“And if, let us say, the men agreed to withdraw from that affiliation?”

Curtis narrowed his eyes. “Have they?”

“If they did, Edwin,” Storrow said slowly, “what then?”

“I would take it under advisement,” Curtis said.

“Advisement of what?” Peters said.

Storrow shot him a glare he hoped was sharp enough and Peters dropped his eyes.

“Advisement, Mr. Mayor, of the larger picture.” Curtis’s eyes had moved inward, something Storrow had seen often in financial negotiations—self-pity disguised as inner counsel.

“Edwin,” he said, “the men will withdraw from the American Federation of Labor. They’ll concede. The question is: Will you?”

The ocean breeze found the awning over the doorway and the flaps of the tarp snapped against themselves.

“The nineteen men should be disciplined but not punished,” Governor Coolidge said. “Prudence, Commissioner, is all we ask.”

“Common sense,” Peters said.

Soft waves broke against the rocks.

Storrow found Curtis staring at him, as if awaiting his final plea. He stood and extended his hand to the little man. Curtis gave the hand a damp shake of his fingers.

“You have my every confidence,” Storrow said.

Curtis gave him a grim smile. “That’s heartening, James. I’ll take it under advisement, rest assured.”

Later that afternoon, in an incident that would have proven a profound embarrassment to the Boston Police Department if it had been reported to the press, a police detail arrived at the new headquarters of the NAACP on Shawmut Avenue. Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, armed with a search warrant, dug up the floor in the kitchen and the yard behind the headquarters.

As guests who’d come to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony stood around him, he found nothing.

Not even a toolbox.

The Storrow Report was released to the papers that night.

Monday morning, portions of it were published, and the editorial pages of all four major dailies proclaimed James J. Storrow the savior of the city. Crews arrived to break down the emergency hospital tents that had been erected across the city, and the extra ambulance drivers were sent home. The presidents of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s ordered employee-firearm training to cease and all company-provided weapons were confiscated. Divisions of the State Guard and platoons of the United States Cavalry, which had been mustering in Concord, found their alert status downgraded from red to blue.

At three-thirty that afternoon, the Boston City Council passed a resolution to name either a building or a public thoroughfare after James J. Storrow.

At four, Mayor Andrew Peters left his office at City Hall to find a crowd awaiting him. The throng cheered.

At five-forty-five, policemen of all eighteen precincts met for evening roll call. It was then that the duty sergeant of each precinct house informed the men that Commissioner Curtis had ordered the immediate termination of the nineteen men he’d suspended the previous week.

In Fay Hall, at eleven in the evening, the members of the Boston Police Department Union voted to reaffirm their affiliation with the American Federation of Labor.

At eleven-oh-five, they voted to strike. It was agreed that this action would occur at tomorrow evening’s roll call, a Tuesday, when fourteen hundred policemen would walk off the job.