554DENNIS LEHANE

The ironworker with the big mouth was sentenced to a year in jail (three months time served), and deportation orders were fi led immediately. If his physical eviction from the country were to occur before he finished his sentence, the United States would graciously commute the remainder of it once he reached international waters. Otherwise, he did the full nine months. Connor, of course, felt some sympathy for the man. Pardi seemed, in the aggregate, an inoffensive sort, a hard worker who'd been engaged to be married in the fall. Hardly a threat to these shores. But what he represented--the very first stop on the road to terrorism--was quite offensive. Mitchell Palmer and the United States had decided the message needed to be sent to the world--we will no longer live in fear of you; you will live in fear of us. And that message was to be sent calmly, implacably, and constantly.

For a few months that summer, Connor forgot he was angry.

The Chicago White Sox came to town after Detroit and Ruth went out with a few of them one night, old friends from the farm league days, and they told him that order had been restored to their city, the army finally cheesing it to the niggers and putting them down once and for all. Thought it would never end, they said. Four days of shooting and pillaging and fires and all because one of theirs swam where he wasn't supposed to. And the whites hadn't been stoning him. They'd just been throwing rocks into the water to warn him off. Ain't their fault he wasn't a good swimmer.

Fifteen whites dead. You believe that? Fifteen. Maybe the niggers had some legitimate grievances, okay, yeah, but to kill fi fteen white men? World was upside down.

It was for Babe. After that game where he'd seen Luther, he couldn't hit shit. Couldn't hit fastballs, couldn't hit curves, couldn't hit it if it had been sent to him on a string at ten miles an hour. He fell into the worst slump of his career. And now that the coloreds had been put back in their place in D. C. and Chicago, and the anarchists seemed to have gone quiet, and the country might have been able to take just one easy breath, the agitators and agitation sprang up from the least likely of quarters: the police.

THE GIVEN DAYThe police, for Christ's sake!

Every day of Ruth's slump brought more signs that push was coming to shove and the city of Boston was going to pop at the seams. The papers reported rumors of a sympathy strike that would make Seattle look like an exhibition game. In Seattle it had been public workers, sure, but garbagemen and transit workers. In Boston, word was, they'd lined up the firemen. If the cops and the jakes walked off the job? Jeepers Crow! The city would become rubble and ash.

Babe had a regular thing going now with Kat Lawson at the Hotel Buckminster, and he left her sleeping one night and stopped in the bar on his way out. Chick Gandil, the White Sox first baseman, was at the bar with a couple fellas, and Babe headed for them but saw something in Chick's eyes that immediately warned him off. He took a seat down the other end, ordered a double scotch, and recognized the guys Chick was talking to: Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell, errand boys for Arnold Rothstein.

And Babe thought: Uh- oh. Nothing good's going to come of this.

Around the time Babe's third scotch arrived, Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell removed their coats from the backs of their chairs and left through the front door, and Chick Gandill walked his own double scotch down the length of the bar and plopped into the seat next to Babe with a loud sigh.

"Gidge."

"Babe."

"Oh, right, right. Babe. How you doing?"

"Ain't hanging with mutts, that's how I'm doing."

"Who's the mutts?"

Babe looked at Gandill. "You know who the mutts are. Sport Sullivan? Abe Fucking Attell? They're mutts work for Rothstein and Rothstein's the mutt of mutts. What the fuck you doing talking to a pair of mutts like that, Chick?"

"Gee, Mom, next time let me ask permission."

"They're dirty as the Muddy River, Gandil. You know it and anyone else with eyes knows it, too. You get seen with a pair of diamond dandies like that, who's going to believe you ain't taking?"