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O n a Sunday afternoon, Danny went to his father’s house in South Boston for a meeting with the Old Men. A Sunday dinner at the Coughlin home was a political affair, and by inviting him to join them in the hour after dinner was served, the Old Men were anointing him in some fashion. Danny held out hope that a detective’s shield—hinted at by both his father and his Uncle Eddie over the past few months—was part of the sacrament. At twenty-seven, he’d be the youngest detective in BPD history.
His father had called him the night before. “Word has it old Georgie Strivakis is losing his faculties.”
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Danny said.
“He sent you out on a detail,” his father said. “Did he not?”
“He offered me the detail and I accepted.”
“To a boat filled with plague-ridden soldiers.”
“I wouldn’t call it the plague.”
“What would you call it, boy?”
“Bad cases of pneumonia, maybe. ‘Plague’ just seems a bit dramatic, sir.”
His father sighed. “I don’t know what gets into your head.”
“Steve should have done it alone?”
“If need be.”
“His life’s worth less than mine then.”
“He’s a Coyle, not a Coughlin. I don’t make excuses for protecting my own.”
“Somebody had to do it, Dad.”
“Not a Coughlin,” his father said. “Not you. You weren’t raised to volunteer for suicide missions.”
“‘To protect and serve,’” Danny said.
A soft, barely audible breath. “Supper tomorrow. Four o’clock sharp. Or is that too healthy for you?”
Danny smiled. “I can manage,” he said, but his father had already hung up.
S o the next afternoon found him walking up K Street as the sun softened against the brown and red brick and the open windows loosed the smell of boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and boiled ham on the bone. His brother Joe, playing in the street with some other kids, saw him and his face lit up and he came running up the sidewalk.
Joe was dressed in his Sunday best—a chocolate brown knickerbocker suit with button-bottom pants cinched at the knees, white shirt and blue tie, a golf cap set askew on his head that matched the suit. Danny had been there when his mother had bought it, Joe fidgeting the whole time, and his mother and Nora telling him how manly he looked in it, how handsome, a suit like this, of genuine Oregon cassimere, how his father would have dreamed of owning such a suit at his age, and all the while Joe looking at Danny as if he could somehow help him escape.
Danny caught Joe as he leapt off the ground and hugged him, pressing his smooth cheek to Danny’s, his arms digging into his neck, and it surprised Danny that he often forgot how much his baby brother loved him.
Joe was eleven and small for his age, though Danny knew he made up for it by being one of the toughest little kids in a neighborhood of tough little kids. He hooked his legs around Danny’s hips, leaned back, and smiled. “Heard you stopped boxing.”
“That’s the rumor.”
Joe reached out and touched the collar of his uniform. “How come?”
“Thought I’d train you,” Danny said. “First trick is to teach you how to dance.”
“Nobody dances.”
“Sure they do. All the great boxers took dance lessons.”
He took a few steps down the sidewalk with his brother and then whirled, and Joe slapped his shoulders and said, “Stop, stop.”
Danny spun again. “Am I embarrassing you?”
“Stop.” He laughed and slapped his shoulders again.
“In front of all your friends?”
Joe grabbed his ears and tugged. “Cut it out.”
The kids in the street were looking at Danny as if they couldn’t decide whether they should be afraid, and Danny said, “Anyone else want in?”
He lifted Joe off his body, tickling him the whole way down to the pavement, and then Nora opened the door at the top of the stoop and he wanted to run.
“Joey,” she said, “your ma wants you in now. Says you need to clean up.”
“I’m clean.”
Nora arched an eyebrow. “I wasn’t asking, child.”
Joe gave a beleaguered good-bye wave to his friends and trudged up the steps. Nora mussed his hair as he passed and he slapped at her hands and kept going and Nora leaned into the jamb and considered Danny. She and Avery Wallace, an old colored man, were the Coughlins’ domestic help, though Nora’s actual position was a lot more nebulous than Avery’s. She’d come to them by accident or providence five years ago on Christmas Eve, a clacking, shivering gray-fleshed escapee from the northern coast of Ireland. What she’d been escaping from had been anyone’s guess, but ever since Danny’s father had carried her into the home wrapped in his greatcoat, frostbitten and covered in grime, she’d become part of the essential fabric of the Coughlin home. Not quite family, not ever quite that, at least not for Danny, but ingrained and ingratiated nonetheless.
