Luther looked; he couldn’t see anything.

Mrs. Giddreaux traced her finger down the flap. “See that cloud there along the edges? The way the paper is softer underneath it?”

Luther noticed it now. “Yes.”

“That’s from steam, son. Steam.”

Luther reached for the envelope and stared at it.

“She’s opening your letters, Luther, and then sending them back like she hasn’t. I don’t know if I’d call that love,” she squeezed his arm, “but I wouldn’t call it indifference.”

CHAPTER fifteen

Autumn yielded to winter in a series of wet gales that carved their way across the eastern seaboard, and Danny’s list of names grew larger. What the list told him, or anyone for that matter, about the likelihood of a May Day uprising was a mystery. Mostly he just had the names of ass-fucked workingmen looking to unionize and deluded romantics who actually thought the world welcomed change.

Danny began to suspect, though, that between the Roxbury Letts and the BSC, he’d become addicted to the strangest of things—meetings. The Letts and their talk and their drinking led to nothing he could see but more talk and more drinking. And yet, on the nights there were no meetings, no saloon afterward, he felt at loose ends. He’d sit in the dark of his cover apartment, drinking and rubbing the button between his thumb and index finger with such agitation, it seemed a miracle in retrospect that it never cracked. So he’d find himself at another meeting of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall in Roxbury. And another after that.

It wasn’t much different from a meeting of the Letts. Rhetoric, rage, helplessness. Danny couldn’t help marvel at the irony—these men who’d served as strikebreakers finding themselves backed into the same corners as the men they’d manhandled or beaten outside factories and mills.

Into another bar one night, and more talk about workers’ rights, but this time with the BSC—brother policemen, patrolmen, foot stampers and beat walkers and nightstick maestros filled with the stunted rage of the perpetually pushed-aside. Still no negotiations, still no decent talk of decent hours and a decent wage, still no raise. And word was that across the border in Montreal, just 350 miles north, the city had broken off negotiations with police and firemen and a strike was unavoidable.

And why not? the men in the bar said. Fucking starving, they said. Ass-fucked and broke-down and handcuffed to a job that gives us no way to feed our families and no way to see them properly either.

“My youngest,” Francie Deegan said, “my youngest, boys, is wearing clothes he got from his brothers and I’m shocked to discover the older ones ain’t wearing ’em still because I’m working so much I think they’re in second grade, but they’re in fifth. I think they’re at my hip, but they’re at me fuckin’ nipple, boys.”

And when he sat back down amid the hear-hears, Sean Gale piped up with:

“Fucking dockworkers, boys, are making three times as much as us coppers who bust them on drunk-and-disorderlies on Friday nights. So somebody better start thinking of how to pay us what’s right.”