Josie Washburn cleared her throat and released the podium.
“You know my name, but you don’t know who I am,” she shouted. Karel felt a vacuum behind him, the crowd shutting up, sitting down. “I stumbled into Omaha in August 1871. I was seventeen and found myself in the establishment of Anna Wilson on lower Douglas Street. I must be brief, but I will say that I helped her accumulate some of the half-million dollars she left to the charitable organizations of Omaha when she died. I’m not ashamed to admit this. I’ve changed my ways from that time—but not in the name of reform. No. Reform is a word for ministers and politicians. I am neither. I know little about the so-called reform slate and their current campaign. But I do have special knowledge of the underworld these reformers nominally oppose, so this is what I will talk about.”
Her penetrating stare peered out from the podium, that look of intention progressives practiced in those days swept east wall to west, front bench to back. Each time her gaze crossed Karel, he wanted to pull his cap over his eyes, to dip his head and stare at his feet.
“As in all cities, there are factions in politics which take turns governing and which are always at war with each other. Each faction charges the other with misdemeanors and crimes of some sort. The charges are usually sustained by the facts, but campaigns for change never succeed. They are never meant to succeed, because the underworld means large profits and quick returns. Meanwhile, you’re all as poor as Job’s turkey!”
Karel was preoccupied, thinking about his mother, as he watched Washburn. Was this what his mother had been like? What would she have done in Omaha, he wondered, if she’d somehow ended up here? If Anna had been lying about the thing with the actor, the knife in her back a myth, would his mother shout in halls like this? Would she profess and proclaim an honorable cause?
“. . . and as if to prove my point, the King Gambler has set up shop on this very ward for twenty years. Little progress has been made to loosen his grip. Do I dare mention his name? No. I’m not so stupid as that. But you know who I mean. The tenement builder, the patron saint of saloon owners. Why else would a pint of beer cost five cents and a liter of milk twenty? The King Gambler is why. Violence is used against the working poor, the disabled, the immigrant, the Negro, our women. The King Gambler and his men protect a system designed to make innocents a commodity. His is an industry of bondage and human chattel. What else should we expect from a man who lives on the backs of fallen women?”
The crowd was quiet until Washburn mentioned the King Gambler. It was Joe Meinhof who started the dissonance, shouting, “Shame! Shame! You’re not poor!” Then other of Jake’s friends broke in with catcalls. “How’d you get your money, Josie?” “You’re no saint!”
Emil Braun shouted back at the election men, “Shut up!” Bastards, he called them, spitting slurs. Prussians.
“. . . yet worst off is the poor marked girl enlisted in an assignation home or brothel. If you have seen such women, as everyone has, then you know it’s true.” Washburn persevered, surer in the face of resistance. Karel turned to see what Jake shouted, but Jake was enrapt. He strained to hear what Washburn said. “. . . when you contemplate the sorrow and degradation it brings to these girls who are kept in dark rooms, it should be no surprise that our suicides are many.”
Meinhof and Ingo on their toes to bark through cupped hands. “Then leave! Get out if you don’t like it!” Braun had enough of it. “Come on,” he told the boys. “We won’t put up with this.”
Braun pushed through the crowd, knocking benches with his knees, holding Alfred by the arm. Jimmy Mac and Karel followed, backs to the stage, headed straight for Jake and his friends. Karel felt sweat run down his sides. Jake standing there listening.
“Look,” Jimmy said. “There’s cops!” Half a dozen policemen were in the doorway. Karel recognized one of them, Harry, who picked Jake up from the Eigler house sometimes in Tom Dennison’s car. Why weren’t the cops doing anything?
“. . . let the error creep out of your mind that a woman seeks the life because she has degraded tendencies, or that she is of low origin. But rather try to comprehend that she has not shared the same advantages and protection by which you have surrounded your own home. If the ministers had devoted as much energy to prevent boys from growing wild oats and teaching men to protect women, as he has in assisting the politician, thousands of souls would have been saved from the yawning abyss of the underworld.”
Election workers hunkered down, muscles flexed, eyes wide and dilated, lips drawn taut. Jake lifted a mitt, motioning for his men to wait. He stared at Karel, confused, his hand up. What are you doing here? he seemed to say, his mouth moving, washed out.
