“You’re naïve, lad.”

“So be it.” Danny reached for the door handle.

“Dan.” McKenna put a hand on his shoulder.

Danny waited.

“Too much has been asked of you this last couple of months. I agree, as God is my judge. But it won’t be much longer ’til you’ll have your gold shield. And all, all will be perfectly brilliant then.”

Danny nodded so Eddie would let go of his shoulder. Eddie dropped his hand.

“No, it won’t,” Danny said and got out of the car.

The next afternoon, in the confessional of a church he’d never entered before, Danny knelt and blessed himself.

The priest said, “You smell like liquor.”

“That’s because I’ve been drinking, Father. I’d share, but I left the bottle back at my apartment.”

“Have you come to confess, son?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You either sinned or you didn’t.”

“I shot a man to death yesterday. Outside a church. I figure you’ve heard about it by now.”

“I have, yes. The man was an anarchist. You…?”

“Yes. I shot him three times. Tried five times,” Danny said, “but I missed twice. Thing is, Father? You’ll tell me I did right. Yeah?”

“That’s for God to—”

“He was going to blow up a church. One of yours.”

“Correct. You did right.”

“But he’s dead. I removed him from this earth. And I can’t shake the feeling…”

A long silence followed, made all the longer by the fact that it was church silence; it smelled of incense and oil soap and was hemmed in by thick velvet and dark wood.

“What feeling?”

“The feeling that we—me and the guy I shot?—we’re just living in the same barrel? See?”

“No. You’re being obtuse.”

“Forgive me,” Danny said. “There’s this big barrel of shit. See? And it’s—”

“Watch your language.”

“—where the ruling class and all the Haves don’t live, right? It’s where they fucking throw every consequence they don’t want to think about. And the idea—”

“You are in a house of God.”

“—the idea is, Father? The idea is that we’re supposed to play nice and go away when they’re done with us. Accept what they give us and drink it and eat it and clap for it and say, ‘Mmmm, more, please. Thanks.’ And, Father, I gotta tell you, I’ve about had my fucking fill.”

“Leave this church at once.”

“Sure. You coming?”

“I think you need to sober up.”

“And I think you need to leave this mausoleum you’re hiding in and see how your parishioners really live. Done that lately, Father?”

“I—”

“Ever?”

Please,” Louis Fraina said, “take a seat.”

It was just past midnight. Three days since the manufactured assassination attempt. At around eleven, Pyotr Glaviach had called Danny and given him the address of a bakery in Mattapan. When Danny arrived, Pyotr Glaviach stepped from the Olds Model M and waved Danny into an alley that ran between the bakery and a tailor. Danny followed him around to the back and into the storeroom. Louis Fraina waited in a hard-backed wooden chair with its twin directly across from him.