The Given Day (20 page)

"You work too much, I think."

"Tell my boss, would you?"

Federico smiled, and it was a hell of a smile, the kind that could warm a winter room. It occurred to Danny that one of the reasons it was so impressive was that you could feel so much heartbreak behind it. Maybe that's what he'd been trying to put his finger on that night on the roof--the way Federico's smile didn't mask the great pain that lay undoubtedly in his past; it embraced it. And in that embracing, triumphed. A soft version of the smile remained in place as he leaned in and thanked Danny in a low whisper for "that unfortunate business," of removing Tessa's dead newborn from the apartment. He assured Danny that were it not for his own work, they would have had him to dinner as soon as Tessa had recovered from the grippe.

Danny looked over at Tessa, caught her looking at him. She lowered her head, and a strand of hair fell from behind her ear and hung over her eye. She was not an American girl, he reminded himself, one for whom sex with a virtual stranger could be tricky but not out of the question. She was Italian. Old World. Mind your manners.

He looked back at her father. "What is it that you do, sir?" "Federico," the old man said and patted his hand. "We drink anisette, we break bread, it must be Federico."

Danny acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. "Federico, what is it you do?"

"I give the breath of angels to mere men." The old man swept his hand behind him like an impresario. Back against the wall between two windows sat a phonograph cabinet. It had seemed out of place to Danny as soon as he'd entered. It was made of fi ne- grain mahogany, designed with ornate carvings that made Danny think of European royalty. The open top exposed a turntable perched on purple velvet inlay, and below, a two- door cabinet looked to be hand carved and had nine shelves, enough to hold several dozen disc rec ords.

The metal hand crank was gold plated, and while the disc record played, you could barely hear the motor. It produced a richness of sound unlike anything Danny had ever heard in his life. They were listening to the intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, and Danny knew if he'd entered the apartment blind he would have assumed the soprano stood in the parlor with them. He took another look at the cabinet and felt pretty sure it cost three or four times what the stove had.

"The Silvertone B -Twelve," Federico said, his voice, always melodious, suddenly more so. "I sell them. I sell the B-Eleven as well, but I prefer the look of the Twelve. Louis the Sixteenth is far superior in design to Louis the Fifteenth. You agree?"

"Of course," Danny said, though if he'd been told it was Louis the Third or Ivan the Eighth, he'd have had to take it on faith.

"No other phonograph on the market can equal it," Federico said with the gleaming eyes of the evangelical. "No other phonograph can play every type of disc record--Edison, Pathe, Victor, Columbia, and Silvertone? No, my friend, this is the only one so capable. You pay your eight dollars for the table model because it is less expensive"--he crinkled his nose downward--"and light--bah!--convenient--bah!-- space saving. But will it sound like this? Will you hear angels? Hardly. And then your cheap needle will wear out and the discs will skip and soon you will hear crackles and whispers. And where will you be then, except eight dollars the poorer?" He spread his arm toward the phonograph cabinet again, as proud as a fi rst-time father. "Sometimes quality costs. It is only reasonable."

Danny suppressed a chuckle at the little old man and his fervent capitalism.

"Papa," Tessa said from the stove, "do not get yourself so . . ." She waved her hands, searching for the word. ". . . eccitato."

"Excited," Danny said.

She frowned at him. "Eggs-y-sigh . . . ?"

"Ex," he said. "Ex-ci-ted."

"Eck-cited."

"Close enough."

She raised her wooden spoon. "En glish!" she barked at the ceiling.

Danny thought of what her neck, so honey-brown, would taste like. Women--his weakness since he'd been old enough to notice them and see that they, in turn, noticed him. Looking at Tessa's neck, her throat, he felt beset by it. The awful, delicious need to possess. To own--for a night--another's eyes, sweat, heartbeat. And here, right in front of her father. Jesus!

He turned back to the old man, whose eyes were half closed to the music. Oblivious. Sweet and oblivious to the New World ways.

"I love music," Federico said and opened his eyes. "When I was a boy, minstrels and troubadours would visit our village from the spring through the summer. I would sit until my mother shooed me from the square--sometimes with a switch, yes?--and watch them play. The sounds. Ah, the sounds! Language is such a poor substitute. You see?"

Danny shook his head. "I'm not sure."

Federico pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in. "Men's tongues fork at birth. It has always been so. The bird cannot lie. The lion is a hunter, to be feared, yes, but he is true to his nature. The tree and rock are true--they are a tree and rock. Nothing more, but nothing less. But man, the only creature who can make words--uses this great gift to betray truth, to betray himself, to betray nature and God. He will point to a tree and tell you it is not a tree, stand over your dead body and say he did not kill you. Words, you see, speak for the brain, and the brain is a machine. Music"--he smiled his glorious smile and raised his index fi nger--"music speaks for the soul because words are too small."

"Never thought of it that way."

Federico pointed at his prized possession. "That is made of wood. It is a tree, but it is not a tree. And the wood is wood, yes, but what it does to the music that comes from it? What is that? Do we have a word for that kind of wood? That kind of tree?"

