The Given Day

  He and the other nineteen survivors left the stage to loud applause.

  The men mingled by the coffee urns or stood in circles and passed around flasks. Danny quickly got a feel for the basic personality breakdown of the membership. You had the Talkers—loud men, like Roper from the Oh-Seven, who rattled off statistics, then got into high-pitched disagreements over semantics and minutiae. Then there were the Bolshies and the Socies, like Coogan from the One-Three and Shaw who worked Warrants out of headquarters, no different from all the radicals and alleged radicals Danny had been reading up on lately, always quick to spout the most fashionable rhetoric, to reach for the toothless slogan. There were also the Emotionals—men like Hannity from the One-One, who had never been able to hold his liquor in the first place and whose eyes welled up too quickly with mention of “fellowship” or “justice.” So, for the most part, what Danny’s old high school English teacher, Father Twohy, used to call men of “prattle, not practice.”

  But there were also men like Don Slatterly, a Robbery detective, Kevin McRae, a flatfoot at the Oh-Six, and Emmett Strack, a twenty-five-year warhorse from the Oh-Three, who said very little but who watched—and saw—everything. They moved through the crowd and dispensed words of caution or restraint here, slivers of hope there, but mostly they just listened and assessed. The men watched their wake the way dogs watched the space their masters had just vacated. It would be these men and a few others like them, Danny decided, who the police brass should worry about if they wanted to avert a strike.

  At the coffee urns, Mark Denton suddenly stood beside him and held out his hand.

  “Tommy Coughlin’s son, right?”

  “Danny.” He shook Denton’s hand.

  “You were at Salutation when it was bombed, right?”

  Danny nodded.

  “But that’s Harbor Division.” Denton stirred sugar into his coffee.

  “The accident of my life,” Danny said. “I’d pinched a thief on the docks and was dropping him off at Salutation when, you know…”

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Coughlin—you’re pretty well known in this department. They say the only thing Captain Tommy can’t control is his own son. That makes you pretty popular, I’d say. We could use guys like you.”

  “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

  Denton’s eyes swept the room. He leaned in closer. “Think quickly, would you?”

  Tessa liked to take to the stoop on mild nights when her father was on the road selling his Silvertone B-XIIs. She smoked small black cigarettes that smelled as harsh as they looked, and some nights Danny sat with her. Something in Tessa made him nervous. His limbs felt cumbersome around her, as if there were no casual way to rest them. They spoke of the weather and they spoke of food and they spoke of tobacco, but they never spoke of the flu or her child or the day Danny had carried her to Haymarket Relief.

  Soon they left the stoop for the roof. No one came up on the roof.

  He learned that Tessa was twenty. That she’d grown up in the Sicilian village of Altofonte. When she was sixteen, a powerful man named Primo Alieveri, had seen her bicycling past the café where he sat with his associates. He’d made inquiries and then arranged to meet with her father. Federico was a music teacher in their village, famous for speaking three languages but also rumored to be going pazzo, having married so late in life. Tessa’s mother had passed on when she was ten, and her father raised her alone, with no brothers or money to protect her. And so a deal was struck.

  Tessa and her father made the trip to Collesano at the base of the Madonie Mountains on the Tyrrhenian coast, arriving the day after Tessa’s seventeenth birthday. Federico had hired guards to protect Tessa’s dowry, mostly jewels and coins passed down from her mother’s side of the family, and their first night in the guesthouse of Primo Alieveri’s estate, the throats of the guards were cut as they slept in the barn and the dowry was taken. Primo Alieveri was mortified. He scoured the village for the bandits. At nightfall, over a fine dinner in the main hall, he assured his guests he and his men were closing in on the suspects. The dowry would be returned and the wedding would take place, as planned, that weekend.

