“Are you angry?” Denton shouted again. “Go ahead—fucking hit one another.”

The room began to quiet. Half the men turned back toward the stage.

“That’s what they want you to do,” Denton called. “Beat yourselves to a pulp. Go ahead. The mayor? The governor? The city council? They laugh at you.”

The last of the men stopped fighting. They sat.

“Are you angry enough to do something?” Mark Denton asked.

No one spoke.

“Are you?” Denton shouted.

“Yes!” a thousand men shouted back.

“We’re a union, men. That means we come together as one body with one purpose and we take it to them where they live. And we demand our rights as men. Any of you want to sit this out? Then fucking sit. The rest of you—show me what we are.”

They rose as one—a thousand men, some with blood on their faces, some with tears of rage bubbling in their eyes. And Danny rose, too, a Judas no longer.

He met his father as his father was leaving the Oh-Six in South Boston.

“I’m out.”

His father paused on the station house steps. “You’re out of what?”

“The union-rat job, the radicals, the whole thing.”

His father came down the stairs and stepped in close. “Those radicals could make you a captain by forty, son.”

“Don’t care.”

“You don’t care?” His father gave him a withered smile. “You turn this chance down, you’ll not get another shot at that gold shield for five years. If ever.”

Fear at that prospect filled Danny’s chest, but he jammed his hands deeper in his pockets and shook his head. “I won’t rat on my own men.”

“They’re subversives, Aiden. Subversives within our own department.”

“They’re cops, Dad. And by the way, what kind of father are you to send me into that kinda job? You couldn’t find someone else?”

His father’s face grew gray. “It’s the price of the ticket.”

“What ticket?”

“For the train that never runs out of track.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Your grandchildren would have ridden it.”

Danny waved it off. “I’m going home, Dad.”

“Your home’s here, Aiden.”

Danny looked up at the white limestone building with its Grecian columns. He shook his head. “Your home is.”

That night he went to Tessa’s door. He knocked softly, looking up and down the hall, but she didn’t answer. So he turned and walked toward his room, feeling like a kid carrying stolen food under his coat. Just as he reached his door, he heard hers unlatch.

He turned in the corridor and she was coming down the hallway toward him with a coat thrown over her shift, barefoot, her expression one of alarm and curiosity. When she reached him, he tried to think of something to say.

“I still felt like talking,” he said.

She looked back at him, her eyes large and dark. “More stories of the Old Country?”

He thought of her on the floor of Primo Alieveri’s great hall, the way her flesh would have looked against the marble as the light of the fire played on her dark hair. A shameful image, really, in which to find lust.