Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

In that moment and several that followed, Federico was still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He seemed bewildered.

Then he saw the blood that had soaked his daughter’s fine white dress while they slept. Tessa never saw how he got to the whip, if it came from his own horse or from a hook in the courtyard, but when he snapped it, he caught one of Primo Alieveri’s men in the eyes and spooked the horses. As the second man bent to his comrade, Tessa’s horse, a tired, orange mare, broke from her grasp and kicked the man in the chest. The horse’s reins raced through her fingers and the beast ran out of the courtyard. Tessa would have given chase, but she was too entranced by her father, her sweet, gentle, slightly pazzo father as he whipped Primo Alieveri to the ground, whipped him until strips of his flesh lay in the courtyard. With one of the guards (and his shotgun), Federico got her dowry back. The chest sat in plain view in the master bedroom, and from there, he and Tessa tracked down her mare and left the village before dusk.

Two days later, after using half the dowry for bribes, they boarded a ship in Cefalu and came to America.

Danny heard this story in halting English, not because Tessa could not grasp the language yet, but because she tried to be precise.

Danny chuckled. “So that day I carried you? That day I was losing my mind trying to speak my broken Italian, you could understand me?”

Tessa gave him arched eyebrows and a faint smile. “I could not understand anything that day except pain. You would expect me to remember English? This … crazy language of yours. Four words you use when one would do. Every time you do this. Remember English that day?” She waved a hand at him. “Stupid boy.”

Danny said, “Boy? I got a few years on you, sweetheart.”

“Yes, yes.” She lit another of her harsh cigarettes. “But you a boy. You a country of boys. And girls. None of you grow up yet. You have too much fun, I think.”

“Fun with what?”

“This.” She waved her hand at the sky. “This silly big country. You Americans — there is no history. There is only now. Now, now, now. I want this now . I want that now. ”

Danny felt a sudden rise of irritation. “And yet everyone seems in a hell of a hurry to leave their country to get here.”

“Ah, yes. Streets paved with gold. The great America where every man can make his fortune. But what of those who don’t? What of the workers, Officer Danny? Yes? They work and work and work and if they get sick from the work, the company says, ‘Bah. Go home and no come back.’ And if they hurt themselves on the work? Same thing. You Americans talk of your freedom, but I see slaves who think they are free. I see companies that use children and families like hogs and—”

Danny waved it away. “And yet you’re here .”

She considered him with her large, dark eyes. It was a careful look he’d grown used to. Tessa never did anything carelessly. She approached each day as if it required study before she’d form an opinion of it.

“You are right.” She tapped her ash against the parapet. “You are a much more … abbondante country than Italia. You have these big — whoosh — cities. You have more automobiles in one block than all of Palermo. But you are a very young country, Officer Danny. You are like the child who believes he is smarter than his father or his uncles who came before.”

Danny shrugged. He caught Tessa looking at him, as calm and cautious as always. He bounced his knee off hers and looked out at the night.

One night in Fay Hall, he sat in back before the start of another union meeting and realized he had all the information his father, Eddie McKenna, and the Old Men could possibly expect from him. He knew that Mark Denton, as leader of the BSC, was just what they feared — smart, calm, fearless, and prudent. He knew that the most trusted men under him — Emmett Strack, Kevin McRae, Don Slatterly, and Stephen Kearns — were cut from the same cloth. And he knew who the deadwood and the empty shirts were as well, those who would be most easily compromised, easily swayed, easily bribed.

At that moment, as Mark Denton once again strode across the stage to the dais to start the meeting, Danny realized that he’d known all he needed to know since the first meeting he’d attended. That was seven meetings ago.

All he had left to do was to sit down with McKenna or his father and give them his impressions, the few notes he’d taken, and a concise list of the leadership of the Boston Social Club. After that, he’d be halfway to his gold shield. Hell, maybe more than halfway. A fingertip’s reach away.

So why was he still here?

That was the question of the month.

Mark Denton said, “Gents,” and his voice was softer than normal, almost hushed. “Gents, if I could have your attention.”

There was something to the hush of his voice that reached every man in the room. The room grew quiet in blocks of four or five rows until the silence reached the back. Mark Denton nodded his thanks. He gave them a weak smile and blinked several times.

“As many of you know,” Denton said, “I was schooled on this job by John Temple of the Oh-Nine Station House. He used to say if he could make a copper out of me there’d be no reason left not to hire dames.”

Chuckles rippled through the room as Denton lowered his head for a moment.

“Officer John Temple passed this afternoon from complications connected to the grippe. He was fifty-one years old.”

Anyone wearing a hat removed it. A thousand men lowered their heads in the smoky hall. Denton spoke again: “If we could also give the same respect to Officer Marvin Tarleton of the One-Five, who died last night of the same cause.”

“Marvin’s dead?” someone called. “He was getting better.”

Denton shook his head. “His heart quit last night at eleven o’clock.” He leaned into the dais. “The preliminary ruling from the department is that the families of neither man receive death benefits because the city has already ruled on similar claims—”

Boos and jeers and overturned chairs temporarily drowned him out.

“—because,” he shouted, “because, because —”

Several men were pulled back down into their seats. Others closed their mouths.

“—because,” Mark Denton said, “the city says the men did not die in the line.”

“How’d they get the fucking flu, then?” Bob Reming shouted. “Their dogs?”

Denton said, “The city would say yes. Their dogs. They’re dogs. The city believes they could have contracted the grippe on any number of occasions unrelated to the job. Thus? They did not die in the line. That’s all we need to know. That’s what we have to accept.”

He stepped back from the dais as a chair went airborne. Within seconds, the first fistfight broke out. Then the second. A third started in front of Danny and he stood back from it as shouts filled the hall, as the building shook from anger and despair.

“Are you angry?” Mark Denton shouted.

Danny watched Kevin McRae wade into the mob and break up one of the fights by pulling both men off their feet by their hair.

“Are you angry?” Denton shouted again. “Go ahead — fucking hit one another .”

The room began to quiet. Half the men turned back toward the stage.

“That’s what they want you to do,” Denton called. “Beat yourselves to a pulp. Go ahead. The mayor? The governor? The city council? They laugh at you.”

The last of the men stopped fighting. They sat.

“Are you angry enough to do something?” Mark Denton asked.

No one spoke.

“Are you?” Denton shouted.

“Yes!” a thousand men shouted back.