Nebraska. When Danny heard the name, about all that came to mind was corn and grain silos, dusk blue skies. Wheat, too, sheaves of it. Did they drink there? Did they have saloons? Or just silos?
They had churches, he was fairly certain. Preachers who struck the air with their fists and railed against the godless Northeast, awash, as it was, in white suds, brown immigrants, and pagan fornication.
Nebraska. Oh, boy.
Danny ordered two shots of Irish and a mug of cold beer. He removed the shirt he wore, unbuttoned, over his undershirt. He leaned into the bar as the bartender brought his drinks. The bartender’s name was Alfonse and he was rumored to run with the hoolies and bullyboys on the city’s east side, though Danny had yet to meet a copper who could pin anything specific on him. Of course, when the suspect in question was a bartender known to have a generous hand, who’d try hard?
“True you stopped the boxing?”
“Not sure,” Danny said.
“Your last fight, I lose money. You both supposed to last to the third.”
Danny held up his palms. “Guy had a fucking stroke.”
“Your fault? I see him lift his arm, too.”
“Yeah?” Danny drained one of his whiskies. “Well, then it’s all fine.”
“You miss it?”
“Not yet.”
“Bad sign.” Alfonse swept Danny’s empty glass off the bar. “A man don’t miss what a man forgot how to love.”
“Jeesh,” Danny said, “what’s your wisdom fee?”
Alfonse spit in a highball glass and walked it back down the bar. It was possible there was something to his theory. Right now, Danny didn’t love hitting things. He loved quiet and the smell of the harbor. He loved drink. Give him a few more and he’d love other things — working girls and the pigs’ feet Alfonse kept down the other end of the bar. The late summer wind, of course, and the mournful music the Italians made in the alleys every evening, a block-by-block journey as flute gave way to violin giving way to clarinet or mandolin. Once Danny got drunk enough, he’d love it all, the whole world.
A meaty hand slapped his back. He turned his head to find Steve looking down at him, eyebrow cocked.
“Still receiving company, I hope.”
“Still.”
“Still buying the first round?”
“The first.” Danny caught Alfonse’s dark eyes and pointed at the bar top. “Where’s the Widow Coyle?”
Steve shrugged off his coat and took a seat. “Praying. Lighting candles.”
“Why?”
“No reason. Love, maybe?”
“You told her,” Danny said.
“I told her.”
Alfonse brought Steve a shot of rye and a bucket of suds. Once he’d walked away, Danny said, “You told her what exactly? About the grippe on the boat?”
“A little bit.”
“A little bit.” Danny threw back his second shot. “We’ve been sworn to silence by state, federal, and maritime authorities. And you tell the widow?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
“All right, it was like that.” Steve downed his own shot. “She grabbed the kids, though, and run right off to church. Only word she’ll say is to Christ Himself.”
“And the pastor. And the two priests. And a few nuns. And her kids.”
Steve said, “It can’t stay hidden long, in either case.”
Danny raised his mug. “Well, you weren’t trying to make detective anyway.”
“Cheers.” Steve met the mug with his bucket and they both drank as Alfonse replenished their shots and left them alone again.
Danny looked at his hands. The doctor on the launch had said the grippe sometimes showed there, even when there were no other signs in the throat or head. It yellowed the flesh along the knuckles, the doctor told them, thickened the fingertips, made the joints throb.
Steve said, “How’s the throat?”
Danny removed his hands from the bar. “Fine. Yours?”
“Tip-top. How long you want to keep doing this?”
“What?” Danny said. “Drinking?”
“Laying our lives on the line for less than a streetcar operator makes.”
“Streetcar operators are important.” Danny raised a glass. “Vital to municipal interests.”
“Stevedores?”
“Them, too.”
“Coughlin,” Steve said. He said it pleasantly, but Danny knew the only time Steve called him by his last name was when he was irate. “Coughlin, we need you. Your voice. Hell, your glamour.”
“My glamour?”
“Fuck off, ya. You know what I mean. False modesty won’t help us a duck’s fart right now and that’s God’s truth.”
“Help who?”
Steve sighed. “It’s us against them. They’ll kill us if they can.”
“Forget the singing.” Danny rolled his eyes. “You need to find an acting troupe.”
“They sent us out to that boat with nothing, Dan.”
Danny scowled. “We get the next two Saturdays off. We get—”
“It fucking kills. And we went out there for what?”
“Duty?”
“Duty.” Steve turned his head away.
Danny chuckled. Anything to lighten the mood, which had grown sober so quickly. “Who would risk us? Steve. On the Blessed Mother? Who? With your arrest record? With my father? My uncle? Who would risk us?”
“They would.”
“Why?”
“Because it’d never occur to them that they couldn’t.”
Danny gave that another dry chuckle, although he felt lost suddenly, a man trying to scoop up coins in a fast current.
Steve said, “Have you ever noticed that when they need us, they talk about duty, but when we need them, they talk about budgets?” He clinked his glass quietly off Danny’s. “If we die from what we did today, Dan, any family we leave behind? They don’t get a fucking dime.”
Danny loosed a weary chuckle on the empty bar. “What are we supposed to do about it?”
“Fight,” Steve said.
Danny shook his head. “Whole world’s fighting right now. France, fucking Belgium, how many dead? No one even has a number. You see progress there?”
Steve shook his head.
“So?” Danny felt like breaking something. Something big, something that would shatter. “The way of the world, Steve. The way of the goddamn world.”
Steve Coyle shook his head. “The way of a world.”
“Hell with it.” Danny tried to shake off the feeling he’d had lately that he was part of some larger canvas, some larger crime. “Let me buy you another.”
“Their world,” Steve said.
Chapter four
On a Sunday afternoon, Danny went to his father’s house in South Boston for a meeting with the Old Men. A Sunday dinner at the Coughlin home was a political affair, and by inviting him to join them in the hour after dinner was served, the Old Men were anointing him in some fashion. Danny held out hope that a detective’s shield — hinted at by both his father and his Uncle Eddie over the past few months — was part of the sacrament. At twenty-seven, he’d be the youngest detective in BPD history.
His father had called him the night before. “Word has it old Georgie Strivakis is losing his faculties.”