“I heard you were seeking aid and comfort for the enemy this afternoon, too, Dan. So listen,” Billups said with a smile, “you might be Tommy Coughlin’s kid and that gets you some passes, okay? But if you keep acting like a pinko cocksucker? Tommy Coughlin’s kid or no, I’ll take it fucking personal.” He tapped his nightstick lightly off Danny’s tunic. “I’m giving you a direct order—get back up that street and hurt some subversive assholes, or else get out of my sight.”

When Danny turned, Jeffries stood there, giggling softly. He walked past him and then back up the street past Hardy. When he reached March, March shrugged, and Danny kept walking. He turned the corner and saw three paddy wagons at the end of the block, saw fellow officers dragging anyone with a mustache or watch cap down the sidewalk and heaving them into the wagons.

He wandered for several blocks, came across the cops and their newly found working-class brothers going at a dozen men who’d wandered out of a meeting of the Lower Roxbury Socialist Fraternal Organization. The mob had the men pressed back against the doors. The men fought back, but then the doors opened behind them and some of them fell backward and others tried to hold back the mob with nothing more than flailing arms. The left door was wrenched off its hinges and the mob washed over the men and flowed into the building. Danny watched out of his good eye and knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing at all. This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything.

Luther went to Costello’s on Commercial Wharf and waited outside because it was whites-only. He stood a long time. One hour.

No McKenna.

In his right hand, he held a paper bag with fruit he’d slipped out of the Coughlin household to give to Nora, as long as McKenna didn’t decide to shoot him or arrest him tonight. The “list,” typed up from fifty thousand telephone users in Philadelphia, was tucked under his left arm.

Two hours.

No McKenna.

Luther left the wharf and walked up toward Scollay Square. Maybe McKenna had been hurt in the line of duty. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. Maybe he’d been shot dead by plug-uglies with an ax to grind.

Luther whistled and hoped.

Danny wandered the streets until he found himself heading along Eustis Street toward Washington. He decided he’d take a right when he reached Washington and cross the city until he reached the North End. He had no intention of stopping back at the Oh-One to sign out. He wasn’t changing out of his uniform. He walked through Roxbury in sweet night air that smelled more of summer than spring, and all around him the rule of law was being enforced, as anyone who looked like a Bolshevik or an anarchist, a Slav, an Italian, or a Jew was learning the price of the likeness. They lay against curbs, stoops, sat against lamp poles. On the cement and the tar—their blood, their teeth. A man ran into an intersection a block up and took a police cruiser to his knees. Airborne, he clawed at space. When he landed, the three cops who’d exited the cruiser held his arm to the ground while the cop who’d stayed behind the wheel drove over his hand.