More shouts and cheers and Dominick gave up trying to impose order and started rushing around to refill drinks.
Boisterous toasts were made to comrades in Russia and Germany and Greece, to Debs, Haywood, Joe Hill, to the people, the great united working peoples of the world!
As they whipped themselves into a preening frenzy, Babe reached for his coat, but Larkin blocked the chair as he hoisted his drink and shouted another toast. Ruth looked at their faces, sheened with sweat and purpose and maybe something beyond purpose, something he couldn’t quite name. Larkin turned his hip to the right and Babe saw an opening, could see the edges of his coat and he started reaching for it again as Jack shouted, “Down with capitalism! Down with the oligarchies!” and Babe got his hand into the fur, but Larkin inadvertently bumped his arm and Babe sighed and started to try again.
Then the six guys walked in off the street. They were dressed in suits, and maybe on any other given day, they’d have seemed respectable types. But today, they reeked of alcohol and anger. Babe knew with one look at their eyes that the shit was going to hit the fan so fast the only hope would be to duck.
Connor Coughlin was in no fucking mood for subversives today. In truth he was in no fucking mood in general, but particularly not for subversives. They’d just had their heads handed to them in court. A nine-month investigation, over two hundred depositions, a six-week trial, all so they could deport an avowed Galleanist named Vittorio Scalone, who’d spoken to anyone within earshot of blowing up the State House during a meeting of the Senate.
The judge, however, didn’t think that was enough to deport a man. He’d stared down from his bench at District Attorney Silas Pendergast, Assistant District Attorney Connor Coughlin, Assistant District Attorney Peter Wald, and the six ADAs and four police detectives in the rows behind them and said, “While the issue of whether the state has the right to pursue deportation measures at a county level is, in some minds, debatable, that is not the issue before this court.” He’d removed his glasses and stared coldly at Connor’s boss. “As much as District Attorney Pendergast may have tried to make it so. No, the issue is whether the defendant committed any treasonous act whatsoever. And I see no evidence that he did any more than make idle threats while under the influence of alcohol.” He’d turned and faced Scalone. “Which, under the Espionage Act, is still a serious crime, young man. For which I sentence you to two years at the Charlestown Penitentiary, six months time served.”
A year and a half. For treason. On the courthouse steps, Silas Pendergast had given all his young ADAs a look of such withering disappointment that Connor knew they’d all be sent back to petty crimes and would not see the likes of this type of case for eons. They’d wandered the city, deflated, popping into bar after bar until they’d stumbled into the Castle Square Hotel and walked in on this. This…shit.
All the talking stopped when they were noticed. They were met with nervous, patronizing smiles, and Connor and Pete Wald went up to the bar and ordered a bottle and five glasses. The bartender spread the bottle and the glasses on the bar, and still no one spoke. Connor loved it—the fat silence that ballooned in the air before a fight. It was a unique silence, a silence with a ticking heartbeat. Their brother ADAs joined them at the bar rail and filled their glasses. A chair scraped. Pete raised his glass and looked around at the faces in the bar and said, “To the Attorney General of these United States.”
“Hear! Hear!” Connor shouted, and they threw back their drinks and refilled them.
“To deportation of undesirables!” Connor said, and the other men joined in chorus.
“To the death of Vlad Lenin!” Harry Block shouted.
They joined him as the other crowd of men started booing and hooting.
A tall guy with dark hair and picture-show looks was suddenly standing beside Connor.
“Hi,” he said.
“Fuck off,” Connor said and threw back his drink as the other ADAs laughed.
“Let’s all be reasonable here,” the man said. “Let’s talk this out. Hey? You might be surprised how many times our views intersect.”
Connor kept his eyes on the bar top. “Uh-huh.”
“We all want the same thing,” the pretty boy said, and patted Connor’s shoulder.
Connor waited for the man to remove his hand.
