The Given Day

  “Praise from Caesar, sir.”

  McKenna lit the stub of a cigar, and the reek of it went straight to Danny’s stomach. The waitress brought a cup of coffee to the table and refilled Danny’s. McKenna watched her ass as she walked away.

  He produced a flask and handed it to Danny. “Help yourself.”

  Danny poured a few drops into his coffee and handed it back.

  McKenna tossed a notepad on the table and placed a fat pencil as stubby as his cigar beside the notepad. “I just came from meeting a few of the other boys. Tell me you’re making better progress than they are.”

  The “other boys” on the squad had been picked, to some degree, for their intelligence, but mostly for their ability to pass as ethnics. There were no Jews or Italians in the BPD, but Harold Christian and Larry Benzie were swarthy enough to be taken for Greeks or Italians. Paul Wascon, small and dark-eyed, had grown up on New York’s Lower East Side. He spoke passable Yiddish and had infiltrated a cell of Jack Reed’s and Jim Larkin’s Socialist Left Wing that worked out of a basement in the West End.

  None of them had wanted the detail. It meant long hours for no extra pay, no overtime, and no reward, because the official department policy was that terrorist cells were a New York problem, a Chicago problem, a San Francisco problem. So even if the squad had success, they’d never get credit, and they sure wouldn’t get overtime.

  But McKenna had pulled them out of their units with his usual combination of bribery, threat, and extortion. Danny had come in through the back door because of Tessa; God knows what Christian and Benzie had been promised, and Wascon’s hand had been caught in the cookie jar back in August, so McKenna owned him for life.

  Danny handed McKenna his notes. “License plate numbers from the Fishermen’s Brotherhood meeting in Woods Hole. Sign-in sheet from the West Roxbury Roofers Union, another from the North Shore Socialist Club. Minutes of all the meetings I attended this week, including two of the Roxbury Letts.”

  McKenna took the notes and placed them in his satchel. “Good, good. What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I got nothing,” Danny said.

  McKenna dropped his pencil and sighed. “Jesus’ sakes.”

  “What?” Danny said, feeling a hair better with the whiskey in his coffee. “Foreign radicals—surprise—mistrust Americans. And they’re paranoid enough to at least consider that I could be a plant, no matter how solid the Sante cover is. And even if they are sold on the cover? Danny Sante ain’t looked on as management material yet. Least not by the Letts. They’re still feeling me out.”

  “You seen Louis Fraina?”

  Danny nodded. “Seen him give a speech. But I haven’t met him. He stays away from the rank and file, surrounds himself with higher-ups and goons.”

  “You seen your old girlfriend?”

  Danny grimaced. “If I’d seen her, she’d be in jail now.”

  McKenna took a sip from his flask. “You been looking?”

  “I’ve been all over this damn state. I even crossed into Connecticut a few times.”

  “Locally?”

  “The Justice guys are crawling all over the North End looking for Tessa and Federico. So the whole neighborhood is tense. Closed up. No one is going to talk to me. No one’s going to talk to any Americano.”

  McKenna sighed and rubbed his face with the heels of his hands. “Well, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

  “Nope.”

  “Just keep plugging.”

  Jesus, Danny thought. This—this—was detective work? Fishing without a net?

  “I’ll get you something.”

  “Besides a hangover?”

  Danny gave him a weak smile.

  McKenna rubbed his face again and yawned. “Fucking terrorists, I swear to Christ.” He yawned again. “Oh, you never came across Nathan Bishop, did you? The doctor.”

  “No.”

  McKenna winked. “That’s ’cause he just did thirty days in the Chelsea drunk tank. They kicked him loose two days ago. I asked one of the bulls there if he’s known to them and they said he likes the Capitol Tavern. Apparently, they send his mail there.”

  “The Capitol Tavern,” Danny said. “That cellar-dive in the West End?”

  “The same.” McKenna nodded. “Maybe you can earn a hangover there, serve your country at the same time.”

