Danny didn’t say anything. He looked at Luther through his one good eye and Luther looked back. Then he came off the lamp pole and reached out his arm. Luther stepped under it and they walked the rest of the way to the clinic.
CHAPTER twenty-eight
Danny stayed in the clinic overnight. He barely remembered Luther leaving. He did remember him putting a sheaf of paper on Danny’s bedside table.
“Tried to give that to your uncle. He never showed up for the meet.”
“He was pretty busy today.”
“Yeah, well, you make sure he gets it? Maybe find a way to get him off me like you said you would once?”
“Sure.” Danny held out his hand and Luther shook it, and Danny floated off to a black-and-white world where everyone was covered in bomb debris.
At one point he woke to a colored doctor sitting by his bed. The doctor, a young man with the gentle air and slim fingers of a concert pianist, confirmed that he’d broken seven of his ribs and the others were badly sprained. One of those broken ribs had nicked a blood vessel and they’d had to cut Danny open to repair it. This explained the blood he’d vomited and made it highly likely that Luther had saved his life. They wrapped Danny’s torso tightly with adhesive tape and told him he’d suffered a concussion and would piss blood for a few days from all the shots the Russians had delivered to his kidneys. Danny thanked the doctor, his words slurring from whatever they’d pumped into his IV, and passed out.
In the morning, he woke to his father and Connor sitting by the bed. His father had one of his hands wrapped in both of his and he smiled softly. “Look who’s up.”
Con’ folded the newspaper and smiled at Danny and shook his head.
“Who did this to you, boy?”
Danny sat up a bit in the bed and his ribs screamed. “How’d you even find me?”
“Colored fella—says he’s a doctor here?—he called into headquarters with your badge number, said another colored fella brought you in here all banged to hell. Ah, it’s a sight, you in a place like this.”
In the bed on the other side of his father lay an old man with his foot hanging in a cast. He looked at the ceiling.
“What happened?” Connor asked.
“Got jumped by a bunch of Letts,” Danny said. “That colored fella was Luther. He probably saved my life.”
The old man in the next bed scratched his leg at the top of the cast.
“We’ve got the holding cells filled to the brink with Letts and Commies,” his father said. “You go have a look later. Find the men who did it and we’ll find ourselves a nice dark lot before we book them.”
Danny said, “Water?”
Con’ found a pitcher on the windowsill and filled a glass and brought it to him.
His father said, “We don’t even have to book them, if you follow my meaning.”
“It’s not hard, sir, to follow your meaning.” Danny drank. “I never saw them.”
“What?”
“They came up on me fast, got my coat over my head, and went to work.”
“How could you not see—?”
“I was following Tessa Ficara.”
“She’s here?” his father said.
“She was last night.”
“Jesus, boy, why didn’t you call for backup?”
“You guys were throwing a party in Roxbury, remember?”
His father ran a hand along his chin. “You lose her?”
“Thanks for the water, Con’.” He smiled at his brother.
Connor chuckled. “You’re a piece of work, brother. You really are.”
“Yeah, I lost her. She turned onto Hammond Street, and the Russians showed up. So what do you want to do, Dad?”
“Well, we’ll talk to Finch and the BI. I’ll have some badges canvass Hammond and the rest of the area, hope for the best. But I doubt she’s still hanging around after last night.” His father held up the Morning Standard. “Front-page news, boy.”
Danny sat up fully in the bed and his ribs howled some more. He blinked at the pain and looked at the headline: “Police Wage War on Reds.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Home,” his father said. “You can’t keep putting her through this. First Salutation. Now this. It’s a strain on her heart, it is.”
“How about Nora? She know?”
His father cocked his head. “Why would she know anything? We’ve no contact with her anymore.”
“I’d like her to know.”
Thomas Coughlin looked at Connor and then back at Danny. “Aiden, you don’t say her name. You don’t bring her up in my presence.”
Danny said, “Can’t do that, Dad.”
“What?” This from Connor, coming up behind their father. “She lied to us, Dan. She humiliated me. Jesus.”
Danny sighed. “She was family for how long?”
“We treated her as family,” his father said, “and look how she repaid us. Now it’s the end of this subject, Aiden.”
Danny shook his head. “For you maybe. Me?” He pulled the sheet off his body. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and hoped neither of them could see the price it cost. Jesus! The pain blew up through his chest. “Con’, hand me my pants, would you?”
Con’ brought them to him, his face dark and bewildered.
Danny stepped into his pants and then found his shirt hanging over the foot of the bed. He slid into it, one careful arm at a time, and considered his father and brother. “Look, I’ve played it your way. But I can’t anymore. I just can’t.”
“Can’t what?” his father said. “You’re talking nonsense.” He looked at the old black man with the broken leg as if for a second opinion, but the man’s eyes were closed.
Danny shrugged. “Then I’m talking nonsense. You know what I realized yesterday? What I finally realized? Ain’t a fucking thing made—”
“Ah, the language!”
