They were all friends of that brown-eyed girl, Agnes. If not before, surely now. She was pretty and modest. She worked in a steam laundry with her mother. She was a hard worker. She attended mass at St. Patrick’s, the nine o’clock service. Everybody knew these things.
Boys promised to take matters into their own hands, since the grown-ups had bungled things. It was up to the boys there. Alfred Braun and Jimmy Mac. Gangs of street kids in matching baggy suits and bowler hats, in felt caps and dark shirts dusted white with billiards chalk. High school kids from the Southside. Wide-shouldered Bohunks in denim pants. Football players in letter sweaters. Boys from slaughterhouses with hands bleached white and shriveled from pickling tanks. Leather-skinned boys who prodded sheep and cattle all summer in dung-layered stockyards. Boys of all stripe and affiliation. They chatted across the street from roadsters, traded cheap cigarettes. All sorts of boys Karel knew from baseball games. Roy Teeter, who would fight anyone and had the scars on his face and hands to prove it; Michael Hykell, who was a talker; Ernie Morris, a small fry who usually took the first punch in a fight; Nathan Shapiro, whose Jewish mother locked him out of the house for the night if she heard him swear; and Louis Weaver, whose older brother died of the flu on a transport to France. All boys like Karel, who wanted to prove they too were salty.
None of the authorities paid much mind to the boys. Mayor Smith observed from the courthouse with the city commissioners, the chief of police, the sheriff. They expected a lynch mob to come for Will Brown—an extra fifty policemen were on guard that Sunday to keep him safe until the arraignment on Monday—but when the mob arrived and it was only boys, the authorities couldn’t bring themselves to disperse the crowd. The courthouse was built with lynch mobs in mind, billed as riot proof only seven years before, with heavy stone blocks, bronze doors, and unscalable walls. Will Brown was at the top of their battlement, in the fifth-floor holding cells. They believed he’d be safe until the trial.
Jake didn’t follow the boys. He ran to Tom Dennison’s office.
His mind was a frenzy. He doubted there was anything he could do, as Silke implored him to. He needed to see Tom’s face. Only Tom could take control. Jake needed to look in the Old Man’s eyes; then he’d know what was going to happen.
The office was empty when he got there. The safe was gone, the card cabinets, the signed photographs of movie stars and pugilists. The walls bare except for nail heads sticking out. The desks and chairs gone, marks worn in the floor where they’d scraped. The place was abandoned. No bodyguards outside. No men taking hedge bets over telegraph wires. No Madge Holloran at the pinewood desk near the door. Jake was alone. The office was cleaned out, every presence deleted.
The tobacco shop still operated below. A man behind the counter waited as Jake stumbled back down the stairs.
“Where’d they go?” Jake shouted. The man knew him. Jake had passed through this shop hundreds of times before.
“What do you want me to say? There’s nothing here but my shop. You see that.”
The mob grew throughout the afternoon. It wasn’t something Mayor Smith counted on, that the rough men of the River Ward and Southside would follow the lead of the fifty boys who first struck out to make demands. But by 5 p.m. thousands more joined in. Once the railroad men and jobbers had salved their hangovers, they heard what had started at the courthouse and wouldn’t be left out.
For a while they weren’t sure what should be done. The counterargument that all this had been set up by Milt Hoffman made its rounds again. There was some dispute whether Will Brown had really done it to Agnes Loebeck. Will Brown was a hunchback. It said this in the papers. He could barely close his hands into a fist, could hardly walk, much less spring from the bushes on a hilltop above the river. How could he rape a girl like that? It was a mystery. Folks wondered why Milt hadn’t stopped a cripple from doing things to Agnes. Milt worked for the Dennison machine. Even though he walked with a cane, Milt was a thug. He’d been known to beat a guy with that cane if his temper got the better of him.
