The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  “The rage remains.” Finch chuckled. “No one is more surprised than us. We thought the rush to judgment over the molasses flood had killed us. Quite the opposite. People don’t want truth, they want certainty.” He shrugged. “Or the illusion of it.”

  “And you and Mr. Palmer are more than happy to ride the tide of this need.”

  Finch stubbed out his cigarette. “My current mandate is the deportation of every radical plotting against my country. The conventional wisdom on the subject is that deportation falls solely under federal jurisdiction. However, Attorney General Palmer, Mr. Hoover, and myself have recently come to the realization that state and local authorities can get more actively involved in deportation. Would you care to know how?”

  Thomas stared at the ceiling. “I’d assume under the state antisyndicalist laws.”

  Finch stared at him. “How’d you arrive at that conclusion?”

  “I didn’t arrive anywhere. Basic common sense, man. The laws are on the books, have been for years.”

  Finch asked, “You wouldn’t ever consider working in Washington, would you?”

  Thomas rapped the window with his knuckles. “See out there, Agent Finch? Can you see the street? The people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Took me fifteen years in Ireland and a month at sea to find it. My home. And a man who’d abandon his home is a man who’d abandon anything.”

  Finch tapped his boater off his knee. “You’re an odd duck.”

  “Just so.” He opened a palm in Finch’s direction. “So the antisyndicalist laws?”

  “Have opened a door in the deportation process that we’d long assumed closed.”

  “Local.”

  “And state, yes.”

  “So you’re marshaling your forces.”

  Finch nodded. “And we’d like your son to be a part of it.”

  “Connor?”

  “Yes.”

  Thomas took a drink of coffee. “How much a part?”

  “Well, we’d have him work with a lawyer from Justice or local—”

  “No. He works the cases as the point man in Boston or he doesn’t work at all.”

  “He’s young.”

  “Older than your Mr. Hoover.”

  Finch looked around the office, indecisive. “Your son catches this train? I promise you the track won’t run out in his lifetime.”

  “Ah,” Thomas said, “but I’d like him to board at the front as opposed to the rear. The view would be all the finer, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. You call him to Washington to hire him. You make sure a photographer’s in attendance.”

  “And in exchange, Attorney General Palmer’s team will have access to the lists your men are compiling.”

  Thomas said, “Per specific requests that would be subject to my review, yes.”

  Thomas watched Finch give it some thought, as if he had a choice in the matter.

  “Acceptable.”

  Thomas stood. He reached across the desk.

  Finch stood and shook his hand. “So we have a deal.”

  “We have a contract, Agent Finch.” Thomas gripped Finch’s hand fast. “Do consider it inviolate.”

  Luther had noticed that Boston might have been different from the Midwest in a lot of ways—the people talked funny for one and everyone dressed in this city, dressed like they were going out to dinner and a show every day, even the children—but a stockyard was a stockyard. Same mud, same stench, same noise. And same job for coloreds—on the bottom rung. Isaiah’s friend Walter Grange had been there fifteen years and he’d risen to the post of key man for the pens, but any white man with fifteen years on the job would have made yard manager by now.

  Walter met Luther when he exited the streetcar at the top of Market Street in Brighton. Walter was a small man with huge white muttonchop sideburns to compensate, Luther guessed, for all the hair he’d lost up top. He had a chest like an apple barrel and short wishbone legs and as he led Luther down Market Street, his thick arms swung in concert with his hips. “Mr. Giddreaux said you were from the Midwest?”

  Luther nodded.

  “So you seen this before, then.”

  Luther said, “Worked the yards in Cincinnati.”

  “Well, I don’t know what Cincinnati’s like, but Brighton’s a whole stock town. Pretty much everything you see along Market here, that’s cattle business.”

  He pointed out the Cattlemen’s Hotel at the corner of Market and Washington and the rival Stockyard Arms across the street and gestured in the direction of packing companies and canneries and three butchers and the various rooming houses and flophouses for workers and salesmen.