“—made sense in my life, Dad. Ever. ’Cept her.”
His father’s face drained of color.
Danny said, “Hand me my shoes, would you, Con’?”
Connor shook his head. “Get ’em yourself, Dan.” He held out his hands, a gesture of such helpless pain and betrayal that it pierced Danny.
“Con’.”
Connor shook his head. “No.”
“Con’, listen.”
“Fuck listening. You’d do this? To me? You’d—”
Connor dropped his hands and his eyes filled. He shook his head at Danny again. He shook his head at the whole ward. He turned on his heel and walked out the door.
Danny found his shoes in the silence and placed them on the floor.
“You’re going to break your brother’s heart? Your mother’s?” his father said. “Mine?”
Danny looked at him as he pushed his feet into his shoes. “It’s not about you, Dad. I can’t live my life for you.”
“Oh.” His father placed his hand over his heart. “Well, I wouldn’t want to begrudge you your earthly pleasures, boy, Lord knows.”
Danny smiled.
His father didn’t. “So you’ve taken your stand against the family. You’re an individual, Aiden. Your own man. Does it feel good?”
Danny said nothing.
His father stood and placed his captain’s hat on his head. He straightened it at the sides. “This great romantic notion your generation has about it going its own way? Do you think you’re the first?”
“No. Don’t think I’ll be the last, either.”
“Probably not,” his father said. “What you will be is alone.”
“Then I’ll be alone.”
His father pursed his lips and nodded. “Good-bye, Aiden.”
“Good-bye, sir.”
Danny held out his hand, but his father ignored it.
Danny shrugged and dropped the hand. He reached behind him and found the papers Luther had given him last night. He tossed them at his father and hit him in the chest. His father caught them and looked down at them.
&
nbsp; “The list McKenna wanted from the NAACP.”
His father’s eyes widened for a moment. “Why would I want it?”
“Then give it back.”
Thomas allowed himself a small smile and placed the papers under his arm.
“It was always about the mailing lists, wasn’t it?” Danny said.
His father said nothing.
“You’ll sell them,” Danny said. “To companies, I’m assuming?”
His father met his eyes. “A man has a right to know the character of the men working for him.”
“So he can fire them before they unionize?” Danny nodded at the idea. “You sold out your own.”
“I’ll bet my life that not a name on any of the lists is Irish.”
“I wasn’t talking about the Irish,” Danny said.
His father looked up at the ceiling, as if he saw cobwebs there that needed tending. He pursed his lips, then looked at his son, a slight quiver in his chin. He said nothing.
“Who got you the list of the Letts once I was out?”
“As luck would have it,” his father’s voice was barely a whisper, “we took care of that yesterday in the raid.”
Danny nodded. “Ah.”
“Anything else, son?”
Danny said, “Matter of fact, yeah. Luther saved my life.”
“So I should give him a raise?”
“No,” Danny said. “Call off your dog.”
“My dog?”
“Uncle Eddie.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Call him off just the same. He saved my life, Dad.”
His father turned to the old man in the bed. He touched his cast and winked at the man when he opened his eyes. “Ah, you’ll be fit as a fiddle, as God is my judge.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Indeed.” Thomas gave the guy a hearty smile. His eyes swept past Danny and the windows behind him. He nodded once and then walked out the same door as Connor.
Danny found his coat on a hook against the wall and put it on.
“That your pops?” the old man said.
Danny nodded.
“I’d stay clear of him for a while.”
Danny said, “Looks like I don’t have much choice.”
“Oh, he’ll be back. His kind always comes back. Sure as time,” the old man said. “Always wins, too.”
Danny finished buttoning his coat. “Ain’t nothing to win anymore,” he said.
“That ain’t the way he sees it.” The old man gave him a sad smile. He closed his eyes. “Which is why he’ll keep winning. Yes, sir.”
After he left the hospital, he visited four more before he found the one where they’d taken Nathan Bishop. Bishop, like Danny, had declined to stay, though Nathan had slipped two armed policemen to do it.
The doctor who’d worked on him before his escape looked at Danny’s tattered uniform, its black splotches of blood, and said, “If you’ve come for your second licks, they should have told you—”
“He’s gone. I know.”
“Lost an ear,” the doctor said.
“Heard that, too. How about his eye?”
“I don’t know. He left before I could hazard an informed diagnosis.”
“Where to?”
The doctor glanced at his watch and slipped it back into his pocket. “I’ve got patients.”
“Where’d he go?”
A sigh. “Far from this city, I suspect. I already told this to the two officers who were supposed to be guarding him. After he climbed out the bathroom window, he could have gone anywhere, but from the time I spent with him, I gathered he saw no point sacrificing five or six years of his life to a Boston prison.”
The doctor’s hands were in his pocket when he turned without another word and walked away.
Danny left the hospital. He was still in a fair amount of pain and made slow progress up Huntington Avenue toward the trolley stop.
