The Given Day

  The gun shook in his hand and he lowered it again.

  Wouldn’t take the people the Deacon associated with long to put all this together, to put him in this room. Whether Smoke lived or died, Luther and Lila’s time in Tulsa was done.

  Still…

  He raised the gun again, gripped his forearm to stop the shakes and stared down the barrel at Smoke. He stood there a good minute before he finally faced the fact that he could stand there for an hour and he’d still never pull that trigger.

  “Ain’t you,” he said.

  Luther looked at the blood still leaking out of the man. He took one last look behind him at Jessie. He sighed. He stepped over Dandy’s corpse.

  “You simple sons of bitches,” Luther said as he headed for the door. “You brought this on yourselves.”

  CHAPTER eight

  After the flu had passed on, Danny returned to walking the beat by day and studying to impersonate a radical at night. In terms of the latter duty, Eddie McKenna left packages at his door at least once a week. He’d unwrap them to find stacks of the latest socialist and Communist propaganda rags, as well as copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, speeches given by Jack Reed, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Jim Larkin, Joe Hill, and Pancho Villa. He read thickets of propaganda so dense with rhetoric it may as well have been a structural engineering manual for all it spoke to any common man Danny could imagine. He came across certain words so often—tyranny, imperialism, capitalist oppression, brotherhood, insurrection—that he suspected a knee-jerk vocabulary had become necessary to ensure a dependable shorthand among the workers of the world. But as the words lost individuality, so they lost their power and gradually their meaning. Once the meaning was gone, Danny wondered, how would these noodle heads—and among the Bolshie and anarchist literature, he had yet to find someone who wasn’t a noodle head—as one unified body, successfully cross a street, never mind overthrow a country?

  When he wasn’t reading speeches, he read missives from what was commonly referred to as the “front line of the workers’ revolution.” He read about striking coal miners burned in their homes alongside their families, IWW workers tarred and feathered, labor organizers assassinated on the dark streets of small towns, unions broken, unions outlawed, workingmen jailed, beaten, and deported. And always it was they who were painted as the enemies of the great American Way.

  To his surprise, Danny felt occasional stirrings of empathy. Not for everyone, of course—he’d always thought anarchists were morons, offering the world nothing but steel-eyed bloodlust, and little in his reading changed his opinion. Communists, too, struck him as hopelessly naïve, pursuing a utopia that failed to take into consideration the most elemental characteristic of the human animal: covetousness. The Bolshies believed it could be cured like an illness, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and to remove it would kill the host. The socialists were the smartest—they acknowledged greed—but their message was constantly entwined with the Communists’ and it was impossible, at least in this country, for it to be heard above the red din.

  But for the life of him Danny couldn’t understand why most of the outlawed or targeted unions deserved their fate. Time and again what was renounced as treasonous rhetoric was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.

  He mentioned this to McKenna over coffee in the South End one night and McKenna wagged a finger at him. “It’s not those men you need to concern yourself with, young protégé. Ask yourself instead, ‘Who’s funding those men? And to what end?’”

  Danny yawned, tired all the time now, unable to remember the last time he’d had a true night’s sleep. “Let me guess—Bolsheviks.”

  “You’re goddamned right. From Mother Russia herself.” He widened his eyes at Danny. “You think this is mildly amusing, yeah? Lenin himself said that the people of Russia will not rest until all the peoples of the world join their revolution. That’s not idle talk, boyo. That’s a clear fucking threat against these shores.” He thumped his index finger off the table. “My shores.”

  Danny suppressed another yawn with his fist. “How’s my cover coming?”

  “Almost there,” McKenna said. “You join that thing they call a policemen’s union yet?”

  “Going to a meeting Tuesday.”

  “What took so long?”

  “If Danny Coughlin, son of Captain Coughlin and no stranger himself to the selfish, politically motivated act, were to suddenly ask to join the Boston Social Club, people might be a bit suspicious.”

  “You’ve a point. Fair enough.”

  “My old partner, Steve Coyle?”

  “The one who caught the grippe, yeah. A shame.”

  “He was a vocal supporter of the union. I’m letting some time pass so it’ll seem I passed a few long dark nights of the soul over him getting sick. Finally my conscience caught up, so I had to check out a meeting. Let them think I have a soft heart.”

  McKenna lit the blackened stub of a cigar. “You’ve always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most.”

  Danny shrugged. “Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess.”

  “Always the danger, that.” McKenna nodded, as if he were intimate with the dilemma. “Then one day, sure, you can’t remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on to. Or why you worked so hard at the holding.”

  Danny joined Tessa and her father for dinner on a night when the cool air smelled of burning leaves. Their apartment was larger than his. His came with a hot plate atop an icebox, but the Abruzzes’ had a small kitchen with a Raven stove. Tessa cooked, her long dark hair tied back, limp and shiny from the heat. Federico uncorked the wine Danny had brought and set it on a windowsill to breathe while he and Danny sat at the small dining table in the parlor and sipped anisette.

  Federico said, “I have not seen you around the building lately.”

  Danny said, “I work a lot.”

  “Even now that the grippe has passed on?”

