Luther went to Costello’s on Commercial Wharf and waited outside because it was whites-only. He stood a long time. One hour.
No McKenna.
In his right hand, he held a paper bag with fruit he’d slipped out of the Coughlin household to give to Nora, as long as McKenna didn’t decide to shoot him or arrest him tonight. The “list,” typed up from fifty thousand telephone users in Philadelphia, was tucked under his left arm.
Two hours.
No McKenna.
Luther left the wharf and walked up toward Scollay Square. Maybe McKenna had been hurt in the line of duty. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. Maybe he’d been shot dead by plug-uglies with an ax to grind.
Luther whistled and hoped.
Danny wandered the streets until he found himself heading along Eustis Street toward Washington. He decided he’d take a right when he reached Washington and cross the city until he reached the North End. He had no intention of stopping back at the Oh-One to sign out. He wasn’t changing out of his uniform. He walked through Roxbury in sweet night air that smelled more of summer than spring, and all around him the rule of law was being enforced, as anyone who looked like a Bolshevik or an anarchist, a Slav, an Italian, or a Jew was learning the price of the likeness. They lay against curbs, stoops, sat against lamp poles. On the cement and the tar — their blood, their teeth. A man ran into an intersection a block up and took a police cruiser to his knees. Airborne, he clawed at space. When he landed, the three cops who’d exited the cruiser held his arm to the ground while the cop who’d stayed behind the wheel drove over his hand.
Danny considered going back to his room on Salem Street and sitting alone with the barrel of his service revolver propped over his lower teeth, the metal on his tongue. In the war, they’d died by the millions. For nothing but real estate. And now, in the streets of the world, the same battle continued. Today, Boston. Tomorrow, someplace else. The poor fighting the poor. As they’d always done. As they were encouraged to. And it would never change. He finally realized that. It would never change.
He looked up at the black sky, at the salted splay of dots. That’s all they were. That, and nothing more. And if there was a God inveigled behind them, then He had lied. He’d promised the meek they would inherit the earth. They wouldn’t. They’d only inherit the small piece they fertilized.
That was the joke.
He saw Nathan Bishop staring at him through a kicked-in face and asking his name, the shame he’d felt, the horror at his very self. He leaned against a streetlamp pole. I can’t do this anymore, he told the sky. That man was my brother, if not of blood then of heart and philosophy. He saved my life and I couldn’t even get him proper medical care. I am shit. I can’t take another fucking step.
Across the street, yet another mass of police and workingmen taunted a small group of residents. At least this mob showed some mercy, allowing a pregnant woman to detach from the other victims and walk away without harm. She hurried along the sidewalk, her shoulders hunched, her hair covered by a dark shawl, and Danny’s thoughts returned to his room on Salem Street, to the gun in his holster, the bottle of scotch.
The woman passed him and turned the corner and he noticed that from behind you’d never guess she was pregnant. She had the walk of the young, the unencumbered, not yet weighted down by work or children or graying wishes. She—
Tessa.
Danny was crossing the street before the word had even passed through his head.
Tessa.
He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He got to the other side of the street and stayed a full block behind her, and the more he watched her walk with that confident languor, the more convinced he became. He passed a call box, then another, but never thought to unlock either of them and phone for help. There was no one in the station houses anyway; they were all out in the streets getting payback. He removed his helmet and coat and tucked them under his right arm, over his gun, and crossed to the other side of the street. As she reached Shawmut Avenue, she looked down the sidewalk, but he wasn’t there, so she learned nothing, but he confirmed everything. It was Tessa. Same dark skin, same etched mouth jutting like a shelf above her chin.
She turned right on Shawmut, and he lagged for a few moments, knowing it was wide there and if he reached the corner too early, she’d have to be blind not to see him. He counted down from five and started walking again. He reached the corner and saw her a block down, turning onto Hammond Street.
Three men in the rear seat of a touring car were looking back at her while the men in the front seat looked at him, slowing, noticing his blue pants, the blue coat under his arm. They were all heavily bearded. They all wore watch caps. The men in back of the open car brandished sticks. The front-seat passenger narrowed his eyes and Danny recognized him: Pyotr Glaviach, the oversize Estonian who could out-drink any saloon’s worth of men and probably outfight them all, too. Pyotr Glaviach, the veteran of the most vicious Lettish warfare in the motherland. The man who’d considered Danny his fellow pamphleteer, his comrade, his brother-in-arms against capitalist oppression.
Danny had found there were times when violence or the threat of it slowed the world down, when everything came at you as if through water. But there were just as many times when violence moved faster than a clock could tick, and this was one of those. As soon as he and Glaviach recognized each other, the car stopped and the men piled out. Danny’s coat got caught on the butt of his pistol as he tried to clear it. Glaviach’s arms closed over his, pinning them to his side. He lifted Danny off his feet and carried him across the sidewalk and rammed his back into a stone wall.
A stick hit his blackened eye.
“Say something.” Glaviach spit in his face and squeezed his body harder.
Danny didn’t have the air to speak so he spit back in the big man’s hairy face, saw that his phlegm already had some blood in it as it landed in the man’s eyes.
Glaviach rammed his skull into Danny’s nose. His head exploded with yellow light and shadows descended on the men around him, as if the sky were dropping. Someone hit his head with a stick again.
“Our comrade, Nathan, you know what happened to him today?” Glaviach shook Danny’s body as if he weighed no more than a child. “He lose his ear. Maybe sight in one eye. He lose that. What you lose?”
Hands grabbed at his gun and there wasn’t much he could do about it because his arms were numb. Fists battered his torso, back, and neck, yet he felt perfectly calm. He felt Death on the street with him and Death’s voice was soft. Death said: It’s okay. It’s time. His front pocket was ripped from his pant leg and loose change fell to the sidewalk. The button, too. Danny watched with an unreasonable sense of loss as it rolled off the curb and fell through a sewer grate.
Nora, he thought. Goddammit. Nora.
When they were done, Pyotr Glaviach found Danny’s service revolver in the gutter. He picked it up and dropped it on top of the unconscious cop’s chest. Pyotr recalled all the men — fourteen — he’d killed, face-to-face, over the years. This number did not include an entire unit of czarist guards they’d trapped in the center of a burning wheat field. He could still smell that odor seven years later, could hear them crying like babies as the flames found their hair, their eyes. You could never lose the smell from your nostrils, the sounds from your ears. You couldn’t undo any of it. Or wash it off. He was tired of the killing. It was why he’d come to America. Because he was so tired. It always led to more.
He spit on the traitor cop a couple more times and then he and his comrades returned to the touring car and drove away.