The Given Day (52 page)

She sipped her coffee and stared across the table with her too-happy face and her sunken eyes. "I half thought you'd have paid me a visit by now."

"Really?"

She nodded, her face beginning to soften from its cast of false gaiety.

"Why would I do that, Nora?"

Her face grew gay again, constricted. "Oh, I don't know. I just hoped, I guess."

"Hoped." He nodded. "What's your son's name by the way?"

She played with her spoon, ran her fingers over the checkered tablecloth. "His name's Gabriel," she said softly, "and he's not my son. I told you that."

"You told me a lot of things," Danny said. "And you never mentioned this son who's not a son until Quentin Finn brought it up for you."

She raised her eyes and they were no longer bright, nor were they angry or wounded. She seemed to have reached a place beyond expectation.

"I don't know whose child Gabriel is. He was simply there the day Quentin brought me to the hovel he calls a home. Gabriel was about eight then, and a wolf would have been better tamed. A mindless, heartless child, our Gabriel. Quentin is a lesser creature among men, of that you've seen, but Gabriel? Sure now the child was molded from devil's clay. He'd crouch for hours by the hearth, watching the fire, as if the flames had voice, and then he'd leave the house without a word and blind a goat. That was Gabriel at nine. Would you like me to tell you what he was like at twelve?"

THE GIVEN DAYDanny didn't want to know anything more about Gabriel or Quentin or Nora's past. Her sullied, embarrassing (and that was it, wasn't it?) past. She was tainted now, a woman he could never acknowledge as his and look the rest of the world in the eye.

Nora sipped some more coffee and looked at him and he could feel it all dying between them. They were both lost, he realized, both fl oating away toward new lives that had nothing to do with one another. They would pass each other one day in a crowd and each would pretend not to have seen the other.

She put on her coat, not a word spoken between them, but both understanding what had transpired. She lifted her hat off the chair. The hat was as threadbare as the coat, and he noticed that her collarbone pressed up hard against her flesh.

He looked down at the table. "You need money?"

"What?" Her whisper was high-pitched, squeaky.

He raised his head. Her eyes had filled. Her lips were clamped tightly against her teeth and she shook her head softly.

"Do you--"

"You didn't say that," she said. "You didn't. You couldn't have." "I just meant--"

"You . . . Danny? My God, you didn't."

He reached for her, but she stepped back. She continued shaking her head at him and then she rushed out of the cafe and into the crowded streets.

He let her go. He let her go. He'd told his father after he'd beaten Quentin Finn that he was ready to grow up now. And that was the truth. He was tired of bucking against the way things were. Curtis had taught him the futility of that in a single afternoon. The world was built and maintained by men like his father and his cronies, and Danny looked out the window at the streets of the North End and decided it was, most times, a good world. It seemed to work in spite of itself. Let other men fight the small and bitter battles against the hardness of it. He was done. Nora, with her lies and sordid history, was just another foolish child's fantasy. She would go off and lie to some other man, and 434DENNIS LEHANE maybe it would be a rich man and she'd live out her lies until they faded and were replaced by a matron's respectability.

Danny would find a woman without a past. A woman fit to be seen in public with him. It was a good world. He would be worthy of it. A grown-up, a citizen.

His fingers searched his pocket for the button, but it wasn't there. For a moment, he was seized with a panic so severe it seemed to demand physical action of him. He straightened in his chair and set his feet, as if preparing to lunge. Then he recalled seeing the button this morning amid some change scattered atop his dresser. So it was there. Safe. He sat back and sipped his coffee, though it had gone cold.

On April 29, in the Baltimore distribution annex of the U. S. Post Office, a postal inspector noticed fluid leaking from a brown cardboard package addressed to Judge Wilfred Enniston of the Fifth District U. S. Appellate Court. When closer inspection of the package revealed that the fluid had burned a hole in the corner of the box, the inspector notified Baltimore police, who dispatched their bomb squad and contacted the Justice Department.

By the end of the evening, authorities discovered thirty-four bombs. They were in packages addressed to Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, John Rockefeller, and thirty- one others. All thirty-four targets worked in either industry or in government agencies whose policies affected immigration standards.