  When Federico passed out at the table, a dreamy smile plastered to his face, Primo’s men helped him out to the guesthouse, and Primo raped Tessa on the table and then again on the stone floor by the hearth. He sent her back to the guesthouse where she tried to rouse Federico, but he continued to sleep the sleep of the dead. She lay on the floor beside the bed with the blood sticky between her thighs and eventually fell asleep.

  In the morning, they were awakened by a racket in the courtyard and the sound of Primo calling their names. They came out of the guesthouse where Primo stood with two of his men, their shotguns slung behind their backs. Tessa’s and Federico’s horses and their wagon were gathered on the courtyard stones. Primo glared at them.

  “A great friend from your village has written to inform me that your daughter is no virgin. She is a puttana and no suitable bride for a man of my stature. Be gone from my sight, little man.”

  In that moment and several that followed, Federico was still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He seemed bewildered.

  Then he saw the blood that had soaked his daughter’s fine white dress while they slept. Tessa never saw how he got to the whip, if it came from his own horse or from a hook in the courtyard, but when he snapped it, he caught one of Primo Alieveri’s men in the eyes and spooked the horses. As the second man bent to his comrade, Tessa’s horse, a tired, orange mare, broke from her grasp and kicked the man in the chest. The horse’s reins raced through her fingers and the beast ran out of the courtyard. Tessa would have given chase, but she was too entranced by her father, her sweet, gentle, slightly pazzo father as he whipped Primo Alieveri to the ground, whipped him until strips of his flesh lay in the courtyard. With one of the guards (and his shotgun), Federico got her dowry back. The chest sat in plain view in the master bedroom, and from there, he and Tessa tracked down her mare and left the village before dusk.

  Two days later, after using half the dowry for bribes, they boarded a ship in Cefalu and came to America.

  Danny heard this story in halting English, not because Tessa could not grasp the language yet, but because she tried to be precise.

  Danny chuckled. “So that day I carried you? That day I was losing my mind trying to speak my broken Italian, you could understand me?”

  Tessa gave him arched eyebrows and a faint smile. “I could not understand anything that day except pain. You would expect me to remember English? This…crazy language of yours. Four words you use when one would do. Every time you do this. Remember English that day?” She waved a hand at him. “Stupid boy.”

  Danny said, “Boy? I got a few years on you, sweetheart.”

  “Yes, yes.” She lit another of her harsh cigarettes. “But you a boy. You a country of boys. And girls. None of you grow up yet. You have too much fun, I think.”

  “Fun with what?”

  “This.” She waved her hand at the sky. “This silly big country. You Americans—there is no history. There is only now. Now, now, now. I want this now. I want that now.”

  Danny felt a sudden rise of irritation. “And yet everyone seems in a hell of a hurry to leave their country to get here.”

  “Ah, yes. Streets paved with gold. The great America where every man can make his fortune. But what of those who don’t? What of the workers, Officer Danny? Yes? They work and work and work and if they get sick from the work, the company says, ‘Bah. Go home and no come back.’ And if they hurt themselves on the work? Same thing. You Americans talk of your freedom, but I see slaves who think they are free. I see companies that use children and families like hogs and—”

  Danny waved it away. “And yet you’re here.”

  She considered him with her large, dark eyes. It was a careful look he’d grown used to. Tessa never did anything carelessly. She approached each day as if it required study before she’d form an opinion of
it.

  “You are right.” She tapped her ash against the parapet. “You are a much more…abbondante country than Italia. You have these big—whoosh—cities. You have more automobiles in one block than all of Palermo. But you are a very young country, Officer Danny. You are like the child who believes he is smarter than his father or his uncles who came before.”

  Danny shrugged. He caught Tessa looking at him, as calm and cautious as always. He bounced his knee off hers and looked out at the night.

