When Danny turned, Jeffries stood there, giggling softly. He walked past him and then back up the street past Hardy. When he reached March, March shrugged, and Danny kept walking. He turned the corner and saw three paddy wagons at the end of the block, saw fellow officers dragging anyone with a mustache or watch cap down the sidewalk and heaving them into the wagons.
He wandered for several blocks, came across the cops and their newly found working-class brothers going at a dozen men who’d wandered out of a meeting of the Lower Roxbury Socialist Fraternal Organization. The mob had the men pressed back against the doors. The men fought back, but then the doors opened behind them and some of them fell backward and others tried to hold back the mob with nothing more than flailing arms. The left door was wrenched off its hinges and the mob washed over the men and flowed into the building. Danny watched out of his good eye and knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing at all. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.
Luther went to Costello’s on Commercial Wharf and waited outside because it was whites-only. He stood a long time. One hour.
No McKenna.
In his right hand, he held a paper bag with fruit he’d slipped out of the Coughlin household to give to Nora, as long as McKenna didn’t decide to shoot him or arrest him tonight. The “list,” typed up from fifty thousand telephone users in Philadelphia, was tucked under his left arm.
Two hours.
No McKenna.
Luther left the wharf and walked up toward Scollay Square. Maybe McKenna had been hurt in the line of duty. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. Maybe he’d been shot dead by plug-uglies with an ax to grind.
Luther whistled and hoped.
Danny wandered the streets until he found himself heading along Eustis Street toward Washington. He decided he’d take a right when he reached Washington and cross the city until he reached the North End. He had no intention of stopping back at the Oh-One to sign out. He wasn’t changing out of his uniform. He walked through Roxbury in sweet night air that smelled more of summer than spring, and all around him the rule of law was being enforced, as anyone who looked like a Bolshevik or an anarchist, a Slav, an Italian, or a Jew was learning the price of the likeness. They lay against curbs, stoops, sat against lamp poles. On the cement and the tar—their blood, their teeth. A man ran into an intersection a block up and took a police cruiser to his knees. Airborne, he clawed at space. When he landed, the three cops who’d exited the cruiser held his arm to the ground while the cop who’d stayed behind the wheel drove over his hand.
Danny considered going back to his room on Salem Street and sitting alone with the barrel of his service revolver propped over his lower teeth, the metal on his tongue. In the war, they’d died by the millions. For nothing but real estate. And now, in the streets of the world, the same battle continued. Today, Boston. Tomorrow, someplace else. The poor fighting the poor. As they’d always done. As they were encouraged to. And it would never change. He finally realized that. It would never change.
He looked up at the black sky, at the salted splay of dots. That’s all they were. That, and nothing more. And if there was a God inveigled behind them, then He had lied. He’d promised the meek they would inherit the earth. They wouldn’t. They’d only inherit the small piece they fertilized.
That was the joke.
He saw Nathan Bishop staring at him through a kicked-in face and asking his name, the shame he’d felt, the horror at his very self. He leaned against a streetlamp pole. I can’t do this anymore, he told the sky. That man was my brother, if not of blood then of heart and philosophy. He saved my life and I couldn’t even get him proper medical care. I am shit. I can’t take another fucking step.
Across the street, yet another mass of police and workingmen taunted a small group of residents. At least this mob showed some mercy, allowing a pregnant woman to detach from the other victims and walk away without harm. She hurried along the sidewalk, her shoulders hunched, her hair covered by a dark shawl, and Danny’s thoughts returned to his room on Salem Street, to the gun in his holster, the bottle of scotch.
The woman passed him and turned the corner and he noticed that from behind you’d never guess she was pregnant. She had the walk of the young, the unencumbered, not yet weighted down by work or children or graying wishes. She—
Tessa.
Danny was crossing the street before the word had even passed through his head.
Tessa.
