis said. “What about my report? When do I share my voice?”

Good God, it was like fighting over toys in a nursery.

“Commissioner Curtis,” the governor said, “we all understand your position. You should no more be beholden to the brazen demands of workingmen than—”

“Beholden?” Curtis said. “I am no such thing, sir. I am extorted. That is what this is, pure and simple. Extortion.”

“Be that as it may,” Peters said, “we think that the best course—”

“—is to forgo personal feelings at this time,” Coolidge said.

“This is not personal.” Curtis craned his head forward and screwed his face into a mask of victimization. “This is public. This is principle. This is Seattle, gentlemen. And St. Petersburg. And Liverpool. If we let them win here, then we truly will be Russianized. The principles that Jefferson and Franklin and Washington stood for will—”

“Edwin, please.” Storrow couldn’t help himself. “I may have brokered a settlement that will allow us to regain our footing, both locally and nationally.”

Edwin Curtis clapped his hands together. “Well, I for one, would love to hear it.”

“The mayor and the city council have found the funds to raise the level of the men’s pay to a fair scale for 1919 and beyond. It’s fair, Edwin, not a gross capitulation, I assure you. We’ve further designated monies to address and improve the working conditions in the precinct houses. It’s a tight budget we’re working with and some other public workers will not receive departmental funding they’d been counting on, but we tried to minimize the overall damage. The greater good will be served.”

Curtis nodded, his lips white. “You think so.”

“I do, Edwin.” Storrow kept his voice soft, warm.

“These men affiliated with a national union against my express orders, in open contempt of the rules and regulations of this police department. That affiliation is an affront to this country.”

Storrow recalled the wonderful spring of his freshman year at Harvard when he’d joined the boxing team and experienced a purity of violence unlike any he could have ever imagined if he wasn’t pummeling and being pummeled every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. His parents found out eventually and that put an end to his pugilism, but, oh, how he would have loved to lace up the gloves right now and pound Curtis’s nose down to the rocks of itself.

“Is that your sticking point, Edwin? The AFL affiliation?”

Curtis threw up his hands. “Of course it is!”

“And if, let us say, the men agreed to withdraw from that affiliation?”

Curtis narrowed his eyes. “Have they?”

“If they did, Edwin,” Storrow said slowly, “what then?”

“I would take it under advisement,” Curtis said.

“Advisement of what?” Peters said.

Storrow shot him a glare he hoped was sharp enough and Peters dropped his eyes.

“Advisement, Mr. Mayor, of the larger picture.” Curtis’s eyes had moved inward, something Storrow had seen often in financial negotiations — self-pity disguised as inner counsel.

“Edwin,” he said, “the men will withdraw from the American Federation of Labor. They’ll concede. The question is: Will you?”

The ocean breeze found the awning over the doorway and the flaps of the tarp snapped against themselves.

“The nineteen men should be disciplined but not punished,” Governor Coolidge said. “Prudence, Commissioner, is all we ask.”

“Common sense,” Peters said.

Soft waves broke against the rocks.

Storrow found Curtis staring at him, as if awaiting his final plea. He stood and extended his hand to the little man. Curtis gave the hand a damp shake of his fingers.

“You have my every confidence,” Storrow said.

Curtis gave him a grim smile. “That’s heartening, James. I’ll take it under advisement, rest assured.”

Later that afternoon, in an incident that would have proven a profound embarrassment to the Boston Police Department if it had been reported to the press, a police detail arrived at the new headquarters of the NAACP on Shawmut Avenue. Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, armed with a search warrant, dug up the floor in the kitchen and the yard behind the headquarters.

As guests who’d come to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony stood around him, he found nothing.

Not even a toolbox.

The Storrow Report was released to the papers that night.

Monday morning, portions of it were published, and the editorial pages of all four major dailies proclaimed James J. Storrow the savior of the city. Crews arrived to break down the emergency hospital tents that had been erected across the city, and the extra ambulance drivers were sent home. The presidents of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s ordered employee-firearm training to cease and all company-provided weapons were confiscated. Divisions of the State Guard and platoons of the United States Cavalry, which had been mustering in Concord, found their alert status downgraded from red to blue.

At three-thirty that afternoon, the Boston City Council passed a resolution to name either a building or a public thoroughfare after James J. Storrow.

At four, Mayor Andrew Peters left his office at City Hall to find a crowd awaiting him. The throng cheered.

At five-forty-five, policemen of all eighteen precincts met for evening roll call. It was then that the duty sergeant of each precinct house informed the men that Commissioner Curtis had ordered the immediate termination of the nineteen men he’d suspended the previous week.

In Fay Hall, at eleven in the evening, the members of the Boston Police Department Union voted to reaffirm their affiliation with the American Federation of Labor.

At eleven-oh-five, they voted to strike. It was agreed that this action would occur at tomorrow evening’s roll call, a Tuesday, when fourteen hundred policemen would walk off the job.

The vote was unanimous.

Chapter thirty-five

In his empty kitchen, Eddie McKenna poured two fingers of Power’s Irish whiskey into a glass of warm milk and drank it as he ate the plate of chicken and mashed potatoes Mary Pat had left on the stove. The kitchen ticked with its own quiet, and the only light came from a small gas lamp over the table behind him. Eddie ate at the sink, as he always did when he was alone. Mary Pat was out at a meeting of the Watch and Ward Society, also known as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. Eddie, who barely believed in naming dogs, would never understand naming an organization, not once, but twice. Ah well, now that Edward Junior was at Rutgers and Beth was off to the convent, at least it kept Mary Pat out of his hair, and the thought of all those frigid biddies klatching together to rail against the sots and the suffragettes brought a smile to his face in the dark kitchen on Telegraph Hill.

He finished his meal. He placed the plate in the sink and the empty glass beside it. He got the bottle of Irish and poured himself a tumblerful and carried the tumbler and the bottle up the stairs with him. A fine night weatherwise. Good for the roof and a few hours’ thinking because, with the exception of the weather, everything had turned to right shit, it had. He half hoped the Bolshevik policemen’s union would strike, if only so it would keep this afternoon’s debacle at the NAACP off the front page. Good Lord how that nigger had set him up. Luther Laurence, Luther Laurence, Luther Laurence. The name ran through his head like mockery defined and contempt distilled.

Oh, Luther. You’ll have fair cause to rue the day you ever left your Momma’s tired, old cunny. I swear that to you, boy.

Out on the roof, the stars hung fuzzy above him, as if they’d been sketched by an unsure hand. Wisps of cloud slid past wisps of smoke from the Cotton Waste Factory. From here he could see the lights of the American Sugar Refining Company, a four-block monstrosity that gave continuous birth to sticky pollutants and rodents you could saddle, and the Fort Point Channel smelled of oil, yet he couldn’t escape the pleasure it gave him to stand up here and survey the neighborhood he and Tommy Coughlin had first worked as pups in their newfound homeland. They’d met on the boat over, two stowaways who’d been pinched on opposite ends of the ship the second day out and been forced into slave labor in the galley. At night, chained together to the legs of a sink the size of a horse trough, they’d traded stories of the Old Sod. Tommy had left behind a drunken father and a sickly twin brother in a tenant-farmer’s hut in Southern Cork. Eddie had left behind nothing but an orphanage in Sligo. Never knew his da, and his ma had passed from the fever when he was eight. So there they were, two crafty lads, scarcely in their teens, but full of piss, sure, full of ambition.

Tommy, with his dazzling, Cheshire grin and twinkling eyes, turned out to be a bit more ambitious than Eddie. While Eddie had, without question, made a fine living in his adopted homeland, Thomas Coughlin had thrived. Perfect family, perfect life, a lifetime of graft piled so high in his office safe it would make Croesus blush. A man who wore his power like a white suit on a coal black night.

The division of power hadn’t been so apparent at the outset. When they’d joined the force, gone through the academy, walked their first beats, nothing had particularly distinguished one young man from the other. But somewhere after their first few years on the force, Tommy had revealed a stealthy intellect while Eddie himself had continued with his combination of cajolery and threat, his body growing wider every year while Perfect Tommy stayed lean and canny. An exam taker suddenly, a riser, a velvet glove.

“Ah, I’ll catch you yet, Tommy,” Eddie whispered, though he knew it was a lie. He hadn’t the head for business and politics the way Tommy did. And if he ever could have gained such gifts, the time was long past. No, he would have to content himself—

The door to his shed was open. Just barely, but open. He went to it and opened it fully. It looked as he had left it — a broom and some garden tools to one side, two of his battered satchels to the right. He pushed them farther into the corner and reached back until he found the lip of the floorboard. He pulled it up, trying to block out the memory of doing almost the exact same thing on Shawmut Avenue this afternoon, all the well-dressed coons standing around him with stoic faces while, on the inside, they howled with laughter.

Below the floorboard were the bundles. He’d always preferred thinking of them that way. Let Thomas put his in the bank or real estate or the wall safe in his office. Eddie liked his bundles and he liked them up here where he could sit after a few drinks and thumb through them, smell them. Once there got to be too many — a problem he happily ran into about once every three years — he’d move them into a safe-deposit box at the First National in Uphams Corner. Until then, he’d sit with them. There they were now, sure, all in their places like bugs in a rug, just as he’d left them, they were. He put the floorboard back. He stood. He closed the shed door until he heard the lock click.

He stopped in the middle of the roof. He cocked his head.

At the far end of the roof a rectangular shape rested against the parapet. A foot long, it was, and half that in height.

What was this now?

Eddie took a pull from his tumbler of Power’s and looked around the dark roof. He listened. Not the way most people would listen, but the way a copper with twenty years chasing mutts into dark alleys and dark buildings listened. The air that just a moment earlier had smelled of oil and the Fort Point Channel, now smelled of his own humid flesh and the gravel at his feet. In the harbor, a boat tooted its horn. In the park below, someone laughed. Somewhere nearby, a window closed. An automobile wheezed up G Street, its gears grinding.

No moonlight, the nearest gas lamp a floor below.

Eddie listened some more. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the night, he was certain the rectangular shape was no illusion, no trick of the darkness. It was there all right, and he damn well knew what it was.

A toolbox.

The toolbox, the one he’d given Luther Laurence, the one filled with pistols he’d spirited out of the evidence rooms of various station houses over the last decade.

Eddie placed the bottle of Power’s on the gravel and removed his.38 from its holster. He thumbed back the hammer.

“You up here?” He held the gun by his ear and scanned the darkness. “You up here, son?”

Another minute of silence. Another minute in which he didn’t move.

And still nothing but the sounds of the neighborhood below and the quiet of the roof in front of him. He lowered his service revolver. He tapped it off his outer thigh as he crossed the roof and reached the toolbox. Here the light was much better; it bounced upward from the lamps in the park and those along Old Harbor Street and it bounced from the factories off the dark channel water and up toward Telegraph Hill. There was little question that it was the toolbox he’d given Luther — same chips in the paint, same scuff marks over the handle. He stared down at it and took another drink and noticed the number of people strolling through the park. A rarity at this time of night, but it was a Friday and maybe the first Friday in a month that hadn’t been marred by heavy rain.

It was the memory of rain that got him to look over the parapet at his gutters and notice that one had come loose from its fasteners and jutted out from the brick, canting to the right and tipping downward. He was already opening the toolbox before he remembered that it held only pistols, and it occurred to him what a harebrained instinct it had been to open it before calling the Bomb Squad. It opened without incident, however, and Eddie McKenna holstered his service revolver and stared in at the last thing he expected to find in this particular toolbox.

Tools.

Several screwdrivers, a hammer, three socket wrenches and two pair of pliers, a small saw.

The hand that touched his back was almost soft. He barely felt it. A big man not used to being touched, he would have expected it to have taken more force to remove him from his feet. But he’d been bent over, his feet set too closely together, one hand resting on his knee, the other holding a glass of whiskey. A cool gust found his chest as he entered the space between his home and the Andersons’, and he heard the flap of his own clothes in the night air. He opened his mouth, thinking he should scream, and the kitchen window flew up past his eyes like an elevator car. A wind filled his ears on a windless night. His whiskey glass hit the cobblestone first, followed by his head. It was an unpleasant sound, and it was followed by another as his spine cracked.

He looked up the walls of his home until his eyes found the edge of the roof and he thought he saw someone up there staring down at him but he couldn’t be sure. His eyes fell on the section of gutter that had detached from the brick and he reminded himself to add it to the list he kept of household repairs that needed seeing to. A long list, that. Never ending.

We found a screwdriver on top of the parapet, Cap’.”

Thomas Coughlin looked up from Eddie McKenna’s body. “What’s that?”

Detective Chris Gleason nodded. “Best we can tell, he was leaning over to remove an old fastener for that gutter, yeah? Thing had snapped in two. He was trying to get it out of the brick and …” Detective Gleason shrugged. “Sorry, Cap’.”

Thomas pointed at the shards of glass by Eddie’s left hand. “He had a drink in his hand, Detective.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In his hand.” Thomas looked up at the roof again. “You’re telling me he was unscrewing a fastener and drinking at the same time?”

“We found a bottle up there, sir. Power & Son. Irish whiskey.”

“I know his favored brand, Detective. You still can’t explain to me why he had a drink in one hand and—”

“He was right-handed, Cap’, yeah?”

Thomas looked in Gleason’s eyes. “What of it?”

“Drink was in his left hand.” Gleason removed his boater and smoothed back his hair. “Captain, sir, you know I don’t want to argue with you. Not over this. Man was a legend, sir. If I thought for one moment any foul play could be on the table? I’d shake this neighborhood ’til it fell into the harbor. But not a single neighbor heard a thing. The park was filled with people, and no one saw anything but a man alone up on a roof. No signs of a struggle, no hint of defensive wounds. Captain? He didn’t even scream, sir.”

Thomas waved it off and nodded at the same time. He closed his eyes for a moment and squatted by his oldest friend. He could see them as boys, filthy from their sea passage, as they ran from their captors. It had been Eddie who had picked the locks that had bound them to the galley sink. He’d done it on the last night, and when their jailers, two crewmen named Laurette and Rivers, came looking for them in the morning, they’d already insinuated themselves among the throngs in steerage. By the time Laurette spotted them and began pointing and shouting, the gangplank had been lowered and Tommy Coughlin and Eddie McKenna ran at top speed through a gauntlet of legs and bags and heavy crates that swung through the air. They dodged shipmen and customs men and policemen and the shrill whistles that repeatedly blew for them. As if in welcome. As if to say, This country is yours, boys, all yours, but you have to grab it.

Thomas looked over his shoulder at Gleason. “Leave us, Detective.”

“Yes, sir.”

Once Gleason’s footsteps had left the alley, Thomas took Eddie’s right hand in his. He looked at the scars on the knuckles, the missing flesh on the tip of the middle finger, courtesy of a knife fight in an alley back in ’03. He raised his friend’s hand to his lips and kissed it. He held on tightly and placed his cheek to it.

“We grabbed it, Eddie. Didn’t we?” He closed his eyes and bit into his lower lip for a moment.

He opened his eyes. He put his free hand to Eddie’s face and used his thumb to close the lids.

“Ah, we did, boy. We surely did.”