“What brings you by?” she asked.
“The Old Men,” he said.
“A planning and a plotting, are they, Aiden? And, sure, where do you fit in the plan?”
He leaned in a bit. “Only my mother calls me ‘Aiden’ anymore.”
She leaned back. “You’re calling me your mother now, are you?”
“Not at all, though you would make a fine one.”
“Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
“You would.”
Her eyes pulsed at that, just for a moment. Pale eyes the color of basil. “You’ll need to go to confession for that one, sure.”
“I don’t need to confess anything to anyone. You go.”
“And why would I go?”
He shrugged.
She leaned into the door, took a sniff of the afternoon breeze, her eyes as pained and unreadable as always. He wanted to squeeze her body until his hands fell off.
“What’d you say to Joe?”
She came off the door, folded her arms. “About what?”
“About my boxing.”
She gave him a small sad smile. “I said you’d never box again. Simple as that.”
“Simple, uh?”
“I can see it in your face, Danny. You’ve no love for it anymore.”
He stopped himself from nodding because she was right and he couldn’t stand that she could see through him so easily. She always had. Always would, he was pretty sure. And what a terrible thing that was. He sometimes considered the pieces of himself he’d left scattered throughout his life, the other Dannys—the child Danny and the Danny who’d once thought of becoming president and the Danny who’d wanted to go to college and the Danny who’d discovered far too late that he was in love with Nora. Crucial pieces of himself, strewn all over, and yet she held the core piece and held it absently, as if it lay at the bottom of her purse with the white specks of talc and the loose change.
“You’re coming in then,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She stepped back from the door. “Well, you best get started.”
T he Old Men came out of the study for dinner—florid men, prone to winking, men who treated his mother and Nora with an Old World courtliness that Danny secretly found grating.
Taking their seats first were Claude Mesplede and Patrick Donnegan, alderman and boss of the Sixth Ward, as paired up and cagey as an old married couple playing bridge.
Sitting across from them was Silas Pendergast, district attorney of Suffolk County and the boss of Danny’s brother Connor. Silas had a gift for looking respectable and morally forthright but was, in fact, a lifelong toady to the ward machines that had paid his way through law school and kept him docile and slightly drunk every day since.
Down the end by his father was Bill Madigan, deputy chief of police and, some said, the man closest to Commissioner O’Meara.
Sitting beside Madigan—a man Danny had never met before named Charles Steedman, tall and quiet and the only man to sport a three-dollar haircut in a room full of fifty-centers. Steedman wore a white suit and white tie and two-toned spats. He told Danny’s mother, when she asked, that he was, among other things, vice president of the New England Association of Hotels and Restaurants and president of the Suffolk County Fiduciary Security Union.
Danny could tell by his mother’s wide eyes and hesitant smile that she had no idea what the hell Steedman had just said but she nodded anyway.
“Is that a union like the IWW?” Danny asked.
“The IWW are criminals,” his father said. “Subversives.”
Charles Steedman held up a hand and smiled at Danny, his eyes as clear as glass. “A tad different than the IWW, Danny. I’m a banker.”
“Oh, a banker!” Danny’s mother said. “How wonderful.”
The last man to sit at the table, taking a place between Danny’s brothers, Connor and Joe, was Uncle Eddie McKenna, not an uncle by blood, but family all the same, his father’s best friend since they were teenage boys running the streets of their newfound country. He and Danny’s father certainly made a formidable pair within the BPD. Where Thomas Coughlin was the picture of trim—trim hair, trim body, trim speech—Eddie McKenna was large of appetite and flesh and fondness for tall tales. He oversaw Special Squads, a unit that managed all parades, visits from dignitaries, labor strikes, riots, and civil unrest of any kind. Under Eddie’s stewardship the unit had grown both more nebulous and more powerful, a shadow department within the department that kept crime low, it was said, “by going to the source before the source got going.” Eddie’s ever-revolving unit of cowboy-cops—the kind of cops Commissioner O’Meara had sworn to purge from the force—hit street crews on their way to heists, rousted ex-cons five steps out of the Charlestown Penitentiary, and had a network of stoolies, grifters, and street spies so immense that it would have been a boon to every cop in the city if McKenna hadn’t kept all names and all history of interactions with said names solely in his head.
