The Given Day (76 page)

"Yes, sir?"

"Are you currently in command of the motor corps and the First Cavalry Troop?"

"I am, sir. Under the command of General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, sir."

"Who are where presently?"

"I believe with Governor Coolidge at the State House, sir."

"Then you are in active command, Major. Your men are to stay at the armory and stand at readiness. They are not to go home. Is that clear?" "Yes, sir."

"I will be by to review them and to give you your deployment assignments."

THE GIVEN DAY"Yes, sir."

"You are going to put down some riots tonight, Major." "With pleasure, sir."

When Peters arrived at the armory fifteen minutes later, he saw a trooper exit the building and head up Commonwealth toward Brighton.

"Trooper!" He left the car and held up a hand. "Where are you going?"

The trooper looked at him. "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm the mayor of Boston."

The trooper immediately straightened and then saluted. "My apologies, sir."

Peters returned the salute. "Where are you going, son?"

"Home, sir. I live right up the--"

"You were given orders to stand at the ready."

The trooper nodded. "But those orders were countermanded by General Stevens."

"Go back inside," Peters said.

As the trooper opened the door, several more troopers started to file out, but the original deserter pushed them back inside, saying, "The mayor, the mayor."

Peters strode inside and immediately spied a man with a major's oak leaf cluster by the staircase leading up to the orderly room.

"Major Dallup!"

"Sir!"

"What is the meaning of this?" Peters's hand swept around the armory, at the men with their collars unbuttoned, weaponless, shifting in place.

"Sir, if I could explain."

"Please do!" Peters was surprised to hear the sound of his voice, raised, flinty.

Before Major Dallup could explain anything, however, a voice boomed from the top of the stairs.

632DENNIS LEHANE

"These men are going home!" Governor Coolidge stood at the landing above them all. "Mayor Peters, you have no business here. Go home as well, sir."

As Coolidge came down the stairs, flanked by General Stevens and Colonel Dalton, Peters rushed up. All four men met in the middle. "This city is rioting."

"It is doing no such thing."

"I have been out in it, Governor, and I tell you, I tell you, I tell you--" Peters hated this stammer he developed when upset but he wouldn't let it stop him now. "I tell you, sir, that it is not sporadic. It is tens of thousands of men and they are--"

"There is no riot," Coolidge said.

"Yes, there is! In South Boston, in the North End, in Scollay Square! Look for yourself, man, if you don't believe me."

"I have looked."

"Where?"

"From the State House."

"The State House?" Peters said, screaming now, his voice sounding to his own ears like that of a child. A female child. "The rioting isn't happening on Beacon Hill, Governor. It's happening--"

"Enough." Coolidge held up a hand.

"Enough?" Peters said.

"Go home, Mr. Mayor. Go home."

It was the tone that got to Andrew Peters, the tone a parent reserved for a bratty child having a pointless tantrum.

Mayor Andrew Peters then did something he was reasonably sure had never occurred in Boston politics--he punched the governor in the face.

He had to jump from a lower step to do it, and Coolidge was tall to begin with, so it wasn't much of a punch. But it did connect with the tissue around the governor's left eye.

Coolidge was so stunned, he didn't move. Peters was so pleased, he decided to do it again.

The general and the colo nel grabbed at his arms, and several troop--

THE GIVEN DAYers ran up the stairs, but in those few seconds, Peters managed to land a few more flailing shots.

The governor, oddly, never moved back or raised his hands to defend himself.

Several troopers carried Mayor Andrew Peters back down the stairs and deposited him on the floor.

He thought of rushing up them again.

Instead, he pointed a finger at Governor Coo lidge. "This is on your conscience."

"But your ledger, Mr. Mayor." Coolidge allowed himself a small smile. "Your ledger, sir." chapter thirty-seven Horace Russell drove Mayor Peters to City Hall Wednesday morning at half past seven. Absent fires and screams and darkness, the streets had lost their ghoulish flavor, but stark evidence of the mob lay everywhere. Nary a window was left intact along Washington or Tremont or any of the streets that intersected them. Husks where once stood businesses. The skeleton frames of charred automobiles. So much trash and debris in the streets Peters could only assume this was what cities looked like after protracted battles and sporadic bombing.

