He stared at Luther for a long time with that blithe, open face of his.
Once the silence had gone on into its second minute, Clayton said, “We best get back at it, Luther.”
McKenna’s head turned, as if on a slow swivel, and he gave the open gaze to Clayton Tomes who quickly looked away.
McKenna turned back to Luther. “Don’t let me hold you up, Luther. I’d best be getting back to work myself. Thank you for the reminder, Clayton.”
Clayton shook his head at his own stupidity.
“Back out to the world,” McKenna said with a weary sigh. “These days? People who make a good wage think it’s okay to bite the hand that feeds them. Do you know what the bedrock of capitalism is, gents?”
“No, suh.”
“Sure don’t, sir.”
“The bedrock of capitalism, gentlemen, is the manufacture or mining of goods for the purpose of sale. That’s it. That’s what this country is built on. And so the heroes of this country are not soldiers or athletes or even presidents. The heroes are the men who built our railroads and our automobiles and our cotton mills and factories. They keep this country running. The men who work for them, therefore, should be grateful to be a part of the process that forms the freest society in the known world.” He reached out and clapped Luther on both shoulders. “But lately they’re not. Can you believe that?”
“There isn’t much of a subversive movement among us colored, Lieutenant, suh.”
McKenna’s eyes widened. “Where have you lived, Luther? There’s quite the lefty movement going on in Harlem right now. Your high-toned colored got himself some education and started reading his Marx and his Booker T. and his Frederick Douglass and now you got men like Du Bois and Garvey and some would argue they’re just as dangerous as Goldman and Reed and the atheistic Wobblies.” He held up a finger. “Some would argue. Some would even claim that the NAACP is just a front, Luther, for subversive and seditionist ideas.” He patted Luther’s cheek softly with a gloved hand. “Some.”
He turned and looked up at the scorched ceiling.
“Well, you’ve your work cut out for you, lads. I’ll leave you to it.”
He placed his hands behind his back and strolled across the floor, and neither Luther nor Clayton took a breath until he’d exited the foyer and descended the front steps.
“Oh, Luther,” Clayton said.
“I know it.”
“Whatever you did to that man, you got to undo it.”
“I didn’t do nothing. He just that way.”
“What way? White?”
Luther nodded.
“And mean,” Luther said. “Kinda mean just keeps eating till the day it dies.”
Chapter twenty
After leaving Special Squads, Danny returned to foot patrol in his old precinct, the Oh-One on Hanover Street. He was assigned to walk his beat with Ned Wilson, who at two months shy of his twenty, had stopped giving a shit five years ago. Ned spent most of their shift drinking or playing craps at Costello’s. Most days, he and Danny saw each other for about twenty minutes after they punched in and five minutes before they punched out. The rest of the time Danny was free to do as he chose. If he made a hard bust, he called Costello’s from a call box and Ned met up with him in time to march the perp up the stairs of the station house. Otherwise, Danny roamed. He walked the entire city, dropping in on as many station houses as he could reach in a day — the Oh-Two in Court Square, down to the Oh-Four on LaGrange, across to the Oh-Five in the South End and as far up the line as he could go on foot in the eighteen station houses of the BPD. The three in West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Jamaica Plain were left for Emmett Strack; the Oh-Seven in Eastie, for Kevin McRae; Mark Denton covered Dorchester, Southie, and the One-Four in Brighton. Danny worked the rest — downtown, the North and South Ends, and Roxbury.
The job was recruitment and testimony. Danny glad-handed, cajoled, harangued, and persuaded a solid one-third of all the cops he approached into writing down an accurate account of his workweek, his debts versus his income, and the conditions of the station house in which he worked. In his first three weeks back on the beat, he roped in sixty-eight men to meetings of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall.
Whereas his time in Special Squads had been marked by a self-loathing so acute he now wondered how he’d managed to do any of it, his time doing BSC work in hopes of forming a union with true bargaining power made him feel a sense of purpose that bordered on the evangelical.
This, he decided one afternoon as he returned to the station house with three more testimonials from patrolmen in the One-Oh, was what he’d been looking for since Salutation Street: a reason why he’d been spared.
In his box, he found a message from his father asking him to come by the house that night after his shift. Danny knew few good things had ever come from one of his father’s summonses, but he caught the streetcar out to South Boston just the same and rode across the city through a soft snow.
Nora answered the door, and Danny could tell she hadn’t expected him to be on the other side of it. She pulled her house sweater tight across her body and took a sudden step back.
“Danny.”
“Evening.”
He’d barely seen her since the flu, barely seen anyone in the family except for the Sunday dinner several weeks back when he’d met Luther Laurence.
“Come in, come in.”
He stepped over the threshold and removed his scarf. “Where’s Ma and Joe?”
“Gone to bed,” she said. “Turn around.”
He did and she brushed the snow off the shoulders and back of his coat.
“Here. Give it to me now.”
He removed the coat and caught a faint whiff of the perfume she wore ever so sparingly. It smelled of roses and a hint of orange.
“How are you?” Danny looked in her pale eyes, thinking: I could die.
“Just fine. Yourself?”
“Good, good.”
She hung his coat on the tree in the hallway and carefully smoothed his scarf with her hand. It was a curious gesture, and Danny stopped breathing for a moment as he watched her. She placed the scarf on a separate hook and turned back to him and just as quickly dropped her eyes, as if she’d been caught at something, which, in a way, she had.
I would do anything, Danny wanted to say. Anything. I’ve been a fool. First with you, then after you, and now as I stand here before you. A fool.
He said, “I—”
“Hmm?”
“You look great,” he said.
Her eyes met his again and they were clear and almost warm. “Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“You know what I mean.” She looked at the floor, hugging her elbows.
“I’m …”
“What?”
“Sorry.”
“I know.” She nodded. “You’ve apologized enough. More than enough. You wanted to be” — she looked up at him — “respectable. Yes?”
Christ — not that word again, thrown back in his face. If he could remove one word from his vocabulary, erase it so that it had never taken hold and thus he never could have used it, it would be that one. He’d been drunk when he said it. Drunk and taken aback by her sudden and sordid revelations about Ireland. About Quentin Finn.
Respectable. Shit.
He held out his hands, at a loss for words.
“Now it’s my turn,” she said. “I’ll be the respectable one.”
He shook his head. “No.”
And he could tell by the fury that sprang into her face that she’d misinterpreted his meaning yet again. He had meant to imply that respectability was a goal unworthy of her. But she took it to mean it was something she could never attain.