The Given Day (28 page)

Babe smiled. He liked the way Reed talked, even if he couldn't understand what he meant.

Another man, a thin man with a profile that was hungry and sharp, joined them and said, "This is the slugger?"

"Indeed," Jack said. "Babe Ruth himself."

"Jim Larkin," the man said, shaking Babe's hand. "I apologize, but I don't follow your game."

"No apologies necessary, Jim." Babe gave him a fi rm shake.

"What my compatriot here is saying," Jim said, "is that the future opiate of the masses is not religion, Mr. Ruth, it's entertainment."

"That so?" Ruth wondered if Stuffy McInnis was home right now, if he'd answer the phone, maybe meet Babe in the city somewhere so they could get a steak and talk baseball and women.

"Do you know why baseball leagues are sprouting up all over the country? At every mill and every shipyard? Why just about every company has a workers' team?"

Ruth said, "Sure. It's fun."

"Well, it is," Jack said. "I'll grant you. But to put a finer point on it, companies like fielding baseball teams because it promotes company unity."

"Nothing wrong with that," Babe said, and Gene snorted again.

Larkin leaned in close again and Babe wanted to lean back from his gin-breath. "And it promotes 'Americanization,' for lack of a better word, among the immigrant workers."

"But most of all," Jack said, "if you're working seventy-five hours a week and playing baseball another fifteen or twenty, guess what you're probably too tired to do?"

Babe shrugged.

"Strike, Mr. Ruth," Larkin said. "You're too tired to strike or even think about your rights as a worker."

Babe rubbed his chin so they'd believe he was thinking about the idea. Truth was, though, he was just hoping they'd go away.

"To the worker!" Jack shouted, raising his glass.

The other men--and Ruth noticed there were nine or ten of them now--raised their glasses and shouted back, "To the worker!" Everyone took a strong slug of liquor, including Ruth.

"To the revolution!" Larkin shouted.

Dominick said, "Now now, gents," but he was lost in the clamor as the men rose on their seats.

"Revolution!"

"To the new proletariat!"

More shouts and cheers and Dominick gave up trying to impose order and started rushing around to refi ll drinks.

Boisterous toasts were made to comrades in Russia and Germany and Greece, to Debs, Haywood, Joe Hill, to the people, the great united working peoples of the world!

As they whipped themselves into a preening frenzy, Babe reached for his coat, but Larkin blocked the chair as he hoisted his drink and shouted another toast. Ruth looked at their faces, sheened with sweat and purpose and maybe something beyond purpose, something he couldn't quite name. Larkin turned his hip to the right and Babe saw an opening, could see the edges of his coat and he started reaching for it again as Jack shouted, "Down with capitalism! Down with the oligarchies!" and Babe got his hand into the fur, but Larkin inadvertently bumped his arm and Babe sighed and started to try again.

Then the six guys walked in off the street. They were dressed in suits, and maybe on any other given day, they'd have seemed respectable types. But today, they reeked of alcohol and anger. Babe knew with one look at their eyes that the shit was going to hit the fan so fast the only hope would be to duck.

Connor Coughlin was in no fucking mood for subversives today. In truth he was in no fucking mood in general, but particularly not for subversives. They'd just had their heads handed to them in court. A nine-month investigation, over two hundred depositions, a six-week trial, all so they could deport an avowed Galleanist named Vittorio Scalone, who'd spoken to anyone within earshot of blowing up the State House during a meeting of the Senate.

The judge, however, didn't think that was enough to deport a man. He'd stared down from his bench at District Attorney Silas Pendergast, Assistant District Attorney Connor Coughlin, Assistant District Attorney Peter Wald, and the six ADAs and four police detectives in the rows behind them and said, "While the issue of whether the state has the right to pursue deportation measures at a county level is, in some minds, debatable, that is not the issue before this court." He'd removed his glasses and stared coldly at Connor's boss. "As much as District Attorney Pendergast may have tried to make it so. No, the issue is whether the defendant committed any treasonous act whatsoever. And I see no evidence that he did any more than make idle threats while under the influence of alcohol." He'd turned and faced Scalone. "Which, under the Espionage Act, is still a serious crime, young man. For which I sentence you to two years at the Charlestown Penitentiary, six months time served."