On the same evening in Boston, Louis Fraina and the Lettish Workingman's Society applied for a parade permit to march from the Dudley Square Opera House to Franklin Park in recognition of May Day.

The application for a permit was denied.

RED SUMMER chapter twenty-six May Day, Luther had breakfast at Solomon's Diner before he went to work at the Coughlins'. He left at five-thirty and got as far as Columbus Square before Lieutenant McKenna's black Hudson detached itself from a curb across the street and did a slow U-turn in front of him. He didn't feel surprised. He didn't feel alarmed. He didn't feel much of anything really.

Luther had read the Standard at the Solomon's counter, his eyes immediately drawn to the headline--"Reds Plot May Day Assassinations." He ate his eggs and read about the thirty-four bombs discovered in the U. S. mail. The list of targets was posted in full on the second page of the paper, and Luther, no fan of white judges or white bureaucrats, still felt ice chips flow through his blood. This was followed by a jolt of patriotic fury, the likes of which he'd never suspected could live in his soul for a country that had never treated his people with any welcome or justice. And yet he pictured these Reds, most of them aliens with accents as thick as their mustaches, willing to do violence and wreckage to his country, and he wanted to join any mob that was 438DENNIS LEHANE going to smash them through the teeth, wanted to say to someone, anyone: Just give me a rifl e.

According to the paper, the Reds were planning a day of national revolt, and the thirty-four bombs that had been intercepted suggested a hundred more that could be out there primed to explode. In the past week, leaflets had been pasted to lamp poles across the city, all of which bore the same words:

Go ahead. Deport us. You senile fossils ruling the United States will see red! The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire.

We will dynamite you!

In yesterday's Traveler, even before news of the thirty- four bombs leaked out, an article had listed some of the recent, infl ammatory comments of American subversives, including Jack Reed's call for "the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism through a proletarian dictatorship" and Emma Goldman's anticonscription speech last year, in which she'd urged all workers to "Follow Rus sia's lead."

Follow Rus sia's lead? Luther thought: You love Rus sia so much, fucking move there. And take your bombs and your onion-soup breath with you. For a few, strangely joyous hours, Luther didn't feel like a colored man, didn't even feel there was such a thing as color, only one thing above all others: He was an American.

That changed, of course, as soon as he saw McKenna. The large man stepped out of his Hudson and smiled. He held up a copy of the Standard and said, "You seen it?"

"I seen it," Luther said.

"We're about to have a very serious day ahead of us, Luther." He slapped the newspaper off Luther's chest a couple of times. "Where's my mailing list?"

"My people ain't Reds," Luther said.

"Oh, they're your people now, uh?"

Shit, Luther wanted to say, they always were.

THE GIVEN DAY"You build my vault?" McKenna said, almost singing the words. "Working on it."

McKenna nodded. "You wouldn't be lying now?"

Luther shook his head.

"Where's my fucking list?"

"It's in a safe."

McKenna said, "All I asked of you is that you get me one simple list. Why has that been so diffi cult?"

Luther shrugged. "I don't know how to bust a safe."

McKenna nodded, as if that were perfectly reasonable. "You'll bring it to me after your shift at the Coughlins'. Outside Costello's. It's on the waterfront. Six o'clock."

Luther said, "I don't know how I'm going to do that. I can't bust a safe."

In reality, there was no safe. Mrs. Giddreaux kept the mailing list in her desk drawer. Unlocked.

McKenna tapped the paper lightly off his thigh, as if giving it some thought. "You need to be inspired, I see. That's okay, Luther. All creative men need a muse."

Luther had no idea what he was on about now, but he didn't like his tone--airy, confi dent.

McKenna draped his arm across Luther's shoulder. "Congratulations."

"On?"

That lit a happy fire in McKenna's face. "Your nuptials. I understand you were married last fall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a woman named Lila Waters, late of Columbus, Ohio. A grand institution, marriage."

Luther said nothing, though he was sure the hate showed in his eyes. First the Deacon, now Lieutenant Eddie McKenna of the BPD--it seemed no matter where he went the Lord saw fit to place demons in his path.

