Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

McKenna filled the doorway with his oversize body and obstinate optimism, that almost beatific sense of purpose that Danny had seen in him all his life, since Eddie’d been a hundred pounds lighter and would drop by to see his father when the Coughlins lived in the North End, always with sticks of licorice for Danny and Connor. Even then, when he’d been just a flatfoot working the Charlestown waterfront with saloons that were judged the city’s bloodiest and a rat population so prodigious the typhus and polio rates were triple those of any other district, the glow around the man had been just as prominent. Part of department lore was that Eddie McKenna had been told early in his career that he’d never work undercover because of his sheer presence. The chief at the time had told him, “You’re the only guy I know who enters a room five minutes before he gets there.”

He hung his coat and slid into the booth across from Danny. He caught the waitress’s eye and mouthed “coffee” to her.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he said to Danny. “You smell like the Armenian who ate the drunken goat.”

Danny shrugged and drank some more coffee.

“And then puked it back up on yourself,” McKenna said.

“Praise from Caesar, sir.”

McKenna lit the stub of a cigar, and the reek of it went straight to Danny’s stomach. The waitress brought a cup of coffee to the table and refilled Danny’s. McKenna watched her ass as she walked away.

He produced a flask and handed it to Danny. “Help yourself.”

Danny poured a few drops into his coffee and handed it back.

McKenna tossed a notepad on the table and placed a fat pencil as stubby as his cigar beside the notepad. “I just came from meeting a few of the other boys. Tell me you’re making better progress than they are.”

The “other boys” on the squad had been picked, to some degree, for their intelligence, but mostly for their ability to pass as ethnics. There were no Jews or Italians in the BPD, but Harold Christian and Larry Benzie were swarthy enough to be taken for Greeks or Italians. Paul Wascon, small and dark-eyed, had grown up on New York’s Lower East Side. He spoke passable Yiddish and had infiltrated a cell of Jack Reed’s and Jim Larkin’s Socialist Left Wing that worked out of a basement in the West End.

None of them had wanted the detail. It meant long hours for no extra pay, no overtime, and no reward, because the official department policy was that terrorist cells were a New York problem, a Chicago problem, a San Francisco problem. So even if the squad had success, they’d never get credit, and they sure wouldn’t get overtime.

But McKenna had pulled them out of their units with his usual combination of bribery, threat, and extortion. Danny had come in through the back door because of Tessa; God knows what Christian and Benzie had been promised, and Wascon’s hand had been caught in the cookie jar back in August, so McKenna owned him for life.

Danny handed McKenna his notes. “License plate numbers from the Fishermen’s Brotherhood meeting in Woods Hole. Sign-in sheet from the West Roxbury Roofers Union, another from the North Shore Socialist Club. Minutes of all the meetings I attended this week, including two of the Roxbury Letts.”

McKenna took the notes and placed them in his satchel. “Good, good. What else?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I got nothing,” Danny said.

McKenna dropped his pencil and sighed. “Jesus’ sakes.”

“What?” Danny said, feeling a hair better with the whiskey in his coffee. “Foreign radicals — surprise — mistrust Americans. And they’re paranoid enough to at least consider that I could be a plant, no matter how solid the Sante cover is. And even if they are sold on the cover? Danny Sante ain’t looked on as management material yet. Least not by the Letts. They’re still feeling me out.”

“You seen Louis Fraina?”

Danny nodded. “Seen him give a speech. But I haven’t met him. He stays away from the rank and file, surrounds himself with higher-ups and goons.”

“You seen your old girlfriend?”

Danny grimaced. “If I’d seen her, she’d be in jail now.”

McKenna took a sip from his flask. “You been looking?”

“I’ve been all over this damn state. I even crossed into Connecticut a few times.”

“Locally?”

“The Justice guys are crawling all over the North End looking for Tessa and Federico. So the whole neighborhood is tense. Closed up. No one is going to talk to me. No one’s going to talk to any Americano.”

McKenna sighed and rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. “Well, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

“Nope.”

“Just keep plugging.”

Jesus, Danny thought. This— this —was detective work? Fishing without a net?

“I’ll get you something.”

“Besides a hangover?”

Danny gave him a weak smile.

McKenna rubbed his face again and yawned. “Fucking terrorists, I swear to Christ.” He yawned again. “Oh, you never came across Nathan Bishop, did you? The doctor.”

“No.”

McKenna winked. “That’s ’cause he just did thirty days in the Chelsea drunk tank. They kicked him loose two days ago. I asked one of the bulls there if he’s known to them and they said he likes the Capitol Tavern. Apparently, they send his mail there.”

“The Capitol Tavern,” Danny said. “That cellar-dive in the West End?”

“The same.” McKenna nodded. “Maybe you can earn a hangover there, serve your country at the same time.”

Danny spent three nights at the Capitol Tavern before Nathan Bishop spoke to him. He’d seen Bishop right off, as he came through the door the very first night and took a seat at the bar. Bishop sat alone at a table lit only by a small candle in the wall above it. He read a small book the first night and from a stack of newspapers the next two. He drank whiskey, the bottle on the table beside the glass, but he nursed his drinks the first two nights, never putting a real dent in the bottle, and walking out as steadily as he’d walked in. Danny began to wonder if Finch and Hoover’s profile had been correct.

The third night, though, he pushed his newspapers aside early and took longer pulls from the glass and chain-smoked. At first he stared at nothing but his own cigarette smoke, and his eyes seemed loose and faraway. Gradually his eyes found the rest of the bar and a smile grew on his face, as if someone had pasted it there too hastily.

When Danny first heard him sing, he couldn’t connect the voice to the man. Bishop was small, wispy, a delicate man with delicate features and delicate bones. His voice, however, was a booming, barreling, train-roar of a thing.

“Here he goes.” The bartender sighed yet didn’t seem dissatisfied.

It was a Joe Hill song, “The Preacher and the Slave,” that Nathan Bishop chose for his first rendition of the night, his deep baritone giving the protest song a distinctly Celtic flavor that went with the tall hearth and dim lighting in the Capitol Tavern, the low baying of the tugboat horns in the harbor.

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,” he sang. “Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right. But when asked how ’bout something to eat, they will answer in voices so sweet: ‘You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky way up high. Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.’ That’s a lie, that’s a lie …”

He smiled sweetly, eyes at half-mast, as the few patrons in the bar clapped lightly. It was Danny who kept it going. He stood from his stool and raised his glass and sang out, “Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out, and they holler, they jump and they shout. ‘Give your money to Jesus,’ they say. ‘He will cure all diseases today.’”