The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  “Captain Coughlin?”

  He looked up at Mike Eigen, a recently promoted sergeant, standing in the doorway.

  “Jesus, Sergeant, what now?”

  “Someone sent a contingent of Metro Park Police in to patrol Southie.”

  Thomas stood. “No one told me.”

  “Not sure where the order came from, Cap’, but they’re pinned down.”

  “What?”

  Eigen nodded. “St. Augustine’s Church. Guy’s are dropping.”

  “Bullets?”

  Eigen shook his head. “Rocks, Cap’.”

  A church. Brother officers being stoned. At a church. In his precinct.

  Thomas Coughlin didn’t know he’d overturned his desk until he heard it crack against the floor. Sergeant Eigen took a step back.

  “Enough,” Thomas said. “By God, enough.”

  Thomas reached for the gun belt he hung on his coat tree every morning.

  Sergeant Eigen watched him buckle the gun belt. “I’d say so, Cap’.”

  Thomas reached for the bottom left drawer of his overturned desk. He lifted the drawer out and propped it on the two upper drawers. He removed a box of .32 shells and stuffed it in his pocket. Found a box of shotgun shells and placed them in the opposite pocket. He looked up at Sergeant Eigen. “Why are you still here?”

  “Cap’?”

  “Assemble every man still standing in this mausoleum. We’ve got a donnybrook to attend.” Thomas raised his eyebrows. “And we shan’t be fooling about in that regard, Sergeant.”

  Eigen snapped him a salute, a smile blowing wide across his face.

  Thomas found himself smiling back as he pulled his shotgun off the rack over the file cabinet. “Hop to it now, son.”

  Eigen ran from the doorway as Thomas loaded his shotgun, loving the snick-snick of the shells sliding into the magazine. The sound of it returned his soul to his body for the first time since the walkout at five-forty-five. On the floor lay a picture of Danny the day he’d graduated from the Academy, Thomas himself pinning the badge to his chest. His favorite photograph.

  He stepped on it on his way out the door, unable to deny the satisfaction that filled him when he heard the glass crunch.

  “You don’t want to protect our city, boy?” he said. “Fine. I will.”

  When they exited the patrol cars at St. Augustine’s, the crowd turned toward them. Thomas could see the Metro Park cops trying to hold the mob back with billy clubs and drawn weapons, but they were already bloody, and the piles of rocks littering the white limestone steps gave testament to a pitched battle these coppers had been losing.

  What Thomas knew about a mob was simple enough—any change in direction forced it to lose its voice if only for a matter of seconds. If you owned those seconds, you owned the mob. If they owned it, they owned you.

  He stepped out of his car and the man nearest him, a Gustie who went by the moniker of Filching Phil Scanlon, laughed and said, “Well, Captain Cough—”

  Thomas split his face to the bone with the butt of his shotgun. Filching Phil dropped like a head-shot horse. Thomas laid the muzzle of his shotgun on the shoulder of the Gustie behind him, Big Head Sparks. Thomas tilted the muzzle toward the sky and fired and Big Head lost the hearing in his left ear. Big Head Sparks wavered, his eyes instantly glazed, and Thomas said to Eigen, “Do the honors, Sergeant.”

  Eigen hit Big Head Sparks in the face with his service revolver, and that was the last of Big Head for the night.

  Thomas pointed his shotgun at the ground and fired.

  The mob backed up.

  “I’m Captain Thomas Coughlin,” he called and stomped his foot down on Filching Phil’s knee. He didn’t get the sound he’d been after, so he did it again. This time he got the sweet crack of bone followed by the predictable shriek. He waved his arm and the eleven men he’d been able to pull together spread along the fringe of the crowd.

  “I’m Captain Thomas Coughlin,” he repeated, “and be of no illusion—we intend to spill blood.” He swept his eyes across the faces in the mob. “Your blood.” He turned to the Metro Park Police officers on the stairs of the church. There were ten of them, and they seemed to have shrunk into themselves. “Level your weapons or stop calling yourselves officers of the law.”