He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He got to the other side of the street and stayed a full block behind her, and the more he watched her walk with that confident languor, the more convinced he became. He passed a call box, then another, but never thought to unlock either of them and phone for help. There was no one in the station houses anyway; they were all out in the streets getting payback. He removed his helmet and coat and tucked them under his right arm, over his gun, and crossed to the other side of the street. As she reached Shawmut Avenue, she looked down the sidewalk, but he wasn’t there, so she learned nothing, but he confirmed everything. It was Tessa. Same dark skin, same etched mouth jutting like a shelf above her chin.
She turned right on Shawmut, and he lagged for a few moments, knowing it was wide there and if he reached the corner too early, she’d have to be blind not to see him. He counted down from five and started walking again. He reached the corner and saw her a block down, turning onto Hammond Street.
Three men in the rear seat of a touring car were looking back at her while the men in the front seat looked at him, slowing, noticing his blue pants, the blue coat under his arm. They were all heavily bearded. They all wore watch caps. The men in back of the open car brandished sticks. The front-seat passenger narrowed his eyes and Danny recognized him: Pyotr Glaviach, the oversize Estonian who could out-drink any saloon’s worth of men and probably outfight them all, too. Pyotr Glaviach, the veteran of the most vicious Lettish warfare in the motherland. The man who’d considered Danny his fellow pamphleteer, his comrade, his brother-in-arms against capitalist oppression.
Danny had found there were times when violence or the threat of it slowed the world down, when everything came at you as if through water. But there were just as many times when violence moved faster than a clock could tick, and this was one of those. As soon as he and Glaviach recognized each other, the car stopped and the men piled out. Danny’s coat got caught on the butt of his pistol as he tried to clear it. Glaviach’s arms closed over his, pinning them to his side. He lifted Danny off his feet and carried him across the sidewalk and rammed his back into a stone wall.
A stick hit his blackened eye.
“Say something.” Glaviach spit in his face and squeezed his body harder.
Danny didn’t have the air to speak so he spit back in the big man’s hairy face, saw that his phlegm already had some blood in it as it landed in the man’s eyes.
Glaviach rammed his skull into Danny’s nose. His head exploded with yellow light and shadows descended on the men around him, as if the sky were dropping. Someone hit his head with a stick again.
“Our comrade, Nathan, you know what happened to him today?” Glaviach shook Danny’s body as if he weighed no more than a child. “He lose his ear. Maybe sight in one eye. He lose that. What you lose?”
Hands grabbed at his gun and there wasn’t much he could do about it because his arms were numb. Fists battered his torso, back, and neck, yet he felt perfectly calm. He felt Death on the street with him and Death’s voice was soft. Death said: It’s okay. It’s time. His front pocket was ripped from his pant leg and loose change fell to the sidewalk. The button, too. Danny watched with an unreasonable sense of loss as it rolled off the curb and fell through a sewer grate.
Nora, he thought. Goddammit. Nora.
When they were done, Pyotr Glaviach found Danny’s service revolver in the gutter. He picked it up and dropped it on top of the unconscious cop’s chest. Pyotr recalled all the men—fourteen—he’d killed, f
ace-to-face, over the years. This number did not include an entire unit of czarist guards they’d trapped in the center of a burning wheat field. He could still smell that odor seven years later, could hear them crying like babies as the flames found their hair, their eyes. You could never lose the smell from your nostrils, the sounds from your ears. You couldn’t undo any of it. Or wash it off. He was tired of the killing. It was why he’d come to America. Because he was so tired. It always led to more.
He spit on the traitor cop a couple more times and then he and his comrades returned to the touring car and drove away.
Luther had gotten good at sneaking in and out of Nora’s rooming house. He’d learned that you made the most noise trying to be quiet, so he did his due diligence when it came to listening from behind her door to the hallway on the other side, but once he was sure there was no one out there, he turned her doorknob quick and smooth and stepped into the hall. He swung the door closed behind him, and even before it clicked against the jamb, he’d already opened the door into the alley. By then, he was in the clear—a black man exiting a building in Scollay Square wasn’t the problem; a black man exiting a white woman’s room in any building whatsoever, that’s what got you killed.
