One of the paramedics grimaced. “He ain’t wearing a badge? He’ll be lucky we get to him by sundown.” They walked off.
Nathan Bishop opened his left eye. It was startlingly white in the ruin of his face.
Danny opened his mouth. He wanted to say something. He wanted to say, I’m sorry. He wanted to say, Forgive me. Instead, he said nothing.
Nathan’s lips were sectioned into strips, but behind them spread a bitter smile.
“My name’s Nathan Bishop,” he slurred. “What’s yours, eh?”
He closed his eye again, and Danny lowered his head.
Luther had an hour for lunch, and he hustled back across the Dover Street Bridge and over to the Giddreauxs’ house on St. Botolph, which, these days, was the operating headquarters of the Boston NAACP. Mrs. Giddreaux worked there with a dozen other women pretty much every day, and it was in the very basement of the house on St. Botolph where the Crisis was printed and then mailed out to the rest of the country. Luther came home to an empty house, as he knew he would — on fine days, the girls all took their lunch in Union Park a few blocks away, and this was the finest day, thus far, of an often unforgiving spring. He let himself into Mrs. Giddreaux’s office. He sat behind her desk. He opened her drawer. He lifted the ledger out and placed it on the desk and that’s where it was sitting half an hour later when Mrs. Giddreaux came back through the door.
She hung up her coat and her scarf. “Luther, honey, what’re you doing in here?”
Luther tapped the ledger with his finger. “I don’t give this list to a policeman, he’s gonna have my wife arrested, have our baby taken from her soon as it’s born.”
Mrs. Giddreaux’s smile froze and then vanished. “Excuse me?”
Luther repeated himself.
Mrs. Giddreaux sat in the chair across from him. “Tell me all of it.”
Luther told her about everything except the vault he’d built under the kitchen floorboards on Shawmut Avenue. Until he knew what McKenna intended it for, he wasn’t going to speak of it. As he talked, Mrs. Giddreaux’s kind, old face lost its kindness and lost its age, too. It grew as smooth and unmoving as a headstone.
When he finished, she said, “You’ve never given him a thing he could use against us? Never once played the rat?”
Luther stared back at her, his mouth open.
“Answer my question, Luther. This is no child’s game.”
“No,” Luther said. “I never gave him anything.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Luther didn’t say anything.
“He wouldn’t just get you under his thumb and not dirty you up a little bit in his filth with him. The police don’t work that way. He would have sent you in with something to plant here or at the new building, something illegal.”
Luther shook his head.
She looked back at him, her breaths coming soft and measured.
Luther shook his head again.
“Luther.”
Luther told her about the vault.
She looked at him with such pained confusion Luther wanted to jump out the window. “Why didn’t you just come to us the moment he approached you?”
Luther said, “I don’t know.”
She shook her head. “Don’t you trust anyone, son? Anyone?”
Luther kept his mouth shut.
Mrs. Giddreaux reached for the phone on her desk and tapped the cradle once, tucked her hair behind her ear as she placed the receiver to her ear. “Edna? Girl, send every typist you’ve got up to the main floor. Get them all in the parlor and the dining room. You hear? Right now. And tell them to carry those typewriters with them. Oh, and Edna? You have phone directories down there, don’t you? No, I can’t use Boston. You have Philadelphia? Good. Send that up, too.”
She hung up and tapped her fingers lightly off her lips. When she looked at Luther again, the anger was gone from her eyes, replaced by the shine of excitement. Then her face darkened again and those fingers stopped tapping.
“What?” Luther said.
“No matter what you bring him tonight, he may just have you arrested or shot.”
“Why would he do that?” Luther said.
She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Because he can. Let’s start there.” She shook her head slightly. “He’ll do it, Luther, because you got him the list. That’s not something you’ll be able to tell someone about from prison.”
“What if I don’t bring it?”
“Oh, then he’ll just kill you,” she said mildly. “Shoot you in the back. No, you’ll have to bring it.” She sighed.
Luther was still back at the “kill you” part.
“I’m going to have to call some people. Dr. Du Bois for starters.” Her fingers tapped her chin now. “Legal Department in New York, that’s for sure. Legal Department in Tulsa, too.”
“Tulsa?”
She glanced back at him, as if just recalling he was still in the room. “If this blows up, Luther, and some policeman comes to arrest your wife? We’ll have counsel waiting for her on the steps of the county jail before she even arrives. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?”
Luther said, “I … I … I—”
“You, you, you,” Mrs. Giddreaux said and then gave him a small, disappointed smile. “Luther, your heart is good. You never sold your people out and you sat here and waited for me when a lesser man would have been off down the street with that ledger. And, son, I do appreciate it. But you’re still a boy, Luther. A child. If you trusted us four months ago, you wouldn’t be in this mess, and neither would we.” She reached across the desk and patted his hand. “It’s okay. It is. Every bear was once a cub.”
She led him out of the office into the living room as a dozen women entered carrying typewriters, their wrists straining from the weight. Half were colored women, the other half were white, college girls mostly, from money mostly, too, and those ones glanced at Luther with a bit of fear and a bit of something else he didn’t care to think too much about.
“Girls, half stay in here, half of you get in that room yonder. Who has the phone directory?”
One of the girls had it on top of her typewriter and tilted her arms so Mrs. Giddreaux could see it.
“Take it with you, Carol.”
“What we gone do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?”
Mrs. Giddreaux looked up sharply at the girl. “What are we, Regina, going to do with it, Regina.”
“What are we going to do with it, Mrs. Giddreaux?” Regina stammered.
Mrs. Giddreaux smiled at Luther. “We’re going to tear it into twelfths, girls, and then we’re going to type it all over again.”
The cops who were able to walk on their own made their way back to the Oh-Nine and were attended to by paramedics in the basement. Before he’d left the Dudley Opera House, Danny had watched the ambulance drivers toss Nathan Bishop and five other damaged radicals into the back of their wagon like fish tossed on ice, before slamming the doors shut and driving off. In the basement, Danny’s shoulder was cleaned and stitched and he was given a bag of ice for his eye, though it was too late to do much about the swelling. Half a dozen men, who’d thought they were okay, weren’t, and they were helped back up the stairs and out onto the street where ambulances took them to Mass General. A team from Department Supply showed up with fresh uniforms that were handed out to the men after Captain Vance reminded them with some embarrassment that the cost of the uniforms, as always, would come out of the men’s pay, but he’d see what he could do about getting a onetime reduction on the cost, given the circumstances.
When they were all assembled in the basement, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna took the podium. He bore a gash on his neck, treated and cleaned but unbandaged, and his white collar was black with blood. When he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, the men leaned forward in their folding chairs.