The Given Day (29 page)

City meetings were held in bowling alleys, pool halls, afternoon boxing clubs, saloons, and cafes. On the South Shore, the groups met in tents, dance halls, or fairgrounds abandoned until summer. On the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley, the preference was for rail yards and tanneries, down by water that boiled with runoff and left a copper froth clinging to the shoreline. In the Berkshires, orchards.

If you went to one meeting, you heard about others. The fishermen in Gloucester spoke of solidarity for their brothers in New Bedford, the Communists in Roxbury for their comrades in Lynn. He never heard anyone discuss bombs or specific plans to overthrow the government. They spoke in vague generalizations. Loud, boastful, as ineffectual as a willful child's. The same held for talk of corporate sabotage. They spoke of May Day, but only in terms of other cities and other cells. The comrades in New York would shake the city to its foundation. The comrades in Pittsburgh would light the first match to ignite the revolution.

Anarchists' meetings were usually held on the North Shore and were sparsely attended. Those who used the megaphone spoke dryly, often reading aloud in broken English from the latest tract by Galleani or Tommasino DiPeppe or the jailed Leone Scribano, whose musings were smuggled out of a prison south of Milan. No one shouted or spoke with much emotion or zeal, which made them unsettling. Danny quickly got the sense that they knew he was not of them--too tall, too well fed, too many teeth.

After one meeting in the rear of a cemetery in Gloucester, three men broke away from the crowd to follow him. They walked slow enough not to close the distance and fast enough to not let it widen. They didn't seem to care that he noticed. At one point, one of them called out in Italian. He wanted to know if Danny had been circumcised.

Danny skirted the edge of the cemetery and crossed a stretch of bone white dunes at the back of a limestone mill. The men, about thirty yards back now, began to whistle sharply through their teeth. "Aww, honey," it sounded like one of them was calling. "Aww, honey."

The limestone dunes recalled dreams Danny'd had, ones he'd forgotten about until this moment. Dreams in which he hopelessly crossed vast moonlit deserts with no idea how he'd gotten there, no idea how he'd ever find his way home. And weighing down on him all the heavier with every step was the growing fear that home no longer existed. That his family and everyone he knew was long dead. And only he survived to wander forsaken lands. He climbed the shortest of the dunes, scrabbling and clawing up it in a winter quiet.

"Aww, honey."

He reached the top of the dune. On the other side was an ink sky. Below it, a few fences with open gates.

He reached a street of disgorged cobblestone where he came upon a pest house. The sign above the door identified it as the Cape Ann Sanatorium, and he opened the door and walked in. He hurried past a nurse at the admitting desk who called after him. She called after him a second time.

He reached a stairwell and looked back down the hall and saw the three men frozen outside, one of them pointing up at the sign. No doubt they'd lost family members to something that waited on the upper floors--TB, smallpox, polio, cholera. In their awkward gesticulating Danny saw that none would dare enter. He found a rear door and let himself out.

The night was moonless, the air so raw it found his gums. He ran full- out back across the white gravel dunes and the cemetery. He found his car where he'd left it by the seawall. He sat in it and fingered the button in his pocket. His thumb ran over the smooth surface and he flashed on Nora swinging the bear at him in the oceanfront room, the pillows scattered all over the floor, her eyes lit with a pale fi re. He closed his eyes and he could smell her. He drove back to the city with a windshield grimed by salt and his own fear drying into his scalp.

One morning, he waited for Eddie McKenna and drank cups of bitter black coffee in a cafe off Harrison Avenue with a checkered tile floor and a dusty ceiling fan that clicked with each revolution. A knife sharpener bumped his cart along the cobblestones outside the window, and his display blades swung from their strings and caught the sun. Darts of light slashed Danny's pupils and the walls of the cafe. He turned in his booth and flicked open his watch and got it to stop jumping in his hand long enough to realize McKenna was late, though that wasn't surprising, and then he took another glance around the cafe to see if any faces were paying too much or too little attention to him. When he was satisfied it was just the normal collection of small businessmen and colored porters and Statler Building secretaries, he went back to his coffee, near certain that even with a hangover, he could spot a tail.

