Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“Oh.”

“Because this place was closed.”

“Right.”

“Have you always suffered Mongoloidism, or did you just come down with it?”

“Always.”

Nathan held out his hand. “Car’s across the street.”

Danny saw it now — an Olds Model M, Pyotr Glaviach behind the wheel looking straight ahead. He turned the key, and the rumble of the heavy engine echoed up the street.

Nathan, walking toward the car, looked back over his shoulder. “You coming?”

Danny hoped McKenna’s men were somewhere he couldn’t see, watching, not boozing it up in a bar around the corner until they decided to stroll on over to the restaurant and make whatever move they had planned. He could picture it — Jersey Jerry and some other thug with a tin shield, both of them standing outside the darkened restaurant, one of them looking at the address he’d written on his own hand, then shaking his head with a five-year-old’s befuddlement.

Danny stepped off the curb and walked toward the car.

They drove a few blocks and then turned onto Harrison as a light rain fell. Pyotr Glaviach turned on his wipers. Like the rest of the car, they were heavy things, and the back-and-forth slap of them found Danny’s chest.

“Quiet tonight,” Nathan said.

Danny looked out at Harrison Avenue, its empty sidewalks. “Yeah. Well, it’s Sunday.”

“I was talking about you.”

The restaurant was called Oktober, the name appearing solely on the door in red lettering so small that Danny had passed it several times over the last couple of months without ever knowing it was there. Three tables inside, and only one of them was set. Nathan led Danny to it.

Pyotr threw the lock on the front door and then took a seat by it, his large hands lying in his lap like sleeping dogs.

Louis Fraina stood at the tiny bar, speaking rapidly on the phone in Russian. He nodded a lot and scribbled furiously in a notepad as the barmaid, a heavyset woman in her sixties, brought Nathan and Danny a bottle of vodka and a basket of brown bread. Nathan poured them each a drink and then raised his in toast. Danny did the same.

“Cheers,” Nathan said.

“What? No Russian?”

“Good Lord, no. You know what Russians call Westerners who can speak Russian?”

Danny shook his head.

“Spies.” Nathan poured them a refill and seemed to read Danny’s thoughts. “You know why Louis is an exception?”

“Why?”

“Because he’s Louis. Try the bread. It’s good.”

From the bar, an explosion of Russian, followed by a surprisingly hearty laugh, and then Louis Fraina hung up the phone. He came to the table and poured himself a drink.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Glad you could make it.”

“Evening, Comrade,” Danny said.

“The writer.” Louis Fraina held out his hand.

Danny shook it. Fraina’s grip was firm but not to the point of trying to prove anything. “Pleased to meet you, Comrade.”

Fraina sat and poured himself another vodka. “Let’s dispense with the ‘Comrade’ for now. I’ve read your work, so I don’t doubt your ideological commitment.”

“Okay.”

Fraina smiled. This close, he gave off a warmth that wasn’t even hinted at in his speeches or the few times Danny had seen him holding court at the back of the Sowbelly. “Western Pennsylvania, yes?”

“Yes,” Danny said.

“What brought you all the way to Boston?” He tore a piece of dark bread from the loaf and popped it in his mouth.

“I had an uncle who lived here. By the time I arrived, he was long gone. I’m not sure where.”

“Was he a revolutionary?”

Danny shook his head. “He was a cobbler.”

“So he could run from the fight in good shoes.”

Danny tipped his head to that and smiled.

Fraina leaned back in his chair and waved at the barmaid. She nodded and disappeared into the back.

“Let’s eat,” Fraina said. “We’ll talk revolution after dessert.”

They ate a salad in vinegar and oil that Fraina called svejie ovoshy. That was followed by draniki, a potato dish, and zharkoye, a meal of beef and still more potatoes. Danny’d had no idea what to expect, but it was quite good, far better than the gruel served nightly in the Sowbelly would have led him to believe. Still, throughout dinner, he had trouble concentrating. Some of it was due to the ringing in his ears. He only heard half of what was said and dealt with the other half by smiling or shaking his head where it seemed appropriate. But it wasn’t the hearing loss, ultimately, that pulled his interest away from the table. It was the feeling, all too familiar lately, that his job was the wrong fit for his heart.

He had woken up this morning, and because of that, a man was now dead. Whether the man deserved to die or not — and he did, he did — wasn’t what concerned Danny at the moment. It was that he’d killed him. Two hours ago. He’d stood in the street and shot him like an animal. He could hear those high-pitched yelps. Could see each of the bullets enter Federico Ficara — the first through the knee, the second through the ass, the third into the stomach. All painful, the first and the third, however, exceptionally so.

Two hours ago, and now he was back on the job and the job was sitting with two men who seemed, at best, overimpassioned but hardly criminal.

When he’d shot Federico in the ass (and that was the one that bothered him the most, the indignity of it, Federico trying to scramble out of that car like forest prey) he’d wondered what created a situation like this — three people shooting it out on a city street near a car laden with dynamite. No god had ever designed such a scenario, even for the lowest of his animals. What created a Federico? A Tessa? Not god. Man.

I killed you, Danny thought. But I didn’t kill it .

He realized Fraina was speaking to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said for a writer of such impassioned polemic, you’re quite taciturn in person.”

Danny smiled. “I like to leave it all on the page.”

Fraina nodded and glanced his glass off Danny’s. “Fair enough.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match as a child would blow out a candle, with pursed lips and an air of purpose. “Why the Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

“I’m not sure I understand your question.”

“You’re an American,” Fraina said. “You need only to walk half a mile across the city to find Comrade Reed’s American Communist Party. And yet you chose to be among Eastern Europeans. Are you uncomfortable with your own kind?”

“No.”

Fraina tilted one palm in Danny’s direction. “Then?”

“I want to write,” Danny said. “Comrade Reed and Comrade Larkin are not known for letting newcomers break in on their paper.”

“But I am?”

“That’s the rumor,” Danny said.

“Candor,” Fraina said. “I like it. Some of them are quite good, by the way. Your musings.”

“Thank you.”

“Some are, well, a bit overwrought. Turgid, one could say.”

Danny shrugged. “I speak from the heart, Comrade Fraina.”

“The revolution needs people who speak from the head. Intelligence, precision — these are what are most valued in the party.”

Danny nodded.

“So you would like to help out with the newspaper. Yes?”

“Very much so.”

“It is not glamorous work. You’d write occasionally, yes, but you’d be expected to work the press and to stuff envelopes and type names and addresses onto those envelopes. This is something you can do?”

“Certainly,” Danny said.

Fraina pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue and dropped it in the ashtray. “Come by the offices next Friday. We’ll see how you take to it.”