The Given Day (70 page)

The men clapped as Danny took his seat. Curtis rose from his desk. He looked shaky, impossibly pale, his tie loosened at the throat, strands of hair pointing askew.

"I will take all remarks and testimony under consideration," he said, his hands gripping the edge of his desk. "Good day, gentlemen." And with that, he and Herbert Parker walked out of the room.

ABLE-BODIED MEN NEEDED

Boston Police Department seeking recruits for Volunteer Police Force to be headed by former Police Supt. William Pierce. White males only. War experience and/ or proven athletic ability preferred. Interested applicants apply at the Commonwealth Armory between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p. m., M-F.

Luther placed the newspaper on the bench where he'd found it. A volunteer police force. Sounded like arming a bunch of white men either too dumb to hold on to a regular job or so desperate to prove their manhood they'd leave the good jobs they had. Either way, a bad combination. He imagined the same ad soliciting black men to fi ll those jobs and laughed out loud, a sound that surprised him. He wasn't the only one--a white man one bench over stiffened, stood, and walked away.

Luther had spent a rare day off wandering the city because he was about to come out of his skin. A child he'd never seen waited for him in Tulsa. His child. Lila, softening toward him by the day (he hoped), waited there, too. He'd once believed the world was a sprawling party just waiting for him to join it and that party would be filled with interesting men and beautiful women and they'd all fi ll the empty parts of him somehow, each in their own way, until there was nothing left to fill and Luther would feel whole for the first time since his father had left THE GIVEN DAYthe family. But now he realized that wasn't the case. He'd met Danny and Nora and felt for them a fondness so piercing it continued to surprise him. And, Lord knows, he loved the Giddreauxs, had found in them a pair of grandparents he'd often dreamed were out there. Yet ultimately it didn't make no difference because his hopes and his heart and his loves lay in Greenwood. That party? Never going to happen. Because even if it did, Luther'd just as soon be home. With his woman. With his son.

Desmond.

That was the name Lila'd given him, one Luther remembered half agreeing on back before he'd run afoul of the Deacon. Desmond Laurence, after Lila's grandfather, a man who'd taught her the Bible while she sat on his knee, probably gave her that steel in her spine, too, for all Luther knew, because it had to have come from somewhere.

Desmond.

A good firm name. Luther'd taken to loving it over the summer months, loving it in a way that brought tears to his eyes. He'd brought Desmond into the world and Desmond would do fine things someday.

If Luther could get back to him. To her. To them.

If a man was lucky, he was moving toward something his whole life. He was building a life, working for a white man, yes, but working for his wife, for his children, for his dream that their life would be better because he'd been part of it. That, Luther finally understood, was what he'd failed to remember in Tulsa and what his father had never known at all. Men were supposed to do for those they loved. Simple as that. Clean and pure as that.

Luther had gotten so sucked up, so turned around by the simple need to move--anywhere, anytime, anyhow--that he'd forgotten that the motion had to be put in service of a purpose.

Now he knew. Now he knew.

And he couldn't do a damn thing about it. Even if he took care of McKenna (one hell of an if ), he still couldn't move toward his family because Smoke was waiting. And he couldn't convince Lila to move toward him (he'd tried several times since Christmas) because she felt Greenwood 586DENNIS LEHANE was home and also suspected--quite understandably--that if she did pick up and move, Smoke would send someone to follow.

Going to come out of my skin, Luther thought for the fi ftieth time that day, right fucking out.

He picked the paper up off the bench and stood. Across Washington Street, in front of Kresge's Five & Dime, two men watched him. They wore pale hats and seersucker suits, and they were both small and scared-looking and they might have been comical--stock clerks dressed up to look respectable--if it weren't for the wide brown holsters they wore over their hips, the pistol butts exposed to the world. Stock clerks with guns. Other stores had hired private detectives, and the banks were demanding U. S. marshals, but the smaller businesses had to make do by training their everyday employees in the handling of weaponry. More volatile than that volunteer police force, in a way, because Luther assumed--or hoped anyway--that the volunteer coppers would at least receive a bit more training, be afforded a bit more leadership. These hired help, though--these clerks and bag boys and sons and sons-in-law of jewelers and furriers and bakers and livery operators--you saw them all over the city now, and they were scared. Terrified. Jumpy. And armed.

