The Given Day (62 page)

Connor lowered the hand. He put it in his pocket and took a step back.

His father blinked and sucked some air through his nose. "And you," he said, looking back over his shoulder at Connor, "don't let me ever hear you talk about treason and my police department ever again. Ever. Am I quite clear?"

"Yes, sir." Connor looked down at his shoes.

"You . . . lawyer." He turned back to Joe. "How's the breathing, boy?"

Joe felt the tears streaming down his face and croaked, "Fine, sir."

His father finally lowered him down the wall until they were face-to- face. "If you ever use that word in this house, it'll not get this good again. Not even close, Joseph. Do you have any trouble comprehending my meaning, son?"

"No, sir."

His father raised his free arm and cocked it into a fist and Joe saw that fist hovering six inches from his face. His father let him look at it, at the ring there, at the faded white scars, at the one knuckle that had never fully healed and was twice the size of the others. His father nodded at him once and then dropped him to the floor.

"The two of you make me sick." He went over to the table, slammed the cork back into the whiskey bottle, and left the room with it under his arm.

His mouth still tasted of soap and his ass still smarted from the calm, emotionless whipping his father had given it after he'd returned from his study half an hour later, when Joe climbed out his bedroom window with some clothes in a pillowcase and walked off into the South Boston night. It was warm, and he could smell the ocean at the end of the street, and the streetlamps glowed yellow. He'd never been out on the streets this late by himself. It was so quiet he could hear his footsteps and he imagined their echoes as a living thing, 516DENNIS LEHANE slipping away from the family home, the last thing anyone remembered hearing before they became part of a legend.

What do you mean, he's gone?" Danny said. "Since when?" "Last night," his father said. "He took off . . . I don't know what time."

His father had been waiting on his stoop when Danny returned home, and the first thing Danny noticed was that he'd lost weight, and the second was that his hair was gray.

"You don't report into your precinct anymore, boy?"

"I don't really have a precinct these days, Dad. Curtis shitcanned me to every cold-piss strike detail he could find. I spent my day in Malden."

"Cobblers?"

Danny nodded.

His father gave that a rueful smile. "Is there one man who isn't on strike these days?"

"You have no reason to think he was snatched or something," Danny said.

"No, no."

"So there was a reason he ran."

His father shrugged. "In his head, I'm sure."

Danny placed a foot on the stoop and unbuttoned his coat. He'd been frying in it all day. "Let me guess, you didn't spare the rod."

His father looked up at him, squinting into the setting sun. "I didn't spare it with you and you turned out none the worse for wear." Danny waited.

His father threw up his hand. "I admit I was a little more impassioned than usual."

"What'd the kid do?"

"He said fuck."

"In front of Ma?"

His father shook his head. "In front of me."

Danny shook his head. "It's a word, Dad."

THE GIVEN DAY"It's the word, Aiden. The word of the streets, of the common poor. A man builds his home to be a sanctuary, and you damn well don't drag the streets into a sanctuary."

Danny sighed. "What did you do?"

Now it was his father's turn to shake his head. "Your brother's out on these streets somewhere. I've put men on it, good men, men who work runaways and truants, but it's harder in the summer, so many boys on the streets, so many working jobs at all hours, you can't tell one from the other."

"Why come to me?"

"You damn well know why," his father said. "The boy worships you. I suspect he may have come here."

Danny shook his head. "If he did, I haven't been around. I've been working a seventy-two on. You're looking at my first hour off."

"What about . . . ?" His father tilted his head and looked up at the building.

"Who?"

"You know who."

"Say her name."

"Don't be a child."

"Say her name."

His father rolled his eyes. "Nora. Happy? Has Nora seen him?" "Let's go ask her."

His father stiffened and didn't move as Danny came up the steps past him and went to the front door. He turned his key in the lock and looked back at the old man.

"We going to find Joe, or not?"

His father rose from the steps and brushed off the seat of his pants and straightened the creases of his trousers. He turned with his captain's hat under his arm.

"This changes nothing between us," he said.

