The Given Day

  “She’s gone,” the old woman said, and Danny saw that she knew what he and Tessa had been up to and it colored how she would look at him as long as he lived here. “They go without a word. Owe me rent, too. You look for her, you will not find her, I think. Women of her village are known for their black hearts. Yes? Witches, some think. Tessa have black heart. Baby die, make it blacker. You,” she said as she pushed past him to her own apartment, “you probably make it blacker still.”

  She opened her door and looked back at him. “They waiting for you.”

  “Who?”

  “The men in your room,” she said and entered her apartment.

  He unsnapped the leather guard on his holster as he walked up the stairs, half of him still thinking of Tessa, of how it might not be too late to find her if the trail wasn’t too cold. He thought she owed him an explanation. He was convinced there was one.

  At the top of the stairs, he heard his father’s voice coming from his apartment and snapped the guard back on his holster. Instead of going toward the voice, though, he went to Tessa and Federico’s apartment. He found the door ajar. He pushed it open. The rug was gone, but otherwise the parlor looked the same. Yet as he walked around it, he saw that all the photographs had been removed. In the bedroom, the closets were empty and the bed was stripped. The top of the dresser where Tessa had kept her powders and perfumes was bare. The hat tree in the corner sprouted empty pegs. He walked back into the parlor and felt a cold drop of sweat roll behind his ear and then down the back of his neck: they’d left behind the Silvertone.

  The top was open and he went to it, smelling it suddenly. Someone had poured acid onto the turntable, and the velvet inlay had been eaten down to nothing. He opened the cabinet to find all of Federico’s beloved record discs smashed into shards. His first instinct was that they must have been murdered; the old man would have never left this behind or allowed anyone to vandalize it so obscenely.

  Then he noticed the note. It was glued to the right cabinet door. The handwriting was Federico’s, identical to that on the note he’d left inviting Danny to dinner that first night; Danny suddenly felt nauseated.

  Policeman,

  Is this wood still a tree?

  Federico

  “Aiden,” his father said from the doorway. “Good to see you, boy.”

  Danny looked over at him. “What the hell?”

  His father stepped into the apartment. “The other tenants say he seemed like such a sweet old man. Your opinion of him as well, I assume?”

  Danny shrugged. He felt numb.

  “Well, he isn’t sweet and he isn’t old. What’s the note he left you all about?”

  “Private joke,” Danny said.

  His father frowned. “Nothing about this is private, boy.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  His father smiled. “Elucidation awaits in your room.”

  Danny followed him down the hall to find two men waiting in his apartment. They wore bow ties and heavy rust-colored suits with dark pinstripes. Their hair was plastered to their skulls by petroleum jelly and parted down the middle. Their shoes were a flat brown and polished. Justice Department. They couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d worn their badges pinned to their foreheads.

  The taller of the two looked over at him. The shorter one sat on the edge of Danny’s coffee table.

  “Officer Coughlin?” the tall man said.

  “Who’re you?”

  “I asked first,” the tall man said.

  “I don’t care,” Danny said. “I live here.”

  Danny’s father folded his arms and leaned against the window, content to watch the show.

  The tall man looked over his shoulder at the other man and then back at Danny. “My name’s Finch. Rayme Finch. Rayme. No ‘ond.’ Just Rayme. You can call me Agent Finch.” He had the look of an athlete, loose-limbed and strong of bone.

  Danny lit a cigarette and leaned against the doorjamb. “You got a badge?”

  “I already showed it to your father.”

  Danny shrugged. “Didn’t show it to me.”

  As Finch reached into his back pocket, Danny caught the little man on the coffee table watching him with the kind of delicate contempt he’d normally associate with bishops or showgirls. He was a few years younger than Danny, maybe twenty-three at the most, and a good ten years younger than Agent Finch, but the pockets beneath his bulging eyes were pendulous and darkly pooled like those of a man twice his age. He crossed his legs and picked at something on his knee.

