8

Brooklyn, 1939

All that fall, from the Brooklyn Bridge down to Twentieth Street, the crowds were growing steadily in the little parish churches and the union halls. He brought them out with his speeches, a man with kindly eyes and the lilt of Southern Italy still on his tongue. Speaking to them quickly and forcefully about unbelievable things—about their rights, and America, and how they were free men.

Nobody had ever seen anything like it. No one could remember anyone challenging the Camardas on their own docks, with all their goons and their shlammers. The squat, swarthy enforcers, with dead eyes and new coats. Strutting the docks all day with their hands shoved deep in their pockets, their lengths of lead pipe wrapped in newspapers. Walking right through the men when they came down to the wharves, like wolves culling sheep.

Then Panto started holding his meetings all over Red Hook and the Heights. He looked too thin and too tall to be a longshoreman, but he was wiry and deceptively strong. Not yet thirty years old. A kindly smile under that silly little moustache and the silly little gigolo’s hat he wore, hook slung over his sleeveless undershirt. For the rallies, he took care to dress up in his one good suit and tie, the hat slung over his eyes at a rakish angle. In the movies, he would have been cast as the bad guy, the mafioso, or the false lover. In person there was something touchingly genteel about him, something careful and dignified, the air of an impoverished provincial signore.

They loved him in the musty local halls, where there hadn’t been a union meeting for ten years, twenty years, or maybe never. In the little parish churches built by congregations of long-vanished Protestants. The walls painted the color of the Mediterranean now, filled with statues of the Virgin, and the favorite saints of Sicily and Calabria, Castellammare and Altomonte. The men shouting his name from the moment he walked up to the front of the hall, or to the altar, standing on chairs and pews just to get a look at him. To hear him tell them the same thing, every time.

“We are strong. We are many. All we have to do is stand up and fight.”

From the Mother Local over on Eleventh Avenue came King Joe Ryan himself, president-for-life of the International, to try to reason with them. But the men shouted him down, ran him back to Chelsea in his two-hundred-dollar suit with his diamond stickpin. King Joe crying out, “People are going to get hurt!” in his pipsqueak brogue, as they surged in around him, his bodyguard of ex-cons kicking and punching furiously to get him clear.

“Starting with you!” the longshoremen shouted at him, pelting him with apples and rolled-up newspapers as he ran the gauntlet out the front door.

Even Camarda and the worst of his shlammers fell back when Panto led them down Columbia Street to the Mooremack Line on Pier 15. Striding like men again, with him at their head in his silly black hat, smiling that kindly, diffident signore’s grin. The goons jeered and cursed him, but Tom could see they were fascinated by the man, too, their eyes following his every word and movement.

“What they can’t crush, they want to follow,” Father Carey, the priest from Saint Francis Xavier’s, told Tom. “That’s the way of this world, where men live entombed in fear and ignorance.”

They lay for him anywhere they might get him alone, in the alleys down by the slips, and outside every saloon and greasy spoon. But Panto didn’t go out drinking, he didn’t go into the saloon save to talk to the men. He had a girl, took her out to the big movie palaces and the nice restaurants up in Park Slope, always very public places with lots of people around.

Down on the docks, the men wouldn’t let him go anywhere alone. Everywhere he walked there was a crowd around him, carrying their longshoremen’s hooks and their own lengths of pipe, warding Camarda’s goons off. A phalanx of men surrounding him, the only sign he was even with them that hat, bobbing up and down above the rest.

In their frustration, the shlammers cut out victims anywhere they could. Waiting to get them drunk, and isolated, and away from the rest. Men bloodying one another with fists, and sticks, and other primitive weapons, breaking one another’s heads along the ancient, cobblestone streets of the waterfront. Tom saw men he knew and like pull down one of Camarda’s goons and stretch his leg out over the curb, while two more men took turns jumping up and down on it until it shattered. He would never forget the sound of breaking bone, the shrill squeal the man made, held down helpless over the curb while they shattered his leg, writhing in his fine coat like a cockroach on its back.

Yet somehow it did not frighten or repel him. Despite himself, he welcomed the chance to fight something. Coming back proudly to Mrs. Maguire’s with his first broken nose a few days later. Charlie expressing alarm while he snapped it back into place with one quick turn of his hands.

