Pyotr Glaviach used one elbow to push himself away from the cooler door. His other arm was behind his back.

“One last time,” Fraina said. “Go.”

“I can’t, Comrade. I—”

Four pistols cocked their hammers. Three came from behind him, the fourth from Pyotr Glaviach.

“Stand!” Glaviach shouted, the echo pinging off the tight stone walls.

Danny stood.

Pyotr Glaviach stepped up behind him. His shadow spilled onto the floor in front of Danny, and that shadow extended one arm.

Fraina gave Danny a mournful smile. “This is the only option left for you and it could expire at a moment’s notice.” He swept his arm toward the door.

“You’re wrong.”

“No,” Fraina said. “I am not. Good night.”

Danny didn’t reply. He walked past him. The four men in the rear of the room cast their shadows on the wall in front of him. He opened the door with a fiery itch at the base of his skull and exited the bakery into the night.

The last thing Danny did in the Daniel Sante rooming house was shave off his beard in the second-floor bathroom. He used shears to cut away the majority of it, placing the thick tufts in a paper bag, and then soaked it with hot water and applied the shaving cream in a thick lather. With each stroke of the straight razor, he felt leaner, lighter. When he wiped off the last stray spot of cream and the final errant hair, he smiled.

Danny and Mark Denton met with Commissioner O’Meara and Mayor Andrew Peters in the mayor’s office on a Saturday afternoon.

The mayor struck Danny as a misplaced man, as if he didn’t fit in his office, his big desk, his stiff, high-collared shirt and tweed suit. He played with the phone on his desk a lot and aligned and realigned his desk blotter.

He smiled at them once they’d taken their seats. “The BPD’s finest, I suspect, eh, gents?”

Danny smiled back.

Stephen O’Meara stood behind the desk. Before he’d said a word, he commanded the room. “Mayor Peters and I have looked into the budget for this coming year and we see places we could move a dollar here, a dollar there. It won’t, I assure you, be enough. But it’s a start, gentlemen, and it’s a little more than that—it’s a public acknowledgment that we take your grievances seriously. Isn’t that right, Mr. Mayor?”

Peters looked up from his pencil holder. “Oh, absolutely, yes.”

“We’ve consulted with city sanitation crews about launching an investigation into the health conditions of each and every station house. They’ve agreed to commence within the first month of the new year.” O’Meara met Danny’s eyes. “Is that a satisfactory start?”

Danny looked over at Mark and then back at the commissioner. “Absolutely, sir.”

Mayor Peters said, “We’re still paying back loans on the Commonwealth Avenue sewer project, gentlemen, not to mention the streetcar route expansions, the home fuel crisis during the war, and a substantial operating deficit for the public schools in the white districts. Our bond rating is low and sinking further. And now cost of living has exploded at an unprecedented rate. So we do—we very much do—appreciate your concerns. We do. But we need time.”