A year and a half. For treason. On the courthouse steps, Silas Pendergast had given all his young ADAs a look of such withering disappointment that Connor knew they'd all be sent back to petty crimes and would not see the likes of this type of case for eons. They'd wandered the city, deflated, popping into bar after bar until they'd stumbled into the Castle Square Hotel and walked in on this. This . . . shit.

All the talking stopped when they were noticed. They were met with nervous, patronizing smiles, and Connor and Pete Wald went up to the bar and ordered a bottle and five glasses. The bartender spread the bottle and the glasses on the bar, and still no one spoke. Connor loved it--the fat silence that ballooned in the air before a fight. It was a unique silence, a silence with a ticking heartbeat. Their brother ADAs joined them at the bar rail and filled their glasses. A chair scraped. Pete raised his glass and looked around at the faces in the bar and said, "To the Attorney General of these United States."

"Hear! Hear!" Connor shouted, and they threw back their drinks and refi lled them.

"To deportation of undesirables!" Connor said, and the other men joined in chorus.

"To the death of Vlad Lenin!" Harry Block shouted.

They joined him as the other crowd of men started booing and hooting.

A tall guy with dark hair and picture- show looks was suddenly standing beside Connor.

"Hi," he said.

"Fuck off," Connor said and threw back his drink as the other ADAs laughed.

"Let's all be reasonable here," the man said. "Let's talk this out. Hey? You might be surprised how many times our views intersect." Connor kept his eyes on the bar top. "Uh-huh."

"We all want the same thing," the pretty boy said, and patted Connor's shoulder.

Connor waited for the man to remove his hand.

He poured himself another drink and turned to face the man. He thought of the judge. Of the treasonous Vittorio Scalone walking out of court with a smirk in his eyes. He thought of trying to explain his frustration and feelings of injustice to Nora, and how that could go either way. She might be sympathetic. She might be distant, indistinct. You could never predict. She seemed to love him sometimes, but other times she looked at him as if he were Joe, worthy only of a pat on the head and a dry kiss good night on the cheek. He could see her eyes now--unreadable. Unreachable. Never quite true. Never quite seeing him, really seeing him. Or anyone for that matter. Something always held in reserve. Except, of course, for when she turned those eyes on . . .

Danny.

The realization came suddenly, but at the same time it had lived in him for so long, he couldn't believe he'd just faced it. His stomach shriveled and the backs of his eyeballs felt as if a razor scraped across them.

He turned with a smile to face the tall pretty boy and emptied his shot glass into his fine black hair and then butted him in the face.

As soon as the mick with the pale hair and matching freckles poured his drink over Jack's head and drove his forehead into his face, Babe tried grabbing his coat off the chair and making a run for it. He knew as well as anyone, though, that the first rule of a bar fight was to hit the biggest guy first, and that happened to be him. So it wasn't any surprise when a stool hit the back of his head and two large arms wrapped over his shoulders and two legs folded over his hips. Babe dropped his coat and spun with the guy on his back and took another stool to his midsection from a guy who looked at him funny and said, "Shit. You look like Babe Ruth."

That caused the guy on his back to loosen his grip, and Ruth surged for the bar and then pulled up short just before he hit it and the guy flew off his back and over the bar and hit the bottles behind the cash register with a great crash.

Babe punched the guy nearest him, realizing only too late but with complete satisfaction that it was the mousy prick, Gene, and Gene went spinning backward on his heels, fl ailing his hands as he fell over a chair and dropped to his ass on the floor. There might have been ten Bolsheviks in the room, and several of them were of good size, but the other guys had a rage on their side the Bolshies couldn't touch. Babe saw the freckled one drop Larkin with a single punch to the center of his face and then step right over him and catch another with a jab to the neck. He suddenly remembered the only piece of advice his father had ever given him: Never go toe to toe with a mick in a bar fight.

Another Bolshie took a running leap at Babe from the top of the bar, and Babe ducked him the way he'd duck a tag, and the Bolshie landed on a tabletop that quivered for just a second before collapsing under the weight.

"You are!" someone called, and he turned to see the jake who'd hit him with the stool, a smear of blood on the guy's mouth. "You're Babe Fucking Ruth."

"I get that all the time," Babe said. He punched the guy in the head, grabbed his coat off the floor, and ran out of the bar.