  Finch produced his badge and a federal ID card stamped with the seal of the United States government: Bureau of Investigation.

  Danny took a quick glance at it. “You’re BI?”

  “Try saying it without a smirk.”

  Danny jerked his thumb at the other guy. “And who’s this exactly?”

  Finch opened his mouth but the other man wiped his hand with a handkerchief before extending the hand to Danny. “John Hoover, Mr. Coughlin,” the man said, and Danny’s hand came away with sweat from the handshake. “I work with the antiradical department at Justice. You don’t cotton to radicals, do you, Mr. Coughlin?”

  “There’re no Germans in the building. Isn’t that what Justice handles?” He looked back at Finch. “And the BI is all about bankruptcy fraud. Yeah?”

  The doughy lump on the coffee table looked at Danny like he wanted to bite the tip of his nose. “Our purview has expanded a bit since the war started, Officer Coughlin.”

  Danny nodded. “Well, good luck.” He stepped over the threshold. “Mind getting the fuck out of my apartment?”

  “We also deal with draft dodgers,” Agent Finch said, “agitators, seditionists, people who would make war on the United States.”

  “It’s a living, I’d guess.”

  “A good one. Anarchists in particular,” Finch said. “Those bastards are tops on our lists. You know—bomb throwers, Officer Coughlin. Like the one you were fucking.”

  Danny squared his shoulders to Finch’s. “I’m fucking who?”

  Agent Finch took a turn leaning against the doorjamb. “You were fucking Tessa Abruzze. At least that’s how she called herself. Am I correct?”

  “I know Miss Abruzze. What of it?”

  Finch gave him a thin smile. “You don’t know shit.”

  “Her father’s a phonograph salesman,” Danny said. “They had some trouble back in Italy but—”

  “Her father,” Finch said, “is her husband.” He raised his eyebrows. “You heard me right. And he couldn’t give a damn about phonographs. Federico Abruzze is not even his real name. He’s an anarchist, and more particularly he’s a Galleanist. You know what that term means or should I provide help?”

  Danny said, “I know.”

  “His real name is Federico Ficara and while you’ve been fucking his wife? He’s been making bombs.”

  “Where?” Danny said.

  “Right here.” Rayme Finch jerked his thumb back down the hall.

  John Hoover crossed one hand over the other and rested them on his belt buckle. “I ask you again, Officer, are you the kind of man who cottons to radicals?”

  “I think my son answered the question,” Thomas Coughlin said.

  John Hoover shook his head. “Not that I heard, sir.”

  Danny looked down at him. His skin had the look of bread pulled too early from the oven and his pupils were so tiny and dark they seemed meant for the head of another animal entirely.

  “The reason I ask is because we are closing the barn door. After the horses have left it, I’ll grant you, but before the barn has burned to the ground. What the war showed us? Is that the enemy is not just in Germany. The enemy came over on ships and availed himself of our wanton immigration policies and he set up shop. He lectures to mine workers and factory workers and disguises himself as the friend of the worker and the downtrodden. But what he really is? What he really is is a prevaricator, an inveigler, a foreign disease, a m
an bent on the destruction of our democracy. He must be ground into dust.” Hoover wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief; the top of his collar had darkened with sweat. “So I’m going to ask you a third time—are you a coddler of the radical element? Are you in effect, sir, an enemy of my Uncle Samuel?”

  Danny said, “Is he serious?”

  Finch said, “Oh yes.”

  Danny said, “John, right?”

  The round man gave him a small nod.

  “You fight in the war?”

  Hoover shook his large head. “I did not have the honor.”

  “The honor,” Danny said. “Well, I didn’t have the honor either, but that’s because I was deemed essential personnel on the home front. What’s your excuse?”

  Hoover’s face reddened and he pocketed his handkerchief. “There are many ways to serve your country, Mr. Coughlin.”

  “Yes, there are,” Danny said. “I’ve got a hole in my neck from serving mine. So if you question my patriotism again, John? I’ll have my father duck and throw you out that fucking window.”

