They met their glasses in toast and Danny caught his father smiling at him, in the eyes if not the mouth. Thomas Coughlin alternated between a variety of demeanors and all coming and going with the speed of a spooked horse that it was easy to forget that they were all aspects of a man who was certain he was doing good. Thomas Coughlin was its servant. The good. Its salesman, its parade marshal, catcher of the dogs who nipped its ankles, pallbearer for its fallen friends, cajoler of its wavering allies.

The question remained, as it had throughout Danny’s life, as to what exactly the good was. It had something to do with loyalty and something to do with the primacy of a man’s honor. It was tied up in duty, and it assumed a tacit understanding of all the things about it that need never be spoken aloud. It was, purely of necessity, conciliatory to the Brahmins on the outside while remaining firmly anti-Protestant on the inside. It was anticolored, for it was taken as a given that the Irish, for all their struggles and all those still to come, were Northern European and undeniably white, white as last night’s moon, and the idea had never been to seat every race at the table, just to make sure that the last chair would be saved for a Hibernian before the doors to the room were pulled shut. It was above all, as far as Danny understood it, committed to the idea that those who exemplified the good in public were allowed certain exemptions as to how they behaved in private.

His father said, “Heard of the Roxbury Lettish Workingman’s Society?”

“The Letts?” Danny was suddenly aware of Charles Steedman watching him from the window. “Socialist workers group, made up mostly of Russian and Latvian émigrés.”

“How about the People’s Workers Party?” Eddie McKenna asked.

Danny nodded. “They’re over in Mattapan. Communists.”

“Union of Social Justice?”

Danny said, “What’s this, a test?”

None of the men answered, just stared back at him, grave and intent.

He sighed. “Union of Social Justice is, I believe, mostly Eastern European café intellectuals. Very antiwar.”

“Anti-everything,” Eddie McKenna said. “Anti-American most of all. These are all Bolshevik fronts—all of them—funded by Lenin himself to stir unrest in our city.”

“We don’t like unrest,” Danny’s father said.

“How about Galleanists?” Deputy Chief Madigan said. “Heard of them?”

Again, Danny felt the rest of the room watching him.

“Galleanists,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice, “are followers of Luigi Galleani. They’re anarchists devoted to dismantling all government, all property, all ownership of any kind.”

“How do you feel about them?” Claude Mesplede said.

“Active Galleanists? Bomb throwers?” Danny said. “They’re terrorists.”

“Not just Galleanists,” Eddie McKenna said. “All radicals.”

Danny shrugged. “The Reds don’t bother me much. They seem mostly harmless. They print their propaganda rags and drink too much at night, end up disturbing their neighbors when they start singing too loud about Trotsky and Mother Russia.”