When they were all assembled in the basement, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna took the podium. He bore a gash on his neck, treated and cleaned but unbandaged, and his white collar was black with blood. When he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper, the men leaned forward in their folding chairs.

“We lost one of our own today, men. A true policeman, a copper’s copper. We are lesser men now, and the world is a lesser place as well.” He lowered his head for a moment. “Today they took one of our own, but they didn’t take our honor.” He stared out at them, his eyes gone cold and clear. “They did not take our courage. They did not take our manhood. They just took one of our brothers.

“We’re going back into their territory tonight. Captain Vance and I will lead you. We are looking, specifically, for four men—Louis Fraina, Wychek Olafski, Pyotr Rastorov, and Luigi Broncona. We have photographs of Fraina and Olafski and sketches of the other two. But we won’t stop with them. We will subdue, without quarter, our common enemy. You all know what that enemy looks like. They wear a uniform as obvious as ours. Ours is blue, theirs is of coarse cloth and scraggly beard and watch cap. And they have the fanatics’ fire in their eyes. We are going to go out into those streets and we will take them back. Of this,” he said, and his eyes found the room, “there is no doubt. There is only resolve.” He gripped the podium, his eyes rolling slowly from left to right. “Tonight, my brothers, there is no rank. No difference between a first-year patrolman and a twenty-year gold shield. Because tonight we are all united in the red of our blood and the blue of our professional cloth. Make no mistake, we are soldiers. And as the poet wrote, ‘Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’ Let that be your benediction, men. Let that be your clarion call.”

He stepped from the podium and snapped a salute and the men rose as one and returned the salute. Danny compared it with this morning’s chaotic mix of fury and fear and found none of that. In accordance with McKenna’s wishes, the men had turned Spartan, utile, so fused to their sense of duty that they were indistinguishable from it.

CHAPTER twenty-seven

When the first detail of officers showed up at the door of The Revolutionary Age, Louis Fraina was waiting for them with two lawyers in attendance. He was cuffed and led out to the wagon on Humboldt Avenue and his lawyers rode with him.

The evening papers had hit the streets by this time and outrage at the morning attack on police had been growing throughout the dinner hour while the streetlamps grew yellow. Danny and a detail of nineteen other officers were dropped at the corner of Warren and St. James and told by Stan Billups, the sergeant in charge, to spread out, taking the streets in four-man squads. Danny went a few blocks south along Warren with Matt March and Bill Hardy and a guy from the One-Two he’d never met before named Dan Jeffries, Jeffries inexplicably excited that he’d met another guy with the same first name, as if this were a favorable omen. Along the sidewalk stood a half dozen men in their work clothes, men in tweed caps and frayed suspenders, dockworkers probably, who’d apparently read the evening papers and been drinking while they had.