That May Day night, he left the bag of fruit in her room after sitting with her about half an hour, watching her eyelids droop repeatedly until they stayed down. It worried him; now that they’d cut her hours, she was tired more, not less, and he knew that had to be about diet. She wasn’t getting enough of something and he wasn’t no doctor so he didn’t know what that something was. But she was tired all the time. Tired and grayer, her teeth starting to loosen. That’s what made Luther take fruit from the Coughlins this time. Seemed he remembered fruit was good for teeth and complexions. How or why he knew that, he couldn’t say, but it felt right.
He left her sleeping and went up the alley, and when he came to the end of it, he saw Danny lumbering across Green Street toward him. But not Danny, really. A version of him. A Danny who’d been fired from a cannon into a block of ice. A Danny with blood all over himself as he walked. Or tried to. Reeled was more like it.
Luther met him in the middle of the street as Danny fell to one knee.
“Hey, hey,” Luther said softly. “It’s me. Luther.”
Danny looked up at him, his face like something someone had tested hammers on. One eye was black. That was the good one. The other was so swollen shut it looked to have been sutured. His lips were twice their normal size, Luther wanting to make a joke about it but feeling it was definitely the wrong time.
“So.” Danny raised a hand, as if to signal the start of a game. “Still mad at me?”
Well, that was something no one had managed to take away apparently—the man’s ease with himself. Busted all to hell and kneeling in the middle of a shit hole street in shit hole Scollay Square, the man was chatting all casual-like, as if this sort of thing happened to him once a week.
“Not at this exact moment,” Luther said. “In general, though? Yeah.”
“Take a number,” Danny said and vomited blood onto the street.
Luther didn’t like the sight or the sound of it. He got a grip of Danny’s hand and started to tug him to his feet.
“Oh, no, no,” Danny said. “Don’t do that. Let me kneel here a bit. Actually, let me crawl. I’m going to crawl to that curb, Luther. Gonna crawl to it.”
Danny, true to his word, crawled from the center of the street to the sidewalk. When he reached it, he crawled a few more feet over the curb and then lay down. Luther sat beside him. Danny eventually worked himself up to a sitting position. He held on to his knees as if they were the only things keeping him from falling off the earth.
“Fuck,” he said eventually. “I’m busted up pretty good.” He smiled through cracked lips as a high whistle preceded his every breath. “Wouldn’t have a handkerchief, would you?”
Luther dug in his other pocket and came back with one. He handed it to him.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Luther said and something about the phrase struck them both funny at the same time and they laughed together in the soft night.
Danny dabbed at the blood on his face until the handkerchief was destroyed by it. “I came to see Nora. I got things to say to her.”
Luther put an arm around Danny’s shoulder, something he’d never ventured to do with a white man before but which seemed perfectly natural under the circumstances. “She needs her sleep, and you need a hospital.”
“I need to see her.”
“Puke some more blood and tell me again.”
“No, I do.”
Luther leaned in. “You know what your breath sound like?”
Danny shook his head.
“A fucking canary’s,” Luther said. “Canary with buckshot in its chest. You’re dying here.”
Danny shook his head again. Then he bent over and heaved his chest. Nothing came out. He heaved again. Again, nothing came out but a sound, the sound Luther had described, the high-pitched hiss of a desperate bird.
“How far’s Mass General from here?” Danny bent over and vomited some more blood into the gutter. “I’m a little too fucked-up to remember.”
“’Bout six blocks,” Luther said.
“Right. Long blocks.” Danny winced and laughed at the same time and spit some blood onto the sidewalk. “I think my ribs are broken.”
“Which ones?”
“All of ’em,” Danny said. “I’m hurt kinda bad here, Luther.”
“I know.” Luther turned and crawled over behind Danny. “I can push you up.”
