The Given Day (66 page)

Danny said, "Anything I can do to help you?"

"With what?" Luther said.

"With whatever's been eating you up all summer. I ain't the only one noticed. Nora's worried, too."

Luther shrugged. "Nothing to tell."

"I am a cop, you know." He tossed his shells at Luther.

Luther swept the shells off his thighs. "For now."

Danny gave that a dark chuckle. "That's a fact, isn't it?"

The Detroit batter banged a cloud-climber toward left and it made a loud clang off the scoreboard. Ruth mistimed the carom and the ball hopped over his glove and he had to go stutter-stepping after it in the grass. By the time he came up with it and threw it into the infi eld, a simple single had turned into a triple and a run had scored.

"You really play him?" Danny said.

"Think I imagined it?" Luther said.

"No, I'm just wondering if it's like them cactuses you're always going on about."

"Cacti."

"Right."

Luther looked out to left, watched Ruth wipe some sweat off his face with his tunic. "Yeah, I played him. Him and some of them others out there and some Cubs, too."

"You win?"

550DENNIS LEHANE

Luther shook his head. "Can't win against that type. If they say the sky's green and get their buddies to agree with them, say it a few more times until they believe it, how you going to fight that?" He shrugged. "Sky's green from then on."

"Sounds like you're talking about the police commissioner, the mayor's offi ce."

"Whole city thinks you're going to strike. Calling you Bolshies." "We're not striking. We're just trying to get a fair shake." Luther chuckled. "In this world?"

"World's changing, Luther. The little man ain't lying down like he used to."

"World ain't changing," Luther said. "Ain't ever going to, neither. They tell you the sky's green until you finally say, 'Okay, the sky's green'? Then they own the sky, Danny, and everything underneath it."

"And I thought I was cynical."

Luther said, "Ain't cynical, just open-eyed. Chicago? They stoned that colored kid 'cuz he drifted over to their side of the water. The water, Danny. Whole city's like to burn to the ground now because they think they own water. And they're right. They do."

"Coloreds are fighting back, though," Danny said.

"And what's that going to do?" Luther said. "Yesterday, those four white men got shot to pieces on the Black Belt by six coloreds. You hear that?"

Danny nodded. "I did."

"All anybody's talking about is how those six coloreds massacred four white men. Those white boys had a goddamned machine gun in that car. A machine gun, and they were firing it at colored folk. People ain't talking about that, though. They just talking about white blood running 'cuz of crazed niggers. They own the water, Danny, and the sky is green. And that's that."

"I can't accept that."

"That's why you're a good man. But being good ain't enough."

THE GIVEN DAY"You sound like my father."

"Better than sounding like mine." Luther looked at Danny, the big, strong cop who probably couldn't remember the last time the world didn't work out for him. "You say you're not going to strike. Well, good. But the whole city, including the colored sections, think you are. Those boys you're trying to get a fair shake from? They're already two steps ahead of you, and it ain't about money to them. It's about you forgetting your place and stepping out of line. They won't allow it."

"They might not have a choice," Danny said.

"Ain't about choice to them," Luther said. "Ain't about rights or a fair shake or any of that shit. You think you're calling their bluff. Problem is, they ain't bluffi ng."

Luther sat back and Danny did, too, and they ate the rest of their peanuts and in the fifth they had a couple beers and a couple hot dogs and waited to see if Ruth would break the AL home run record. He didn't, though. He went zero for four and made two errors. An uncharacteristic game for him all around, and some fans wondered aloud if he'd come down with something, or if he was just hungover.

On the walk back from Fenway, Luther's heart was banging away in his chest. It had been happening all summer, rarely for any particu lar reason. His throat would close up and his chest would fl ood with what felt like warm water and then bang- bang- bang- bang, his heart would just start going crazy.

As they walked along Mass. Ave., he looked over at Danny, saw Danny watching him carefully.

"Whenever you're ready," Danny said.

Luther stopped for a moment. Exhausted. Wiped out from carrying it. He looked over at Danny. "I'd have to trust you with something bigger than anyone ever trusted you with something in their lives."

