Luther didn’t trust himself to speak.
McKenna slapped him in the face, still smiling. “They’re not the gentlest of souls, I can tell you that. They merely show the mother the baby’s face and then they take that child—if it’s a Negro child, that is—and they whisk it straightaway to the county orphanage. That wouldn’t be the case, of course, if the father was around, but you’re not around, are you? You’re here.”
Luther said, “Tell me what you want me—”
“I fucking told you, Luther. I fucking told you and told you.” He squeezed the flesh along Luther’s jaw and pulled his face close. “You get that list and you bring it to Costello’s tonight at six. No fucking excuses. Understood?”
Luther closed his eyes and nodded. McKenna let go of his face and stepped back.
“Right now you hate me. I can see that. But today we’re going to settle accounts in this little burg of ours. Today, the Reds—all Reds, even colored Reds—are getting their eviction notices from this fair city.” He held out his arms and shrugged. “And by tomorrow, you’ll thank me, because we’ll have us a nice place to live again.”
He tapped the paper off his thigh again and gave Luther a solemn nod before walking toward his Hudson.
“You’re making a mistake,” Luther said.
McKenna looked back over his shoulder. “What’s that?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
McKenna walked back and punched Luther in the stomach. All the air left his body like it was never coming back. He dropped to his knees and opened his mouth but his throat had collapsed along with his lungs, and for a terrifying length of time he couldn’t get a breath in or out. He was sure he’d die like that, on his knees, his face gone blue like someone with the grippe.
When the air did come, it hurt, going down his windpipe like a spade. His first breath came out sounding like the screech of a train wheel, followed by another and then another, until they began to sound normal, if a little high-pitched.
McKenna stood over him, patient. “What was that?” he said softly.
“NAACP folks ain’t Red,” Luther said. “And if some are, they ain’t the kind going to blow shit up or fire off guns.”
McKenna slapped the side of his head. “I’m not sure I heard you.”
Luther could see twins of himself reflected in McKenna’s irises. “What you think? You think a bunch of coloreds are going to run in these here streets with weapons? Give you and all the other redneck assholes in this country an excuse to kill us all? You think we want to get massacred?” He stared up at the man, saw that his fist was clenched. “You got a bunch of foreign-born sons of bitches trying to stir up a revolution today, McKenna, so I say you go get them. Put ’em down like dogs. I got no love for those people. And neither do any other colored folk. This is our country, too.”
McKenna took a step back and considered him with a wry smile.
“What’d you say?”
Luther spit on the ground and took a breath. “Said this is our country, too.”
“’Tis not, son.” McKenna shook his large head. “Nor will it ever be.”
He left Luther there and climbed into his car and it pulled away from the curb. Luther rose from his knees and sucked a few breaths into his lungs until the nausea had almost passed. “Yes, it is,” he whispered, over and over, until he saw McKenna’s taillights take a right turn on Massachusetts Avenue.
“Yes, it is,” he said one more time and spit into the gutter.
That morning, the reports started coming out of Division 9 in Roxbury that a crowd was gathering in front of the Dudley Opera House. Each of the other station houses was asked to send men, and the Mounted Unit met at the BPD stables and warmed up their horses.
Men from all the city’s precincts were dropped at Division 9 under the command of Lieutenant McKenna. They assembled on the first floor in the wide lobby in front of the desk sergeant’s counter, and McKenna addressed them from the landing of the stairwell that curved up toward the second floor.
“We happy, happy few,” he said, taking them all in with a soft smile. “Gentlemen, the Letts are gathering in an illegal assembly in front of the Opera House. What do you think about that?”
No one knew if the question was rhetorical or not, so no one answered.
“Patrolman Watson?”
“Loo?”
“What do you think of this illegal assembly?”
Watson, whose family had changed their Polish name from something long and unpronounceable, straightened his shoulders. “I’d say they picked the wrong day for it, Loo.”