Luther couldn't help himself--he saw them eyeing him, so he walked toward them, crossing the street even though that hadn't been his original intention, giving his steps just a bit of saunter, a dash of colored man's edge to it, throwing the glint of a smile into his eyes. The two little men exchanged looks, and one of them wiped his hand off the side of his pants just below his pistol.

"Nice day, isn't it?" Luther reached the sidewalk.

Neither of the men said a word.

"Big blue sky," Luther said. "First clean air in about a week? Ya'll should enjoy it."

The pair remained silent and Luther tipped his hat to them and continued on up the sidewalk. It had been a foolish act, particularly since he'd just been thinking about Desmond, about Lila, about be--

THE GIVEN DAYcoming a more responsible man. But something about white men with guns, he was sure, would always bring out the devil in him.

And judging by the mood in the city, there was about to be a whole lot more of them. He passed his third Emergency Relief tent of the day, saw some nurses inside setting up tables and wheeling beds around. Earlier that afternoon, he'd walked through the West End and up through Scollay Square, and just about every third block, it seemed, he stumbled upon ambulances grouped together, waiting for what was starting to feel like the unavoidable. He looked down at the Herald in his hand, at the front-page editorial they'd run above the fold:

Seldom has the feeling in this community been more tense than it is today over the conditions in the police department. We are at a turning of the ways. We shall take a long step toward "Russianizing" ourselves, or toward submitting to soviet rule if we, by any pretext, admit an agency of the law to become the servant of a special interest.

Poor Danny, Luther thought. Poor honest, outmatched son of a bitch.

James Jackson Storrow was the wealthiest man in Boston. When he'd become president of General Motors, he'd reorganized it from top to bottom without costing a single worker his job or a sole stock--holder his confidence. He founded the Boston Chamber of Commerce and had chaired the Cost of Living Commission in the days leading up to the Great War. During that conflict of waste and despair, he'd been appointed federal fuel administrator by Woodrow Wilson and had seen to it that New England homes never wanted for coal or oil, sometimes using his own personal credit to ensure the shipments left their depots on time.

He'd heard others say he was a man who wore his power lightly, but the truth was, he'd never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion of the egomaniacal 588DENNIS LEHANE heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they thus wielded "power" barbarically so the world would not fi nd them out.

Terrible days, these, between the "powerful" and the "powerless," the whole absurd battle opening up a new front here in this city, the city he loved more than any other, and this front possibly the worst anywhere since October of '17.

Storrow received Mayor Peters in the billiards room of his Louisburg Square home, noting as the mayor entered that he was well tanned. This confirmed for Storrow the suspicion he'd long held that Peters was a frivolous man, one ill-suited to his job in normal circumstances, but in the current climate, egregiously so.

An affable chap, of course, as so many frivolous men were, crossing to Storrow with a bright, eager smile and a spring in his step.

"Mr. Storrow, so kind of you to see me."

"The honor is mine, Mr. Mayor."

The mayor's handshake was unexpectedly firm, and Storrow noted a clarity in the man's blue eyes that made him wonder if there was more to him than he'd initially assumed. Surprise me, Mr. Mayor, surprise me.

"You know why I've come," Peters said.

"I presume to discuss the situation with the police."

"Exactly so, sir."

Storrow led the mayor to two cherry leather armchairs. Between them sat a table with two decanters and two glasses. One decanter held brandy. The other, water. He waved his hand at the decanters as a way of offering them to the mayor.

Peters nodded his thanks and poured a glass of water.

Storrow crossed one leg over the other and reconsidered the man yet again. He pointed at his own glass, and Peters filled it with water and they both sat back.

