“Cheers,” Nathan said.
“What? No Russian?”
“Good Lord, no. You know what Russians call Westerners who can speak Russian?”
Danny shook his head.
“Spies.” Nathan poured them a refill and seemed to read Danny’s thoughts. “You know why Louis is an exception?”
“Why?”
“Because he’s Louis. Try the bread. It’s good.”
From the bar, an explosion of Russian, followed by a surprisingly hearty laugh, and then Louis Fraina hung up the phone. He came to the table and poured himself a drink.
“Good evening, gentlemen. Glad you could make it.”
“Evening, Comrade,” Danny said.
“The writer.” Louis Fraina held out his hand.
Danny shook it. Fraina’s grip was firm but not to the point of trying to prove anything. “Pleased to meet you, Comrade.”
Fraina sat and poured himself another vodka. “Let’s dispense with the ‘Comrade’ for now. I’ve read your work, so I don’t doubt your ideological commitment.”
“Okay.”
Fraina smiled. This close, he gave off a warmth that wasn’t even hinted at in his speeches or the few times Danny had seen him holding court at the back of the Sowbelly. “Western Pennsylvania, yes?”
“Yes,” Danny said.
“What brought you all the way to Boston?” He tore a piece of dark bread from the loaf and popped it in his mouth.
“I had an uncle who lived here. By the time I arrived, he was long gone. I’m not sure where.”
“Was he a revolutionary?”
Danny shook his head. “He was a cobbler.”
“So he could run from the fight in good shoes.”
Danny tipped his head to that and smiled.
Fraina leaned back in his chair and waved at the barmaid. She nodded and disappeared into the back.
“Let’s eat,” Fraina said. “We’ll talk revolution after dessert.”
They ate a salad in vinegar and oil that Fraina called svejie ovoshy. That was followed by draniki, a potato dish, and zharkoye, a meal of beef and still more potatoes. Danny’d had no idea what to expect, but it was quite good, far better than the gruel served nightly in the Sowbelly would have led him to believe. Still, throughout dinner, he had trouble concentrating. Some of it was due to the ringing in his ears. He only heard half of what was said and dealt with the other half by smiling or shaking his head where it seemed appropriate. But it wasn’t the hearing loss, ultimately, that pulled his interest away from the table. It was the feeling, all too familiar lately, that his job was the wrong fit for his heart.
He had woken up this morning, and because of that, a man was now dead. Whether the man deserved to die or not—and he did, he did—wasn’t what concerned Danny at the moment. It was that he’d killed him. Two hours ago. He’d stood in the street and shot him like an animal. He could hear those high-pitched yelps. Could see each of the bullets enter Federico Ficara—the first through the knee, the second through the ass, the third into the stomach. All painful, the first and the third, however, exceptionally so.
Two hours ago, and now he was back on the job and the job was sitting with two men who seemed, at best, overimpassioned but hardly criminal.
When he’d shot Federico in the ass (and that was the one that bothered him the most, the indignity of it, Federico trying to scramble out of that car like forest prey) he’d wondered what created a situation like this—three people shooting it out on a city street near a car laden with dynamite. No god had ever designed such a scenario, even for the lowest of his animals. What created a Federico? A Tessa? Not god. Man.
I killed you, Danny thought. But I didn’t kill it.
He realized Fraina was speaking to him.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said for a writer of such impassioned polemic, you’re quite taciturn in person.”
Danny smiled. “I like to leave it all on the page.”
Fraina nodded and glanced his glass off Danny’s. “Fair enough.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He blew out the match as a child would blow out a candle, with pursed lips and an air of purpose. “Why the Lettish Workingman’s Society?”
“I’m not sure I understand your question.”
“You’re an American,” Fraina said. “You need only to walk half a mile across the city to find Comrade Reed’s American Communist Party. And yet you chose to be among Eastern Europeans. Are you uncomfortable with your own kind?”
“No.”
Fraina tilted one palm in Danny’s direction. “Then?”