McKenna raised a hand above them all. “We are sworn to protect and serve Americans in general and Bostonians in particular. The Letts, well”—he chuckled—“the Letts are neither, gents. Heathens and subversives that they are, they have chosen to ignore the city’s strict orders not to march and plan to parade from the Opera House down Dudley Street to Upham’s Corner in Dorchester. From there they plan to turn right on Columbia Road and continue until they reach Franklin Park, where they will hold a rally in support of their comrades—yes, comrades—in Hungary, Bavaria, Greece, and, of course, Russia. Are there any Russians among us here today?”
Someone shouted, “Hell no!” and the other men repeated it in a cheer.
“Any Bolsheviki?”
“Hell no!”
“Any gutless, atheistic, subversive, hook-nosed, cock-smoking, anti-American dog fuckers?”
The men were laughing when they shouted, “Hell no!”
McKenna leaned on the railing and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Three days ago, the mayor of Seattle received a bomb in the mail. Luckily for him, his housekeeper got to it before he did. Poor woman’s in the hospital with no hands. Last night, as I’m sure you all know, the U.S. postal service intercepted thirty-four bombs meant to kill the attorney general of this great nation as well as several learned judges and captains of industry. Today, radicals of every stripe—but mostly heathen Bolsheviki—have promised a national day of revolt to take place in key cities across this fine land. Gentlemen, I ask you—is this the kind of country we wish to live in?”
“Hell no!”
The men were moving around Danny, shifting from foot to foot.
“Would you like to walk out the back door right now and hand it over to a horde of subversives and ask them to please remember to shut the lights out at bedtime?”
“Hell no!” Shoulders jostled off one another and Danny could smell sweat and hangover breath and a strange burnt-hair odor, an acrid scent of fury and fear.
“Or,” McKenna shouted, “would you, instead, like to take this country back?”
The men were so used to saying “Hell no!” that several did so again.
McKenna cocked an eyebrow at them. “I said—Would you like to take this fucking country back?”
“Hell, yes!”
Dozens of the men attended BSC meetings alongside Danny, men who just the other night had been bemoaning the shoddy treatment they received at the hands of their department, men who’d expressed kinship for all the workers of the world in their struggle against Big Money. But all that, for the moment, was swept away by the tonic of unity and a shared purpose.
“We are going down to the Dudley Opera House,” McKenna shouted, “right now and we are going to order these subversives, these Communists and anarchists and bomb throwers, to stand the fuck down!”
The cheer that rose up was unintelligible, a collective roar of the blood.
“We are going to say, in the strictest terms, ‘Not on my watch!’” McKenna leaned over the rail, his neck extended, his jaw thrust forward. “Can you say it with me, gents?”
“Not on my watch!” the men shouted.
“Let me hear it again.”
“Not on my watch!”
“Are you with me?”
“Yes!”
“Are you frightened?”
“Hell no!”
“Are you Boston police?”
>
“Hell yes!”
“The finest, most respected police force in these forty-eight states?”
“Hell yes!”
McKenna stared at them, his head sweeping slowly from one side of the crowd to the other, and Danny saw no humor in his face, no ironic glint. Just certitude. McKenna let the silence build, the men shuffling from side to side, hands wiping sweat on the sides of pants and the handles of nightsticks.
“Then,” McKenna hissed, “let’s go earn our pay.”
The men turned in several directions at once. They shoved one another gleefully. They barked in one another’s faces, and then someone figured out where the exit was and they turned into the rear corridor and moved in a sea through the door. They poured out the back of the station house and up the alley, some already rapping their billy clubs off the walls and the tops of metal trash cans.
Mark Denton found Danny in the crowd and said, “Just wondering…”
“What’s that?”
“We keeping the peace,” Mark said, “or ending it?”
Danny looked at him. “Fair question.”
When they rounded the corner into Dudley Square, Louis Fraina stood on the top steps of the Opera House, speaking through a bullhorn to a crowd of a couple hundred.
“…they tell us we have the right to—”
He lowered the bullhorn as he saw them enter the street and then raised it again.
“And here they come now, the private army of the ruling class.” Fraina pointed, and the crowd turned to see the blue uniforms coming up the street toward them.
