“And faith,” O’Meara said. “Just a bit more of that. Would you gentlemen be willing to poll your fellow officers? Get a list of their grievances and personal accounts of their day-to-day experiences on the job? Personal testimonials as to how this fiscal imbalance is affecting their home lives? Would you be willing to fully document the sanitation conditions at the station houses and list what you believe are repeated abuses of power at the upper chains of command?”

“Without fear of reprisal?” Danny said.

“Without a one,” O’Meara said. “I assure you.”

“Then certainly,” Mark Denton said.

O’Meara nodded. “Let’s meet back here in one month. In that time, let’s refrain from voicing complaints in the press or stirring up the bees’ nest in any way. Is that acceptable?”

Danny and Mark nodded.

Mayor Peters stood and shook their hands. “I may be new to the post, gentlemen, but I hope to reward your confidence.”

O’Meara came from around the desk and pointed at the office doors. “When we open those doors, the press will be there. Camera flashes, shouted questions, the like. Are any of you undercover at the moment?”

Danny couldn’t believe how quick the smile broke across his face or how inexplicably proud he felt to say, “Not anymore, sir.”

In a rear booth at the Warren Tavern, Danny handed Eddie McKenna a box that contained his Daniel Sante clothes and rooming-house key, various notes he’d taken that hadn’t been included in his reports, and all the literature he’d studied to inform his cover.

Eddie pointed at Danny’s clean-shaven face. “So, you’re done.”

“I am done.”

McKenna picked through the box, then pushed it aside. “There’s no chance he could change his mind? Wake up after a good night’s sleep and—?”

Danny gave him a look that cut him off.

“Think they would have killed you?”

“No. Logically? No. But when you hear four hammers cock at your back?”

McKenna nodded. “Sure that’d make Christ Himself revisit the wisdom of His convictions.”

They sat in silence for a while, each to his own drink and his own thoughts.

“I could build you a new cover, move you to a new cell. There’s one in—”

“Stop. Please. I’m done. I don’t even know what the fuck we were doing. I don’t know why—”

“Ours is not to reason why.”

“Mine is not to reason why. This is your baby.”

McKenna shrugged.

“What did I do here?” Danny’s gaze fell on his open palms. “What was accomplished? Outside of making lists of union guys and harmless Bolsheviki—”

“There are no harmless Reds.”

“—what the fuck was the point?”

Eddie McKenna drank from his brown bucket of beer and then relit his cigar, one eye squinting through the smoke. “We’ve lost you.”

“What?” Danny said.

“We have, we have,” Eddie said softly.

“I don’t know what you’re on about. It’s me. Danny.”