Back at the station house, Danny and Steve gave their report to Sergeant Strivakis and separated. Steve went to find his brother’s widow and Danny went to find a drink. A year from now, Steve might still be finding his way to the Widow Coyle, but Danny could have a much harder time finding a drink. While the East Coast and West Coast had been concerned with recession and war, telephones and baseball, anarchists and their bombs, the Progressives and their ole-time-religion allies had risen out of the South and the Midwest. Danny didn’t know a soul who had taken the Prohibition bills seriously, even when they’d made it to the floor of the House. It seemed impossible, with all the other shifts going on in the country’s fabric, that these prim, self-righteous “don’t dos” had a chance. But one morning the whole country woke up to realize that not only did the idiots have a chance, they had a foothold. Gained while everyone else paid attention to what had seemed more important. Now the right of every adult to imbibe hung in the balance of one state: Nebraska. Whichever way it voted on the Volstead ratification in two months would decide whether an entire booze-loving country climbed on the wagon.

Nebraska. When Danny heard the name, about all that came to mind was corn and grain silos, dusk blue skies. Wheat, too, sheaves of it. Did they drink there? Did they have saloons? Or just silos?

They had churches, he was fairly certain. Preachers who struck the air with their fists and railed against the godless Northeast, awash, as it was, in white suds, brown immigrants, and pagan fornication.

Nebraska. Oh, boy.

Danny ordered two shots of Irish and a mug of cold beer. He removed the shirt he wore, unbuttoned, over his undershirt. He leaned into the bar as the bartender brought his drinks. The bartender’s name was Alfonse and he was rumored to run with the hoolies and bullyboys on the city’s east side, though Danny had yet to meet a copper who could pin anything specific on him. Of course, when the suspect in question was a bartender known to have a generous hand, who’d try hard?

“True you stopped the boxing?”

“Not sure,” Danny said.

“Your last fight, I lose money. You both supposed to last to the third.”

Danny held up his palms. “Guy had a fucking stroke.”

“Your fault? I see him lift his arm, too.”

“Yeah?” Danny drained one of his whiskies. “Well, then it’s all fine.”

“You miss it?”

“Not yet.”

“Bad sign.” Alfonse swept Danny’s empty glass off the bar. “A man don’t miss what a man forgot how to love.”

“Jeesh,” Danny said, “what’s your wisdom fee?”

Alfonse spit in a highball glass and walked it back down the bar. It was possible there was something to his theory. Right now, Danny didn’t love hitting things. He loved quiet and the smell of the harbor. He loved drink. Give him a few more and he’d love other things—working girls and the pigs’ feet Alfonse kept down the other end of the bar. The late summer wind, of course, and the mournful music the Italians made in the alleys every evening, a block-by-block journey as flute gave way to violin giving way to clarinet or mandolin. Once Danny got drunk enough, he’d love it all, the whole world.