“Comrades, feast your eyes on what a corrupt society does to preserve its illusion of itself. They call it the Land of the Free, but speech is not free, is it? The right to assemble is not free. Not today, not for us. We followed procedure. We filed our applications for the right to parade but those permits were denied to us. And why?” Fraina looked around at the crowd. “Because they fear us.”
The Letts turned fully toward them. On the steps, up by Fraina, Danny saw Nathan Bishop. He seemed smaller than Danny remembered. Bishop’s eyes locked on his, followed by a curious cock of his head. Danny held the look, trying to will a pride he did not feel into his own eyes. Nathan Bishop’s eyes narrowed with recognition. Recognition, followed by bitterness and then, most surprising, a crestfallen despair.
Danny dropped his eyes.
“Look at them in their domed helmets. With their nightsticks and their guns. These are not forces of law. These are forces of oppression. And they are afraid—terrified, comrades—because we hold the moral high ground. We are right. We are the workingmen of this city and we will not be sent to our rooms.”
McKenna raised his own bullhorn as they got within thirty yards of the crowd.
“You are in violation of city ordinances prohibiting assembly without permit.”
Fraina raised his bullhorn. “Your ordinances are a lie. Your city is a lie.”
“I order you to disperse.” McKenna’s voice crackled in the morning air. “If you refuse, you will be removed by force.”
They were fifteen yards away now and spreading out. Their faces were gaunt and determined and Danny searched for fear in their eyes and found very little.
“Force is all they have!” Fraina shouted. “Force is the weapon of choice for all tyrants since the dawn of time. Force is the unreasonable response to a reasonable action. We have broken no law!”
The Letts strolled toward them.
“You are in violation of city ordinance eleven-dash-four—”
“You are in violation of us, sir. You are in violation of our constitutional rights.”
“If you do not disperse, you will be arrested. Come down off those steps.”
“I will no more remove myself from these steps than—”
“I am ordering—”
“I do not recognize your authority.”
“You are breaking the law, sir!”
The two crowds met.
For a moment no one seemed to know what to do. The cops mingled with the Letts, the Letts mingled with the cops, all of them interspersed, and few among them aware of how it had happened. A pigeon cooed from a windowsill and the air still carried a hint of dew. The rooftops along Dudley Square smoked with remnants of the early-morning fog. This close Danny had a hard time telling who was cop and who was Lett, and then a group of bearded Letts walked around from the side of the Opera House wielding ax handles. Big guys, Russians by the look of them, eyes clear of anything that could be confused with doubt.
The first of them reached the throng and swung his ax handle.
Fraina shouted, “No!” but that was lost in the sound of the wood connecting with the domed helmet of James Hinman, a patrolman at the One-Four. The helmet sprang up out of the crowd and hung in the sky. Then it clanged to the street, and Hinman disappeared.
The closest Lett to Danny was a thin Italian with a handlebar mustache and a tweed cap. In the moment it took for the guy to realize how close he stood to a cop, Danny snapped his elbow into his mouth and the guy gave him a look like he’d broken his heart instead of his teeth and hit the pavement. The next Lett charged Danny by stepping on his fallen comrade’s chest. Danny cleared his nightstick but Kevin McRae rose out of the crowd behind the big Lett and grabbed him by the hair, giving Danny a wild smile as he twirled the guy through the crowd and ran him into a brick wall.
Danny traded punches for several minutes with a small, balding Russian. Small as he was, the fucker could jab, and he wore a matching pair of knuckle-clusters over his fists. Danny concentrated so hard on slipping the jabs to his face that it left him open to body shots. The two of them went back and forth along the left flank of the crowd, Danny trying for the knockout punch. The guy was slippery, but then he caught his foot in the cracks between the cobblestones, and his knee buckled. He stumbled and fell on his back and tried to scramble to his feet but Danny stomped on his stomach and kicked him in the face and the guy curled up and vomited out the side of his mouth.
Whistles blew as the mounted police tried to wade into the crowd, but the horses kept backing up. It was all incestuous now, Letts and cops intertwined and the Letts swinging sticks, swinging pipes and blackjacks and, Jesus, fucking ice picks. They threw rocks and threw punches, and the cops started to get savage, too, gouging at eyes, biting ears and noses, banging heads off the pavement. Someone fired a pistol and one of the horses rose up on its hind legs and threw its rider. The horse tipped to its right and toppled, hooves kicking at anything in its way.
