Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“Ain’t you,” he said.

Luther looked at the blood still leaking out of the man. He took one last look behind him at Jessie. He sighed. He stepped over Dandy’s corpse.

“You simple sons of bitches,” Luther said as he headed for the door. “You brought this on yourselves.”

After the flu had passed on, Danny returned to walking the beat by day and studying to impersonate a radical at night. In terms of the latter duty, Eddie McKenna left packages at his door at least once a week. He’d unwrap them to find stacks of the latest socialist and Communist propaganda rags, as well as copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, speeches given by Jack Reed, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Jim Larkin, Joe Hill, and Pancho Villa. He read thickets of propaganda so dense with rhetoric it may as well have been a structural engineering manual for all it spoke to any common man Danny could imagine. He came across certain words so often — tyranny, imperialism, capitalist oppression, brotherhood, insurrection — that he suspected a knee-jerk vocabulary had become necessary to ensure a dependable shorthand among the workers of the world. But as the words lost individuality, so they lost their power and gradually their meaning. Once the meaning was gone, Danny wondered, how would these noodle heads — and among the Bolshie and anarchist literature, he had yet to find someone who wasn’t a noodle head — as one unified body, successfully cross a street, never mind overthrow a country?

When he wasn’t reading speeches, he read missives from what was commonly referred to as the “front line of the workers’ revolution.” He read about striking coal miners burned in their homes alongside their families, IWW workers tarred and feathered, labor organizers assassinated on the dark streets of small towns, unions broken, unions outlawed, workingmen jailed, beaten, and deported. And always it was they who were painted as the enemies of the great American Way.

To his surprise, Danny felt occasional stirrings of empathy. Not for everyone, of course — he’d always thought anarchists were morons, offering the world nothing but steel-eyed bloodlust, and little in his reading changed his opinion. Communists, too, struck him as hopelessly naïve, pursuing a utopia that failed to take into consideration the most elemental characteristic of the human animal: covetousness. The Bolshies believed it could be cured like an illness, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and to remove it would kill the host. The socialists were the smartest — they acknowledged greed — but their message was constantly entwined with the Communists’ and it was impossible, at least in this country, for it to be heard above the red din.

But for the life of him Danny couldn’t understand why most of the outlawed or targeted unions deserved their fate. Time and again what was renounced as treasonous rhetoric was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.

He mentioned this to McKenna over coffee in the South End one night and McKenna wagged a finger at him. “It’s not those men you need to concern yourself with, young protégé. Ask yourself instead, ‘Who’s funding those men? And to what end?’”

Danny yawned, tired all the time now, unable to remember the last time he’d had a true night’s sleep. “Let me guess — Bolsheviks.”

“You’re goddamned right. From Mother Russia herself.” He widened his eyes at Danny. “You think this is mildly amusing, yeah? Lenin himself said that the people of Russia will not rest until all the peoples of the world join their revolution. That’s not idle talk, boyo. That’s a clear fucking threat against these shores.” He thumped his index finger off the table. “My shores.”

Danny suppressed another yawn with his fist. “How’s my cover coming?”

“Almost there,” McKenna said. “You join that thing they call a policemen’s union yet?”

“Going to a meeting Tuesday.”

“What took so long?”

“If Danny Coughlin, son of Captain Coughlin and no stranger himself to the selfish, politically motivated act, were to suddenly ask to join the Boston Social Club, people might be a bit suspicious.”

“You’ve a point. Fair enough.”

“My old partner, Steve Coyle?”

“The one who caught the grippe, yeah. A shame.”

“He was a vocal supporter of the union. I’m letting some time pass so it’ll seem I passed a few long dark nights of the soul over him getting sick. Finally my conscience caught up, so I had to check out a meeting. Let them think I have a soft heart.”

McKenna lit the blackened stub of a cigar. “You’ve always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most.”

Danny shrugged. “Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess.”

“Always the danger, that.” McKenna nodded, as if he were intimate with the dilemma. “Then one day, sure, you can’t remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on to. Or why you worked so hard at the holding.”

Danny joined Tessa and her father for dinner on a night when the cool air smelled of burning leaves. Their apartment was larger than his. His came with a hot plate atop an icebox, but the Abruzzes’ had a small kitchen with a Raven stove. Tessa cooked, her long dark hair tied back, limp and shiny from the heat. Federico uncorked the wine Danny had brought and set it on a windowsill to breathe while he and Danny sat at the small dining table in the parlor and sipped anisette.

Federico said, “I have not seen you around the building lately.”

Danny said, “I work a lot.”

“Even now that the grippe has passed on?”

Danny nodded. It was just one more of the beefs cops had with the department. The Boston police officer got one day off for every twenty. And on that day off, he wasn’t allowed to leave city limits in case an emergency arose. So most of the single guys lived near their stations in rooming houses because what was the point in getting settled when you had to be at work in a few hours anyway? In addition, three nights a week, you were required to sleep at the station house, in the fetid beds on the top floor, which were lice- or bug-ridden and had just been slept in by the poor slob who would take your place on the next patrol.

“You work too much, I think.”

“Tell my boss, would you?”

Federico smiled, and it was a hell of a smile, the kind that could warm a winter room. It occurred to Danny that one of the reasons it was so impressive was that you could feel so much heartbreak behind it. Maybe that’s what he’d been trying to put his finger on that night on the roof — the way Federico’s smile didn’t mask the great pain that lay undoubtedly in his past; it embraced it. And in that embracing, triumphed. A soft version of the smile remained in place as he leaned in and thanked Danny in a low whisper for “that unfortunate business,” of removing Tessa’s dead newborn from the apartment. He assured Danny that were it not for his own work, they would have had him to dinner as soon as Tessa had recovered from the grippe.

Danny looked over at Tessa, caught her looking at him. She lowered her head, and a strand of hair fell from behind her ear and hung over her eye. She was not an American girl, he reminded himself, one for whom sex with a virtual stranger could be tricky but not out of the question. She was Italian. Old World. Mind your manners.

He looked back at her father. “What is it that you do, sir?”

“Federico,” the old man said and patted his hand. “We drink anisette, we break bread, it must be Federico.”

Danny acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. “Federico, what is it you do?”