“I do, too,” Peters said.

“Such men fiddle while cities burn.” Storrow felt a long sigh leave him, heard it exit his mouth and enter the room as if it had spent so many decades bearing witness to waste and folly that it would still be circling the room when he reentered on the morrow. “Such men love ash.”

The next afternoon, Danny, Mark Denton, and Kevin McRae met with James J. Storrow in a suite at the Parker House. They brought with them detailed reports on the health and sanitation conditions of all eighteen precinct houses, signed accounts from over twenty patrolmen that detailed their average workday or week, and analyses of the pay rates of thirty other local professions—including city hall janitors, streetcar operators, and dockworkers—that dwarfed their own pay scale. They spread it all before James J. Storrow and three other businessmen who formed his commission and sat back while they went over it, passing particular sheets of interest among them and engaging in nods of surprise and grumps of consternation and eye rolls of apathy that had Danny worried he may have overloaded their hand.

Storrow went to lift another patrolman’s account off the stack and then pushed the whole thing away from him. “I’ve seen enough,” he said quietly. “Quite enough. No wonder you gentlemen feel abandoned by the very city you protect.” He looked at the other three men, all of whom took his lead and nodded at Danny and Mark Denton and Kevin McRae in sudden commiseration. “This is shameful, gentlemen, and not all the blame falls on Commissioner Curtis. This happened on Commissioner O’Meara’s watch, as well as under the eyes of Mayors Curley and Fitzgerald.” Storrow came around from behind the table and extended his hand, shaking first Mark Denton’s, then Danny’s, then Kevin McRae’s. “My profoundest apologies.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Storrow leaned back against the table. “What are we to do, gentlemen?”

“We just want our fair lot, sir,” Mark Denton said.

“And what is your fair lot?”

Danny said, “Well, sir, it’s a three-hundred-a-year increase in pay for starters. An end to overtime and special detail work without compensation comparative to those thirty other professions we brought up in our analysis.”

“And?”

“And,” Kevin McRae said, “it’s an end to the company-store policy of paying for our uniforms and our equipment. It’s also about clean stations, sir, clean beds, usable toilets, a sweeping out of the vermin and the lice.”

Storrow nodded. He turned and looked back at the other men, though it was clear his was the only word that really counted. He turned back to the policemen. “I concur.”

“Excuse me?” Danny said.

A smile found Storrow’s eyes. “I said I concur, Officer. In fact, I’ll champion your point of view and recommend your grievances be settled in the manner you’ve put forth.”

Danny’s first thought: It was this easy?

His second thought: Wait for the “but.”

“But,” Storrow said, “I only have the power to recommend. I cannot implement change. Only Commissioner Curtis can.”