He poured himself another drink and turned to face the man. He thought of the judge. Of the treasonous Vittorio Scalone walking out of court with a smirk in his eyes. He thought of trying to explain his frustration and feelings of injustice to Nora, and how that could go either way. She might be sympathetic. She might be distant, indistinct. You could never predict. She seemed to love him sometimes, but other times she looked at him as if he were Joe, worthy only of a pat on the head and a dry kiss good night on the cheek. He could see her eyes now—unreadable. Unreachable. Never quite true. Never quite seeing him, really seeing him. Or anyone for that matter. Something always held in reserve. Except, of course, for when she turned those eyes on…
Danny.
The realization came suddenly, but at the same time it had lived in him for so long, he couldn’t believe he’d just faced it. His stomach shriveled and the backs of his eyeballs felt as if a razor scraped across them.
He turned with a smile to face the tall pretty boy and emptied his shot glass into his fine black hair and then butted him in the face.
As soon as the mick with the pale hair and matching freckles poured his drink over Jack’s head and drove his forehead into his face, Babe tried grabbing his coat off the chair and making a run for it. He knew as well as anyone, though, that the first rule of a bar fight was to hit the biggest guy first, and that happened to be him. So it wasn’t any surprise when a stool hit the back of his head and two large arms wrapped over his shoulders and two legs folded over his hips. Babe dropped his coat and spun with the guy on his back and took another stool to his midsection from a guy who looked at him funny and said, “Shit. You look like Babe Ruth.”
That caused the guy on his back to loosen his grip, and Ruth surged for the bar and then pulled up short just before he hit it and the guy flew off his back and over the bar and hit the bottles behind the cash register with a great crash.
Babe punched the guy nearest him, realizing only too late but with complete satisfaction that it was the mousy prick, Gene, and Gene went spinning backward on his heels, flailing his hands as he fell over a chair and dropped to his ass on the floor. There might have been ten Bolsheviks in the room, and several of them were of good size, but the other guys had a rage on their side the Bolshies couldn’t touch. Babe saw the freckled one drop Larkin with a single punch to the center of his face and then step right over him and catch another with a jab to the neck. He suddenly remembered the only piece of advice his father had ever given him: Never go toe to toe with a mick in a bar fight.
Another Bolshie took a running leap at Babe from the top of the bar, and Babe ducked him the way he’d duck a tag, and the Bolshie landed on a tabletop that quivered for just a second before collapsing under the weight.
“You are!” someone called, and he turned to see the jake who’d hit him with the stool, a smear of blood on the guy’s mouth. “You’re Babe Fucking Ruth.”
“I get that all the time,” Babe said. He punched the guy in the head, grabbed his coat off the floor, and ran out of the bar.
WORKING CLASS
CHAPTER thirteen
In the late autumn of 1918, Danny Coughlin stopped walking a beat, grew a thick beard, and was reborn as Daniel Sante, a veteran of the 1916 Thomson Lead Miners Strike in western Pennsylvania. The real Daniel Sante had been close to Danny’s height and had the same dark hair. He’d also left behind no family members when he’d been conscripted to fight in the Great War. Shortly after his arrival in Belgium, however, he’d come down with the grippe and died in a field hospital without ever firing a shot.
Of the miners in that ’16 strike, five had been jailed for life when they’d been tied, how
ever circumstantially, to a bomb that had exploded in the home of Thomson Iron & Lead’s president, E. James McLeish. McLeish had been taking his morning bath when his houseman carried in the mail. The houseman tripped crossing the threshold and juggled a cardboard package wrapped in plain brown paper. His left arm was later discovered in the dining room; the rest of him remained in the foyer. An additional fifty strikers were jailed on shorter sentences or beaten so badly by police and Pinkertons that they wouldn’t be traveling anywhere for several years, and the rest had met the fate of the average striker in the Steel Belt—they lost their jobs and drifted over the border into Ohio in hopes of hiring on for companies that hadn’t seen the blackball list of Thomson Iron & Lead.
It was a good story to establish Danny’s credentials in the workers-of-the-world revolution because no well-known labor organizations—not even the fast-moving Wobblies—had been involved. It had been organized by the miners themselves with such speed it probably surprised them. By the time the Wobblies did arrive, the bomb had already exploded and the beatings had commenced. Nothing left to do but visit the men in the hospital while the company hired fresh recruits from the morning cattle calls.