  The crowd took another step back as the Metro Park cops extended their arms.

  “Cock them!” Thomas shouted.

  They did, and the crowd took several more steps back.

  “If I see anyone holding a rock,” Thomas called, “we shoot to kill.”

  He took five steps forward, the shotgun coming to rest on the chest of a man with a rock in his hand. The man dropped the rock and then urinated down his left leg. Thomas considered mercy and quickly deemed it inappropriate for the atmosphere. He opened the urinator’s forehead with his shotgun butt and stepped over him.

  “Run, you wretched curs.” He swept his eyes across them. “RUN!”

  No one moved—they looked too shocked—and Thomas turned to Eigen, to the men on the fringe, to the Metro Park cops.

  “Fire at will.”

  The Metro Park cops stared back at him.

  Thomas rolled his eyes. He drew his service revolver, raised it above his head, and fired six times.

  The men got the point. They began to discharge their weapons into the air and the crowd exploded like drops from a shattered water bucket. They ran up the street. They ran and ran, darting into alleys and down side streets, banging off overturned cars, falling to the sidewalk, stomping on one another, hurling themselves into storefronts and landing on the broken glass they’d created only an hour before.

  Thomas flicked his wrist and emptied his shell casings onto the street. He laid the shotgun at his feet and reloaded his service revolver. The air was sharp with cordite and the echoes of gunfire. The mob continued its desperate flight. Thomas holstered his revolver and reloaded his shotgun. The long summer of impotence and confusion faded from his heart. He felt twenty-five years old.

  Tires squealed behind him. Thomas turned as one black Buick and four patrol cars pulled to a stop as a soft rain began to fall. Superintendent Michael Crowley exited the Buick. He carried his own shotgun and wore his service revolver in a shoulder holster. He sported a fresh bandage on his forehead, and his fine dark suit was splattered with egg yolk and bits of shell.

  Thomas smiled at him and Crowley gave him a tired smile in return.

  “Time for a little law and order, wouldn’t you say, Captain?”

  “Indeed, Superintendent.”

  They walked up the center of the street as the rest of the men dropped in behind them.

  “Like the old days, Tommy, eh?” Crowley said as they started to make out the outer edge of a fresh mob concentrated in Andrew Square two blocks ahead.

  “Just what I was thinking, Michael.”

  “And when we clear them here?”

  When we clear them. Not if. Thomas loved it.

  “We take Broadway back.”

  Crowley clapped a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.

  “Ah, how I missed this.”

  “Me, too, Michael. Me, too.”

  Mayor Peters’s chauffeur, Horace Russell, glided the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost along the fringes of the trouble, never once entering a street so strewn with debris or the throngs that they would have been hard-pressed to get back out again. And so, while the populace rioted, its mayor observed them from a remove, but not so much of a remove that he couldn’t hear their terrible war cries, their shrieks and high-pitched laughter, the shock of sudden gunfire, the incessant shattering of glass.

  Once he’d toured Scollay Square, he thought he’d seen the worst of it, but then he saw the North End, and not long thereafter, South Boston. He realized that nightmares so bad he’d never dared dream them had come to fruition.

  The voters had handed him a city of peerless reputation. The Athens of America, the birthplace of the American Revolution and two presidents, seat to more higher educati
on than any other city in the nation, the Hub of the universe.

  And on his watch, it was disassembling itself brick by brick.

  They crossed back over the Broadway Bridge, leaving behind the flames and screams of the South Boston slum. Andrew Peters told Horace Russell to take him to the nearest phone. They found one at the Castle Square Hotel in the South End, which was, for the moment, the only quiet neighborhood they’d passed through tonight.

  With the bell staff and the manager conspicuously watching, Mayor Peters called the Commonwealth Armory. He informed the soldier who answered who he was and told him to get Major Dallup to the phone on the double

  “Dallup here.”