  “You get used to the stench,” he said. “Me, I don’t even smell it no more.”

  Luther had stopped noticing it in Cincinnati, but now it was hard to recall how he’d accomplished that. The smokestacks emptied black spirals into the sky and the sky huffed it back down again and the oily air smelled of blood and fat and charred meat. Of chemicals and manure and hay and mud. Market Street flattened as it crossed Faneuil Street and it was here that the stockyards began, stretching for blocks on either side of the street with the train tracks cutting through their centers. The smell of manure grew worse, rising in a thick tide, and high fences with Cyclone wire up top sprouted out of the ground and the world was suddenly filled with dust and the sound of whistles and the neighing, mooing, and bleating of livestock. Walter Grange unlocked a wooden gate and led Luther through and the ground below grew dark and muddy.

  “Lot of people got their interests tied up in the yards,” Walter said. “You got small ranchers and big cattle outfits. You got order buyers and dealer buyers and commission agents and loan officers. You got railroad reps and telegraph operators and market analysts and ropers and handlers and teamsters to transport the livestock once it’s been sold. You got packers ready to buy in the morning and walk those cows right back out the yard and up to the slaughterhouses, have ’em sold for steaks by noon tomorrow. You got people work for the market news services and you got gatemen and yardmen and pen men and weigh-masters and more commission firms than you can shake a fist at. And we ain’t even talking about the unskilled labor yet.” He cocked one eyebrow at Luther. “That’d be you.”

  Luther looked around. Cincinnati all over again, but he must have forgotten a lot of Cincinnati, blocked it out. The yards were enormous. Miles of muddy aisles cut between wooden pens filled with snorting animals. Cows, hogs, sheep, lambs. Men ran every which way, some in the rubber boots and dungarees of yard workers, but others in suits and bow ties and straw boaters and still others in checked shirts and cowboy hats. Cowboy hats in Boston! He passed a scale the height of his house in Columbus, practically the width of it, too, and watched a man lead a dazed-looking heifer up there and hold up his hand to a man standing beside the scale with a pencil poised over a piece of paper. “Doing a whole draft, George.”

  “My apologies, Lionel. You go ahead.”

  The man led another cow and then a third and still another up onto that scale, and Luther wondered just how much weight that scale could take, if it could weigh a ship and the people on it.

  He’d fallen back of Walter and hurried to catch up as the man took a right turn down a path between yet more pens, and when Luther reached him, Walter said, “The key man takes responsibility for all the livestock comes off the trains on his shift. That’s me. I lead them to their catch pens and we keep ’em there, feed ’em, clean up after ’em until they get sold, and then a man shows up with a bill of sale and we release them to him.”

  He stopped at the next corner and handed Luther a shovel.

  Luther gave it a bitter smile. “Yeah, I remember this.”

  “Then I can save me some breath. We in charge of pens nineteen through fifty-seven. Got that?”

  Luther nodded.

  “Every time I empty one, you clean it and restock it with hay and water. End of the day, three times a week,
you go there”—he pointed—“and you clean that, too.”

  Luther followed his finger and saw the squat brown building at the west end of the yard. You didn’t have to know what it was to sense its mean purpose. Nothing that squat and unadorned and functional-looking could ever put a smile on anyone’s face.

  “The killing floor,” Luther said.

  “You got a problem with that, son?”

  Luther shook his head. “It’s a job.”

  Walter Grange agreed with a sigh and a pat on the back. “It’s a job.”

  Two days after Danny and Nora’s wedding, Connor met with Attorney General Palmer at his home in Washington, D.C. The windows were boarded up, the front rooms had been obliterated, their ceilings caved in; the staircase just past the entrance hall was shorn in half, with the bottom half indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble and the top half dangling above the entranceway. D.C. police and federal agents had set up a command post in what had once been the parlor, and they moved freely through the house as Mitchell Palmer’s valet led Connor to the office in the rear.