“You should be careful,” Charlie told him, referring to more than the street brawls, Tom understood. “Nothin’s ever what it seems down there on the docks.”

“Seems clear enough to me.”

“Is it? I hear you’re runnin’ with a lot of reds.”

“Who told you that?”

“Friends of mine. They say you’re off with that communist lawyer, Longhi—”

“There’s more priests than Communists down by the waterfront these days,” Tom said, snorting.

“The waterfront’s a world to itself, Tommy,” his brother warned him. “You think you can see it plain enough. But there’s always somethin’ else goin’ on—somethin’ you don’t see. I know. The first beat I ever walked was down in Red Hook, an’ they would’ve had to fish me out of the bay, if it hadn’t been for the Old Man. You got to watch yourself down there.”

“You should be down there now, Charlie.”

“Where’s the center of it, Tommy? Where’s the fight?”

“Pier Fifteen.”

“The Mooremack Lines, that’s Billy McCormack’s pier. He’ll get it straightened out.”

The first time he had ever heard that name from his brother. Even down on the docks, no one spoke it much, save in low voices and while looking over their shoulders.

“We don’t see Mr. William bloody McCormack down on Pier Fifteen very much, Charlie. Instead, we got the Camardas. You want to work, you have to play ball with those fellas,” he said, growing heated.

“But that’s the way of it everywhere, Tommy. You want to get on, you have to play ball.”

“Do ya know what they do to the men down there, Charlie? They squeeze ’em every way they can—squeeze ’em till there’s no more left to get. They give up half their wages just to be in the shape-up. Men like that—strong men, proud men. Having to stand out on the dockside and see if they’re good enough to be allowed to work.

“They make ’em take out loans from the Camardas’ shylocks, whether they need one or not, an’ they make ’em give their nickels to the Camardas’ policy bankers, whether they want to play policy or not. They even make ’em get their hair cut by the Camarda barbers, an’ buy their grapes from the Camarda fruit dealers, whether they’re gonna make their wine that year or not. And every couple weeks the Camardas send one of their torpedoes around to make ’em buy a ticket to another of their charity rackets. Another banquet for King Joe Ryan!”

“I know what you’re sayin’, Tommy,” his brother commiserated. “But give Bill McCormack a chance. He’s a businessman, he wants things to run smooth—”

“They got fourteen thousand men down there, Charlie! Fourteen thousand, from Owl’s Head to Greenpoint,” he snapped, exasperated. “Jesus God, it’s the biggest racket in the world! Squeezing out blood money penny by penny, from the poorest sons of bitches in the City!”

“Just make sure it’s not your blood they squeeze, boy-o.”

Tom berated himself that it wasn’t. He wasn’t much use to them, he knew, still thin as a rake handle. After getting himself fired from the checker’s job he tried working the holds, quitting after a week and before he killed somebody, such as himself. It was the hardest work he had ever done, made reaping and thrashing the oat sheaves back in Bohola seem like a Sunday outing.

He managed to catch on as a recording secretary with Panto’s Rank-and-File Committee. Helping the priests help the men where he could. Working the docks with the committee in the day, then off to study the law or work on his brother’s campaign for Brooklyn DA at night. Falling asleep on the long subway ride home after midnight to Mrs. Maguire’s on West 103rd, and again the moment he set his head to the pillow.

He had never felt so tired, but also so exhilarated. It was as if every one of his senses was piqued to a point he had never experienced before. He loved being on the docks in the early morning, as the sun was coming up. The gray and white skyscrapers emerging through the dirty yellow half-light at the water. The great bridges, and the rising bustle of the harbor, coming to life like some grand orchestra tuning up around him. The battered freighters, the rusty-black hulls rising out of the water, fat little tugs pushing and worrying them into place at the dock.

He loved the smell of the City around him—a very different smell from the early mornings he had known in Bohola, or Dublin, or back at his boardinghouse in Manhattan. The brine and the diesel, and even the stinkwash of the garbage slicks lolling around the moorings. The coal smoke, and the incinerators from the tenements by the waterfront, the gasoline of the dockside generators, the choking richness of thousands of pounds of raw sugar, or tea, or coffee being poured down the chutes.