McKenna filled the doorway with his oversize body and obstinate optimism, that almost beatific sense of purpose that Danny had seen in him all his life, since Eddie'd been a hundred pounds lighter and would drop by to see his father when the Coughlins lived in the North End, always with sticks of licorice for Danny and Connor. Even then, when he'd been just a flatfoot working the Charlestown waterfront with saloons that were judged the city's bloodiest and a rat population so prodigious the typhus and polio rates were triple those of any other district, the glow around the man had been just as prominent. Part of department lore was that Eddie McKenna had been told early in his career that he'd never work undercover because of his sheer presence. The chief at the time had told him, "You're the only guy I know who enters a room five minutes before he gets there."

He hung his coat and slid into the booth across from Danny. He caught the waitress's eye and mouthed "coffee" to her.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God," he said to Danny. "You smell like the Armenian who ate the drunken goat."

Danny shrugged and drank some more coffee.

"And then puked it back up on yourself," McKenna said. "Praise from Caesar, sir."

McKenna lit the stub of a cigar, and the reek of it went straight to Danny's stomach. The waitress brought a cup of coffee to the table and refilled Danny's. McKenna watched her ass as she walked away.

He produced a flask and handed it to Danny. "Help yourself."

Danny poured a few drops into his coffee and handed it back.

McKenna tossed a notepad on the table and placed a fat pencil as stubby as his cigar beside the notepad. "I just came from meeting a few of the other boys. Tell me you're making better progress than they are."

The "other boys" on the squad had been picked, to some degree, for their intelligence, but mostly for their ability to pass as ethnics. There were no Jews or Italians in the BPD, but Harold Christian and Larry Benzie were swarthy enough to be taken for Greeks or Italians. Paul Wascon, small and dark-eyed, had grown up on New York's Lower East Side. He spoke passable Yiddish and had infiltrated a cell of Jack Reed's and Jim Larkin's Socialist Left Wing that worked out of a basement in the West End.

None of them had wanted the detail. It meant long hours for no extra pay, no overtime, and no reward, because the offi cial department policy was that terrorist cells were a New York problem, a Chicago problem, a San Francisco problem. So even if the squad had success, they'd never get credit, and they sure wouldn't get overtime.

But McKenna had pulled them out of their units with his usual combination of bribery, threat, and extortion. Danny had come in through the back door because of Tessa; God knows what Christian and Benzie had been promised, and Wascon's hand had been caught in the cookie jar back in August, so McKenna owned him for life.

Danny handed McKenna his notes. "License plate numbers from the Fishermen's Brotherhood meeting in Woods Hole. Sign-in sheet from the West Roxbury Roofers Union, another from the North Shore Socialist Club. Minutes of all the meetings I attended this week, including two of the Roxbury Letts."

McKenna took the notes and placed them in his satchel. "Good, good. What else?"

"Nothing."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I got nothing," Danny said.

McKenna dropped his pencil and sighed. "Jesus' sakes."

"What?" Danny said, feeling a hair better with the whiskey in his coffee. "Foreign radicals--surprise--mistrust Americans. And they're paranoid enough to at least consider that I could be a plant, no matter how solid the Sante cover is. And even if they are sold on the cover?

Danny Sante ain't looked on as management material yet. Least not by the Letts. They're still feeling me out."

"You seen Louis Fraina?"

Danny nodded. "Seen him give a speech. But I haven't met him. He stays away from the rank and file, surrounds himself with higher-ups and goons."

"You seen your old girlfriend?"

Danny grimaced. "If I'd seen her, she'd be in jail now."

McKenna took a sip from his flask. "You been looking?"

"I've been all over this damn state. I even crossed into Connecticut a few times."

"Locally?"

"The Justice guys are crawling all over the North End looking for Tessa and Federico. So the whole neighborhood is tense. Closed up. No one is going to talk to me. No one's going to talk to any Americano."

McKenna sighed and rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. "Well, I knew it wasn't going to be easy."

"Nope."

"Just keep plugging."

Jesus, Danny thought. This--this--was detective work? Fishing without a net?

"I'll get you something."

"Besides a hangover?"

Danny gave him a weak smile.

