Danny sighed. “What did you do?”
Now it was his father’s turn to shake his head. “Your brother’s out on these streets somewhere. I’ve put men on it, good men, men who work runaways and truants, but it’s harder in the summer, so many boys on the streets, so many working jobs at all hours, you can’t tell one from the other.”
“Why come to me?”
“You damn well know why,” his father said. “The boy worships you. I suspect he may have come here.”
Danny shook his head. “If he did, I haven’t been around. I’ve been working a seventy-two on. You’re looking at my first hour off.”
“What about …?” His father tilted his head and looked up at the building.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“Say her name.”
“Don’t be a child.”
“Say her name.”
His father rolled his eyes. “Nora. Happy? Has Nora seen him?”
“Let’s go ask her.”
His father stiffened and didn’t move as Danny came up the steps past him and went to the front door. He turned his key in the lock and looked back at the old man.
“We going to find Joe, or not?”
His father rose from the steps and brushed off the seat of his pants and straightened the creases of his trousers. He turned with his captain’s hat under his arm.
“This changes nothing between us,” he said.
“Perish the thought.” Danny fluttered a hand over his heart, which brought a grimace to his father’s face, then he pushed open the door into the front hall. The stairs were sticky with heat and they climbed them slowly, Danny feeling like he could easily lie down on one of the landings and take a nap after three straight days of strike patrol.
“You ever hear from Finch anymore?” he asked.
“I get the occasional call,” his father said. “He’s back in Washington.”
“You tell him I saw Tessa?”
“I mentioned it. He didn’t seem terribly interested. It’s Galleani he wants and that old dago is smart enough to train ’em here, but he sends them out of state to do most of their mischief.”
Danny felt the bitterness in his own grin. “She’s a terrorist. She’s making bombs in our city. Who knows what else. But they’ve got bigger fish to fry?”
His father shrugged. “It’s the way of things, boy. If they hadn’t bet the house on terrorists being responsible for that molasses tank explosion, things would probably be different. But they did bet the house, and it blew that molasses all over their faces. Boston’s an embarrassment now, and you and your BSC boys aren’t making it better.”
“Oh, right. It’s us.”
“Don’t play the martyr. I didn’t say it was all you. I just said there’s a taint to our beloved department in certain corridors of federal law enforcement. And some of that’s because of the half-cocked hysteria surrounding the tank explosion, and some of it’s due to the fear that you’ll embarrass the nation by going on strike.”
“No one’s talking strike yet, Dad.”
“Yet.” His father paused at the third-floor landing. “Jesus, it’s hotter than the arse of a swamp rat.” He looked at the hall window, its thick glass covered in soot and a greasy residue. “I’m three stories up, but I can’t even see my city.”
“Your city.” Danny chuckled.
His father gave him a soft smile. “It is my city, Aiden. It was men like me and Eddie who built this department. Not the commissioners, not O’Meara much as I respected him, and certainly not Curtis. Me. And as goes the police, so goes the city.” He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Oh, your old man might be back on his heels temporarily, but I’m getting my second wind, boy. Don’t you doubt it.”
They climbed the last two flights in silence. At Danny’s room, his father took a series of breaths as Danny inserted his key in the lock.
Nora opened the door before he could turn the key. She smiled. Then she saw who stood beside him, and her pale eyes turned to ash.
“And what’s this?” she said.
“I’m looking for Joe,” his father said.
She kept her eyes on Danny, as if she hadn’t heard him. “You bring him here?”
“He showed up,” Danny said.
His father said, “I have no more desire to be here than you—”
“Whore,” Nora said to Danny. “I believe that was the last word I heard from this man’s mouth. I believe he spit on his own floor to emphasize the point.”
“Joe’s missing,” Danny said.
That didn’t move her at first. She stared at Danny with a cold rage that, while it encompassed his father, was just as much directed at him for bringing the man to their door. She flicked her gaze off his face and onto his father’s.
“What’d you call him to make him run?” she said.
“I just want to know if the boy came by.”
“And I want to know why he ran.”
“We had a moment of discord,” his father said.
“Ah.” She tilted her head back at that. “I know all about how you resolve moments of discord with young Joe. Was the switch involved?”
His father turned to Danny. “There’s a limit to how long I’ll stand for a situation I deem undignified.”
“Jesus,” Danny said. “The two of you. Joe’s missing. Nora?”
Her jaw tightened and her eyes remained ash, but she stepped back from the door enough so Danny and his father could enter the room.
Danny took off his coat straightaway and stripped the suspenders from his shoulders. His father took in the room, the fresh curtains, the new bedspread, the flowers in the vase on the table by the window.
Nora stood by the foot of the bed in her factory uniform — Ladlassie stripe overalls with a beige blouse underneath. She gripped her left wrist with her right hand. Danny poured three whiskeys and gave a glass to each of them, and his father’s eyebrows rose slightly at the sight of Nora drinking hard liquor.
“I smoke, too,” she said, and Danny saw a tightening of his father’s lips that he recognized as a suppressed smile.
The two of them raced each other on the drink, Danny’s father draining his glass one drop ahead of Nora, and then they each held out their glasses again and Danny refilled them. His father took his to the table by the window and placed his hat on the table and sat and Nora said, “Mrs. DiMassi said a boy was by this afternoon.”
“What?” his father said.
“He didn’t leave a name. She said he was ringing our bell and looking up at our window and when she came out on the stoop, he ran away.”
“Anything else?”
Nora drank more whiskey. “She said he was the spitting image of Danny.”
Danny could see the tension drain from his father’s shoulders and neck as he took a sip of his drink.
Eventually, he cleared his throat. “Thank you, Nora.”
“You’ve no need to thank me, Mr. Coughlin. I love the boy. But you could do me a courtesy in return.”
His father reached for his handkerchief and pulled it from his coat. “Certainly. Name it.”
“Finish up your drink, if you please, and be on your way.”
Chapter thirty-one
Two days later, on a Saturday in June, Thomas Coughlin walked from his home on K Street to Carson Beach for a meeting regarding the future of his city. Even though he was dressed in the lightest suit he owned, a blue and white seersucker, and his sleeves were short, the heat soaked through to his skin. He carried a brown leather satchel that grew heavier every couple of hundred yards. He was a little too old to be playing the bag man, but he wasn’t trusting this particular bag to anyone else. These were sensitive days in the wards, where the wind could shift at a moment’s notice. His beloved Commonwealth was currently under the stewardship of a Republican governor, a transplant from Vermont with no love of, nor appreciation for, local mores or local history. The police commissioner was a bitter man of tiny mind who hated the Irish, hated Catholics, and therefore hated the wards, the great Democratic wards that had built this city. He only understood his hate; he did not understand compromise, patronage, the way of doing things that had been established in this town over seventy years ago and had defined it ever since. Mayor Peters was the picture of ineffectuality, a man who won the vote only because the ward bosses had fallen asleep at the switch and the rivalry between the two main and two true mayoral candidates, Curley and Gallivan, had grown so bitter that a third flank had opened up, and Peters had reaped the November rewards. Since his election, he had done nothing, absolutely nothing of note, while his cabinet had pillaged the till with such shamelessness that it was only a matter of time before the looting hit the front pages and gave birth to the sworn enemy of politics since the dawn of man: illumination.