“I want to write,” Danny said. “Comrade Reed and Comrade Larkin are not known for letting newcomers break in on their paper.”
“But I am?”
“That’s the rumor,” Danny said.
“Candor,” Fraina said. “I like it. Some of them are quite good, by the way. Your musings.”
“Thank you.”
“Some are, well, a bit overwrought. Turgid, one could say.”
Danny shrugged. “I speak from the heart, Comrade Fraina.”
“The revolution needs people who speak from the head. Intelligence, precision—these are what are most valued in the party.”
Danny nodded.
“So you would like to help out with the newspaper. Yes?”
“Very much so.”
“It is not glamorous work. You’d write occasionally, yes, but you’d be expected to work the press and to stuff envelopes and type names and addresses onto those envelopes. This is something you can do?”
“Certainly,” Danny said.
Fraina pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue and dropped it in the ashtray. “Come by the offices next Friday. We’ll see how you take to it.”
Just like that, Danny thought. Just like that.
Leaving the Oktober, he found himself behind Louis Fraina and Pyotr Glaviach as Nathan Bishop trotted across the sidewalk to open the back of the Olds Model M. Fraina stumbled and a gunshot report echoed in the empty street. Pyotr Glaviach knocked Fraina to the ground and covered his body. The smaller man’s glasses fell off the curb and into the gutter. The gunman stepped out of the building next door, one arm extended, and Danny took the lid off a trash can and knocked the pistol out of his hand and the gun went off again and Danny hit him in the forehead. Sirens rang out. They were drawing closer. Danny hit the gunman another time with the metal lid and the man fell on his ass.
He turned back as Glaviach shoved Fraina into the backseat of the Model M and stood on the running board. Nathan Bishop hopped up front. Bishop waved his arm frantically at Danny. “Come on!”
The shooter grabbed Danny by his ankles and pulled his legs out from under him. Danny hit the sidewalk so hard he bounced.
A police cruiser turned onto Columbus.
“Go!” Danny called.
The Model M squealed as it pulled away from the curb.
“Find out if he a White!” Glaviach shouted from the running board as the cruiser drove over the curb in front of the restaurant and the Model M took a sharp left out of sight.
The first two coppers on the scene ran into the restaurant. They pushed back the barmaid and two men who’d ventured out. They shut the door behind them. The next cruiser arrived on their heels and banged to a stop halfway up the curb. McKenna climbed out, already chuckling at the absurdity of it all, as Jersey Jerry Hamilton let go of Danny’s ankles. They got to their feet. The two patrolmen with McKenna came over and manhandled them over to the cruiser.
“Realistic enough, you think?” McKenna said.
Hamilton rubbed his forehead several times and then he punched Danny’s arm. “I’m bleeding, you fuck.”
Danny said, “I kept away from the face.”
“Kept away from the…?” Hamilton spit blood onto the street. “I should ram your—”
Danny stepped in close. “I could hospitalize you right fucking here, right now. You want that, mug?”
“He
y, why’s he think he can talk to me like this?”
“Because he can.” McKenna clapped their shoulders. “Assume the positions, gents.”
“No, I’m serious,” Danny said. “You want to two-step with me?”
Hamilton looked away. “I was just saying.”
“You were just saying,” Danny said.
“Gents,” McKenna said.
Danny and Jersey Jerry placed their palms on the hood of the cruiser and McKenna made a show of frisking them.
“This is bullshit,” Danny whispered. “They’ll see through it.”
“Nonsense,” McKenna said. “Ye of little faith.”
McKenna placed loose cuffs on their hands and pushed them into the back of the cruiser. He got behind the wheel and drove them all back down Harrison.
In the car, Hamilton said, “You know? If I ever see you off the job—”
“You’ll what?” Danny said. “Cry yourself stupider?”
McKenna drove Danny back to his cover apartment in Roxbury and pulled to the curb a half block up from the building.
“How you feeling?”