  Three men waited for him there. The eldest and fleshiest of them he recognized instantly as Mitchell Palmer. He was round without being quite portly and his lips were the thickest part of him; they sprouted from his face like a rose. He shook Connor’s hand, thanked him for coming, and introduced him to a thin BI agent named Rayme Finch and a dark-eyed, dark-haired Justice Department lawyer named John Hoover.

  Connor had to step over some books in order to take his seat. The explosion had shaken them from their shelves, and the built-in bookcases sported great cracks. Plaster and paint had fallen from the ceiling, and the window behind Mitchell Palmer bore two small fissures in the panes.

  Palmer caught his eye. “You see what they can do, these radicals.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But I won’t give them the satisfaction of moving out, I assure you.”

  “Very brave of you, sir.”

  Palmer swiveled his chair slightly from side to side as Hoover and Finch took theirs on either side of him.

  “Mr. Coughlin, are you happy with the direction in which our country is heading?”

  Connor pictured Danny and his whore dancing on their wedding day, sleeping in their soiled bed. “No, sir.”

  “And why is that?”

  “We seem to be giving away the keys to it.”

  “Well said, young Coughlin. Would you help us stop this habit?”

  “With pleasure, sir.”

  Palmer swiveled his chair until he was looking at the cracks in his window. “Ordinary times call for ordinary law. Would you call these times ordinary?”

  Connor shook his head. “I would not, sir.”

  “Extraordinary times, then…?”

  “Call for extraordinary measures.”

  “Just so. Mr. Hoover?”

  John Hoover hitched his pants at the knee and leaned forward. “The attorney general is determined to rout the evil from our midst. To this end, he has asked me to head a new section of the Bureau of Investigation to be known from here on as the General Intelligence Division or G-I-D. Our mandate, as the name suggests, is to gather intelligence against the radicals, the Communists and Bolsheviki, the anarchists and the Galleanists. In short, the enemies of a free and just society. You?”

  “Mr. Hoover?”

  “You?” Hoover’s eyes bulged. “You?”

  Connor said, “I’m not sure I—”

  “You, Coughlin? You, sir. Which are you?”

  “I’m none of those,” Connor said and the hardness of his own voice surprised him.

  “Then join us, Mr. Coughlin.” Mitchell Palmer turned back from his window and extended his hand across the desk.

  Connor stood and shook the hand. “I’d be honored, sir.”

  “Welcome to our table, son.”

  Luther was plastering walls on the first floor of the Shawmut Avenue building with Clayton Tomes when they heard three car doors slam outside and saw McKenna and two plainclothes cops exit the black Hudson and climb the stairs into the building.

  In McKenna’s eyes, as soon as he entered the room, Luther saw something far beyond the normal corruption, the normal disdain. He saw something so unhinged by rage it belonged in a pit, chained and caged.

  The two cops he’d brought with him spread out into the room. One of them carried a toolbox for some reason. Judging by the way it pulled his shoulder down, it was heavy. He placed it on the floor near the kitchen doorway.

  McKenna removed his hat and waved with it toward Clayton. “Good to see you again, son.”

  “Sir.”

  McKenna stopped by Luther and looked down at the bucket of plaster between them. “Luther, would you be offended if I asked you a rather arcane question?”

  Luther thought: So much for Danny or the captain taking care of this problem.

  “Nah, suh.”

  “I’m curious as to where you trace your ancestry,” McKenna said. “Africa? Haiti? Or Australia, eh? You could be one of the aboriginals, yeah? Do you know, son?”

  “What’s that, suh?”

  “Where you come from?”

  “I come from America. These here United States.”

  McKenna shook his head. “You live here now. But where’d your people come from, son? I ask ya—do you know?”

  Luther gave up. “I don’t, suh.”

