“I know what it is. Where would I get the mailing list?”
“Well, Isaiah Giddreaux must have access to it. There must be a copy of it somewhere in that nigger-bourgeoisie palace you call home. Find it.”
“And if I build your vault and find your mailing list?”
“Don’t adopt the tone of someone who has options, Luther.”
“Fine. What do you want me to put in this vault?” Luther asked.
“You keep asking questions?” McKenna draped his arm over Luther’s shoulders. “Maybe it’ll be you.”
Leaving another ineffectual BSC meeting, Danny was exhausted as he headed for the el stop at Roxbury Crossing, and Steve Coyle fell in beside him as Danny knew he would. Steve was still coming to meetings, still making people wish he’d go away, still talking about grander and grander fool-ambitions. Danny had to report for duty in four hours and wished only to lay his head to his pillow and sleep for a day or so.
“She’s still here,” Steve said as they walked up the stairs to the el.
“Who?”
“Tessa Ficara,” Steve said. “Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten her.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” Danny said, and it came out too sharp.
“I’ve been talking to people,” Steve said quickly. “People who owe me from when I worked the streets.”
Danny wondered just who these people could be. Cops were always under the misguided impression that people felt gratitude or indebtedness toward them when nothing could be further from the truth. Unless you were saving their lives or their wallets, people resented cops. They did not want you around.
“Talking to people is a bit dangerous,” he said. “In the North End particularly.”
“I told you,” Steve said, “my sources owe me. They trust me. Anyway, she’s not in the North End. She’s over here in Roxbury.”
The train entered the station with screaming brakes, and they boarded it and took seats on the empty car. “Roxbury, uh?”
“Yeah. Somewhere between Columbus and Warren, and she’s working with Galleani himself on something big.”
“Something bigger than the landmass between Columbus and Warren?”
“Look,” Steve said as they burst from a tunnel and the lights of the city suddenly dipped below them as the track rose, “this one guy told me he’ll get me an exact address for fifty bucks.”
“Fifty bucks?”
“Why do you keep repeating what I say?”
Danny held up a hand. “I’m tired. Sorry. Steve, I don’t have fifty bucks.”
“I know, I know.”
“That’s over two weeks’ pay.”
“I said I know. Jesus.”
“I could lay my hands on three. Maybe four?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, whatever you can do. I mean, we want to get this bitch, right?”
Truth was, ever since he’d shot Federico, Danny hadn’t given Tessa a sole thought. He couldn’t explain why that was, just that it was.
“If we don’t get her,” he said, “someone else will, Steve. She’s a federal problem. You understand.”
“I’ll be careful. Don’t you worry.”
That wasn’t the point, but Danny’d grown used to Steve missing the point lately. He closed his eyes, head back against the window, as the el car bumped and rattled along.
“You think you can get me the four bucks soon?” Steve asked.
Danny kept his eyes closed because he feared Steve would see the contempt in them if he opened them. He kept them closed and nodded once.
At Batterymarch station, he declined Steve’s offer of a drink, and they went their separate ways. By the time Danny reached Salem Street, he was starting to see spots. He could picture his bed, the white sheets, the cool pillow….
“And how’ve you been keeping then, Danny?”
Nora crossed the street toward him, stepping between a horse-drawn wagon and a sputtering tin lizzy that chucked great bursts of ink-colored smoke from its tailpipe. When she reached the curb, he stopped and turned fully toward her. Her eyes were false and bright and she wore a pale gray blouse he’d always liked and a blue skirt that left her ankles exposed. Her coat looked thin, even for the warming air, and her cheekbones were too pronounced. Her eyes sat back in her head.
“Nora.”
She held out a hand to him in a manner he found comically formal and he shook it as if it were a man’s.
“So?” she said, still working the brightness into her eyes.
“So?” Danny said.
“How’ve you been keeping?” she said a second time.
“I’ve been fair,” he said. “You?”
“Tip-top,” she said.
“Swell news.”
“Aye.”
Even at eight in the evening, the North End sidewalks were thick with people. Danny, tired of being jostled, took Nora by the elbow and led her to a café that was nearly empty. They took a seat by the small window that overlooked the street.
She removed her coat as the proprietor came out of the back, tying his apron on, and caught Danny’s eye.
“Due caffè, per favore.”
“Sì, signore. Venire a destra in su.”
“Grazie.”
Nora gave him a hesitant smile. “I forgot how much pleasure that gave me.”
“What’s that?”
“Your Italian. The sound of it, yeah?” She looked around the café and then out at the street. “You seem at home here, Danny.”
“It is home.” Danny suppressed a yawn. “Always has been.”
“And now how about that molasses flood?” She removed her hat and placed it on a chair. She smoothed her hair. “They’re saying it was definitely the company’s fault?”
Danny nodded. “Looks to be the case.”
“The stench is awful still.”
It was. Every brick and gutter and cobblestone crack in the North End held some residual evidence of the flood. The warmer it got, the worse it smelled. Insects and rodents had tripled in number, and the disease rate among children erupted.
The proprietor returned from the back and placed their coffees in front of them. “Qui andate, signore, signora.”
