“Nice day, isn’t it?” Luther reached the sidewalk.

Neither of the men said a word.

“Big blue sky,” Luther said. “First clean air in about a week? Ya’ll should enjoy it.”

The pair remained silent and Luther tipped his hat to them and continued on up the sidewalk. It had been a foolish act, particularly since he’d just been thinking about Desmond, about Lila, about becoming a more responsible man. But something about white men with guns, he was sure, would always bring out the devil in him.

And judging by the mood in the city, there was about to be a whole lot more of them. He passed his third Emergency Relief tent of the day, saw some nurses inside setting up tables and wheeling beds around. Earlier that afternoon, he’d walked through the West End and up through Scollay Square, and just about every third block, it seemed, he stumbled upon ambulances grouped together, waiting for what was starting to feel like the unavoidable. He looked down at the Herald in his hand, at the front-page editorial they’d run above the fold:

Seldom has the feeling in this community been more tense than it is today over the conditions in the police department. We are at a turning of the ways. We shall take a long step toward “Russianizing” ourselves, or toward submitting to soviet rule if we, by any pretext, admit an agency of the law to become the servant of a special interest.

Poor Danny, Luther thought. Poor honest, outmatched son of a bitch.

James Jackson Storrow was the wealthiest man in Boston. When he’d become president of General Motors, he’d reorganized it from top to bottom without costing a single worker his job or a sole stockholder his confidence. He founded the Boston Chamber of Commerce and had chaired the Cost of Living Commission in the days leading up to the Great War. During that conflict of waste and despair, he’d been appointed federal fuel administrator by Woodrow Wilson and had seen to it that New England homes never wanted for coal or oil, sometimes using his own personal credit to ensure the shipments left their depots on time.

He’d heard others say he was a man who wore his power lightly, but the truth was, he’d never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion of the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they thus wielded “power” barbarically so the world would not find them out.

Terrible days, these, between the “powerful” and the “powerless,” the whole absurd battle opening up a new front here in this city, the city he loved more than any other, and this front possibly the worst anywhere since October of ’17.

Storrow received Mayor Peters in the billiards room of his Louisburg Square home, noting as the mayor entered that he was well tanned. This confirmed for Storrow the suspicion he’d long held that Peters was a frivolous man, one ill-suited to his job in normal circumstances, but in the current climate, egregiously so.