“’Preciate that.”
“On three?”
“Fine.”
“One, two, three.” Luther put his shoulder into the big man’s back, pushed hard, and Danny let out a series of loud groans and one sharp yelp, but then he was on his feet. Wavering, but on his feet.
Luther slid under him and draped Danny’s left arm over his shoulder.
“Mass General’s going to be filled,” Danny said. “Fuck. Every hospital. My boys in blue going to be filling emergency rooms all over this city.”
“Filling it with who?”
“Russians, mostly. Jews.”
Luther said, “There’s a colored clinic over on Barton and Chambers. You got any objections to a colored doctor working on you?”
“Take a one-eyed Chinese gal, long as she can make the pain go away.”
“Bet you would,” Luther said and they started walking. “You can sit up in the bed, tell everyone not to call you ‘suh.’ How you just regular-folk like that.”
“You’re some prick.” Danny chuckled, an act that brought fresh blood to his lips. “So what were you doing here?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Danny swayed so much he almost tipped the two of them to the sidewalk. “Well, I am.” He held up a hand and they both stopped. Danny took a big breath. “She all right?”
“No. She’s not all right. Whatever she did to any of you? She paid her debt.”
“Oh.” Danny tilted his head at him. “You like her?”
Luther caught the look. “Like that?”
“Like that.”
“Hell, no. Most certainly, I do not.”
A bloody smile. “You sure?”
“Want me to drop you? Yeah, I’m sure. You got your tastes, I got mine.”
“And Nora ain’t your taste?”
“White women ain’t. The freckles? The little asses? Them tiny bones and weird hair?” Luther grimaced and shook his head. “Not for me. No, sir.”
Danny looked at Luther through one black eye and one swollen one. “So…?”
“So,” Luther said, exasperated suddenly, “she’s my friend. I look after her.”
“Why?”
He gave Danny a long, careful look. “Ain’t nobody else want the job.”
Danny’s smile spread through cracked, blackened lips. “Okay, then.”
Luther said, “
Who got to you? Size you are, had to be a few of ’em.”
“Bolshies. Over in Roxbury, maybe twenty blocks. Long walk. I probably had it coming.” Danny took a few shallow breaths. He leaned his head to the side and vomited. Luther shifted his feet so it wouldn’t hit his shoes or trouser cuffs, and it was a bit awkward, him leaning off to the side, half sprawled over the man’s back. The good news was that it wasn’t half as red as Luther had feared. When Danny finished, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “All right.”
They stumbled another block together before Danny had to rest again. Luther propped him up against a streetlamp and Danny leaned back against it with his eyes closed, his face wet with sweat.
He eventually opened his good eye and stared up at the sky, as if searching for something there. “I’ll tell you, Luther, it’s been one hell of a year.”
Luther thought back to his own year and that got him laughing, laughing hard. He bent over from it. A year ago—shit. That was a whole lifetime away.
“What?” Danny said.
Luther held up a hand. “You and me both.”
“What are you supposed to do,” Danny said, “when everything you built your life on turns out to be a fucking lie?”
“Build a new life, I guess.”
Danny raised an eyebrow at that.
“Oh, because you’re bleeding all over yourself, you want sympathy?” Luther stepped back up to Danny, the big man lying back against the streetlamp pole like it was all he had left of friends in this world. “I ain’t got that for you. Whatever’s wearing you down, shit, throw it off. God don’t care. Ain’t nobody care. Whatever you need to do to make yourself right, get yourself out of pain? I say you do that thing.”
Danny’s smile was cracked, his lips half black. “Easy, huh?”
“Ain’t nothing easy.” Luther shook his head. “Simple, though, yeah.”
“I wish it was that—”
“You walked twenty blocks, puking up your own blood, to get to one place and one person. If you need any more truth in your life, white boy, than that?” Luther’s laugh was hard and quick. “It ain’t showing up on this here earth.”