Along the Boston Common, men lay in drunken stupors or openly engaged in dice games. Across Tremont, a few souls raised plywood over their window frames. In front of some businesses, men paced with shotguns and rifles. Phone lines hung severed from their poles. All street signs had been removed, and most gas lamps were shattered.

Peters placed a hand over his eyes because he felt an overwhelming need to weep. A stream of words ran through his head, so constant it took him a minute to realize it also left his tongue in a low whisper:

THE GIVEN DAYThis never had to happen, this never had to happen, this never had to happen. . . .

The impulse to weep turned to something colder as they reached City Hall. He strode up to his office and immediately placed a call to police headquarters.

Curtis answered the phone himself, his voice a tired shadow of itself. "Hello."

"Commissioner, it's Mayor Peters."

"You call for my resignation, I expect."

"I call for damage assessment. Let's start there."

Curtis sighed. "One hundred and twenty-nine arrests. Five rioters shot, none critically injured. Five hundred sixty-two people treated for injuries at Haymarket Relief, a third of those related to cuts from broken glass. Ninety-four muggings reported. Sixty-seven assaults-andbattery. Six rapes."

"Six?"

"Reported, yes."

"Your estimate as to the real number?"

Another sigh. "Based on uncorroborated reports from the North End and South Boston, I'd place the number in the dozens. Thirty, let's say."

"Thirty." Peters felt the need to weep again, but it didn't come as an overwhelming wave, merely as a stabbing sensation behind his eyes. "Property damage?"

"In the hundreds of thousands."

"The hundreds of thousands, yes, I thought so myself."

"Mostly small businesses. The banks and department stores--" "Hired private security. I know."

"The firemen will never strike now."

"What?"

"The firemen," Curtis said. "The sympathy strike. My man in the department tells me they are so irate about the countless false alarms they responded to last night that they've turned against the strikers."

"How does this information help us right now, Commissioner?"

636DENNIS LEHANE

"I won't resign," Curtis said.

The gall of this man. The gumption. A city under siege of its populace and all he thinks of is his job and his pride.

"You won't have to," Peters said. "I'm removing you from your command."

"You can't."

"Oh, I can. You love rules, Commissioner. Please consult Section Six, Chapter Three-twenty-three of the 1885 city bylaws. Once you've done that, clean out your desk. Your replacement will be there by nine."

Peters hung up. He would have expected to feel more satisfaction, but it was one of the more dispiriting aspects of this entire affair that the only possible flush of victory had lain in averting the strike. Once it had begun, no man, least of all himself, could lay claim to any accomplishment. He called to his secretary, Martha Pooley, and she came into the office with the list of names and telephone numbers he'd asked for. He started with Colo nel Sullivan of the State Guard. When he answered, Peters skipped all formalities.

"Colo nel Sullivan, this is your mayor. I am giving you a direct order that cannot be countermanded. Understood?"

"Yes, Mr. Mayor."

"Assemble the entire State Guard in the Boston area. I am putting the Tenth Regiment, the First Cavalry Troop, the First Motor Corps, and the Ambulance Corps under your command. Is there any reason you cannot perform these duties, Colonel?"

"None whatsoever, sir."

"See to it."

"Yes, Mr. Mayor."

Peters hung up and immediately dialed the home of General Charles Cole, former commander of the Fifty-second Yankee Division and one of the chief members of the Storrow Committee. "General Cole."

"Mr. Mayor."

"Would you serve your city as acting police commissioner, sir?" "It would be my honor."

THE GIVEN DAY"I'll send a car. At what time could you be ready, General?" "I'm already dressed, Mr. Mayor."

Governor Coolidge held a press conference at ten. He announced that in addition to the regiments Mayor Peters had called up, he had asked Brigadier General Nelson Bryant to assume command of the state response to the crisis. General Bryant had accepted and would command the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Regiments of the State Guard as well as a machine-gun company.

Volunteers continued to converge on the Chamber of Commerce to receive their badges, uniforms, and weapons. Most, he noted, were former officers of the Massachusetts Yankee Division and had served with distinction in the Great War. He further noted that 150 Harvard undergraduates, including the entire football team, had been sworn in as members of the volunteer police department.

