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The Given Day

Page 32

by Dennis Lehane


  “Then they’re fortunate.”

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

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

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

  Fraina raised himself from his haunches. “Go.”

  “No, Comrade.”

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

  “One last time,” Fraina said. “Go.”

  “I can’t, Comrade. I—”

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

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

  Danny stood.

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

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

  “You’re wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Danny smiled back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Without fear of reprisal?” Danny said.

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

  “Then certainly,” Mark Denton said.

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

  Danny and Mark nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

  “I am done.”

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

  Danny gave him a look that cut him off.

  “Think they would have killed you?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ours is not to reason why.”

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

  McKenna shrugged.

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

  “There are no harmless Reds.”

  “—what the fuck was the point?”

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

  “What?” Danny said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No.”

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

  “Change hurts.”

  “That’s your answer?”

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

  “It isn’t.”

  “It’s got to.”

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

  CHAPTER nineteen

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

  “Hmm?”

  She gave him those pale eyes of hers, the sparkle of them like a flickering match. “You heard what I said. Have you a girl somewhere?”

  Luther shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

  She laughed.

  “What?”

  “Sure, you’re lying.”

  “Uh? What makes you say that?”

  “I can hear it in your voice, I can.”

  “Hear what?”

  She gave him a throaty laugh. “Love.”

  “Just ’cause I love someone don’t mean she’s mine.”

  “Now that’s the truest thing you’ve said all week. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean…” She trailed off and went back to humming softly as she peeled the potatoes, the humming a habit of hers Luther was fairly certain she was unaware of.

  Luther used the flat of the knife to push the chopped celery off the cutting board and into the pot. He sidestepped Nora to pull some carrots from the colander in the sink and took them back down the counter with him, chopped off their tops before lining them up and slicing them four at a time.

  “She pretty?” Nora asked.

  “She’s pretty,” Luther said.

  “Tall? Short?”

  “She kinda small,” Luther said. “Like you.”

  “I’m small, am I?” She gave Luther a look over her shoulder, one hand holding the peeler, and Luther, as he had before, got the sense of the volcanic from her in the most innocent of moments. He didn’t know too many other white women and no Irishwomen, but he’d long had the feeling that Nora was a woman worth treading very carefully around.

  “You ain’t big,” he said.

  She looked over at him for a long time. “We’ve been acquainted for months, Mr. Laurence, and it occurred to me at the factory today that I know next to nothing, I do, about you.”

  Luther chuckled. “Pot calling the kettle black if ever I did hear it.”

  “You’ve some meaning you’re keeping to yourself over there?”

  “Me?” Luther shook his head. “I know you’re from Ireland but not where exactly.”

  “Do you know Ireland?”

  “Not a whit.”

  “Then what difference would it make?”

  “I know you came here five years ago. I know you are courting Mr. Connor but don’t seem to think about it much. I—”

  “Excuse me, boy?”

  Luther had discovered that when the Irish said “boy” to a colored man it didn’t mean what it meant when a white American said it. He chuckled again. “Hit a nerve there, I did, lass?”

  Nora laughed. She held the back of her wet hand to her lips, the peeler sticking out. “Do that again.”

  “What?”

  “The brogue, the brogue.”

  “Ah, sure, I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  She leaned against the side of the sink and stared at him. “That is Eddie McKenna’s voice, right down to the timbre itself, it ’tis.”

  Luther shrugged. “Not bad, uh?”

  Nora’s face sobered. “Don’t ever let him hear you do that.”

  “You think I’m out my mind?”

  She placed the peeler on the counter. “You miss her. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I miss her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Luther shook his head. “I’d just as soon hold on to that for the moment, Miss O’Shea.”

  Nora wiped her hands on her apron. “What’re you running from, Luther?”

  “What’re you?”

  She smiled and her eyes sparkled again but this time from the wet in them. “Danny.”

  He nodded. “I seen that. Something else, though, too. Something further back.”

  She turned back to the sink, lifted out the pot filled with water and potatoes. She carried it to the sink. “Ah, we’re an interesting pair, Mr. Laurence. Are we not? All our intuition used for others, never ourselves.”

  “Lotta good it does us, then,” Luther said.

  She said that?” Danny said from the phone in his rooming house. “She was running from me?”

  “She did.” Luther sat at the phone table in the Giddreauxs’ foyer.

  “She say it like she was tired of running?”

  “No,” Luther said. “She said it like she was right used to it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No. Thanks, really. Eddie come at you yet?”

  “He let me know he’s on his way. Not how or what yet, though.”

  “Okay. Well, when he does…”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “Nora?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think she’s too much woman for you.”

  Danny’s laugh was a booming thing. Could make you feel like a bomb went off at your feet. “You do, uh?”

  “Just an opinion.”

  “’Night, Luther.”

  “’Night, Danny.”

  One of Nora’s secrets was that she smoked. Luther had caught her at it early in his time at the Coughlin house, and it had since become their habit to sneak out for one together while Mrs. Ellen Coughlin prepared herself for dinner in the bathroom but long before Mr. Connor or Captain Coughlin had returned from work.

  One of those times, on a high-sun-deep-chill afternoon, Luther asked her about Danny again.

  “What of him?”

  “You said you were running from him.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was sober?”

  “In the kitchen that time.”

  “Ah.” She shrugged and exhaled at the same time, her cigarette held up in front of her face. “Well, maybe he ran from me.”

  “Oh?”

  Her eyes flashed, that danger you sensed in her getting closer to the surface. “You want to know something about your friend Aiden? Something you’d never guess?”

&n
bsp; Luther knew it was one of those times silence was your best friend.

  Nora blew out another stream of smoke, this one coming out fast and bitter. “He seems very much the rebel, yeah? Very independent and free-thinking, he does, yeah?” She shook her head, took another hard drag off her cigarette. “He’s not. In the end, he’s not a’tall.” She looked at Luther, a smile forcing its way onto her face. “In the end, he couldn’t live with my past, that past you’re so curious about. He wanted to be, I believe the word was, ‘respectable.’ And I, sure, I couldn’t give him that.”

  “But Mr. Connor, he don’t strike me as the type who—”

  She shook her head repeatedly. “Mr. Connor knows nothing of my past. Only Danny. And look how the knowledge tossed us in the fire.” She gave him another tight smile and stubbed out her cigarette with her toe. She lifted the dead butt off the frozen porch and placed it in the pocket of her apron. “Are we done with the questions for the day, Mr. Laurence?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s her name?” she said.

  He met her gaze. “Lila.”

  “Lila,” she said, her voice softening. “A fine name, that.”

  Luther and Clayton Tomes were doing structural demolition in the Shawmut Avenue building on a Saturday so cold they could see their breath. Even so, the demo was such hard work—crowbar and sledgehammer work—that within the first hour they’d stripped down to their undershirts.

  Close to noon, they took a break and ate the sandwiches Mrs. Giddreaux had prepared for them and drank a couple beers.

  “After this,” Clayton said, “we—what?—patch up that sub flooring?”

  Luther nodded and lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke in a long, weary exhale. “Next week, week after, we can run the electrical up back of them walls, maybe get around to some of them pipes you so excited about.”

 

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