He looked across the table at Danny and pointed his fork at his chest. “Hear what happened yesterday while you were out in the harbor doing the Lord’s work?”
Danny shook his head carefully. He’d spent the morning sleeping off the drunk he’d earned elbow to elbow with Steve Coyle the night before. Nora brought out the last of the dishes, green beans with garlic that steamed as she placed it on the table.
“They struck,” Eddie McKenna said.
Danny was confused. “Who?”
“The Sox and the Cubs,” Connor said. “We were there, me and Joe.”
“Send them all to fight the Kaiser, I say,” Eddie McKenna said. “A bunch of slackers and Bolsheviks.”
Connor chuckled. “You believe it, Dan? People went bughouse.”
Danny smiled, trying to picture it. “You’re not having me on?”
“Oh, it happened,” Joe said, all excited now. “They were mad at the owners and they wouldn’t come out to play and people started throwing stuff and screaming.”
“So then,” Connor said, “they had to send Honey Fitz out there to calm the crowd. Now the mayor’s at the game, okay? The governor, too.”
“Calvin Coolidge.” His father shook his head, as he did every time the governor’s name came up. “A Republican from Vermont running the Democratic Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” He sighed. “Lord save us.”
“So, they’re at the game,” Connor said, “but Peters, he might be mayor, but no one cares. They’ve got Curley in the stands and Honey Fitz, two ex -mayors who are a hell of a lot more popular, so they send Honey out with a megaphone and he stops the riot before it can really get going. Still, people throwing things, tearing up the bleachers, you name it. Then the players come out to play, but, boy, no one was cheering.”
Eddie McKenna patted his large belly and breathed through his nose. “Well, now, I hope these Bolshies will be stripped of their Series medals. Just the fact that they give them ‘medals’ for playing a game is enough to turn the stomach. And I say, Fine. Baseball’s dead anyway. Bunch of slackers without the guts to fight for their country. And Ruth the worst of them. You hear he wants to hit now, Dan? Read it in this morning’s paper—doesn’t want to pitch anymore, says he’s going to sit out if they don’t pay him more and keep him off the mound at the same time. You believe that?”
“Ah, this world.” His father took a sip of Bordeaux.
“Well,” Danny said, looking around the table, “what was their beef?”
“Hmm?”
“Their complaint? They didn’t strike for nothing.”
Joe said, “They said the owners changed the agreement?” Danny watched him cock his eyes back into his head, trying to remember the specifics. Joe was a fanatic for the sport and the most trustworthy source at the table on all matters baseball. “And they cut them out of money they’d promised and every other team had gotten in other Series. So they struck.” He shrugged, as if to say it all made perfect sense to him, and then he cut into his turkey.
“I agree with Eddie,” his father said. “Baseball’s dead. It’ll never come back.”
“Yes, it will,” Joe said desperately. “Yes, it will.”
“This country,” his father said, with one of the many smiles in his collection, this time the wry one. “Everyone thinks it’s okay to hire on for work but then sit down when that work turns out to be hard.”
H e and Connor took their coffee and cigarettes out on the back porch and Joe followed them. He climbed the tree in the backyard because he knew he wasn’t supposed to and knew his brothers wouldn’t call this to his attention.
Connor and Danny looked so little alike people thought they were kidding when they said they were brothers. Where Danny was tall and dark-haired and broad-shouldered, Connor was fair-haired and trim and compact, like their father. Danny had gotten the old man’s blue eyes, though, and his sly sense of humor, where Connor’s brown eyes and disposition—a coiled affability that disguised an obstinate heart—came entirely from their mother.
“Dad said you went out on a warship yesterday?”
Danny nodded. “That I did.”
“Sick soldiers, I heard.”
Danny sighed. “This house leaks like Hudson tires.”