  “I do.” He squeezed Luther’s shoulder. “Once you know what to look for, you can always tell where someone hails from. Your great-grandfather, Luther, based on that nose of yours and that kinky, tight hair and those truck-tire lips—he was from sub-Saharan Africa. Probably around Rhodesia’d be my guess. But your lighter skin and those freckles ’round your cheekbones are, God’s truth as I’m standing here, West Indian. So your great-grandfather was from the monkey tree and your great-grandmother from the island tree and they found their place as slaves in the New World and produced your grandfather who produced your father who produced you. But that New World, it isn’t exactly America now, is it? You’re like a country within the country, I’ll surely grant you, but hardly the country itself. You’re a non-American who was born in America and can never, ever become an American.”

  “Why’s that?” Luther stared back into the man’s soulless eyes.

  “Because you’re ebon, son. Negroid. Black honey in the land of white milk. In other words, Luther? You should have stayed home.”

  “No one asked.”

  “Then you should have fought harder,” McKenna said. “Because your true place in this world, Luther? Is back where you fucking came from.”

  “Mr. Marcus Garvey says pretty much the same thing,” Luther said.

  “Comparing me to Garvey, are we?” McKenna said with a slightly dreamy smile and a shrug. “’Tis no bother. Do you like working for the Coughlins?”

  “I did.”

  One of the cops sauntered over until he was directly behind Luther.

  “That’s right,” McKenna said. “I’d forgotten—you were let go. Killed a bunch of people in Tulsa, ran from your wife and child, came here to work for a police captain, and still you fucked that up. If you were a cat, I’d say you were near down to your last life.”

  Luther could feel Clayton’s eyes. Clayton would have heard about Tulsa through the grapevine. He would have never guessed, though, that his new friend could have been involved. Luther wanted to explain it, but all he could do was look back at McKenna.

  “What you want me to do now?” Luther said. “That’s the point here—get me to do something for you?”

  McKenna toasted that with a flask. “Coming along?”

  “What?” Luther said.

  “This building. Your remodeling.” McKenna lifted a crowbar off the floor.

  “I guess.”

  “Almost there, I’d say. ’Least on this floor.” He smashed out two windowpanes with the crowbar. “That help?”

  Some glass tinkled to the floor, and Luther wondered what it was in
some people made feeding hate so pleasant.

  The cop behind Luther chuckled softly. He stepped alongside him and caressed his chest with his nightstick. His cheeks were burned by the wind and his face reminded Luther of a turnip left too long in the fields. He smelled of whiskey.

  The other cop carried the toolbox across the room and placed it between Luther and McKenna.

  “We were men with an agreement. Men,” McKenna said, leaning in close enough for Luther to smell his whiskey-tongue and drugstore aftershave. “And you went running to Tommy Coughlin and his over-privileged whelp of a son? You thought that would save you, but, Lord, all it did was curse you.”

  He slapped Luther so hard Luther spun in place and fell to his hip.

  “Get up!”

  Luther stood.

  “You spoke out of turn about me?” McKenna kicked Luther in the shin so hard Luther had to replant his other leg so as not to fall. “You asked the royal Coughlins for special dispensation with me?”

  McKenna pulled his service revolver and placed it to Luther’s forehead. “I am Edward McKenna of the Boston Police Department. I am not someone else. I am not some lackey! I am Edward McKenna, Lieutenant, and you are remiss!”

  Luther tilted his eyes up. That black barrel fed from Luther’s head to McKenna’s hand like a growth.

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Don’t you ‘yes, suh’ me.” McKenna hit Luther’s head with the butt of the pistol.

  Luther’s knees dropped halfway to the floor but he snapped back up before his knees could make contact. “Yes, suh,” he said again.

  McKenna extended his arm and placed the barrel between Luther’s eyes again. He cocked the hammer. He uncocked it. He cocked it again. He gave Luther a wide, amber-toothed smile.

  Luther was dog-tired, bone-tired, heart-tired. He could see the fear covering Clayton’s face in a sweat, and he understood it, he could identify with it. But he couldn’t touch it. Not right now. Fear wasn’t his problem now. Sick was. He was sick of running and sick of this whole game he’d been playing since he could stand on two feet. Sick of cops, sick of power, sick of this world.

  “Whatever you’re gonna do, McKenna? Shit. Just fucking do it.”