McKenna rubbed his face again and yawned. "Fucking terrorists, I swear to Christ." He yawned again. "Oh, you never came across Nathan Bishop, did you? The doctor."

"No."

McKenna winked. "That's 'cause he just did thirty days in the Chelsea drunk tank. They kicked him loose two days ago. I asked one of the bulls there if he's known to them and they said he likes the Capitol Tavern. Apparently, they send his mail there."

"The Capitol Tavern," Danny said. "That cellar- dive in the West End?"

"The same." McKenna nodded. "Maybe you can earn a hangover there, serve your country at the same time."

Danny spent three nights at the Capitol Tavern before Nathan
Bishop spoke to him. He'd seen Bishop right off, as he came through the door the very first night and took a seat at the bar. Bishop sat alone at a table lit only by a small candle in the wall above it. He read a small book the first night and from a stack of newspapers the next two. He drank whiskey, the bottle on the table beside the glass, but he nursed his drinks the first two nights, never putting a real dent in the bottle, and walking out as steadily as he'd walked in. Danny began to wonder if Finch and Hoover's profile had been correct.

The third night, though, he pushed his newspapers aside early and took longer pulls from the glass and chain-smoked. At fi rst he stared at nothing but his own cigarette smoke, and his eyes seemed loose and faraway. Gradually his eyes found the rest of the bar and a smile grew on his face, as if someone had pasted it there too hastily.

When Danny first heard him sing, he couldn't connect the voice to the man. Bishop was small, wispy, a delicate man with delicate features and delicate bones. His voice, however, was a booming, barreling, train-roar of a thing.

"Here he goes." The bartender sighed yet didn't seem dissatisfi ed.

It was a Joe Hill song, "The Preacher and the Slave," that Nathan Bishop chose for his fi rst rendition of the night, his deep baritone giving the protest song a distinctly Celtic flavor that went with the tall hearth and dim lighting in the Capitol Tavern, the low baying of the tugboat horns in the harbor.

"Long-haired preachers come out every night," he sang. "Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right. But when asked how 'bout something to eat, they will answer in voices so sweet: 'You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky way up high. Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky when you die.' That's a lie, that's a lie . . ."

He smiled sweetly, eyes at half-mast, as the few patrons in the bar clapped lightly. It was Danny who kept it going. He stood from his stool and raised his glass and sang out, "Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out, and they holler, they jump and they shout. 'Give your money to Jesus,' they say. 'He will cure all diseases today.'"

Danny put his arm around the guy beside him, a chimney sweep with a bad hip, and the chimney sweep raised his own glass. Nathan Bishop worked his way out from behind his table, making sure to scoop up both his whiskey bottle and his whiskey glass, and joined them at the bar as two merchant marines jumped in, loud as hell and way off key, but who cared as they all swung their elbows and their drinks from side to side:

"If you fi ght hard for children and wife Try to get something good in this life, You're a sinner and bad man, they tell, When you die you will sure go to hell."

The last line came out in shouts and torn laughs, and then the bartender rang the bell behind the bar and promised a free round.

"We're singing for our supper, boys!" one of the merchant marines cried out.

"You're getting the free drink to stop singing!" the bartender shouted over the laughter. "Them's the terms and none other."

They were all drunk enough to cheer to that and then they bellied up for their free drinks and shook hands all around--Daniel Sante meet Abe Rowley, Abe Rowley meet Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet, Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet meet Nathan Bishop, Nathan Bishop meet Daniel Sante.

"Hell of a voice there, Nathan."

"Thank you. Good on yours as well, Daniel."

"Habit of yours, is it, to just start singing out in a bar?"

"Across the pond, where I'm from, it's quite common. It was getting fairly gloomy in here until I took up the cause, wouldn't you say?"

"I wouldn't argue."

"Well, then, cheers."

"Cheers."

They met their glasses, then threw back their shots.

Seven drinks and four songs later they ate the stew that the bar- tender kept cooking in the fireplace all day. It was horrid; the meat was brown and unidentifiable and the potatoes were gray and chewy. If Danny had to guess, he'd bet the grit it left on his teeth came from sawdust. But it filled them. After, they sat and drank and Danny told his Daniel Sante lies about western Pennsylvania and Thomson Lead.