  Danny’s father fluttered a hand over his heart and stepped away from the window.

  Hoover, though, stared back at Danny with the coal-blue clarity of the unexamined conscience. The moral fortitude of a knee-high boy who played at battle with sticks. Who grew older, but not up.

  Finch cleared his throat. “The business at hand, gents, is bombs. Could we return to that?”

  “How would you have known about my association with Tessa?” Danny said. “Were you tailing me?”

  Finch shook his head. “Her. Her and her husband, Federico, were last seen ten months ago in Oregon. Beat the holy shit out of a railroad porter who tried to inspect Tessa’s bag. Had to jump off the train while it was going a good head of steam. Thing was, they had to leave the bag behind. Portland PD met the train, found blasting caps, dynamite, a couple of pistols. A real anarchist’s toolbox. The porter, poor suspicious bastard, died from his injuries.”

  “Still haven’t answered my question,” Danny said.

  “We tracked them here about a month ago. This is Galleani’s home base, after all. We’d heard rumors she was pregnant. The flu was running the show then, though, so that slowed us up. Last night a guy, let’s say, we count on in the anarchist underground coughed up Tessa’s address. She must have got word, though, because she got into the wind before we could get here. You? You were easy. We asked all the tenants in the building if Tessa had been acting suspicious lately. To a man or woman they all said, ‘Outside of fucking the cop on the fifth floor? Why no.’”

  “Tessa a bomber?” Danny shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”

  “No?” Finch said. “Back in her room an hour ago, John found metal shavings in the floor cracks and burn marks that could have only come from acid. You want a look? They’re making bombs, Officer Coughlin. No, correct that—they’ve made bombs. Probably used the manual Galleani wrote himself.”

  Danny went to the window and opened it. He sucked in the cold air and looked out at the harbor lights. Luigi Galleani was the father of anarchism in America, publicly devoted to the overthrow of the federal government. Name a major terrorist act in the last five years and he’d been fingered as the architect.

  “As for your girlfriend,” Finch said, “her real name is Tessa, but that’s probably the only true thing you know about her.” Finch came over to the window beside Danny and his father. He produced a folded handkerchief and opened it. “See this?”

  Danny looked into the handkerchief and saw white powder.

  “That’s fulminate of mercury. Looks just like table salt, doesn’t it? Put it on a rock and hit the rock with a hammer, though, and both the rock and the hammer will explode. Probably your arm, too. Your girlfriend was born Tessa Valparo in Naples. She grew up in a slum, lost her parents to cholera, and started working in a bordello at twelve. She killed a client when she was thirteen. With a razor and an impressive imagination. Fell in with Federico shortly after that and they came here.”

  “Where,” Hoover said, “they quickly made the acquaintance of Luigi Galleani just north of here in Lynn. They helped him plan attacks in New York and Chicago and play sob sister to all those poor helpless workers from Cape Cod to Seattle. They worked on that disgraceful propaganda rag Cronaca Sovversiva as well. You’re familiar with it?”

  Danny said, “You can’t work in the North End and not see it. People wrap their fish in it, for Christ’s sake.”

  “And yet it’s illegal,” Hoover said.

  “Well, it’s illegal to distribute through the mail,” Rayme Finch said. “I’m the reason it’s so actually. I raided their offices. I’ve arrested Galleani twice. I guarantee you, I’ll deport him before the year’s out.”

  “Why haven’t you deported him already?”

  “The law thus far favors subversives,” Hoover said. “Thus far.”

  Danny chuckled. “Eugene Debs is in jail for giving a fucking speech.”

  “One that advocated violence,” Hoover said, and his voice was loud and strained, “against this country.”

  Danny rolled his eyes at the chunky little peacock. “My point is, if you can jail a former presidential candidate for giving a speech, why can’t you deport the most dangerous anarchist in the country?”

