Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

His father said, “Heard of the Roxbury Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

“The Letts?” Danny was suddenly aware of Charles Steedman watching him from the window. “Socialist workers group, made up mostly of Russian and Latvian émigrés.”

“How about the People’s Workers Party?” Eddie McKenna asked.

Danny nodded. “They’re over in Mattapan. Communists.”

“Union of Social Justice?”

Danny said, “What’s this, a test?”

None of the men answered, just stared back at him, grave and intent.

He sighed. “Union of Social Justice is, I believe, mostly Eastern European café intellectuals. Very antiwar.”

“Anti-everything,” Eddie McKenna said. “Anti-American most of all. These are all Bolshevik fronts — all of them — funded by Lenin himself to stir unrest in our city.”

“We don’t like unrest,” Danny’s father said.

“How about Galleanists?” Deputy Chief Madigan said. “Heard of them?”

Again, Danny felt the rest of the room watching him.

“Galleanists,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “are followers of Luigi Galleani. They’re anarchists devoted to dismantling all government, all property, all ownership of any kind.”

“How do you feel about them?” Claude Mesplede said.

“Active Galleanists? Bomb throwers?” Danny said. “They’re terrorists.”

“Not just Galleanists,” Eddie McKenna said. “All radicals.”

Danny shrugged. “The Reds don’t bother me much. They seem mostly harmless. They print their propaganda rags and drink too much at night, end up disturbing their neighbors when they start singing too loud about Trotsky and Mother Russia.”

“Things may have changed lately,” Eddie said. “We’re hearing rumors.”

“Of?”

“An insurrectionary act of violence on a major scale.”

“When? What kind?”

His father shook his head. “That information carries with it a need-to-know designation, and you don’t need to know yet.”

“In due time, Dan.” Eddie McKenna gave him a big smile. “In due time.”

“‘The purpose of terrorism,’” his father said, “‘is to inspire terror.’ Know who said that?”

Danny nodded. “Lenin.”

“He reads the papers,” his father said with a soft wink.

McKenna leaned in toward Danny. “We’re planning an operation to counter the radicals’ plans, Dan. And we need to know exactly where your sympathies lie.”

“Uh-huh,” Danny said, not quite seeing the play yet.

Thomas Coughlin had leaned back from the light, his cigar gone dead between his fingers. “We’ll need you to tell us what’s transpiring with the social club.”

“What social club?”

Thomas Coughlin frowned.

“The Boston Social Club?” Danny looked at Eddie McKenna. “Our union?”

“It’s not a union,” Eddie McKenna said. “It just wants to be.”

“And we can’t have that,” his father said. “We’re policemen, Aiden, not common laborers. There’s a principle to be upheld.”

“Which principle is that?” Danny said. “Fuck the workingman?” Danny took another look around the room, at the men gathered here on an innocent Sunday afternoon. His eyes fell on Steedman. “What’s your stake in this?”

Steedman gave him a soft smile. “Stake?”

Danny nodded. “I’m trying to figure out just what it is you’re doing here.”

Steedman reddened at that and looked at his cigar, his jaw moving tightly.

Thomas Coughlin said, “Aiden, you don’t speak to your elders in that tone. You don’t—”

“I’m here,” Steedman said, looking up from his cigar, “because workers in this country have forgotten their place. They have forgotten, young Mr. Coughlin, that they serve at the discretion of those who pay their wages and feed their families. Do you know what a ten-day strike can do? Just ten days.”

Danny shrugged.

“It can cause a medium-size business to default on its loans. When loans are in default, stock plummets. Investors lose money. A lot of money. And they have to cut back their business. Then the bank has to step in. Sometimes, this means the only solution is foreclosure. The bank loses money, the investors lose money, their companies lose money, the original business goes under, and the workers lose their jobs anyway. So while the idea of unions is, on the surface, rather heart-warming, it is also quite unconscionable for reasonable men to so much as discuss it in polite company.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Does that answer your question, son?”

“I’m not exactly sure how your logic applies to the public sector.”

“In triplicate,” Steedman said.

Danny gave him a tight smile and turned to McKenna. “Is Special Squads going after unions, Eddie?”

“We’re going after subversives. Threats to this nation.” He gave Danny a roll of his big shoulders. “I need you to hone your skills somewhere. Might as well start local.”

“In our union.”

“That’s what you call it.”

“What could this possibly have to do with an act of ‘insurrectionary violence’?”

“It’s a milk run,” McKenna said. “You help us figure out who really runs things in there, who the members of the brain trust are, et cetera, we’ll have more confidence to send you after bigger fish.”

Danny nodded. “What’s my end?”

His father cocked his head at that, his eyes diminishing to slits.

Deputy Chief Madigan said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s that—”

“Your end?” his father said. “If you succeed with the BSC and then succeed with the Bolsheviks?”

“Yes.”

“A gold shield.” His father smiled. “That’s what you wanted us to say, yes? Counting on it, were you?”

Danny felt an urge to grind his teeth. “It’s either on the table or it isn’t.”

“ If you tell us what we need to know about the infrastructure of that alleged policeman’s union? And if you then infiltrate a radical group of our choosing and then come back with the information necessary to stop any act of concerted violence?” Thomas Coughlin looked over at Deputy Chief Madigan and then back at Danny. “We’ll put you first in line.”

“I don’t want first in line. I want the gold shield. You’ve dangled it long enough.”

The men traded glances, as if they hadn’t counted on his reaction from the outset.

After a time, his father said, “Ah, the boy knows his mind, doesn’t he?”

“He does,” Claude Mesplede said.

“That’s plain as the day, ’tis,” Patrick Donnegan said.

Out beyond the doors, Danny heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen, the words indecipherable, but whatever she said caused Nora to laugh and the sound of it made him picture Nora’s throat, the flesh over her windpipe.

His father lit his cigar. “A gold shield for the man who brings down some radicals and lets us know what’s on the mind of the Boston Social Club to boot.”

Danny held his father’s eyes. He removed a cigarette from his pack of Murads and tapped it off the edge of his brogan before lighting it. “In writing.”

Eddie McKenna chuckled. Claude Mesplede, Patrick Donnegan, and Deputy Chief Madigan looked at their shoes, the rug. Charles Steedman yawned.

Danny’s father raised an eyebrow. It was a slow gesture, meant to suggest he admired Danny. But Danny knew that while Thomas Coughlin had a dizzying array of character traits, admiration wasn’t one of them.

“Is this the test by which you’d choose to define your life?” His father eventually leaned forward, and his face was lit with what many people could mistake for pleasure. “Or would you prefer to save that for another day?”