Chapter thirty-six

Five minutes before the roll call of every shift, George Strivakis, the duty sergeant at the Oh-One station house on Hanover Street, rang a gong that hung just outside the station house door to let the men know it was time to report. When he opened the door late in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 9, he ignored a small hitch in his step as his eyes took note of the crowd gathered on the street. Only after he had rung the gong, giving it several hard hits from his metal rod, did he raise his head fully and take in the breadth of the mob.

There had to be at least five hundred people in front of him. The back edges of the throng continued to swell as men, women, and street urchins streamed in from the side streets. The roofs on the other side of Hanover filled, mostly kids up there, a few older ones who had the coal-pebble eyes of gang members. What immediately struck Sergeant George Strivakis was the quiet. Except for the scuffling of feet, the stray jangling of keys or coins, no one said a word. The energy, though, lived in their eyes. To a man, woman, and child they all bore the same pinned-back charge, the look of street dogs at sundown on the night of a full moon.

George Strivakis withdrew his gaze from the back of the crowd and settled on the men up front. Jesus. Coppers all. In civilian dress. He rang the gong again and then broke the silence with a hoarse shout: “Officers, report!”

It was Danny Coughlin who stepped forward. He walked up the steps and snapped a salute. Strivakis returned the salute. He’d always liked Danny, had long known he lacked the political touch to rise to a captaincy but had secretly hoped he’d become chief inspector one day like Crowley. Something shriveled in him as he considered this young man of such evident promise about to engage in mutiny.

“Don’t do it, son,” he whispered.

Danny’s eyes fixed on a spot just beyond Strivakis’s right shoulder.

“Sergeant,” he said, “the Boston police are on strike.”

With that, the silence shattered in a roar of cheers and hats thrown high in the air.

The strikers entered the station and filed downstairs to the property room. Captain Hoffman had added four extra men to the desk, and the strikers took their turns and handed in their department-issued property.

Danny stood before Sergeant Mal Ellenburg, whose distinguished career hadn’t been able to surmount his German ancestry during the war years. Down here since ’16, he’d become a house cat, the kind of cop who often forgot where he’d left his revolver.

Danny placed his own revolver on the counter between them, and Mal noted it on his clipboard before dropping it in a bin below. Danny followed the revolver with his department manual, hat number plate, call box and locker keys, and pocket billy. Mal noted it all and swept it away into various bins. He looked up at Danny and waited.

Danny looked back at him.

Mal held out his hand.

Danny stared into his face.

Mal closed his hand and opened it again.

“You gotta ask for it, Mal.”

“Jesus, Dan.”

Danny gritted his teeth to keep his mouth from trembling.

Mal looked away for a moment. When he looked back, he propped his elbow on the counter and flipped his palm open in front of Danny’s chest.

“Please turn over your shield, Officer Coughlin.”

Danny pulled back his jacket and exposed the badge pinned to his shirt. He unhooked the shield from its pin and slid the pin out of his shirt. He placed the pin back behind the hook and placed the shield in Mal Ellenburg’s palm.

“I’m coming back for that,” Danny said.

The strikers assembled in the foyer. They could hear the crowd outside and by the volume Danny assumed it had doubled. Something rammed into the door twice and then the door was flung open and ten men pushed their way inside and slammed the door shut behind them. They were young mostly, a few older men who looked like they had the war in their eyes, and they’d been pelted with fruit and eggs.

Replacements. Volunteers. Scabs.

Danny placed the back of his hand on Kevin McRae’s chest to let him know the men should be allowed to pass unmolested and unremarked, and the strikers made a path as the replacements walked between them and up the stairs into the station.

Outside, the sound of the mob rattled and shook like a storm wind.

Inside, the snap of gun slides being racked in the first-floor weapons room. Handing out the riot guns, readying for a tussle.

Danny took a long, slow breath and opened the door.

The noise blew up from all sides and blew down from the rooftops. The crowd hadn’t doubled; it had tripled. Easily fifteen hundred people out here, and it was hard to tell from the faces who was for them and who was against because those faces had turned into grotesque masks of either glee or fury, and the shouts of “We love ya, boys!” were intermingled with “Fuck you, coppers!” and wails of “Why? Why?” and “Who will protect us?” The applause would have been deafening if it weren’t for the jeers and the projectiles of fruit and eggs, most of which splattered against the wall. A horn beeped insistently, and Danny could make out a truck just beyond the fringe of the crowd. The men in back were replacements by the look of them, because the look of them was scared. As he descended into it, Danny scanned the crowd as best he could, saw some crudely fashioned signs of both support and condemnation. The faces were Italian and Irish and young and old. Bolsheviks and anarchists mingled with several smug faces of the Black Hand. Not far from them, Danny recognized a few members of the Gusties, the largest street gang in Boston. If this was Southie, the Gusties’ home turf, it wouldn’t have been surprising, but the fact that they’d crossed the city and spread their ranks made Danny wonder if he could honestly answer the shouts of “Who will protect us?” with anything but “I don’t know.”

A thick guy popped out of the crowd and punched Kevin McRae full in the face. Danny was separated from him by a dozen people. As he pushed his way through, he heard the thick guy shouting, “’Member me, McRae? Broke my fucking arm during a nick last year? What you gonna do now?” By the time Danny reached Kevin, the guy was long gone, but others were taking his cue, others who’d shown up to do nothing more than pay back beatings they’d received at the hands of these no-longer cops, these ex-cops.

Ex-cops. Jesus.

Danny lifted Kevin to his feet as the crowd surged forward, bouncing off them. The men in the truck had dismounted and were fighting their way toward the station house. Someone threw a brick and one of the scabs went down. A whistle blew as the doors of the station opened and Strivakis and Ellenburg appeared on the steps, flanked by a few other sergeants and lieutenants and a half dozen white-faced volunteers.

As Danny watched the scabs fight their way toward the steps and Strivakis and Ellenburg swing their billy clubs to clear a path, his instinct was to run toward them, to help them, to join them. Another brick sailed through the crowd and glanced off the side of Strivakis’s head. Ellenburg caught him before he could go down and the two of them began to swing their billies with renewed fury, blood streaming down Strivakis’s face and into his collar. Danny took a step toward them, but Kevin pulled him back.

“Ain’t our fight anymore, Dan.”

Danny looked at him.

Kevin, his teeth bloodied, his breath short, said it again. “Ain’t our fight.”

The scabs made it through the doors as Danny and Kevin reached the back of the crowd and Strivakis took a few last swooping cracks at the crowd and then slammed the doors behind him. The mob beat on the doors. Some men overturned the truck that had delivered the recruits and someone lit the contents of a barrel on fire.

Ex-cops, Danny thought.

For the time being anyway.

Good Lord.

Ex-cops.

Commissioner Curtis sat behind his desk with a revolver lying just to the right of his ink blotter. “So, it’s begun.”

Mayor Peters nodded. “It has, Commissioner.”

Curtis’s bodyguard stood behind him with his arms folded across his chest. Another waited outside the door. Neither was from the department, because Curtis no longer trusted any of the men. They were Pinkertons. The one behind Curtis looked old and rheumatic, as if any sudden movement would send his limbs flying off. The one outside the door was obese. Neither, Peters decided, looked fit enough to provide protection with their bodies, so they could only be one other thing: shooters.

“We need to call out the State Guard,” Peters said.

Curtis shook his head. “No.”

“That’s not your decision, I’m afraid.”

Curtis leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “It’s not yours, either, Mr. Mayor. It’s the governor’s. I just got off the phone with him not five minutes ago and he made it very clear, we are not to engage the Guard at this juncture.”

“What juncture would you two prefer?” Peters said. “Rubble?”

“Governor Coolidge stated that countless studies have shown that rioting in a case like this never begins on the first night. It takes the mob a full day to mobilize.”

“Given that very few cities have ever watched their entire police department walk off the job,” Peters said, trying to keep his voice under control, “I’m wondering how many of these countless studies pertain to our immediate situation, Commissioner.”

“Mr. Mayor,” Curtis said, looking over at his bodyguard, as if he expected him to wrestle Peters to the ground, “you need to take your concerns up with the governor.”

Andrew Peters stood and took his boater from the corner of the desk. “If you’re wrong, Commissioner, don’t bother coming to work tomorrow.”

He left the office, trying to ignore the tremors in the backs of his legs.

Luther!”

Luther stopped at the corner of Winter and Tremont Streets and looked for the source of the voice. Hard to tell who could have called to him because the streets were filling as the sun flattened against red brick and the greens of the Common darkened with its passing. Several groups of men had spread themselves out in the Common and were openly running dice games, and the few women still on the streets walked quickly, most tightening their coats or cinching their collars close to their throats.

Bad times, he decided as he turned to walk down Tremont toward the Giddreauxs’ home, are definitely coming.

“Luther! Luther Laurence!”

He stopped again, his windpipe grown cold at the sound of his true surname. A familiar black face appeared between two white faces, swimming its way out of the crowd like a small balloon. Luther recognized the face but it still took him a few anxious seconds to place it with certainty as the man split between the two white people and came toward the sidewalk with one glad hand raised above his shoulder. He slapped the hand down into Luther’s and his grip was firm.

“Luther Laurence, I do declare!” He pulled Luther into a hug.

“Byron,” Luther said as they broke the hug.

Old Byron Jackson. His old boss at the Hotel Tulsa, head of the Colored Bellmen’s Union. A fair man with the tip pool. Old Byron, who smiled the brightest of all smiles for the white folk and cursed them with the nastiest shit imaginable as soon as they’d left his presence. Old Byron, who lived alone in an apartment above the hardware store on Admiral, and never spoke of the wife and daughter in the daguerreotype atop his bare dresser. Yeah, Old Byron was one of the good ones.

“A bit north for you, isn’t it?” Luther said.

“That’s the truth,” Old Byron said. “You, too, Luther. As I live, I never expected to find you here. Rumors had it …”

Old Byron looked out at the crowd.

“Had it what?” Luther said.

Old Byron leaned in, his eyes on the sidewalk. “Rumors had it you were dead, son.”

Luther gestured up Tremont with his head and Old Byron fell into step as they walked toward Scollay Square and away from the Giddreauxs’ and the South End. It was slow going, the crowd thickening by the minute.

“Ain’t dead,” Luther said. “Just in Boston.”

Old Byron said, “What brings these folks out like this?”

“Police just walked off the job.”

“Hush your mouth.”

“They did,” Luther said.

“I read they might,” Old Byron said, “but I never would have believed it. This going to be bad for our folk, Luther?”

Luther shook his head. “I don’t think. Ain’t a lot of lynching up here, but you never know what’ll happen someone forgets to chain the dog.”

“Even the quietest dog, right?”

“Them most of all.” Luther smiled. “What brought you all the way up here, Byron?”

“Brother,” Old Byron said. “Got the cancer. Eating him alive.”

Luther looked over at him, saw the weight of it pulling his shoulders down.

“He got a chance?”

Old Byron shook his head. “It’s in his bones.”

Luther put a hand on the old man’s back. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, son.”

“He in hospital?”

Old Byron shook his head. “Home.” He jerked a thumb off to his left. “West End.”

“You his only kin?”

“Got a sister. She in Texarkana. She too frail to travel.”

Luther didn’t know what else to say so he said “I’m sorry” again, and Old Byron shrugged.

“What you gone do, am I right?”

Off to their left someone screamed and Luther saw a woman with a bloody nose, her face clenched, as if expecting another punch from the man who ripped her necklace off and then ran toward the Common. Someone laughed. A kid shimmied up a streetlamp pole, pulled a hammer from his belt, and smashed the lamp.

“This getting thick with ugly,” Old Byron said.

“Yeah, it is.” Luther thought of turning around, since most of the crowd seemed to be moving toward Court Square and then Scollay Square beyond, but when he looked behind him, he couldn’t see any space. All he could see were shoulders and heads, a pack of drunk sailors in the mix now, red-eyed and pimple-faced. A moving wall, pushing them forward. Luther felt bad for leading Old Byron into this, for suspecting him, if only for a moment, of being anything but an old man who was losing his brother. He craned his neck above the crowd to see if he could find a way out for them, and just ahead, at the corner of City Hall Avenue, a group of men hurled rocks into the window of Big Chief’s Cigar Store, the sound of it like a half dozen rifle reports. The plate glass broke into fins that hung in place for a moment, creaking in the moist breeze, and then they dropped.

A piece of glass ricocheted into a small guy’s eye and he had time to reach for it before the crowd swarmed over him and into the cigar store. Those who couldn’t make it inside broke the window next door, this one to a bakery, and loaves of bread and cupcakes sailed overhead and fell into the midst of the mob.

Old Byron looked frightened, his eyes wide, and Luther put an arm around him and tried to calm the old man’s fear with idle talk. “What’s your brother’s name?”

Old Byron cocked his head like he didn’t understand the question.

“I said what’s—?”

“Carnell,” Old Byron said. “Yeah.” He gave Luther a shaky smile and nodded. “His name’s Carnell.”

Luther smiled back. He hoped it was a comforting smile, and he kept his arm around Old Byron, even though he feared the blade or the pistol he now knew the man had on his person somewhere.

It was the “Yeah” that got him. The way Old Byron said it like he was confirming it to himself, answering a question on a test he’d over-prepared for.

Another window exploded, this time on their right. And then another. A fat white man pushed them hard to the left as he made his charge for Peter Rabbit Hats. The windows kept dropping — Sal Myer’s Gents’ Furnishings, Lewis Shoes, the Princeton Clothing Company, Drake’s Dry Goods. Sharp, dry explosions. Glass glittering against the walls, crunching underfoot, spitting through the air. A few feet ahead of them, a soldier swung a chair leg into the head of a sailor, the wood already dark with blood.

Carnell. Yeah. His name’s Carnell.

Luther removed his arm from Old Byron’s shoulders.

“What’s Cornell do for work?” Luther said as a sailor with arms slashed to bits by a window pushed through them, bleeding all over everything he touched.

“Luther, we got to get out of here.”

“What’s Cornell do?” Luther said.

“He a meat packer,” Old Byron said.

“Cornell’s a meat packer.”

“Yeah,” Old Byron shouted. “Luther, we got to get free of this.”

“Thought you said his name was Carnell,” Luther said.

Old Byron’s mouth opened but he didn’t say anything. He gave Luther a helpless, hopeless look, his lips moving slightly as he tried to find the words.

Luther shook his head slowly. “Old Byron,” he said. “Old Byron.”

“I can explain.” Old Byron worked a sad smile onto his face.

Luther nodded, as if ready to listen, and then shoved him into the nearest group to his right and quick-pivoted between two men who looked whiter than white and scareder than scared. He slid between two more men with their backs to each other. Someone broke another window, and then a few someones began firing guns in the air. One of the bullets came back down and hit the arm of a guy beside Luther and the blood spouted and the guy yelped. Luther reached the opposite sidewalk and slipped on some glass pebbles. He almost went down, but he righted himself at the last second and risked a look back across the street. He spotted Old Byron, his back pressed to a brick wall, eyes darting, as a man wrestled the carcass of a sow over a butcher’s window frame, the sow’s belly dragging across the broken glass. The man wrenched it to the sidewalk where he took several punches to the head from three men who kept swinging until they’d knocked him back through the open window. They availed themselves of his bloodied sow and carried it over their heads down Tremont.

Carnell, my ass.

Luther walked gingerly through the glass and tried to keep to the edge of the crowd, but within minutes he’d been forced toward the center again. It was no longer a group of people, it was a living, thinking hive that commanded the bees within, made sure they were all anxious and jangly and hungry. Luther pulled his hat down tighter and kept his head down.