Danny said, "You tended to Nora when no one else would. That means more to me even than saving my life. You loved my wife, Luther, 552DENNIS LEHANE when I was too stupid to. Whatever you need from me?" Danny touched his chest. "You got."

An hour later, standing over the bump of land that was Clayton Tomes's grave in the backyard of the Shawmut Avenue building, Danny said, "You're right. This is big. Fucking huge."

In the house, they sat on the empty floor. It was almost done now, very little left but trim work and the painting. Luther fi nished telling all of it, every last bit, right down to the day last month when he'd picked the lock on the toolbox McKenna had given him. It had taken him twenty minutes, and one look inside told him everything.

No wonder it was so heavy.

Pistols.

He'd checked them, one by one, found that they were all well oiled and in good condition, though hardly new. Loaded, too. Twelve of them. A dozen loaded guns meant to be found on the day the Boston police decided to raid the NAACP and make it look like an army readying for a race war.

Danny sat silent for a long time and drank from his fl ask. Eventually, he handed it across to Luther. "He'll kill you regardless."

"I know it," Luther said. "Ain't me I'm concerned with. It's Yvette. She's like a mother to me. And I can see him, you know, just for the hell of it? 'Cause she's what he call 'nigger bourgeoisie'? He'll kill her for fun. He definitely want to jail her. That's what the guns are all about."

Danny nodded.

"I know he's like blood to you," Luther said.

Danny held up a hand. He closed his eyes and rocked slightly in place.

"He killed that boy? For nothing?"

"For nothing but being black and alive."

THE GIVEN DAYDanny opened his eyes. "Whatever we do from this point on . . . ? You understand."

Luther nodded. "Dies with us."

Connor's first big federal case involved an ironworker named Massimo Pardi. Pardi had stood up at a meeting of the Roslindale Ironworkers Union, Local 12, and proclaimed that the safety conditions at Bay State Iron & Smelting had better improve immediately or the company "might find itself smelted right to the ground." He'd been loudly cheered before four other men--Brian Sullivan, Robert Minton, Duka Skinner, and Luis Ferriere--had lifted him onto their shoulders and walked him around the room. It was that action and those men who sealed Pardi's fate: 1 + 4 = syndicalism. Plain and simple.

Connor filed deportation orders against Massimo Pardi in district court and argued his case before the judge on the grounds that Pardi had violated the Espionage and Sedition Act under the antisyndicalist laws of the Commonwealth and therefore should be deported back to Calabria where a local magistrate could decide if any further punishment were necessary.

Even Connor was surprised when the judge agreed.

Not the next time, though. Certainly not the time after that.

What Connor fi nally realized--and what he hoped would hold him in good stead as long as he practiced law--was that the best arguments were those shorn of emotion or inflammatory rhetoric. Stick with the rule of law, eschew polemic, let pre ce dent speak for you, and leave opposing counsel to choose whether to fight the soundness of those laws on appeal. It was quite the revelation. While opposing counsel thundered and raged and shook their fi sts in front of increasingly exasperated judges, Connor calmly pointed out the logical strictures of justice. And he could see in the eyes of the judges that they didn't like it, they didn't want to agree. Their seepy hearts held for the defendants, but their intellects knew truth when they saw it.

The Massimo Pardi case was to become, in hindsight, emblematic.

554DENNIS LEHANE

The ironworker with the big mouth was sentenced to a year in jail (three months time served), and deportation orders were fi led immediately. If his physical eviction from the country were to occur before he finished his sentence, the United States would graciously commute the remainder of it once he reached international waters. Otherwise, he did the full nine months. Connor, of course, felt some sympathy for the man. Pardi seemed, in the aggregate, an inoffensive sort, a hard worker who'd been engaged to be married in the fall. Hardly a threat to these shores. But what he represented--the very first stop on the road to terrorism--was quite offensive. Mitchell Palmer and the United States had decided the message needed to be sent to the world--we will no longer live in fear of you; you will live in fear of us. And that message was to be sent calmly, implacably, and constantly.

For a few months that summer, Connor forgot he was angry.