  Danny spent three nights at the Capitol Tavern before Nathan Bishop spoke to him. He’d seen Bishop right off, as he came through the door the very first night and took a seat at the bar. Bishop sat alone at a table lit only by a small candle in the wall above it. He read a small book the first night and from a stack of newspapers the next two. He drank whiskey, the bottle on the table beside the glass, but he nursed his drinks the first two nights, never putting a real dent in the bottle, and walking out as steadily as he’d walked in. Danny began to wonder if Finch and Hoover’s profile had been correct.

  The third night, though, he pushed his newspapers aside early and took longer pulls from the glass and chain-smoked. At first he stared at nothing but his own cigarette smoke, and his eyes seemed loose and faraway. Gradually his eyes found the rest of the bar and a smile grew on his face, as if someone had pasted it there too hastily.

  When Danny first heard him sing, he couldn’t connect the voice to the man. Bishop was small, wispy, a delicate man with delicate features and delicate bones. His voice, however, was a booming, barreling, train-roar of a thing.

  “Here he goes.” The bartender sighed yet didn’t seem dissatisfied.

  It was a Joe Hill song, “The Preacher and the Slave,” that Nathan Bishop chose for his first rendition of the night, his deep baritone giving the protest song a distinctly Celtic flavor that went with the tall hearth and dim lighting in the Capitol Tavern, the low baying of the tugboat horns in the harbor.

  “Long-haired preachers come out every night,” he sang. “Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right. But when asked how ’bout something to eat, they will answer in voices so sweet: ‘You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky way up high. Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.’ That’s a lie, that’s a lie…”

  He smiled sweetly, eyes at half-mast, as the few patrons in the bar clapped lightly. It was Danny who kept it going. He stood from his stool and raised his glass and sang out, “Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out, and they holler, they jump and they shout. ‘Give your money to Jesus,’ they say. ‘He will cure all diseases today.’”

  Danny put his arm around the guy beside him, a chimney sweep with a bad hip, and the chimney sweep raised his own glass. Nathan Bishop worked his way out from behind his table, making sure to scoop up both his whiskey bottle and his whiskey glass, and joined them at the bar as two merchant marines jumped in, loud as hell and way off key, but who cared as they all swung their elbows and their drinks from side to side:

  “If you fight hard for children and wife

  Try to get something good in this life,

  You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,

  When you die you will sure go to hell.”

  The last line came out in shouts and torn laughs, and then the bartender rang the bell behind the bar and promised a free round.

  “We’re singing for our supper, boys!” one of the merchant marines cried out.

  “You’re getting the free drink to stop singing!” the bartender shouted over the laughter. “Them’s the terms and none other.”

  They were all drunk enough to cheer to that and then they bellied up for their free drinks and shook hands all around—Daniel Sante meet Abe Rowley, Abe Rowley meet Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet, Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet meet Nathan Bishop, Nathan Bishop meet Daniel Sante.

  “Hell of a voice there, Nathan.”

  “Thank you. Good on yours as well, Daniel.”

  “Habit of yours, is it, to just start singing out in a bar?”

  “Across t
he pond, where I’m from, it’s quite common. It was getting fairly gloomy in here until I took up the cause, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I wouldn’t argue.”

  “Well, then, cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  They met their glasses, then threw back their shots.

  Seven drinks and four songs later they ate the stew that the bartender kept cooking in the fireplace all day. It was horrid; the meat was brown and unidentifiable and the potatoes were gray and chewy. If Danny had to guess, he’d bet the grit it left on his teeth came from sawdust. But it filled them. After, they sat and drank and Danny told his Daniel Sante lies about western Pennsylvania and Thomson Lead.

  “That’s just it, isn’t it?” Nathan said, rolling his cigarette from a pouch on his lap. “You ask for anything in this world and the answer is always ‘No.’ Then you’re forced to take from those who themselves took before you—and in much bigger slices, I might add—and they dare call you a thief. It’s fairly absurd.” He offered Danny the cigarette he’d just rolled.