Dozens of people, all cut up from the glass, keened and moaned. The sight and sound of them incited the hive even more. Anyone wearing a straw hat had it wrenched from his head and men beat the shit out of one another over stolen shoes and bread loaves and suit jackets, most times destroying the very thing they tried to possess. The packs of sailors and the soldiers were roving enemy squads, bursting out of the herd in sudden explosions to pummel their rivals. Luther saw a woman pushed into a doorway, saw several men press around her. He heard her scream but he couldn’t get anywhere near her, the walls of shoulders and heads and torsos moving alongside of him like freight cars in the stockyards. He heard the woman scream again and the men laugh and hoot, and he looked out at this hideous sea of white faces stripped of their everyday masks and wanted to burn them all in a great fire.

By the time they reached Scollay Square, there had to be four thousand of them. Tremont widened here and Luther finally broke from the center again, made his way to the sidewalk, heard someone say, “Nigger got his own hat,” and kept moving until he ran into another wall of men pouring out of a shattered liquor store, draining the bottles and smashing them to the sidewalk and then opening replacements. Some inbred-looking short sons of bitches kicked down the doors of Waldron’s Casino, and Luther heard the burlesque show in there screech to an end. Several of the men came right back out pushing a piano in front of them, the piano player lying belly-down on top, one of the short sons of bitches sitting on his ass and riding him like a horse.

He turned to his right and Old Byron Jackson stabbed him in the bicep. Luther fell back against the wall of Waldron’s Casino. Old Byron swung with that knife again, the old man’s face a feral, terrified thing. Luther kicked out at him, then came off the wall as Old Byron lunged and missed, the knife sending a spark off the brick. Luther cuffed him in the ear but good, bounced the other side of his head off the wall.

“The fuck you doing this for?” he said.

“Got debts,” Old Byron said and came at him in a low rush.

Luther banged into someone’s back as he dodged the thrust. The man he’d bumped grabbed his shirt and spun him to face him. Luther jerked out of the man’s grasp and kicked behind him, heard the kick connect with some part of Old Byron Jackson, the old man letting out an “oof” of air. The white man punched him in the cheek, but Luther had expected that and he rolled with it right into the crowd still dancing out in front of the liquor store. He broke through them and leapt up onto the piano keys, heard a smattering of cheers break out as he vaulted off the keys and over the piano player and the man riding him. He landed on the other side and kept his footing and got a quick glimpse of a guy’s shock at this nigger dropping out of the sky and then he pushed into the crowd.

The mob moved on. They poured through Faneuil Hall, and some cows were set loose from their pens, and someone overturned a produce cart and lit it on fire in front of its owner, who dropped to his knees and pulled his hair out of his bleeding scalp by the roots. Up ahead, a sudden burst of gunfire, several pistols fired above the crowd, and then a desperate shout: “We are plainclothes police officers! Cease and desist at once.”

More warning shots and then the crowd started shouting back.

“Kill the cops! Kill the cops!”

“Kill the scabs!”

“Kill the cops!”

“Kill the scabs!”

“Kill the cops!”

“Back off or we will shoot to kill! Back off!”

They must have meant it because Luther felt the surge change direction and he was spun in place and the swarm moved back the way it had come. More shots fired. Another cart lit afire, the yellow and red reflecting off the bronze cobblestone and the red brick, Luther catching his own shadow moving through the colors along with all the other shadows. Shrieking that filled the sky. A crack of bone, a sharp scream, a thunderclap of plate glass, fire alarms ringing so consistently that Luther barely heard them anymore.

And then the rain came, a fat pouring of it, clattering and hissing, steaming off bare heads. At first Luther held out hope it would thin the crowd, but if anything it brought more of them. Luther was buffeted along within the hive as it destroyed ten more storefronts, three restaurants, rushed through a boxing match at Beech Hall and beat the fighters senseless. Beat the audience, too.

Along Washington Street, the major department stores — Filene’s, White’s, Chandler’s, and Jordan Marsh — had loaded up for bear. The guys guarding Jordan Marsh saw them coming from two blocks away and stepped off the sidewalk with pistols and shotguns. They didn’t even wait for a debate. They set themselves in the middle of Washington Street, fifteen of them at least, and fired. The hive went into a crouch and then took another couple of steps forward, but the Jordan Marsh men charged them, guns booming and chucking, and the surge reversed again. Luther heard terror screams and the Jordan Marsh men kept firing and the hive ran all the way back to Scollay Square.

Which was an uncaged zoo by now. Everyone drunk and howling up at the raindrops. Dazed burlesque girls stripped of their tassels wandering around with bare chests. Overturned touring cars and bonfires along the sidewalk. Headstones ripped from the Old Granary Burying Ground and propped up against walls and fences. Two people fucking on top of an overturned Model T. Two men in a bare-knuckle boxing match in the middle of Tremont Street while the bettors formed a ring around them and the blood and rain-streaked glass crunched under their feet. Four soldiers dragged an unconscious sailor to the bumper of one of the flipped cars and pissed on him as the crowd cheered. A woman appeared in an upper window and screamed for help. The crowd cheered her, too, before a hand clamped over her face and wrenched her back from the window. The crowd cheered some more.

Luther noticed the dark bloodstain on his upper sleeve and took a look at the wound long enough to realize it wasn’t deep. He noticed a guy passed out against the curb with a bottle of whiskey between his legs and he reached down and took the bottle. He poured some over his arm and then drank some and watched another window explode and heard more screams and wails but all of them eventually drowned out by the leering cheers of this triumphant hive.

This? he wanted to scream. This is what I kowtowed to? You people? You made me feel like less because I wasn’t you? I’ve been saying “yes, suh” to you? “No suh”? To you? To you fucking … animals?

He took another drink and the sweep of his gaze landed on Old Byron Jackson across the street, standing in front of a whitewashed storefront, what had once been a bookstore, several years abandoned. Maybe the last window left in Scollay Square. Old Byron looked down Tremont in the wrong direction, and Luther tilted his head and drained the bottle and dropped it to his feet and started across the street.

Glazed, white, maskless faces loomed all around him, drunk from liquor, drunk on power and anarchy, but drunk on something else, too, something nameless until now, something they’d always known was there but pretended they didn’t.

Oblivion.

That’s all it was. They did things in their everyday life and gave it other names, nice names — idealism, civic duty, honor, purpose. But the truth was right in front of them now. No one did anything for any other reason but that they wanted to. They wanted to rage and they wanted to rape and they wanted to destroy as many things as they could destroy simply because those things could be destroyed.

Fuck you, Luther thought, and fuck this. He reached Old Byron Jackson and sank one hand into his crotch and the other into his hair.

I’m going home.

He lifted Old Byron off the ground and swung him back in the air as the old man howled and when he got to the top of the pendulum, Luther swung it all the way back and threw Old Byron Jackson through the plate glass window.

“Nigger fight,” someone called.

Old Byron landed on the bare floor and the glass shards popped all over him and all around him and he tried to cover up with his arms but the glass hit him anyway, one shard taking off a cheek, another carving a steak off his outer thigh.

“You going to kill him, boy?”

Luther turned and looked at three white men to his left. They were swimming in booze.

“Might could,” he said.

He climbed through the window and into the store and the broken glass and Old Byron Jackson.

“What kinda debts?”

Old Byron huffed his breath and then hissed it and grabbed his thigh in his hands and let out a low moan.

“I asked you a question.”

Behind him one of the white men chuckled. “You hear? He axed him a question.”

“What kinda debts?”

“What kind you think?” Old Byron ground his head back into the glass and arched his back.

“You using, I take it.”

“Used my whole life. Opium, not heroin,” Old Byron said. “Who you think supplied Jessie Tell, fool?”

Luther stepped on Old Byron’s ankle and the old man gritted his teeth.

“Don’t say his name,” Luther said. “He was my friend. You ain’t.”

One of the white men called, “Hey! You going to kill him, shine, or what?”

Luther shook his head and heard the men groan and then scuttle off.

“Ain’t going to save you, though, Old Byron. You die, you die. Came all the way up here just to kill one of your own for that shit you put in you?” Luther spit on the glass pebbles.

Old Byron spit blood up at Luther, but all it did was land on his own shirt. “Never liked your ass, Luther. You think you special.”

Luther shrugged. “I am special. Any day aboveground that I ain’t you or I ain’t that?” He jerked his thumb behind him. “You’re god-damned fucking correct I’m special. Ain’t afraid of them anymore, ain’t afraid of you, ain’t afraid of this here color of my skin. Fuck all that forever.”

Old Byron rolled his eyes. “Like you even less.”

“Good.” Luther smiled. He crouched by Old Byron. “I ’spect you’ll live, old man. You get back on that train to Tulsa. Hear? And when you get off it, you go run your sad ass right to Smoke and tell him you missed me. Tell him it don’t matter none, though, because he ain’t going to have to look hard for me from now on.” Luther lowered his face until he was close enough to kiss Old Byron Jackson. “You tell Smoke I’m coming for him.” He slapped his good cheek once, hard. “I’m coming home, Old Byron. You tell Smoke that. You don’t?” Luther shrugged. “I’ll tell him myself.”

He stood and crossed the broken glass and stepped through the window. He never looked back at Old Byron. He worked his way through the feverish white folk and the screams and the rain and the storm of the hive and knew he was done with every lie he’d ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he’d ever lived, every lie.

Scollay Square. Court Square. The North End. Newspaper Row. Roxbury Crossing. Pope’s Hill. Codman and Eggleston Squares. The calls came in from all over the city, but nowhere more voluminously than in Thomas Coughlin’s precinct. South Boston was blowing up.

The mobs had emptied the stores along Broadway and thrown the goods to the street. Thomas couldn’t find even the strayest hair of logic in that — at least use what you looted. From the inner harbor to Andrew Square, from the Fort Point Channel to Farragut Road — not a single window in a single business stood intact. Hundreds of homes had suffered similar fates. East and West Broadway swelled with the worst of the populace, ten thousand strong and growing. Rapes—rapes, Thomas thought with clenched teeth — had occurred in public view, three on West Broadway, one on East Fourth, another at one of the piers along Northern Avenue.

And the calls kept coming in:

The manager of Mully’s Diner beaten unconscious when a roomful of patrons decided not to pay their bills. The poor sod at Haymarket Relief now with a broken nose, a shattered eardrum, and half a dozen missing teeth.

At Broadway and E, some fun-loving fellas drove a stolen buggy over the sidewalk and into the front window of O’Donnell’s Bakery. That wasn’t enough revelry, however — they had to set it afire. In the process, they torched the bakery and burned seventeen years of Declan O’Donnell’s dreams to soot.

Budnick Creamery — destroyed. Connor & O’Keefe’s — ash. Up and down Broadway, haberdashers, tailors, pawnshops, produce stores, even a bicycle shop — all gone. Either burned to the ground or smashed beyond salvage.

Boys and girls, most younger than Joe, hurled eggs and rocks from the roof of Mohican Market, and the scant few officers Thomas could afford to send reported they were helpless to fire back at children. Responding firemen complained of the same thing.

And the latest report — a streetcar forced to stop at the corner of Broadway and Dorchester Street because of all the goods piled in the intersection. The mob added boxes, barrels, and mattresses to the pile and then someone brought some gasoline and a box of matches. The occupants of the streetcar were forced to flee the car along with the driver and most were beaten while the crowd rushed onto the car, tore the seats from their metal clamps, and tossed them through the windows.

What was this addiction to broken glass? That’s what Thomas wanted to know. How was one to stop this madness? He had a mere twenty-two policemen under his command, most sergeants and lieutenants, most well into their forties, plus a contingent of useless frightened volunteers.

“Captain Coughlin?”

He looked up at Mike Eigen, a recently promoted sergeant, standing in the doorway.

“Jesus, Sergeant, what now?”

“Someone sent a contingent of Metro Park Police in to patrol Southie.”

Thomas stood. “No one told me.”

“Not sure where the order came from, Cap’, but they’re pinned down.”

“What?”

Eigen nodded. “St. Augustine’s Church. Guy’s are dropping.”

“Bullets?”

Eigen shook his head. “Rocks, Cap’.”

A church. Brother officers being stoned. At a church. In his precinct.

Thomas Coughlin didn’t know he’d overturned his desk until he heard it crack against the floor. Sergeant Eigen took a step back.

“Enough,” Thomas said. “By God, enough.”

Thomas reached for the gun belt he hung on his coat tree every morning.

Sergeant Eigen watched him buckle the gun belt. “I’d say so, Cap’.”

Thomas reached for the bottom left drawer of his overturned desk. He lifted the drawer out and propped it on the two upper drawers. He removed a box of.32 shells and stuffed it in his pocket. Found a box of shotgun shells and placed them in the opposite pocket. He looked up at Sergeant Eigen. “Why are you still here?”

“Cap’?”

“Assemble every man still standing in this mausoleum. We’ve got a donnybrook to attend.” Thomas raised his eyebrows. “And we shan’t be fooling about in that regard, Sergeant.”

Eigen snapped him a salute, a smile blowing wide across his face.

Thomas found himself smiling back as he pulled his shotgun off the rack over the file cabinet. “Hop to it now, son.”

Eigen ran from the doorway as Thomas loaded his shotgun, loving the snick-snick of the shells sliding into the magazine. The sound of it returned his soul to his body for the first time since the walkout at five-forty-five. On the floor lay a picture of Danny the day he’d graduated from the Academy, Thomas himself pinning the badge to his chest. His favorite photograph.

He stepped on it on his way out the door, unable to deny the satisfaction that filled him when he heard the glass crunch.

“You don’t want to protect our city, boy?” he said. “Fine. I will.”

When they exited the patrol cars at St. Augustine’s, the crowd turned toward them. Thomas could see the Metro Park cops trying to hold the mob back with billy clubs and drawn weapons, but they were already bloody, and the piles of rocks littering the white limestone steps gave testament to a pitched battle these coppers had been losing.

What Thomas knew about a mob was simple enough — any change in direction forced it to lose its voice if only for a matter of seconds. If you owned those seconds, you owned the mob. If they owned it, they owned you.

He stepped out of his car and the man nearest him, a Gustie who went by the moniker of Filching Phil Scanlon, laughed and said, “Well, Captain Cough—”

Thomas split his face to the bone with the butt of his shotgun. Filching Phil dropped like a head-shot horse. Thomas laid the muzzle of his shotgun on the shoulder of the Gustie behind him, Big Head Sparks. Thomas tilted the muzzle toward the sky and fired and Big Head lost the hearing in his left ear. Big Head Sparks wavered, his eyes instantly glazed, and Thomas said to Eigen, “Do the honors, Sergeant.”

Eigen hit Big Head Sparks in the face with his service revolver, and that was the last of Big Head for the night.

Thomas pointed his shotgun at the ground and fired.

The mob backed up.

“I’m Captain Thomas Coughlin,” he called and stomped his foot down on Filching Phil’s knee. He didn’t get the sound he’d been after, so he did it again. This time he got the sweet crack of bone followed by the predictable shriek. He waved his arm and the eleven men he’d been able to pull together spread along the fringe of the crowd.