A chorus of panic echoed over the River Ward once it started. Paddy wagons screamed by with a cop on the runner to churn the siren. Jake followed in their wake. The closer he got to the courthouse, the more fighting he saw. It was like the melee on Clandish in 1917—kids fighting police, police trying to push bystanders off the block—except the kids enjoyed fighting more than they did before. The cops were desperate. Groups of raiders formed in the mob party. Ten, twenty boys, a man to lead. They charged the courthouse doors and had to be beaten back. One group fell and another stood. There were thousands in the mob party and only a few dozen police outside. Some doughboys moved to the front to give advice. Then the mob party threw bricks at the police who guarded the courthouse doors, a bombardment, before the raiders charged. A few cops were hurt. Nobody made it inside.
Injured raiders sat along the curb when Jake reached the courthouse block on the Farnam side. These were high school kids. They sat on the pavement with hands in their hair to keep the blood in, joking about where they’d gone wrong and which one of the cops it was who got them. They talked like this was a football game with a rival team. These weren’t street kids. They wore letter sweaters and had good teeth. “Do you think it will scar?” one asked. He removed a handkerchief to show the swollen blemish over his eye where he’d been walloped by a cop. “I hope it scars.”
Bill and Ducky Sutez raised a new party, and Karel grabbed Alfred and Jimmy to follow along, the band the ballplayers made, thirty or so of them, to rush the vestibule. They surged the doors to see what they could do. Soldiers, ballplayers, boys from tenements, from the dorming house, from Jobbers Canyon, some Karel didn’t know. A German artillery cannon captured from the Argonne Forest was on display outside the courthouse—a gift from the War Department to commend the city’s enthusiasm for selling bonds. It had an eight-foot gun. The raiders lifted the hitch and wheeled the carriage as fast as they could to batter down the doors, and it worked. They rushed in and demanded Will Brown be handed over.
Karel could see only a few feet in front of himself as their bodies pushed forward. There was constantly someone stepping on his foot or pulling his shirt until it stretched off a shoulder. Police fired warning shots down the elevator shafts, and that drove the raiders crazy. Bill Sutez screamed into the atrium sky and pulled a revolver. Karel pushed anyone who came near him, whether cop or raider, because he couldn’t find his friends. A cop caught a bullet in his shoulder and screamed until another was there to hold him. Did Bill Sutez fire the shot? Karel didn’t know. A few more cops were beaten unconscious and carried out. Onlookers rushed out too, unsure why they’d gone inside in the first place. Everybody wanted outside. Formaldehyde and ammonia bombs had been thrown down the stairs. At the first scent of them, Karel ran, which was fine. It was easy. Fire hoses punched at his back, washed him and the others out the vestibule, over each other where the German artillery cannon was stuck halfway in the door. Raiders stumbled, ammonia blind, over their legs, ones at the front who’d been hit with fumes, some with dangling broken arms, until someone led off to the hospital. Cops poked hoses out the door and blasted anyone who was close.
Mist from the spray freckled Karel’s face where he stood near the curb. There were thousands on the north side of the courthouse. With hardly any space to stand, men and boys passed bootleg whiskey and swigged from tilted bottles because there wasn’t room to raise their arms. They stashed flasks in hip pockets. Hundreds of bottles out of thin air. Crates of booze had materialized at a corner newsstand.
There was shattering glass, shotgun fire, windows breaking. All of it punctuated by a woman’s carnal cheer. That was what Karel heard, the noises he had to brace himself against. The screaming and laughing of those hurt and those in the mob party. He wasn’t a kid anymore. Not now for sure. If he could find his friends, he’d tell them how he saw two people fucking in the back of a car, how he too swigged whiskey from a flask. It was all okay, whatever people put themsel
ves to do. He let his mind cloud over with the flash of small arms, the police sirens, their useless, barking orders, the shouts of celebration and calls for revenge. He had the sense (they all must have) that whatever was going to happen would be okay, that it was sanctioned by some wanton authority.