Then there were the men. Walking down to the docks in their shabby, loose clothes, pants legs maybe tied with cheap twine, so they wouldn’t get caught in anything. Tattered checker jackets worn against the growing cold, or fraying leather coats worn down to the consistency of sandpaper. Soft caps that could be easily folded and stuck into pockets, sandwiches or a couple of doughnuts wrapped in wax paper, if they were lucky. Standing for hours in the shape-up while the hiring bosses decided who they would and would not deign to choose for the day. Picking out the ones favored by the Camardas by the not-so-secret tokens they wore, the little toothpicks or the union buttons, or the cigarette tucked behind an ear.

As the weeks went on, he could see the change come over them, the pride growing visibly in their every movement. The men standing straighter, no longer in the defensive half crouch of whipped dogs. Yelling out at the hiring bosses when they tried to ghost-cut a ship, the top gangs insisting on staying together. He came to know them as he worked the tiny Rank-and-File headquarters on Remsen Street, their friendship steadily widening his existence. They took him home with them, feeding him, introducing him to their families, to their mothers, who all wanted to put some meat on his bones.

Such food! Like nothing he had ever tasted before. Heaping Italian suppers, brimming with garlic and peppers, homemade tomato sauces, deep troughs of lasagna. Hand-rolled spaghetti and linguine, made in the kitchen that morning. Washed down with homemade grappa, or the tart wine stomped in the tenement basement, wine with a bite in it, bitter as vinegar. He loved it all.

It was not just the Italians, either, but the Bohemians and the Poles and the Swedes, every possible people under the sun. Mixed on the waterfront, all of them, working shoulder to shoulder like some labor song of solidarity. All save the coloreds—the one exception to the international brotherhood of the longshoremen’s union. Kept to their own dingy little local hall, at the far end of the Hook. Neglected even by the Camardas in their rackets, making so little they weren’t worth the trouble. Allowed on the white man’s waterfront only when there was some particularly odious cargo to be unpacked, usually bananas, which came crawling with tarantulas bigger than your hand.

“That’s not right,” Panto conceded to him one evening when Tom was over for supper at the home of his fiancée, Alice, a sweet young woman with large black eyes and long hair, and the lovely, full breasts that all the Italian girls seemed to have.

“They’re men, too; they deserve dignity. We take care a that. We gonna take care of everything, so they can never divide us again.”

There was a rare hesitation in his voice, eyes sincere but dropping down to where he played with the linguine on his plate, twirling and untwirling it with his fork.

“What is it?”

“Only . . .”

“Only what?”

“Only maybe not right away—”

“Jesus, Peter, how long do they have to wait—”

“I don’ mean that. I don’ mean put ’em off forever an’ ever,” Panto said patiently, making Tom blush for mistaking him. This good man. “I mean we got to win somethin’ now. Or it’s gonna be too late.”

“Win something?”

“We got to get it, Tom,” he said, bringing his hands close together, as if narrowing in on something, eyes struggling to convey exactly what he meant. “Because the men won’t last out there much longer. Too many outta work, not enough coal to get through the winter. We gotta get somethin’, then go on from there.”

“You don’t mean giving in?”

Instantly ashamed of himself again, but confused, wanting to know what he meant. Missing it, he knew later. Missing what he was really saying.

“No, no.” Panto shook his head again, almost sorrowful at being misunderstood. His face looking heavy-eyed, and lined well beyond his twenty-eight years. “We don’t give in. Never. But we got to win somethin’. I been hearing from a few people—never mind for now. Reasonable people. Maybe we can make them listen.”

 

“He’s smart, your boy.” Charlie had nodded approvingly when Tom told him about their conversation. “Sure, Tommy, it’s shameful how they treat the coloreds down there. It’s shameful how they treat everybody. But he’s right. He’s got to win something now, if he’s going to hold on till we can get in to help him.”

He wanted to argue, even then. Wanted to ask, How can you be neutral in this? But he listened, for it was Charlie who had opened up this dizzying new world to him. Back when he had first arrived at Mrs. Maguire’s, just a few weeks before, spouting all his big Dublin university talk about the superiority of Irish culture, and letters, and everything else. They had laughed in his face, Charlie, and Michael and Jack, his other older brothers, who were working now one as a fireman, the other a policeman.