“I’m Captain Thomas Coughlin,” he repeated, “and be of no illusion — we intend to spill blood.” He swept his eyes across the faces in the mob. “Your blood.” He turned to the Metro Park Police officers on the stairs of the church. There were ten of them, and they seemed to have shrunk into themselves. “Level your weapons or stop calling yourselves officers of the law.”

The crowd took another step back as the Metro Park cops extended their arms.

“Cock them!” Thomas shouted.

They did, and the crowd took several more steps back.

“If I see anyone holding a rock,” Thomas called, “we shoot to kill.”

He took five steps forward, the shotgun coming to rest on the chest of a man with a rock in his hand. The man dropped the rock and then urinated down his left leg. Thomas considered mercy and quickly deemed it inappropriate for the atmosphere. He opened the urinator’s forehead with his shotgun butt and stepped over him.

“Run, you wretched curs.” He swept his eyes across them. “RUN!”

No one moved — they looked too shocked — and Thomas turned to Eigen, to the men on the fringe, to the Metro Park cops.

“Fire at will.”

The Metro Park cops stared back at him.

Thomas rolled his eyes. He drew his service revolver, raised it above his head, and fired six times.

The men got the point. They began to discharge their weapons into the air and the crowd exploded like drops from a shattered water bucket. They ran up the street. They ran and ran, darting into alleys and down side streets, banging off overturned cars, falling to the sidewalk, stomping on one another, hurling themselves into storefronts and landing on the broken glass they’d created only an hour before.

Thomas flicked his wrist and emptied his shell casings onto the street. He laid the shotgun at his feet and reloaded his service revolver. The air was sharp with cordite and the echoes of gunfire. The mob continued its desperate flight. Thomas holstered his revolver and reloaded his shotgun. The long summer of impotence and confusion faded from his heart. He felt twenty-five years old.

Tires squealed behind him. Thomas turned as one black Buick and four patrol cars pulled to a stop as a soft rain began to fall. Superintendent Michael Crowley exited the Buick. He carried his own shotgun and wore his service revolver in a shoulder holster. He sported a fresh bandage on his forehead, and his fine dark suit was splattered with egg yolk and bits of shell.

Thomas smiled at him and Crowley gave him a tired smile in return.

“Time for a little law and order, wouldn’t you say, Captain?”

“Indeed, Superintendent.”

They walked up the center of the street as the rest of the men dropped in behind them.

“Like the old days, Tommy, eh?” Crowley said as they started to make out the outer edge of a fresh mob concentrated in Andrew Square two blocks ahead.

“Just what I was thinking, Michael.”

“And when we clear them here?”

When we clear them. Not if. Thomas loved it.

“We take Broadway back.”

Crowley clapped a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.

“Ah, how I missed this.”

“Me, too, Michael. Me, too.”

Mayor Peters’s chauffeur, Horace Russell, glided the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost along the fringes of the trouble, never once entering a street so strewn with debris or the throngs that they would have been hard-pressed to get back out again. And so, while the populace rioted, its mayor observed them from a remove, but not so much of a remove that he couldn’t hear their terrible war cries, their shrieks and high-pitched laughter, the shock of sudden gunfire, the incessant shattering of glass.

Once he’d toured Scollay Square, he thought he’d seen the worst of it, but then he saw the North End, and not long thereafter, South Boston. He realized that nightmares so bad he’d never dared dream them had come to fruition.

The voters had handed him a city of peerless reputation. The Athens of America, the birthplace of the American Revolution and two presidents, seat to more higher education than any other city in the nation, the Hub of the universe.

And on his watch, it was disassembling itself brick by brick.

They crossed back over the Broadway Bridge, leaving behind the flames and screams of the South Boston slum. Andrew Peters told Horace Russell to take him to the nearest phone. They found one at the Castle Square Hotel in the South End, which was, for the moment, the only quiet neighborhood they’d passed through tonight.

With the bell staff and the manager conspicuously watching, Mayor Peters called the Commonwealth Armory. He informed the soldier who answered who he was and told him to get Major Dallup to the phone on the double

“Dallup here.”

“Major. Mayor Peters.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Are you currently in command of the motor corps and the First Cavalry Troop?”

“I am, sir. Under the command of General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, sir.”

“Who are where presently?”

“I believe with Governor Coolidge at the State House, sir.”

“Then you are in active command, Major. Your men are to stay at the armory and stand at readiness. They are not to go home. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I will be by to review them and to give you your deployment assignments.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are going to put down some riots tonight, Major.”

“With pleasure, sir.”

When Peters arrived at the armory fifteen minutes later, he saw a trooper exit the building and head up Commonwealth toward Brighton.

“Trooper!” He left the car and held up a hand. “Where are you going?”

The trooper looked at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the mayor of Boston.”

The trooper immediately straightened and then saluted. “My apologies, sir.”

Peters returned the salute. “Where are you going, son?”

“Home, sir. I live right up the—”

“You were given orders to stand at the ready.”

The trooper nodded. “But those orders were countermanded by General Stevens.”

“Go back inside,” Peters said.

As the trooper opened the door, several more troopers started to file out, but the original deserter pushed them back inside, saying, “The mayor, the mayor.”

Peters strode inside and immediately spied a man with a major’s oak leaf cluster by the staircase leading up to the orderly room.

“Major Dallup!”

“Sir!”

“What is the meaning of this?” Peters’s hand swept around the armory, at the men with their collars unbuttoned, weaponless, shifting in place.

“Sir, if I could explain.”

“Please do!” Peters was surprised to hear the sound of his voice, raised, flinty.

Before Major Dallup could explain anything, however, a voice boomed from the top of the stairs.

“These men are going home!” Governor Coolidge stood at the landing above them all. “Mayor Peters, you have no business here. Go home as well, sir.”

As Coolidge came down the stairs, flanked by General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, Peters rushed up. All four men met in the middle.

“This city is rioting.”

“It is doing no such thing.”

“I have been out in it, Governor, and I tell you, I tell you, I tell you—” Peters hated this stammer he developed when upset but he wouldn’t let it stop him now. “I tell you, sir, that it is not sporadic. It is tens of thousands of men and they are—”

“There is no riot,” Coolidge said.

“Yes, there is! In South Boston, in the North End, in Scollay Square! Look for yourself, man, if you don’t believe me.”

“I have looked.”

“Where?”

“From the State House.”

“The State House?” Peters said, screaming now, his voice sounding to his own ears like that of a child. A female child. “The rioting isn’t happening on Beacon Hill, Governor. It’s happening—”

“Enough.” Coolidge held up a hand.

“Enough?” Peters said.

“Go home, Mr. Mayor. Go home.”

It was the tone that got to Andrew Peters, the tone a parent reserved for a bratty child having a pointless tantrum.

Mayor Andrew Peters then did something he was reasonably sure had never occurred in Boston politics — he punched the governor in the face.

He had to jump from a lower step to do it, and Coolidge was tall to begin with, so it wasn’t much of a punch. But it did connect with the tissue around the governor’s left eye.

Coolidge was so stunned, he didn’t move. Peters was so pleased, he decided to do it again.

The general and the colonel grabbed at his arms, and several troopers ran up the stairs, but in those few seconds, Peters managed to land a few more flailing shots.

The governor, oddly, never moved back or raised his hands to defend himself.

Several troopers carried Mayor Andrew Peters back down the stairs and deposited him on the floor.

He thought of rushing up them again.

Instead, he pointed a finger at Governor Coolidge. “This is on your conscience.”

“But your ledger, Mr. Mayor.” Coolidge allowed himself a small smile. “Your ledger, sir.”

Chapter thirty-seven

Horace Russell drove Mayor Peters to City Hall Wednesday morning at half past seven. Absent fires and screams and darkness, the streets had lost their ghoulish flavor, but stark evidence of the mob lay everywhere. Nary a window was left intact along Washington or Tremont or any of the streets that intersected them. Husks where once stood businesses. The skeleton frames of charred automobiles. So much trash and debris in the streets Peters could only assume this was what cities looked like after protracted battles and sporadic bombing.

Along the Boston Common, men lay in drunken stupors or openly engaged in dice games. Across Tremont, a few souls raised plywood over their window frames. In front of some businesses, men paced with shotguns and rifles. Phone lines hung severed from their poles. All street signs had been removed, and most gas lamps were shattered.

Peters placed a hand over his eyes because he felt an overwhelming need to weep. A stream of words ran through his head, so constant it took him a minute to realize it also left his tongue in a low whisper: This never had to happen, this never had to happen, this never had to happen….

The impulse to weep turned to something colder as they reached City Hall. He strode up to his office and immediately placed a call to police headquarters.

Curtis answered the phone himself, his voice a tired shadow of itself. “Hello.”

“Commissioner, it’s Mayor Peters.”

“You call for my resignation, I expect.”

“I call for damage assessment. Let’s start there.”

Curtis sighed. “One hundred and twenty-nine arrests. Five rioters shot, none critically injured. Five hundred sixty-two people treated for injuries at Haymarket Relief, a third of those related to cuts from broken glass. Ninety-four muggings reported. Sixty-seven assaults-and-battery. Six rapes.”

“Six?”

“Reported, yes.”

“Your estimate as to the real number?”

Another sigh. “Based on uncorroborated reports from the North End and South Boston, I’d place the number in the dozens. Thirty, let’s say.”

“Thirty.” Peters felt the need to weep again, but it didn’t come as an overwhelming wave, merely as a stabbing sensation behind his eyes. “Property damage?”

“In the hundreds of thousands.”

“The hundreds of thousands, yes, I thought so myself.”

“Mostly small businesses. The banks and department stores—”

“Hired private security. I know.”

“The firemen will never strike now.”

“What?”

“The firemen,” Curtis said. “The sympathy strike. My man in the department tells me they are so irate about the countless false alarms they responded to last night that they’ve turned against the strikers.”

“How does this information help us right now, Commissioner?”

“I won’t resign,” Curtis said.

The gall of this man. The gumption. A city under siege of its populace and all he thinks of is his job and his pride.

“You won’t have to,” Peters said. “I’m removing you from your command.”

“You can’t.”

“Oh, I can. You love rules, Commissioner. Please consult Section Six, Chapter Three-twenty-three of the 1885 city bylaws. Once you’ve done that, clean out your desk. Your replacement will be there by nine.”

Peters hung up. He would have expected to feel more satisfaction, but it was one of the more dispiriting aspects of this entire affair that the only possible flush of victory had lain in averting the strike. Once it had begun, no man, least of all himself, could lay claim to any accomplishment. He called to his secretary, Martha Pooley, and she came into the office with the list of names and telephone numbers he’d asked for. He started with Colonel Sullivan of the State Guard. When he answered, Peters skipped all formalities.

“Colonel Sullivan, this is your mayor. I am giving you a direct order that cannot be countermanded. Understood?”

“Yes, Mr. Mayor.”

“Assemble the entire State Guard in the Boston area. I am putting the Tenth Regiment, the First Cavalry Troop, the First Motor Corps, and the Ambulance Corps under your command. Is there any reason you cannot perform these duties, Colonel?”

“None whatsoever, sir.”

“See to it.”

“Yes, Mr. Mayor.”

Peters hung up and immediately dialed the home of General Charles Cole, former commander of the Fifty-second Yankee Division and one of the chief members of the Storrow Committee. “General Cole.”

“Mr. Mayor.”

“Would you serve your city as acting police commissioner, sir?”

“It would be my honor.”

“I’ll send a car. At what time could you be ready, General?”

“I’m already dressed, Mr. Mayor.”

Governor Coolidge held a press conference at ten. He announced that in addition to the regiments Mayor Peters had called up, he had asked Brigadier General Nelson Bryant to assume command of the state response to the crisis. General Bryant had accepted and would command the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Regiments of the State Guard as well as a machine-gun company.

Volunteers continued to converge on the Chamber of Commerce to receive their badges, uniforms, and weapons. Most, he noted, were former officers of the Massachusetts Yankee Division and had served with distinction in the Great War. He further noted that 150 Harvard undergraduates, including the entire football team, had been sworn in as members of the volunteer police department.

“We are in good hands, gentlemen.”

When asked why the State Guard had not been called out the previous evening, Governor Coolidge responded, “Yesterday I was persuaded to leave matters of public safety to city authorities. I have since regretted the wisdom of this trust.”

When a reporter asked the governor how he’d suffered the bruise under his left eye, Governor Coolidge announced that the press conference was over and left the room.

Danny stood with Nora on the rooftop of his building and looked down at the North End. During the worst of the rioting, some men had blocked off Salem Street with truck tires they’d doused in gasoline and lit afire. Danny could see one now, melted into the street and still smoking, the stench filling his nostrils. The mob had grown all evening, restless, itchy. At about ten o’clock, it had stopped roiling and begun to vent. Danny had watched from his window. Impotent.

By the time it abated about 2 A.M., the streets lay as smashed and violated as they had after the molasses flood. The voices of the victims — of assaults, of muggings, of motiveless beatings, of rape — rose from the streets and out of tenement windows and rooming houses. Moaning, keening, weeping. The cries of those chosen for random violence, bereft with the knowledge that they’d never know justice in this world.

And it was his fault.

Nora told him it wasn’t, but he could see she didn’t fully believe it. She’d changed over the course of the night; doubt had entered her eyes. About the choice he’d made, about him. When they’d finally lain down in bed last night, her lips found his cheek and they were cool and hesitant. Instead of going to sleep with one arm over his chest and one leg over his, her usual custom, she turned onto her left side. Her back touched his, so it wasn’t a complete rejection, but he felt it nonetheless.

Now, standing with their coffee on the rooftop, looking at the damage strewn below them in the gray light of an overcast morning, she placed a hand on Danny’s lower back. It was the lightest of touches and just as quickly removed. When Danny turned, she was chewing the edge of her thumb and her eyes were moist.

“You’re not going to work today,” he said.

She shook her head but said nothing.

“Nora.”

She stopped chewing her thumb and lifted her coffee cup off the parapet. She looked at him, her eyes wide and blank, unreadable.

“You’re not going to—”

“Yes, I am,” she said.

He shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want you out on those streets.”

Her shoulders moved almost imperceptibly. “It’s my job. I’m not getting fired.”

“You won’t get fired.”

Another tiny shrug. “And if you’re wrong? How would we eat?”

“This will be over soon.”

She shook her head.

“It will. Once the city realizes we had no choice and that—”

She turned to him. “The city will hate you, Danny.” She swept her arm at the streets below. “They’ll never forgive you for this.”

“So we were wrong?” A well of isolation sprang up inside him, as desolate and hopeless as any he’d ever known.

“No,” she said. “No.” She came to him and the touch of her hands on his cheeks felt like salvation. “No, no, no.” She shook his face until he met her eyes. “You weren’t wrong. You did the only thing you could. It’s just …” She looked off the roof again.

“Just what?”

“They made it so that the only choice you had left was the one sure to doom you.” She kissed him; he tasted the salt of her tears. “I love you. I believe in what you did.”

“But you think we’re doomed.”

Her hands trailed off his face and fell to her sides. “I think …” Her face cooled as he watched her, something he was learning about her, her need to treat crisis with detachment. She raised her eyes and they were no longer moist. “I think you might be out of a job.” She gave him a sad, tight smile. “So I can’t be losing mine, can I now?”

He walked her to work.