  One night in Fay Hall, he sat in back before the start of another union meeting and realized he had all the information his father, Eddie McKenna, and the Old Men could possibly expect from him. He knew that Mark Denton, as leader of the BSC, was just what they feared—smart, calm, fearless, and prudent. He knew that the most trusted men under him—Emmett Strack, Kevin McRae, Don Slatterly, and Stephen Kearns—were cut from the same cloth. And he knew who the deadwood and the empty shirts were as well, those who would be most easily compromised, easily swayed, easily bribed.

  At that moment, as Mark Denton once again strode across the stage to the dais to start the meeting, Danny realized that he’d known all he needed to know since the first meeting he’d attended. That was seven meetings ago.

  All he had left to do was to sit down with McKenna or his father and give them his impressions, the few notes he’d taken, and a concise list of the leadership of the Boston Social Club. After that, he’d be halfway to his gold shield. Hell, maybe more than halfway. A fingertip’s reach away.

  So why was he still here?

  That was the question of the month.

  Mark Denton said, “Gents,” and his voice was softer than normal, almost hushed. “Gents, if I could have your attention.”

  There was something to the hush of his voice that reached every man in the room. The room grew quiet in blocks of four or five rows until the silence reached the back. Mark Denton nodded his thanks. He gave them a weak smile and blinked several times.

  “As many of you know,” Denton said, “I was schooled on this job by John Temple of the Oh-Nine Station House. He used to say if he could make a copper out of me there’d be no reason left not to hire dames.”

  Chuckles rippled through the room as Denton lowered his head for a moment.

  “Officer John Temple passed this afternoon from complications connected to the grippe. He was fifty-one years old.”

  Anyone wearing a hat removed it. A thousand men lowered their heads in the smoky hall. Denton spoke again: “If we could also give the same respect to Officer Marvin Tarleton of the One-Five, who died last night of the same cause.”

  “Marvin’s dead?” someone called. “He was getting better.”

  Denton shook his head. “His heart quit last night at eleven o’clock.” He leaned into the dais. “The preliminary ruling from the department is that the families of neither man receive death benefits because the city has already ruled on similar claims—”

  Boos and jeers and overturned chairs temporarily drowned him out.

  “—because,” he shouted, “because, because—”

  Several men were pulled back down into their seats. Others closed their mouths.

  “—because,” Mark Denton said, “the city says the men did not die in the line.”

  “How’d they get the fucking flu, then?” Bob Reming shouted. “Their dogs?”

  Denton said, “The city would say yes. Their dogs. They’re dogs. The city believes they could have contracted the grippe on any number of occasions unrelated to the job. Thus? They did not die in the line. That’s all we need to know. That’s what we have to accept.”

  He stepped back from the dais as a chair went airborne. Within seconds, the first fistfight broke out. Then the second. A third started in front of Danny and he stood back from it as shouts filled the hall, as the building shook from anger and despair.

  “Are you angry?” Mark Denton shouted.

  Danny watched Kevin McRae wade into the mob and break up one of the fights by pulling both men off their feet by their hair.

  “Are you angry?” Denton shouted again. “Go ahead—fucking hit one another.”

  The room began to quiet. Half the men turned back toward the stage.

  “That’s what they want you to do,” Denton called. “Beat yourselves to a pulp. Go ahead. The mayor? The governor? The city council? They laugh at you.”

  The last of the men stopped fighting. They sat.

  “Are you angry enough to do something?” Mark Denton asked.

  No one spoke.

  “Are you?” Denton shouted.

  “Yes!” a thousand men shouted back.

  “We’re a union, men. That means we come together as one body with one purpose and we take it to them where they live. And we demand our rights as men. Any of you want to sit this out? Then fucking sit. The rest of you—show me what we are.”

  They rose as one—a thousand men, some with blood on their faces, some with tears of rage bubbling in their eyes. And Danny rose, too, a Judas no longer.

  He met his father as his father was leaving the Oh-Six in South Boston.

  “I’m out.”

  His father paused on the station house steps. “You’re out of what?”

  “The union-rat job, the radicals, the whole thing.”

