Jake didn’t answer. A space opened at the window and Tom bid Jake to stand next to him. He put an arm over Jake’s shoulders as they watched what unfolded. All of them were drunk, even Tom. All of them festive for the occasion. A crate of the same booze from the street was up here, half-empty by then. They pointed out what looked interesting from the window. A fistfight. A woman who bared herself to raiders and made promises. The sunset made spectacular by the smoke. Anything the men said was half covered by the racket. Mostly it was Billy talking to boy runners who rushed up three steps at a time to tell what happened:
How a black was chased down Seventeenth Street and caught outside the Omaha National Bank. A mob tried to lynch him, but police stopped it. Tom shook his head as he heard. How a black was pulled off a streetcar on Farnam, this one with a pistol in his belt. He holed up in the basement of an iron foundry until police removed him to the city jail for his own good.
Around 8 p.m. a runner told how the Townsend Gun Company had been raided, and that street kids had broken the windows of sporting goods stores to scout for baseball bats and weapons. Several doughboys filched guns and ammunition from pawn shops, and soon they began firing on the courthouse.
The women prisoners were released. Over ten thousand citizens were trying to destroy the courthouse and murder a man—whatever these women had done couldn’t be worse than that.
A sixteen-year-old leader of a mob party was killed in a gunfire exchange with police, or from friendly fire. An insane man escaped from the prisoners and dashed to the river. Taxis ran hot, packed. Thousands hustled in from neighborhoods nearby before they missed the lynching.
And then word came about what happened to Mayor Ed Smith. The runners were barely coherent they were so excited. Smith was inside the courthouse doors amid the sound of gunfire when he fired at a rogue doughboy in uniform. The doughboy confirmed this, holding up his quivering, bloody hand where the bullet went through. When Smith emerged, he held a small pistol. The mob became unglued at his holding a gun.
Smith was going to talk some sense into the crowd. That was why he came outside in the first place. “Lynch me if you got to lynch someone!” He was hit on the head with a baseball bat before he could say more then struck with the butts of revolvers. They slipped a rope around the mayor’s neck and dragged him to the corner and before long had him hanging from a light pole at Sixteenth and Harney, hatless and bloody, his feet clear of the ground, his eyes bugging out of his skull. This was the mayor. Two men tugged the rope to lift him higher.
Three police detectives cut down the mayor and rushed him away. His head was badly beaten. There were rope burns on his neck and he could hardly breathe. He might die at the hospital.
Tom’s mouth shrunk as he heard what happened to Ed Smith. His eyes narrowed. He felt the change in his face and couldn’t control it like he’d always been able to control his expression. He was dumbfounded, he wanted to be less drunk. He tried to figure out the balance that was being created. A calculation he couldn’t figure. Could he repay what he owed? And to whom would he tender compensation? How could he even imagine he could square this chaos?
Tom fell into a state his men had never seen before and needed to compose himself. He was a man who valued control over all else, a gambler aware of the angles. Anarchy wasn’t something he stomached easily. “All we did was have Milt march with the boys,” he said.
“We sure did,” Billy said. “The taxis, some liquor. But goddamn. Look at this! Who would of guessed it?”
Some in the mob complained how they’d let Mayor Smith get away. They were angry with how those detectives slipped in and cut Smith down from the rope and drove off with him. Some yelled about how they should have done more. When they had the mayor in hand, they should have finished him off, because he protected that Will Brown.
They rocked a police car back and forth until it tipped. They put a match to a stream of gasoline so the car exploded. A group of boys fled around the corner, hair singed off.
Karel saw where these boys came from, and that was where he went. All he could do was follow the desire of the moment, the voice of the mob, and he wanted to be where people were set to their sharpest edge. The hanging of Mayor Smith changed them, the ringleaders, the loudmouths. It made them realize their capabilities, that great violent mass of them, explosions in their ears. They were serious about what they wanted. All police were in the courthouse. None were left outside. The sheriff and his deputies, the prisoners, Will Brown too, all trapped on the top floors. There was no escape unless the mob granted escape.