Around them, gray ash and the endless crunch of glass. Scraps of bloodied clothing, splattered pies on the cobblestone amid chunks of brick and charred wood. Blackened storefronts. Overturned carts and overturned cars, all burnt. Two halves of one skirt in the gutter, wet and covered in soot.

It didn’t get any worse once they left the North End, it just got more repetitive and, by the time they reached Scollay Square, larger in scope and scale. He tried to pull Nora to him, but she preferred to walk alone. Every now and then she would glance the side of her hand off his and gave him a look of intimate sorrow, and once she leaned into his shoulder as they climbed Bowdoin Street, but she never spoke.

Neither did he.

There was nothing to say.

After he dropped her at work, he walked back to the North End and joined the picket line outside the Oh-One station house. Throughout the late morning and early afternoon, they walked back and forth along Hanover Street. Some passersby greeted them with calls of support and others with shouts of “for shame,” but the majority said nothing. They passed along the edge of the sidewalk with downturned eyes or stared through Danny and the other men as if they were ghosts.

Scabs arrived throughout the day. Danny had given the order that they were to be allowed entrance as long as they crossed along the outer edges of the picket line and not through it. Outside of one tense chest-bumping incident and a few catcalls, the scabs passed into the Oh-One station house without ado.

Up and down Hanover came the sound of hammers as men replaced windows with wood planks while others swept up the glass and rescued from the debris any goods the mob had overlooked. A cobbler Danny knew, Giuseppe Balari, stood for a long time staring into the wreckage of his shop. He’d stacked wood against his shop door and laid out his tools, but at the moment when he could have begun covering his storefront, he placed the hammer down on the sidewalk and just stood there, hands out by his side, palms up. He stood that way for ten minutes.

When he turned, Danny didn’t manage to drop his eyes in time and Giuseppe’s found his. He stared across the street at Danny and mouthed one word: Why?

Danny shook his head, a helpless gesture, and turned his face forward as he made another circuit in front of the station house. When he looked again, Giuseppe had placed a wood plank to the window frame and begun hammering.

Midday, several city tow trucks cleared the streets, the husks rattling and clanking over the cobblestones, the tow drivers repeatedly having to stop to retrieve pieces that had fallen off. Not long after, a Packard Single Six pulled to the curb by the picket line and Ralph Raphelson stuck his head out the back window. “A minute, Officer?”

Danny turned his sign upside down and leaned it against a lamp pole. He climbed into the backseat with Raphelson. Raphelson gave him an awkward smile and said nothing. Danny looked out the window at the men walking in circles, at the wood storefronts up and down Hanover.

Raphelson said, “The vote on a sympathy strike has been delayed.”

Danny’s first reaction was a chilled numbness. “Delayed?”

Raphelson nodded.

“For how long?”

Raphelson looked out his window. “Difficult to ascertain. We’ve had a hard time reaching several of the delegates.”

“You can’t vote without them?”

He shook his head. “All delegates must be present. That’s sacrosanct.”

“How long before everyone’s rounded up?”

“Hard to tell.”

Danny turned on the seat. “How long?”

“Could be later today. Could be tomorrow.”

The numbness left Danny, replaced by an adrenal spike of fear. “But no later.”

Raphelson said nothing.

“Ralph,” Danny said. “Ralph.”

Raphelson turned his head, looked at him.

“No later than tomorrow,” Danny said. “Right?”

“I can’t guarantee anything.”

Danny sat back in his seat. “Oh, my God,” he whispered. “Oh, my God.”

In Luther’s room, he and Isaiah packed the laundry Mrs. Grouse had brought up to them. Isaiah, a veteran traveler, showed Luther how to roll his clothing instead of folding it, and they placed it in Luther’s suitcase.

“It’ll give you a lot more room,” he said, “and you’re less apt to suffer wrinkles. But you have to roll it tight now. Like this.”

Luther watched Isaiah, then brought the legs of a pair of trousers together and started rolling them from the cuffs.

“A little tighter.”

Luther unrolled the trousers and made the first curl twice as tight and clenched his hands as he continued the roll.

“You’re getting it now.”

Luther cinched the fabric hard between his fingers. “She going to be okay?”

“It’ll pass, I’m sure.” Isaiah lay a shirt on the bed and buttoned it up. He folded it and smoothed the creases and rolled it up. When he was done, he turned and placed it in the suitcase and smoothed his palm across it one last time. “It’ll pass.”

When they came down the stairs, they left the suitcase at the bottom and found Yvette in the parlor. She looked up from the afternoon edition of The Examiner, and her eyes were bright.

“They may send the State Guard to the trouble spots.”

Luther nodded.

Isaiah took his customary seat by the hearth. “I expect the rioting is near over.”

“I certainly hope so.” Yvette folded the paper and placed it on the side table. She smoothed her dress against her knees. “Luther, would you pour me a cup of tea?”

Luther crossed to the tea service on the sideboard and placed a cube of sugar and spoonful of milk in the cup before adding the tea. He put the cup in its saucer and carried it to Mrs. Giddreaux. She thanked him with a smile and a nod.

“Where were you?” she said.

“We were upstairs.”

“Not now.” She took a sip of tea. “During the grand opening. The ribbon cutting.”

Luther went back to the sideboard and poured another cup of tea. “Mr. Giddreaux?”

Isaiah held up a hand. “Thank you, but no, I’m fine, son.”

Luther nodded and added a cube of sugar and sat across from Mrs. Giddreaux. “I got hung up. I’m sorry.”

She said, “That big policeman, oh, he was mad. It was as if he knew exactly where to look. And yet, he found nothing at all.”

“Strange,” Luther said.

Mrs. Giddreaux took another sip of tea. “How lucky for us.”

“I guess that’s how it turned out.”

“And now you’re off to Tulsa.”

“It’s where my wife and son are, ma’am. You know if there was any lesser reason, I’d never be going.”

She smiled and looked down at her knees. “Maybe you’ll write.”

That damn near broke Luther, damn near brought him to his knees.

“Ma’am, you surely know that I will write. You surely must know that.”

She gathered up his soul in her beautiful eyes. “You do that, my son. You do that.”

When she looked back at her knees, Luther met Isaiah’s gaze. He nodded at the great old man. “If I may impose …”

Mrs. Giddreaux looked back up.

“I still have a bit a business to clear up with those white friends I made.”

“What sort of business?”

“A proper good-bye,” Luther said. “If I could stay one or two more nights, it sure would make things easier.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “Are you patronizing an old woman, Luther?”

“Never, ma’am.”

She pointed a finger and wagged it slowly. “Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”

“Might could,” Luther said. “Depends if it got some of your roast chicken attached to it, ma’am.”

“Is that the trick?”

“I believe it is.”

Mrs. Giddreaux stood and smoothed her skirt. She turned toward the kitchen. “I have potatoes need peeling and beans need washing, young man. Don’t be tarrying.”

Luther followed her out of the room. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

It was sundown when the mobs returned to the streets. In some sections — South Boston and Charlestown — it was the same random mayhem, but in other areas, particularly Roxbury and the South End, it had developed a political tenor. When Andrew Peters heard about this, he had Horace Russell drive him over to Columbus Avenue. General Cole didn’t want him to leave without a military escort, but Peters convinced him he’d be fine. He’d been doing it all last night and it was a lot easier with one car than three.

Horace Russell stopped the car at Arlington and Columbus. The mob was a block farther down, and Peters stepped out of the car and walked half a block. Along the way he passed three barrels filled with pitch, upended torches sticking out of them. The sight of them — the sense they gave of the medieval — stoked his dread.

The signs were worse. Whereas the few he’d seen last night were mostly crude variations on either FUCK THE POLICE or FUCK THE SCABS, these new ones had been carefully prepared in red lettering as bright as fresh blood. Several were in Russian, but the rest were clear enough:

… and the one Mayor Andrew J. Peters liked least of all …

He hurried back to the car and told Horace Russell to drive straight to General Cole.

General Cole took the news with a knowing nod. “We’ve received reports that the mob in Scollay Square is also growing political. South Boston is already bursting at the seams. I don’t think they’ll be able to hold them back with forty policemen, as they did last night. I’m sending volunteers to both areas to see if they can quell the disturbance. Barring that they’re to report back with specifics about crowd size and the depth of the Bolshevik influence.”

“‘Burn, Boston, burn,’” Peters whispered.

“It won’t come to that, Mr. Mayor, I assure you. Why, the entire Harvard football team is now armed and standing by for orders. Those are fine young men. And I’m in constant contact with Major Sullivan and the State Guard Command. They’re just around the corner, sir, standing at the ready.”

Peters nodded, taking comfort in that, however small. Four full regiments plus a machine-gun unit and the motor and ambulance corps.

“I’ll check in with Major Sullivan now,” Peters said.

“Careful out there, Mr. Mayor. Dusk is near upon us.”

Peters left the office that just yesterday had been occupied by Edwin Curtis. He walked up the hill to the State House, and his heart leapt at the sight of them — my god, an army! Under the grand archway at the back of the building, the First Cavalry Troop paraded their horses back and forth in a steady stream, the clop of the hooves sounding like muffled gunshots against the cobblestones. On the front lawns facing Beacon Street, the Twelfth and Fifteenth Regiments stood at parade rest. Across the street, at the top of the Common, the Tenth and Eleventh stood at full attention. If Peters had never wanted it to come to this, he could nevertheless be forgiven for the swell of pride the sight of the Commonwealth’s might birthed in him. This was the antithesis of the mob. This was calculated force, beholden to the rule of law, capable of restraint and violence in equal measure. This was the fist beneath the velvet glove of democracy, and it was gorgeous.

He accepted their salutes as he passed through them and up the front steps of the State House. His body felt utterly weightless by the time he passed through the great marble hall and was directed to Major Sullivan in the back with the First Cavalry. Major Sullivan had set up his command post under the archway, and the telephones and field radios on the long table in front of him were ringing at a furious pace. Officers answered them and scribbled on paper and handed the papers to Major Sullivan, who took note of the mayor as he approached, and then went back to scanning his latest dispatch.

He saluted Andrew Peters. “Mr. Mayor, I’d say you’re just in time.”

“For?”

“The volunteer police General Cole sent to Scollay Square walked into an ambush, sir. There have been shots fired, several injuries reported.”

“Good Lord.”

Major Sullivan nodded. “They won’t last, sir. I’m not sure they’ll last five minutes in truth.”

Well then, here it was.

“Your men are ready?”

“You see them here before you, sir.”

“The cavalry?” Peters said.

“No quicker way to break up a crowd and establish dominance, Mr. Mayor.”

Peters was struck by the absurdity of it all — a nineteenth-century military action in twentieth-century America. Absurd but somehow apt.

Peters gave the order: “Save the volunteers, Major.”

“With pleasure, sir.” Major Sullivan snapped a salute and a young captain brought him his horse. Sullivan toed the stirrup without ever looking at it and swung gracefully atop his horse. The captain climbed onto the mount behind his and raised a bugle to his shoulder.

“First Cavalry Troop, on my command we will ride down into Scollay Square to the intersection of Cornhill and Sudbury. We will rescue the volunteer policemen and restore order. You are not to fire on the crowd unless you have no — I repeat, absolutely no—choice. Is that understood?”

A hard chorus of “Yes, sir!”

“Then, gentlemen, at-ten-tion!”

The horses swung into rows as sharp and straight as razors.

Peters thought, Wait a minute. Hold on. Slow down. Let’s think about this.

“Charge!”

The bugle blew and Major Sullivan’s mount burst out through the portico, as if fired from a gun. The rest of the cavalry followed suit and Mayor Peters found himself running alongside them. He felt like a child at his first parade, but this was better than any parade, and he was no longer a child but a leader of men, a man worthy of salutes given without irony.

He was almost crushed by the flank of a horse as they rounded the corner of the State House fence line, took a quick right and then streamed left onto Beacon at full gallop. The sound of all those galloping hooves was unlike anything he had ever heard, as if the heavens had unleashed boulders by the hundreds, by the thousands, and sudden white cracks and fissures appeared in the windows along lower Beacon, and Beacon Hill itself shuddered from the glorious fury of the beasts and their riders.

The breadth of them had passed him by the time they turned left on Cambridge Street and headed for Scollay Square, but Mayor Peters kept running, the sharp decline of Beacon giving him added speed, and when he broke out onto Cambridge, they appeared before him, a block ahead, sabers held aloft, that bugle trumpeting their arrival. And just beyond them, the mob. A vast pepper sea that spread in every direction.

How Andrew Peters wished he’d been born twice as fast, wished he’d been given wings, as he watched those majestic brown beasts and their magnificent riders breach the crowd! They parted that pepper sea as Andrew Peters continued to run and the pepper gained clarity, became heads and then faces. Sounds grew more distinct as well. Shouts, screams, some squealing that sounded nonhuman, the clang and thwang of metal, the first gunshot.

Followed by the second.

Followed by the third.

Andrew Peters reached Scollay Square in time to see a horse and rider fall through the storefront of a burned-out drugstore. A woman lay on the ground with blood seeping from her ears and a hoofprint in the center of her forehead. Sabers slashed at limbs. A man with blood all over his face pushed past his mayor. A volunteer policeman lay curled up on the sidewalk, clutching his side, weeping, most of his teeth gone. The horses spun in ferocious circles, their great legs stomping and clopping, their riders swinging those sabers.

A horse toppled, and its legs kicked out as it whinnied. People fell, people were kicked, people screamed. The horse kept kicking. The rider got a firm grip on the stirrup and the horse rose up in the crowd, its white eyes as large as eggs and wide with terror as it rose on its front legs and kicked out with its back legs and then toppled again with a squeal of confusion and abandonment.

Directly in front of Mayor Peters a volunteer policeman with a Springfield rifle and a face warped by fear leveled his weapon. Andrew Peters saw what was going to happen in the split second before it did, saw the other man in the black bowler with the stick, the man looking dazed, as if he’d taken a hit to the head, but still holding that stick, wavering. And Andrew Peters shouted, “No!”

But the bullet left the volunteer policeman’s rifle and entered the chest of the dazed man with the stick. It exited his body as well, punching its way out and imbedding itself in the shoulder of another man, who spun and hit the ground. The volunteer policeman and Andrew Peters both watched the man with the stick stand in place, bent over at the waist. He stood like that for a few seconds, and then he dropped the stick and pitched forward onto the ground. His leg jerked, and then he sighed forth a gout of black blood and went still.

Andrew Peters felt the whole horrible summer coalesce into this moment. All the dreams they’d had of peace, of a mutually beneficial solution, all the hard work and goodwill and good faith, all the hope …

The mayor of the great city of Boston lowered his head and wept.

Chapter thirty-eight

Thomas had held out hope that the work he and Crowley and their ragtag band had performed last night would have sent the proper message, but it wasn’t to be. They’d busted heads last night, they had. They’d gone in, fierce and fearless, and met the mob in Andrew Square, then met it again on West Broadway, and they’d cleared it. Two old warhorses and thirty-two bucks of varying experience and varying levels of fear. Thirty-four against thousands! When he’d finally arrived home, Thomas hadn’t been able to fall asleep for hours.

But now the mob was at it again. In twice the numbers. And unlike last night, they were organized. Bolsheviks and anarchists moved among them, handing out weapons and rhetoric in equal measure. The Gusties and a variety of in-state and out-of-state plug-uglies had formed squads, and they were hitting safes up and down Broadway. Mayhem, yes, but no longer mindless.