Danny gave him a small shrug, figuring the old man was getting a bit tipsy.

Federico closed his eyes again and his hands floated up by his ears, as if he were conducting the music himself, willing it forth into the room.

Danny caught Tessa looking at him again and this time she did not drop his gaze. He gave her his best smile, the slightly confused, slightly embarrassed one, the small boy's smile. A flush spread under her chin, and still she didn't look away.

He turned back to her father. His eyes remained closed, his hands conducting, even though the disc record had ended and the needle popped back and forth over its innermost grooves.

Steve Coyle smiled broadly when he saw Danny enter Fay Hall, the meeting place of the Boston Social Club. He worked his way down a row of folding chairs, one leg dragging noticeably after the other. He shook Danny's hand. "Thanks for coming."

Danny hadn't counted on this. It made him feel twice as guilty, infiltrating the BSC under false pretenses while his old partner, sick and unemployed, showed up to support a fight he wasn't even part of anymore.

Danny managed a smile. "Didn't expect to see you here."

Steve looked back over his shoulder at the men setting up the stage. "They let me help out. I'm a living example of what happens when you don't have a union with negotiating power, you know?" He clapped Danny's shoulder. "How are you?"

"Fine," Danny said. For five years he'd known every detail of his partner's life, often on a minute-to-minute basis. It was suddenly odd to realize he hadn't checked in on Steve in two weeks. Odd and shameful. "How you feeling?"

Steve shrugged. "I'd complain, but who'd listen?" He laughed loud and clapped Danny's shoulder again. His beard stubble was white. He looked lost inside his newly damaged body. As if he'd been turned upside down and shaken.

"You look good," Danny said.

"Liar." Again the awkward laugh followed by an awkward solemnity, a look of dewy earnestness. "I'm really glad you're here."

Danny said, "Don't mention it."

"Turn you into a union man yet," Steve said.

"Don't bet on it."

Steve clapped him on the back a third time and introduced him around. Danny knew about half of the men on a surface level, their paths having crossed on various calls over the years. They all seemed nervous around Steve, as if they hoped he'd take whatever affl icted him to another policemen's union in another city. As if bad fortune were as contagious as the grippe. Danny could see it in their faces when they shook Steve's hand--they'd have preferred him dead. Death allowed for the illusion of heroism. The maimed turned that illusion into an uncomfortable odor.

The head of the BSC, a patrolman named Mark Denton, strode toward the stage. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Danny, and rail thin. He had pale skin, as hard and shiny as piano keys, and his black hair was slicked back tight against his skull.

Danny and the other men took their chairs as Mark Denton crossed the stage and placed his hands on the edges of the dais. He gave the room a tired smile.

"Mayor Peters canceled the meeting we had scheduled at the end of the week."

Groans broke out in the room, a few catcalls.

Denton held up a hand to quiet them. "There're rumors of a streetcar workers strike, and the mayor believes that's of more pressing importance right now. We have to go to the back of the line."

"Maybe we should strike," someone said.

Denton's dark eyes flashed. "We don't talk of strike, men. That's just what they want. You know how that would play in the papers? Do you really want to give them that kind of ammunition, Timmy?"

"No, I don't, Mark, but what are our options? We're fucking starving out here."

Denton acknowledged that with a firm nod. "I know we are. But even whispering the word strike is heresy, men. You know it and I know it. Our best chance right now is to appear patient and open up talks with Samuel Gompers and the AFL."

"That really happening?" someone behind Danny asked.

Denton nodded. "In fact, I was planning to put a motion to the floor. Later tonight, I'll grant you, but why wait?" He shrugged. "All those in favor of the BSC opening up charter talks with the American Federation of Labor, say aye."

Danny felt it then, an almost tactile stirring of the blood throughout the room, a sense of collective purpose. He couldn't deny his blood jumped along with everyone else's. A charter in the most powerful union in the country. Jesus.

"Aye," the crowd shouted.

"All against?"

No one spoke.

"Motion accepted," Denton said.

Was it actually possible? No police department in the nation had ever pulled this off. Few had dared try. And yet, they could be the fi rst. They could--quite literally--change history.

Danny reminded himself he wasn't part of this.

Because this was a joke. This was a pack of naive, overly dramatic men who thought with enough talk they could bend the world to their needs. It didn't work that way, Danny could have told them. It worked the other way.

After Denton, the cops felled by the flu paraded onstage. They talked of themselves as the lucky ones; unlike nine other offi cers from the city's eighteen station houses, they'd survived. Of twenty onstage, twelve had returned to duty. Eight never would. Danny lowered his eyes when Steve took the dais. Steve, just two months ago singing in the barbershop quartet, had trouble keeping his words straight. He kept stuttering. He asked them not to forget him, not to forget the fl u. He asked that they remember their brotherhood and fellowship to all who'd sworn to protect and to serve.

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 fl asks. 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 popu lar, 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.