Gasoline cans were brought from a filling station. Some men lifted the cans to a windowsill and splashed gas through. A torch was thrown in after. The mob didn’t let firemen get close to the building. Pumper trucks were blocked in the traffic of bodies. Kids cut the fire hoses with knives. Nobody was allowed to leave the courthouse, armed members of the mob stationed at every door. They held looted .22s and more ammunition than could be shot. The rooms filled with smoke.
The prisoners were driven to the roof. Almost the whole inside of the courthouse was wood, its rooms packed with paper, county records, land deeds. It burned quickly. The prisoners lay flat on their bellies because snipers across the way buzzed bullets over their heads. One prisoner who peeked over the edge had his face sprayed with buckshot. Two others were hit by rifle slugs, their bodies jumping even as they lay flat. Half the mob was armed. It didn’t matter if a man had a rifle or a pistol, he took a shot.
Prisoners pled with the deputies to hand over Will Brown. They didn’t want to die for the sake of Will Brown going to trial. They picked him up and were going to throw him off the edge before Sheriff Clark made them think better of it.
Alfred and Jimmy Mac had been looking for Karel, and they found him on the south side of the courthouse. They stole a ladder from a fire truck and were going to scale the east side of the building. Jimmy Mac asked Karel if he wanted to climb. Of course he did. What else could he do? They’d need help lifting the ladder. Karel could climb to the second story, the others right behind. Spotlights from cars played on the boys as they clambered over ledges to pull themselves up. Fire bit at their heels. The other two formed a human ladder to reach a third-floor window ledge, Karel on their shoulders, hanging sixty feet above the pavement to show his shoe bottoms to the crowd as his legs swung free from Jimmy’s shoulders. A cheer erupted when he pulled himself up. Standing in that cheer, that noise of approval from the mob, Karel couldn’t stop. He dropped a rope for Jimmy and Alfred. All the windows on the third floor were smashed out. Inside the offices burned, so they started over again to reach the next floor.
Jake couldn’t see much of what went on from where he was, the dappled texture of hats and white faces, bodies packed around the block. He heard explosions and shouted demands, smelled gunpowder brimstone and gasoline smoke that poured out windows. He and Tom Dennison sat and watched. Nothing but people for blocks and blocks. They shuffled and pointed. They stood close. This was happening. They were burning down the courthouse, they were destroying the city. All this to get Will Brown.
Policemen trapped on the fourth floor waved a white flag. When Karel pulled himself to that ledge, the cops begged to be rescued. They’d been forced up the stairs by smoke and were being overcome. “Sure,” Alfred said, crawling up behind. “There’s ladders. But we got them.” He gestured down to where the mob now held bigger ladders than what were stolen by Alfred and Jimmy. “We got all the ladders.” Alfred smiled. “But we don’t rescue a cop for nothing.”
Those cops promised anything. There was only one thing the mob wanted.
Jimmy Mac shouted down the news, but it was useless. The cops shouted too, but nobody could hear them from up there. Finally a cop in a blue uniform threw a note to the crowd. There was mass ecstasy when the note was read. Come to the fourth floor of the building and we will hand the nigger over to you. Ladders were raised, the police saved. Once the police reached the ground, raiders began to climb. Kar
el waited from his ledge. He felt at home on the ledge, how it was when he slid to make a catch in centerfield, like he wouldn’t leave this place until someone made him, and no one could make him. Young men—those from the boys’ mob who could taste their triumph—gripped the rungs as they climbed and showed rope nooses to the crowd. Karel helped raiders through the window before he entered. The raiders searched for Will Brown, but Will Brown wasn’t there.
He was on the roof and the roof was going to collapse. There was an iron stairway on the backside of an elevator shaft. Sheriff Clark started his men down this way.
Will Brown was told to stay put, to crouch in a corner where nobody could see him. He’d have no chance in the crowd. The others might make it.
Clark and his deputies went first down the stairs, the prisoners except Will Brown behind them. They were met by raiders on the fourth floor. Ducky Sutez was first among them. “We’ll kill every one of you unless we get that Negro,” he said. The sheriff was trapped between the mob and the prisoners. Clark refused to hand Will Brown over. There was shoving on these narrow stairs bolted to the backside of an elevator shaft, inside a burning building. Clark didn’t move. He wouldn’t let the raiders by.