Truth was, Danny felt like weeping. Not for any particular reason, just a general and all-consuming exhaustion. He rubbed his hands over his face.
“I’m okay.”
“You shot the bejesus out of an Eye-tie terrorist under extraordinary duress just four hours ago, then went right into an undercover meeting with another possible terrorist and—”
“Fucking Eddie, they’re not—”
“What’d you say?”
“—fucking terrorists. They’re Communists. And they’d love to see us fail, yes, see this whole government collapse and cascade into the ocean. I grant you that. But they’re not bomb throwers.”
“You’re naïve, lad.”
“So be it.” Danny reached for the door handle.
“Dan.” McKenna put a hand on his shoulder.
Danny waited.
“Too much has been asked of you this last couple of months. I agree, as God is my judge. But it won’t be much longer ’til you’ll have your gold shield. And all, all will be perfectly brilliant then.”
Danny nodded so Eddie would let go of his shoulder. Eddie dropped his hand.
“No, it won’t,” Danny said and got out of the car.
The next afternoon, in the confessional of a church he’d never entered before, Danny knelt and blessed himself.
The priest said, “You smell like liquor.”
“That’s because I’ve been drinking, Father. I’d share, but I left the bottle back at my apartment.”
“Have you come to confess, son?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? You either sinned or you didn’t.”
“I shot a man to death yesterday. Outside a church. I figure you’ve heard about it by now.”
“I have, yes. The man was an anarchist. You…?”
“Yes. I shot him three times. Tried five times,” Danny said, “but I missed twice. Thing is, Father? You’ll tell me I did right. Yeah?”
“That’s for God to—”
“He was going to blow up a church. One of yours.”
“Correct. You did right.”
“But he’s dead. I removed him from this earth. And I can’t shake the feeling…”
A long silence followed, made all the longer by the fact that it was church silence; it smelled of incense and oil soap and was hemmed in by thick velvet and dark wood.
“What feeling?”
“The feeling that we—me and the guy I shot?—we’re just living in the same barrel? See?”
“No. You’re being obtuse.”
“Forgive me,” Danny said. “There’s this big barrel of shit. See? And it’s—”
“Watch your language.”
“—where the ruling class and all the Haves don’t live, right? It’s where they fucking throw every consequence they don’t want to think about. And the idea—”
“You are in a house of God.”
“—the idea is, Father? The idea is that we’re supposed to play nice and go away when they’re done with us. Accept what they give us and drink it and eat it and clap for it and say, ‘Mmmm, more, please. Thanks.’ And, Father, I gotta tell you, I’ve about had my fucking fill.”
“Leave this church at once.”
“Sure. You coming?”
“I think you need to sober up.”
“And I think you need to leave this mausoleum you’re hiding in and see how your parishioners really live. Done that lately, Father?”
“I—”
“Ever?”
Please,” Louis Fraina said, “take a seat.”
It was just past midnight. Three days since the manufactured assassination attempt. At around eleven, Pyotr Glaviach had called Danny and given him the address of a bakery in Mattapan. When Danny arrived, Pyotr Glaviach stepped from the Olds Model M and waved Danny into an alley that ran between the bakery and a tailor. Danny followed him around to the back and into the storeroom. Louis Fraina waited in a hard-backed wooden chair with its twin directly across from him.
Danny took that seat, close enough to the small, dark-eyed man to reach out and stroke the whiskers of his neatly trimmed beard. Fraina’s eyes never left Danny’s face. They were not the blazing eyes of a fanatic. They were the eyes of an animal so used to being hunted that some boredom had settled in. He crossed his legs at the ankles and leaned back in his chair. “Tell me what happened after we left.”
Danny jerked a thumb behind him. “I’ve told Nathan and Comrade Glaviach.”
Fraina nodded. “Tell me.”
“Where is Nathan, by the way?”
Fraina said, “Tell me what happened. Who was this man who tried to kill me?”
“I never got his name. Never even spoke with him.”
“Yes, he seems quite the ghost.”