So Danny’s cover as Daniel Sante was expected to hold up fine under the scrutiny of the various radical movements he encountered. And it did. Not a single person, as far as he could tell, had questioned it. The problem was that even if they believed it, his story still didn’t make him stand out.
He went to meetings and wasn’t noticed. He went to the bars afterward and was left alone. When he tried to strike up a conversation, he was met with polite agreement of anything he said and just as politely turned away from. He’d rented rooms in a building in Roxbury, and there, during the day, he brushed up on his radical periodicals—The Revolutionary Age, Cronaca Sovversiva, Proletariat, and The Worker. He reread Marx & Engels, Reed & Larkin, and speeches by Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Trotsky, Lenin, and Galleani himself until he could recite most of it verbatim. Mondays and Wednesdays brought another meeting of the Roxbury Letts followed by a boozy gathering at the Sowbelly Saloon. He spent his nights with them and his mornings with a curl-up-and-cry-for-your-momma hangover, nothing about the Letts being frivolous, including their drinking. Bunch of Sergeis and Borises and Josefs, with the occasional Peter or Pyotr thrown in, the Letts raged through the night with vodka and slogans and wooden buckets of warm beer. Slamming the steins on scarred tables and quoting Marx, quoting Engels, quoting Lenin and Emma Goldman and screeching about the rights of the workingman, all the while treating the barmaid like shit.
They brayed about Debs, whinnied about Big Bill Haywood, thumped their shot glasses to the tables and pledged retribution for the tarred-and-feathered Wobblies in Tulsa, even though the tarring and feathering had taken place two years ago and it wasn’t like any of them were going to go wipe it off. They tugged their watch caps and huffed their cigarettes and railed against Wilson, Palmer, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They crowed about Jack Reed and Jim Larkin and the fall of the house of Nicholas II.
Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.
Danny wondered if his hangovers came from the booze or the bullshit. Christ, the Bolshies blabbed until your eyes crossed. Until you dreamed in the harsh chop of Russian consonants and the nasal drag of Latvian vowels. Two nights a week with them and he’d only seen Louis Fraina once, when the man gave a speech and then vanished under heavy security.
He’d crisscrossed the state, looking for Nathan Bishop. At job fairs, in seditionist bars, at Marxist fund-raisers. He’d gone to union meetings, radical gatherings, and get-togethers of utopists so pie-eyed their ideas were an insult to adulthood. He noted the names of the speakers and faded into the background but always introduced himself as “Daniel Sante,” so that the person whose hand he shook would respond in kind—“Andy Thurston” as opposed to just “Andy,” “Comrade Gahn” as opposed to “Phil.” When the opportunity presented itself, he stole a page or two of the sign-in sheets. If cars were parked outside the meeting sites, he copied down the license numbers.
City meetings were held in bowling alleys, pool halls, afternoon boxing clubs, saloons, and cafés. On the South Shore, the groups met in tents, dance halls, or fairgrounds abandoned until summer. On the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley, the preference was for rail yards and tanneries, down by water that boiled with runoff and left a copper froth clinging to the shoreline. In the Berkshires, orchards.
If you went to one meeting, you heard about others. The fishermen in Gloucester spoke of solidarity for their brothers in New Bedford, the Communists in Roxbury for their comrades in Lynn. He never heard anyone discuss bombs or specific plans to overthrow the government. They spoke in vague generalizations. Loud, boastful, as ineffectual as a willful child’s. The same held for talk of corporate sabotage. They spoke of May Day, but only in terms of other cities and other cells. The comrades in New York would shake the city to its foundation. The comrades in Pittsburgh would light the first match to ignite the revolution.