Thomas had received a call from the mayor himself asking him to refrain from action until the State Guard arrived. When Thomas asked when His Honor expected that help to come, the mayor told him there’d been some unforeseen trouble in Scollay Square but the troops would be arriving presently.

Presently.

West Broadway was anarchy. The citizens Thomas had sworn to protect were being victimized at this very moment. And the only possible saviors would arrive … presently.

Thomas ran a hand over his eyes and then lifted the receiver from the telephone cradle and asked the operator to patch him through to his home. Connor answered.

“All quiet?” Thomas asked.

“Here?” Connor said. “Sure. What’s it like on the streets?”

“Bad,” Thomas said. “Stay in.”

“You need another body? I can help, Dad.”

Thomas closed his eyes for a moment, wishing he loved this son more. “Another body won’t make a shred of difference now, Con’. We’re past that point.”

“Fucking Danny.”

“Con’,” Thomas said, “how many times do I have to tell you about my distaste for profanity? Does anything get through your thick skull on that score, son?”

“Sorry, Dad. Sorry.” Connor’s heavy breath moved through the phone lines. “I just … Danny caused this. Danny, Dad. The whole city’s tearing itself—”

“It isn’t all Danny’s fault. He’s one man.”

“Yeah,” Connor said, “but he was supposed to be family.”

That seared something in Thomas. The “supposed to be.” Was this what became of pride in your offspring? Was this the end of the road that began when you held your firstborn, fresh from your wife’s womb, and allowed yourself to dream of his future? Was this the price of loving blindly and too much?

“He is family,” Thomas said. “He’s blood, Con’.”

“To you maybe.”

Oh, Jesus. This was the price. It certainly was. Of love. Of family.

“Where’s your mother?” Thomas said.

“In bed.”

Not surprising — an ostrich always searched out the nearest pile of sand.

“Where’s Joe?”

“Bed, too.”

Thomas dropped his heels off the corner of the desk. “It’s nine o’clock.”

“Yeah, he’s been sick all day.”

“With what?”

“I dunno. A cold?”

Thomas shook his head at that. Joe was like Aiden — nothing knocked him down. He’d sooner poke out his own eyes before he took to his bed on a night like this.

“Go check on him.”

“What?”

“Con’, go check on him.”

“Fine, fine.”

Connor placed the receiver down and Thomas heard his footfalls in the hall and then a creak as he opened Joe’s bedroom door. Silence. Then Connor’s footfalls coming toward the phone, quicker, and Thomas spoke as soon as he heard him lift the receiver.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Jesus, Dad.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“About an hour ago. Look, he couldn’t have—”

“Find him,” Thomas said, surprised the words came out a cold hiss instead of a hot shout. “You understand me, Con’? Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Find your brother,” Thomas said. “Now.”

Back in June, the first time Joe had slipped out of the house on K Street, he’d fallen in with Teeny Watkins, a boy who’d attended first and second grades at Gate of Heaven with him before he dropped out to support his ma and three sisters. Teeny was a newsie, and Joe, during those three days on the streets, had dreamed of becoming one himself. The newsies ran in tight packs based on whichever newspaper they were affiliated with. Gang fights were common. If Teeny were to be believed, so was breaking-and-entering on behalf of adult gangs like the Gusties, since newsies tended to run small and could squeeze through windows adults couldn’t.

Running with the newsies, Joe saw a brighter world, a louder one. He became acquainted with lower Washington Street’s Newspaper Row and all its saloons and shouting matches. He ran with his newfound gang along the edges of Scollay Square and West Broadway, and imagined the day when he’d cross over those edges and become part of that night world.

On the third day, though, Teeny handed Joe a canister of gasoline and a pack of matches and told him to set fire to a Traveler newsstand on Dover Street. When Joe refused, Teeny didn’t argue. He just took the can and the matches back. Then he beat Joe in front of the other newsies, many of whom laid down bets. There was no fury to the beating, no emotion. Every time Joe looked into Teeny’s eyes as he brought another fist down onto Joe’s face, it was clear that Teeny could beat him to death if he chose. That, Joe realized, was the only outcome the other newsies were betting on. Whether Teeny did or not was an issue to which Teeny himself seemed indifferent.

It took him a few months to get over the coldness with which the beating had been delivered. The beating itself was almost forgettable by comparison. But now, knowing that the city was coming alive — and even coming apart — in a way it might not do again in his lifetime, any pains or lessons from that day receded and were replaced by his appetite for the night world and his possible place in it.

Once he left the house, he cut over two blocks and walked up H Street toward the noise. He’d heard it all last night from his bedroom — West Broadway making even more of a racket than usual. West Broadway was where the saloons were and the rows and rows of boardinghouses and the gambling dens and the boys playing shell games on the corners and whistling to the women who stood in the windows of rooms lit red or orange or dark mustard. East Broadway ran through City Point, the respectable part of South Boston, the section where Joe lived. But it was just a matter of crossing East Broadway and making one’s way down the hill until you reached the intersections of East and West Broadway and Dorchester Street. There you found the rest of Southie, the vast majority of it, and it wasn’t quiet and respectable and well tended. It jumped and exploded with laughter and quarrels and shouts and loud off-key singing. Straight up West Broadway until you hit the bridge, straight down Dorchester Street until you hit Andrew Square. Nobody had a car around these parts, much less a driver, like his father. No one owned a home; this was renters’ territory. And the only thing rarer than a car was a yard. Boston proper had Scollay Square to provide its release, but Southie had West Broadway. Not as grand, not as brightly lit, but just as dense with sailors and thieves and men getting a load on.

Now, at nine in the evening, it was like a carnival. Joe made his way down the middle of the street, where men drank openly from bottles and you had to be careful not to step on a blanket where dice were being thrown. A barker called, “Pretty ladies for every taste,” and upon seeing Joe: “All ages welcome! As long as you’re stiff and not a stiff, come on in! Pret-ty ladies lined up for your delight!” A drunk reeled into him and Joe fell to the street and the guy gave him a glance over his shoulder and continued staggering. Joe dusted himself off. He smelled smoke in the air as some men ran past him carrying a dresser with clothes piled high on top. Just about every third man brandished a rifle. A few others held shotguns. He walked another half block and sidestepped a fistfight between two women, and he started thinking maybe this wasn’t the best night to investigate West Broadway. McCory’s Department Store burned ahead of him, people standing around cheering the flame and smoke. Joe heard a loud crash and looked up to see a body falling from a second-story window. He stepped back and the body hit the street and broke into several sharp pieces and the crowd hooted. A mannequin. The ceramic head had cracked and one ear had broken into several shards and Joe looked up in time to see the second one sailing out of the same window. That one landed on its feet and snapped in half at the waist. Someone wrenched the head off the first mannequin and hurled it into the crowd.

Joe decided it was definitely time to head back. He turned and a small, bespectacled man with wet hair and brown teeth stooped in front of him, blocking his path. “You look like a sporting man, Young John. Are you a sporting man?”

“Name’s not John.”

“Who’s to know from names? That’s what I say. Are you a sporting man then? Are ye? Are ye?” The man put his hand on his shoulder. “Because, Young John, right down that alley there, we’ve some of the finest sports betting in the world.”

Joe shrugged off the hand. “Dogs?”

“Dogs, aye,” the man said. “We’ve got dogs fighting dogs. And cocks fighting cocks. And we’ve dogs fighting rats, ten at a time!”

Joe moved to his left and the man moved with him.

“Don’t like the rats?” The man haw-hawwed. “All the more reason to see ’em kilt.” He pointed. “Right down that alley.”

“Nah.” Joe tried to wave it away. “I don’t think—”

“That’s correct! Why think?” The man lurched forward and Joe could smell wine and egg on his breath. “Come now, Young John. Down yonder way.”

The man reached for his wrist and Joe saw an opening and darted past the guy. The guy grabbed at his shoulder, but Joe snapped away from his hand and kept walking fast. He looked back and the guy followed him.

“A dandy, are you, Young John? So it’s Lord John, is it? Excuse me all to heaven indeed! Are we not to your cultured taste, your lordship?”

The man trotted in front of him and swayed from side to side, as if made jaunty by the prospect of fresh sport.

“Come, Young John, let’s be friends.”

The man took another swipe at him and Joe jerked to his right and darted ahead again. He turned back long enough to raise his palms and show the man he wanted no trouble, and then he turned forward again and picked up the pace, hoping the guy would tire of the game and spend his energy on an easier mark.

“You’ve pretty hair, Young John. The color of some cats I’ve seen, it ’tis.”

Joe heard the man pick up sudden speed behind him, a mad scrabbling, and he hopped up onto the sidewalk and ducked low and ran through the skirts of two tall women smoking cigars who swatted at him and let loose high laughs. He looked back over his shoulder at them but they’d turned their attention to the brown-toothed barker who was still in pursuit.

“Ah, leave him alone, ya cretin.”

“Mind yourselves, ladies, or I’ll be back with me blade.”

The women laughed. “We’ve seen your blade, Rory, and, sure, it’s shameful small, it is.”

Joe broke back out into the middle of the street.

Rory scuttled up alongside him. “Can I shine your shoes, Lord? Can I turn down your bed?”

“Let him be, you ponce,” one of the women called, but Joe could tell by their voices that they’d lost interest. He swung his arms by his side, trying to pretend he didn’t notice Rory making ape sounds beside him, the man swinging his arms now, too. Joe kept his head turned forward, trying to appear like a boy with a firm destination as he headed deeper into the thickening mob.

Rory ran his hand gently along the side of Joe’s face and Joe punched him.

His fist caught the side of Rory’s head and the man blinked. Several men along the sidewalk laughed. Joe ran and the laughter followed them up the street.

“Can I be of service?” Rory called as he trotted behind him. “Can I help you with your griefs? They looks a might heavy for ye.”

He was gaining on him and Joe darted around an overturned wagon and through a group of men. He ran past two men with shotguns and through the doors of a saloon. He stepped to his left and watched the doors and took several gulps of air and then looked around at the men, many in their work shirts and suspenders, a majority with handlebar mustaches and black bowlers. They looked back at him. Somewhere in the rear of the saloon, beyond the crowd and the smoke, Joe heard grunts and moans and knew that he’d interrupted some kind of show back there, and he opened his mouth to tell them he was being chased. He caught the bartender’s eye as he did, and the bartender pointed across the bar at him and said, “Throw that fucking kid out of here.”

Two hands gripped his arms, and his feet left the floor and he sailed through the air and back through the doors. He cleared the sidewalk and landed on the street and bounced. He felt a burn in both knees and his right hand as he tried to come to a stop. And then he wasn’t bouncing anymore. Someone stepped over him and kept walking. He lay there nauseated and heard brown-toothed Rory say, “No, allow me, your lordship.”

Rory grasped Joe by his hair. Joe swatted at his arms and Rory tightened his grip.

He held Joe a few inches off the ground. Joe’s scalp screamed and Rory’s back teeth were black as he smiled. When he burped it smelled of wine and eggs again. “You’ve got trimmed nails and, sure, fine clothes, Young Lord John. You’re quite the picture.”

Joe said, “My father is—”

Rory squeezed Joe’s jaw in his hand. “You’ll be finding a new father in me, so ye might want to save your fucking energy, your lordship.”

He drew his hand back and Joe kicked him. He connected with Rory’s knee first and the man’s grip loosened in his hair and Joe got his whole body into the next kick and drove it into the man’s inner thigh. He’d been aiming for his groin but it hadn’t worked out. But the kick was sharp enough to make Rory hiss and wince and let go of his hair.

That’s when the straight razor came out.

Joe dropped to all fours and scrambled between Rory’s legs. Once he’d cleared them, he stayed that way, moving through the dense crowd on his hands and knees — between a pair of dark trousers and then a pair of tan ones, then two-toned spats followed by brown work boots caked with dried mud. He didn’t look back. He just kept crawling, feeling like a crab, scuttling left, then right, then left again, the pairs of legs growing denser and denser, the air carrying less and less oxygen as he crawled ever deeper into the heart of the mob.

At nine-fifteen, Thomas received a call from General Cole, the acting commissioner.

“Are you in contact with Captain Morton at the Sixth?” General Cole said.

“Constant contact, General.”

“How many men does he have at his command?”

“A hundred, sir. Mostly volunteers.”

“And you, Captain?”

“About the same, General.”

General Cole said, “We’re sending the Tenth Regiment of the State Guard to the Broadway Bridge. You and Captain Morton are to sweep the crowd up West Broadway toward the bridge. You understand, Captain?”

“Yes, General.”

“We’ll pin them down there. We’ll start making arrests and hauling them into trucks. That sight alone should disperse the majority of them.”

“I agree.”

“We’ll meet at the bridge at twenty-two hundred, Captain. You think that gives you enough time to push them toward my net?”

“I was just waiting on your orders, General.”

“Well, now you have them, Captain. See you soon.”

He hung up and Thomas rang Sergeant Eigen’s desk. When he answered, Thomas said, “Assemble the men immediately,” and hung up.

He called Captain Morton. “You ready, Vincent?”

“Ready and willing, Thomas.”

“We’ll send ’em your way.”

“Looking forward to it,” Morton said.

“See you at the bridge.”

“See you at the bridge.”

Thomas performed the same ritual he had the previous night, donning his holster, filling his pockets with shells, loading his Remington. Then he walked out of his office into the roll call room.

They were all assembled — his men, the Metro Park cops from last night, and sixty-six volunteers. These last gave him momentary pause. It wasn’t the aged war veterans he was worried about, it was the young pups, particularly the Harvard contingent. He didn’t like their eyes, the way they swam with the light of those on a lark, a fraternity prank. There were two sitting on a table in the back who kept whispering and chuckling as he explained their orders.

“… and when we enter West Broadway, we’ll be coming up on their flank. We will form a line stretching from one side of the street to the other and we will not break that line. We will push them west, always west, toward the bridge. Don’t get caught up trying to push every single body. Some will remain behind. As long as they pose no direct threat, leave them. Just keep pushing.”

One of the Harvard footballers nudged the other and they both guffawed.

Thomas stepped off the rostrum and continued talking as he worked his way through the men. “If you are hit with projectiles, ignore them. Just keep pushing. If we receive fire, I will give the order to fire back. Only me. You are not to return fire until you hear my order.”

The Harvard boys watched him come with bright smiles on their faces.

“When we reach D Street,” Thomas said, “we will be joined by the men of the Sixth Precinct. There we will form a pincer and funnel what’s left of the mob straight at the Broadway Bridge. At that point, we will leave no stragglers behind. Everyone comes along for the ride.”

He reached the Harvard boys. They raised their eyebrows at him. One was blond and blue-eyed and the other brown-haired and bespectacled, his forehead splattered with acne. Their friends sat along the back wall with them and watched to see what would happen.

Thomas asked the blond one, “What’s your name, son?”

“Chas Hudson, Cap’n.”

“And your friend?”

“Benjamin Lorne,” the brown-haired one said. “I’m right here.”

Thomas nodded at him and turned back to Chas. “You know what happens, son, when you don’t take a battle seriously?”

Chas rolled his eyes. “Guess you’ll be telling me, Cap’n.”

Thomas slapped Benjamin Lorne in the face so hard he fell off the table and his glasses flew into the back row. He stayed down there, on his knees, as blood dribbled from his mouth.

