But men lay crumpled in the street and against walls as the reinforcements used their nightsticks on the few that weren’t brothers of the badge whether the bodies were moving or not. On the far fringes of the crowd, a small group of demonstrators, the last ones out apparently, were cut off by more reinforcements and more horses. Cops had cut heads and cut knees and holes that leaked from their shoulders and hands and thighs and swelling contusions and black eyes and broken arms and fat lips. Danny saw Mark Denton trying to pull himself to his feet, and he crossed to him and gave him his hand. Mark stood and applied weight to his right foot and winced.
“Broken?” Danny said.
“Twisted, I think.” Mark slung his arm around Danny’s shoulder and they walked to the loading dock on the other side of the street, Mark sucking oxygen from the air with a hiss.
“You sure?”
“Might be sprained,” Mark said. “Fuck, Dan, I lost my helmet.”
He had a cut along his hairline that had dried black and he gripped his ribs with his free arm. Danny leaned him against the loading dock and noticed two cops kneeling over Sergeant Francie Stoddard. One of them met his eyes and shook his head.
“What?” Danny said.
“He’s dead. He’s gone,” the cop said.
“He’s what?” Mark said. “No. How the fuck…?”
“He just grabbed his chest,” the cop said. “Right in the middle of it all. Just grabbed his chest and went all red and starting gasping. We got him over here, but…” The cop shrugged. “Fucking heart attack. You believe that? Here? In this?” The cop looked out at the street.
His partner still held Stoddard’s hand. “Fucking guy had less than a year till his thirty, he goes like this?” The cop was crying. “He goes like this, because of them?”
“Jesus Christ,” Mark whispered and touched the top of Stoddard’s shoe. They’d worked together five years at D-10 in Roxbury Crossing.
“They shot Welch in the thigh,” the first cop said. “Shot Armstrong in the hand. Fuckers were stabbing guys with ice picks?”
“There’s going to be some hell to pay,” Mark said.
“You goddamn got that right,” the crying cop said. “You can make goddamn fucking book on that.”
Danny looked away from Stoddard’s body. Ambulances rolled up Dudley Street. Across the square, a cop rose from the pavement on wobbly feet and wiped at the blood in his eyes and then tipped over again. Danny saw a cop empty a metal trash can on a prone Lett, then drop the can on the body for good measure. It was the cream-colored suit that got Danny moving. He walked toward them as the cop delivered a kick so hard it lifted his other foot off the ground.
Nathan Bishop’s face looked like a crushed plum. His teeth littered the ground near his chin. One ear was torn halfway off. The fingers of both hands pointed in all the wrong directions.
Danny put his hand on the shoulder of the cop. It was Henry Temple, a Special Squads goon.
“I think you got him,” Danny said.
Temple looked at Danny for a bit like he was searching for an apt response. Then he shrugged and walked off.
A pair of paramedics were passing and Danny said, “We got one here.”
One of the paramedics grimaced. “He ain’t wearing a badge? He’ll be lucky we get to him by sundown.” They walked off.
Nathan Bishop opened his left eye. It was startlingly white in the ruin of his face.
Danny opened his mouth. He wanted to say something. He wanted to say, I’m sorry. He wanted to say, Forgive me. Instead, he said nothing.
Nathan’s lips were sectioned into strips, but behind them spread a bitter smile.
“My name’s Nathan Bishop,” he slurred. “What’s yours, eh?”
He closed his eye again, and Danny lowered his head.
Luther had an hour for lunch, and he hustled back across the Dover Street Bridge and over to the Giddreauxs’ house on St. Botolph, which, these days, was the operating headquarters of the Boston NAACP. Mrs. Giddreaux worked there with a dozen other women pretty much every day, and it was in the very basement of the house on St. Botolph where the Crisis was printed and then mailed out to the rest of the country. Luther came home to an empty house, as he knew he would—on fine days, the girls all took their lunch in Union Park a few blocks away, and this was the finest day, thus far, of an often unforgiving spring. He let himself into Mrs. Giddreaux’s office. He sat behind her desk. He opened her drawer. He lifted the ledger out and placed it on the desk and that’s where it was sitting half an hour later when Mrs. Giddreaux came back through the door.
She hung up her coat and her scarf. “Luther, honey, what’re you doing in here?”
Luther tapped the ledger with his finger. “I don’t give this list to a policeman, he’s gonna have my wife arrested, have our baby taken from her soon as it’s born.”
Mrs. Giddreaux’s smile froze and then vanished. “Excuse me?”
Luther repeated himself.
Mrs. Giddreaux sat in the chair across from him. “Tell me all of it.”
Luther told her about everything except the vault he’d built under the kitchen floorboards on Shawmut Avenue. Until he knew what McKenna intended it for, he wasn’t going to speak of it. As he talked, Mrs. Giddreaux’s kind, old face lost its kindness and lost its age, too. It grew as smooth and unmoving as a headstone.
When he finished, she said, “You’ve never given him a thing he could use against us? Never once played the rat?”
Luther stared back at her, his mouth open.
“Answer my question, Luther. This is no child’s game.”
