646DENNIS LEHANE

He accepted their salutes as he passed through them and up the front steps of the State House. His body felt utterly weightless by the time he passed through the great marble hall and was directed to Major Sullivan in the back with the First Cavalry. Major Sullivan had set up his command post under the archway, and the telephones and field radios on the long table in front of him were ringing at a furious pace. Officers answered them and scribbled on paper and handed the papers to Major Sullivan, who took note of the mayor as he approached, and then went back to scanning his latest dispatch.

He saluted Andrew Peters. "Mr. Mayor, I'd say you're just in time." "For?"

"The volunteer police General Cole sent to Scollay Square walked into an ambush, sir. There have been shots fired, several injuries reported." "Good Lord."

Major Sullivan nodded. "They won't last, sir. I'm not sure they'll last five minutes in truth."

Well then, here it was.

"Your men are ready?"

"You see them here before you, sir."

"The cavalry?" Peters said.

"No quicker way to break up a crowd and establish dominance, Mr. Mayor."

Peters was struck by the absurdity of it all--a nineteenth-century military action in twentieth-century America. Absurd but somehow apt. Peters gave the order: "Save the volunteers, Major."

"With pleasure, sir." Major Sullivan snapped a salute and a young captain brought him his horse. Sullivan toed the stirrup without ever looking at it and swung gracefully atop his horse. The captain climbed onto the mount behind his and raised a bugle to his shoulder.

"First Cavalry Troop, on my command we will ride down into Scollay Square to the intersection of Cornhill and Sudbury. We will rescue the volunteer policemen and restore order. You are not to fire on the crowd unless you have no--I repeat, absolutely no--choice. Is that understood?"

THE GIVEN DAYA hard chorus of "Yes, sir!"

"Then, gentlemen, at-ten-tion!"

The horses swung into rows as sharp and straight as razors.

Peters thought, Wait a minute. Hold on. Slow down. Let's think about this.

"Charge!"

The bugle blew and Major Sullivan's mount burst out through the portico, as if fired from a gun. The rest of the cavalry followed suit and Mayor Peters found himself running alongside them. He felt like a child at his first parade, but this was better than any parade, and he was no longer a child but a leader of men, a man worthy of salutes given without irony.

He was almost crushed by the flank of a horse as they rounded the corner of the State House fence line, took a quick right and then streamed left onto Beacon at full gallop. The sound of all those galloping hooves was unlike anything he had ever heard, as if the heavens had unleashed boulders by the hundreds, by the thousands, and sudden white cracks and fissures appeared in the windows along lower Beacon, and Beacon Hill itself shuddered from the glorious fury of the beasts and their riders.

The breadth of them had passed him by the time they turned left on Cambridge Street and headed for Scollay Square, but Mayor Peters kept running, the sharp decline of Beacon giving him added speed, and when he broke out onto Cambridge, they appeared before him, a block ahead, sabers held aloft, that bugle trumpeting their arrival. And just beyond them, the mob. A vast pepper sea that spread in every direction.

How Andrew Peters wished he'd been born twice as fast, wished he'd been given wings, as he watched those majestic brown beasts and their magnificent riders breach the crowd! They parted that pepper sea as Andrew Peters continued to run and the pepper gained clarity, became heads and then faces. Sounds grew more distinct as well. Shouts, screams, some squealing that sounded nonhuman, the clang and thwang of metal, the fi rst gunshot.

Followed by the second.