“Well, I do work for the DA.”
Danny chuckled. “Juiced-in, eh, Con’?”
Connor frowned. “How bad were they? The soldiers.”
Danny looked down at his cigarette and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “Pretty bad.”
“What is it?”
“Honestly? Don’t know. Could be influenza, pneumonia, or something no one’s ever heard of.” Danny shrugged. “Hopefully, it sticks to soldiers.”
Connor leaned against the railing. “They say it’ll be over soon.”
“The war?” Danny nodded. “Yeah.”
For a moment, Connor looked uncomfortable. A rising star in the DA’s office, he’d also been a vocal advocate of American entrance into the war. Yet somehow he managed to miss the draft, and both brothers knew who was usually responsible for “somehows” in their family.
Joe said, “Hey down there,” and they looked up to see that he’d managed to reach the second-highest branch.
“You crack your head,” Connor said, “Ma will shoot you.”
“Not going to crack my head,” Joe said, “and Ma doesn’t have a gun.”
“She’ll use Dad’s.”
Joe stayed where he was, as if giving it some thought.
“How’s Nora?” Danny asked, trying to keep his voice loose.
Connor waved his cigarette at the night. “Ask her yourself. She’s a strange bird. She acts all proper around Ma and Dad, you know? But she ever go Bolsheviki on you?”
“Bolsheviki?” Danny smiled. “Ah, no.”
“You should hear her, Dan, talking about the rights of the workers and women’s suffrage and the poor immigrant children in the factories and blah, blah, blah. The old man’d keel over if he heard her sometimes. I’ll tell you that’s going to change, though.”
“Yeah?” Danny chuckled at the idea of Nora changing, Nora so stubborn she’d die of thirst if you ordered her to drink. “How’s that going to happen?”
Connor turned his head, the smile in his eyes. “You didn’t hear?”
“I work eighty hours a week. Apparently I missed some gossip.”
“I’m going to marry her.”
Danny’s mouth went dry. He cleared his throat. “You asked her?”
“Not yet. I’ve talked to Dad about it, though.”
“Talked to Dad, but not to her.”
Connor shrugged and gave him another wide grin. “What’s the shock, brother? She’s beautiful, we go to shows and the flickers together, she learned to cook from Ma. We have a great time. She’ll make a great wife.”
“Con’—” Danny started, but his younger brother held up a hand.
“Dan, Dan, I know something… happened between you two. I’m not blind. The whole family knows.”
This was news to Danny. Above him, Joe scrambled around the tree like a squirrel. The air had cooled, and dusk settled softly against the neighboring row houses.
“Hey, Dan? That’s why I’m telling you this. I want to know if you’re comfortable with it.”
Danny leaned against the rail. “What do you think ‘happened’ between me and Nora?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
Danny nodded, thinking: She’ll never marry him.
“What if she says no?”
“Why would she say that?” Connor tossed his hands up at the absurdity of it.
“You never know with these Bolshies.”
Connor laughed. “Like I said, that’ll change quick. Why wouldn’t she say yes? We spend all our free time together. We—”
“The flickers, like you said. Someone to watch a show with. It’s not the same.”
“Same as what?”
“Love.”
Connor narrowed his eyes. “That is love.” He shook his head at Danny. “Why do you always complicate things, Dan? A man meets a woman, they share common understandings, common heritage. They marry, raise a family, instill those understandings in them. That’s civilization. That’s love.”
Danny shrugged. Connor’s anger was building with his confusion, always a dangerous combination, particularly if Connor was in a bar. Danny might have been the son who’d boxed, but Connor was the true brawler in the family.
Connor was ten months younger than Danny. This made them “Irish twins,” but beyond the bloodline, they’d never had much in common. They’d graduated from high school the same day, Danny by the skin of his teeth, Connor a year early and with honors. Danny had joined the police straightaway, while Connor had accepted a full scholarship to Boston Catholic College in the South End. After two years doubling up on his classes there, he’d graduated summa cum laude and entered Suffolk Law School. There’d never been any question where he’d work once he passed the bar. He’d had a slot waiting for him in the DA’s office since he’d worked there as an office boy in his late teens. Now, with four years on the job, he was starting to get bigger cases, larger prosecutions.
