Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

The three policemen stood and saluted James J. Storrow and the men of his commission and took their leave.

Danny, Nora, and Luther played hearts on an old sheet placed between two iron smokestacks on the roof of Danny’s building. Late evening, all three of them tired — Luther smelling of the stockyard, Nora of the factory — and yet they were up here with two bottles of wine and a deck of cards because there were few places a black man and a white man could congregate in public and fewer still where a woman could join those men and partake of too much wine. It felt to Danny, when the three of them were together like this, that they were beating the world at something.

Luther said, “Who’s that?” and his voice was lazy with the wine.

Danny followed his eyes and saw James Jackson Storrow crossing the roof toward him. He started to stand and Nora caught his wrist when he wavered.

“I was told by a kind Italian woman to search for you here,” Storrow said. He glanced at the three of them, at the tattered sheet with the cards spread across it, at the bottles of wine. “I apologize for intruding.”

“Not at all,” Danny said as Luther made it to his feet and held out a hand to Nora. Nora grasped his hand and Luther tugged her upright and she smoothed her dress.

“Mr. Storrow, this is my wife, Nora, and my friend, Luther.”

Storrow shook each of their hands as if this kind of gathering occurred every day on Beacon Hill.

“An honor to meet you both.” He gave them each a nod. “Could I abscond with your husband for just a moment, Mrs. Coughlin?”

“Of course, sir. Careful with him, though — he’s a bit spongy on his feet.”

Storrow gave her a wide smile. “I can see that, ma’am. It’s no bother.”

He tipped his hat to her and followed Danny across the roof to the eastern edge and they looked out at the harbor.

“You count coloreds among your equals, Officer Coughlin?”

“Long as they don’t complain,” Danny said, “I don’t either.”

“And public drunkenness in your wife is no cause for your concern either?”

Danny kept his eyes on the harbor. “We’re not in public, sir, and if we were, I wouldn’t give much of a fuck. She’s my wife. Means a hell of a lot more to me than the public.” He turned his gaze on Storrow. “Or anyone else for that matter.”

“Fair enough.” Storrow placed a pipe to his lips and took a minute to light it.

“How’d you find me, Mr. Storrow?”

“It wasn’t hard.”

“So what brings you?”

“Your president, Mr. Denton, wasn’t home.”

“Ah.”

Storrow puffed on his pipe. “Your wife possesses a spirit of the flesh that fairly leaps off her.”

“A ‘spirit of the flesh’?”

He nodded. “Quite so. It’s easy to see how you became enraptured with her.” He sucked on the pipe again. “The colored man I’m still trying to figure out.”

“Your reason for coming, sir?”

Storrow turned so that they were face-to-face. “Mark Denton may very well have been at home. I never checked. I came directly to you, Officer Coughlin, because you have both passion and temperance, and your men, I can only assume, feel that. Officer Denton struck me as quite intelligent, but his gifts for persuasion are less than yours.”

“Who would you like me to persuade, Mr. Storrow, and what am I selling?”

“The same thing I’m selling, Officer — peaceful resolution.” He placed a hand on Danny’s arm. “Talk to your men. We can end this, son. You and I. I’m going to release my report to the papers tomorrow night. I will be recommending full acquiescence to your demands. All but one.”

Danny nodded. “AFL affiliation.”

“Exactly.”

“So we’re left with nothing again, nothing but promises.”

“But they’re my promises, son. With the full weight of the mayor and governor and the Chamber of Commerce behind them.”

Nora let out a high laugh, and Danny looked across the roof to see her flicking cards at Luther and Luther holding up his hands in mock defense. Danny smiled. He’d learned over the last few months how much Luther’s preferred method of displaying affection for Nora was through teasing, an affection she gladly returned in kind.

Danny kept his eyes on them. “Every day in this country they’re breaking unions, Mr. Storrow. Telling us who we have a right to associate with and who we don’t. When they need us, they speak of family. When we need them, they speak of business. My wife over there? My friend? Myself? We’re outcasts, sir, and alone we’d probably drown. But together, we’re a union. How long before Big Money gets that in their head?”

“They will never get it in their heads,” Storrow said. “You think you’re fighting a larger fight, Officer, and maybe you are. But it’s a fight as old as time, and it will never end. No one will wave a white flag, nor ever concede defeat. Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J. P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?”

“No, sir.”

“Gods don’t think they can become men.”

Danny turned and met the man’s eyes, said nothing.

“If you remain adamant on AFL affiliation, every hope you ever held for a better lot will be ground into dust.”

Danny looked back at Nora and Luther again. “Do I have your word that if I sell my men on withdrawal from the AFL, the city will grant us our due?”

“You have my word and the mayor’s and the governor’s.”

“It’s your word I care about.” Danny held out his hand. “I’ll sell it to my men.”

Storrow shook his hand, then held it firm. “Smile, young Coughlin — we’re going to save this city, you and I.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Danny sold it to them. In Fay Hall, at nine the next morning. After the vote, which was a shaky 406 to 377, Sid Polk asked, “What if they shaft us again?”

“They won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” Danny said. “But at this point, I don’t see any logic to it.”

“What if this was never about logic?” someone called.

Danny held up his hands because no answer occurred to him.

Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Peters, and James Storrow made the drive to Commissioner Curtis’s house in Nahant late Sunday afternoon. They met the commissioner out on his back deck which overlooked the Atlantic under a sallow sky.

Several things were clear to Storrow within moments of their assemblage. The first was that Coolidge had no respect for Peters and Peters hated him for it. Every time Peters opened his mouth to make a point, Coolidge cut him off.

The second thing, and the more worrisome, was that time had done nothing to remove from Edwin Upton Curtis the air of self-loathing and misanthropy that lived in him so fully it colored his flesh like a virus.

Peters said, “Commissioner Curtis, we have—”

“—come,” Coolidge said, “to inform you that Mr. Storrow may have found a resolution to our crisis.”

Peters said, “And that—”

“—if you were to hear our reasoning, I’m sure you would conclude we have all reached an acceptable compromise.” Coolidge sat back in his deck chair.

“Mr. Storrow,” Curtis said, “how have you been faring since last we met?”

“Well, Edwin. Yourself?”

Curtis said to Coolidge, “Mr. Storrow and I last met at a fabulous fete thrown by Lady Dewar in Louisburg Square. A legendary night, that, wouldn’t you say, James?”

Storrow couldn’t recall the night for the life of him. Lady Dewar had been dead more than a decade. As socialites went, she’d been presentable, but hardly elite. “Yes, Edwin, it was a memorable occasion.”