"Perish the thought." Danny fluttered a hand over his heart, which brought a grimace to his father's face, then he pushed open the door into the front hall. The stairs were sticky with heat and they climbed 518DENNIS LEHANE them slowly, Danny feeling like he could easily lie down on one of the landings and take a nap after three straight days of strike patrol.

"You ever hear from Finch anymore?" he asked.

"I get the occasional call," his father said. "He's back in Washington." "You tell him I saw Tessa?"

"I mentioned it. He didn't seem terribly interested. It's Galleani he wants and that old dago is smart enough to train 'em here, but he sends them out of state to do most of their mischief."

Danny felt the bitterness in his own grin. "She's a terrorist. She's making bombs in our city. Who knows what else. But they've got bigger fish to fry?"

His father shrugged. "It's the way of things, boy. If they hadn't bet the house on terrorists being responsible for that molasses tank explosion, things would probably be different. But they did bet the house, and it blew that molasses all over their faces. Boston's an embarrassment now, and you and your BSC boys aren't making it better."

"Oh, right. It's us."

"Don't play the martyr. I didn't say it was all you. I just said there's a taint to our beloved department in certain corridors of federal law enforcement. And some of that's because of the half- cocked hysteria surrounding the tank explosion, and some of it's due to the fear that you'll embarrass the nation by going on strike."

"No one's talking strike yet, Dad."

"Yet." His father paused at the third-floor landing. "Jesus, it's hotter than the arse of a swamp rat." He looked at the hall window, its thick glass covered in soot and a greasy residue. "I'm three stories up, but I can't even see my city."

"Your city." Danny chuckled.

His father gave him a soft smile. "It is my city, Aiden. It was men like me and Eddie who built this department. Not the commissioners, not O'Meara much as I respected him, and certainly not Curtis. Me. And as goes the police, so goes the city." He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. "Oh, your old man might be back on his heels temporarily, but I'm getting my second wind, boy. Don't you doubt it."

THE GIVEN DAYThey climbed the last two flights in silence. At Danny's room, his father took a series of breaths as Danny inserted his key in the lock.

Nora opened the door before he could turn the key. She smiled. Then she saw who stood beside him, and her pale eyes turned to ash.

"And what's this?" she said.

"I'm looking for Joe," his father said.

She kept her eyes on Danny, as if she hadn't heard him. "You bring him here?"

"He showed up," Danny said.

His father said, "I have no more desire to be here than you--"

"Whore," Nora said to Danny. "I believe that was the last word I heard from this man's mouth. I believe he spit on his own fl oor to emphasize the point."

"Joe's missing," Danny said.

That didn't move her at first. She stared at Danny with a cold rage that, while it encompassed his father, was just as much directed at him for bringing the man to their door. She flicked her gaze off his face and onto his father's.

"What'd you call him to make him run?" she said.

"I just want to know if the boy came by."

"And I want to know why he ran."

"We had a moment of discord," his father said.

"Ah." She tilted her head back at that. "I know all about how you resolve moments of discord with young Joe. Was the switch involved?"

His father turned to Danny. "There's a limit to how long I'll stand for a situation I deem undignifi ed."

"Jesus," Danny said. "The two of you. Joe's missing. Nora?"

Her jaw tightened and her eyes remained ash, but she stepped back from the door enough so Danny and his father could enter the room.

Danny took off his coat straightaway and stripped the suspenders from his shoulders. His father took in the room, the fresh curtains, the new bedspread, the flowers in the vase on the table by the window.

520DENNIS LEHANE

Nora stood by the foot of the bed in her factory uniform--Ladlassie stripe overalls with a beige blouse underneath. She gripped her left wrist with her right hand. Danny poured three whiskeys and gave a glass to each of them, and his father's eyebrows rose slightly at the sight of Nora drinking hard liquor.

"I smoke, too," she said, and Danny saw a tightening of his father's lips that he recognized as a suppressed smile.

The two of them raced each other on the drink, Danny's father draining his glass one drop ahead of Nora, and then they each held out their glasses again and Danny refilled them. His father took his to the table by the window and placed his hat on the table and sat and Nora said, "Mrs. DiMassi said a boy was by this afternoon."