Wait’ll you see this town, they had told him, and done their best to show him, each in his own way. They tutored him on his manners, on how to buy a suit and eat in a good restaurant. Taking him to the museums, and to the Polo Grounds, and Carnegie Hall, and the top of the Empire State, and all the other great and grand buildings.

It made him feel ashamed of his own ignorance, to have come from such a small, backward corner of the world and not know it—not just Bohola and Lismirrane, but even Dublin, and the whole of Ireland. He’d been amazed to learn that his brother had a Jew law partner, knew colored men and Puerto Ricans from East Harlem—even invited them over to break bread with him, in the attached house he had bought out in Bay Ridge. The place three times the size of the home they had all lived in back in Bohola, and remarkably quiet and neat by contrast. A place of shadows and low lights—the way that Claire, the wife, liked it. A constant presence in the background, her face already nearly rigid as a mask by then. Confined to the wheelchair, Neddy Moran or Jimmy always standing over her, looking to see if there was anything she needed.

Jimmy, the adopted son, in his last year at Fordham by then, and a natural rival at first. The two of them feeling each other out warily across the dinner table, but soon enough fast friends, the boy’s natural enthusiasm and goodheartedness shining through. It was a place where he always felt at home, going over for Sunday dinner, or maybe a Saturday-night crack with Charlie and the brothers.

It was, too, that same fall that Charlie ran for Brooklyn DA. Opening up to Tom yet another world where men vied for power. The campaign wildly exciting, the nights filled up with torchlight rallies, and long cars careening around quiet Brooklyn streets. Neddy Moran at the wheel, and Charlie’s law partner, Natie Cohen, or maybe the Old Man always at his brother’s side.

“It is an education,” his brother liked to tell him. Watching him, Tom knew, to see what he was picking up.

He remembered one evening out in a tiny lansmen’s hall in Brownsville, before a crowd of Jewish tailors, butchers, and pushcart vendors. He never liked going out to that part of the world. It always seemed dark and shabby, and infinitely old, somehow, though he knew there was scarcely a building standing that had been there forty years. The side streets lined with monotonous three- and four-story brick apartment houses, or slumping wooden row houses, even old farmhouses rotting slowly into empty lots littered with bottles and discarded gravestones from some upturned local cemetery. The streetlights smashed and stripped cars abandoned along the curb. Above, the elevated trains roared like a waking nightmare through the dark. Even on Pitkin Avenue, the bustling shopping district, many of the stores looked dilapidated and stuffed willy-nilly with cheap goods, as if the vendors’ pushcarts had just been shoved inside, Yiddish writing scribbled in chalk above the entrance.

In the little hall on Stone Street, the crowd was already agitated before Charlie said a word, maddened by news of the latest atrocities from Poland. He had just started in denouncing the Nazis when a workingman in baggy canvas pants and a cap tugged low over his brow pushed his way to the front of the crowd, shaking a muscled arm at him.

“Never mind the goddamned Nazis. Whattaya gonna do about the Coughlin thugs, right here in Brooklyn?” he yelled out, bringing the house down. The men stamping their feet in the murky yellow light, drowning out his brother’s speech, while Tom and Natie looked about apprehensively.

“What’s your question now?” Charlie asked from the platform, holding out an ear and looking slightly stunned.

“You know damned well who! The Christian Mobilizers!” the angry man sneered. “They come right into our synagogues with their baseball bats! Why don’t you get your Bishop Molloy to do something about it?”

A yell of affirmation resounded through the little hall, the spontaneous cry from the throats of half a thousand garment cutters, and warehousemen, and pickle sellers. Charlie waiting until it died down before he would answer.

“If I come out of my house, and a gang of no-good hoodlums descends upon me, and beats me on my stoop, do I go runnin’ to the bishop’s for justice?” he asked evenly, the slowly rising heat in his voice enfolding and carrying away their own anger. The crowd noise dying down as they hung on his words now, unsure of what he would say.

“Never mind the bishop! I go to the police. I go to the law! And I tell you this: when I am the district attorney of Brooklyn, the law will do an honest day’s work,” he told them, waving his fist right back at the crowd. “No man will be able to attack another, no man will desecrate a sacred house of worship, without paying the full penalty of the law!”