Chas opened his mouth but Thomas cut off anything he might have said by squeezing his hand over his jaw. “What happens, son, is that the man next to you usually gets hurt.” Thomas looked over at Chas’s Harvard buddies as Chas gurgled. “You are officers of the law tonight. Understood?”

He got eight nods in return.

He turned his attention back to Chas. “I don’t care who your family is, son. If you make a mistake tonight? I will shoot you in the heart.”

He pushed him back against the wall and let go of his chin.

Thomas turned back to the rest of the men. “Further questions?”

Everything went fine until they reached F Street. They were hit with eggs and they were hit with stones, but for the most part the mob moved steadily up West Broadway. When one didn’t, he was hit with a billy club and the message was received and the mob moved again. Several dropped their rifles to the sidewalk and the cops and volunteers scooped them up as they continued forward. After five blocks, they were carrying an extra rifle per man and Thomas had them stop long enough to remove the bullets. The crowd stopped as well and Thomas found several faces who might have been making designs on those rifles, so he ordered the men to smash them against the pavement. The sight of that got the crowd moving again, and moving smoothly, and Thomas began to feel the same confidence he’d felt last night when he’d swept Andrew Square with Crowley.

At F Street, however, they ran into the radicalized section — the sign holders, the rhetoric spouters, the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists. Several were fighters, and a melee broke out on the corner of F and Broadway as a dozen volunteers taking up the rear were outflanked and then set upon by the godless subversives. They used pipes mostly, but then Thomas spotted a heavily bearded fella raising a pistol and he drew his own revolver, took one step forward, and shot the man.

The slug hit him high in the shoulder and he spun and dropped. Thomas pointed his revolver at the man who’d been standing next to him as the rest of the Bolshies froze. Thomas looked at his men as they fanned out beside him and he said one word:

“Aim!”

The rifle barrels came up in one swift line, as if choreographed, and the Bolshies turned and ran for their lives. Several of the volunteers were cut and bleeding, but none critically, and Thomas gave them a minute to check themselves for more serious damage as Sergeant Eigen checked on the man Thomas had shot.

“He’ll live, Cap’.”

Thomas nodded. “Then leave him where he lies.”

From there they faced no further challenge as they walked the next two blocks and the crowd ran before them. The logjam started when they reached D Street, home of the Sixth Precinct. Captain Morton and his men had pushed from the sides and now the entire crowd was jammed and milling between D Street and A, just short of the Broadway Bridge. Thomas saw Morton himself on the north side of Broadway, and when their eyes met Thomas pointed to the south side and Morton nodded. Thomas and his men fanned out along the south side of the street while Morton’s men took the north and now they very much did push. They pushed hard. They formed a fence out of their rifles and used that steel and their own fury and fear to manhandle the entire herd forward, ever forward. For several blocks it was like trying to push a pride of lions through a mouse hole. Thomas lost track of how many times he was spat on or scratched and it became impossible to tell which fluids on his face and neck were which. He did find one reason to permit himself a small smile in the midst of it all, however, when he spotted the formerly smug Chas Hudson with a broken nose and an eye as black as a cobra.

The faces of the mob, however, did not elicit anything near to joy in him. His people, the faces nearest him as Irish as potatoes and drunken sentiment, all twisted into repulsive, barbaric masks of rage and self-pity. As if they’d a right to do this. As if this country owed them any more than it had handed Thomas when he stepped off the boat, which is to say nothing but a fresh chance. He wanted to push them straight back to Ireland, straight back to the loving arms of the British, back to their cold fields and their dank pubs and their toothless women. What had that gray country ever given them except melancholia and alcoholism and the dark humor of the habitually defeated? So they came here, one of the few cities in the world where their kind was given a fair shake. But did they act like Americans? Did they act with respect or gratitude? No. They acted like what they were — the niggers of Europe. How dare they? When this was over, it would take Thomas and good Irishmen like him another decade to undo all the damage this mob had done in two days. Damn you all, he thought as they continued to push them back. Damn you all for smearing our race yet again.

Just past A Street, he felt some give. Broadway widened here, opening into a basin where it met the Fort Point Channel. Just beyond was the Broadway Bridge, and Thomas’s heart fairly leapt to see the troops arrayed on the bridge and the trucks rolling off it into the square. He allowed himself his second smile of the evening, and that’s when someone shot Sergeant Eigen in the stomach. The sound of it hung in the air as Eigen’s face bore a look of surprise mixed with growing awareness. Then he fell to the street. Thomas and Lieutenant Stone reached him first. Another bullet hit a drainpipe just to their left and the men returned fire, a dozen rifles discharging at once as Thomas and Stone lifted Eigen off the ground and carried him toward the sidewalk.

That’s when he saw Joe. The boy ran along the north side of the street toward the bridge and Thomas made out the man chasing his son as well, a onetime pimp and barker named Rory Droon, a pervert and rapist, now chasing his son. Thomas got Eigen to the sidewalk and they lowered him so that his back was against a wall, and Eigen said, “Am I dying, Cap’?”

“No, but you’ll be in a fair sight of pain, son.” Thomas searched the crowd for his son. He couldn’t find Joe, but he saw Connor suddenly, streaking up the street toward the bridge, dodging those he could, bulling his way through others, and Thomas felt a flush of pride for his middle son that surprised him because he couldn’t remember the last time such a feeling had come upon him.

“Get him,” he whispered.

“What’s that, sir?” Stone said.

“Stay with Sergeant Eigen,” Thomas said. “Slow the bleeding.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I’ll be back,” Thomas said and headed into the mob.

The volleys of gunfire had whipped the crowd to a boil. Connor couldn’t tell where the bullets were coming from, just that they were coming, pinging off poles and brick and street signs. He wondered if this is how men had felt in the war, during a battle, this sense of complete chaos, of your own death flying past you in the air, ricocheting off something hard and coming back for a second pass. People ran every which way, banged into one another, snapped ankles, shoved and scratched and wailed in terror. A couple ahead of him fell down, either from a bullet or a rock or just because they entwined their legs and tripped, and Connor vaulted into the air and cleared them. As he came down he saw Joe up by the bridge, the dirty-looking man grabbing him by the hair. Connor sidestepped a guy swinging a pipe at no one in particular, then spun around a woman on her knees, and the dirty-looking guy was turning his way when Connor punched him full in the face. His momentum carried him forward so that he finished the punch by landing on the guy and dropping him to the street. He scrambled up and grabbed the guy by the throat and raised his fist again but the guy was out, out cold, a small pool of blood forming on the pavement where his head had landed. Connor stood and looked for Joe, saw the kid crumpled in a ball when Connor had managed to knock them both over. He went to his little brother and turned him over and Joe looked up at him with wide eyes.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Here.” Connor stooped and Joe wrapped his arms around his shoulders and Connor lifted him off the street.

“Fire at will!”

Connor spun, saw the State Guard troops coming off the bridge, their rifles extended. Rifles from the crowd pointed back. A collection of volunteer policemen, one with a black eye and broken nose, leveled their weapons as well. Everyone was pointing at everyone else, as if there were no sides, just targets.

“Close your eyes, Joe. Close your eyes.”

He pressed Joe’s head to his shoulder and all the rifles seemed to go off at once. The air exploded with white puffs from the muzzles. A sudden, high-pitched shriek. A member of the State Guard grabbing his neck. A bloody hand raised in the air. Connor ran for a car overturned at the base of the bridge with Joe in his arms as the crack of rifle fire erupted anew. Bullets sparked off the side of the car, the clang of them like the sound of heavy coins thrown into a metal bowl, and Connor pressed Joe’s face harder to his shoulder. A bullet hissed by on his right and hit a guy in the knee. The guy fell. Connor turned his head away. He’d almost reached the front of the car when the bullets hit the window. The glass slid through the night air like sleet or hail, translucent, a shower of silver rushing out of all that blackness.

Connor found himself on his back. He didn’t remember slipping. He was just suddenly on the ground. He could hear the ping of bullets grow less insistent, could hear the yells and moans and people shouting out names. He smelled cordite and smoke in the air and the faint odor of roasted meat for some reason. He heard Joe call his name and then shriek it, his voice wracked with horror and sadness. He reached out his hand and felt Joe’s close over it, but Joe still wouldn’t stop screaming.

Then his father’s voice, shushing Joe, cooing to him. “Joseph, Joseph, I’m here. Ssssh.”

“Dad?” Connor said.

“Connor,” his father said.

“Who turned out the lights?”

“Jesus,” his father whispered.

“I can’t see, Dad.”

“I know, son.”

“Why can’t I see?”

“We’re going to get you to a hospital, son. Immediately. I swear.”

“Dad?”

He felt his father’s hand on his chest. “Just lie still, son. Just lie still.”

Chapter thirty-nine

The next morning, the State Guard placed a machine gun on a tripod at the northern end of West Broadway in South Boston. They placed another at the intersection of West Broadway and G Street and a third at the intersection of Broadway and Dorchester Street. The Tenth Regiment patrolled the streets. The Eleventh Regiment manned the rooftops.

They repeated the procedure in Scollay Square and along Atlantic Avenue in the North End. General Cole blocked off access to any streets entering Scollay Square and set up a checkpoint on the Broadway Bridge. Anyone caught on the streets in question without a viable reason for being there was subject to immediate arrest.

The city remained quiet throughout the day, the streets empty.

Governor Coolidge held a press conference. While he expressed sympathy for the nine confirmed dead and the hundreds injured, he stated that it was the mob itself that was to blame. The mob and the policemen who had left their posts. The governor went on to state that while the mayor had attempted to shore up the city during the terrible crisis, it was clear he had been wholly unprepared for such an emergency. Therefore control from this point on would be assumed by the state and the governor himself. In that capacity, his first order of business was to reinstate Edwin Upton Curtis to his rightful place as police commissioner.

Curtis appeared by his side at the rostrum and announced that the police department of the great city of Boston, acting in concert with the State Guard, would brook no further rioting. “The rule of law will be respected or the consequences will be dire. This is not Russia. We will use every measure of force at our disposal to ensure democracy for our citizens. Anarchy ends today.”

A reporter from the Transcript stood and raised his hand. “Governor Coolidge, am I clear that it is your opinion that Mayor Peters is at fault for the past two nights’ chaos?”

Coolidge shook his head. “The mob is at fault. The policemen who committed gross dereliction of their sworn duties are at fault. Mayor Peters is not at fault. He was merely caught unawares and was thus, in the early stages of the riots, a bit ineffectual.”

“But, Governor,” the reporter said, “we’ve heard several reports that it was Mayor Peters who wished to call out the State Guard within an hour of the police walkout, and that you, sir, and Commissioner Curtis vetoed the idea.”

“Your information is incorrect,” Coolidge said.

“But, Governor—”

“Your information is incorrect,” Coolidge repeated. “This press conference is completed.”

Thomas Coughlin held his son’s hand while he wept. Connor didn’t make a sound, but the tears slid freely from the thick white bandages covering his eyes and rolled off his chin to dampen the collar of his hospital gown.

His mother stared out the window of Mass General, trembling, her eyes dry.

Joe sat in a chair on the other side of the bed. He hadn’t spoken a word since they’d lifted Connor into the ambulance last night.

Thomas touched Connor’s cheek. “It’s okay,” he whispered.

“How’s it okay?” Connor said. “I’m blind.”

“I know, I know, son. But we’ll get through this.”

Connor turned his head away and tried to remove his hand, but Thomas held fast to it.

“Con’,” Thomas said, hearing the helplessness in his own voice, “it’s a terrible blow. Of that there can be little doubt. But don’t give in to the sin of despair, son. It’s the worst sin of all. God will help you through this. He just asks for strength.”

“Strength?” Connor coughed a wet laugh. “I’m blind.”

At the window, Ellen blessed herself.

“Blind,” Connor whispered.

Thomas could think of nothing to say. Maybe this, of all things, was the true price of family — being unable to stop the pains of those you loved. Unable to suck it out of the blood, the heart, the head. You held them and named them and fed them and made your plans for them, never fully realizing that the world was always out there, waiting to apply its teeth.

Danny walked into the room and froze.

Thomas hadn’t thought it through, but he realized immediately what Danny saw in their eyes: They blamed him.

Well, of course they did. Who else was to blame?

Even Joe, who’d idolized Danny for so long, stared up at him with confusion and spite.

Thomas kept it simple. “Your brother was blinded last night.” He raised Connor’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “In the riots.”

“Dan?” Connor said. “That you?”

“It’s me, Con’.”

“I’m blind, Dan.”

“I know.”

“I don’t blame you, Dan. I don’t.”

Danny lowered his head and his shoulders shook. Joe looked away.

“I don’t,” Connor said again.

Ellen left the window and crossed the room to Danny. She placed a hand on his shoulder. Danny raised his head. Ellen looked in his eyes as Danny dropped his hands by his side and turned up the palms.

Ellen slapped him in the face.

Danny’s face crumpled and Ellen slapped him again.

“Get out,” she whispered. “Get out, you … you Bolshevik.” She pointed at Connor. “You did that. You. Get out.”

Danny looked toward Joe, but Joe looked away.

He looked at Thomas. Thomas met his eyes and then shook his head and turned his face from him.

That night, the State Guard shot four men in Jamaica Plain. One died. The Tenth Regiment cleared the dice players from the Boston Common, marching them up Tremont Street at bayonet point. A crowd gathered. Warning shots were fired. A man was shot through the chest trying to rescue a dice player. He succumbed to his wounds later that evening.

The rest of the city was quiet.

Danny spent the next two days marshaling support. He was assured in person that the Telephone & Telegraph Union was ready to walk off the job at a moment’s notice. The Bartenders Union assured him of the same, as did the United Hebrew Trade Unions, and the Carmen and Electrical Workers Unions. The firemen, however, would not agree to meet with him or return his calls.

I came here to say good-bye,” Luther said.

Nora stepped back from the door. “Come in, come in.”

Luther entered. “Danny around?”

“No. He’s at a meeting in Roxbury.”

Luther noticed she had her coat on. “You’re going there?”

“I am. I expect it might not go well.”

“Let me walk you then.”

Nora smiled. “I’d like that.”

On their way to the el, they got plenty of stares, this white woman and this black man strolling through the North End. Luther considered staying a step behind her, so he’d appear to be her valet or something similar, but then he remembered why he was going back to Tulsa in the first place, what he’d seen in that mob, and he kept abreast of her, his head high, his eyes clear and looking straight ahead.

“So you’re going back,” Nora said.

“Yeah. Got to. Miss my wife. Want to see my child.”

“It’ll be dangerous, though.”

“What isn’t these days?” Luther said.

She gave that a small smile. “You’ve a point.”

On the el, Luther felt his legs stiffen involuntarily when they crossed the trestle that had been hit during the molasses flood. It had long since been repaired and reinforced, but he doubted he’d ever feel safe crossing it.

What a year! If he lived a dozen lives, would he ever see another twelve months like these? He’d come to Boston for safety, but the thought of it now made him suppress a laugh — from Eddie McKenna to the May Day riots to the whole police force walking off the job, Boston had to be the least safe city he’d ever come across in his life. The Athens of America, my ass. Way these crazy Yankees had been acting since Luther arrived, he’d change the name to the Asylum of America.

