The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  Thomas removed his coat and loosened his tie and placed the satchel at his feet as he came to the end of K Street and paused in the shade of a great elm. The sea lay only forty feet away, the beach filled, but the breeze was desultory, the air clammy. He could feel eyes on him, the gazes of those who recognized him but dared not approach. This filled him with enough satisfaction to close his eyes in the shade for a moment, to imagine a cooler breeze. He had made it clear many years ago in the neighborhood that he was their benefactor, their friend, their patron. You needed something, you put the touch on Tommy Coughlin and sure he’d take care of it, he would. But never—ever—on a Saturday. On Saturdays, you left Tommy Coughlin alone so he could attend to his family, his beloved sons and beloved wife.

  They’d called him Four Hands Tommy back then, an appellation some believed bespoke a man who had his hands in a lot of pockets, but one which actually took root after he’d apprehended Boxy Russo and three other plug-uglies of the Tips Moran gang after he’d caught them coming out the back of a Jew furrier’s place off Washington Street. He’d been a beat cop then and after he’d subdued them (“Sure it must have taken four hands to fight four men!” Butter O’Malley had said when he’d finished booking them), he’d tied them together in twos and waited for the wagons. They hadn’t put up much of a struggle after he’d snuck up and slapped his billy club off the back of Boxy Russo’s noggin. The galoot had dropped his end of the safe, and so the others had been forced to do the same, and the end result was four mashed feet and two broken ankles.

  He smiled to remember it now. Those were simpler times. Fine times.

  He was young and powerful-strong, and sure, wasn’t he just the fastest man on the force? He and Eddie McKenna worked the docks in Charlestown and the North End and South Boston and there was no more violent place for a copper to be. No richer either, once the big boys figured out they weren’t going to scare these two off, so they might as well all come to an accommodation. Boston was, after all, a port city, and anything that disrupted the entry to those ports was bad for business. And the soul of business, as Thomas Coughlin had known since he was a lad in Clonakilty, County Cork, was accommodation.

  He opened his eyes and they filled with the blue glitter of the sea and he shoved off again, making his way along the seawall toward Carson Beach. Even without the heat, this summer was already taking on the feel of a nightmare. Dissension within the ranks that could lead to a strike on his beloved force. Danny in the midst of it. Danny, too, lost to him as a son. Over a harlot who, in his good graces, he’d taken in when she was little more than a shivering puddle of gray flesh and loose teeth. Of course, she’d been from Donegal, which should have been fair warning; you could never trust a Donegalan; they were known liars and fomenters of dissent. And now Joe, missing for a second day, out there somewhere in the city, eluding all attempts to recover him. He had too much Danny in him, that was plain to see, too much of Thomas’s own brother, Liam, a man who’d tried to break the world open, only to see it do the very same to him. He’d died, Liam had, gone now these twenty-eight years, bled out in an alley behind a pub in Cork City, his assailant unknown, his pockets picked clean. The motive had been an argument over a woman or a gambling debt, both, in Thomas’s mind, pretty much the same thing in terms of risk versus reward. He’d loved Liam, his twin brother, the way he loved Danny, the way he loved Joe—in confusion and admiration and futility. They were windmill tilters who scoffed at reason, who lived through their hearts. As had Liam, as had Thomas’s father, a man who’d drank the bottle until the bottle drank him back.

  Thomas saw Patrick Donnegan and Claude Mesplede sitting in the small gazebo that looked out on the sea. Just beyond it was a dark green fishing pier, mostly empty at midday. He raised a hand and they raised theirs as he began the trudge across the sand through families trying to escape the heat of their homes for the heat of this sand. He would never understand this phenomenon of lying by the water, of taking the entire family to engage in the mass indulgence of idleness. It seemed like something Romans would have done, baking under their sun gods. Men were no more meant to be idle than horses were. It fostered a restlessness of thinking, an acceptance of amoral possibilities and the philosophy of relativism. Thomas would kick the men if he could, kick them from the sand and send them out to work.

  Patrick Donnegan and Claude Mesplede watched him come with smiles on their faces. They were always smiling, these two, a pair if ever there was one. Donnegan was the ward boss for the Sixth and Mesplede was its alderman, and they had held these positions for eighteen years, through mayors, through governors, through police captains and police commissioners, through presidents. Nestled deep in the bosom of the city where no one ever thought to look, they ran it, along with a few other ward bosses and aldermen and congressmen and councilors who’d been smart enough to secure positions on the key committees that controlled the wharves and the saloons and the building contracts and the zoning variances. If you controlled these, you controlled crime and you controlled the enforcement of law and, thus, you controlled everything that swam in the same sea, which was to say, everything that made a city run—the courts, the precincts, the wards, the gambling, the women, the businesses, the unions, the vote. The last, of course, was the procreative engine, the egg that hatched the chicken that hatched more eggs that hatched more chickens and would do so ad infinitum.

  As childishly simple as this process was, most men, given a hundred years on earth, would never understand it because most men didn’t want to.

  Thomas entered the gazebo and leaned against the inner wall. The wood was hot and the white sun found the center of his forehead as a bullet to a hawk.