“How’s work?” Danny said.
Connor lit a fresh cigarette. “There’s some very bad people out there.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I’m not talking about Gusties and garden-variety plug-uglies, brother. I’m talking about radicals, bombers.”
Danny cocked his head and pointed at the shrapnel scar on his own neck.
Connor chuckled. “Right, right. Look who I’m talking to. I guess I just never knew how…how…fucking evil these people are. We’ve got a guy now, we’ll be deporting him when we win, and he actually threatened to blow up the Senate.”
“Just talk?” Danny asked.
Connor gave that an irritated head shake. “No such thing. I went to a hanging a week ago?”
Danny said, “You went to a…?”
Connor nodded. “Part of the job sometimes. Silas wants the people of the Commonwealth to know we represent them all the way to the end.”
“Doesn’t seem to go with your nice suit. What’s that color—yellow?”
Connor swiped at his head. “They call it cream.”
“Oh. Cream.”
“It wasn’t fun, actually.” Connor looked out into the yard. “The hanging.” He gave Danny a thin smile. “Around the office, though, they say you get used to it.”
They said nothing for a bit. Danny could feel the pall of the world out there, with its hangings and diseases, its bombs and its poverty, descend on their little world in here.
“So, you’re gonna marry Nora,” he said eventually.
“That’s the plan.” Connor raised his eyebrows up and down.
He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Best of luck then, Con’.”
“Thanks.” Connor smiled. “Heard you just moved into a new place, by the way.”
“No new place,” Danny said, “just a new floor. Better view.”
“Recently?”
“About a month ago,” Danny said. “Apparently some news travels slow.”
“It does when you don’t visit your mother.”
Danny placed a hand to his heart, adopted a thick brogue. “Ah, ’tis a fierce-terrible son, sure, who doesn’t visit his dear old mudder every day of the week.”
Connor chuckled. “You stayed in the North End, though?”
“It’s home.”
“It’s a shit hole.”
“You grew up there,” Joe said, suddenly dangling from the lowest branch.
“That’s right,” Connor said, “and Dad moved us out as soon as he was able.”
“Traded one slum for another,” Danny said.
“An Irish slum, though,” Connor said. “I’ll take it over a wop slum anytime.”
Joe dropped to the ground. “This isn’t a slum.”
Danny said, “It ain’t up here on K Street, no.”
“Neither’s the rest of it.” Joe walked up on the porch. “I know slums,” he said with complete assurance and opened the door and went inside.
I n his father’s study, they lit cigars and asked Danny if he wanted one. He declined but rolled a cigarette and sat by the desk beside Deputy Chief Madigan. Mesplede and Donnegan were over by the decanters, pouring themselves healthy portions of his father’s liquor, and Charles Steedman stood by the tall window behind his father’s desk, lighting his cigar. His father and Eddie McKenna stood talking with Silas Pendergast in the corner, back by the doors. The DA nodded a lot and said very little as Captain Thomas Coughlin and Lieutenant Eddie McKenna spoke to him with their hands on their chins, their foreheads tilted low. Silas Pendergast nodded a final time, picked his hat off the hook, and bade good-bye to everyone.
“He’s a fine man,” his father said, coming around the desk. “He understands the common good.” His father took a cigar from the humidor, snipped the end, and smiled with raised eyebrows at the rest of them. They all smiled back because his father’s humor was infectious that way, even if you didn’t understand the cause of it.
“Thomas,” the deputy chief said, speaking in a tone of deference to a man several ranks his inferior, “I assume you explained the chain of command to him.”
Danny’s father lit his cigar, clenching it in his back teeth as he got it going. “I told him that the man in the back of the cart need never see the horse’s face. I trust he understood my meaning.”
Claude Mesplede came around behind Danny’s chair and patted him on the shoulder. “Still the great communicator, your father.”
His father’s eyes flicked over at Claude as Charles Steedman sat in the window seat behind him and Eddie McKenna took a seat to Danny’s left. Two politicians, one banker, three cops. Interesting.