  His father came down the stairs and stepped in close. “Those radicals could make you a captain by forty, son.”

  “Don’t care.”

  “You don’t care?” His father gave him a withered smile. “You turn this chance down, you’ll not get another shot at that gold shield for five years. If ever.”

  Fear at that prospect filled Danny’s chest, but he jammed his hands deeper in his pockets and shook his head. “I won’t rat on my own men.”

  “They’re subversives, Aiden. Subversives within our own department.”

  “They’re cops, Dad. And by the way, what kind of father are you to send me into that kinda job? You couldn’t find someone else?”

  His father’s face grew gray. “It’s the price of the ticket.”

  “What ticket?”

  “For the train that never runs out of track.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Your grandchildren would have ridden it.”

  Danny waved it off. “I’m going home, Dad.”

  “Your home’s here, Aiden.”

  Danny looked up at the white limestone building with its Grecian columns. He shook his head. “Your home is.”

  That night he went to Tessa’s door. He knocked softly, looking up and down the hall, but she didn’t answer. So he turned and walked toward his room, feeling like a kid carrying stolen food under his coat. Just as he reached his door, he heard hers unlatch.

  He turned in the corridor and she was coming down the hallway toward him with a coat thrown over her shift, barefoot, her expression one of alarm and curiosity. When she reached him, he tried to think of something to say.

  “I still felt like talking,” he said.

  She looked back at him, her eyes large and dark. “More stories of the Old Country?”

  He thought of her on the floor of Primo Alieveri’s great hall, the way her flesh would have looked against the marble as the light of the fire played on her dark hair. A shameful image, really, in which to find lust.

  “No,” he said. “Not those stories.”

  “New ones, then?”

  Danny opened his door. It was a reflexive gesture, but then he looked in Tessa’s eyes and saw that the effect had been anything but casual.

  “You want to come in and talk?” he said.

  She stood there in her coat and the threadbare white shift underneath, looking at him for a long time. He could see her body underneath the shift. A light sheen of perspiration dotted the brown flesh below the hollow of her throat.

  “I want to come in,” she said.

  CHAPTER nine

  The first time Lila ever laid eyes on Luther was at a picnic on the outskirts of Minerva Park in a green f
ield along the banks of the Big Walnut River. It was supposed to be a gathering of just the folks who worked for the Buchanan family at the mansion in Columbus, while the Buchanans themselves were on vacation in Saginaw Bay. But someone had mentioned it to someone and that someone mentioned it to someone else and by the time Lila arrived in the late morning of that hot August day there were at least sixty people going full-out for high times down along the water. It was a month after the massacre of coloreds in East St. Louis, and that month had passed slow and winter-bleak among the workers at the Buchanan house, pieces of gossip trickling in here and there that contradicted the newspaper accounts and, of course, the conversation among the white folk around the Buchanan dinner table. To hear the stories—of white women stabbing colored women with kitchen knives while white men burned the neighborhood down and strung their ropes and shot the colored men—was plenty reason to have a dark cloud drift down into the heads of everyone Lila knew, but four weeks later, it seemed folks had decided to retire that cloud for a day, to have fun while there was fun to be had.

  Some men had cut an oil drum in half and covered the halves in cattle wire and started barbecuing and folks had brought tables and chairs and the tables were covered with plates of fried catfish and creamy potato salad and deep brown drumsticks and fat purple grapes and heaps and heaps of greens. Children ran and folks danced and some men played baseball in the wilting grass. Two men had brought their guitars and were cutting heads against each other like they were standing on a street corner in Helena, and the sounds of those guitars was as sharp as the sky.

  Lila sat with her girlfriends, housemaids all—’Ginia and CC and Darla Blue—and they drank sweet tea and watched the men and the children play and it wasn’t no trick at all to figure out which men were single because they acted more childish than the children, prancing and bowing up and getting loud. They reminded Lila of ponies before a race, pawing the dirt, rearing their heads.