“Grazie così tanto, signore.”
“Siete benvenuti. Siete per avere così bello fortunato una moglie, signore.” The man clapped his hands and gave them a broad smile and went back behind the counter.
“What did he say?” Nora said.
“He said it was a nice night out.” Danny stirred a lump of sugar into his coffee. “What brings you here?”
“I was out for a walk.”
“Long walk,” he said.
She reached for the cup of sugar between them. “How would you know how long a walk it is? That would mean you know where I live.”
He placed his pack of Murads on the table. Christ, he was fucking exhausted. “Let’s not.”
“What?”
“Do this back-and-forth.”
She added two lumps to her own coffee and followed it with cream. “How’s Joe?”
“He’s fine,” Danny said, wondering if he was. It had been so long since he’d been by the house. Work kept him away mostly, meetings at the social club, but something more, too, something he didn’t want to put his finger on.
She sipped her coffee and stared across the table with her too-happy face and her sunken eyes. “I half thought you’d have paid me a visit by now.”
“Really?”
She nodded, her face beginning to soften from its cast of false gaiety.
“Why would I do that, Nora?”
Her face grew gay again, constricted. “Oh, I don’t know. I just hoped, I guess.”
“Hoped.” He nodded. “What’s your son’s name by the way?”
She played with her spoon, ran her fingers over the checkered tablecloth. “His name’s Gabriel,” she said softly, “and he’s not my son. I told you that.”
“You told me a lot of things,” Danny said. “And you never
mentioned this son who’s not a son until Quentin Finn brought it up for you.”
She raised her eyes and they were no longer bright, nor were they angry or wounded. She seemed to have reached a place beyond expectation.
“I don’t know whose child Gabriel is. He was simply there the day Quentin brought me to the hovel he calls a home. Gabriel was about eight then, and a wolf would have been better tamed. A mindless, heartless child, our Gabriel. Quentin is a lesser creature among men, of that you’ve seen, but Gabriel? Sure now the child was molded from devil’s clay. He’d crouch for hours by the hearth, watching the fire, as if the flames had voice, and then he’d leave the house without a word and blind a goat. That was Gabriel at nine. Would you like me to tell you what he was like at twelve?”
Danny didn’t want to know anything more about Gabriel or Quentin or Nora’s past. Her sullied, embarrassing (and that was it, wasn’t it?) past. She was tainted now, a woman he could never acknowledge as his and look the rest of the world in the eye.
Nora sipped some more coffee and looked at him and he could feel it all dying between them. They were both lost, he realized, both floating away toward new lives that had nothing to do with one another. They would pass each other one day in a crowd and each would pretend not to have seen the other.
She put on her coat, not a word spoken between them, but both understanding what had transpired. She lifted her hat off the chair. The hat was as threadbare as the coat, and he noticed that her collarbone pressed up hard against her flesh.
He looked down at the table. “You need money?”
“What?” Her whisper was high-pitched, squeaky.
He raised his head. Her eyes had filled. Her lips were clamped tightly against her teeth and she shook her head softly.
“Do you—”
“You didn’t say that,” she said. “You didn’t. You couldn’t have.”
“I just meant—”
“You…Danny? My God, you didn’t.”
He reached for her, but she stepped back. She continued shaking her head at him and then she rushed out of the café and into the crowded streets.
He let her go. He let her go. He’d told his father after he’d beaten Quentin Finn that he was ready to grow up now. And that was the truth. He was tired of bucking against the way things were. Curtis had taught him the futility of that in a single afternoon. The world was built and maintained by men like his father and his cronies, and Danny looked out the window at the streets of the North End and decided it was, most times, a good world. It seemed to work in spite of itself. Let other men fight the small and bitter battles against the hardness of it. He was done. Nora, with her lies and sordid history, was just another foolish child’s fantasy. She would go off and lie to some other man, and maybe it would be a rich man and she’d live out her lies until they faded and were replaced by a matron’s respectability.
Danny would find a woman without a past. A woman fit to be seen in public with him. It was a good world. He would be worthy of it. A grown-up, a citizen.
His fingers searched his pocket for the button, but it wasn’t there. For a moment, he was seized with a panic so severe it seemed to demand physical action of him. He straightened in his chair and set his feet, as if preparing to lunge. Then he recalled seeing the button this morning amid some change scattered atop his dresser. So it was there. Safe. He sat back and sipped his coffee, though it had gone cold.
On April 29, in the Baltimore distribution annex of the U.S. Post Office, a postal inspector noticed fluid leaking from a brown cardboard package addressed to Judge Wilfred Enniston of the Fifth District U.S. Appellate Court. When closer inspection of the package revealed that the fluid had burned a hole in the corner of the box, the inspector notified Baltimore police, who dispatched their bomb squad and contacted the Justice Department.
By the end of the evening, authorities discovered thirty-four bombs. They were in packages addressed to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, John Rockefeller, and thirty-one others. All thirty-four targets worked in either industry or in government agencies whose policies affected immigration standards.
On the same evening in Boston, Louis Fraina and the Lettish Workingman’s Society applied for a parade permit to march from the Dudley Square Opera House to Franklin Park in recognition of May Day.