"We are in good hands, gentlemen."

When asked why the State Guard had not been called out the previous evening, Governor Coolidge responded, "Yesterday I was persuaded to leave matters of public safety to city authorities. I have since regretted the wisdom of this trust."

When a reporter asked the governor how he'd suffered the bruise under his left eye, Governor Coolidge announced that the press conference was over and left the room.

Danny stood with Nora on the rooftop of his building and looked
down at the North End. During the worst of the rioting, some men had blocked off Salem Street with truck tires they'd doused in gasoline and lit afire. Danny could see one now, melted into the street and still smoking, the stench fi lling his nostrils. The mob had grown all evening, restless, itchy. At about ten o'clock, it had stopped roiling and begun to vent. Danny had watched from his window. Impotent.

By the time it abated about 2 A. M., the streets lay as smashed and violated as they had after the molasses flood. The voices of the victims--of 638DENNIS LEHANE assaults, of muggings, of motiveless beatings, of rape--rose from the streets and out of tenement windows and rooming houses. Moaning, keening, weeping. The cries of those chosen for random violence, bereft with the knowledge that they'd never know justice in this world.

And it was his fault.

Nora told him it wasn't, but he could see she didn't fully believe it. She'd changed over the course of the night; doubt had entered her eyes. About the choice he'd made, about him. When they'd fi nally lain down in bed last night, her lips found his cheek and they were cool and hesitant. Instead of going to sleep with one arm over his chest and one leg over his, her usual custom, she turned onto her left side. Her back touched his, so it wasn't a complete rejection, but he felt it nonetheless.

Now, standing with their coffee on the rooftop, looking at the damage strewn below them in the gray light of an overcast morning, she placed a hand on Danny's lower back. It was the lightest of touches and just as quickly removed. When Danny turned, she was chewing the edge of her thumb and her eyes were moist.

"You're not going to work today," he said.

She shook her head but said nothing.

"Nora."

She stopped chewing her thumb and lifted her coffee cup off the parapet. She looked at him, her eyes wide and blank, unreadable. "You're not going to--"

"Yes, I am," she said.

He shook his head. "It's too dangerous. I don't want you out on those streets."

Her shoulders moved almost imperceptibly. "It's my job. I'm not getting fired."

"You won't get fired."

Another tiny shrug. "And if you're wrong? How would we eat?" "This will be over soon."

THE GIVEN DAYShe shook her head.

"It will. Once the city realizes we had no choice and that--"

She turned to him. "The city will hate you, Danny." She swept her arm at the streets below. "They'll never forgive you for this."

"So we were wrong?" A well of isolation sprang up inside him, as desolate and hopeless as any he'd ever known.

"No," she said. "No." She came to him and the touch of her hands on his cheeks felt like salvation. "No, no, no." She shook his face until he met her eyes. "You weren't wrong. You did the only thing you could. It's just . . ." She looked off the roof again.

"Just what?"

"They made it so that the only choice you had left was the one sure to doom you." She kissed him; he tasted the salt of her tears. "I love you. I believe in what you did."

"But you think we're doomed."

Her hands trailed off his face and fell to her sides. "I think . . ." Her face cooled as he watched her, something he was learning about her, her need to treat crisis with detachment. She raised her eyes and they were no longer moist. "I think you might be out of a job." She gave him a sad, tight smile. "So I can't be losing mine, can I now?"

He walked her to work. Around them, gray ash and the endless crunch of glass. Scraps of bloodied clothing, splattered pies on the cobblestone amid chunks of brick and charred wood. Blackened storefronts. Overturned carts and overturned cars, all burnt. Two halves of one skirt in the gutter, wet and covered in soot.

It didn't get any worse once they left the North End, it just got more repetitive and, by the time they reached Scollay Square, larger in scope and scale. He tried to pull Nora to him, but she preferred to walk alone. Every now and then she would glance the side of her hand off his and gave him a look of intimate sorrow, and once she leaned into his shoulder as they climbed Bowdoin Street, but she never spoke.