The Given Day (30 page)

"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 fi fty 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 infl uenza-related sickness among the men as work related. Steve Coyle, a little drunker than one would have hoped, spoke of his ongoing fi ght 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 fi gure 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 Co alition 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 ap- proach 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 the 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."

"Sure. I used to box," he said. Then: "In Pennsylvania."

"But have you ever been physically pushed aside?"

"Pushed aside?" Danny shook his head. "Not that I can remember. Why?"

"I wonder if you know how exceptional that is. To walk through this world without fear of other men."

Danny had never thought of it like that before. It suddenly embarrassed him that he'd moved through his entire life expecting it to work for him. And it usually had.

"It must be nice," Nathan said. "That's all."

"What do you do?" Danny asked.

"What do you do?"

"I'm looking for work. But you? Your hands aren't those of a laborer. Your clothes, either."

Nathan touched the lapel of his coat. "These aren't expensive clothes."

"They're not rags either. They match your shoes."

Nathan Bishop gave that a crooked smile. "Interesting observation. You a cop?"

"Yes," Danny said and lit a cigarette.

"I'm a doctor."

"A copper and a doctor. You can fix whoever I shoot."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

"No really."

"Okay, I'm not a copper. You a doctor, though?"

"I was." Bishop stubbed his cigarette out. He took a slow pull of his drink.

"Can you quit being a doctor?"

"You can quit anything." Bishop took another drink and let out a long sigh. "I was a surgeon once. Most of the people I saved didn't deserve to be saved."

"They were rich?"

Danny saw an exasperation cross Bishop's face that he was becoming familiar with. It meant Bishop was heading for the place where his anger would dominate him, where he couldn't be calmed down until he'd exhausted himself.

"They were oblivious," he said, his tongue lathering the word with contempt. "If you said to them, 'People die every day. In the North End, in the West End, in South Boston, in Chelsea. And the thing that's killing them is one thing. Poverty. That's all. Simple as that.' " He rolled another cigarette and leaned over the table as he did, slurped his drink from the glass with his hands still in his lap. "You know what people say when you tell them that? They say, 'What can I do?' As if that's an answer. What can you do? You can very well fucking help.

That's what you can do, you bourgeois piece of shit. What can you do? What can't you do? Roll up your fucking sleeves, get off your fat fucking arse, and move your wife's fatter fucking arse off the same cushion, and go down to where your mates--your brother and sister fellow fucking human beings--are quite authentically starving to death. And do whatever you need to do to help them. That's what the bloody fuck you can bloody well fucking do."

Nathan Bishop slammed back the rest of his drink. He dropped the glass to the scarred wood table and looked around the bar, his eyes red and sharp.

In the heavy air that often followed one of Nathan's tirades, Danny said nothing. He could feel the men at the nearest table shift in awkwardness. One of them suddenly began talking about Ruth, about the newest trade rumors. Nathan breathed heavily through his nostrils while he reached for the bottle and placed his cigarette between his lips. He got a shaky hand on the bottle. He poured himself another drink. He leaned back in his chair and flicked his thumbnail over a match and lit his cigarette.

"That's what you can do," he whispered.

In the Sowbelly Saloon, Danny tried to see through the crowd of Roxbury Letts to the back table where Louis Fraina sat tonight in a dark brown suit and a slim black tie sipping from a small glass of amber liquor. It was only the blaze of his eyes behind a pair of small round spectacles that gave him away as something other than a college professor who'd entered the wrong bar. That, and the deference the others showed him, placing his drink carefully on the table in front of him, asking him questions with the jutting chins of anxious children, checking to see whether he was watching when they expounded on a point. It was said that Fraina, Italian by birth, spoke Rus sian as close to fluently as could be asked of one not raised in the Motherland, an assessment rumored to have been first delivered by Trotsky himself. Fraina kept a black moleskin notebook open on the table in front of him, and he'd occasionally jot notes in it with a pencil or fl ip through the pages. He rarely looked up, and when he did, it was only to acknowledge a speaker's point with a soft flick of his eyelids. Not once had he and Danny exchanged so much as a glance.

The other Letts, though, had finally stopped treating Danny with the amused politeness one reserved for children and the feeble-minded. He wouldn't say they trusted him yet, but they were getting used to having him around.

Even so, they spoke in accents so thick they'd soon tire of conversation with him and jump ship as soon as another Lett interrupted in the mother tongue. That night, they had a full docket of problems and solutions that had carried over from the meeting into the bar.

Problem: The United States had launched a covert war against the provisional Bolshevik government of the new Rus sia. Wilson had authorized the detachment of the 339th, who'd joined up with British forces and seized the Rus sian port of Archangel on the White Sea. Hoping to cut the supplies of Lenin and Trotsky and starve them out during a long winter, the American and British forces were instead facing an early winter freeze and were rumored to be at the mercy of their White Rus sian allies, a corrupt group of warlords and tribal gangsters. This embarrassing quagmire was just one more instance of Western Capitalism attempting to crush the will of the great people's movement.