The application for a permit was denied.
RED SUMMER
CHAPTER twenty-six
May Day, Luther had breakfast at Solomon’s Diner before he went to work at the Coughlins’. He left at five-thirty and got as far as Columbus Square before Lieutenant McKenna’s black Hudson detached itself from a curb across the street and did a slow U-turn in front of him. He didn’t feel surprised. He didn’t feel alarmed. He didn’t feel much of anything really.
Luther had read the Standard at the Solomon’s counter, his eyes immediately drawn to the headline—“Reds Plot May Day Assassinations.” He ate his eggs and read about the thirty-four bombs discovered in the U.S. mail. The list of targets was posted in full on the second page of the paper, and Luther, no fan of white judges or white bureaucrats, still felt ice chips flow through his blood. This was followed by a jolt of patriotic fury, the likes of which he’d never suspected could live in his soul for a country that had never treated his people with any welcome or justice. And yet he pictured these Reds, most of them aliens with accents as thick as their mustaches, willing to do violence and wreckage to his country, and he wanted to join any mob that was going to smash them through the teeth, wanted to say to someone, anyone: Just give me a rifle.
According to the paper, the Reds were planning a day of national revolt, and the thirty-four bombs that had been intercepted suggested a hundred more that could be out there primed to explode. In the past week, leaflets had been pasted to lamp poles across the city, all of which bore the same words:
Go ahead. Deport us. You senile fossils ruling the United States will see red! The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire. We will dynamite you!
In yesterday’s Traveler, even before news of the thirty-four bombs leaked out, an article had listed some of the recent, inflammatory comments of American subversives, including Jack Reed’s call for “the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism through a proletarian dictatorship” and Emma Goldman’s anticonscription speech last year, in which she’d urged all workers to “Follow Russia’s lead.”
Follow Russia’s lead? Luther thought: You love Russia so much, fucking move there. And take your bombs and your onion-soup breath with you. For a few, strangely joyous hours, Luther didn’t feel like a colored man, didn’t even feel there was such a thing as color, only one thing above all others: He was an American.
That changed, of course, as soon as he saw McKenna. The large man stepped out of his Hudson and smiled. He held up a copy of the Standard and said, “You seen it?”
“I seen it,” Luther said.
“We’re about to have a very serious day ahead of us, Luther.” He slapped the newspaper off Luther’s chest a couple of times. “Where’s my mailing list?”
“My people ain’t Reds,” Luther said.
“Oh, they’re your people now, uh?”
Shit, Luther wanted to say, they always were.
“You build my vault?” McKenna said, almost singing the words.
“Working on it.”
McKenna nodded. “You wouldn’t be lying now?”
Luther shook his head.
“Where’s my fucking list?”
“It’s in a safe.”
McKenna said, “All I asked of you is that you get me one simple list. Why has that been so difficult?”
Luther shrugged. “I don’t know how to bust a safe.”
McKenna nodded, as if that were perfectly reasonable. “You’ll bring it to me after your shift at the Coughlins’. Outside Costello’s. It’s on the waterfront. Six o’clock.”
Luther said, “I don�
��t know how I’m going to do that. I can’t bust a safe.”
In reality, there was no safe. Mrs. Giddreaux kept the mailing list in her desk drawer. Unlocked.
McKenna tapped the paper lightly off his thigh, as if giving it some thought. “You need to be inspired, I see. That’s okay, Luther. All creative men need a muse.”
Luther had no idea what he was on about now, but he didn’t like his tone—airy, confident.
McKenna draped his arm across Luther’s shoulder. “Congratulations.”
“On?”
That lit a happy fire in McKenna’s face. “Your nuptials. I understand you were married last fall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a woman named Lila Waters, late of Columbus, Ohio. A grand institution, marriage.”
Luther said nothing, though he was sure the hate showed in his eyes. First the Deacon, now Lieutenant Eddie McKenna of the BPD—it seemed no matter where he went the Lord saw fit to place demons in his path.
“Funny thing is, when I started sniffing around back in Columbus, I found that your bride has a warrant out for her arrest.”
Luther laughed.
“You find that funny?”
Luther smiled. “If you knew my wife, McKenna, you’d be laughing, too.”
“I’m sure I would, Luther.” McKenna nodded several times. “Problem is, this warrant is very real. Seems your wife and a boy by the name of Jefferson Reese—that ring a bell?—seems they were stealing from their employers, family by the name of Hammond? Apparently, they’d been doing it for years by the time your beloved took off to Tulsa. But Mr. Reese, he got himself arrested with some silver frames and some petty cash, and he pinned the whole thing on your wife. Apparently he was under the impression that a partner in his enterprise made the difference between hard time and soft time. They slapped the hard charge on him anyway, and he’s in prison now, but the charge is still pending against your wife. Pregnant wife, the way I hear it. So she’s sitting there on, let me see if I remember, Seventeen Elwood Street in Tulsa, and I doubt she’s moving around all that much, what with the loaf in her oven.” McKenna smiled and patted Luther’s face. “Ever see the kind of midwives they hire in a county lockup?”
The Given Day Page 42