  Danny nodded. It was just one more of the beefs cops had with the department. The Boston police officer got one day off for every twenty. And on that day off, he wasn’t allowed to leave city limits in case an emergency arose. So most of the single guys lived near their stations in rooming houses because what was the point in getting settled when you had to be at work in a few hours anyway? In addition, three nights a week, you were required to sleep at the station house, in the fetid beds on the top floor, which were lice-or bug-ridden and had just been slept in by the poor slob who would take your place on the next patrol.

  “You work too much, I think.”

  “Tell my boss, would you?”

  Federico smiled, and it was a hell of a smile, the kind that could warm a winter room. It occurred to Danny that one of the reasons it was so impressive was that you could feel so much heartbreak behind it. Maybe that’s what he’d been trying to put his finger on that night on the roof—the way Federico’s smile didn’t mask the great pain that lay undoubtedly in his past; it embraced it. And in that embracing, triumphed. A soft version of the smile remained in place as he leaned in and thanked Danny in a low whisper for “that unfortunate business,” of removing Tessa’s dead newborn from the apartment. He assured Danny that were it not for his own work, they would have had him to dinner as soon as Tessa had recovered from the grippe.

  Danny looked over at Tessa, caught her looking at him. She lowered her head, and a strand of hair fell from behind her ear and hung over her eye. She was not an American girl, he reminded himself, one for whom sex with a virtual stranger could be tricky but not out of the question. She was Italian. Old World. Mind your manners.

  He looked back at her father. “What is it that you do, sir?”

  “Federico,” the old man said and patted his hand. “We drink anisette, we break bread, it must be Federico.”

  Danny acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. “Federico, what is it you do?”

  “I
give the breath of angels to mere men.” The old man swept his hand behind him like an impresario. Back against the wall between two windows sat a phonograph cabinet. It had seemed out of place to Danny as soon as he’d entered. It was made of fine-grain mahogany, designed with ornate carvings that made Danny think of European royalty. The open top exposed a turntable perched on purple velvet inlay, and below, a two-door cabinet looked to be hand carved and had nine shelves, enough to hold several dozen disc records.

  The metal hand crank was gold plated, and while the disc record played, you could barely hear the motor. It produced a richness of sound unlike anything Danny had ever heard in his life. They were listening to the intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, and Danny knew if he’d entered the apartment blind he would have assumed the soprano stood in the parlor with them. He took another look at the cabinet and felt pretty sure it cost three or four times what the stove had.

  “The Silvertone B-Twelve,” Federico said, his voice, always melodious, suddenly more so. “I sell them. I sell the B-Eleven as well, but I prefer the look of the Twelve. Louis the Sixteenth is far superior in design to Louis the Fifteenth. You agree?”

  “Of course,” Danny said, though if he’d been told it was Louis the Third or Ivan the Eighth, he’d have had to take it on faith.

  “No other phonograph on the market can equal it,” Federico said with the gleaming eyes of the evangelical. “No other phonograph can play every type of disc record—Edison, Pathé, Victor, Columbia, and Silvertone? No, my friend, this is the only one so capable. You pay your eight dollars for the table model because it is less expensive”—he crinkled his nose downward—“and light—bah!—convenient—bah!—space saving. But will it sound like this? Will you hear angels? Hardly. And then your cheap needle will wear out and the discs will skip and soon you will hear crackles and whispers. And where will you be then, except eight dollars the poorer?” He spread his arm toward the phonograph cabinet again, as proud as a first-time father. “Sometimes quality costs. It is only reasonable.”

  Danny suppressed a chuckle at the little old man and his fervent capitalism.

  “Papa,” Tessa said from the stove, “do not get yourself so…” She waved her hands, searching for the word. “…eccitato.”

  “Excited,” Danny said.

  She frowned at him. “Eggs-y-sigh…?”

  “Ex,” he said. “Ex-ci-ted.”

  “Eck-cited.”

  “Close enough.”

  She raised her wooden spoon. “English!” she barked at the ceiling.

  Danny thought of what her neck, so honey-brown, would taste like. Women—his weakness since he’d been old enough to notice them and see that they, in turn, noticed him. Looking at Tessa’s neck, her throat, he felt beset by it. The awful, delicious need to possess. To own—for a night—another’s eyes, sweat, heartbeat. And here, right in front of her father. Jesus!

  He turned back to the old man, whose eyes were half closed to the music. Oblivious. Sweet and oblivious to the New World ways.

  “I love music,” Federico said and opened his eyes. “When I was a boy, minstrels and troubadours would visit our village from the spring through the summer. I would sit until my mother shooed me from the square—sometimes with a switch, yes?—and watch them play. The sounds. Ah, the sounds! Language is such a poor substitute. You see?”

  Danny shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

  Federico pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in. “Men’s tongues fork at birth. It has always been so. The bird cannot lie. The lion is a hunter, to be feared, yes, but he is true to his nature. The tree and rock are true—they are a tree and rock. Nothing more, but nothing less. But man, the only creature who can make words—uses this great gift to betray truth, to betray himself, to betray nature and God. He will point to a tree and tell you it is not a tree, stand over your dead body and say he did not kill you. Words, you see, speak for the brain, and the brain is a machine. Music”—he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index finger—“music speaks for the soul because words are too small.”

