Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

The other Letts, though, had finally stopped treating Danny with the amused politeness one reserved for children and the feeble-minded. He wouldn’t say they trusted him yet, but they were getting used to having him around.

Even so, they spoke in accents so thick they’d soon tire of conversation with him and jump ship as soon as another Lett interrupted in the mother tongue. That night, they had a full docket of problems and solutions that had carried over from the meeting into the bar.

Problem: The United States had launched a covert war against the provisional Bolshevik government of the new Russia. Wilson had authorized the detachment of the 339th, who’d joined up with British forces and seized the Russian port of Archangel on the White Sea. Hoping to cut the supplies of Lenin and Trotsky and starve them out during a long winter, the American and British forces were instead facing an early winter freeze and were rumored to be at the mercy of their White Russian allies, a corrupt group of warlords and tribal gangsters. This embarrassing quagmire was just one more instance of Western Capitalism attempting to crush the will of the great people’s movement.

Solution: Workers everywhere should unite and engage in civil unrest until the Americans and the British withdrew their troops.

Problem: The oppressed firemen and policemen of Montreal were being violently devalued by the state and stripped of their rights.

Solution: Until the Canadian government capitulated to the police and firemen and paid them a fair wage, workers everywhere should unite in civil unrest.

Problem: Revolution was in the air in Hungary and Bavaria and Greece and even France. In Germany, the Spartacists were moving on Berlin. In New York, the Harbor Workers Union had refused to report for duty, and across the country unions were warning of “No Beer, No Work” sit-downs if Prohibition became the law of the land.

Solution: In support of all these comrades, the workers of the world should unite in civil unrest.

Should.

Could.

Might.

No actual plans for revolution that Danny could hear. No specific plotting of the insurrectionary deed.

Just more drinking. More talk that turned into drunken shouts and shattered stools. And it wasn’t just the men shattering stools and shouting that night but the women as well, although it was often hard to tell them apart. The workers revolution had no place for the sexist caste system of the United Capitalist States of America — but most women in the bar were hard-faced and industrial-gray, as sexless in their coarse clothes and coarse accents as the men they called comrades. They were without humor (a common affliction among the Letts) and, worse, politically opposed to it — humor was seen as a sentimental disease, a by-product of romanticism, and romantic notions were just one more opiate the ruling class used to keep its masses from seeing the truth.

“Laugh all you want,” Hetta Losivich said that night. “Laugh so that you look like fools, like hyenas. And the industrialists will laugh at you because they have you exactly where they want you. Impotent. Laughing, but impotent.”

A brawny Estonian named Pyotr Glaviach slapped Danny on the shoulder. “Pampoolats, yes? Tomorrow, yes?”

Danny looked up at him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Glaviach had a beard so unruly it looked as if he’d been interrupted swallowing a raccoon. It shook now as he tilted his head back and roared with laughter. He was one of those rare Letts who laughed, as if to make up for the paucity in the rest of the ranks. It wasn’t a laughter Danny particularly trusted, however, since he’d heard that Pyotr Glaviach had been a charter member of the original Letts, men who’d banded together in 1912 to pitch the first guerrilla skirmishes against Nicholas II. These inaugural Letts had waged a campaign of hit-and-hide against czarist soldiers who’d outnumbered them eighty to one. They lived outdoors during the Russian winter on a diet of half-frozen potatoes and massacred whole villages if they suspected a single Romanov sympathizer lived there.

Pyotr Glaviach said, “We go out tomorrow and we hand out pampoolat. For the workers, yes? You see?”

Danny didn’t see. He shook his head. “Pampoo-what?”

Pyotr Glaviach slapped his hands together impatiently. “Pampoolat, you donkey man. Pampoolat.”

“I don’t—”

“Flyers,” a man behind Danny said. “I think he means flyers.”

Danny turned in his booth. Nathan Bishop stood there, one elbow resting on the top of Danny’s seat back.

“Yes, yes,” Pyotr Glaviach said. “We hand out flyers. We spread the news.”

“Tell him ‘okay,’” Nathan Bishop says. “He loves that word.”

“Okay,” Danny said to Glaviach and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Ho-kay! Ho-kay, meester! You meet me here,” Glaviach said. He gave him a big thumbs-up back. “Eight o’clock.”

Danny sighed. “I’ll be here.”

“We have fun,” Glaviach said and slapped Danny on the back. “Maybe meet pretty women.” He roared again and then stumbled away.

Bishop slid into the booth and handed him a mug of beer. “The only way you’ll meet pretty women in this movement is to kidnap the daughters of our enemies.”

Danny said, “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a Lett?”

“Are you?”

“Hoping to be.”

Nathan shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I belong to any one organization. I help out. I’ve known Lou for a long time.”

“Lou?”

“Comrade Fraina,” Nathan said and gestured with his chin. “Would you like to meet him some day?”

“Are you kidding? I’d be honored.”

Bishop gave that a small, private smile. “You have any worthwhile talents?”

“I write.”

“Well?”

“I hope so.”

“Give me some samples, I’ll see what I can do.” He looked around the bar. “God, that’s a depressing thought.”

“What? Me meeting Comrade Fraina?”

“Huh? No. Glaviach got me thinking. There really isn’t a good-looking woman in any of the movements. Not a … Well, there’s one.”

“There’s one?”

He nodded. “How could I have forgotten? There is one.” He whistled. “Bloody gorgeous, she is.”

“She here?”

He laughed. “If she were here, you’d know it.”

“What’s her name?”

Bishop’s head moved so swiftly Danny feared he’d blown his cover. Bishop looked him in the eyes and seemed to be studying his face.

Danny took a sip of his beer.

Bishop looked back out at the crowd. “She has lots of them.”

Luther got off the freight in Boston, where Uncle Hollis’s chicken-scratch map directed him and found Dover Street easily enough. He followed it to Columbus Avenue and followed Columbus through the heart of the South End. When he found St. Botolph Street, he walked down a row of redbrick town houses along a sidewalk carpeted in damp leaves until he found number 121 and he went up the stairs and rang the bell.

The man who lived at 121 was Isaiah Giddreaux, the father of Uncle Hollis’s second wife, Brenda. Hollis had married four times. The first and third had left him, Brenda had died of typhus, and about five years back Hollis and the fourth had kind of mutually misplaced each other. Hollis had told Luther that as much as he missed Brenda, and he missed her something terrible on many a day, he sometimes missed her father just as much. Isaiah Giddreaux had moved east back in ’05 to join up with Dr. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, but he and Hollis had remained in touch.

The door was opened by a small slim man wearing a dark wool three-piece suit and a navy-blue tie speckled with white dots. His hair was speckled with white, too, and cropped close to his skull, and he wore round spectacles that revealed calm, clear eyes behind their panes.