Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Thomas saw Patrick Donnegan and Claude Mesplede sitting in the small gazebo that looked out on the sea. Just beyond it was a dark green fishing pier, mostly empty at midday. He raised a hand and they raised theirs as he began the trudge across the sand through families trying to escape the heat of their homes for the heat of this sand. He would never understand this phenomenon of lying by the water, of taking the entire family to engage in the mass indulgence of idleness. It seemed like something Romans would have done, baking under their sun gods. Men were no more meant to be idle than horses were. It fostered a restlessness of thinking, an acceptance of amoral possibilities and the philosophy of relativism. Thomas would kick the men if he could, kick them from the sand and send them out to work.

Patrick Donnegan and Claude Mesplede watched him come with smiles on their faces. They were always smiling, these two, a pair if ever there was one. Donnegan was the ward boss for the Sixth and Mesplede was its alderman, and they had held these positions for eighteen years, through mayors, through governors, through police captains and police commissioners, through presidents. Nestled deep in the bosom of the city where no one ever thought to look, they ran it, along with a few other ward bosses and aldermen and congressmen and councilors who’d been smart enough to secure positions on the key committees that controlled the wharves and the saloons and the building contracts and the zoning variances. If you controlled these, you controlled crime and you controlled the enforcement of law and, thus, you controlled everything that swam in the same sea, which was to say, everything that made a city run — the courts, the precincts, the wards, the gambling, the women, the businesses, the unions, the vote. The last, of course, was the procreative engine, the egg that hatched the chicken that hatched more eggs that hatched more chickens and would do so ad infinitum.

As childishly simple as this process was, most men, given a hundred years on earth, would never understand it because most men didn’t want to.

Thomas entered the gazebo and leaned against the inner wall. The wood was hot and the white sun found the center of his forehead as a bullet to a hawk.

“How’s the family, Thomas?”

Thomas handed him the satchel. “Tops, Patrick. Just tops. And the missus?”

“She’s fit, Thomas. Picking out architects for the house we’re building in Marblehead, she is.” Donnegan opened the satchel, peered inside.

“And yours, Claude?”

“My eldest, Andre, has passed the bar.”

“Grand stuff. Here?”

“In New York. He graduated Columbia.”

“You must be fierce-proud.”

“I am, Thomas, thank you.”

Donnegan stopped rummaging in the satchel. “Every list we asked for?”

“And more.” Thomas nodded. “We threw in the NAACP as a bonus.”

“Ah, you’re a miracle worker.”

Thomas shrugged. “It was Eddie mostly.”

Claude handed Thomas a small valise. Thomas opened it and looked at the two bricks of money inside, both wrapped tightly in paper and taped. He had a practiced eye when it came to such transactions, and he knew by the thickness that his and Eddie’s payments were even larger than promised. He raised an eyebrow at Claude.

“Another company joined us,” Claude said. “Profit participation rose accordingly.”

“Shall we walk, Thomas?” Patrick said. “’Tis diabolical heat.”

“A sound suggestion.”

They removed their jackets and strolled to the pier. At midday it was empty of fishermen, save for a few who seemed far more interested in the buckets of beer at their feet than any fish they could jerk over the rail.

They leaned against the rail and looked out at the Atlantic and Claude Mesplede rolled his own cigarette and lit it with a cupped match that he flicked into the ocean. “We’ve compiled that list of saloons that will be converting to rooming houses.”

Thomas Coughlin nodded. “There’s no weak link?”

“Not a one.”

“No criminal histories to worry about?”

“None at all.”

He nodded. He reached into his jacket and removed his cigar from the inside pocket. He snipped the end and put his match to it.

“And they all have basements?”

“As a matter of course.”

“I see no problem then.” He puffed slowly on the cigar.

“There’s an issue with the wharves.”

“Not in my districts.”

“The Canadian wharves.”

He looked at Donnegan, then at Mesplede.

“We’re working on it,” Donnegan said.

“Work faster.”

“Thomas.”

He turned to Mesplede. “Do you know what will happen if we don’t control point of entry and point of contact?”

“I do.”

“Do you?”

“I said I do.”

“The lunatic Irish and the lunatic dagos will organize. They won’t be mad dogs in the street anymore, Claude. They’ll be units. They’ll control the stevedores and the teamsters, which means they’ll control transport. They’ll be able to set terms.”

“That will never happen.”

Thomas considered the ash at the end of his cigar. He held it out to the wind and watched the wind eat the ash until the flame glowed underneath. He waited until it had turned from blue to red before he spoke again.

“If they take control of this, they’ll tip the balance. They’ll control us. At their leisure, gents, not ours. You’re our man with the friends in Canada, Claude.”

“And you’re our man in the BPD, Thomas, and I’m hearing talk of a strike.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“It is the subject.”

Thomas looked over at him and Claude flicked his ash into the sea and took another hungry puff. He shook his head at his own anger and turned his back to the sea. “Are you telling me there won’t be a strike? Can you guarantee that? Because from what I saw on May Day, you have a rogue police department out there. They engage in a gang fight, and you’re telling us you can control them?”

“I was after you all last year to get the mayor’s ear on this one, and what happened?”

“Don’t put this on my door, Tommy.”

“I’m not putting it on your door, Claude. I’m asking about the mayor.”

Claude looked over at Donnegan and said, “Ach,” and flipped his cigarette into the sea. “Peters is no mayor. You know that. He spends all his time shacked up with his fourteen-year-old concubine. Who is, I might add, his cousin. Meanwhile, his men, carpetbaggers all, could make Ulysses Grant’s gangster-cabinet blush. Now there might be some sympathy for your men’s plight, but they pissed that all away, didn’t they?”

“When?”

“In April. They were offered their two-hundred-a-year increase and they declined.”

“Jesus,” Thomas said, “cost of living has risen seventy-three percent. Seventy-three .”

“I know the number.”

“That two hundred a year was a prewar figure. The poverty level is fifteen hundred a year, and most coppers make far less than that. They’re the police, Claude, and they’re working for less wages than niggers and women.”

Claude nodded and placed a hand on Thomas’s shoulder, gave it a soft squeeze. “I can’t argue with you. But the thinking in City Hall and in the commissioner’s office is that the men can be put on the Pay No Heed list because they’re emergency personnel. They can’t affiliate with a union and they sure can’t strike.”

“But they can.”

“No, Thomas,” he said, his eyes clear and cold. “They can’t. Patrick’s been out in the wards, taking an informal poll, if you will. Patrick?”

Patrick spread his hands over the rail. “Tom, it’s like this — I’ve talked to our constituents, and if the police dare strike, this city will vent all its rage — at unemployment, the high cost of living, the war, the niggers coming from down South to take jobs, at the price of getting up in the damn morning — and send it straight at the city.”