  “How’s the family, Thomas?”

  Thomas handed him the satchel. “Tops, Patrick. Just tops. And the missus?”

  “She’s fit, Thomas. Picking out architects for the house we’re building in Marblehead, she is.” Donnegan opened the satchel, peered inside.

  “And yours, Claude?”

  “My eldest, Andre, has passed the bar.”

  “Grand stuff. Here?”

  “In New York. He graduated Columbia.”

  “You must be fierce-proud.”

  “I am, Thomas, thank you.”

  Donnegan stopped rummaging in the satchel. “Every list we asked for?”

  “And more.” Thomas nodded. “We threw in the NAACP as a bonus.”

  “Ah, you’re a miracle worker.”

  Thomas shrugged. “It was Eddie mostly.”

  Claude handed Thomas a small valise. Thomas opened it and looked at the two bricks of money inside, both wrapped tightly in paper and taped. He had a practiced eye when it came to such transactions, and he knew by the thickness that his and Eddie’s payments were even larger than promised. He raised an eyebrow at Claude.

  “Another company joined us,” Claude said. “Profit participation rose accordingly.”

  “Shall we walk, Thomas?” Patrick said. “’Tis diabolical heat.”

  “A sound suggestion.”

  They removed their jackets and strolled to the pier. At midday it was empty of fishermen, save for a few who seemed far more interested in the buckets of beer at their feet than any fish they could jerk over the rail.

  They leaned against the rail and looked out at the Atlantic and Claude Mesplede rolled his own cigarette and lit it with a cupped match that he flicked into the ocean. “We’ve compiled that list of saloons that will be converting to rooming houses.”

  Thomas Coughlin nodded. “There’s no weak link?”

  “Not a one.”

  “No criminal histories to worry about?”

  “None at all.”

  He nodded. He reached into his jacket and removed his cigar from the inside pocket. He snipped the end and put his match to it.

  “And they all have basements?”

  “As a matter of course.”

  “I see no problem then.” He puffed slowly on the cigar.

  “There’s an iss
ue with the wharves.”

  “Not in my districts.”

  “The Canadian wharves.”

  He looked at Donnegan, then at Mesplede.

  “We’re working on it,” Donnegan said.

  “Work faster.”

  “Thomas.”

  He turned to Mesplede. “Do you know what will happen if we don’t control point of entry and point of contact?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you?”

  “I said I do.”

  “The lunatic Irish and the lunatic dagos will organize. They won’t be mad dogs in the street anymore, Claude. They’ll be units. They’ll control the stevedores and the teamsters, which means they’ll control transport. They’ll be able to set terms.”

  “That will never happen.”

  Thomas considered the ash at the end of his cigar. He held it out to the wind and watched the wind eat the ash until the flame glowed underneath. He waited until it had turned from blue to red before he spoke again.

  “If they take control of this, they’ll tip the balance. They’ll control us. At their leisure, gents, not ours. You’re our man with the friends in Canada, Claude.”

  “And you’re our man in the BPD, Thomas, and I’m hearing talk of a strike.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “It is the subject.”

  Thomas looked over at him and Claude flicked his ash into the sea and took another hungry puff. He shook his head at his own anger and turned his back to the sea. “Are you telling me there won’t be a strike? Can you guarantee that? Because from what I saw on May Day, you have a rogue police department out there. They engage in a gang fight, and you’re telling us you can control them?”

  “I was after you all last year to get the mayor’s ear on this one, and what happened?”

  “Don’t put this on my door, Tommy.”

  “I’m not putting it on your door, Claude. I’m asking about the mayor.”

  Claude looked over at Donnegan and said, “Ach,” and flipped his cigarette into the sea. “Peters is no mayor. You know that. He spends all his time shacked up with his fourteen-year-old concubine. Who is, I might add, his cousin. Meanwhile, his men, carpetbaggers all, could make Ulysses Grant’s gangster-cabinet blush. Now there might be some sympathy for your men’s plight, but they pissed that all away, didn’t they?”

  “When?”

  “In April. They were offered their two-hundred-a-year increase and they declined.”

  “Jesus,” Thomas said, “cost of living has risen seventy-three percent. Seventy-three.”

  “I know the number.”

  “That two hundred a year was a prewar figure. The poverty level is fifteen hundred a year, and most coppers make far less than that. They’re the police, Claude, and they’re working for less wages than niggers and women.”

  Claude nodded and placed a hand on Thomas’s shoulder, gave it a soft squeeze. “I can’t argue with you. But the thinking in City Hall and in the commissioner’s office is that the men can be put on the Pay No Heed list because they’re emergency personnel. They can’t affiliate with a union and they sure can’t strike.”

  “But they can.”

  “No, Thomas,” he said, his eyes clear and cold. “They can’t. Patrick’s been out in the wards, taking an informal poll, if you will. Patrick?”

  Patrick spread his hands over the rail. “Tom, it’s like this—I’ve talked to our constituents, and if the police dare strike, this city will vent all its rage—at unemployment, the high cost of living, the war, the niggers coming from down South to take jobs, at the price of getting up in the damn morning—and send it straight at the city.”