Meinhof and Ingo grabbed opposite ends of a bench to dump its occupants. Election men yelled, “Josie! How many virgins did you sacrifice for that dress?” Nearly everyone in the crowd turned from the stage to see what the commotion was, again rushing up Karel’s heels. It wasn’t just machine men shouting. Others joined the tide. “Shame! Shame!”
Braun still pulled the boys along. Karel shouted, “Stop it,” to freeze the swerve, to catch his breath, but it was no use. He felt sick as Braun rushed at Jake.
“I know you, Jake Strauss,” Braun shouted, jabbing a knuckle under Jake’s chin. Jake didn’t see it coming. “You whup folks that don’t agree with you. Is that it?”
The cobwebs of Braun’s hair strew over his head. “Some country ignint, you are. Trying to corrupt a good boy like Karel Miihlstein. You should hate yourself.”
“Get lost!” Jake slapped the hand away.
Braun’s knuckles were back in Jake’s face. He was slick, like he could dislocate his arm from the shoulder. “I’m Emil Braun,” he said. “I’m an organizer. This is not how it’s done—breaking up a meeting. This isn’t civility.”
Jake twisted away, but Braun was fixed to his chest. Everywhere Jake turned it was a fog of greasy hair, knuckles jabbed under his chin.
Something came loose in Jake. He grabbed Braun by the front of his shirt. “Piss off!” His men surged, their muscled arms at his back, knocking Jimmy and Karel away, pushing Alfred to the floor.
“My name is Emil Braun! I’m the deacon of a tenement on Pierce Street!”
Jake’s friends tore at Braun’s clothes. “That doesn’t matter,” they shouted. “No one will miss you!”
“It’s your fault,” Braun declared. He circled, trying to face them all, his shirt stretched around his face. “It’s Prussians like you what give good Germans a bad name!”
The belligerents closed in. They wanted blood. They wanted Jake to come loose. It was too easy. There was nothing to stop him.
Jake swung at Braun. His face red as the blood pumped in. His eyes bugged. He swung again and knocked Braun to the floor.
Alfred tried to stop his father from going back for more. It was no use. Braun regained his feet and charged at Jake to be walloped again. Feet slick under him, Braun collapsed into a clump of Reds this time, taking one of them down to the floor with him.
The police at the door didn’t move. “Please, stop them.” Jimmy pled with his fellow Irish to do something, but they wouldn’t. They laughed as the Reds encircled Braun. Braun tried to explain how he was a friend of Josh Joseph. “That means something!”
“You can’t run into a man’s back,” one of the Reds explained. “Not at a meeting. We’re the South Omaha Bolsheviki! We deserve more respect than that!”
Karel felt it, the rising chaos. The Sicilian gentleman tugged Josie Washburn to the exit, but she wouldn’t budge. She watched like others watched. Karel did too. He wished his father was there to pull him away.
Jake looked at Karel again. His face fell in embarrassment. There was nothing Jake would do to stop this. He turned out from the circle to the door.
“Wait!” Karel grabbed his arm. Jake was red and sweaty. He tried to say something, but Karel couldn’t hear what. “Make the cops stop them,” Karel begged. “Do something.”
“I can’t,�
�� Jake said.
“You’re lying.”
“I got to go. I’m sorry for your friend, but there’s nothing I can do.”
Jake pulled away and left. Where was he going? Why did he get involved with all this just to leave once it got hot?
Emil Braun was going to get it. Ingo and Rudi shoved him into the ring. Meinhof jabbed him with a cane he picked off the floor. They shouted, “Did you hear? He cursed America! I heard!” This was a lie—or maybe it wasn’t, who knew with Braun?—but the chorus was ready to agree. “Get him! Teach him a lesson!” All it took was a second. A stockyard worker pulled off his shirt. The crowd, hungry for a rout, pushed Braun in. They had him corralled. They smacked him when the rhythm compelled. Members of all groups closed in. It didn’t matter who they were, if they’d heard Emil Braun give a talk in the cellar of a saloon, if they’d sung “The Internationale” to the tune he set. They wanted blood—that was what mattered.