He caught Nora smiling at him from the white section of the car and he tipped his hat to her and she gave him a mock salute in return. What a find she was. If Danny didn’t find a way to fuck it up, he’d grow old a very happy man with this woman by his side. Not that Danny seemed intent on fucking it up, just that he was a man after all, and no one knew better than Luther himself how completely a man could step on his own dick when what he thought he wanted contradicted what he knew he needed.

The el car rolled through a shell of a city, a ghost town of ash and glass pebbles. No one on the streets but the State Guard. All that rage of the last two days gone corked up and bottled. Machine guns could have that effect, Luther didn’t doubt it, but he wondered if there were more to it than just the show of power. Maybe in the end the need to postpone the truth — we are the mob — was stronger than the ecstasy of giving in to it. Maybe everyone just woke up this morning ashamed, tired, unable to face another pointless night. Maybe they looked at those machine guns and a sigh of relief left their hearts. Daddy was home now. They no longer had to fear he’d left them alone, left them for good.

They got off the el at Roxbury Crossing and walked toward Fay Hall.

Nora said, “How are the Giddreauxs taking your departure?”

Luther shrugged. “They understand. I think Yvette had taken a bit more of a shine to me than she’d counted on, so it’s hard, but they understand.”

“You’re leaving today?”

“Tomorrow,” Luther said.

“You’ll write.”

“Yes, ma’am. Ya’ll should think of coming for a visit.”

“I’ll mention it to himself. I don’t know what we’re going to do, Luther. I surely don’t.”

Luther looked over at her, at the minute quiver in her chin. “You don’t think they’ll get their jobs back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

At Fay Hall, they held a vote on whether to remain with the American Federation of Labor. The result was in favor, 1388 to 14. They held a second vote on whether to continue the strike. This was a bit more contentious. Men called out from the floor, asking Danny if the Central Labor Union would make right on their promise of a sympathy strike. Another cop mentioned he’d heard the firemen were waffling. They were pissed about all the false alarms during the riots, and the BFD had made a great show of advertising for volunteers to replace them. The turnout had been twice as large as expected.

Danny had left two messages with Ralph Raphelson’s office, asking him to come to Fay Hall, but he hadn’t heard back yet. He took the podium. “The Central Labor Union is still trying to pull together all their delegates. As soon as they do, they’ll vote. I’ve had no indication that they’ll vote any other way but than how they told us they expect to. Look, they’re killing us in the press. I understand. The riots hurt us.”

“They’re killing us from the pulpits, too,” Francis Leonard shouted. “You should hear what they’re saying about us in morning mass.”

Danny held up a hand. “I’ve heard, I’ve heard. But we can still win the day. We just have to hold together, stay strong in our resolve. The governor and the mayor still fear a sympathy strike, and we still have the power of the AFL behind us. We can still win.”

Danny wasn’t sure how much of his own words he believed, but he felt a sudden glow of hope when he noticed Nora and Luther enter the back of the hall. Nora gave him a wave and a bright smile and he smiled back.

Then as they moved to their right, Ralph Raphelson stepped into the space they’d vacated. He removed his hat and his eyes met Danny’s.

He shook his head.

Danny felt as if he’d been hit in the spine with a pipe and stabbed in the stomach with an ice-cold knife.

Raphelson put his hat back on and turned to go, but Danny wasn’t letting him off the hook, not now, not tonight.

“Gentlemen, please give a warm hand to Ralph Raphelson of the Boston Central Labor Union!”

Raphelson turned with a grimace on his face as the men turned, saw him, and broke into applause.

“Ralph,” Danny called with a wave of his arm, “come on up here and tell the men what the BCLU has planned.”

Raphelson came down the aisle with a sick smile plastered to his face and a stiff gait. He climbed the steps to the stage and shook Danny’s hand and whispered, “I’ll get you for this, Coughlin.”

“Yeah?” Danny gripped his hand tight, squeezing the bones, and smiled big. “I fucking hope you choke to death.”

He dropped the hand and walked to the back of the stage as Raphelson took the podium and Mark sidled up to Danny.

“He selling us out?”

“He already sold us.”

“It gets worse,” Mark said.

Danny turned, saw that Mark’s eyes were damp, the pockets beneath them dark.

“Jesus, how could it get worse?”

“This is a telegram Samuel Gompers sent to Governor Coolidge this morning. Coolidge released it to the press. Just read the circled part.”

Danny’s eyes scanned the page until he found the sentence circled in pencil:

While it is our belief that the Boston Police were poorly served and their rights as workingmen denied by both yourself and Police Commissioner Curtis, it has always been the position of the American Federation of Labor to discourage all government employees from striking.

The men were booing Raphelson now, most on their feet. Several chairs toppled.

Danny dropped the copy of the telegram to the floor of the stage. “We’re done.”

“There’s still hope, Dan.”

“For what?” Danny looked at him. “The American Federation of Labor and the Central Labor Union both just sold us down the river on the same day. Fucking hope?”

“We could still get our jobs back.”

Several men rushed the stage and Ralph Raphelson took a half dozen steps backward.

“They’ll never give us our jobs back,” Danny said. “Never.”

The el ride back to the North End was bad. Luther had never seen Danny in so dark a mood. It covered him like a cloak. He sat beside Luther and offered hard eyes to the other passengers who gave him a funny look. Nora sat beside him and rubbed his hand nervously, as if to calm him, but it was really to calm herself, Luther knew.

Luther had known Danny long enough to know you’d have to be insane to take the guy on in a fair fight. He was too big, too fearless, too impervious to pain. So he’d never be dumb enough to question Danny’s strength, but he’d never been close enough before to feel this capacity for violence that lived in the man like a second, deeper soul.

The other men on the car stopped giving them funny looks. Stopped giving them any looks at all. Danny just sat there, staring out at the rest of the car, never seeming to blink, those eyes of his gone dark, just waiting for an excuse to let the rest of him erupt.

They got off in the North End and walked up Hanover toward Prince Street. Night had come on while they rode the el, but the streets were near empty due to the State Guard presence. About halfway along Hanover, as they passed St. Leonard’s Church, someone called Danny’s name. It was a hoarse, weak voice. They turned and Nora let out a small yelp as a man stepped out of the shadows of St. Leonard’s with a hole in his coat that expelled smoke.

“Jesus, Steve,” Danny said and caught the man as he fell into his arms. “Nora, honey, can you find a guardsman, tell him a cop’s been shot?”

“I’m not a cop,” Steve said.

“You’re a cop, you’re a cop.”

He lowered Steve to the ground as Nora went running up the street.

“Steve, Steve.”

Steve opened his eyes as the smoke continued to flow from the hole in his chest. “All this time asking around? And I just ran into her. Turned into the alley between Stillman and Cooper? Just looked up and there she was. Tessa. Pop.”

His eyelids fluttered. Danny pulled up his shirt and tore off a length of it, wadded it up and pressed it to the hole.

Steve opened his eyes. “She’s gotta be … moving now, Dan. Right now.”

A guardsman’s whistle blew and Danny saw Nora running back down the street toward them. He turned to Luther. “Put your hand on this. Press hard.”

Luther followed his instructions, pressed the heel of his palm against the wadded-up shirt, watched it redden.

Danny stood.

“Wait! Where you going?”

“Get the person who did this. You tell the guardsmen it was a woman named Tessa Ficara. You got that name?”

“Yeah, yeah. Tessa Ficara.”

Danny ran up Prince Street.

He caught her coming down the fire escape. He was in the rear doorway of a haberdashery on the other side of the alley and she came out of a window on the third floor onto the fire escape and walked down to the landing below. She lifted the ladder until its hooks disengaged from the housing and then latched onto the iron again as she lowered it to the pavement. When she turned her body to begin the climb down, he drew his revolver and crossed the alley. When she reached the last rung and stepped to the pavement, he placed the gun to the side of her neck.

“Keep your hands on the ladder and do not turn around.”

“Officer Danny,” she said. She started to turn and he slapped the side of her face with his free hand.

“What did I say? Hands on the ladder and don’t turn around.”

“As you wish.”

He ran his hands through the pockets of her coat and then the folds of her clothing.

“You like that?” she said. “You like feeling me?”

“You want to get hit again?” he said.

“If you must hit,” she said, “hit harder.”

His hand bumped a hard bulge by her groin and he felt her body stiffen.

“I’ll assume you didn’t grow a dick, Tessa.”

He reached down her leg, then ran his hands up under her dress and chemise. He pulled the Derringer from the waistband of her underwear and pocketed it.

“Satisfied?” she said.

“Not by a fair sight.”

“What about your dick, Danny?” she said, the word coming out “deke,” as if she were trying it out for the first time. Although, from experience, he knew she wasn’t.

“Raise your right leg,” he said.

She complied. “Is it hard?”

She wore a gunmetal-lace boot with a Cuban heel and black velveteen top. He ran his hand up and around it.

“Now the other one.”

She lowered her right leg. As she raised the left, she bumped her ass back against him. “Oh, it is. Very hard.”

He found the knife in her left boot. It was small and thin but, he had little doubt, very sharp. He pulled it out with the crude scabbard attached and pocketed it beside the gun.

“Would you like me to lower my leg or do you want to fuck me where I stand?”

He could see his breath in the cold. “Fucking you ain’t in my plans tonight, bitch.”

He ran his hand up her body again and heard her take slow even breaths. Her hat was a broad-brimmed crepe sailor with a red ribbon across the brim tied off into a bow at the front. He removed it and stepped back from her and ran his hand over the trim. He found two razor blades tucked beneath the silk and he tossed them to the alley along with the hat.

“You dirtied my hat,” she said. “Poor, poor hat.”

He placed a hand on her back and removed all the pins from her hair until it spilled down her neck and back and then he threw the pins away and stepped back again.

“Turn around.”

“Yes, master.”

She turned and leaned back against the ladder and crossed her hands at the waist. She smiled and it made him want to slap her again.

“You think you will arrest me now?”

He produced a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them from his finger.

She nodded and the smile remained. “You are no longer a police officer, Danny. I know these things.”

“Citizen’s arrest,” he said.

“If you arrest me, I’ll hang myself.”

It was his turn to shrug. “Okay.”

“And the baby in my belly will die as well.”

He said, “Knocked up again, are we?”

“Sì.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide and dark as always. She ran a hand over her belly. “A life lives in me.”

“Uh-uh,” Danny said. “Try another one, honey.”

“I don’t have to. Bring me to jail and the jail doctor will confirm that I am pregnant. I promise you, I will hang myself. And a child will die in my womb.”

He locked the cuffs over her wrists and then yanked on them so that her body slammed into his and their faces almost touched.

“Don’t fucking play me, whore. You pulled it off once, but twice ain’t going to happen in your time on earth.”

“I know that,” she said, and he could taste her breath. “I am a revolutionary, Danny, and I—”

“You’re a fucking terrorist. A bomb maker.” He grabbed the cuff chain and pulled her close. “You just shot a guy who spent the last nine months looking for a job. He was of ‘the people.’ Just another working stiff trying to get by and you fucking shot him.”

“Ex-officer Danny,” she said and her tone was that of an elderly woman speaking to a child, “casualties are a part of war. Just ask my dead husband.”

The metal shot from between her hands and into his body. It bit his flesh and then hit bone and chiseled through that and his hip caught fire and the bolt of pain shot down through his thigh and reached his knee.

He pushed her back and she stumbled and looked at him with her hair in her face and her lips wet with spittle.

Danny glanced at the knife sticking out of his hip and then his leg gave way and he dropped to his ass in the alley and watched the blood sluice down his outer thigh. He raised his.45 and pointed it at her.

The pain came in bolts that shook his entire body. It was worse than anything he’d experienced.

“I’m carrying a child,” she said and took a step backward.

Danny took a bite from the air and sucked it through his teeth.

Tessa held out her hands and he shot her once in the chin and once between her breasts and she fell down in the alley and flopped like a fish. Her heels kicked the cobblestones, and then she tried to sit up, taking a loud gulp of the air as the blood spilled down her coat. Danny watched her eyes roll back in her head and then her head hit the alley and she was still. Lights came on in the windows.

He went to lay back and something punched him in the thigh. He heard the pistol report a half a second before the next bullet hit him high on the right side of his chest. He tried to lift his own pistol. He raised his head and saw a man standing on the fire escape. His pistol flashed and the bullet chunked into the cobblestones. Danny kept trying to raise his own pistol but his arm wouldn’t follow commands, and the next shot hit his left hand. The whole time, he couldn’t help thinking: Now who the fuck is this guy?

He rested on his elbows and let the gun fall from his right hand. He wished he could have died on any other day but this. This one had carried too much defeat with it, too much despair, and he would have liked to leave the world believing in something.

The man on the fire escape rested his elbows on the rail and took aim.

Danny closed his eyes.

He heard a scream, a bellow really, and wondered if it was his own. A clank of metal, a higher pitched scream. He opened his eyes and saw the man fall through the air, and his head made a loud pop against the cobblestones and his body folded in half.

Luther heard the first shot after he’d already passed the alley. He stood still on the sidewalk and heard nothing for almost a minute and was about to walk away when he heard the second one — a sharp pop followed immediately by another one. He jogged back to the alley. Some lights had come on and he could see two figures lying in the middle of the alley, one of them trying to raise a gun off the stone. Danny.

A man stood up on the fire escape. He wore a black bowler and pointed a gun down at Danny. Luther saw the brick lying by a trash can, thought it might be a rat at first even as he reached for it, but the rat didn’t move, and he closed his hand over it and came up with, yup, a brick.

When Danny lay back on his elbows, Luther saw that execution coming, could feel it in his chest, and he let loose the loudest yell he was capable of, a nonsensical “Aaaahhhh” that seemed to empty his heart and soul of its blood.

The man on the fire escape looked up and Luther already had his arm cocked. He could feel grass underfoot, the smell of a field in late August, the scent of leather and dirt and sweat, see the runner trying to take home, take home against his arm, trying to show him up like that? Luther’s feet left the alley, and his arm turned into a catapult. He saw a catcher’s mitt waiting, and the air sizzled when he unleashed the brick into it. That brick got up there in a goddamned hurry, too, like it had been pulled from the fire of its maker but for no other purpose. That brick had ambition.

Hit that son of a bitch right in the side of his silly hat. Crushed the hat and half his head. The guy lurched. The guy canted. He fell over the fire escape and tried to grab it, tried kicking at it, but there wasn’t no hope in that. He just fell. Fell straight down, screaming like a girl, and landed on his head.

Danny smiled. Blood pumping out of him like it was heading to put out a fire, and he fucking smiles!

“Twice you saved my life.”

“Sssh.”

Nora came running up the alley, her shoes clicking on the stones. She dropped to her knees over her husband.

“Compress, honey,” Danny said. “Your scarf. Forget the leg. The chest, the chest, the chest.”

She used her scarf on the left hole in his chest and Luther took off his jacket and applied it to the bigger hole in his leg. They knelt over him pressing all their weight into his chest.

“Danny, don’t leave me.”

“Not leaving,” Danny said. “Strong. Love you.”

Nora’s tears poured down into his face. “Yes, yes, you’re strong.”

“Luther.”

“Yeah?”

A siren bleated in the night, followed by another.

“Hell of a throw.”

“Sssh.”

“You should …” — Danny smiled and blood bubbled over his lips — “… be a baseball player or something.”