“No,” Luther said. “I never gave him anything.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Luther didn’t say anything.
“He wouldn’t just get you under his thumb and not dirty you up a little bit in his filth with him. The police don’t work that way. He would have sent you in with something to plant here or at the new building, something illegal.”
Luther shook his head.
She looked back at him, her breaths coming soft and measured.
Luther shook his head again.
“Luther.”
Luther told her about the vault.
She looked at him with such pained confusion Luther wanted to jump out the window. “Why didn’t you just come to us the moment he approached you?”
Luther said, “I don’t know.”
She shook her head. “Don’t you trust anyone, son? Anyone?”
Luther kept his mouth shut.
Mrs. Giddreaux reached for the phone on her desk and tapped the cradle once, tucked her hair behind her ear as she placed the receiver to her ear. “Edna? Girl, send every typist you’ve got up to the main floor. Get them all in the parlor and the dining room. You hear? Right now. And tell them to carry those typewriters with them. Oh, and Edna? You have phone directories down there, don’t you? No, I can’t use Boston. You have Philadelphia? Good. Send that up, too.”
She hung up and tapped her fingers lightly off her lips. When she looked at Luther again, the anger was gone from her eyes, replaced by the shine of excitement. Then her face darkened again and those fingers stopped tapping.
“What?” Luther said.
“No matter what you bring him tonight, he may just have you arrested or shot.”
“Why would he do that?” Luther said.
She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Because he can. Let’s start there.” She shook her head slightly. “He’ll do it, Luther, because you got him the list. That’s not something you’ll be able to tell someone about from prison.”
“What if I don’t bring it?”
“Oh, then he’ll just kill you,” she said mildly. “Shoot you in the back. No, you’ll have to bring it.” She sighed.
Luther was still back at the “kill you” part.
“I’m going to have to call some people. Dr. Du Bois for starters.” Her fingers tapped her chin now. “Legal Department in New York, that’s for sure. L
egal Department in Tulsa, too.”
“Tulsa?”
She glanced back at him, as if just recalling he was still in the room. “If this blows up, Luther, and some policeman comes to arrest your wife? We’ll have counsel waiting for her on the steps of the county jail before she even arrives. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?”
Luther said, “I…I…I—”
“You, you, you,” Mrs. Giddreaux said and then gave him a small, disappointed smile. “Luther, your heart is good. You never sold your people out and you sat here and waited for me when a lesser man would have been off down the street with that ledger. And, son, I do appreciate it. But you’re still a boy, Luther. A child. If you trusted us four months ago, you wouldn’t be in this mess, and neither would we.” She reached across the desk and patted his hand. “It’s okay. It is. Every bear was once a cub.”
She led him out of the office into the living room as a dozen women entered carrying typewriters, their wrists straining from the weight. Half were colored women, the other half were white, college girls mostly, from money mostly, too, and those ones glanced at Luther with a bit of fear and a bit of something else he didn’t care to think too much about.
“Girls, half stay in here, half of you get in that room yonder. Who has the phone directory?”
One of the girls had it on top of her typewriter and tilted her arms so Mrs. Giddreaux could see it.
“Take it with you, Carol.”
“What we gone do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?”
Mrs. Giddreaux looked up sharply at the girl. “What are we, Regina, going to do with it, Regina.”
“What are we going to do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?” Regina stammered.
Mrs. Giddreaux smiled at Luther. “We’re going to tear it into twelfths, girls, and then we’re going to type it all over again.”
The cops who were able to walk on their own made their way back to the Oh-Nine and were attended to by paramedics in the basement. Before he’d left the Dudley Opera House, Danny had watched the ambulance drivers toss Nathan Bishop and five other damaged radicals into the back of their wagon like fish tossed on ice, before slamming the doors shut and driving off. In the basement, Danny’s shoulder was cleaned and stitched and he was given a bag of ice for his eye, though it was too late to do much about the swelling. Half a dozen men, who’d thought they were okay, weren’t, and they were helped back up the stairs and out onto the street where ambulances took them to Mass General. A team from Department Supply showed up with fresh uniforms that were handed out to the men after Captain Vance reminded them with some embarrassment that the cost of the uniforms, as always, would come out of the men’s pay, but he’d see what he could do about getting a onetime reduction on the cost, given the circumstances.
When they were all assembled in the basement, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna took the podium. He bore a gash on his neck, treated and cleaned but unbandaged, and his white collar was black with blood. When he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, the men leaned forward in their folding chairs.
“We lost one of our own today, men. A true policeman, a copper’s copper. We are lesser men now, and the world is a lesser place as well.” He lowered his head for a moment. “Today they took one of our own, but they didn’t take our honor.” He stared out at them, his eyes gone cold and clear. “They did not take our courage. They did not take our manhood. They just took one of our brothers.