The hall reduced instantly to pandemonium, the workingmen stamping, and clapping, and whistling now in approval. Even the angry man who had just been shouting at him nodding his head in grudging assent.

“Boy, you were quick on your feet with that one,” Tom told his brother admiringly in the car afterward. But Charlie had just shrugged, while Natie grinned up in the front seat.

“Oh, we knew that was comin’.”

“What? How?”

“We planted it.”

“That was your man there?”

“Natie had heard that sort of thing was goin’ around. So we made sure to drag it out in the open, where we could kill it.”

Charlie turned to him, smiling a little smugly in the faint light from the dashboard. “Don’t ya see it, Tom? Whoever was spreadin’ that kind of talk wanted to set me against the bishop. If I said he wasn’t responsible, I’d lose every Jewish vote in the borough. And if I said I would go talk to him, I’d lose every Catholic vote.”

“So you really did hear the question.”

“If you wait—if you seem bamboozled by the question like that—they let their guard down,” he said matter-of-factly. “They wait to hear you hang yourself, rather than try an’ shout you down.”

“It’s all a sleight of hand, then,” Tom had said, marveling, feeling let down somehow.

“Let me ask you this, Tom: Would it’ve been better to tell ’em that the bishop’s a lovely Catholic gentleman, but that those b’hoys from the Christian Front don’t answer to him? Or even to the pope for that matter? To advise ’em to arm themselves, an’ go do battle in the streets?”

Charlie shook his head, still smiling in the shifting light of the street lamps as they passed.

“No, that’s not what they want to hear. I tell ’em that we’ll take care of it—which we will, I promise you that. That’s what they really want to know: that they’re not in Poland. That they live in a place where the law of the jungle has been abolished. They want us to take care of it, an’ so we will. That’s the art of politics, Tom. Tell ’em only as much truth as they want to hear.”

 

The City was not a pleasant place just then. It seemed like an aquarium world, a place of unsuspected depths and terrors, seen always in the half-light from under the elevated lines. Not nearly as rich as it would be after the war. Still grimy, and hard starved by the Depression even though it was recovering, the pace picking up, the crowds visibly growing on the trains to work in the morning. Like a man who’s nearly died, back up and walking around . . .

And yet there was such a step to it. He liked nothing better, in the few hours he had to himself, than to sail out into it. Riding high on the double-decker buses, or swinging up on the trolleys, or simply walking off in almost any direction, to see what he could find. The City seeming to expand infinitely around him, as if some Hollywood set crew was building more and more of it every day. Moving through whole neighborhoods he’d never seen before and never would again.

Worlds within worlds, gears within gears, spinning on forever.

It fired him in his work. Made it feel all the more wrong to him that anyone should have to slave and bend the knee in such a place. Charlie smiled at his chasing windmills, but he was sure that they were gaining.

By the end of October he could feel the quickening. The crowds in the churches bigger and louder than ever. The men making fires from old wooden cartons in the trash cans, faces glowing in the dark. Everybody aware that their agitations had to come to a head. Everybody ready for something to happen. Peter Panto telling them all, his eyes shining: “They are nothing to us, if we are together.”

 

He was with Panto when he almost walked into it down on President Street. He and Protter, one of the lefty lawyers they had volunteering for them, had spotted him out alone and insisted on going with him, or who knew what would have happened.

They turned the corner, and right there was Emil Camarda, with Albert Anastasia and six of his boys. All of a sudden they were very close, cutting off any chance of retreat, hands jammed into the pockets of their fine coats. He could smell their sour, acid breath, they were so near, could feel their visceral menace, their animal physicality, as he would never feel anything else, until that bull Slim brought into the practice ring in Mexico. Thinking, My God, they’re going to try to kill us right here . . .

“You wanted to speak to me,” Panto told their boss, his voice hard and unflustered.

Tom glanced at the goon closest to him, who was Anastasia himself. He looked short but solid as a lead safe, his muscled arms and chest bulging at his overcoat. Impeccably dressed, a white carnation in his buttonhole, his hands jammed into both his pockets, clutching God only knew what. His plump, dark face was closely shaved, a high wave of brilliantined hair pushing up his hat. Eyes unblinking and expressionless, fixing on Tom like a predatory bird’s.

