The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  “They will never get it in their heads,” Storrow said. “You think you’re fighting a larger fight, Officer, and maybe you are. But it’s a fight as old as time, and it will never end. No one will wave a white flag, nor ever concede defeat. Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J. P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Gods don’t think they can become men.”

  Danny turned and met the man’s eyes, said nothing.

  “If you remain adamant on AFL affiliation, every hope you ever held for a better lot will be ground into dust.”

  Danny looked back at Nora and Luther again. “Do I have your word that if I sell my men on withdrawal from the AFL, the city will grant us our due?”

  “You have my word and the mayor’s and the governor’s.”

  “It’s your word I care about.” Danny held out his hand. “I’ll sell it to my men.”

  Storrow shook his hand, then held it firm. “Smile, young Coughlin—we’re going to save this city, you and I.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Danny sold it to them. In Fay Hall, at nine the next morning. After the vote, which was a shaky 406 to 377, Sid Polk asked, “What if they shaft us again?”

  “They won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” Danny said. “But at this point, I don’t see any logic to it.”

  “What if this was never about logic?” someone called.

  Danny held up his hands because no answer occurred to him.

  Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Peters, and James Storrow made the drive to Commissioner Curtis’s house in Nahant late Sunday afternoon. They met the commissioner out on his back deck which overlooked the Atlantic under a sallow sky.

  Several things were clear to Storrow within moments of their assemblage. The first was that Coolidge had no respect for Peters and Peters hated him for it. Every time Peters opened his mouth to make a point, Coolidge cut him off.

  The second thing, and the more worrisome, was that time had done nothing to remove from Edwin Upton Curtis the air of self-loathing and misanthropy that lived in him so fully it colored his flesh like a virus.

  Peters said, “Commissioner Curtis, we have—”

  “—come,” Coolidge said, “to inform you that Mr. Storrow may have found a resolution to our crisis.”

  Peters said, “And that—”

  “—if you were to hear our reasoning, I’m sure you would conclude we have all reached an acceptable compromise.” Coolidge sat back in his deck chair.

  “Mr. Storrow,” Curtis said, “how have you been faring since last we met?”

  “Well, Edwin. Yourself?”

  Curtis said to Coolidge, “Mr. Storrow and I last met at a fabulous fete thrown by Lady Dewar in Louisburg Square. A legendary night, that, wouldn’t you say, James?”

  Storrow couldn’t recall the night for the life of him. Lady Dewar had been dead more than a decade. As socialites went, she’d been presentable, but hardly elite. “Yes, Edwin, it was a memorable occasion.”

  “I was mayor then, of course,” Curtis said to Peters.

  “And a fine one you were, Commissioner.” Peters looked over at Coolidge as if surprised the governor had let him finish a thought.

  It was the wrong thought, though. A dark squall passed through Curtis’s small eyes, taking the blithe compliment Peters had delivered and twisting it into an insult. By calling him “Commissioner,” the current mayor had reminded him of what he no longer was.

  Dear Lord, Storrow thought, this city could burn to its bricks because of narcissism and a meaningless faux pas.

  Curtis stared at him. “Do you think the men have a grievance, James?”

  Storrow took his time searching for his pipe. He used three matches to get it lit in the ocean breeze and then crossed his legs. “I think they do, Edwin, yes, but let’s be clear that you inherited those grievances from the previous administration. No one believes that you are the cause of those grievances or that you have done anything but attempt to deal with them honorably.”

  Curtis nodded. “I offered them a raise. They turned it down flat.”

  Because it was sixteen years too late, Storrow thought.

  “I initiated several committees to study their work conditions.”

  Cherry-picked with toadies, Storrow thought.

  “It’s an issue of respect now. Respect for the office. Respect for this country.”

  “Only if you make it thus, Edwin.” Storrow uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “The men respect you, Commissioner. They do. And they respect this Commonwealth. I believe my report will bear that out.”

  “Your report,” Curtis said. “What about my report? When do I share my voice?”