Speeding cars rushed into the crowds with young men on sideboards, to find where the action was. Cars with Sicilians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Serbs, Germans. Once word of the riot spread, anyone who wanted to take a swing at a cop made a beeline to the courthouse. A gang hijacked a streetcar and wore out the bell as they plowed into the mess. Musky husbands rushed from houses with whatever hammer or club or bat they could lay hands on and then hopped a taxi to get there fast. Jalopies swung recklessly around the blocks. They swerved and skidded to miss bystanders and each other. Karel heard motors hammer at full throttle a block away, spreading echoes between the high-rises of downtown, while trucks hopped hot over the pavement to load up with furniture or produce or women’s garments, whatever could be looted. Crammed full inside, passengers on the footboards, taxis slumped cockeyed and labored up hills, running for free. “The fare is already paid for. As long as all this goes on, it’s paid for!”
People shouted out any news they heard. Smutty details of the rape. Conjecture about Will Brown’s body in relation to the girl’s. They made him out to be huge, a towering man with mountainous shoulders, arms like a gorilla, legs like a mule. Karel had seen Will Brown when they had him cornered on the Loebeck porch, but he couldn’t recall if what people said was true. Karel shook as he remembered Will Brown. A voice came to him through the drunk of the mob. The voice of a stranger god. They talked about Agnes Loebeck as if she were a little girl, pious and pure, like she only ever wore long, white Sunday dresses; like she picked berries in a pristine field; like she’d never even heard of anything resembling a dick before. They made jokes about black sex, about slicing off Will Brown’s organ and stuffing it in his mouth. About shooting it off with shotgun spray at close range. About sledgehammering his balls and feeding them to a hog. They talked about that woman Will Brown lived with down in Gibson, Virginia Jones, and what kind of woman she was, shacking up with two black men. What did anyone expect to happen when things like that went on in a city?
Towheaded Will Francis rode a white horse. Its hooves struck streetcar rails, whose glint showed down the block. Somehow he’d acquired a white Arabian, an erect, regal horse, muscled and ghostly beautiful. A rope hung from the pommel of his saddle. “We want the Negro and we’re going to get him,” Will Francis shouted. He rode back and forth to excite the others. “I got the rope! Get us the Negro, men, and us boys will do the rest!”
The man next to Jake collapsed. He dropped like he was nothing. People fired warning shots—both police and hotheads in the mob. Some fired until they ran out of bullets, then yelled until more were found. A bullet fell from the sky and dug into the top of the man’s head. Jake was next to him when he dropped, a body crumpled into his legs. Jake tried to help the man to his feet, but it was no use. His hat fell off, and they saw what happened. A woman poked her finger out the top of the hat to show where the bullet went through.
They circled in to look, the body facedown, a man in a blue suit, neither old nor young. There was hardly any blood. He’d been standing watching and a stray bullet came down on his skull. “He was next to me,” the woman holding the hat said. “Then, kaput.” This made sense. Nobody questioned it. A truck came along, they laid the body in the back. The truck drove off with the body.
Raiders stormed the courthouse again, and a few made it up the stairs this time. They found Chief Eberstein and made him address the mob from a window. Eberstein urged them to let the law take its course. Nobody listened, nobody could hear.
Jake had been at the back of the crowd, but now he was surrounded, with nowhere to go, just people everywhere, talking and jeering and telling each other what they thought should happen. Jake couldn’t find the boy. It was impossible. Who knew where Karel could be in this mess? Karel could be one of the raiders, could be inside the courthouse swinging a brick at a cop. Jake had to push and shove just to hold his ground, just to watch as a ladder was raised up the side of the courthouse. A few of the mob climbed in a second-floor window, none of them Karel. They didn’t last long before the police forced them down.
You’re not judge and jury, a sergeant rushed out to tell the mob. He was grabbed and punched in the mouth. They took his nightstick and beat him. Sheriff Clark tried to talk some sense into the mob—all those government men and their logic—and he was greeted by a girl who slung a skipping stone upside his head.
Jake saw Karel. The boy had bore out a circle for himself. Nobody wanted near him—hopping on his toes, swinging his arms—but people watched. Jake pushed through to see. Black-haired Karel had muscles in his neck and had grown a voice, and Jake wondered if it was really him. “Karel!” Jake shouted. The boy stopped to look around; it was him, hair stuck to his face, his shirt nearly torn from his body, how he swayed in a drunken swagger. “What are you doing?” Jake shouted. Karel looked at Jake but didn’t answer. What on earth could he say?