"Funny thing is, when I started sniffing around back in Columbus, I found that your bride has a warrant out for her arrest."

440DENNIS LEHANE

Luther laughed.

"You find that funny?"

Luther smiled. "If you knew my wife, McKenna, you'd be laughing, too."

"I'm sure I would, Luther." McKenna nodded several times. "Problem is, this warrant is very real. Seems your wife and a boy by the name of Jefferson Reese--that ring a bell?--seems they were stealing from their employers, family by the name of Hammond? Apparently, they'd been doing it for years by the time your beloved took off to Tulsa. But Mr. Reese, he got himself arrested with some silver frames and some petty cash, and he pinned the whole thing on your wife. Apparently he was under the impression that a partner in his enterprise made the difference between hard time and soft time. They slapped the hard charge on him anyway, and he's in prison now, but the charge is still pending against your wife. Pregnant wife, the way I hear it. So she's sitting there on, let me see if I remember, Seventeen Elwood Street in Tulsa, and I doubt she's moving around all that much, what with the loaf in her oven." McKenna smiled and patted Luther's face. "Ever see the kind of midwives they hire in a county lockup?"

Luther didn't trust himself to speak.

McKenna slapped him in the face, still smiling. "They're not the gentlest of souls, I can tell you that. They merely show the mother the baby's face and then they take that child--if it's a Negro child, that is--and they whisk it straightaway to the county orphanage. That wouldn't be the case, of course, if the father was around, but you're not around, are you? You're here."

Luther said, "Tell me what you want me--"

"I fucking told you, Luther. I fucking told you and told you." He squeezed the flesh along Luther's jaw and pulled his face close. "You get that list and you bring it to Costello's tonight at six. No fucking excuses. Understood?"

Luther closed his eyes and nodded. McKenna let go of his face and stepped back.

"Right now you hate me. I can see that. But today we're going to THE GIVEN DAYsettle accounts in this little burg of ours. Today, the Reds--all Reds, even colored Reds--are getting their eviction notices from this fair city." He held out his arms and shrugged. "And by tomorrow, you'll thank me, because we'll have us a nice place to live again."

He tapped the paper off his thigh again and gave Luther a solemn nod before walking toward his Hudson.

"You're making a mistake," Luther said.

McKenna looked back over his shoulder. "What's that?" "You're making a mistake."

McKenna walked back and punched Luther in the stomach. All the air left his body like it was never coming back. He dropped to his knees and opened his mouth but his throat had collapsed along with his lungs, and for a terrifying length of time he couldn't get a breath in or out. He was sure he'd die like that, on his knees, his face gone blue like someone with the grippe.

When the air did come, it hurt, going down his windpipe like a spade. His first breath came out sounding like the screech of a train wheel, followed by another and then another, until they began to sound normal, if a little high-pitched.

McKenna stood over him, patient. "What was that?" he said softly. "NAACP folks ain't Red," Luther said. "And if some are, they ain't the kind going to blow shit up or fire off guns."

McKenna slapped the side of his head. "I'm not sure I heard you."

Luther could see twins of himself reflected in McKenna's irises. "What you think? You think a bunch of coloreds are going to run in these here streets with weapons? Give you and all the other redneck assholes in this country an excuse to kill us all? You think we want to get massacred?" He stared up at the man, saw that his fist was clenched. "You got a bunch of foreign-born sons of bitches trying to stir up a revolution today, McKenna, so I say you go get them. Put 'em down like dogs. I got no love for those people. And neither do any other colored folk. This is our country, too."

McKenna took a step back and considered him with a wry smile. "What'd you say?"

442DENNIS LEHANE

Luther spit on the ground and took a breath. "Said this is our country, too."

" 'Tis not, son." McKenna shook his large head. "Nor will it ever be."

He left Luther there and climbed into his car and it pulled away from the curb. Luther rose from his knees and sucked a few breaths into his lungs until the nausea had almost passed. "Yes, it is," he whispered, over and over, until he saw McKenna's taillights take a right turn on Massachusetts Avenue.