  Good God, it was like fighting over toys in a nursery.

  “Commissioner Curtis,” the governor said, “we all understand your position. You should no more be beholden to the brazen demands of workingmen than—”

  “Beholden?” Curtis said. “I am no such thing, sir. I am extorted. That is what this is, pure and simple. Extortion.”

  “Be that as it may,” Peters said, “we think that the best course—”

  “—is to forgo personal feelings at this time,” Coolidge said.

  “This is not personal.” Curtis craned his head forward and screwed his face into a mask of victimization. “This is public. This is principle. This is Seattle, gentlemen. And St. Petersburg. And Liverpool. If we let them win here, then we truly will be Russianized. The principles that Jefferson and Franklin and Washington stood for will—”

  “Edwin, please.” Storrow couldn’t help himself. “I may have brokered a settlement that will allow us to regain our footing, both locally and nationally.”

  Edwin Curtis clapped his hands together. “Well, I for one, would love to hear it.”

  “The mayor and the city council have found the funds to raise the level of the men’s pay to a fair scale for 1919 and beyond. It’s fair, Edwin, not a gross capitulation, I assure you. We’ve further designated monies to address and improve the working conditions in the precinct houses. It’s a tight budget we’re working with and some other public workers will not receive departmental funding they’d been counting on, but we tried to minimize the overall damage. The greater good will be served.”

  Curtis nodded, his lips white. “You think so.”

  “I do, Edwin.” Storrow kept his voice soft, warm.

  “These men affiliated with a national union against my express orders, in open contempt of the rules and regulations of this police department. That affiliation is an affront to this country.”

  Storrow recalled the wonderful spring of his freshman year at Harvard when he’d joined the boxing team and experienced a purity of violence unlike any he could have ever imagined if he wasn’t pummeling and being pummeled every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. His parents found out eventually and that put an end to his pugilism, but, oh, how he would have loved to lace up the gloves right now and pound Curtis’s nose down to the rocks of itself.

  “Is that your sticking point, Edwin? The AFL affiliation?”

  Curtis threw up his hands. “Of course it is!”

  “And if, let us say, the men agreed to withdraw from that affiliation?”

  Curtis narrowed his eyes. “Have they?”

  “If they did, Edwin,” Storrow said slowly, “what then?”

  “I would take it under advisement,” Curtis said.

  “Advisement of what?” Peters said.

  Storrow shot him a glare he hoped was sharp enough and Peters dropped his eyes.

  “Advisement, Mr. Mayor, of the larger picture.” Curtis’s eyes had moved inward, something Storrow had seen often in financial negotiations—self-pity disguised as inner counsel.

  “Edwin,” he said, “the men will withdraw from the American Federation of Labor. The
y’ll concede. The question is: Will you?”

  The ocean breeze found the awning over the doorway and the flaps of the tarp snapped against themselves.

  “The nineteen men should be disciplined but not punished,” Governor Coolidge said. “Prudence, Commissioner, is all we ask.”

  “Common sense,” Peters said.

  Soft waves broke against the rocks.

  Storrow found Curtis staring at him, as if awaiting his final plea. He stood and extended his hand to the little man. Curtis gave the hand a damp shake of his fingers.

  “You have my every confidence,” Storrow said.

  Curtis gave him a grim smile. “That’s heartening, James. I’ll take it under advisement, rest assured.”

  Later that afternoon, in an incident that would have proven a profound embarrassment to the Boston Police Department if it had been reported to the press, a police detail arrived at the new headquarters of the NAACP on Shawmut Avenue. Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, armed with a search warrant, dug up the floor in the kitchen and the yard behind the headquarters.

  As guests who’d come to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony stood around him, he found nothing.

  Not even a toolbox.

  The Storrow Report was released to the papers that night.