He found Nora that night, when she returned to her rooming house from work. He stood with his back against her stoop, not because sitting down was too painful but because getting back up again was. She walked up the street in dusk yellowed by weak streetlamps and every time her face passed from dark into gauzy light, he took a breath.
Then she saw him. “Holy Mary Mother of God, what happened to you?”
“Which part?” A thick bandage jutted off his forehead, and both eyes were black.
“All of you.” She appraised him with something that might have been humor, might have been horror.
“You didn’t hear?” He cocked his head, noticing she didn’t look too good herself, her face drawn and sagging at the same time, her eyes too wide and empty.
“I heard there was a fight between policemen and the Bolsheviks, but I…” She stopped in front of him and raised her hand, as if to touch his swollen eye, but she paused and her hand hung in the air. She took a step back.
“I lost the button,” he said.
“What button?”
“The bear’s eye.”
She cocked her head in confusion.
“From Nantasket. That time?”
“The stuffed bear? The one from the room?”
He nodded.
“You kept its eye?”
“Well, it was a button, but yeah. I still had it. Never left my pocket.”
He could see she had no idea what to do with that information.
He said, “That night you came to see me…”
She crossed her arms.
“I let you go because…”
She waited.
“Because I was weak,” he said.
“And that kept you now, did it, from caring for a friend?”
“We’re not friends, Nora.”
“Then what are we, Danny?” She stood on the sidewalk, her eyes on the pavement, so tense he could see goose bumps in her flesh and the cords in her neck.
Danny said, “Look at me. Please.”
She kept her head down.
“Look at me,” he said again.
Her eyes found his.
“When we look at each other like this, right now, I don’t know what that is, but ‘friendship’ seems kind of watery, don’t you think?”
“Oh, you,” she said and shook her head, “you were always the talker now. They’d have called the Blarney Stone the Danny Stone if they could have—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t make it small. It’s not small, Nora.”
“What are you doing here?” she whispered. “Jesus, Danny. What? I already have one husband, or haven’t you heard? And you’ve always been a boy in a man’s body. You run from thing to thing. You—”
“You have a husband?” He chuckled.
“He laughs,” she said to the street with a loud sigh.
“I do.” He stood. He placed a hand to her chest just below her throat. He kept his fingers there, lightly, and tried to get the smile off his face as he saw her anger rise. “I just…Nora, I’m just…I mean, the two of us? Trying to be so respectable? Wasn’t that our word?”
“After you broke with me”—her face remained a stone, but he could see the light finding her eyes—“I needed stability. I needed…”
That brought a roar from him, an explosion he couldn’t stop that erupted out of the center of his body and, even as it punched its way along his ribs, felt better than anything he’d felt in a long time. “Stability?”
“Yes.” She hit his chest with her fist. “I wanted to be a good American girl, an upstanding citizen.”
“Well, that worked out tremendously well.”
“Stop laughing.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?” And the laugh finally reached her voice.
“Because, because…” He held her shoulders and the waves finally passed. He moved his palms down her arms and took her hands in his and this time she let him. “Because all this time you were with Connor, you wanted to be with me.”
“Ah, you’re a cocky man, you are, D
anny Coughlin.”
He tugged on her hands and stooped until their faces were at the same level. “And I wanted to be with you. And the two of us lost so much time, Nora, trying to be”—he looked up at the sky in frustration—“whatever the fuck we were trying to be.”
“I’m married.”
“I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit about anything anymore, Nora, except this. Right here. Right now.”
She shook her head. “Your family will disown you just like they disowned me.”
“So?”
“So you love them.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Danny shrugged. “But I need you, Nora.” He touched her forehead with his own. “I need you.” He repeated it in a whisper, his head against hers.
“You’ll throw away your whole world,” she whispered and her voice was wet.
“I was done with it anyway.”
Her laugh came out strangled and damp.
“We can never marry in the Church.”
“I’m done with that, too,” he said.
They stood there for a long time, and the streets smelled of the early-evening rain.
“You’re crying,” she said. “I can feel the tears.”
He removed his forehead from hers and tried to speak, but he couldn’t, so he smiled, and the tears rolled off his chin.
She leaned back and caught one on her finger.
“This is not pain?” she said and put it in her mouth.
“No,” Danny said and lowered his forehead to hers again. “This is not pain.”
Luther came home after a day at the Coughlin household in which, for the second time since he’d been there, the captain had invited him into his study.
“Take a seat, take a seat,” the captain said as he removed his uniform coat and hung it on the coat tree behind his desk.
Luther sat.
The captain came around to the front of the desk with two glasses of whiskey and handed one to Luther. “I heard what you did for Aiden. I’d like to thank you for saving my son’s life.” He clinked his heavy glass off Luther’s.
Luther said, “It was nothing, sir.”
“Scollay Square.”
“Sir?”
“Scollay Square. That’s where you ran into Aiden, yes?”
The Given Day Page 46