His father said, “You know why they’ll have so many problems in Chicago? Why their crime rate will go through the roof after Volstead?”
The men waited and his father drew on his cigar and considered the brandy snifter on the desk by his elbow but didn’t lift it.
“Because Chicago is a new city, gentlemen. The fire wiped it clean of history, of values. And New York is too dense, too sprawling, too crowded with the nonnatives. They can’t maintain order, not with what’s coming. But Boston”—he lifted his brandy and took a sip as the light caught the glass—“Boston is small and untainted by the new ways. Boston understands the common good, the way of things.” He raised his glass. “To our fair city, gentlemen. Ah, she’s a grand old broad.”
They met their glasses in toast and Danny caught his father smiling at him, in the eyes if not the mouth. Thomas Coughlin alternated between a variety of demeanors and all coming and going with the speed of a spooked horse that it was easy to forget that they were all aspects of a man who was certain he was doing good. Thomas Coughlin was its servant. The good. Its salesman, its parade marshal, catcher of the dogs who nipped its ankles, pallbearer for its fallen friends, cajoler of its wavering allies.
The question remained, as it had throughout Danny’s life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man’s honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be spoken aloud. It was, purely of necessity, conciliatory to the Brahmins on the outside while remaining firmly anti-Protestant on the inside. It was anticolored, for it was taken as a given that the Irish, for all their struggles and all those still to come, were Northern European and undeniably white, white as last night’s moon, and the idea had never been to seat every race at the table, just to make sure that the last chair would be saved for a Hibernian before the doors to the room were pulled shut. It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private.
His father said, “Heard of the Roxbury Lettish Workingman’s Society?”
“The Letts?” Danny was suddenly aware of Charles Steedman watching him from the window. “Socialist workers group, made up mostly of Russian and Latvian émigrés.”
“How about the People’s Workers Party?” Eddie McKenna asked.
Danny nodded. “They’re over in Mattapan. Communists.”
“Union of Social Justice?”
Danny said, “What’s this, a test?”
None of the men answered, just stared back at him, grave and intent.
He sighed. “Union of Social Justice is, I believe, mostly Eastern European café intellectuals. Very antiwar.”
“Anti-everything,” Eddie McKenna said. “Anti-American most of all. These are all Bolshevik fronts—all of them—funded by Lenin himself to stir unrest in our city.”
“We don’t like unrest,” Danny’s father said.
“How about Galleanists?” Deputy Chief Madigan said. “Heard of them?”
Again, Danny felt the rest of the room watching him.
“Galleanists,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “are followers of Luigi Galleani. They’re anarchists devoted to dismantling all government, all property, all ownership of any kind.”
“How do you feel about them?” Claude Mesplede said.
“Active Galleanists? Bomb throwers?” Danny said. “They’re terrorists.”
“Not just Galleanists,” Eddie McKenna said. “All radicals.”
Danny shrugged. “The Reds don’t bother me much. They seem mostly harmless. They print their propaganda rags and drink too much at night, end up disturbing their neighbors when they start singing too loud about Trotsky and Mother Russia.”
“Things may have changed lately,” Eddie said. “We’re hearing rumors.”
“Of?”
“An insurrectionary act of violence on a major scale.”
“When? What kind?”
His father shook his head. “That information carries with it a need-to-know designation, and you don’t need to know yet.”
“In due time, Dan.” Eddie McKenna gave him a big smile. “In due time.”
“‘The purpose of terrorism,’” his father said, “‘is to inspire terror.’ Know who said that?”
Danny nodded. “Lenin.”
“He reads the papers,” his father said with a soft wink.
McKenna leaned in toward Danny. “We’re planning an operation to counter the radicals’ plans, Dan. And we need to know exactly where your sympathies lie.”
“Uh-huh,” Danny said, not quite seeing the play yet.
Thomas Coughlin had leaned back from the light, his cigar gone dead between his fingers. “We’ll need you to tell us what’s transpiring with the social club.”
“What social club?”
Thomas Coughlin frowned.
“The Boston Social Club?” Danny looked at Eddie McKenna. “Our union?”
“It’s not a union,” Eddie McKenna said. “It just wants to be.”
