“There isn’t much of a subversive movement among us colored, Lieutenant, suh.”

McKenna’s eyes widened. “Where have you lived, Luther? There’s quite the lefty movement going on in Harlem right now. Your high-toned colored got himself some education and started reading his Marx and his Booker T. and his Frederick Douglass and now you got men like Du Bois and Garvey and some would argue they’re just as dangerous as Goldman and Reed and the atheistic Wobblies.” He held up a finger. “Some would argue. Some would even claim that the NAACP is just a front, Luther, for subversive and seditionist ideas.” He patted Luther’s cheek softly with a gloved hand. “Some.”

He turned and looked up at the scorched ceiling.

“Well, you’ve your work cut out for you, lads. I’ll leave you to it.”

He placed his hands behind his back and strolled across the floor, and neither Luther nor Clayton took a breath until he’d exited the foyer and descended the front steps.

“Oh, Luther,” Clayton said.

“I know it.”

“Whatever you did to that man, you got to undo it.”

“I didn’t do nothing. He just that way.”

“What way? White?”

Luther nodded.

“And mean,” Luther said. “Kinda mean just keeps eating till the day it dies.”

CHAPTER twenty

After leaving Special Squads, Danny returned to foot patrol in his old precinct, the Oh-One on Hanover Street. He was assigned to walk his beat with Ned Wilson, who at two months shy of his twenty, had stopped giving a shit five years ago. Ned spent most of their shift drinking or playing craps at Costello’s. Most days, he and Danny saw each other for about twenty minutes after they punched in and five minutes before they punched out. The rest of the time Danny was free to do as he chose. If he made a hard bust, he called Costello’s from a call box and Ned met up with him in time to march the perp up the stairs of the station house. Otherwise, Danny roamed. He walked the entire city, dropping in on as many station houses as he could reach in a day—the Oh-Two in Court Square, down to the Oh-Four on LaGrange, across to the Oh-Five in the South End and as far up the line as he could go on foot in the eighteen station houses of the BPD. The three in West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Jamaica Plain were left for Emmett Strack; the Oh-Seven in Eastie, for Kevin McRae; Mark Denton covered Dorchester, Southie, and the One-Four in Brighton. Danny worked the rest—downtown, the North and South Ends, and Roxbury.

The job was recruitment and testimony. Danny glad-handed, cajoled, harangued, and persuaded a solid one-third of all the cops he approached into writing down an accurate account of his workweek, his debts versus his income, and the conditions of the station house in which he worked. In his first three weeks back on the beat, he roped in sixty-eight men to meetings of the Boston Social Club at Fay Hall.