The vote was unanimous.

CHAPTER thirty-five

In his empty kitchen, Eddie McKenna poured two fingers of Power’s Irish whiskey into a glass of warm milk and drank it as he ate the plate of chicken and mashed potatoes Mary Pat had left on the stove. The kitchen ticked with its own quiet, and the only light came from a small gas lamp over the table behind him. Eddie ate at the sink, as he always did when he was alone. Mary Pat was out at a meeting of the Watch and Ward Society, also known as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice. Eddie, who barely believed in naming dogs, would never understand naming an organization, not once, but twice. Ah well, now that Edward Junior was at Rutgers and Beth was off to the convent, at least it kept Mary Pat out of his hair, and the thought of all those frigid biddies klatching together to rail against the sots and the suffragettes brought a smile to his face in the dark kitchen on Telegraph Hill.

He finished his meal. He placed the plate in the sink and the empty glass beside it. He got the bottle of Irish and poured himself a tumbler-ful and carried the tumbler and the bottle up the stairs with him. A fine night weatherwise. Good for the roof and a few hours’ thinking because, with the exception of the weather, everything had turned to right shit, it had. He half hoped the Bolshevik policemen’s union would strike, if only so it would keep this afternoon’s debacle at the NAACP off the front page. Good Lord how that nigger had set him up. Luther Laurence, Luther Laurence, Luther Laurence. The name ran through his head like mockery defined and contempt distilled.

Oh, Luther. You’ll have fair cause to rue the day you ever left your Momma’s tired, old cunny. I swear that to you, boy.

Out on the roof, the stars hung fuzzy above him, as if they’d been sketched by an unsure hand. Wisps of cloud slid past wisps of smoke from the Cotton Waste Factory. From here he could see the lights of the American Sugar Refining Company, a four-block monstrosity that gave continuous birth to sticky pollutants and rodents you could saddle, and the Fort Point Channel smelled of oil, yet he couldn’t escape the pleasure it gave him to stand up here and survey the neighborhood he and Tommy Coughlin had first worked as pups in their newfound homeland. They’d met on the boat over, two stowaways who’d been pinched on opposite ends of the ship the second day out and been forced into slave labor in the galley. At night, chained together to the legs of a sink the size of a horse trough, they’d traded stories of the Old Sod. Tommy had left behind a drunken father and a sickly twin brother in a tenant-farmer’s hut in Southern Cork. Eddie had left behind nothing but an orphanage in Sligo. Never knew his da, and his ma had passed from the fever when he was eight. So there they were, two crafty lads, scarcely in their teens, but full of piss, sure, full of ambition.