Bishop slid into the booth and handed him a mug of beer. “The only way you’ll meet pretty women in this movement is to kidnap the daughters of our enemies.”

Danny said, “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a Lett?”

“Are you?”

“Hoping to be.”

Nathan shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I belong to any one organization. I help out. I’ve known Lou for a long time.”

“Lou?”

“Comrade Fraina,” Nathan said and gestured with his chin. “Would you like to meet him some day?”

“Are you kidding? I’d be honored.”

Bishop gave that a small, private smile. “You have any worthwhile talents?”

“I write.”

“Well?”

“I hope so.”

“Give me some samples, I’ll see what I can do.” He looked around the bar. “God, that’s a depressing thought.”

“What? Me meeting Comrade Fraina?”

“Huh? No. Glaviach got me thinking. There really isn’t a good-looking woman in any of the movements. Not a…Well, there’s one.”

“There’s one?”

He nodded. “How could I have forgotten? There is one.” He whistled. “Bloody gorgeous, she is.”

“She here?”

He laughed. “If she were here, you’d know it.”

“What’s her name?”

Bishop’s head moved so swiftly Danny feared he’d blown his cover. Bishop looked him in the eyes and seemed to be studying his face.

Danny took a sip of his beer.

Bishop looked back out at the crowd. “She has lots of them.”

CHAPTER fourteen

Luther got off the freight in Boston, where Uncle Hollis’s chicken-scratch map directed him and found Dover Street easily enough. He followed it to Columbus Avenue and followed Columbus through the heart of the South End. When he found St. Botolph Street, he walked down a row of redbrick town houses along a sidewalk carpeted in damp leaves until he found number 121 and he went up the stairs and rang the bell.

The man who lived at 121 was Isaiah Giddreaux, the father of Uncle Hollis’s second wife, Brenda. Hollis had married four times. The first and third had left him, Brenda had died of typhus, and about five years back Hollis and the fourth had kind of mutually misplaced each other. Hollis had told Luther that as much as he missed Brenda, and he missed her something terrible on many a day, he sometimes missed her father just as much. Isaiah Giddreaux had moved east back in ’05 to join up with Dr. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, but he and Hollis had remained in touch.

The door was opened by a small slim man wearing a dark wool three-piece suit and a navy-blue tie speckled with white dots. His hair was speckled with white, too, and cropped close to his skull, and he wore round spectacles that revealed calm, clear eyes behind their panes.

He extended his hand. “You must be Luther Laurence.”

Luther shook the hand. “Isaiah?”

Isaiah said, “Mr. Giddreaux if you please, son.”

“Mr. Giddreaux, yes, sir.”

For a small man Isaiah seemed tall. He stood as straight as any man Luther had ever seen, his hands folded in front of his belt buckle, his eyes so clear it was impossible to read them. They could have been the eyes of a lamb lying down in the last spot of sun on a summer evening. Or those of a lion, waiting for the lamb to get sleepy.