  Danny held up a hand. “Thanks, no. I buy ’em in the packs.” He pulled his Murads from his shirt pocket and placed them on the table.

  Nathan lit his. “How’d you get that scar?”

  “This?” Danny pointed to his neck. “Methane explosion.”

  “In the mines?”

  Danny nodded.

  “My father was a miner,” Nathan said. “Not here.”

  “Across the pond?”

  “Just so.” He smiled. “Just outside of Manchester in the North. It’s where I grew up.”

  “Tough country I’ve always heard.”

  “Yes, it is. Sinfully dreary, as well. A palette of grays and the occasional brown. My father died there. In a mine. Can you imagine?”

  “Dying in a mine?” Danny said. “Yes.”

  “He was strong, my father. That’s the most unfortunate aspect of the whole sordid mess. You see?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “Well, take me for instance. I’m no physical specimen. Uncoordinated, terrible at sports, nearsighted, bowlegged, and asthmatic.”

  Danny laughed. “You leave anything out?”

  Nathan laughed and held up a hand. “Several things. But that’s it, you see? I’m physically weak. If a tunnel collapsed and I had several hundred pounds of dirt on me, maybe a half-ton wood beam in the mix, a terribly limited supply of oxygen, well, I’d just succumb. I’d die like a good Englishman, quietly and without complaint.”

  “Your father, though,” Danny said.

  “Crawled,” Nathan said. “They found his shoes where the walls had collapsed on him. It was three hundred feet from where they found his corpse. He crawled. With a broken back, through hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of dirt and rock while the mining company waited two days to begin excavation. They were worried that rescue attempts could put the walls of the main tunnel at risk. Had my father known that, I wonder if it would have stopped his crawling sooner or pushed him on another fifty feet.”

  They sat in silence for a time, the fire spitting and hissing its way along some logs that still held a bit of dampness. Nathan Bishop poured himself another drink and then tilted the bottle over Danny’s glass, poured just as generously.

  “It’s wrong,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “What men of means demand of men without them. And then they expect the poor to be grateful for the scraps. They have the cheek to act offended—morally offended—if the poor don’t play along. They should all be burned at the stake.”

  Danny could feel the liquor in him turning sludgy. “Who?”

  “The rich.” He gave Danny a lazy smile. “Burn them all.”

  Danny found himself at Fay Hall again for another meeting of the BSC. On tonight’s agenda, the department’s continued refusal to treat influenza-related sickness among the men as work related. Steve Coyle, a little drunker than one would have hoped, spoke of his ongoing fight to get some kind of disability payments from the department he’d served twelve years.

  After the flu discussion was exhausted, they moved on to a preliminary proposal for the department to assume part of the expense of replacing damaged or severely worn uniforms.

  “It’s the most innocuous salvo we can fire,” Mark Denton said. “If they reject it, then we can point to it later to show their refusal to grant us any concessions at all.”

  “Point for who?” Adrian Melkins asked.

  “The press,” Mark Denton said. “Sooner or later, this fight will be fought in the papers. I want them on our side.”

  After the meeting, as the men milled by the coffee urns or passed their flasks, Danny found himself thinking of his father and then of Nathan Bishop’s.

  “Nice beard,” Mark Denton said. “You grow cats in that thing?”

  “Undercover work,” Danny said. He pictured Bishop’s father crawling through a collapsed mine. Pictured his son still trying to drink it away. “What do you need?”

  “Huh?”

  “From me,” Danny said.

  Mark took a step back, appraised him. “I’ve been trying to figure out since the first time you showed up here whether you’re a plant or not.”

  “Who’d plant me?”

  Denton laughed. “That’s rich. Eddie McKenna’s godson, Tommy Coughlin’s son. Who’d plant you? Hilarious.”

  “If I was a plant, why’d you ask for my help?”

  “To see how fast you jumped at the offer. I’ll admit, you not jumping right away gave me pause. Now here you are, though, asking me how you can help out.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I guess it’s my turn to say I’ll think about it,” Denton said.