Two Letts got Danny by the arms and one of them butted the side of his face. They ran him across the cobblestones into a metal store grate and his nightstick fell from his hands. One of them punched him in the right eye. Danny stomped blindly and hit an ankle, drove his knee up and hit a groin. The breath blew out of the guy and Danny swung him into the grate and pulled one arm free as the other man sank his teeth into his shoulder. Danny spun with the biter draped over him and ran backward into a brick wall, felt the guy’s teeth leave his skin. He took a few steps forward and then ran himself backward again, twice as hard. When the guy fell from his body, Danny turned and scooped up his nightstick and swung it into the guy’s face, heard the cheekbone crack.
He added a final kick to the ribs and turned back to the center of the street. A Lett charged back and forth along the rear of the crowd on one of the police horses, swinging a length of pipe at any domed heads he saw. Several of the other horses roamed riderless. On the far side of the street, two patrolman lifted Francie Stoddard, a sergeant at the One-Oh, onto a loading dock, Stoddard’s mouth wide and gulping, his shirt open at the collar, one palm pressed to the center of his chest.
Shots hit the air and Paul Welch, a sergeant with the Oh-Six, spun and grabbed his hip and then disappeared in the crush of men. Danny heard a scuffle of footsteps and turned in time to duck a Lett charging him with an ice pick. He speared the guy’s solar plexus with his night-stick. The guy gave him a look of self-pity
and shame. Spit popped out of his mouth. When he hit the pavement, Danny grabbed his ice pick and hurled it onto the nearest roof.
Someone had gotten a grip on the leg of the Lett on horseback and he vaulted off the animal and into the crowd. The horse galloped up Dudley Street toward the el tracks. Blood poured down Danny’s back and the vision in his right eye blurred as it began to swell. His head felt as if someone had hammered nails through it. The Letts were going to lose the war, Danny had no doubt, but they were winning this battle by a large fucking margin. Cops were down all over the street while burly Letts in their coarse Cossack clothing screamed in triumph as their own heads rose above the throng.
Danny waded into the crowd, swinging his nightstick, trying to tell himself he didn’t love it, he didn’t feel his heart swell because he was bigger and stronger and faster than most and could down a man with one blow from either fist or nightstick. He took out four Letts with six swings and felt the mob turn toward him. He saw a pistol aimed at him, saw the hole in the barrel and the eyes of the young Lett wielding it, a boy really, nineteen, tops. The pistol shook, but he took little comfort from that because the kid was only fifteen feet away, and the crowd opened up a corridor between them to give him a clean shot. Danny didn’t reach for his own revolver; he’d never clear it in time.
The kid’s finger whitened against the trigger. The cylinder turned. Danny considered closing his eyes but then the kid’s arm shot straight up above his head. The pistol discharged into the sky.
Nathan Bishop stood beside the kid, rubbing his wrist where it had made contact with the kid’s elbow. He looked reasonably untarnished by the fighting, his suit a little rumpled but mostly unstained, which was saying something for a cream-colored suit in a sea of black and blue fabric and swinging fists. One of his eyeglass lenses was cracked. He stared at Danny through the good lens, both of them breathing hard. Danny felt relief, of course. And gratitude. But shame larger than all that. Shame more than anything.
A horse burst between them, its great black body trembling, its smooth flank shuddering in the air. Another horse burst through the throng followed by two more, all in full charge with riders astride them. Behind them was an army of blue uniforms, still crisp and un-soiled, and the wall of people around Danny and Nathan Bishop and the boy with the pistol collapsed. Several of the Letts had fought in guerrilla campaigns back in the motherland and knew the benefits of cut-and-run. In the mad-dash dispersal, Danny lost sight of Nathan Bishop. Within a minute, most of the Letts were running past the Opera House, and Dudley Square was suddenly littered with blue uniforms, Danny and the other men looking at one another as if to say: Did any of that just happen?