Storrow said, "How do you envision I can be of assistance?" "You're the most respected man in the city," Peters said. "You are also beloved, sir, for all that you did to keep homes warm during the THE GIVEN DAYwar. I need you and as many men as you choose from the Chamber of Commerce to form a commission to study the issues the policemen have raised and the counterarguments of Police Commissioner Curtis to decide which have wisdom and which, ultimately, should win the day."

"Would this commission have the power to rule or merely to recommend?"

"City bylaws state that unless there is evidence of reckless misconduct on the part of the police commissioner, he has final say in all issues regarding police matters. He can't be overruled by either myself or Governor Coolidge."

"So we'd have limited power."

"Power to recommend only, yes, sir. But with the esteem in which you are held, not only in this state, but in this region, and at a national level as well, I feel confident that your recommendation would be taken to heart with the appropriate respect."

"When would I form such a commission?"

"Without delay. Tomorrow."

Storrow finished his water and uncorked the brandy decanter. He pointed it at Peters, and the mayor tilted his empty glass in his direction and Storrow poured.

"As far as the policemen's union, I see no way we can ever allow the affiliation with the American Federation of Labor to stand."

"As you say then, sir."

"I'll want to meet with the union representatives immediately. Tomorrow afternoon. Can you arrange it?"

"Done."

"As to Commissioner Curtis, what's your sense of the man, Mr. Mayor?"

"Angry," Peters said.

Storrow nodded. "That's the man I remember. He served his term as mayor when I was overseer at Harvard. We met on a few occasions. I remember only the anger. Suppressed though it may have been, it was of the most dire, self-loathing tenor. When a man like 590DENNIS LEHANE that regains authority after so long in the wilderness, I worry, Mr. Mayor."

"I do, too," Peters said.

"Such men fiddle while cities burn." Storrow felt a long sigh leave him, heard it exit his mouth and enter the room as if it had spent so many de cades bearing witness to waste and folly that it would still be circling the room when he reentered on the morrow. "Such men love ash."

The next afternoon, Danny, Mark Denton, and Kevin McRae met with James J. Storrow in a suite at the Parker House. They brought with them detailed reports on the health and sanitation conditions of all eighteen precinct houses, signed accounts from over twenty patrolmen that detailed their average workday or week, and analyses of the pay rates of thirty other local professions--including city hall janitors, streetcar operators, and dockworkers--that dwarfed their own pay scale. They spread it all before James J. Storrow and three other businessmen who formed his commission and sat back while they went over it, passing particu lar sheets of interest among them and engaging in nods of surprise and grumps of consternation and eye rolls of apathy that had Danny worried he may have overloaded their hand.

Storrow went to lift another patrolman's account off the stack and then pushed the whole thing away from him. "I've seen enough," he said quietly. "Quite enough. No wonder you gentlemen feel abandoned by the very city you protect." He looked at the other three men, all of whom took his lead and nodded at Danny and Mark Denton and Kevin McRae in sudden commiseration. "This is shameful, gentlemen, and not all the blame falls on Commissioner Curtis. This happened on Commissioner O'Meara's watch, as well as under the eyes of Mayors Curley and Fitzgerald." Storrow came around from behind the table and extended his hand, shaking first Mark Denton's, then Danny's, then Kevin McRae's. "My profoundest apologies."

"Thank you, sir."

THE GIVEN DAYStorrow leaned back against the table. "What are we to do, gentlemen?"

"We just want our fair lot, sir," Mark Denton said.

"And what is your fair lot?"

Danny said, "Well, sir, it's a three-hundred-a-year increase in pay for starters. An end to overtime and special detail work without compensation comparative to those thirty other professions we brought up in our analysis."

"And?"

"And," Kevin McRae said, "it's an end to the company-store policy of paying for our uniforms and our equipment. It's also about clean stations, sir, clean beds, usable toilets, a sweeping out of the vermin and the lice."

Storrow nodded. He turned and looked back at the other men, though it was clear his was the only word that really counted. He turned back to the policemen. "I concur."

"Excuse me?" Danny said.

A smile found Storrow's eyes. "I said I concur, Officer. In fact, I'll champion your point of view and recommend your grievances be settled in the manner you've put forth."