WORKING CLASS chapter thirteen In the late autumn of 1918, Danny Coughlin stopped walking a beat, grew a thick beard, and was reborn as Daniel Sante, a veteran of the 1916 Thomson Lead Miners Strike in western Pennsylvania. The real Daniel Sante had been close to Danny's height and had the same dark hair. He'd also left behind no family members when he'd been conscripted to fight in the Great War. Shortly after his arrival in Belgium, however, he'd come down with the grippe and died in a field hospital without ever firing a shot.

Of the miners in that '16 strike, five had been jailed for life when they'd been tied, however circumstantially, to a bomb that had exploded in the home of Thomson Iron & Lead's president, E. James McLeish. McLeish had been taking his morning bath when his houseman carried in the mail. The houseman tripped crossing the threshold and juggled a cardboard package wrapped in plain brown paper. His left arm was later discovered in the dining room; the rest of him remained in the foyer. An additional fifty strikers were jailed on shorter sentences or beaten so badly by police and Pinkertons that they wouldn't be traveling anywhere for several years, and the rest had met the fate of the average striker in the Steel Belt--they lost their jobs and drifted over the border into Ohio in hopes of hiring on for companies that hadn't seen the blackball list of Thomson Iron & Lead.

It was a good story to establish Danny's credentials in the workersof-the-world revolution because no well-known labor organizations-- not even the fast-moving Wobblies--had been involved. It had been organized by the miners themselves with such speed it probably surprised them. By the time the Wobblies did arrive, the bomb had already exploded and the beatings had commenced. Nothing left to do but visit the men in the hospital while the company hired fresh recruits from the morning cattle calls.

So Danny's cover as Daniel Sante was expected to hold up fi ne under the scrutiny of the various radical movements he encountered. And it did. Not a single person, as far as he could tell, had questioned it. The problem was that even if they believed it, his story still didn't make him stand out.

He went to meetings and wasn't noticed. He went to the bars afterward and was left alone. When he tried to strike up a conversation, he was met with polite agreement of anything he said and just as politely turned away from. He'd rented rooms in a building in Roxbury, and there, during the day, he brushed up on his radical periodicals--The Revolutionary Age, Cronaca Sovversiva, Proletariat, and The Worker. He reread Marx & Engels, Reed & Larkin, and speeches by Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Trotsky, Lenin, and Galleani himself until he could recite most of it verbatim. Mondays and Wednesdays brought another meeting of the Roxbury Letts followed by a boozy gathering at the Sowbelly Saloon. He spent his nights with them and his mornings with a curl-up-and-cry-for-your-momma hangover, nothing about the Letts being frivolous, including their drinking. Bunch of Sergeis and Borises and Josefs, with the occasional Peter or Pyotr thrown in, the Letts raged through the night with vodka and slogans and wooden buckets of warm beer. Slamming the steins on scarred tables and quoting Marx, quoting Engels, quoting Lenin and Emma Goldman and screeching about the rights of the workingman, all the while treating the barmaid like shit.

They brayed about Debs, whinnied about Big Bill Haywood, thumped their shot glasses to the tables and pledged retribution for the tarred-and-feathered Wobblies in Tulsa, even though the tarring and feathering had taken place two years ago and it wasn't like any of them were going to go wipe it off. They tugged their watch caps and huffed their cigarettes and railed against Wilson, Palmer, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They crowed about Jack Reed and Jim Larkin and the fall of the house of Nicholas II.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Danny wondered if his hangovers came from the booze or the bullshit. Christ, the Bolshies blabbed until your eyes crossed. Until you dreamed in the harsh chop of Rus sian consonants and the nasal drag of Latvian vowels. Two nights a week with them and he'd only seen Louis Fraina once, when the man gave a speech and then vanished under heavy security.

He'd crisscrossed the state, looking for Nathan Bishop. At job fairs, in seditionist bars, at Marxist fund-raisers. He'd gone to union meetings, radical gatherings, and get-togethers of utopists so pie- eyed their ideas were an insult to adulthood. He noted the names of the speakers and faded into the background but always introduced himself as "Daniel Sante," so that the person whose hand he shook would respond in kind--"Andy Thurston" as opposed to just "Andy," "Comrade Gahn" as opposed to "Phil." When the opportunity presented itself, he stole a page or two of the sign-in sheets. If cars were parked outside the meeting sites, he copied down the license numbers.