“Thanks,” Danny shouted back.

“You’re welcome.” Mark’s smile was taut. He leaned in again. “What happens if we don’t deliver, Dan? You thought of that? What happens?”

Danny looked out at the men, their faces sheened with sweat, several reaching past Mark to slap at Danny’s shoulder, to raise their glasses to him. Exhilarating? Hell, it made him feel like kings must feel. Kings and generals and lions.

“We’ll deliver,” he shouted back at Mark.

“I sure as hell hope so.”

Danny had a drink with Eddie McKenna at the Parker House a few days later, the two of them lucky to find chairs by the hearth on a bitter evening of black gusts and shuddering window frames. “Any news on the new commissioner?”

McKenna fingered his coaster. “Ah, he’s a lackey for the fucking Brahmins, through and through. A purple-veined whore wearing virgin’s clothes, he is. You know he went after Cardinal O’Connell himself last year?”

“What?”

McKenna nodded. “Sponsored a bill at the last Republican Convention to pull all public funding from parochial schools.” He raised his eyebrows. “They can’t take our heritage, they go after our religion. Nothing’s sacred to these Haves. Nothing.”

“So the likelihood of a raise…”

“The raise is not something I’d concern myself with for a bit.”

Danny thought of all the men in Fay Hall the other morning chanting his name and he resisted the urge to punch something. They’d been so close. So close.

Danny said, “I got a meeting with Curtis and the mayor in three days.”

McKenna shook his head. “There’s only one thing to do during regime change—keep your head down.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Ready it for a new hole.”

Danny and Mark Denton met to discuss strategy for their morning meeting with Mayor Peters and Commissioner Curtis. They sat at one of the tables in the back of the Blackstone Saloon on Congress Street. It was a dive, a well-known cops’ bar where the other men, sensing that Mark and Danny held keys to their fate, left them alone.

“A raise of two hundred a year is no longer enough,” Mark said.

“I know,” Danny said. Cost of living had risen so dramatically in the last six months that all that prewar figure would do was restore the men to the poverty level. “What if we come in asking for three hundred?”

Mark rubbed his forehead. “It’s tricky. They could get to the press before us and say we’re greedy. And Montreal definitely hasn’t helped our bargaining position.”

Danny reached through the stack of papers Denton had fanned across the table. “But the numbers bear us out.” He lifted the article he’d clipped from last week’s Traveler on the leaps in the prices of coal, oil, milk, and public transportation.

“But if we ask for three hundred when they’re still digging in their heels on two?”

Danny sighed and rubbed his own forehead. “Let’s just throw it on the table. When they balk, we can come down to two-fifty for veterans, two-ten for new recruits, start building a scale.”