  Finch sighed. “American kids and an American wife. That’s what got him his sympathy votes last time. He’s going, though. Trust me. He’s fucking going next time.”

  “They’re all going,” Hoover said. “Every last unwashed one of them.”

  Danny turned to his father. “Say something.”

  “Say what?” his father said mildly.

  “Say what you’re doing here.”

  “I told you,” his father said, “these gentlemen informed me that my own son was shacking up with a subversive. A bomb maker, Aiden.”

  “Danny.”

  His father pulled a pack of Black Jack from his pocket and offered it to the room. John Hoover took a piece, but Danny and Finch declined. His father and Hoover unwrapped their sticks of gum and popped them in their mouths.

  His father sighed. “If it hit the papers, Danny, that my son was taking the favors, shall we say, of a violent radical while her husband built bombs right under his nose—what would that say about my beloved department?”

  Danny turned to Finch. “So find ’em and deport ’em. That’s your plan, right?”

  “Bet your ass. But until I find them and until they go,” Finch said, “they’re planning on making some noise. Now we know they’ve got some things planned for May. I understand your father already briefed you on that. We don’t know where or who they’re going to hit. We have some ideas, but still, radicals aren’t predictable. They’ll go after the usual list of judges and politicians, but it’s the industrial targets we have trouble protecting. Which industry will they choose? Coal, iron, lead, sugar, steel, rubber, textiles? Will they hit a factory? Or a distillery? Or an oil derrick? We don’t know. But what we do know is that they’re going to hit something big right here in your town.”

  “When?”

  “Could be tomorrow. Could be three months from now.” Finch shrugged. “Or they might wait until May. Can’t tell.”

  “But we assure you,” Hoover said, “their insurrectionary act will be loud.”

  Finch reached into his jacket, unfolded a piece of paper, and handed it to Danny. “We found this in her closet. I think it’s a first draft.”

  Danny unfolded the page. The note was composed of letters cut from the newspaper and glued to the page:

  Go-Head!

  Deport us! We will dynamite you.

  Danny handed the note back.

  “It’s a press release,” Finch said. “I’d bank on it. They just haven’t sent it out yet. But when it does hit the streets, you can be sure a boom is going to follow.”

  Danny said, “And you’re telling me all this, why?”

  “To see if you have an interest in stopping them.”
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  “My son is a proud man,” Thomas Coughlin said. “He wouldn’t stand for word to get out on something like this and sully his reputation.”

  Danny ignored him. “Anyone in their right mind would want to stop them.”

  “But you’re not just anyone,” Hoover said. “Galleani tried to blow you up once.”

  Danny said, “What?”

  “Who do you think ordered the bombing of Salutation Street?” Finch said. “You think that was random? It was revenge for the arrest of three of theirs in an antiwar protest the month before. Who do you think was behind those ten cops got blown up in Chicago last year? Galleani, that’s who. And his minions. They’ve tried to kill Rockefeller. They’ve tried to kill judges. They’ve blown up parades. Hell, they exploded a bomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Galleani and his Galleanists. At the turn of the century people of this exact same philosophy killed President McKinley, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, the empress of Austria, and the king of Italy. All in a six-year span. They may blow themselves up occasionally, but they’re not comical. They’re murderers. And they were making bombs right here under your nose while you were fucking one of them. Oh, no, let me amend that—while she was fucking you. So how personal does it have to get, Officer Coughlin, before you wake up?”

  Danny thought of Tessa in his bed, of the guttural sounds they’d made, of her eyes widening as he’d pushed into her, of her nails tearing his skin, her mouth spreading into a smile, and outside, the clank of the fire escape as people moved up and down it.

  “You’ve seen them up close,” Finch said. “If you saw them again, you’d have a second or two’s advantage over anyone who was going off a faded photograph.”

  “I can’t find them here,” Danny said. “Not here. I’m an American.”

  “This is America,” Hoover said.

  Danny pointed at the floorboards and shook his head. “This is Italy.”

  “But what if we can get you close?”