Danny said, “I tried to. The police attacked immediately. They hit me, they hit him, they hit me some more. Then they threw us both in the back of the car and drove us to the station house.”
“Which one?”
“Roxbury Crossing.”
“And you exchanged no pleasantries with my assailant on the ride there?”
“I tried. He didn’t respond. Then the copper told me to shut my hole.”
“He said that? Shut your hole?”
Danny nodded. “Threatened to run his nightstick through it.”
Fraina’s eyes sparkled. “Vivid.”
The floor was caked with old flour. The room smelled of yeast and sweat and sugar and mold. Large brown tins, some the height of a man, stood against the walls, and bags of flour and grain were stacked between them. A bare lightbulb dangled from a chain in the center of the room and left pools of shadow where rodents squeaked. The ovens had probably been shut off since noon, but the room was thick with heat.
Fraina said, “A matter of feet, wouldn’t you say?”
Danny put a hand in his pocket and found the button among some coins. He pressed it to his palm and leaned forward. “Comrade?”
“The would-be assassin.” He waved at the air around him. “This man no one can find a record of. This man who went unseen, even by a comrade I know who was in the holding cell at Roxbury Crossing that night. A veteran of the first czarist revolution, this man, a true Lett like our comrade, Pyotr.”
The big Estonian leaned against the large cooler door, his arms crossed, and gave no indication he’d heard his name.
“He didn’t see you there, either,” Fraina said.
“They never put me in the holding pen,” Danny said. “They had their fun and shipped me in a paddy wagon to Charlestown. I told Comrade Bishop as much.”
Fraina smiled. “Well, it’s settled, then. Everything is fine.” He clapped his hands. “Eh, Pyotr? What did I tell you?”
Glaviach kept his eyes on the shelving behind Danny’s head. “Everything fine.”
“Everything is fine,” Fraina said.
> Danny sat there, the heat of the place finding his feet, the underside of his scalp.
Fraina leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Except, well, this man was only seven or eight feet away when he fired. How do you miss at that range?”
Danny said, “Nerves?”
Fraina stroked his beard and nodded. “That’s what I thought at first. But then I began to wonder. There were three of us clustered together. Four, if we count you bringing up the rear. And beyond us? A big, heavy touring car. So, I put it to you, Comrade Sante, where did the bullets go?”
“The sidewalk, I’d guess.”
Fraina clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. We checked there. We checked everywhere within a two-block radius. This was easy to do, because the police never checked. They never looked. A gun fired within city limits. Two shots discharged? And the police treated it as if it were no more than a hurled insult.”
“Hmm,” Danny said. “That is—”
“Are you federal?”
“Comrade?”
Fraina removed his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “Justice Department? Immigration? Bureau of Investigation?”
“I don’t—”
He stood and placed his glasses back on. He looked down at Danny. “Or local, perhaps? Part of this undercover dragnet we hear is sweeping the city? I understand the anarchists in Revere have a new member who claims to be from the north of Italy but speaks with the accent and cadence of one from the south.” He strolled around to the back of Danny’s chair. “And you, Daniel? Which are you?”
“I’m Daniel Sante, a machinist from Harlansburg, Pennsylvania. I’m no bull, Comrade. I’m no government slug. I am exactly who I say I am.”
Fraina crouched behind him. He leaned in and whispered in Danny’s ear, “What other response would you give?”
“None.” Danny tilted his head until he could see Fraina’s lean profile. “Because it’s the truth.”
Fraina placed his hands on the back of the chair. “A man tries to assassinate me and just happens to be a terrible shot. You come to my rescue because you just happen to be exiting at the same time as I. The police just happen to arrive within seconds of the gunshot. Everyone in the restaurant is detained and yet none are questioned. The assassin vanishes from police custody. You are released without charge and, in the height of providence, just happen to be a writer of some talent.” He strolled around to the front of the chair again and tapped his temple. “You see how fortunate all these events are?”
The Given Day Page 31