The Given Day (39 page)

Danny put a hand in his pocket and found the button among some coins. He pressed it to his palm and leaned forward. "Comrade?"

"The would- be assassin." He waved at the air around him. "This man no one can find a record of. This man who went unseen, even by a comrade I know who was in the holding cell at Roxbury Crossing that night. A veteran of the first czarist revolution, this man, a true Lett like our comrade, Pyotr."

The big Estonian leaned against the large cooler door, his arms crossed, and gave no indication he'd heard his name.

"He didn't see you there, either," Fraina said.

"They never put me in the holding pen," Danny said. "They had their fun and shipped me in a paddy wagon to Charlestown. I told Comrade Bishop as much."

Fraina smiled. "Well, it's settled, then. Everything is fine." He clapped his hands. "Eh, Pyotr? What did I tell you?"

Glaviach kept his eyes on the shelving behind Danny's head. "Everything fi ne."

"Everything is fine," Fraina said.

Danny sat there, the heat of the place finding his feet, the underside of his scalp.

Fraina leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Except, well, this man was only seven or eight feet away when he fired. How do you miss at that range?"

Danny said, "Nerves?"

Fraina stroked his beard and nodded. "That's what I thought at fi rst. But then I began to wonder. There were three of us clustered together. Four, if we count you bringing up the rear. And beyond us? A big, heavy touring car. So, I put it to you, Comrade Sante, where did the bullets go?"

"The sidewalk, I'd guess."

Fraina clucked his tongue and shook his head. "Unfortunately, no.

322DENNIS LEHANE

We checked there. We checked everywhere within a two-block radius. This was easy to do, because the police never checked. They never looked. A gun fired within city limits. Two shots discharged? And the police treated it as if it were no more than a hurled insult."

"Hmm," Danny said. "That is--"

"Are you federal?"

"Comrade?"

Fraina removed his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. "Justice Department? Immigration? Bureau of Investigation?"

"I don't--"

He stood and placed his glasses back on. He looked down at Danny. "Or local, perhaps? Part of this undercover dragnet we hear is sweeping the city? I understand the anarchists in Revere have a new member who claims to be from the north of Italy but speaks with the accent and cadence of one from the south." He strolled around to the back of Danny's chair. "And you, Daniel? Which are you?"

"I'm Daniel Sante, a machinist from Harlansburg, Pennsylvania. I'm no bull, Comrade. I'm no government slug. I am exactly who I say I am."

Fraina crouched behind him. He leaned in and whispered in Danny's ear, "What other response would you give?"

"None." Danny tilted his head until he could see Fraina's lean profile. "Because it's the truth."

Fraina placed his hands on the back of the chair. "A man tries to assassinate me and just happens to be a terrible shot. You come to my rescue because you just happen to be exiting at the same time as I. The police just happen to arrive within seconds of the gunshot. Everyone in the restaurant is detained and yet none are questioned. The assassin vanishes from police custody. You are released without charge and, in the height of providence, just happen to be a writer of some talent." He strolled around to the front of the chair again and tapped his temple. "You see how fortunate all these events are?"

"Then they're fortunate."

"I don't believe in luck, Comrade. I believe in logic. And this story of yours has none." He crouched in front of Danny. "Go now. Tell your THE GIVEN DAYbourgeois bosses that the Lettish Workingman's Society is above reproach and violates no law. Tell them not to send a second rube to prove otherwise."

Danny heard footsteps enter the storeroom behind him. More than a pair. Maybe three pair, all told.

"I am exactly who I say," Danny said. "I am dedicated to the cause and to the revolution. I'm not leaving. I refuse to deny who I am for any man."

Fraina raised himself from his haunches. "Go."

"No, Comrade."

Pyotr Glaviach used one elbow to push himself away from the cooler door. His other arm was behind his back.

"One last time," Fraina said. "Go."

"I can't, Comrade. I--"

Four pistols cocked their hammers. Three came from behind him, the fourth from Pyotr Glaviach.

"Stand!" Glaviach shouted, the echo pinging off the tight stone walls.

Danny stood.

Pyotr Glaviach stepped up behind him. His shadow spilled onto the floor in front of Danny, and that shadow extended one arm.

Fraina gave Danny a mournful smile. "This is the only option left for you and it could expire at a moment's notice." He swept his arm toward the door.