"What?" his father said.

"He didn't leave a name. She said he was ringing our bell and looking up at our window and when she came out on the stoop, he ran away."

"Anything else?"

Nora drank more whiskey. "She said he was the spitting image of Danny."

Danny could see the tension drain from his father's shoulders and neck as he took a sip of his drink.

Eventually, he cleared his throat. "Thank you, Nora."

"You've no need to thank me, Mr. Coughlin. I love the boy. But you could do me a courtesy in return."

His father reached for his handkerchief and pulled it from his coat. "Certainly. Name it."

"Finish up your drink, if you please, and be on your way." chapter thirty -one Two days later, on a Saturday in June, Thomas Coughlin walked from his home on K Street to Carson Beach for a meeting regarding the future of his city. Even though he was dressed in the lightest suit he owned, a blue and white seersucker, and his sleeves were short, the heat soaked through to his skin. He carried a brown leather satchel that grew heavier every couple of hundred yards. He was a little too old to be playing the bag man, but he wasn't trusting this particular bag to anyone else. These were sensitive days in the wards, where the wind could shift at a moment's notice. His beloved Commonwealth was currently under the stewardship of a Republican governor, a transplant from Vermont with no love of, nor appreciation for, local mores or local history. The police commissioner was a bitter man of tiny mind who hated the Irish, hated Catholics, and therefore hated the wards, the great Demo cratic wards that had built this city. He only understood his hate; he did not understand compromise, patronage, the way of doing things that had been established in this town over seventy years ago and had defined it ever since. Mayor Peters was the picture of ineffectuality, a man who won the vote only because the 522DENNIS LEHANE ward bosses had fallen asleep at the switch and the rivalry between the two main and two true mayoral candidates, Curley and Gallivan, had grown so bitter that a third flank had opened up, and Peters had reaped the November rewards. Since his election, he had done nothing, absolutely nothing of note, while his cabinet had pillaged the till with such shamelessness that it was only a matter of time before the looting hit the front pages and gave birth to the sworn enemy of politics since the dawn of man: illumination.

Thomas removed his coat and loosened his tie and placed the satchel at his feet as he came to the end of K Street and paused in the shade of a great elm. The sea lay only forty feet away, the beach fi lled, but the breeze was desultory, the air clammy. He could feel eyes on him, the gazes of those who recognized him but dared not approach. This filled him with enough satisfaction to close his eyes in the shade for a moment, to imagine a cooler breeze. He had made it clear many years ago in the neighborhood that he was their benefactor, their friend, their patron. You needed something, you put the touch on Tommy Coughlin and sure he'd take care of it, he would. But never--ever--on a Saturday. On Saturdays, you left Tommy Coughlin alone so he could attend to his family, his beloved sons and beloved wife.

They'd called him Four Hands Tommy back then, an appellation some believed bespoke a man who had his hands in a lot of pockets, but one which actually took root after he'd apprehended Boxy Russo and three other plug-uglies of the Tips Moran gang after he'd caught them coming out the back of a Jew furrier's place off Washington Street. He'd been a beat cop then and after he'd subdued them ("Sure it must have taken four hands to fight four men!" Butter O'Malley had said when he'd finished booking them), he'd tied them together in twos and waited for the wagons. They hadn't put up much of a struggle after he'd snuck up and slapped his billy club off the back of Boxy Russo's noggin. The galoot had dropped his end of the safe, and so the others had been forced to do the same, and the end result was four mashed feet and two broken ankles.

THE GIVEN DAYHe smiled to remember it now. Those were simpler times. Fine times. He was young and powerful- strong, and sure, wasn't he just the fastest man on the force? He and Eddie McKenna worked the docks in Charlestown and the North End and South Boston and there was no more violent place for a copper to be. No richer either, once the big boys figured out they weren't going to scare these two off, so they might as well all come to an accommodation. Boston was, after all, a port city, and anything that disrupted the entry to those ports was bad for business. And the soul of business, as Thomas Coughlin had known since he was a lad in Clonakilty, County Cork, was accommodation.