Thomas stared at the ceiling. “I’d assume under the state antisyndicalist laws.”
Finch stared at him. “How’d you arrive at that conclusion?”
“I didn’t arrive anywhere. Basic common sense, man. The laws are on the books, have been for years.”
Finch asked, “You wouldn’t ever consider working in Washington, would you?”
Thomas rapped the window with his knuckles. “See out there, Agent Finch? Can you see the street? The people?”
“Yes.”
“Took me fifteen years in Ireland and a month at sea to find it. My home. And a man who’d abandon his home is a man who’d abandon anything.”
Finch tapped his boater off his knee. “You’re an odd duck.”
“Just so.” He opened a palm in Finch’s direction. “So the antisyndicalist laws?”
“Have opened a door in the deportation process that we’d long assumed closed.”
“Local.”
“And state, yes.”
“So you’re marshaling your forces.”
Finch nodded. “And we’d like your son to be a part of it.”
“Connor?”
“Yes.”
Thomas took a drink of coffee. “How much a part?”
“Well, we’d have him work with a lawyer from Justice or local—”
“No. He works the cases as the point man in Boston or he doesn’t work at all.”
“He’s young.”
“Older than your Mr. Hoover.”
Finch looked around the office, indecisive. “Your son catches this train? I promise you the track won’t run out in his lifetime.”
“Ah,” Thomas said, “but I’d like him to board at the front as opposed to the rear. The view would be all the finer, wouldn’t you say?”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. You call him to Washington to hire him. You make sure a photographer’s in attendance.”
“And in exchange, Attorney General Palmer’s team will have access to the lists your men are compiling.”
Thomas said, “Per specific requests that would be subject to my review, yes.”
Thomas watched Finch give it some thought, as if he had a choice in the matter.
“Acceptable.”
Thomas stood. He reached across the desk.
Finch stood and shook his hand. “So we have a deal.”
“We have a contract, Agent Finch.” Thomas gripped Finch’s hand fast. “Do consider it inviolate.”
Luther had noticed that Boston might have been different from the Midwest in a lot of ways — the people talked funny for one and everyone dressed in this city, dressed like they were going out to dinner and a show every day, even the children — but a stockyard was a stockyard. Same mud, same stench, same noise. And same job for coloreds — on the bottom rung. Isaiah’s friend Walter Grange had been there fifteen years and he’d risen to the post of key man for the pens, but any white man with fifteen years on the job would have made yard manager by now.
Walter met Luther when he exited the streetcar at the top of Market Street in Brighton. Walter was a small man with huge white muttonchop sideburns to compensate, Luther guessed, for all the hair he’d lost up top. He had a chest like an apple barrel and short wishbone legs and as he led Luther down Market Street, his thick arms swung in concert with his hips. “Mr. Giddreaux said you were from the Midwest?”
Luther nodded.
“So you seen this before, then.”
Luther said, “Worked the yards in Cincinnati.”
“Well, I don’t know what Cincinnati’s like, but Brighton’s a whole stock town. Pretty much everything you see along Market here, that’s cattle business.”
He pointed out the Cattlemen’s Hotel at the corner of Market and Washington and the rival Stockyard Arms across the street and gestured in the direction of packing companies and canneries and three butchers and the various rooming houses and flophouses for workers and salesmen.
“You get used to the stench,” he said. “Me, I don’t even smell it no more.”
Luther had stopped noticing it in Cincinnati, but now it was hard to recall how he’d accomplished that. The smokestacks emptied black spirals into the sky and the sky huffed it back down again and the oily air smelled of blood and fat and charred meat. Of chemicals and manure and hay and mud. Market Street flattened as it crossed Faneuil Street and it was here that the stockyards began, stretching for blocks on either side of the street with the train tracks cutting through their centers. The smell of manure grew worse, rising in a thick tide, and high fences with Cyclone wire up top sprouted out of the ground and the world was suddenly filled with dust and the sound of whistles and the neighing, mooing, and bleating of livestock. Walter Grange unlocked a wooden gate and led Luther through and the ground below grew dark and muddy.
“Lot of people got their interests tied up in the yards,” Walter said. “You got small ranchers and big cattle outfits. You got order buyers and dealer buyers and commission agents and loan officers. You got railroad reps and telegraph operators and market analysts and ropers and handlers and teamsters to transport the livestock once it’s been sold. You got packers ready to buy in the morning and walk those cows right back out the yard and up to the slaughterhouses, have ’em sold for steaks by noon tomorrow. You got people work for the market news services and you got gatemen and yardmen and pen men and weigh-masters and more commission firms than you can shake a fist at. And we ain’t even talking about the unskilled labor yet.” He cocked one eyebrow at Luther. “That’d be you.”
Luther looked around. Cincinnati all over again, but he must have forgotten a lot of Cincinnati, blocked it out. The yards were enormous. Miles of muddy aisles cut between wooden pens filled with snorting animals. Cows, hogs, sheep, lambs. Men ran every which way, some in the rubber boots and dungarees of yard workers, but others in suits and bow ties and straw boaters and still others in checked shirts and cowboy hats. Cowboy hats in Boston! He passed a scale the height of his house in Columbus, practically the width of it, too, and watched a man lead a dazed-looking heifer up there and hold up his hand to a man standing beside the scale with a pencil poised over a piece of paper. “Doing a whole draft, George.”
“My apologies, Lionel. You go ahead.”
The man led another cow and then a third and still another up onto that scale, and Luther wondered just how much weight that scale could take, if it could weigh a ship and the people on it.
He’d fallen back of Walter and hurried to catch up as the man took a right turn down a path between yet more pens, and when Luther reached him, Walter said, “The key man takes responsibility for all the livestock comes off the trains on his shift. That’s me. I lead them to their catch pens and we keep ’em there, feed ’em, clean up after ’em until they get sold, and then a man shows up with a bill of sale and we release them to him.”
He stopped at the next corner and handed Luther a shovel.
Luther gave it a bitter smile. “Yeah, I remember this.”
“Then I can save me some breath. We in charge of pens nineteen through fifty-seven. Got that?”
Luther nodded.
“Every time I empty one, you clean it and restock it with hay and water. End of the day, three times a week, you go there” — he pointed — “and you clean that, too.”
Luther followed his finger and saw the squat brown building at the west end of the yard. You didn’t have to know what it was to sense its mean purpose. Nothing that squat and unadorned and functional-looking could ever put a smile on anyone’s face.
“The killing floor,” Luther said.
“You got a problem with that, son?”
Luther shook his head. “It’s a job.”