Anarchists’ meetings were usually held on the North Shore and were sparsely attended. Those who used the megaphone spoke dryly, often reading aloud in broken English from the latest tract by Galleani or Tommasino DiPeppe or the jailed Leone Scribano, whose musings were smuggled out of a prison south of Milan. No one shouted or spoke with much emotion or zeal, which made them unsettling. Danny quickly got the sense that they knew he was not of them—too tall, too well fed, too many teeth.
After one meeting in the rear of a cemetery in Gloucester, three men broke away from the crowd to follow him. They walked slow enough not to close the distance and fast enough to not let it widen. They didn’t seem to care that he noticed. At one point, one of them called out in Italian. He wanted to know if Danny had been circumcised.
Danny skirted the edge of the cemetery and crossed a stretch of bone white dunes at the back of a limestone mill. The men, about thirty yards back now, began to whistle sharply through their teeth. “Aww, honey,” it sounded like one of them was calling. “Aww, honey.”
The limestone dunes recalled dreams Danny’d had, ones he’d forgotten about until this moment. Dreams in which he hopelessly crossed vast moonlit deserts with no idea how he’d gotten there, no idea how he’d ever find his way home. And weighing down on him all the heavier with every step was the growing fear that home no longer existed. That his family and everyone he knew was long dead. And only he survived to wander forsaken lands. He climbed the shortest of the dunes, scrabbling and clawing up it in a winter quiet.
“Aww, honey.”
He reached the top of the dune. On the other side was an ink sky. Below it, a few fences with open gates.
He reached a street of disgorged cobblestone where he came upon a pest house. The sign above the door identified it as the Cape Ann Sanatorium, and he opened the door and walked in. He hurried past a nurse at the admitting desk who called after him. She called after him a second time.
He reached a stairwell and looked back down the hall and saw the three men frozen outside, one of them pointing up at the sign. No doubt they’d lost family members to something that waited on the upper floors—TB, smallpox, polio, cholera. In their awkward gesticulating Danny saw that none would dare enter. He found a rear door and let himself out.
The night was moonless, the air so raw it found his gums. He ran full-out back across the white gravel dunes and the cemetery. He found his car where he’d left it by the seawall. He sat in it and fingered the button in his pocket. His thumb ran over the smooth surface and he flashed on Nora swinging the bear at him in the oceanfront room, the pillows scattered all over the floor, her eyes lit with a pale fire. He closed his eyes and he could smell her. He drove back to the city with a windshield grimed by salt and his own fear drying into his scalp.
One morning, he waited for Eddie McKenna and drank cups of bitter black coffee in a café off Harrison Avenue with a checkered tile floor and a dusty ceiling fan
that clicked with each revolution. A knife sharpener bumped his cart along the cobblestones outside the window, and his display blades swung from their strings and caught the sun. Darts of light slashed Danny’s pupils and the walls of the café. He turned in his booth and flicked open his watch and got it to stop jumping in his hand long enough to realize McKenna was late, though that wasn’t surprising, and then he took another glance around the café to see if any faces were paying too much or too little attention to him. When he was satisfied it was just the normal collection of small businessmen and colored porters and Statler Building secretaries, he went back to his coffee, near certain that even with a hangover, he could spot a tail.
McKenna filled the doorway with his oversize body and obstinate optimism, that almost beatific sense of purpose that Danny had seen in him all his life, since Eddie’d been a hundred pounds lighter and would drop by to see his father when the Coughlins lived in the North End, always with sticks of licorice for Danny and Connor. Even then, when he’d been just a flatfoot working the Charlestown waterfront with saloons that were judged the city’s bloodiest and a rat population so prodigious the typhus and polio rates were triple those of any other district, the glow around the man had been just as prominent. Part of department lore was that Eddie McKenna had been told early in his career that he’d never work undercover because of his sheer presence. The chief at the time had told him, “You’re the only guy I know who enters a room five minutes before he gets there.”
He hung his coat and slid into the booth across from Danny. He caught the waitress’s eye and mouthed “coffee” to her.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he said to Danny. “You smell like the Armenian who ate the drunken goat.”
Danny shrugged and drank some more coffee.
“And then puked it back up on yourself,” McKenna said.
The Given Day Page 23