Not far from them the mob bombarded the courthouse. Jake couldn’t hear for all the glass breaking. Police sprayed fire hoses from a third-floor window—that was how it escalated—and the mob threw rocks in return. Nearly every window was gone through with a rock or stone or brick, shards hanging from the casements. Any police who tried to stop the mob were stoned—they couldn’t stop six thousand from smashing out windows or rushing the doors, not if the mob party would risk getting hit with rocks too. Rubble rained on everyone near the building, not just the cops. Girls filled tin buckets with stones from a vacant lot and carried them to throwers. Cooks from a hotel kitchen carried dishpans filled with bricks from a demolished building.
There was an explosion on the west side of the courthouse, a fireball and plume of smoke. Karel took off sprinting in that direction. Jake tried to follow but couldn’t. He didn’t want to be there. Karel did.
When Karel got to the front he saw what caused the fireball: someone got the bright idea to steal gasoline from a filling station in a tin can. He was going to toss it through a window and start the courthouse on fire, but the gas exploded in his hand. Scorches marked the grass where it happened, charred earth, a trail through the mob where the burned man was being led away.
Evie stayed home as long as she could stand it, knowing from the start that Jake would find his way to the courthouse to see what was going on. With her window open Evie heard the masses simmer throughout the day and knew it had something to do with that Will Brown the police had captured, the one who did bad things to a girl. Evie saw folks run down her street to go join the action, saw a madam lock her door up tight, which meant real trouble on a night like this, when there was a lot of money to be made. But if it was too much trouble, if the money wasn’t even worth it to a madam, then something bad was going to happen.
Evie locked her windows at the sash, and her doors too, to head out in search of Jake, although she wouldn’t have admitted that. She walked a few blocks to see what was going on up near the courthouse. She heard the noise echo between the buildings long before she could see anything. All those people. The puffs of smoke. The sun setting behind the buildings in all its fall glory. These people were gruesome. Evie knew she should hurry back to her rooms—that she should be smarter; she had too much to lose trying to pass through a lynch mob to find Jake. What if someone in the mob picked her out? Jake Strauss would be fine. Evie should get out of there, because she was shaking and should listen to her fear, and it was no secret what kind of blood the mob wanted to spill.
She stayed only a minute. Climbed with wobbly legs to the top of a stoop outside the Omaha Building to look for Jake. She couldn’t see him in among the thousands of hats and faces and flops of styled hair in the mob party. This was no surprise. What was Evie going to do if she found him anyway? Drag him out of there? She just wanted to se
e what he was doing. If he was part of the mob or not. If he incited the crazies on or tried to talk them out of what they were going to do. Like this would show who Jake really was.
Evie had no hope of spotting him. She snuck away as fast as she could. Looking for Jake wasn’t worth the risk of being caught up in something bad, she told herself. She had to get out of there.
Jake noticed boys going in and out of the Bee Building. All these boys hustled up the front steps and through the door and nobody stopped them. The building was guarded by private security. Nobody in the mob touched it, their attention focused in the opposite direction, on the courthouse. Except for those boys who hurried in and out—boys who weren’t rioting. Jake recognized one of them, then another. All these boys were runners for the machine. Billy Nesselhous’s boys, in dungarees and short wool jackets, with grime-smudged faces and penny cigars. A boy army that worked for nickel tips. The runners bound in and out of the Bee Building. It was Chip Lee who was at the door to keep out unwanteds, Chip who normally guarded the door to Dennison’s office.
It didn’t take much to get inside. Chip had always liked Jake and let him pass. He chased the boys up to the top floor. Billy and Meinhof were there, waiting to hear what was going on.
Billy jabbed Meinhof in the shoulder and winked when he saw Jake on the landing.
“I won’t make trouble,” Jake promised.
“Great,” Billy laughed. “He won’t bother us, he says. What a relief.”
A small group of men were in a sparsely furnished office, backs turned to peer out the windows. Tom Dennison was at their middle. “What do you think?” he asked, grinning. “Would something like this happen if we ran things?”
Kings of Broken Things Page 28