  “Major. Mayor Peters.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Are you currently in command of the motor corps and the First Cavalry Troop?”

  “I am, sir. Under the command of General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, sir.”

  “Who are where presently?”

  “I believe with Governor Coolidge at the State House, sir.”

  “Then you are in active command, Major. Your men are to stay at the armory and stand at readiness. They are not to go home. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will be by to review them and to give you your deployment assignments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are going to put down some riots tonight, Major.”

  “With pleasure, sir.”

  When Peters arrived at the armory fifteen minutes later, he saw a trooper exit the building and head up Commonwealth toward Brighton.

  “Trooper!” He left the car and held up a hand. “Where are you going?”

  The trooper looked at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m the mayor of Boston.”

  The trooper immediately straightened and then saluted. “My apologies, sir.”

  Peters returned the salute. “Where are you going, son?”

  “Home, sir. I live right up the—”

  “You were given orders to stand at the ready.”

  The trooper nodded. “But those orders were countermanded by General Stevens.”

  “Go back inside,” Peters said.

  As the trooper opened the door, several more troopers started to file out, but the original deserter pushed them back inside, saying, “The mayor, the mayor.”

  Peters strode inside and immediately spied a man with a major’s oak leaf cluster by the staircase leading up to the orderly room.

  “Major Dallup!”

  “Sir!”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Peters’s hand swept around the armory, at the men with their collars unbuttoned, weaponless, shifting in place.

  “Sir, if I could explain.”

  “Please do!” Peters was surprised to hear the sound of his voice, raised, flinty.

  Before Major Dallup could explain anything, however, a voice boomed from the top of the stairs.

  “These men are going home!” Governor Coolidge stood at the landing above them all. “Mayor Peters, you have no business here. Go home as well, sir.”

  As Coolidge came down the stairs, flanked by General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, Peters rushed up. All four men met in the middle.

  “This city is rioting.”

  “It is doing no such thing.”

  “I have been out in it, Governor, and I tell you, I tell you, I tell you—” Peters hated this stammer he developed when upset but he wouldn’t let it stop him now. “I tell you, sir, that it is not sporadic. It is tens of thousands of men and they are—”

  “There is no riot,” Coolidge said.

  “Yes, there is! In South Boston, in the North End, in Scollay Square! Look for yourself, man, if you don’t believe me.”

  “I have looked.”

  “Where?”

  “From the State House.”

  “The State House?” Peters said, screaming now, his voice sounding to his own ears like that of a child. A female child. “The rioting isn’t happening on Beacon Hill, Governor. It’s happening—”

  “Enough.” Coolidge held up a hand.

  “Enough?” Peters said.

  “Go home, Mr. Mayor. Go home.”

  It was the tone that got to Andrew Peters, the tone a parent reserved for a bratty child having a pointless tantrum.

  Mayor Andrew Peters then did something he was reasonably sure had never occurred in Boston politics—he punched the governor in the face.

  He had to jump from a lower step to do it, and Coolidge was tall to begin with, so it wasn’t much of a punch. But it did connect with the tissue around the governor’s left eye.

  Coolidge was so stunned, he didn’t move. Peters was so pleased, he decided to do it again.

  The general and the colonel grabbed at his arms, and several troopers ran up the stairs, but in those few seconds, Peters managed to land a few more flailing shots.

  The governor, oddly, never moved back or raised his hands to defend himself.

  Several troopers carried Mayor Andrew Peters back down the stairs and deposited him on the floor.

  He thought of rushing up them again.

  Instead, he pointed a finger at Governor Coolidge. “This is on your conscience.”

  “But your ledger, Mr. Mayor.” Coolidge allowed himself a small smile. “Your ledger, sir.”