The Chicago White Sox came to town after Detroit and Ruth went out with a few of them one night, old friends from the farm league days, and they told him that order had been restored to their city, the army finally cheesing it to the niggers and putting them down once and for all. Thought it would never end, they said. Four days of shooting and pillaging and fires and all because one of theirs swam where he wasn't supposed to. And the whites hadn't been stoning him. They'd just been throwing rocks into the water to warn him off. Ain't their fault he wasn't a good swimmer.

Fifteen whites dead. You believe that? Fifteen. Maybe the niggers had some legitimate grievances, okay, yeah, but to kill fi fteen white men? World was upside down.

It was for Babe. After that game where he'd seen Luther, he couldn't hit shit. Couldn't hit fastballs, couldn't hit curves, couldn't hit it if it had been sent to him on a string at ten miles an hour. He fell into the worst slump of his career. And now that the coloreds had been put back in their place in D. C. and Chicago, and the anarchists seemed to have gone quiet, and the country might have been able to take just one easy breath, the agitators and agitation sprang up from the least likely of quarters: the police.

THE GIVEN DAYThe police, for Christ's sake!

Every day of Ruth's slump brought more signs that push was coming to shove and the city of Boston was going to pop at the seams. The papers reported rumors of a sympathy strike that would make Seattle look like an exhibition game. In Seattle it had been public workers, sure, but garbagemen and transit workers. In Boston, word was, they'd lined up the firemen. If the cops and the jakes walked off the job? Jeepers Crow! The city would become rubble and ash.

Babe had a regular thing going now with Kat Lawson at the Hotel Buckminster, and he left her sleeping one night and stopped in the bar on his way out. Chick Gandil, the White Sox first baseman, was at the bar with a couple fellas, and Babe headed for them but saw something in Chick's eyes that immediately warned him off. He took a seat down the other end, ordered a double scotch, and recognized the guys Chick was talking to: Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell, errand boys for Arnold Rothstein.

And Babe thought: Uh- oh. Nothing good's going to come of this.

Around the time Babe's third scotch arrived, Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell removed their coats from the backs of their chairs and left through the front door, and Chick Gandill walked his own double scotch down the length of the bar and plopped into the seat next to Babe with a loud sigh.

"Gidge."

"Babe."

"Oh, right, right. Babe. How you doing?"

"Ain't hanging with mutts, that's how I'm doing."

"Who's the mutts?"

Babe looked at Gandill. "You know who the mutts are. Sport Sullivan? Abe Fucking Attell? They're mutts work for Rothstein and Rothstein's the mutt of mutts. What the fuck you doing talking to a pair of mutts like that, Chick?"

"Gee, Mom, next time let me ask permission."

"They're dirty as the Muddy River, Gandil. You know it and anyone else with eyes knows it, too. You get seen with a pair of diamond dandies like that, who's going to believe you ain't taking?"

556DENNIS LEHANE

"Why do you think I met him here?" Chick said. "This ain't Chicago. It's nice and quiet. And no one'll get wind, Babe, my boy, long as you keep your nigger lips shut." Gandil smiled and drained his drink and dropped it to the bar. "Shoving off, my boy. Keep swinging for the fences. You've gotta hit one sometime this month, right?" He clapped Babe on the back and laughed and walked out of the bar.

Nigger lips. Shit.

Babe ordered another.

Police talking about a strike, ballplayers talking to known fi xers, his home-run-record chase stalled at sixteen because of a chance sighting of a colored fella he'd met once in Ohio.

Was anything fucking sacred anymore?

The BOSTON

POLICE STRIKE chapter thirty-three Danny met with Ralph Raphelson at the headquarters of the Boston Central Labor Union on the first Thursday in August. Raphelson was so tall he was one of the rare men with a face Danny had to look up into as he shook his hand. Thin as a fi ngernail, with wispy blond hair racing to depart the steep slope of his skull, he motioned Danny to a chair and took his own behind his desk. Beyond the windows, a hot-soup rain fell from beige clouds and the streets smelled like stewed produce.

"Let's start with the obvious," Ralph Raphelson said. "If you have an itch to comment on or give me the rough work about my name, please scratch it now."

Danny let Raphelson see him consider it before he said, "Nope. All set."

"Much appreciated." Raphelson opened his hands. "What can we do for the Boston Police Department this morning, Offi cer Coughlin?"