  Monday morning, portions of it were published, and the editorial pages of all four major dailies proclaimed James J. Storrow the savior of the city. Crews arrived to break down the emergency hospital tents that had been erected across the city, and the extra ambulance drivers were sent home. The presidents of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s ordered employee-firearm training to cease and all company-provided weapons were confiscated. Divisions of the State Guard and platoons of the United States Cavalry, which had been mustering in Concord, found their alert status downgraded from red to blue.

  At three-thirty that afternoon, the Boston City Council passed a resolution to name either a building or a public thoroughfare after James J. Storrow.

  At four, Mayor Andrew Peters left his office at City Hall to find a crowd awaiting him. The throng cheered.

  At five-forty-five, policemen of all eighteen precincts met for evening roll call. It was then that the duty sergeant of each precinct house informed the men that Commissioner Curtis had ordered the immediate termination of the nineteen men he’d suspended the previous week.

  In Fay Hall, at eleven in the evening, the members of the Boston Police Department Union voted to reaffirm their affiliation with the American Federation of Labor.

  At eleven-oh-five, they voted to strike. It was agreed that this action would occur at tomorrow evening’s roll call, a Tuesday, when fourteen hundred policemen would walk off the job.

  The vote was unanimous.

  CHAPTER thirty-five

  In his empty kitchen, Eddie McKenna poured two fingers of Power’s Irish whiskey into a glass of warm milk and drank it as he ate the plate of chicken and mashed potatoes Mary Pat had left on the stove. The kitchen ticked with its own quiet, and the only light came from a small gas lamp over the table behind him. Eddie ate at the sink, as he always did when he was alone. Mary Pat was out at a meeting of the Watch and Ward Society, also known as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. Eddie, who barely believed in naming dogs, would never understand naming an organization, not once, but twice. Ah well, now that Edward Junior was at Rutgers and Beth was off to the convent, at least it kept Mary Pat out of his hair, and the thought of all those frigid biddies klatching together to rail against the sots and the suffragettes brought a smile to his face in the dark kitchen on Telegraph Hill.

  He finished his meal. He placed the plate in the sink and the empty glass beside it. He got the bottle of Irish and poured himself a tumbler-ful and carried the tumbler and the bottle up the stairs with him. A fine night weatherwise. Good for the roof and a few hours’ thinking because, with the exception of the weather, everything had turned to right shit, it had. He half hoped the Bolshevik policemen’s union would strike, if only so it would keep this afternoon’s debacle at the NAACP off the front page. Good Lord how that nigger had set him up. Luther Laurence, Luther Laurence, Luther Laurence. The name ran through his head like mockery defined and contempt distilled.

  Oh, Luther. You’ll have fair cause to rue the day you ever left your Momma’s tired, old cunny. I swear that to you, boy.

  Out on the roof, the stars hung fuzzy above him, as if they’d been sketched by an unsure hand. Wisps of cloud slid past wisps of smoke from the Cotton Waste Factory. From here he could see the lights of the American Sugar Refining Company, a four-block monstrosity that gave continuous birth to sticky pollutants and rodents you could saddle, and the Fort Point Channel smelled of oil, yet he couldn’t escape the pleasure it gave him to stand up here and survey the neighborhood he and Tommy Coughlin had first worked as pups in their newfound homeland. They’d met on the boat over, two stowaways who’d been pinched on opposite ends of the ship the second day out and been forced into slave labor in the galley. At night, chained together to the legs of a sink the size of a horse trough, they’d traded stories of the Old Sod. Tommy had left behind a drunken father and a sickly twin brother in a tenant-farmer’s hut in Southern Cork. Eddie had left behind nothing but an orphanage in Sligo. Never knew his da, and his ma had passed from the fever when he was eight. So there they were, two crafty lads, scarcely in their teens, but full of piss, sure, full of ambition.

  Tommy, with his dazzling, Cheshire grin and twinkling eyes, turned out to be a bit more ambitious than Eddie. While Eddie had, without question, made a fine living in his adopted homeland, Thomas Coughlin had thrived. Perfect family, perfect life, a lifetime of graft piled so high in his office safe it would make Croesus blush. A man who wore his power like a white suit on a coal black night.

