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of the Commodore in cuffs, stylish, smiling. Brannigan had her by the arm. He was wearing his official police face, grim and serious, but it was easy to see how pleased he was. Cassidy put on his glasses to read the front-page account. “You’ve got no reason to hide, Fin. Wasn’t you shot nobody.”
    â€œBrannigan will try to make it seem I did. Bet on it.”
    â€œYou’ll only make it worse if you try to avoid him.”
    â€œHave a loose end to tie up. Once I do, I’ll set things straight.”
    Dunne waited for the backroom to clear out. It was being used by Red Doyle for a meeting of the maintenance crew from the Fifth Avenue Coach Company, which ran the main bus lines in Manhattan and the Bronx. Doyle was regularly dispatched from the uptown headquarters of the Transit Workers Union to encourage the men in their demand for a six-day week and an end to the shape-up system that forced them to report at the beginning of each shift to see who’d be hired, who wouldn’t. He used a chair as his soapbox, pushed his fingers through his dense tangle of red hair and ranted against “the plethora of plutocrats” who ran the bus company.
    A trucker in a worn leather jacket, who’d sat silent and alone drinking boilermakers, slammed his shot glass down so hard on the bar that it cracked. “Shut that sheenie communist up, will you!” he yelled at Cassidy.
    Cassidy picked up the bat he kept beneath the bar. “First, pay me for the glass, then get out.”
    â€œMy pleasure.” The trucker tossed a dollar at Cassidy. “Bad enough the Jews run the White House, now they’re taking over the bars.” He jammed his newspaper under his arm and left.
    When the meeting was over, Doyle came to the bar. “Do you have to be such a rabble-rouser?” Cassidy said. “Can’t you tone it down a bit?”
    â€œYou’ve only heard my sweet talk. Wait till I get fired up.”
    In the days when Big Mike, Dunne’s old man, had been a well-known union organizer, Doyle had been an up-and-comer in labor circles. Later on, during the Red Scare when Attorney General Palmer rounded up alien radicals, Dunne read in the papers how Doyle’s reputation for fiery left-wing rhetoric led to his detention. But, despite his convincing brogue, it turned out that Doyle had been born and bred in Butte, Montana, and wasn’t entitled to a one-way ticket to the land of his origin. After a brief stint in federal prison, he returned to organizing, eventually joining the vanquished IRA irreconcilables who—their dream of a socialist republic smashed to smithereens by the Irish Free State—took up the cause of New York’s heavily Irish transit workers.
    Cassidy served Doyle a beer. “What I can’t figure out about you,” he said, “is whether you’re called ‘Red’ on account of your politics or your hair.”
    â€œNeither.” Doyle downed his beer in one long gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “First place I worked in New York was Coney Island. Nobody bothered to tell me about the bad blood between Irish skin and the sun. Turned the color of a lobster. Italians I worked with had a good laugh. Dubbed me Red. After that I worked in sunless places, but the label of Red stuck.”
    By the time the crowd cleared out and Dunne was able to get to sleep, it was after one o’clock. When he awoke, the morning light was already leaking through the blinds on the front window, tiding across the floor. Cassidy was behind the bar washing glasses. Two stubble-face men rapped on the window. Cassidy shook his head. They grumbled for a moment before they left in search of another bar, fresh pack of smokes, some way to tell one day from the next.
    Cassidy looked over the papers, offering a running commentary on the growing tensions between the Germans in the Sudetenland and the Czechoslovakian Republic, to which