“And we can’t have that,” his father said. “We’re policemen, Aiden, not common laborers. There’s a principle to be upheld.”
“Which principle is that?” Danny said. “Fuck the workingman?” Danny took another look around the room, at the men gathered here on an innocent Sunday afternoon. His eyes fell on Steedman. “What’s your stake in this?”
Steedman gave him a soft smile. “Stake?”
Danny nodded. “I’m trying to figure out just what it is you’re doing here.”
Steedman reddened at that and looked at his cigar, his jaw moving tightly.
Thomas Coughlin said, “Aiden, you don’t speak to your elders in that tone. You don’t—”
“I’m here,” Steedman said, looking up from his cigar, “because workers in this country have forgotten their place. They have forgotten, young Mr. Coughlin, that they serve at the discretion of those who pay their wages and feed their families. Do you know what a ten-day strike can do? Just ten days.”
Danny shrugged.
“It can cause a medium-size business to default on its loans. When loans are in default, stock plummets. Investors lose money. A lot of money. And they have to cut back their business. Then the bank has to step in. Sometimes, this means the only solution is foreclosure. The bank loses money, the investors lose money, their companies lose money, the original business goes under, and the workers lose their jobs anyway. So while the idea of unions is, on the surface, rather heart-warming, it is also quite unconscionable for reasonable men to so much as discuss it in polite company.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Does that answer your question, son?”
“I’m not exactly sure how your logic applies to the public sector.”
“In triplicate,” Steedman said.
Danny gave him a tight smile and turned to McKenna. “Is Special Squads going after unions, Eddie?”
“We’re going after subversives. Threats to this nation.” He gave Danny a roll of his big shoulders. “I need you to hone your skills somewhere. Might as well start local.”
“In our union.”
“That’s what you call it.”
“What could this possibly have to do with an act of ‘insurrectionary violence’?”
“It’s a milk run,” McKenna said. “You help us figure out who really runs things in there, who the members of the brain trust are, et cetera, we’ll have more confidence to send you after bigger fish.”
Danny nodded. “What’s my end?”
His father cocked his head at that, his eyes diminishing to slits.
Deputy Chief Madigan said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s that—”
“Your end?” his father said. “If you succeed with the BSC and then succeed with the Bolsheviks?”
“Yes.”
“A gold shield.” His father smiled. “That’s what you wanted us to say, yes? Counting on it, were you?”
Danny felt an urge to grind his teeth. “It’s either on the table or it isn’t.”
“ If you tell us what we need to know about the infrastructure of that alleged policeman’s union? And if you then infiltrate a radical group of our choosing and then come back with the information necessary to stop any act of concerted violence?” Thomas Coughlin looked over at Deputy Chief Madigan and then back at Danny. “We’ll put you first in line.”
“I don’t want first in line. I want the gold shield. You’ve dangled it long enough.”
The men traded glances, as if they hadn’t counted on his reaction from the outset.
After a time, his father said, “Ah, the boy knows his mind, doesn’t he?”
“He does,” Claude Mesplede said.
“That’s plain as the day, ’tis,” Patrick Donnegan said.
Out beyond the doors, Danny heard his mother’s voice in the kitchen, the words indecipherable, but whatever she said caused Nora to laugh and the sound of it made him picture Nora’s throat, the flesh over her windpipe.
His father lit his cigar. “A gold shield for the man who brings down some radicals and lets us know what’s on the mind of the Boston Social Club to boot.”
Danny held his father’s eyes. He removed a cigarette from his pack of Murads and tapped it off the edge of his brogan before lighting it. “In writing.”
Eddie McKenna chuckled. Claude Mesplede, Patrick Donnegan, and Deputy Chief Madigan looked at their shoes, the rug. Charles Steedman yawned.
Danny’s father raised an eyebrow. It was a slow gesture, meant to suggest he admired Danny. But Danny knew that while Thomas Coughlin had a dizzying array of character traits, admiration wasn’t one of them.
“Is this the test by which you’d choose to define your life?” His father eventually leaned forward, and his face was lit with what many people could mistake for pleasure. “Or would you prefer to save that for another day?”
