“I know who you are, Officer.” Raphelson gave his desk blotter a light pat. “And I’m well acquainted with the BSC. Let me put your mind at ease — we want to help.”
Danny nodded. “Mr. Raphelson—”
“Ralph.”
“Ralph, if you know who I am, then you know I’ve talked to several of your member groups.”
“Oh, I do, yes. I hear you’re quite convincing.”
Danny’s first thought: I am? He wiped some rain off his coat. “If our hand is forced and we have no choice but to walk off the job, would the Central Labor Union support us?”
“Verbally? Of course.”
“How about physically?”
“You’re talking about a sympathy strike.”
Danny met his eyes. “Yes, I am.”
Raphelson rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “You understand how many men the Boston Central Labor Union represents?”
“I’ve heard a shade under eighty thousand.”
“A shade over,” Raphelson said. “We just picked up a plumbers local from West Roxbury.”
“A shade over then.”
“You ever known eight men could agree on anything?”
“Rarely.”
“And we’ve got eighty thousand — firemen, plumbers, phone operators, machinists, teamsters, boilermakers, and transit men. And you want me to bring them into agreement to strike on behalf of men who’ve hit them with clubs when they struck?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
That brought a smile to Raphelson’s eyes if not his lips.
“Why not?” Danny repeated. “You know any of those men whose wages have kept up with the cost of living? Any who can keep their families fed and still find the time to read their kids a story at bedtime? They can’t, Ralph. They’re not treated like workers. They’re treated like field hands.”
Raphelson laced his hands behind his head and considered Danny. “You’re pretty swell at the emotional rhetoric, Coughlin. Pretty swell.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment. I have to deal in practicalities. Once all the essential-dignity-of-the-working-class sentiments are dispensed with, who’s to say my eighty thousand men have jobs to come back to? You seen the latest unemployment figures? Why shouldn’t those men take my men’s jobs? What if your strike drags on? Who’s to keep the families fed if the men finally have the time to read those bedtime stories? Their kids’ stomachs are rumbling, but glory hallelujah, they’ve got fairy tales. You say, ‘Why not?’ There are eighty thousand reasons and their families why not.”
It was cool and dark in the office, the blinds only half open to the dark day, the sole light coming from a small desk lamp by Raphelson’s elbow. Danny met Raphelson’s eyes and waited him out, sensing a caged anticipation in the man.
Raphelson sighed. “And yet, I’ll grant you, I’m interested.”
Danny leaned forward in his chair. “Then it’s my turn to ask why.”
Raphelson fiddled with his window blinds until the slats let in just a bit more of the damp day. “Organized labor is nearing a turning point. We’ve made our few strides over the past two decades mostly because we caught Big Money by surprise in some of the larger cities. But lately? Big Money’s gotten smart. They’re framing the debate by taking ownership of the language. You’re no longer a workingman fighting for his rights. You’re Bolsheviki. You’re a ‘subversive.’ Don’t like the eighty-hour week? You’re an anarchist. Only Commies expect disability pay.” He flicked a hand at the window. “It’s not just kids who like bedtime stories, Coughlin. We all do. We like them simple and comforting. And right now that’s what Big Money is doing to Labor — they’re telling a better bedtime story.” He turned his head from the window, gave Danny a smile. “Maybe we finally have an opportunity to rewrite it.”
“That’d be nice,” Danny said.
Raphelson stretched a long arm across the desk. “I’ll be in touch.”
Danny shook the hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet, but as you said” — Raphelson glanced at the rain — “‘why not?’”
Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis tipped the printer’s courier a nickel and carried the boxes to his desk. There were four of them, each the size of a brick, and he placed one in the center of his ink blotter and removed the cardboard cover to consider the contents. They reminded him of wedding invitations, and he swallowed a sour and sad reflection of his only daughter, Marie, plump and dull-eyed since the cradle, now fading into spinsterhood with a complacency he found sordid.
He lifted the top slip of paper from the box. The script was quite handsome, utile but bold, the paper a heavy cotton bond the color of flesh. He placed the slip back on the top of the stack and decided to send the printer a personal letter of thanks, a commendation on such a fine job delivered under the stress of a rush order.
Herbert Parker entered from his office next door and said not a word as he crossed to Curtis and joined his friend at the desk, and they stared down at the stack of slips on the ink blotter.
To:___________________________________________
Boston Police Officer
By authority conferred on me as Police Commissioner, I hereby discharge you from the Boston Police Department. Said discharge is effective upon receipt of this notice. The cause and reasons for such discharge are as follows:
Specifications:__________________________________
“Who did you use?” Parker said.
“The printer?”
“Yes.”
“Freeman and Sons on School Street.”
“Freeman. Jewish?”
“Scottish, I think.”
“He does fine work.”
“Doesn’t he, though?”
Fay Hall. Packed. Every man in the department who wasn’t on duty and even some who were, the room smelling of the warm rain and several decades’ worth of sweat, body odor, cigar and cigarette smoke so thick it slathered the walls like another coat of paint.
Mark Denton was over in one corner of the stage, talking to Frank McCarthy, the just-arrived organizer of the New England chapter of the American Federation of Labor. Danny was in the other corner talking to Tim Rose, a beat cop from the Oh-Two who pounded the bricks around City Hall and Newspaper Row.
“Who told you this?” Danny said.
“Wes Freeman himself.”
“The father?”
“No, the son. Father’s a sot, a gin junkie. The son does all the work now.”
“One thousand discharge slips?”
Tim shook his head. “Five hundred discharge slips, five hundred suspensions.”
“Already printed.”
Tim nodded. “And delivered to Useless Curtis himself at eight sharp this a.m.”
Danny caught himself tugging on his chin and nodding at the same time, another habit he’d inherited from his father. He stopped and gave Tim what he hoped was a confident smile. “Well, I guess they took their dancing shoes off, uh?”
“I guess they did.” Tim gestured with his chin at Mark Denton and Frank McCarthy. “Who’s the swell with Denton?”
“Organizer with the AFL.”
Tim’s eyes pulsed. “He bring the charter?”
“He brought the charter, Tim.”
“Guess we took off our dancing shoes then, too, eh, Dan?” A smile exploded across Tim’s face.
“We did at that.” Danny clapped his shoulder as Mark Denton picked the megaphone off the floor and stepped to the dais.
Danny crossed to the stage, and Mark Denton knelt at the edge to give Danny his ear and Danny told him about the discharge and suspension slips.