He reached a stairwell and looked back down the hall and saw the three men frozen outside, one of them pointing up at the sign. No doubt they’d lost family members to something that waited on the upper floors—TB, smallpox, polio, cholera. In their awkward gesticulating Danny saw that none would dare enter. He found a rear door and let himself out.

The night was moonless, the air so raw it found his gums. He ran full-out back across the white gravel dunes and the cemetery. He found his car where he’d left it by the seawall. He sat in it and fingered the button in his pocket. His thumb ran over the smooth surface and he flashed on Nora swinging the bear at him in the oceanfront room, the pillows scattered all over the floor, her eyes lit with a pale fire. He closed his eyes and he could smell her. He drove back to the city with a windshield grimed by salt and his own fear drying into his scalp.

One morning, he waited for Eddie McKenna and drank cups of bitter black coffee in a café off Harrison Avenue with a checkered tile floor and a dusty ceiling fan that clicked with each revolution. A knife sharpener bumped his cart along the cobblestones outside the window, and his display blades swung from their strings and caught the sun. Darts of light slashed Danny’s pupils and the walls of the café. He turned in his booth and flicked open his watch and got it to stop jumping in his hand long enough to realize McKenna was late, though that wasn’t surprising, and then he took another glance around the café to see if any faces were paying too much or too little attention to him. When he was satisfied it was just the normal collection of small businessmen and colored porters and Statler Building secretaries, he went back to his coffee, near certain that even with a hangover, he could spot a tail.

McKenna filled the doorway with his oversize body and obstinate optimism, that almost beatific sense of purpose that Danny had seen in him all his life, since Eddie’d been a hundred pounds lighter and would drop by to see his father when the Coughlins lived in the North End, always with sticks of licorice for Danny and Connor. Even then, when he’d been just a flatfoot working the Charlestown waterfront with saloons that were judged the city’s bloodiest and a rat population so prodigious the typhus and polio rates were triple those of any other district, the glow around the man had been just as prominent. Part of department lore was that Eddie McKenna had been told early in his career that he’d never work undercover because of his sheer presence. The chief at the time had told him, “You’re the only guy I know who enters a room five minutes before he gets there.”

He hung his coat and slid into the booth across from Danny. He caught the waitress’s eye and mouthed “coffee” to her.