  CHAPTER thirty-seven

  Horace Russell drove Mayor Peters to City Hall Wednesday morning at half past seven. Absent fires and screams and darkness, the streets had lost their ghoulish flavor, but stark evidence of the mob lay everywhere. Nary a window was left intact along Washington or Tremont or any of the streets that intersected them. Husks where once stood businesses. The skeleton frames of charred automobiles. So much trash and debris in the streets Peters could only assume this was what cities looked like after protracted battles and sporadic bombing.

  Along the Boston Common, men lay in drunken stupors or openly engaged in dice games. Across Tremont, a few souls raised plywood over their window frames. In front of some businesses, men paced with shotguns and rifles. Phone lines hung severed from their poles. All street signs had been removed, and most gas lamps were shattered.

  Peters placed a hand over his eyes because he felt an overwhelming need to weep. A stream of words ran through his head, so constant it took him a minute to realize it also left his tongue in a low whisper: This never had to happen, this never had to happen, this never had to happen….

  The impulse to weep turned to something colder as they reached City Hall. He strode up to his office and immediately placed a call to police headquarters.

  Curtis answered the phone himself, his voice a tired shadow of itself. “Hello.”

  “Commissioner, it’s Mayor Peters.”

  “You call for my resignation, I expect.”

  “I call for damage assessment. Let’s start there.”

  Curtis sighed. “One hundred and twenty-nine arrests. Five rioters shot, none critically injured. Five hundred sixty-two people treated for injuries at Haymarket Relief, a third of those related to cuts from broken glass. Ninety-four muggings reported. Sixty-seven assaults-and-battery. Six rapes.”

  “Six?”

  “Reported, yes.”

  “Your estimate as to the real number?”

  Another sigh. “Based on uncorroborated reports from the North End and South Boston, I’d place the number in the dozens. Thirty, let’s say.”

  “Thirty.” Peters felt the need to weep again, but it didn’t come as an overwhelming wave, merely as a stabbing sensation behind his eyes. “Property damage?”

  “In the hundreds of thousands.”

  “The hundreds of thousands, yes, I thought so myself.”

  “Mostly small businesses. The banks and department stores—”

  “Hired private security. I know.”

  “The firemen will never strike now.”

  “What?”

  “The firemen,” Curtis said. “The sympathy strike. My man in the departmen
t tells me they are so irate about the countless false alarms they responded to last night that they’ve turned against the strikers.”

  “How does this information help us right now, Commissioner?”

  “I won’t resign,” Curtis said.

  The gall of this man. The gumption. A city under siege of its populace and all he thinks of is his job and his pride.

  “You won’t have to,” Peters said. “I’m removing you from your command.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Oh, I can. You love rules, Commissioner. Please consult Section Six, Chapter Three-twenty-three of the 1885 city bylaws. Once you’ve done that, clean out your desk. Your replacement will be there by nine.”

  Peters hung up. He would have expected to feel more satisfaction, but it was one of the more dispiriting aspects of this entire affair that the only possible flush of victory had lain in averting the strike. Once it had begun, no man, least of all himself, could lay claim to any accomplishment. He called to his secretary, Martha Pooley, and she came into the office with the list of names and telephone numbers he’d asked for. He started with Colonel Sullivan of the State Guard. When he answered, Peters skipped all formalities.

  “Colonel Sullivan, this is your mayor. I am giving you a direct order that cannot be countermanded. Understood?”

  “Yes, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Assemble the entire State Guard in the Boston area. I am putting the Tenth Regiment, the First Cavalry Troop, the First Motor Corps, and the Ambulance Corps under your command. Is there any reason you cannot perform these duties, Colonel?”

  “None whatsoever, sir.”

  “See to it.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mayor.”

  Peters hung up and immediately dialed the home of General Charles Cole, former commander of the Fifty-second Yankee Division and one of the chief members of the Storrow Committee. “General Cole.”

  “Mr. Mayor.”

  “Would you serve your city as acting police commissioner, sir?”

  “It would be my honor.”

  “I’ll send a car. At what time could you be ready, General?”

  “I’m already dressed, Mr. Mayor.”