Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“There is no riot,” Coolidge said.

“Yes, there is! In South Boston, in the North End, in Scollay Square! Look for yourself, man, if you don’t believe me.”

“I have looked.”

“Where?”

“From the State House.”

“The State House?” Peters said, screaming now, his voice sounding to his own ears like that of a child. A female child. “The rioting isn’t happening on Beacon Hill, Governor. It’s happening—”

“Enough.” Coolidge held up a hand.

“Enough?” Peters said.

“Go home, Mr. Mayor. Go home.”

It was the tone that got to Andrew Peters, the tone a parent reserved for a bratty child having a pointless tantrum.

Mayor Andrew Peters then did something he was reasonably sure had never occurred in Boston politics — he punched the governor in the face.

He had to jump from a lower step to do it, and Coolidge was tall to begin with, so it wasn’t much of a punch. But it did connect with the tissue around the governor’s left eye.

Coolidge was so stunned, he didn’t move. Peters was so pleased, he decided to do it again.

The general and the colonel grabbed at his arms, and several troopers ran up the stairs, but in those few seconds, Peters managed to land a few more flailing shots.

The governor, oddly, never moved back or raised his hands to defend himself.

Several troopers carried Mayor Andrew Peters back down the stairs and deposited him on the floor.

He thought of rushing up them again.

Instead, he pointed a finger at Governor Coolidge. “This is on your conscience.”

“But your ledger, Mr. Mayor.” Coolidge allowed himself a small smile. “Your ledger, sir.”

Horace Russell drove Mayor Peters to City Hall Wednesday morning at half past seven. Absent fires and screams and darkness, the streets had lost their ghoulish flavor, but stark evidence of the mob lay everywhere. Nary a window was left intact along Washington or Tremont or any of the streets that intersected them. Husks where once stood businesses. The skeleton frames of charred automobiles. So much trash and debris in the streets Peters could only assume this was what cities looked like after protracted battles and sporadic bombing.

Along the Boston Common, men lay in drunken stupors or openly engaged in dice games. Across Tremont, a few souls raised plywood over their window frames. In front of some businesses, men paced with shotguns and rifles. Phone lines hung severed from their poles. All street signs had been removed, and most gas lamps were shattered.

Peters placed a hand over his eyes because he felt an overwhelming need to weep. A stream of words ran through his head, so constant it took him a minute to realize it also left his tongue in a low whisper: This never had to happen, this never had to happen, this never had to happen….

The impulse to weep turned to something colder as they reached City Hall. He strode up to his office and immediately placed a call to police headquarters.

Curtis answered the phone himself, his voice a tired shadow of itself. “Hello.”

“Commissioner, it’s Mayor Peters.”

“You call for my resignation, I expect.”

“I call for damage assessment. Let’s start there.”

Curtis sighed. “One hundred and twenty-nine arrests. Five rioters shot, none critically injured. Five hundred sixty-two people treated for injuries at Haymarket Relief, a third of those related to cuts from broken glass. Ninety-four muggings reported. Sixty-seven assaults-and-battery. Six rapes.”

“Six?”

“Reported, yes.”

“Your estimate as to the real number?”

Another sigh. “Based on uncorroborated reports from the North End and South Boston, I’d place the number in the dozens. Thirty, let’s say.”

“Thirty.” Peters felt the need to weep again, but it didn’t come as an overwhelming wave, merely as a stabbing sensation behind his eyes. “Property damage?”

“In the hundreds of thousands.”

“The hundreds of thousands, yes, I thought so myself.”

“Mostly small businesses. The banks and department stores—”

“Hired private security. I know.”

“The firemen will never strike now.”

“What?”

“The firemen,” Curtis said. “The sympathy strike. My man in the department tells me they are so irate about the countless false alarms they responded to last night that they’ve turned against the strikers.”

“How does this information help us right now, Commissioner?”

“I won’t resign,” Curtis said.

The gall of this man. The gumption. A city under siege of its populace and all he thinks of is his job and his pride.

“You won’t have to,” Peters said. “I’m removing you from your command.”

“You can’t.”

“Oh, I can. You love rules, Commissioner. Please consult Section Six, Chapter Three-twenty-three of the 1885 city bylaws. Once you’ve done that, clean out your desk. Your replacement will be there by nine.”

Peters hung up. He would have expected to feel more satisfaction, but it was one of the more dispiriting aspects of this entire affair that the only possible flush of victory had lain in averting the strike. Once it had begun, no man, least of all himself, could lay claim to any accomplishment. He called to his secretary, Martha Pooley, and she came into the office with the list of names and telephone numbers he’d asked for. He started with Colonel Sullivan of the State Guard. When he answered, Peters skipped all formalities.

“Colonel Sullivan, this is your mayor. I am giving you a direct order that cannot be countermanded. Understood?”

“Yes, Mr. Mayor.”

“Assemble the entire State Guard in the Boston area. I am putting the Tenth Regiment, the First Cavalry Troop, the First Motor Corps, and the Ambulance Corps under your command. Is there any reason you cannot perform these duties, Colonel?”

“None whatsoever, sir.”

“See to it.”

“Yes, Mr. Mayor.”

Peters hung up and immediately dialed the home of General Charles Cole, former commander of the Fifty-second Yankee Division and one of the chief members of the Storrow Committee. “General Cole.”

“Mr. Mayor.”

“Would you serve your city as acting police commissioner, sir?”

“It would be my honor.”

“I’ll send a car. At what time could you be ready, General?”

“I’m already dressed, Mr. Mayor.”

Governor Coolidge held a press conference at ten. He announced that in addition to the regiments Mayor Peters had called up, he had asked Brigadier General Nelson Bryant to assume command of the state response to the crisis. General Bryant had accepted and would command the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Regiments of the State Guard as well as a machine-gun company.

Volunteers continued to converge on the Chamber of Commerce to receive their badges, uniforms, and weapons. Most, he noted, were former officers of the Massachusetts Yankee Division and had served with distinction in the Great War. He further noted that 150 Harvard undergraduates, including the entire football team, had been sworn in as members of the volunteer police department.

“We are in good hands, gentlemen.”

When asked why the State Guard had not been called out the previous evening, Governor Coolidge responded, “Yesterday I was persuaded to leave matters of public safety to city authorities. I have since regretted the wisdom of this trust.”

When a reporter asked the governor how he’d suffered the bruise under his left eye, Governor Coolidge announced that the press conference was over and left the room.

Danny stood with Nora on the rooftop of his building and looked down at the North End. During the worst of the rioting, some men had blocked off Salem Street with truck tires they’d doused in gasoline and lit afire. Danny could see one now, melted into the street and still smoking, the stench filling his nostrils. The mob had grown all evening, restless, itchy. At about ten o’clock, it had stopped roiling and begun to vent. Danny had watched from his window. Impotent.