Danny said nothing.
His father looked around the room again. Eventually he shrugged and met his son’s eyes.
“Deal.”
B y the time Danny left the study, his mother and Joe had gone to bed and the house was dark. He went out on the front landing because he could feel the house digging into his shoulders and scratching at his head, and he sat on the stoop and tried to decide what to do next. Along K Street, the windows were dark and the neighborhood was so quiet he could hear the hushed lapping of the bay a few blocks away.
“And what dirty job did they ask of you this time?” Nora stood with her back to the door.
He turned to look at her. It hurt, but he kept doing it. “Wasn’t too dirty.”
“Ah, wasn’t too clean, either.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point?” She sighed. “You’ve not looked happy in a donkey’s age.”
“What’s happy?” he said.
She hugged herself against the cooling night. “The opposite of you.”
It had been more than five years since that Christmas Eve when Danny’s father had brought Nora O’Shea through the front door, carrying her in his arms like firewood. Though his face was pink from the cold, her flesh was gray, her chattering teeth loose from malnutrition. Thomas Coughlin told the family he’d found her on the Northern Avenue docks, beset by ruffians she was when he and Uncle Eddie waded in with their nightsticks as if they were still first-year patrolmen. Sure now, just look at the poor, starving waif with nary an ounce of meat on her bones! And when Uncle Eddie had reminded him that it was Christmas Eve and the poor girl managed to croak out a feeble “Thank ye, sir. Thank ye,” her voice the spitting image of his own, dear departed Ma, God rest her, well wasn’t it a sign from Christ Himself on the eve of His own birthday?
Even Joe, only six at the time and still in thrall to his father’s grandiloquent charms, didn’t buy the story, but it put the family in an extravagantly Christian mood, and Connor went to fill the tub while Danny’s mother gave the gray girl with the wide, sunken eyes a cup of tea. She watched the Coughlins from behind the cup with her bare, dirty shoulders peeking out from under the greatcoat like damp stones.
Then her eyes found Danny’s, and before they passed from his face, a small light appeared in them that seemed uncomfortably familiar. In that moment, one he would turn over in his head dozens of times in the ensuing years, he was sure he’d seen his own cloaked heart looking back at him through a starving girl’s eyes.
Bullshit, he told himself. Bullshit.
He would learn very quickly how fast those eyes could change—how that light that had seemed a mirror of his own thoughts could go dull and alien or falsely gay in an instant. But still, knowing the light was there, waiting to appear again, he became addicted to the highly unlikely possibility of unlocking it at will.
Now she stared at him carefully on the porch and said nothing.
“Where’s Connor?” he said.
“Off to the bar,” she said. “Said he’d be at Henry’s if you were to come looking.”
Her hair was the color of sand and strung in curls that hugged her scalp and ended just below her ears. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t short, and something seemed to move beneath her flesh at all times, as if she were missing a layer and if you looked close enough you’d see her bloodstream.
“You two are courting, I hear.”
“Stop.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Connor’s a boy.”
“He’s twenty-six. Older’n you.”
She shrugged. “Still a boy.”
“Are you courting?” Danny flicked his cigarette into the street and looked at her.
“I don’t know what we’re doing, Danny.” She sounded weary. Not so much of the day, but of him. It made him feel like a child, petulant and easily bruised. “Would you like me to say that I don’t feel some allegiance to this family, some weight for what I could never repay your father? That I know for sure I won’t marry your brother?”
“Yes,” Danny said, “that’s what I’d like to hear.”
“Well, I can’t say that.”
“You’d marry out of gratitude?”
She sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Danny’s throat felt tight, like it might collapse in on itself. “And when Connor finds out you left a husband behind in—”
“He’s dead,” she hissed.
“To you. Not the same as dead, though, is it?”
Her eyes were fire now. “What’s your point, boy?”
“How do you think he’s going to take that news?”
“All I can hope,” she said, her voice weary again, “is that he takes it a fair sight better than you did.”
Danny said nothing for a bit and they both stared over the short distance between them, his eyes, he hoped, as merciless as hers.
“He won’t,” he said and walked down the stairs into the quiet and the dark.
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