Babe didn’t really mind, though, because it gave him time to leaf through more stories on the flood and the immediate response to it: the crackdown on all radicals or subversives who might have been involved. Agents of the Bureau of Investigation and officers of the Boston Police Department had kicked down doors at the headquarters of the Lettish Workingman’s Society, the Boston chapter of the IWW, and Reed and Larkin’s Left Wing of the Socialist Party. They filled holding pens across the city and sent the overflow to the Charles Street Jail.

At Suffolk County Superior Court, sixty-five suspected subversives were brought before Judge Wendell Trout. Trout ordered the police to release all who had not been formally charged with a crime, but signed eighteen deportation orders for those who could prove no U.S. citizenship. Dozens more were held pending Justice Department review of their immigration status and criminal history, actions Babe found perfectly reasonable, though some others did not. When the labor lawyer James Vahey, twice a Democratic candidate for governor of the Commonwealth, argued before the federal magistrate that internment of men who had not been charged with a crime was an affront to the Constitution, he was upbraided for his harsh tone and the cases were continued until February.

In this morning’s Traveler, they’d compiled a photo essay that took up pages four through seven. Even though authorities weren’t confirming yet whether their wide net had caught the terrorists responsible, and that made Babe mad, the anger flared only for the briefest moment before it was tamped out by a delicious, itchy trill that thumped the top of his spine as he marveled at the sheer wreckage of it: a whole neighborhood smashed and tossed and smothered in the black-iron slathering of that liquid mass. Pictures of the crumpled firehouse were followed by one of bodies stacked along Commercial like loaves of brown bread and another of two Red Cross workers leaning against an ambulance, one of them with a hand over his face and a cigarette between his lips. There was a shot of the firemen forming a relay line to remove the rubble and get to their men. A dead pig in the middle of a piazza. An old man sitting on a stoop, resting the side of his head on a dripping-brown hand. A dead-end street with the brown current up to the door knockers, stones and wood and glass floating on the surface. And the people—the cops and firemen and Red Cross and doctors and immigrants in their shawls and bowlers, everyone with the same look on their faces: how the fuck did this happen?

Babe saw that look on people’s faces a lot lately. Not for any particular reason, either. Just in general. It was like they were all walking through this crazy world, trying to keep pace but knowing they couldn’t, they just couldn’t. So part of them waited for that world to come back up behind them on a second try and just roll right over them, send them—finally—on into the next one.