The Given Day by Dennis Lehane Page A

below him. It loosed a baritone yowl that moved the walls and shimmied the floors. All in less than a second. Enough time for the thief to look at Danny and Danny to look at the duty sergeant and the duty sergeant to look at the two patrolmen who'd been arguing over the Belgian war in the corner. Then the rumble and the building- shudder deepened. The wall behind the duty sergeant drizzled plaster. It looked like powdered milk or soap flakes. Danny wanted to point so the sergeant could get a look at it, but the sergeant disappeared, just dropped past the desk like a condemned man through a scaffold. The windows blew out. Danny looked through them and saw a gray film of sky. Then the floor beneath him collapsed.
    From thunder to collapse, maybe ten seconds. Danny opened his eyes a minute or two later to the peal of fire alarms. Another sound ringing in his left ear as well, a bit higher-pitched, though not as loud. A kettle's constant hiss. The duty sergeant lay across from him on his back, a slab of desk over his knees, his eyes closed, nose broken, some teeth, too. Danny had something sharp digging into his back. He had scratches all over his hands and arms. Blood flowed from a hole in his neck, and he dug his handkerchief out of his pocket and placed it to the wound. His greatcoat and uniform were shredded in places. His domed helmet was gone. Men in their underwear, men who'd been sleeping in bunks between shifts, lay in the rubble. One had his eyes open and looked at Danny as if Danny could explain why he'd woken up to this.
    Outside, sirens. The heavy slap of fire engine tires. Whistles.
    The guy in his underwear had blood on his face. He lifted a chalky hand and wiped some of it off.
    "Fucking anarchists," he said.
    That had been Danny's first thought, too. Wilson had just been reelected on a promise that he'd keep them out of all Belgian affairs, all French and German affairs. But a change of heart had apparently taken place somewhere in the corridors of power. Suddenly it was deemed necessary for the United States to join the war effort. Rockefeller said so. J. P. Morgan said so. Lately the press had said so. Belgian children were being treated poorly. Starving. The Huns had a reputed fondness for atrocity--bombing French hospitals, starving more Belgian children. Always the children, Danny had noticed. A lot of the country smelled a rat, but it was the radicals who started making a ruckus. Two weeks back there'd been a demonstration a few blocks away, anarchists and socialists and the IWW. The police--both city and harbor--had broken it up, made some arrests, cracked some heads. The anarchists mailed threats to the newspapers, promised reprisals.
    "Fucking anarchists," the cop in his underwear repeated. "Fucking terrorist Eye-talians."
    Danny tested his left leg, then his right. When he was pretty sure they'd hold him, he stood. He looked up at the holes in the ceiling.
    Holes the size of beer casks. From here, all the way down in the basement, he could see the sky.
    Someone moaned to his left, and he saw the top of the thief's red hair sticking out from beneath mortar and wood and a piece of door from one of the cells down the hall. He pulled a blackened plank off the guy's back, removed a brick from his neck. He knelt by the thief as the guy gave him a tight smile of thanks.
    "What's your name?" Danny asked, because it suddenly seemed important. But the life slid off the thief's pupils as if falling from a ledge. Danny would have expected it to rise. To flee upward. But instead it sank into itself, an animal retreating into its hole until there was nothing left of it. Just a not-quite-guy where the guy had lain, a distant, cooling thing. He pressed the handkerchief harder against his neck, closed the thief's eyelids with his thumb, and felt an inexplicable agitation over not knowing the man's name.
    At Mass General, a doctor used tweezers to pull whiskers of metal from Danny's neck. The metal had come from the piece