Luther noticed one of Danny’s cop friends watching him raise the bottle to his lips, the guy making note which whiskey he wouldn’t be drinking the rest of the night.
“Do you, Luther? You think I’m trying to prove something? Show what a free-minded white man I am?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing.” Luther handed the bottle back.
Danny took another swig. “Ain’t doing shit, except trying to get my friend to dance with my wife on her wedding day because she asked me to.”
“Danny.” Luther could feel the liquor riding in him, itching. “Things is.”
“Things is?” Danny cocked an eyebrow.
Luther nodded. “As they’ve always been. And they don’t change just because you want them to.”
Nora crossed the roof toward them, a little tipsy herself judging by the sway of her, a champagne glass held loosely in one hand, cigarette in the other.
Before Luther could speak, Danny said, “He don’t want to dance.”
Nora turned her lower lip down at that. She wore a pearl-colored gown of satin messaline and silver tinsel. The drop skirt was wrinkled and the whole outfit a hair on the sloppy side now, but she still had those eyes, and that face made Luther think of peace, think of home.
“I think I’ll cry.” Her eyes were gay and shiny with alcohol. “Boo hoo.”
Luther chuckled. He noticed a lot of people looking at them, just as he’d feared.
He took Nora’s hand with a roll of his eyes and she tugged him to his feet and the violinist and the accordionist began to play, and she led him out to the center of the roof under the half moon and her hand was warm in his. His other hand found the small of her back and he could feel the heat coming off the skin there and off her jaw and the pulse of her throat. She smelled of alcohol and jasmine and that undeniable whiteness he’d noticed the first time he’d ever put his arms around her, as if her flesh had never been touched by dew. A papery smell, starchy.
“It’s an odd world, is it not?” she said.
“Most certainly.”
Her brogue was thicker with the alcohol. “I’m sorry you lost your job.”
“I’m not. I got another one.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Stockyards. Start day after next.”
Luther raised his arm and she swirled under it and then turned back into his chest.
“You are the truest friend I’ve ever had.” She spun again, as light as summer.
Luther laughed. “You’re drunk, girl.”
“I am,” she said gleefully. “But you’re still family, Luther. To me.” She nodded at Danny. “To him, too. Are we your family yet, Luther?”
Luther looked into her face and the rest of the roof evaporated. What a strange woman. Strange man. Strange world.
“Sure, sister,” he said. “Sure.”
The day of his eldest son’s wedding, Thomas came to work to find Agent Rayme Finch waiting for him in the anteroom outside the desk sergeant’s counter.
“Come to register a complaint, have we?”
Finch stood, straw boater in hand. “If I may have a word.”
Thomas ushered him through the squad room and back to his office. He removed his coat and hat and hung them on the tree by the file cabinets and asked Finch if he wanted coffee.
“Thank you.”
Thomas pressed the intercom button. “Stan, two coffees, please.” He looked over at Finch. “Welcome back. Staying long?”
Finch gave that a noncommittal twitch of the shoulders.
Thomas removed his scarf and placed it on the tree over his coat and then moved last night’s stack of incident reports from his ink blotter to the left side of his desk. Stan Beck brought the coffee and left. Thomas handed a cup across the desk to Finch.
“Cream or sugar?”
“Neither.” Finch took the cup with a nod.
Thomas added cream to his own cup. “What brings you by?”
“I understand that you do, in fact, have quite a network of men attending meetings of the various radical groups in your city, that you even have some who’ve infiltrated a few groups under deep cover.” Finch blew on his coffee and took a tiny sip, then licked the sting from his lips. “As I understand it, and quite the contrary to what you led me to believe, you’re compiling lists.”
Thomas took his seat and sipped his coffee. “Your ambition might exceed your ‘understanding,’ lad.”
Finch gave that thin smile. “I’d like access to those lists.”
“Access?”
“Copies.”
“Ah.”
“Is that a problem?”
Thomas leaned back and propped his heels on the desk. “At the moment, I fail to see how interagency cooperation is advantageous to the Boston Police Department.”
“Maybe you’re taking the narrow view.”
“I don’t believe I am.” Thomas smiled. “But I’m always open to fresh perspectives.”
Finch struck a match off the edge of Thomas’s desk and lit a cigarette. “Let’s consider the reaction if word leaked that a rogue contingent of the Boston Police Department was selling the member rolls and mailing lists of known radical organizations to corporations instead of sharing them with the federal government.”
“Allow me to correct one wee mistake.”
“My information is solid.”
Thomas folded his hands over his abdomen. “The mistake you made, son, was in use of the word rogue. We’re hardly that. In fact, were you to point a finger at myself or any of the people I’m in congress with in this city? Why, Agent Finch, you’d surely find a dozen fingers pointing back at you, Mr. Hoover, Attorney General Palmer, and that fledgling, underfunded agency of yours.” Thomas reached for his coffee cup. “So I’d advise caution when making threats in my fair city.”
Finch crossed his legs and flicked ash into the tray beside his chair. “I get the gist.”
“Consider my soul appropriately comforted.”
“Your son, the one who killed the terrorist, I understand he’s lost to my cause.”
Thomas nodded. “A union man now, he is, through and through.”
“But you’ve another son. A lawyer as I understand it.”
“Careful with talk of family, Agent Finch.” Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re treading a tightrope in a circus fire about now.”
Finch held up a hand. “Just hear me out. Share your lists with us. I’m not saying you can’t make all the profit you want on the side. But if you share them with us, I’ll make sure your son the lawyer gets plum work in the coming months.”
Thomas shook his head. “He’s DA property.”
“Silas Pendergast?” Finch shook his head. “He’s a whore for the wards and everyone knows you run him, Captain.”
Thomas held out his hands. “Make your case.”
“The preliminary suspicions that the molasses tank explosion was a terrorist act have been a boon for us. Simply put, this country is sick of terror.”
“But the explosion wasn’t a terrorist act.”
“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?”