Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“Answer my question, Luther. This is no child’s game.”

“No,” Luther said. “I never gave him anything.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Luther didn’t say anything.

“He wouldn’t just get you under his thumb and not dirty you up a little bit in his filth with him. The police don’t work that way. He would have sent you in with something to plant here or at the new building, something illegal.”

Luther shook his head.

She looked back at him, her breaths coming soft and measured.

Luther shook his head again.

“Luther.”

Luther told her about the vault.

She looked at him with such pained confusion Luther wanted to jump out the window. “Why didn’t you just come to us the moment he approached you?”

Luther said, “I don’t know.”

She shook her head. “Don’t you trust anyone, son? Anyone?”

Luther kept his mouth shut.

Mrs. Giddreaux reached for the phone on her desk and tapped the cradle once, tucked her hair behind her ear as she placed the receiver to her ear. “Edna? Girl, send every typist you’ve got up to the main floor. Get them all in the parlor and the dining room. You hear? Right now. And tell them to carry those typewriters with them. Oh, and Edna? You have phone directories down there, don’t you? No, I can’t use Boston. You have Philadelphia? Good. Send that up, too.”

She hung up and tapped her fingers lightly off her lips. When she looked at Luther again, the anger was gone from her eyes, replaced by the shine of excitement. Then her face darkened again and those fingers stopped tapping.

“What?” Luther said.

“No matter what you bring him tonight, he may just have you arrested or shot.”

“Why would he do that?” Luther said.

She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Because he can. Let’s start there.” She shook her head slightly. “He’ll do it, Luther, because you got him the list. That’s not something you’ll be able to tell someone about from prison.”

“What if I don’t bring it?”

“Oh, then he’ll just kill you,” she said mildly. “Shoot you in the back. No, you’ll have to bring it.” She sighed.

Luther was still back at the “kill you” part.

“I’m going to have to call some people. Dr. Du Bois for starters.” Her fingers tapped her chin now. “Legal Department in New York, that’s for sure. Legal Department in Tulsa, too.”

“Tulsa?”

She glanced back at him, as if just recalling he was still in the room. “If this blows up, Luther, and some policeman comes to arrest your wife? We’ll have counsel waiting for her on the steps of the county jail before she even arrives. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?”

Luther said, “I … I … I—”

“You, you, you,” Mrs. Giddreaux said and then gave him a small, disappointed smile. “Luther, your heart is good. You never sold your people out and you sat here and waited for me when a lesser man would have been off down the street with that ledger. And, son, I do appreciate it. But you’re still a boy, Luther. A child. If you trusted us four months ago, you wouldn’t be in this mess, and neither would we.” She reached across the desk and patted his hand. “It’s okay. It is. Every bear was once a cub.”

She led him out of the office into the living room as a dozen women entered carrying typewriters, their wrists straining from the weight. Half were colored women, the other half were white, college girls mostly, from money mostly, too, and those ones glanced at Luther with a bit of fear and a bit of something else he didn’t care to think too much about.

“Girls, half stay in here, half of you get in that room yonder. Who has the phone directory?”

One of the girls had it on top of her typewriter and tilted her arms so Mrs. Giddreaux could see it.

“Take it with you, Carol.”

“What we gone do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?”

Mrs. Giddreaux looked up sharply at the girl. “What are we, Regina, going to do with it, Regina.”

“What are we going to do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?” Regina stammered.

Mrs. Giddreaux smiled at Luther. “We’re going to tear it into twelfths, girls, and then we’re going to type it all over again.”

The cops who were able to walk on their own made their way back to the Oh-Nine and were attended to by paramedics in the basement. Before he’d left the Dudley Opera House, Danny had watched the ambulance drivers toss Nathan Bishop and five other damaged radicals into the back of their wagon like fish tossed on ice, before slamming the doors shut and driving off. In the basement, Danny’s shoulder was cleaned and stitched and he was given a bag of ice for his eye, though it was too late to do much about the swelling. Half a dozen men, who’d thought they were okay, weren’t, and they were helped back up the stairs and out onto the street where ambulances took them to Mass General. A team from Department Supply showed up with fresh uniforms that were handed out to the men after Captain Vance reminded them with some embarrassment that the cost of the uniforms, as always, would come out of the men’s pay, but he’d see what he could do about getting a onetime reduction on the cost, given the circumstances.

When they were all assembled in the basement, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna took the podium. He bore a gash on his neck, treated and cleaned but unbandaged, and his white collar was black with blood. When he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, the men leaned forward in their folding chairs.

“We lost one of our own today, men. A true policeman, a copper’s copper. We are lesser men now, and the world is a lesser place as well.” He lowered his head for a moment. “Today they took one of our own, but they didn’t take our honor.” He stared out at them, his eyes gone cold and clear. “They did not take our courage. They did not take our manhood. They just took one of our brothers.

“We’re going back into their territory tonight. Captain Vance and I will lead you. We are looking, specifically, for four men — Louis Fraina, Wychek Olafski, Pyotr Rastorov, and Luigi Broncona. We have photographs of Fraina and Olafski and sketches of the other two. But we won’t stop with them. We will subdue, without quarter, our common enemy. You all know what that enemy looks like. They wear a uniform as obvious as ours. Ours is blue, theirs is of coarse cloth and scraggly beard and watch cap. And they have the fanatics’ fire in their eyes. We are going to go out into those streets and we will take them back. Of this,” he said, and his eyes found the room, “there is no doubt. There is only resolve.” He gripped the podium, his eyes rolling slowly from left to right. “Tonight, my brothers, there is no rank. No difference between a first-year patrolman and a twenty-year gold shield. Because tonight we are all united in the red of our blood and the blue of our professional cloth. Make no mistake, we are soldiers. And as the poet wrote, ‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’ Let that be your benediction, men. Let that be your clarion call.”

He stepped from the podium and snapped a salute and the men rose as one and returned the salute. Danny compared it with this morning’s chaotic mix of fury and fear and found none of that. In accordance with McKenna’s wishes, the men had turned Spartan, utile, so fused to their sense of duty that they were indistinguishable from it.

When the first detail of officers showed up at the door of The Revolutionary Age, Louis Fraina was waiting for them with two lawyers in attendance. He was cuffed and led out to the wagon on Humboldt Avenue and his lawyers rode with him.