"You're wrong."

"No," Fraina said. "I am not. Good night."

Danny didn't reply. He walked past him. The four men in the rear of the room cast their shadows on the wall in front of him. He opened the door with a fiery itch at the base of his skull and exited the bakery into the night.

The last thing Danny did in the Daniel Sante rooming house was shave off his beard in the second-fl oor bathroom. He used shears to cut away the majority of it, placing the thick tufts in a paper bag, and then 324DENNIS LEHANE soaked it with hot water and applied the shaving cream in a thick lather.

With each stroke of the straight razor, he felt leaner, lighter. When he wiped off the last stray spot of cream and the final errant hair, he smiled.

Danny and Mark Denton met with Commissioner O'Meara and
Mayor Andrew Peters in the mayor's office on a Saturday afternoon.

The mayor struck Danny as a misplaced man, as if he didn't fit in his offi ce, his big desk, his stiff, high-collared shirt and tweed suit. He played with the phone on his desk a lot and aligned and realigned his desk blotter.

He smiled at them once they'd taken their seats. "The BPD's finest, I suspect, eh, gents?"

Danny smiled back.

Stephen O'Meara stood behind the desk. Before he'd said a word, he commanded the room. "Mayor Peters and I have looked into the budget for this coming year and we see places we could move a dollar here, a dollar there. It won't, I assure you, be enough. But it's a start, gentlemen, and it's a little more than that--it's a public acknowledgment that we take your grievances seriously. Isn't that right, Mr. Mayor?"

Peters looked up from his pencil holder. "Oh, absolutely, yes."

"We've consulted with city sanitation crews about launching an investigation into the health conditions of each and every station house. They've agreed to commence within the first month of the new year." O'Meara met Danny's eyes. "Is that a satisfactory start?"

Danny looked over at Mark and then back at the commissioner. "Absolutely, sir."

Mayor Peters said, "We're still paying back loans on the Commonwealth Avenue sewer project, gentlemen, not to mention the streetcar route expansions, the home fuel crisis during the war, and a substantial operating deficit for the public schools in the white districts. Our bond rating is low and sinking further. And now cost of living has exploded at an unprece dented rate. So we do--we very much do--appreciate your concerns. We do. But we need time."

"And faith," O'Meara said. "Just a bit more of that. Would you gen--

THE GIVEN DAYtlemen be willing to poll your fellow officers? Get a list of their grievances and personal accounts of their day-to-day experiences on the job? Personal testimonials as to how this fiscal imbalance is affecting their home lives? Would you be willing to fully document the sanitation conditions at the station houses and list what you believe are repeated abuses of power at the upper chains of command?"

"Without fear of reprisal?" Danny said.

"Without a one," O'Meara said. "I assure you."

"Then certainly," Mark Denton said.

O'Meara nodded. "Let's meet back here in one month. In that time, let's refrain from voicing complaints in the press or stirring up the bees' nest in any way. Is that acceptable?"

Danny and Mark nodded.

Mayor Peters stood and shook their hands. "I may be new to the post, gentlemen, but I hope to reward your confi dence."

O'Meara came from around the desk and pointed at the offi ce doors. "When we open those doors, the press will be there. Camera flashes, shouted questions, the like. Are any of you undercover at the moment?"

Danny couldn't believe how quick the smile broke across his face or how inexplicably proud he felt to say, "Not anymore, sir."

In a rear booth at the Warren Tavern, Danny handed Eddie McKenna a box that contained his Daniel Sante clothes and rooming-house key, various notes he'd taken that hadn't been included in his reports, and all the literature he'd studied to inform his cover.

Eddie pointed at Danny's clean-shaven face. "So, you're done."

"I am done."

McKenna picked through the box, then pushed it aside. "There's no chance he could change his mind? Wake up after a good night's sleep and--?"

Danny gave him a look that cut him off.

"Think they would have killed you?"

"No. Logically? No. But when you hear four hammers cock at your back?"

326DENNIS LEHANE

McKenna nodded. "Sure that'd make Christ Himself revisit the wisdom of His convictions."

They sat in silence for a while, each to his own drink and his own thoughts.

"I could build you a new cover, move you to a new cell. There's one in--"

"Stop. Please. I'm done. I don't even know what the fuck we were doing. I don't know why--"

"Ours is not to reason why."