  “This city will riot,” Claude said. “Just like Montreal. And you know what happens when people are forced to see the mob that lives within them? They don’t like it. They want someone to pay. At the polls, Tom. Always at the polls.”

  Thomas sighed and puffed his cigar. Out in the sea, a small yacht floated into his field of vision. He could make out three figures on the deck as thick dark clouds began to mass just to their south and march toward the sun.

  Patrick Donnegan said, “Your boys strike? Big Business wins. They’ll use that strike as a cudgel to fuck organized labor, Irishmen, Democrats, fuck anyone who ever thought of a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work in this country. You let them turn this into what they’ll turn it into? You’ll set the working class back thirty years.”

  Thomas gave that a smile. “It’s not all on me, boys. Maybe if O’Meara, God rest him, was still with us, I’d have more say in the outcome, but with Curtis? That toad’ll blow this city down to its foundations to stick it to the wards and the men who run them.”

  “Your son,” Claude said.

  Thomas turned, the cigar between his teeth pointing at Claude’s nose. “What?”

  “Your son is in league with the BSC. Quite an orator, we hear, like his father.”

  Thomas removed his cigar. “We stay away from family, Claude. That’s a rule.”

  “Maybe in fairer days,” Claude said. “But your son is in this, Tommy. Deep. And the way I hear it, he’s growing in popularity by the day and his rhetoric grows exponentially more inflammatory. If you could talk to him, maybe…” Claude shrugged.

  “We don’t have that kind of relationship anymore. There’s been a rift.”

  Claude took that information in, his small eyes tilting up in his head for a moment as he sucked softly on his lower lip. “You’ll have to repair it then. Someone has to talk these boys out of doing anything stupid. I’ll work on the mayor and his hoodlums. Patrick will work on the public sentiment. I’ll even see what I can do about a favorable article or two in the press. But, Thomas, you’ve got to work on your son.”

  Thomas looked over at Patrick. Patrick nodded.

  “We don’t want to take the gloves off, sure now, do we, Thomas?”

  Thomas declined to respond to that. He placed his cigar back in his mouth, and the three of them leaned on the rail again and looked out at the ocean.

  Patrick Donnegan looked out at the yacht as the clouds reached it and covered it in shadow. “I’ve been thinking about one of those for myself. Smaller, of course.”

  Claude laughed.

  “What?”

  “You’re building a house on the water. What would you want with a boat?”

  “So I could look back in at my house,” Patrick said.

  Thomas grinned in spite of his dark mood and Claude chuckled.

  “He’s addicted to the trough, I’m afraid.”

  Patrick shrugged. “I’m fond of the trough, boys, I admit it. Believe in the trough, I do. But it’s a small trough. It’s a big-house trough. Them? They want troughs the size of countries. They don’t know where to stop.”

  On the yacht, the three figures suddenly moved with quick jerky motions as the cloud above them opened.

  Claude clapped his hands together and then rubbed them off each other. “Well, we don’t want to be caught out,” he said. “There’s rain coming, gentlemen.”

  “God’s truth,” Patrick said as they walked off the pier. “You can smell it, sure.”

  By the time he got home it was pouring, a fine black unleashing of the heavens. A man who’d never been fond of a strong sun, he found himself invigorated, even though the drops were as warm as sweat and only added to the thickness of the humidity. The last few blocks, he slowed his pace to a fairgrounds stroll and tilted his face up into it. When he reached the house, he went in through the back, taking the path along the side so he could check on his flowers, and they seemed as pleased as he to finally have some water. The back door opened onto the kitchen and he gave Ellen a start as he came through it looking like something that had escaped the ark.

  “Mercy, Thomas!”

  “Mercy indeed, my love.” He smiled at her, trying to remember the last time he’d done so. She returned the smile, and he tried to remember the last time he’d seen that as well.

  “You
’re soaked to the bone.”

  “I needed it.”

  “Here, sit. Let me get you a towel.”

  “I’m fine, love.”

  She came back from the linen closet with a towel. “I’ve news of Joe,” she said, her eyes bright and wet.

  “For the love of Pete,” he said, “out with it, Ellen.”

  She draped the towel over his head and rubbed vigorously. She spoke as if she were discussing a lost cat. “He’s turned up at Aiden’s.”

  Before Joe ran away, she’d been locked in her room, incapacitated by Danny’s nuptials. Once Joe had gone on the run, she’d emerged and launched into a cleaning frenzy, telling Thomas she was back to her old self, she was, and would he please be so kind as to find their son? When she wasn’t cleaning, she was pacing. Or knitting. And all the while, she asked him, over and over, what he was doing about Joe. She’d say it the way a worried mother would, yes, but the way a worried mother would to a boarder. He’d lost all connection with her over the years, made his peace with a warmth that lived occasionally in her voice but rarely in her eyes, because the eyes alit on nothing, seemed instead to always be tilted slightly up, as if she were conversing with her own mind and nothing else. He didn’t know this woman. He was reasonably sure he loved her, because of time, because of attrition, but time had also robbed them of each other, fostered within a relationship based on itself and nothing more, no different from that of a saloon keeper and his most frequent patron. You loved out of habit and lack of brighter options.