Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Thomas pointed his shotgun at the ground and fired.

The mob backed up.

“I’m Captain Thomas Coughlin,” he called and stomped his foot down on Filching Phil’s knee. He didn’t get the sound he’d been after, so he did it again. This time he got the sweet crack of bone followed by the predictable shriek. He waved his arm and the eleven men he’d been able to pull together spread along the fringe of the crowd.

“I’m Captain Thomas Coughlin,” he repeated, “and be of no illusion — we intend to spill blood.” He swept his eyes across the faces in the mob. “Your blood.” He turned to the Metro Park Police officers on the stairs of the church. There were ten of them, and they seemed to have shrunk into themselves. “Level your weapons or stop calling yourselves officers of the law.”

The crowd took another step back as the Metro Park cops extended their arms.

“Cock them!” Thomas shouted.

They did, and the crowd took several more steps back.

“If I see anyone holding a rock,” Thomas called, “we shoot to kill.”

He took five steps forward, the shotgun coming to rest on the chest of a man with a rock in his hand. The man dropped the rock and then urinated down his left leg. Thomas considered mercy and quickly deemed it inappropriate for the atmosphere. He opened the urinator’s forehead with his shotgun butt and stepped over him.

“Run, you wretched curs.” He swept his eyes across them. “RUN!”

No one moved — they looked too shocked — and Thomas turned to Eigen, to the men on the fringe, to the Metro Park cops.

“Fire at will.”

The Metro Park cops stared back at him.

Thomas rolled his eyes. He drew his service revolver, raised it above his head, and fired six times.

The men got the point. They began to discharge their weapons into the air and the crowd exploded like drops from a shattered water bucket. They ran up the street. They ran and ran, darting into alleys and down side streets, banging off overturned cars, falling to the sidewalk, stomping on one another, hurling themselves into storefronts and landing on the broken glass they’d created only an hour before.

Thomas flicked his wrist and emptied his shell casings onto the street. He laid the shotgun at his feet and reloaded his service revolver. The air was sharp with cordite and the echoes of gunfire. The mob continued its desperate flight. Thomas holstered his revolver and reloaded his shotgun. The long summer of impotence and confusion faded from his heart. He felt twenty-five years old.

Tires squealed behind him. Thomas turned as one black Buick and four patrol cars pulled to a stop as a soft rain began to fall. Superintendent Michael Crowley exited the Buick. He carried his own shotgun and wore his service revolver in a shoulder holster. He sported a fresh bandage on his forehead, and his fine dark suit was splattered with egg yolk and bits of shell.

Thomas smiled at him and Crowley gave him a tired smile in return.

“Time for a little law and order, wouldn’t you say, Captain?”

“Indeed, Superintendent.”

They walked up the center of the street as the rest of the men dropped in behind them.

“Like the old days, Tommy, eh?” Crowley said as they started to make out the outer edge of a fresh mob concentrated in Andrew Square two blocks ahead.

“Just what I was thinking, Michael.”

“And when we clear them here?”

When we clear them. Not if . Thomas loved it.

“We take Broadway back.”

Crowley clapped a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.

“Ah, how I missed this.”

“Me, too, Michael. Me, too.”

Mayor Peters’s chauffeur, Horace Russell, glided the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost along the fringes of the trouble, never once entering a street so strewn with debris or the throngs that they would have been hard-pressed to get back out again. And so, while the populace rioted, its mayor observed them from a remove, but not so much of a remove that he couldn’t hear their terrible war cries, their shrieks and high-pitched laughter, the shock of sudden gunfire, the incessant shattering of glass.

Once he’d toured Scollay Square, he thought he’d seen the worst of it, but then he saw the North End, and not long thereafter, South Boston. He realized that nightmares so bad he’d never dared dream them had come to fruition.

The voters had handed him a city of peerless reputation. The Athens of America, the birthplace of the American Revolution and two presidents, seat to more higher education than any other city in the nation, the Hub of the universe.

And on his watch, it was disassembling itself brick by brick.

They crossed back over the Broadway Bridge, leaving behind the flames and screams of the South Boston slum. Andrew Peters told Horace Russell to take him to the nearest phone. They found one at the Castle Square Hotel in the South End, which was, for the moment, the only quiet neighborhood they’d passed through tonight.

With the bell staff and the manager conspicuously watching, Mayor Peters called the Commonwealth Armory. He informed the soldier who answered who he was and told him to get Major Dallup to the phone on the double

“Dallup here.”

“Major. Mayor Peters.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Are you currently in command of the motor corps and the First Cavalry Troop?”

“I am, sir. Under the command of General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, sir.”

“Who are where presently?”

“I believe with Governor Coolidge at the State House, sir.”

“Then you are in active command, Major. Your men are to stay at the armory and stand at readiness. They are not to go home. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I will be by to review them and to give you your deployment assignments.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are going to put down some riots tonight, Major.”

“With pleasure, sir.”

When Peters arrived at the armory fifteen minutes later, he saw a trooper exit the building and head up Commonwealth toward Brighton.

“Trooper!” He left the car and held up a hand. “Where are you going?”

The trooper looked at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m the mayor of Boston.”

The trooper immediately straightened and then saluted. “My apologies, sir.”

Peters returned the salute. “Where are you going, son?”

“Home, sir. I live right up the—”

“You were given orders to stand at the ready.”

The trooper nodded. “But those orders were countermanded by General Stevens.”

“Go back inside,” Peters said.

As the trooper opened the door, several more troopers started to file out, but the original deserter pushed them back inside, saying, “The mayor, the mayor.”

Peters strode inside and immediately spied a man with a major’s oak leaf cluster by the staircase leading up to the orderly room.

“Major Dallup!”

“Sir!”

“What is the meaning of this?” Peters’s hand swept around the armory, at the men with their collars unbuttoned, weaponless, shifting in place.

“Sir, if I could explain.”

“Please do!” Peters was surprised to hear the sound of his voice, raised, flinty.

Before Major Dallup could explain anything, however, a voice boomed from the top of the stairs.

“These men are going home!” Governor Coolidge stood at the landing above them all. “Mayor Peters, you have no business here. Go home as well, sir.”

As Coolidge came down the stairs, flanked by General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, Peters rushed up. All four men met in the middle.

“This city is rioting.”

“It is doing no such thing.”

“I have been out in it, Governor, and I tell you, I tell you, I tell you—” Peters hated this stammer he developed when upset but he wouldn’t let it stop him now. “I tell you, sir, that it is not sporadic. It is tens of thousands of men and they are—”