"Mine is not to reason why. This is your baby."

McKenna shrugged.

"What did I do here?" Danny's gaze fell on his open palms. "What was accomplished? Outside of making lists of union guys and harmless Bolsheviki--"

"There are no harmless Reds."

"--what the fuck was the point?"

Eddie McKenna drank from his brown bucket of beer and then relit his cigar, one eye squinting through the smoke. "We've lost you." "What?" Danny said.

"We have, we have," Eddie said softly.

"I don't know what you're on about. It's me. Danny."

McKenna looked up at the ceiling tiles. "When I was a boy, I stayed with an uncle for a time. Can't remember if he was on me mother's side or me da's, but he was gray Irish trash just the same. No music to him a'tall, no love, no light. But he had a dog, yeah? Mangy mutt, he was, and dumb as peat, but he had love, he had light. Sure he'd dance in place when he saw me coming up the hill, his tail awagging, dance for the sheer joy of knowing I'd pet him, I'd run with him, I'd rub his patchy belly." Eddie drew on his cigar and exhaled slowly. "Became sick, he did. Worms. Started sneezing blood. Time comes, me uncle tells me to take him to the ocean. Cuffs me when I refuse. Cuffs me worse when I cry. So I carry the cur to the ocean. I carry him out to a point just above me chin and I let him go. I'm supposed to hold him down for a count of sixty, but there's little point. He's weak and feeble and sad and he sinks without a THE GIVEN DAYnoise. I walk back into shore, and me uncle cuffs me again. 'For what?' I shout. He points. And there he is, that feeble brick-headed mutt, swimming back in. Swimming toward me. Eventually, he makes it to shore. He's shivering, he's heaving, he's sopping wet. A marvel, this dog, a romantic, a hero. And he looks at me just in time for me uncle to bring the axe down on his spine and cut him in half."

He sat back. He lifted his cigar from the ashtray. A barmaid removed half a dozen mugs from the next table over. She walked back to the bar, and the room was quiet.

"Fuck you tell a story like that for?" Danny said. "Fuck's wrong with you?"

"It's what's wrong with you, boy. You've got 'fair' in your head now. Don't deny it. You think it's attainable. You do. I can see it."

Danny leaned in, his beer sloshing down the side of his bucket as he lowered it from his mouth. "I'm supposed to fucking learn something from the dog story? What--that life is hard? That the game is rigged? You think this is news? You think I believe the unions or the Bolshies or the BSC stand a spit of a chance of getting their due?"

"Then why are you doing it? Your father, your brother, me--we're worried, Dan. Worried sick. You blew your cover with Fraina because some part of you wanted to blow it."

"No."

"And yet you sit there and tell me you know that no reasonable or sensible government--local, state, or federal--will ever allow the Sovietizing of this country. Not ever. But you continue to get deeper and deeper into the BSC muck and further and further from those who hold you dear. Why? You're me godson, Dan? Why?"

"Change hurts."

"That's your answer?"

Danny stood. "Change hurts, Eddie, but believe me, it's coming." "It isn't."

"It's got to."

Eddie shook his head. "There are fights, m' boy, and there is folly. And I fear you'll soon learn the difference." chapter nineteen In the kitchen with Nora late of a Tuesday afternoon, Nora just back from her job at the shoe factory, Luther chopping vegetables for the soup, Nora peeling potatoes, when Nora said, "You've a girl?"

"Hmm?"

She gave him those pale eyes of hers, the sparkle of them like a fl ickering match. "You heard what I said. Have you a girl somewhere?" Luther shook his head. "No, ma'am."

She laughed.

"What?"

"Sure, you're lying."

"Uh? What makes you say that?"

"I can hear it in your voice, I can."

"Hear what?"

She gave him a throaty laugh. "Love."

"Just 'cause I love someone don't mean she's mine."

"Now that's the truest thing you've said all week. Just because you love someone doesn't mean . . ." She trailed off and went back to hum--

THE GIVEN DAYming softly as she peeled the potatoes, the humming a habit of hers Luther was fairly certain she was unaware of.

Luther used the flat of the knife to push the chopped celery off the cutting board and into the pot. He sidestepped Nora to pull some carrots from the colander in the sink and took them back down the counter with him, chopped off their tops before lining them up and slicing them four at a time.