Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“Mayor Peters canceled the meeting we had scheduled at the end of the week.”

Groans broke out in the room, a few catcalls.

Denton held up a hand to quiet them. “There’re rumors of a streetcar workers strike, and the mayor believes that’s of more pressing importance right now. We have to go to the back of the line.”

“Maybe we should strike,” someone said.

Denton’s dark eyes flashed. “We don’t talk of strike, men. That’s just what they want. You know how that would play in the papers? Do you really want to give them that kind of ammunition, Timmy?”

“No, I don’t, Mark, but what are our options? We’re fucking starving out here.”

Denton acknowledged that with a firm nod. “I know we are. But even whispering the word strike is heresy, men. You know it and I know it. Our best chance right now is to appear patient and open up talks with Samuel Gompers and the AFL.”

“That really happening?” someone behind Danny asked.

Denton nodded. “In fact, I was planning to put a motion to the floor. Later tonight, I’ll grant you, but why wait?” He shrugged. “All those in favor of the BSC opening up charter talks with the American Federation of Labor, say aye.”

Danny felt it then, an almost tactile stirring of the blood throughout the room, a sense of collective purpose. He couldn’t deny his blood jumped along with everyone else’s. A charter in the most powerful union in the country. Jesus.

“Aye,” the crowd shouted.

“All against?”

No one spoke.

“Motion accepted,” Denton said.

Was it actually possible? No police department in the nation had ever pulled this off. Few had dared try. And yet, they could be the first. They could — quite literally — change history.

Danny reminded himself he wasn’t part of this.

Because this was a joke. This was a pack of naïve, overly dramatic men who thought with enough talk they could bend the world to their needs. It didn’t work that way, Danny could have told them. It worked the other way.

After Denton, the cops felled by the flu paraded onstage. They talked of themselves as the lucky ones; unlike nine other officers from the city’s eighteen station houses, they’d survived. Of twenty onstage, twelve had returned to duty. Eight never would. Danny lowered his eyes when Steve took the dais. Steve, just two months ago singing in the barbershop quartet, had trouble keeping his words straight. He kept stuttering. He asked them not to forget him, not to forget the flu. He asked that they remember their brotherhood and fellowship to all who’d sworn to protect and to serve.

He and the other nineteen survivors left the stage to loud applause.

The men mingled by the coffee urns or stood in circles and passed around flasks. Danny quickly got a feel for the basic personality breakdown of the membership. You had the Talkers — loud men, like Roper from the Oh-Seven, who rattled off statistics, then got into high-pitched disagreements over semantics and minutiae. Then there were the Bolshies and the Socies, like Coogan from the One-Three and Shaw who worked Warrants out of headquarters, no different from all the radicals and alleged radicals Danny had been reading up on lately, always quick to spout the most fashionable rhetoric, to reach for the toothless slogan. There were also the Emotionals — men like Hannity from the One-One, who had never been able to hold his liquor in the first place and whose eyes welled up too quickly with mention of “fellowship” or “justice.” So, for the most part, what Danny’s old high school English teacher, Father Twohy, used to call men of “prattle, not practice.”

But there were also men like Don Slatterly, a Robbery detective, Kevin McRae, a flatfoot at the Oh-Six, and Emmett Strack, a twenty-five-year warhorse from the Oh-Three, who said very little but who watched — and saw — everything. They moved through the crowd and dispensed words of caution or restraint here, slivers of hope there, but mostly they just listened and assessed. The men watched their wake the way dogs watched the space their masters had just vacated. It would be these men and a few others like them, Danny decided, who the police brass should worry about if they wanted to avert a strike.

At the coffee urns, Mark Denton suddenly stood beside him and held out his hand.

“Tommy Coughlin’s son, right?”

“Danny.” He shook Denton’s hand.

“You were at Salutation when it was bombed, right?”

Danny nodded.

“But that’s Harbor Division.” Denton stirred sugar into his coffee.

“The accident of my life,” Danny said. “I’d pinched a thief on the docks and was dropping him off at Salutation when, you know …”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Coughlin — you’re pretty well known in this department. They say the only thing Captain Tommy can’t control is his own son. That makes you pretty popular, I’d say. We could use guys like you.”

“Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

Denton’s eyes swept the room. He leaned in closer. “Think quickly, would you?”

Tessa liked to take to the stoop on mild nights when her father was on the road selling his Silvertone B-XIIs. She smoked small black cigarettes that smelled as harsh as they looked, and some nights Danny sat with her. Something in Tessa made him nervous. His limbs felt cumbersome around her, as if there were no casual way to rest them. They spoke of the weather and they spoke of food and they spoke of tobacco, but they never spoke of the flu or her child or the day Danny had carried her to Haymarket Relief.

Soon they left the stoop for the roof. No one came up on the roof.

He learned that Tessa was twenty. That she’d grown up in the Sicilian village of Altofonte. When she was sixteen, a powerful man named Primo Alieveri, had seen her bicycling past the café where he sat with his associates. He’d made inquiries and then arranged to meet with her father. Federico was a music teacher in their village, famous for speaking three languages but also rumored to be going pazzo, having married so late in life. Tessa’s mother had passed on when she was ten, and her father raised her alone, with no brothers or money to protect her. And so a deal was struck.

Tessa and her father made the trip to Collesano at the base of the Madonie Mountains on the Tyrrhenian coast, arriving the day after Tessa’s seventeenth birthday. Federico had hired guards to protect Tessa’s dowry, mostly jewels and coins passed down from her mother’s side of the family, and their first night in the guesthouse of Primo Alieveri’s estate, the throats of the guards were cut as they slept in the barn and the dowry was taken. Primo Alieveri was mortified. He scoured the village for the bandits. At nightfall, over a fine dinner in the main hall, he assured his guests he and his men were closing in on the suspects. The dowry would be returned and the wedding would take place, as planned, that weekend.

When Federico passed out at the table, a dreamy smile plastered to his face, Primo’s men helped him out to the guesthouse, and Primo raped Tessa on the table and then again on the stone floor by the hearth. He sent her back to the guesthouse where she tried to rouse Federico, but he continued to sleep the sleep of the dead. She lay on the floor beside the bed with the blood sticky between her thighs and eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, they were awakened by a racket in the courtyard and the sound of Primo calling their names. They came out of the guesthouse where Primo stood with two of his men, their shotguns slung behind their backs. Tessa’s and Federico’s horses and their wagon were gathered on the courtyard stones. Primo glared at them.

“A great friend from your village has written to inform me that your daughter is no virgin. She is a puttana and no suitable bride for a man of my stature. Be gone from my sight, little man.”