  Eddie McKenna sometimes conducted business meetings on his roof. He lived in a Queen Anne atop Telegraph Hill in South Boston. His view—of Thomas Park, Dorchester Heights, the downtown skyline, the Fort Point Channel, and Boston Harbor—was, much like his persona, expansive. The roof was tarred and flat as sheet metal; Eddie kept a small table and two chairs out there, along with a metal shed where he stored his tools and those his wife, Mary Pat, used in the tiny garden behind their house. He was fond of saying that he had the view and he had the roof and he had the love of a good woman so he couldn’t begrudge the good Lord for forsaking him a yard.

  It was, like most of the things Eddie McKenna said, as full of the truth as it was full of shit. Yes, Thomas Coughlin, had once told Danny, Eddie’s cellar was barely able to hold its fill of coal, and yes, his yard could support a tomato plant, a basil plant, and possibly a small rosebush but certainly none of the tools needed to tend them. This was of little import, however, because tools weren’t all Eddie McKenna kept in the shed.

  “What else?” Danny had asked.

  Thomas wagged a finger. “I’m not that drunk, boy.”

  Tonight, he stood with his godfather by the shed with a glass of Irish and one of the fine cigars Eddie received monthly from a friend on the Tampa PD. The air smelled damp and smoky the way it did in heavy fog, but the skies were clear. Danny had given Eddie his report on meeting Nathan Bishop, on Bishop’s comment about what should be done to the rich, and Eddie had barely acknowledged he’d heard.

  But when Danny handed over yet another list—this one half names/half license plates of a meeting of the Coalition of the Friends of the Southern Italian Peoples, Eddie perked right up. He took the list from Danny and scanned it quickly. He opened the door to his garden shed and removed the cracked leather satchel he carried everywhere and added the piece of paper to it. He put the satchel back in the shed and closed the door.

  “No padlock?” Danny said.

  Eddie cocked his head. “For tools now?”

  “And satchels.”

  Eddie smiled. “Who in their right mind would ever so much as approach this abode with less than honest intentions?”

  Danny gave that a smile, but a perfunctory one. He smoked his cigar and looked out at the city and breathed in t
he smell of the harbor. “What are we doing here, Eddie?”

  “It’s a nice night.”

  “No. I mean with this investigation.”

  “We’re hunting radicals. We’re protecting and serving this great land.”

  “By compiling lists?”

  “You seem a bit off your feed, Dan.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Not yourself. Have you been getting enough sleep?”

  “No one’s talking about May Day. Not how you expected them to anyway.”

  “Well, it’s not like they’re going to go a galavanting about, shouting their nefarious aims from the rooftops, are they? You’ve barely been on them a month.”

  “They’re talkers, the lot of them. But that’s all they are.”

  “The anarchists?”

  “No,” Danny said. “They’re fucking terrorists. But the rest? You’ve got me checking out plumbers unions, carpenters, every toothless socialist knitting group you can find. For what? Names? I don’t understand.”

  “Are we to wait until they do blow us up before we decide to take them seriously?”

  “Who? The plumbers?”

  “Be serious.”

  “The Bolshies?” Danny said. “The socialists? I’m not sure they have the capacity to blow up anything outside of their own chests.”

  “They’re terrorists.”

  “They’re dissidents.”

  “Maybe you need some time off.”

  “Maybe I just need a clearer sense of exactly what the hell we’re doing here.”

  Eddie put an arm around his shoulder and led him to the roof edge. They looked out at the city—its parks and gray streets, brick buildings, black rooftops, the lights of downtown reflecting off the dark waters that coursed through it.

  “We’re protecting this, Dan. This right here. That’s what we’re doing.” He took a pull of his cigar. “Home and hearth. And nothing less than that indeed.”

  With Nathan Bishop, another night at the Capitol Tavern, Nathan taciturn until the third drink kicked in and then:

  “Has anyone ever hit you?”

  “What?”

  He held up his fists. “You know.”