“That’s right,” Camarda said, blowing cigar smoke in their faces, staring out at them through slitted eyes encircled in flesh. But there was an uncertainty in his voice that even Tom could pick up. Something was wrong—something he hadn’t counted on. He turned his gaze speculatively on each of them, still giving no indication to his shlammers.

“I’m not gonna say nothin’ in front of your henchmen,” Panto told him coolly. Camarda made a small gesture then, and Anastasia’s eyes blinked, the raptor’s stare broken. He nodded, and on that signal he and the rest of the goons skulked away, like wild dogs cheated out of a carcass.

They went up to have coffee with Camarda in his office then, a long room in the old sugar company building. Where they could sit and see half the harbor, and the enormous grain elevators off Red Hook, and the Statue of Liberty, and act just like they were civilized human beings. Drinking the incredibly dark, bitter coffee the Italians drank in tiny little cups, Panto and Camarda dickering perfunctorily across the table. Tom and Protter listening for the slightest pressure on the old floorboards outside, their eyes darting continually between Panto and the door.

“I like you, Pete,” Camarda told him, the pig eyes trying to open as widely and sincerely as they could. “I think you’re a very fine fellow. A lotta people think you’re a very fine fellow; you got guts to come down here an’ talk to me like this.”

“You like me? That’s nice.”

Panto smiling that sweet, kindly smile that made him look like a kid.

“Don’t be a wise guy, be smart.” Camarda frowned. “What I wanna know is what you want, smart guy. You wanna be a hiring boss? A local president? It’s all yours.”

“It’s not what I want. It’s what the men out there want. They choose, with a real election.”

“Then how d’ya keep control over anything?” Camarda said, sounding genuinely baffled.

“I don’t want anybody to control it,” Panto told him, rising now with that stately, Old World dignity of his and putting on his hat. “Not you, not me. I want to break it up.”

“You know, some of the boys don’t like some of the things you’re doin’,” Camarda told him, his face looking flushed and infuriated. “Maybe it’s better you don’t do them no more. You know what I’m sayin’?”

Panto nodded and smiled, that strange, kindly smile again. They started to go, Tom the last one out, when Emil Camarda buttonholed him with his eyes.

“You’re Charlie O’Kane’s brother, ain’t you?” he asked, grunting when Tom nodded his head, as if he had satisfied himself about something. “Tell your brother I hope he wins.”

“No, you don’t,” Tom told him, mustering every last bit of courage within him.

Then they were back out on the street, walking as fast as they could away from the water. Pete’s hand shaking a little as he pulled out a cigarette, the first sign of fear Tom had ever witnessed in the man.

“Jesus, what the hell’re you thinkin’, goin’ out to meet with a man like that alone?” Protter said as they hurried away.

“He invited me, man-to-man. I didn’t think he’d do nothin’ in daylight,” Panto admitted, then gave a short, rueful laugh. “Guess I was wrong.”

“It’s no joke. He could’ve killed you right there,” Tom said soberly. “That’s what he had in mind.”

“I know,” Panto said, blowing out a long train of smoke as they walked on. “I thought I had a guarantee, that’s all.”

“From who?”

“Don’t worry,” he told them, though the smile turned grim on his face. “I’ll never trust the bastard again.”

 

“The scripture instructs us to be gentle as doves and as wise as serpents,” Father Carey said when Tom told him about it, out early one morning while they were waiting for the shape-up, warming their hands around an open trash fire. “But he hasn’t got that in him. It’s a powerful disadvantage when all you have to work with are snakes.”

They were near the far end of the waterfront, by Buttermilk Channel, where the wind wiped away even the steady hum of the City behind them. The only noise the jangling of the lines and the water slapping against the hulls in the dark.

He’d grown to like the little priest with the impish, Bing Crosby smile. Wearing an old gray sweater everywhere and walking with his head down. Telling Tom of his vocation in the idle moments.

“It wasn’t any great light from above. I was playing ball uptown, across from the Palisades, and I looked over at those tremendous rocks, and the sand beneath them. I’d learned a little about geology in school, and I knew that with time, all those high rocks would be ground down into sand, too, and in that moment I understood it—the whole long skein of time, and how little we mean in it. And I thought, I’ll be gone, too, and if I’m only going to live a little time, I’d better make the most of it.”