  The division of power hadn’t been so apparent at the outset. When they’d joined the force, gone through the academy, walked their first beats, nothing had particularly distinguished one young man from the other. But somewhere after their first few years on the force, Tommy had revealed a stealthy intellect while Eddie himself had continued with his combination of cajolery and threat, his body growing wider every year while Perfect Tommy stayed lean and canny. An exam taker suddenly, a riser, a velvet glove.

  “Ah, I’ll catch you yet, Tommy,” Eddie whispered, though he knew it was a lie. He hadn’t the head for business and politics the way Tommy did. And if he ever could have gained such gifts, the time was long past. No, he would have to content himself—

  The door to his shed was open. Just barely, but open. He went to it and opened it fully. It looked as he had left it—a broom and some garden tools to one side, two of his battered satchels to the right. He pushed them farther into the corner and reached back until he found the lip of the floorboard. He pulled it up, trying to block out the memory of doing almost the exact same thing on Shawmut Avenue this afternoon, all the well-dressed coons standing around him with stoic faces while, on the inside, they howled with laughter.

  Below the floorboard were the bundles. He’d always preferred thinking of them that way. Let Thomas put his in the bank or real estate or the wall safe in his office. Eddie liked his bundles and he liked them up here where he could sit after a few drinks and thumb through them, smell them. Once there got to be too many—a problem he happily ran into about once every three years—he’d move them into a safe-deposit box at the First National in Uphams Corner. Until then, he’d sit with them. There they were now, sure, all in their places like bugs in a rug, just as he’d left them, they were. He put the floorboard back. He stood. He closed the shed door until he heard the lock click.

  He stopped in the middle of the roof. He cocked his head.

  At the far end of the roof a rectangular shape rested against the parapet. A foot long, it was, and half that in height.

  What was this now?

  Eddie took a pull from his tumbler of Power’s and looked around the dark roof. He listened. Not the way most people would listen, but the wa
y a copper with twenty years chasing mutts into dark alleys and dark buildings listened. The air that just a moment earlier had smelled of oil and the Fort Point Channel, now smelled of his own humid flesh and the gravel at his feet. In the harbor, a boat tooted its horn. In the park below, someone laughed. Somewhere nearby, a window closed. An automobile wheezed up G Street, its gears grinding.

  No moonlight, the nearest gas lamp a floor below.

  Eddie listened some more. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the night, he was certain the rectangular shape was no illusion, no trick of the darkness. It was there all right, and he damn well knew what it was.

  A toolbox.

  The toolbox, the one he’d given Luther Laurence, the one filled with pistols he’d spirited out of the evidence rooms of various station houses over the last decade.

  Eddie placed the bottle of Power’s on the gravel and removed his .38 from its holster. He thumbed back the hammer.

  “You up here?” He held the gun by his ear and scanned the darkness. “You up here, son?”

  Another minute of silence. Another minute in which he didn’t move.

  And still nothing but the sounds of the neighborhood below and the quiet of the roof in front of him. He lowered his service revolver. He tapped it off his outer thigh as he crossed the roof and reached the toolbox. Here the light was much better; it bounced upward from the lamps in the park and those along Old Harbor Street and it bounced from the factories off the dark channel water and up toward Telegraph Hill. There was little question that it was the toolbox he’d given Luther—same chips in the paint, same scuff marks over the handle. He stared down at it and took another drink and noticed the number of people strolling through the park. A rarity at this time of night, but it was a Friday and maybe the first Friday in a month that hadn’t been marred by heavy rain.

  It was the memory of rain that got him to look over the parapet at his gutters and notice that one had come loose from its fasteners and jutted out from the brick, canting to the right and tipping downward. He was already opening the toolbox before he remembered that it held only pistols, and it occurred to him what a harebrained instinct it had been to open it before calling the Bomb Squad. It opened without incident, however, and Eddie McKenna holstered his service revolver and stared in at the last thing he expected to find in this particular toolbox.