“We lost one of our own today, men. A true policeman, a copper’s copper. We are lesser men now, and the world is a lesser place as well.” He lowered his head for a moment. “Today they took one of our own, but they didn’t take our honor.” He stared out at them, his eyes gone cold and clear. “They did not take our courage. They did not take our manhood. They just took one of our brothers.
“We’re going back into their territory tonight. Captain Vance and I will lead you. We are looking, specifically, for four men — Louis Fraina, Wychek Olafski, Pyotr Rastorov, and Luigi Broncona. We have photographs of Fraina and Olafski and sketches of the other two. But we won’t stop with them. We will subdue, without quarter, our common enemy. You all know what that enemy looks like. They wear a uniform as obvious as ours. Ours is blue, theirs is of coarse cloth and scraggly beard and watch cap. And they have the fanatics’ fire in their eyes. We are going to go out into those streets and we will take them back. Of this,” he said, and his eyes found the room, “there is no doubt. There is only resolve.” He gripped the podium, his eyes rolling slowly from left to right. “Tonight, my brothers, there is no rank. No difference between a first-year patrolman and a twenty-year gold shield. Because tonight we are all united in the red of our blood and the blue of our professional cloth. Make no mistake, we are soldiers. And as the poet wrote, ‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’ Let that be your benediction, men. Let that be your clarion call.”
He stepped from the podium and snapped a salute and the men rose as one and returned the salute. Danny compared it with this morning’s chaotic mix of fury and fear and found none of that. In accordance with McKenna’s wishes, the men had turned Spartan, utile, so fused to their sense of duty that they were indistinguishable from it.
Chapter twenty-seven
When the first detail of officers showed up at the door of The Revolutionary Age, Louis Fraina was waiting for them with two lawyers in attendance. He was cuffed and led out to the wagon on Humboldt Avenue and his lawyers rode with him.
The evening papers had hit the streets by this time and outrage at the morning attack on police had been growing throughout the dinner hour while the streetlamps grew yellow. Danny and a detail of nineteen other officers were dropped at the corner of Warren and St. James and told by Stan Billups, the sergeant in charge, to spread out, taking the streets in four-man squads. Danny went a few blocks south along Warren with Matt March and Bill Hardy and a guy from the One-Two he’d never met before named Dan Jeffries, Jeffries inexplicably excited that he’d met another guy with the same first name, as if this were a favorable omen. Along the sidewalk stood a half dozen men in their work clothes, men in tweed caps and frayed suspenders, dockworkers probably, who’d apparently read the evening papers and been drinking while they had.
“Give those Bolshie’s hell,” one of them called, and the rest of them cheered. The silence that followed was awkward, the silence of strangers introduced at a party neither had much wished to attend, and then three men walked out of a coffee shop a few doors down. Two wore spectacles and carried books. All three wore the coarse clothing of Slavic immigrants. Danny saw it happening before it actually did:
One of the Slavic men looked over his shoulder. Two of the men on the sidewalk pointed. Matt March called, “Hey, you three!”
That was all it took.
The three men ran, and the dockworkers broke off in pursuit, and Hardy and Jeffries ran after them. A half block down the Slavs were tackled to the pavement.
Hardy and Jeffries reached the pile and Hardy pulled one of the dockworkers back and then his nightstick caught the glow of the streetlamp as he swung it down on the head of one of the Slavs.
Danny said, “Hey!” but Matt March caught him by the arm.
“Dan, wait.”
“What?”
March gave him a level gaze. “This is for Stoddard.”
Danny pulled his arm free. “We don’t know they’re Bolsheviks.”
“We don’t know they’re not.” March twirled his nightstick and smiled at Danny.
Danny shook his head and walked up the street.
March called, “You’re taking the narrow view, Officer.”
By the time he reached the dockworkers, they were already turning away. Two of the victims crawled along the street while the third lay on the cobblestones, his hair black with blood, his broken wrist cradled against his chest.
“Jesus,” Danny said.
“Oops,” Hardy said.
“Hell you guys doing? Get an ambulance.”
“Fuck him,” Jeffries said and spit on the guy. “Fuck his friends, too. You want an ambulance? You find a call box and ask for one yourself.”
Up the street, Sergeant Billups appeared. He talked to March, met Danny’s eyes and then walked up the street toward him. The dockworkers had disappeared. Shouts and breaking glass echoed from a block or two over.
Billups looked at the man on the ground, then at Danny. “Problem, Dan?”
“Just want an ambulance for the guy,” Danny said.
Billups gave the man another glance. “He looks fine to me, Officer.”
“He ain’t.”
Billups stood over the man. “You hurt, sweetheart?”
The man said nothing, just held his broken wrist tighter against his chest.
Billups ground his heel into the man’s ankle. His victim writhed and moaned through cracked teeth. Billups said, “Can’t hear you, Boris. What’s that?”
Danny reached for Billups’s arm and Billups slapped his hand away.
A bone cracked and the man let out a high sigh of disbelief.
“All better now, sweetie?” Billups took his foot off the man’s ankle. The man rolled over and gasped into the cobblestones. Billups put his arm around Danny and walked him a few feet away.
“Look, Sarge, I understand. We’re all looking to knock some heads. Me, too. But the right heads, don’t you think? We don’t even—”
“I heard you were seeking aid and comfort for the enemy this afternoon, too, Dan. So listen,” Billups said with a smile, “you might be Tommy Coughlin’s kid and that gets you some passes, okay? But if you keep acting like a pinko cocksucker? Tommy Coughlin’s kid or no, I’ll take it fucking personal.” He tapped his nightstick lightly off Danny’s tunic. “I’m giving you a direct order — get back up that street and hurt some subversive assholes, or else get out of my sight.”
When Danny turned, Jeffries stood there, giggling softly. He walked past him and then back up the street past Hardy. When he reached March, March shrugged, and Danny kept walking. He turned the corner and saw three paddy wagons at the end of the block, saw fellow officers dragging anyone with a mustache or watch cap down the sidewalk and heaving them into the wagons.
He wandered for several blocks, came across the cops and their newly found working-class brothers going at a dozen men who’d wandered out of a meeting of the Lower Roxbury Socialist Fraternal Organization. The mob had the men pressed back against the doors. The men fought back, but then the doors opened behind them and some of them fell backward and others tried to hold back the mob with nothing more than flailing arms. The left door was wrenched off its hinges and the mob washed over the men and flowed into the building. Danny watched out of his good eye and knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing at all. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.