He was quiet, they all were. A terrible quiet. Braun was silent, except for his wet breathing, his soaked shirt unsticking from his skin as his diaphragm expanded.
The boys had helped carry Braun up the tenement stairs. There weren’t enough volunteers to convey a mobbed and beaten man. For what if the mob came back, then what would happen? “What about the hospital?” Jimmy asked. But there was no money. Braun gave everything the family had for Josh’s funeral, the coffin, the choir. There was nothing left. There was sad little to begin with. If they did more harm than good bumping his broken body up the stairs, the boys were sorry. There was no other way. In the room was a table where they could lay him at least. An old woman could be called. Maybe not a doctor, but a wise old woman. Maybe not wise, but at least old.
The old woman and Braun’s wife toweled off blood. Where something was broken they tied tight with a dressing ripped from his clothes.
All the election men gathered in a switchyard southwest of the German tenements, near Twenty-Fourth and Hickory. They leaned on the fenders of cars that straddled the tracks until the wall of their bodies fractured so Dennison’s Olds 45 could pass through to their middle. Jake watched from inside the car. He was afraid of what was going to happen.
It was up near Capitol Avenue where Tom found him. He had a suitcase and was going to Evie. They would buy train tickets. He had the thousand-dollar bill. They’d get away. He believed this. His heart still raced in his ears, his hands alive where he’d struck Braun. It was Maria’s suitcase, an old leather one he’d stuffed some clothes in. She’d wrapped a sandwich in wax paper and sent him on his way once he told her what he was planning.
The sky was overcast as he rushed north. Searchlights danced on the screen of low, churning clouds from the army’s balloon training field north of the city. It was in the dailies how there would be elevations and maneuvers throughout the night to practice for surprise blimp attacks on the Western Front. The searchlights made Jake skittish. Clandish Street itself resembled a military zone after the fight at the Santa Philomena. Cops pacing walkways. Paddy wagons stationed at intersections. The streets nearly deserted save for nervous police.
Jake was going to Evie. He’d always been trouble. Falling for her was different. He’d marry her, and that would be the first useful thing he’d do.
But up on Capitol Avenue he heard the growling motor, the squirming rubber against the curb. He looked to the sky, saw the clouds, hoary and gray, and searchlight circles dancing. He heard the door unlatch. Jake slipped inside the Olds next to Tom, next to Tom’s machine gun.
They didn’t say a word in the car. Not even Harry. The car drove south out of downtown and in the silence Jake was left to guess what was going to happen. On the night Tom’s men finished off the Cypriot, Jake had heard, they’d taken the body down this way.
It was Joe Meinhof who opened the door when the Olds stopped at the switchyard. The way Meinhof smiled, his spiteful eyes, Jake thought he was finished. They’d caught him going to Evie. If they searched his pockets, they’d find the thousand-dollar bill.
Jake rushed into the men once he was free from the car. He ducked around, trying to hide. Dozens of men in the crisscross beams of headlights. They cleared away where he walked. No one let him get close. Jake needed to stand next to someone, but the men kept moving away. Dennison was following Jake—that was why he couldn’t hide. The men made way for Tom.
Tom went right up to Jake. He said, “Don’t forget your luggage,” and held out the suitcase. “You wouldn’t want to be without extra shorts on the trip tonight. Might need those.” The others laughed at Jake. Tom staring him down. Jake couldn’t look into those steel and flint eyes, so he looked at the scar on the Old Man’s face instead. Fighting back tears, he was so scared.
“I was worried you couldn’t hack it with the dirty work.” Tom spoke in his big voice so everyone heard. “But they tell me you broke up the reception tonight, Jake. Almost started a riot single-handed.” The men laughed like Jake was one of them, he realized. “Some union stooge tried to give you grief and you brought the hammer down. I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Tom put his hand on Jake’s shoulder and spoke softer. “You’re in the truck to Red Oak. Then I want you at Mecklenburg’s tomorrow. I haven’t forgotten you.”
Jake caught his breath and grinned back. It was the night before the election. Tom wouldn’t be worried about him and Evie now. They were safe for the moment.
