It was a good story to establish Danny’s credentials in the workers-of-the-world revolution because no well-known labor organizations—not even the fast-moving Wobblies—had been involved. It had been organized by the miners themselves with such speed it probably surprised them. By the time the Wobblies did arrive, the bomb had already exploded and the beatings had commenced. Nothing left to do but visit the men in the hospital while the company hired fresh recruits from the morning cattle calls.

So Danny’s cover as Daniel Sante was expected to hold up fine under the scrutiny of the various radical movements he encountered. And it did. Not a single person, as far as he could tell, had questioned it. The problem was that even if they believed it, his story still didn’t make him stand out.

He went to meetings and wasn’t noticed. He went to the bars afterward and was left alone. When he tried to strike up a conversation, he was met with polite agreement of anything he said and just as politely turned away from. He’d rented rooms in a building in Roxbury, and there, during the day, he brushed up on his radical periodicals—The Revolutionary Age, Cronaca Sovversiva, Proletariat, and The Worker. He reread Marx & Engels, Reed & Larkin, and speeches by Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Trotsky, Lenin, and Galleani himself until he could recite most of it verbatim. Mondays and Wednesdays brought another meeting of the Roxbury Letts followed by a boozy gathering at the Sowbelly Saloon. He spent his nights with them and his mornings with a curl-up-and-cry-for-your-momma hangover, nothing about the Letts being frivolous, including their drinking. Bunch of Sergeis and Borises and Josefs, with the occasional Peter or Pyotr thrown in, the Letts raged through the night with vodka and slogans and wooden buckets of warm beer. Slamming the steins on scarred tables and quoting Marx, quoting Engels, quoting Lenin and Emma Goldman and screeching about the rights of the workingman, all the while treating the barmaid like shit.

They brayed about Debs, whinnied about Big Bill Haywood, thumped their shot glasses to the tables and pledged retribution for the tarred-and-feathered Wobblies in Tulsa, even though the tarring and feathering had taken place two years ago and it wasn’t like any of them were going to go wipe it off. They tugged their watch caps and huffed their cigarettes and railed against Wilson, Palmer, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They crowed about Jack Reed and Jim Larkin and the fall of the house of Nicholas II.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Danny wondered if his hangovers came from the booze or the bullshit. Christ, the Bolshies blabbed until your eyes crossed. Until you dreamed in the harsh chop of Russian consonants and the nasal drag of Latvian vowels. Two nights a week with them and he’d only seen Louis Fraina once, when the man gave a speech and then vanished under heavy security.

He’d crisscrossed the state, looking for Nathan Bishop. At job fairs, in seditionist bars, at Marxist fund-raisers. He’d gone to union meetings, radical gatherings, and get-togethers of utopists so pie-eyed their ideas were an insult to adulthood. He noted the names of the speakers and faded into the background but always introduced himself as “Daniel Sante,” so that the person whose hand he shook would respond in kind—“Andy Thurston” as opposed to just “Andy,” “Comrade Gahn” as opposed to “Phil.” When the opportunity presented itself, he stole a page or two of the sign-in sheets. If cars were parked outside the meeting sites, he copied down the license numbers.