  “Never thought of it that way.”

  Federico pointed at his prized possession. “That is made of wood. It is a tree, but it is not a tree. And the wood is wood, yes, but what it does to the music that comes from it? What is that? Do we have a word for that kind of wood? That kind of tree?”

  Danny gave him a small shrug, figuring the old man was getting a bit tipsy.

  Federico closed his eyes again and his hands floated up by his ears, as if he were conducting the music himself, willing it forth into the room.

  Danny caught Tessa looking at him again and this time she did not drop his gaze. He gave her his best smile, the slightly confused, slightly embarrassed one, the small boy’s smile. A flush spread under her chin, and still she didn’t look away.

  He turned back to her father. His eyes remained closed, his hands conducting, even though the disc record had ended and the needle popped back and forth over its innermost grooves.

  Steve Coyle smiled broadly when he saw Danny enter Fay Hall, the meeting place of the Boston Social Club. He worked his way down a row of folding chairs, one leg dragging noticeably after the other. He shook Danny’s hand. “Thanks for coming.”

  Danny hadn’t counted on this. It made him feel twice as guilty, infiltrating the BSC under false pretenses while his old partner, sick and unemployed, showed up to support a fight he wasn’t even part of anymore.

  Danny managed a smile. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Steve looked back over his shoulder at the men setting up the stage. “They let me help out. I’m a living example of what happens when you don’t have a union with negotiating power, you know?” He clapped Danny’s shoulder. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” Danny said. For five years he’d known every detail of his partner’s life, often on a minute-to-minute basis. It was suddenly odd to realize he hadn’t checked in on Steve in two weeks. Odd and shameful. “How you feeling?”

  Steve shrugged. “I’d complain, but who’d listen?” He laughed loud and clapped Danny’s shoulder again. His beard stubble was white. He looked lost inside his newly damaged body. As if he’d been turned upside down and shaken.

  “You look good,” Danny said.

  “Liar.” Again the awkward laugh followed by an awkward solemnity, a look of dewy earnestness. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

  Danny said, “Don’t mention it.”

  “Turn you into a union man yet,” Steve said.

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  Steve clapped him on the back a third time and introduced him around. Danny knew about half of the men on a surface level, their paths having crossed on various calls over the years. They all seemed nervous around Steve, as if they hoped he’d take whatever afflicted him to another policemen’s union in another city. As if bad fortune were as contagious as the grippe. Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve’s hand—they’d have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.

  The head of the BSC, a patrolman named Mark Denton, strode toward the stage. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Danny, and rail thin. He had pale skin, as hard and shiny as piano keys, and his black hair was slicked back tight against his skull.

  Danny and the other men took their chairs as Mark Denton crossed the stage and placed his hands on the edges of the dais. He gave the room a tired smile.

  “Mayor Peters canceled the meeting we had scheduled at the end of the week.”

  Groans broke out in the room, a few catcalls.

  Denton held up a hand to quiet them. “There’re rumors of a streetcar workers strike, and the mayor believes that’s of more pressing importance right now. We have to go to the back of the line.”

  “Maybe we should strike,” someone said.

  Denton’s dark eyes flashed. “We don’t talk of strike, men. That’s just what they wan
t. You know how that would play in the papers? Do you really want to give them that kind of ammunition, Timmy?”

  “No, I don’t, Mark, but what are our options? We’re fucking starving out here.”

  Denton acknowledged that with a firm nod. “I know we are. But even whispering the word strike is heresy, men. You know it and I know it. Our best chance right now is to appear patient and open up talks with Samuel Gompers and the AFL.”

  “That really happening?” someone behind Danny asked.

  Denton nodded. “In fact, I was planning to put a motion to the floor. Later tonight, I’ll grant you, but why wait?” He shrugged. “All those in favor of the BSC opening up charter talks with the American Federation of Labor, say aye.”

  Danny felt it then, an almost tactile stirring of the blood throughout the room, a sense of collective purpose. He couldn’t deny his blood jumped along with everyone else’s. A charter in the most powerful union in the country. Jesus.

  “Aye,” the crowd shouted.

  “All against?”

  No one spoke.

  “Motion accepted,” Denton said.

  Was it actually possible? No police department in the nation had ever pulled this off. Few had dared try. And yet, they could be the first. They could—quite literally—change history.

  Danny reminded himself he wasn’t part of this.

  Because this was a joke. This was a pack of naïve, overly dramatic men who thought with enough talk they could bend the world to their needs. It didn’t work that way, Danny could have told them. It worked the other way.

  After Denton, the cops felled by the flu paraded onstage. They talked of themselves as the lucky ones; unlike nine other officers from the city’s eighteen station houses, they’d survived. Of twenty onstage, twelve had returned to duty. Eight never would. Danny lowered his eyes when Steve took the dais. Steve, just two months ago singing in the barbershop quartet, had trouble keeping his words straight. He kept stuttering. He asked them not to forget him, not to forget the flu. He asked that they remember their brotherhood and fellowship to all who’d sworn to protect and to serve.