Tom moved to the center of the cars, where Billy Nesselhous waited. The priority of the moment was to cross into Iowa to retrieve the hired votes. Every rental car in the city had been reserved for this purpose, with only men on the payroll having access. Jake and Evie couldn’t have gotten a car anyway, even if Jake had tried renting one for their escape. So Jake learned. Every man in the machine had a job to do. Jake was to ride in a flatbed truck with Joe Meinhof.
Meinhof hummed under the noise of the highway as he drove, hand limp over the stick shift ball as it jolted from side to side. Jake held to the bottom of his seat as they bounced along because the latch of his door was loose. If the truck turned too sharply, like when they pulled into Red Oak, his door flew open and he had to reach out into the rushing wind to slam it.
The truck, borrowed from a service station, smelled like grease and chewing tobacco. Potato chips crumbled on the rubber mat under their feet. The wood planks that made up the bed rattled behind the cab, the chains too that wrapped around the tops of posts, where the men they’d picked up at a Red Oak saloon held on. Others sat out of the wind, on the boards, but had nothing to hold. Everything shifted and lurched, going fast down the middle of a rutted gravel highway. The headlight beams were the only light in front of them, as far as the wends let them see. Behind them and to the sides there was nothing, an echo of light in the dust clouds they left behind. Jake wanted to sleep, to talk, to do something other than wait and see if a deer, a person crossing, would pop into their light in the road.
“Do you think it’s worth it, Joe? Driving all night, for what? A dozen votes?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know.” Jake saw pairs of headlights up ahead, the bigger highway that led along the river to Omaha. “It’s a lot of work.”
“You’re young. You don’t know any better than to feel that way.”
“I was thinking of quitting. Did you know that, Joe?”
“Sure I know. You got that girl. We all know. You spent money that wasn’t yours to keep her happy. Evie got you all worked up, and you did something you shouldn’t of. That’s all.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“What were you thinking when Tom took you down to the tracks in his car? Did you think he was going to do bad things to you?”
“Was I shaking?”
“Yeah, you were.”
“That’s why I got to go. I don’t like that. I got better things I could be doing.”
“No, you don’t.” Meinhof sped up to blast through a crossing. “You don’t have to quit. Just square
things. Make it up to the Old Man. Talk to Billy. He’d have some idea of what you got to do to make it right.”
“If you say so.”
Jake was talking too much. He knew this. But Joe Meinhof was his friend. And what did it matter anyway? They’d all seen him with the suitcase.
“You can be such a kid about things, Jake. Honest. I don’t know what Tom sees in you. Sometimes I really don’t. There’s more to what we do than you think there is.”
“Sure. I know that.”
“You bullshitter. Those reformers want to tear apart our home. They’ll take everything we love away from us. Clandish. The saloons. Our jobs. What will we do if they win? You ever think of that?”
“You want my spot. That’s all. I know what you’re about.”
“You don’t know. How long have I been telling you these things? And you never cared enough to listen. Why am I surprised you fucked up?”
A man from the flatbed watched them argue through the back window. His face pressed the glass, lit up white. The man stared at Jake. He was shivering.
It was quiet on the River Ward that morning. Any player who seriously disagreed with machine politics was arrested in the days prior on suspicion of vagrancy or some other trumped-up nonsense that took forty-eight hours to clear no matter how evident his innocence should be. The melee at the Santa Philomena was the perfect excuse to root out men Tom Dennison wanted in jail on the seventh of May. All stops were pulled on the Ward. Voters on the payroll of the Pendergast machine in Kansas City would arrive throughout the morning to cast their ballots, along with others recruited from towns in Iowa. Red Oak, Glenwood, Griswold, Walnut. Every barroom on the Ward was rented and stocked with liquor. Bootleggers who owed their survival to Tom Dennison saw to these parties. And it wasn’t just bootleggers and machine men. Every favor granted over the past three years was cashed in during polling hours. If a family received coal over the winter, if a grocery bill or bar tab was covered, if someone was granted leniency from a judge, then a car would appear outside their home on Election Day to shuttle them to a poll.
Kings of Broken Things Page 18
