Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Ads seeking the new police force contained within them new standards and rate of pay, all in keeping with the strikers’ original demands. Base salary would now start at fourteen hundred dollars a year. Uniforms, badges, and service revolvers would be provided free of charge. Within two weeks of the riots, city cleanup crews, licensed plumbers, electricians, and carpenters began arriving at each of the station houses to clean and remodel them until they met safety and sanitation codes at a state level.

Governor Coolidge composed a telegram to Samuel Gompers of the AFL. Before he sent the telegram to Gompers, he released it to the press where it was published on the front page of every daily the following morning. The telegram was also released to the wire services and would run in over seventy newspapers across the country in the following two days. Governor Coolidge proclaimed the following: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

Within a week, those words had turned Governor Coolidge into a national hero and some suggested he should consider a run for the presidency the following year.

Andrew Peters faded from public view. His ineffectuality was deemed, if not quite criminal, then certainly unconscionable. His failure to call out the State Guard on the first night of the strike represented an unforgivable dereliction of his duties, and popular opinion held that it was only the quick thinking and steely resolve of Governor Coolidge and the unfairly maligned Commissioner Curtis that had saved the city from itself.

While the rest of the active police force found their jobs in jeopardy, Steve Coyle was given a full policeman’s funeral. Commissioner Curtis singled out former Patrolman Stephen Coyle as an exemplar of the “old guard” policeman, the one who put duty before all else. Curtis repeatedly failed to note that Coyle had been released from the employ of the BPD almost a full year before. He further promised to form a committee to look into posthumously reinstating Coyle’s medical benefits for any immediate family he happened to have.

In the first days after the death of Tessa Ficara, the papers trumpeted the irony of a striking police officer who, in less than a year, had brought about the demise of two of the most wanted terrorists in the land as well as a third, Bartolomeo Stellina, the man Luther had killed with the brick, who was reputed to be a devoted Galleanist. Even though the strikers were now viewed with the enmity once reserved for the Germans (to whom they were often compared), accounts of Officer Coughlin’s heroics turned public sympathy back toward the strikers. Maybe, it was felt, if they returned to their jobs right away, some of them, at least those with distinguished records akin to Officer Coughlin’s, could be reinstated.

The next day, however, the Post reported that Officer Coughlin might have had a prior acquaintanceship with the Ficaras, and the evening Transcript, citing unnamed sources in the Bureau of Investigation, reported that Officer Coughlin and the Ficaras had once lived on the same floor of the same building in the North End. The next morning, the Globe ran a story citing several tenants in the building who described the relationship between Officer Coughlin and the Ficaras as quite social, so social in fact that his relationship with Tessa Ficara may have crossed into unseemly areas; there was even some question as to whether he had paid for her favors. With that question in mind, his prior shooting of her husband suddenly looked as if it could have been colored by more than a sense of duty. Public opinion turned wholly against Officer Coughlin, the dirty cop, and all of his striking “comrades.” Any talk of the strikers ever returning to work ended.

National coverage of the two days of rioting entered the arena of myth. Several newspapers wrote of machine guns turned on innocent crowds, of a death toll estimated in the hundreds, property damage in the millions. The actual dead numbered nine and the property damage slightly less than one million dollars, but the public would hear none of it. The strikers were Bolsheviks, and the strike had unleashed civil war in Boston.

When Danny left the hospital in mid-October, he still dragged his left foot and had trouble lifting anything heavier than a teacup with his left hand. His speech, however, was fully restored. He would have left the hospital two weeks earlier, but one of his wounds had developed sepsis. He’d gone into shock, and for the second time that month a priest had delivered last rites.

After the stories that defamed him in the papers, Nora had been forced to leave their building on Salem Street and had moved their few belongings to a rooming house in the West End. It was there they returned when Danny was released from the hospital. She had chosen the West End because Danny’s rehabilitation would be taking place at Mass General, and the walk from there to the apartment took a matter of minutes. Danny climbed the stairs to the second floor, and he and Nora entered the dingy room with one gray window that looked out on an alley.

“It’s all we could afford,” Nora said.

“It’s fine.”

“I tried to get the grime off the outside of the window, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, it just—”

He put his good arm around her. “It’s fine, honey. We won’t be here long.”

One night in November, he lay in bed with his wife after they’d managed to make love for the first time since he’d been injured. “I’ll never be able to get a job here.”

“You could.”

He looked at her.

She smiled and rolled her eyes. She slapped his chest lightly. “That’s what you get, boy, for sleeping with a terrorist.”

He chuckled. It felt good to be able to joke about something so bleak.

His family had visited the hospital twice while he was still in a coma. His father had come once after the stroke to tell him they would always love him, of course, but could never again admit him to their home. Danny had nodded and shook his father’s hand and waited until he was five minutes gone before he wept.

“There’s nothing to keep us here after my rehabilitation,” he said.

“No.”

“Are you interested in an adventure?”

She slid her arm over his chest. “I’m interested in anything.”

Tessa had miscarried the day before her death. Or so the coroner told Danny. Danny would never know if the coroner lied to save him the guilt, but he chose to believe him because the alternative, he feared, could be the thing that finally broke him.

When he’d met Tessa, she’d been in labor. When he came across her again in May, she’d been pretending to be pregnant. And now, at her death, pregnant again. It was as if she’d had an overpowering need to remake her rage as flesh and blood, to be certain it would live on and pass down through the generations. This need (and Tessa, as a whole) was something he would never understand.

Sometimes, he woke from a sleep with the cold echo of her laughter ringing in his ears.

A package from Luther arrived. There was two thousand dollars in it — two years’ salary — and a formal portrait of Luther, Lila, and Desmond sitting before a fireplace. They were dressed in the latest fashions; Luther even wore a coat with tails over his winged collar.

“She’s beautiful,” Nora said. “And that child, good Lord.”

Luther’s note was brief:

Dear Danny and Nora,

I am home now. I am happy. I hope this is enough. If you need more wire immediately and I will send it.

Your friend,

Danny opened the packet of bills and showed it to Nora.

“Sweet Jesus!” She let out a noise that was half laughing — half weeping. “Where did he get it?”