“We’re going back into their territory tonight. Captain Vance and I will lead you. We are looking, specifically, for four men—Louis Fraina, Wychek Olafski, Pyotr Rastorov, and Luigi Broncona. We have photographs of Fraina and Olafski and sketches of the other two. But we won’t stop with them. We will subdue, without quarter, our common enemy. You all know what that enemy looks like. They wear a uniform as obvious as ours. Ours is blue, theirs is of coarse cloth and scraggly beard and watch cap. And they have the fanatics’ fire in their eyes. We are going to go out into those streets and we will take them back. Of this,” he said, and his eyes found the room, “there is no doubt. There is only resolve.” He gripped the podium, his eyes rolling slowly from left to right. “Tonight, my brothers, there is no rank. No difference between a first-year patrolman and a twenty-year gold shield. Because tonight we are all united in the red of our blood and the blue of our professional cloth. Make no mistake, we are soldiers. And as the poet wrote, ‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’ Let that be your benediction, men. Let that be your clarion call.”
He stepped from the podium and snapped a salute and the men rose as one and returned the salute. Danny compared it with this morning’s chaotic mix of fury and fear and found none of that. In accordance with McKenna’s wishes, the men had turned Spartan, utile, so fused to their sense of duty that they were indistinguishable from it.
CHAPTER twenty-seven
When the first detail of officers showed up at the door of The Revolutionary Age, Louis Fraina was waiting for them with two lawyers in attendance. He was cuffed and led out to the wagon on Humboldt Avenue and his lawyers rode with him.
The evening papers had hit the streets by this time and outrage at the morning attack on police had been growing throughout the dinner hour while the streetlamps grew yellow. Danny and a detail of nineteen other officers were dropped at the corner of Warren and St. James and told by Stan Billups, the sergeant in charge, to spread out, taking the streets in four-man squads. Danny went a few blocks south along Warren with Matt March and Bill Hardy and a guy from the One-Two he’d never met before named Dan Jeffries, Jeffries inexplicably excited that he’d met another guy with the same first name, as if this were a favorable omen. Along the sidewalk stood a half dozen men in their work clothes, men in tweed caps and frayed suspenders, dockworkers probably, who’d apparently read the evening papers and been drinking while they had.
“Give those Bolshie’s hell,” one of them called, and the rest of them cheered. The silence that followed was awkward, the silence of strangers introduced at a party neither had much wished to attend, and then three men walked out of a coffee shop a few doors down. Two wore spectacles and carried books. All three wore the coarse clothing of Slavic immigrants. Danny saw it happening before it actually did:
One of the Slavic men looked over his shoulder. Two of the men on the sidewalk pointed. Matt March called, “Hey, you three!”
That was all it took.
The three men ran, and the dockworkers broke off in pursuit, and Hardy and Jeffries ran after them. A half block down the Slavs were tackled to the pavement.
Hardy and Jeffries reached the pile and Hardy pulled one of the dockworkers back and then his nightstick caught the glow of the streetlamp as he swung it down on the head of one of the Slavs.
Danny said, “Hey!” but Matt March caught him by the arm.
“Dan, wait.”
“What?”
March gave him a level gaze. “This is for Stoddard.”
Danny pulled his arm free. “We don’t know they’re Bolsheviks.”
“We don’t know they’re not.” March twirled his nightstick and smiled at Danny.
Danny shook his head and walked up the street.
March called, “You’re taking the narrow view, Officer.”
By the time he reached the dockworkers, they were already turning away. Two of the victims crawled along the street while the third lay on the cobblestones, his hair black with blood, his broken wrist cradled against his chest.
“Jesus,” Danny said.
“Oops,” Hardy said.
“Hell you guys doing? Get an ambulance.”
“Fuck him,” Jeffries said and spit on the guy. “Fuck his friends, too. You want an ambulance? You find a call box and ask for one yourself.”
Up the street, Sergeant Billups appeared. He talked to March, met Danny’s eyes and then walked up the street toward him. The dock-workers had disappeared. Shouts and breaking glass echoed from a block or two over.
&nbs
p; Billups looked at the man on the ground, then at Danny. “Problem, Dan?”
“Just want an ambulance for the guy,” Danny said.
Billups gave the man another glance. “He looks fine to me, Officer.”
“He ain’t.”
Billups stood over the man. “You hurt, sweetheart?”
The man said nothing, just held his broken wrist tighter against his chest.
Billups ground his heel into the man’s ankle. His victim writhed and moaned through cracked teeth. Billups said, “Can’t hear you, Boris. What’s that?”
Danny reached for Billups’s arm and Billups slapped his hand away.
A bone cracked and the man let out a high sigh of disbelief.
“All better now, sweetie?” Billups took his foot off the man’s ankle. The man rolled over and gasped into the cobblestones. Billups put his arm around Danny and walked him a few feet away.
“Look, Sarge, I understand. We’re all looking to knock some heads. Me, too. But the right heads, don’t you think? We don’t even—”
“I heard you were seeking aid and comfort for the enemy this afternoon, too, Dan. So listen,” Billups said with a smile, “you might be Tommy Coughlin’s kid and that gets you some passes, okay? But if you keep acting like a pinko cocksucker? Tommy Coughlin’s kid or no, I’ll take it fucking personal.” He tapped his nightstick lightly off Danny’s tunic. “I’m giving you a direct order—get back up that street and hurt some subversive assholes, or else get out of my sight.”
The Given Day Page 44