Running his labor school out of the basement of Saint Xavier’s, up on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan. Talking about raising up a whole generation of union men, like his father had before him, trying to organize the streetcar conductors. But both of them knowing it all came down to one man on the docks.

“It’s blasphemy to say it, but sometimes I think this must be what it felt like when He walked among us.”

“And you know how that worked out,” Tom told the priest, summoning his last ounce of atheism, though he knew exactly how he felt.

“But that’s just it. I don’t know how we’d replace him. We’re not the apostles here, and I don’t know that the men are ready. That’s why you can’t ever let him go anywhere alone again.”

“We won’t, Father,” Tom promised, and then the dawn was upon them, and they watched as the men began to emerge one by one along the gray desolation of the docks, in their shabby, tied pants and boots and patched checker jackets, waiting to see if they might be allowed to work on that day. Dwarfed by every other thing around them—the great, rusting black ships, and the grain and sugar elevators, the mountains of sand and gravel, the apartment houses, and farther off the skyscrapers, and the statue in the harbor.

“Look at them there,” Father Carey said softly. “They’re human beings—men—and yet they’re the only element that keeps it all going. It’s a machine, don’t you see?”

“Come again?”

“How everything works down here,” he told him. “We like to think it’s the way of the world, but in fact it’s something manmade—an enormous, terrible machine. Everything about how these men live is part of the machine—the way the hiring is organized, the loan-sharking, the numbers games. A perfect, capitalist machine, all of it designed to squeeze every last drop of blood and sweat from these men, and give it over to the politicians, and the crooked union bosses, and the owners.”

“Talk like that could get you in trouble, Father,” Tom said, grinning.

“Ah, but it’s a good thing, for if it’s just a machine—just a manmade thing—then men can change it. Just as all those big ships, and those elevators, and those great buildings are nothing without men to give them meaning. It’s simple enough. All we must do is get it across to them that they are part of the Body of Christ, and that their work is a sacred vocation, and it must be honored.”

“Is that all, Father?”

“And that’s your sermon for today,” Father Carey said, grinning back at Tom—half daft with their cause, the way they all were in those days, all of them on the docks. “But whatever you do, don’t let anything happen to Panto!”

They redoubled their efforts to have men with him wherever he went after that. Tom trying to make it his business to know where he was every minute he was down on the docks. Yet just days later he was with him and his fiancée in his boardinghouse room on North Elliott Place when Panto told him he’d arranged another meeting, one that could change everything.

“You can’t trust them! You can’t trust anyone!” Tom implored him. “Why can’t you see that?”

“The men can’t fill their bellies with my words,” was all he said in response, confidentially, his voice dropping as if it were a secret. “The Camardas cut off their work, soon they have to give in. Then—pfft!—we got nothing. All the air goes out. It’s like what that McCormack said—if they don’t like it, they can eat cobblestones.”

“McCormack? When the hell were you talkin’ to him? Listen, just wait until after Charlie’s elected—”

Panto cut him off. “Your brother’s right—we have to choose what victory we can. That’s why I’m going. Don’t worry, I’ll only meet with them if I get the guarantee I want.”

“That’s what you said the last time—”

“Don’t worry. This is different.” Speaking now to Alice, his beautiful and dark-eyed girl, listening with a look of despair on her face. “I only go if I trust it. But it’s nothing to take some risk for the men. They take their risks for me every day.”

“Don’t do this,” Tom told him. “They will kill you, sure as we’re standin’ here. You saw them—”

Circling them in the street like a pack of dogs. Their animal desire to hurt someone, smash something almost tangible. If they can’t crush you, they will follow. If they can’t follow, they will crush you . . .

“Don’t worry,” Panto said.

But three days after that, when he was getting ready for his date with Alice, the candy store down on the corner sent word up to his rooming house that he had a phone call. He bounded downstairs, meeting her on the stoop, and she said that he seemed relieved, even happy, “as if a rock had been lifted from his chest.” He was dressed in his good suit, the one he always wore for her, and he told her to call the police if he wasn’t back by ten the next morning.

A car came for him, “a long car,” she’d said, a shiny new sedan, with three men already inside it—that was all she saw—and he put on his fedora and climbed inside. And then he was gone.