Prisoners at the rear broke away to get Will Brown. They passed him over their heads, from hand to hand, down the iron stairway to where the raiders were. They got Will Brown. The raiders. Karel was there. He reached up at Will Brown but couldn’t touch him. Men had taken over again, their arms longer than Karel’s, their hips heavier when he tried to move them. Karel stretched but couldn’t reach—all at once Will Brown fell, and it was Karel’s hands that tried to catch the weight of the man and pass it off. But Karel couldn’t hold. The weight crashed through him, crumpled him into a corner. Will Brown on top. Karel saw Will Brown’s eyes as the raiders grabbed and lifted him and carried on. Will Brown’s white eyes popping out of his skull. Raiders lifted Karel to his feet, but Karel’s legs didn’t work. His legs and hands were numb where he touched the black. He flattened against the wall to watch raiders tear off down the stairs. He couldn’t follow.
They held Will Brown out a window. They ripped his clothes off. They had him.
Thousands rushed to the south side once word spread. Jake watched as Farnam Street emptied outside the Bee Building, on the north side, the masses hurrying, pushing, scuttling over to see Will Brown strung up on a traffic signal at Eighteenth and Harney. He was dragged through the crowd at the end of a rope, bleeding and bruised, to where a boy climbed a pole and tied a noose over the iron beam. The noise was awful. Rifle echoes, pistols. Mothers pushed to the front. They lifted babies to see a body flounder at the end of a rope.
A bullet sliced the rope. The body fell from the traffic signal and was tied to the bumper of a police car and dragged down the street. Karel was back on his ledge to watch where the car went. Down Harney to Thirteenth. Thirteenth to Douglas. Douglas to Fifteenth, on and on. Karel heard praise for the parading car. He heard guns, alone with his back against the burning building. The granite scalded him, but he didn’t pull away. He leaned into the heat.
He caught a glimpse of the car as it came down Seventeenth Street. He saw the body dragged behind. The driver went slow so others could run along or pose for a photograph.
A boy sold pieces of the noose for ten cents. He sliced off segments with a knife.
Will Brown burned in the middle of Dodge, on Seventeenth. The car stopped and a pyre was built. Pallets were smashed to pieces and thrown in a pile. Brown was put on top. He was doused with coal oil from a street lantern and lit.
They dragged the grist until martial law was declared and troops from Fort Omaha and Fort Crook flooded the city. The boys went home. What remained of the body was found hung in front of the Beaton Drug Company store at Fifteenth and Farnam, just around the corner from where Tom Dennison once kept an office above a tobacco shop.
Jake stayed with Tom Dennison the whole night. They sat next to the window. They watched embers smolder through the smashed-in maws of the courthouse and heard the hammering of pistons from the car with Will Brown’s body behind it, the motor echoes between buildings, the victive ovations of teenage hooligans. They smelled wisps of burning flesh in the breeze. They watched as soldiers trucked in, as machine-gun nests were built on street corners.
Jake twisted an early edition of the Bee in his hands. In the years after he would deny even being in the city during the riot—claiming he was in Lincoln that night.
There were thousands of questions Jake could have asked once it was over. Why did Milt Hoffman lead the boys’ mob? Why did the taxis run for free? Who supplied the liquor? Why didn’t the machine do anything to stop this? Why was Tom Dennison in this office to watch, this front-row seat?
Jake didn’t ask Tom any of these questions. He asked about the Cypriot.
“What are you talking about?”
“The Cypriot,” he said. “Ugo Daniel. Why was there a bounty?”
Tom didn’t laugh, as Jake thought he might. He looked Jake in the eyes. He was tired, his flinty eyes ancient. There was a scorched smell even though it rained. Firemen searched the courthouse for cinders that still flickered in dark rooms. A boy sat on a ledge, rocking himself.
“Who was the Cypriot?” Jake repeated. “What did he do?”
“He was nobody.”
Tom turned to look out the window. He was quiet a long time, as if remembering that morning two years ago when he arrived at his office to the news that the Cypriot had got the works. He walked in to see Jake Strauss waiting, the kid who’d taken care of it.
“I don’t know who he was. That’s the truth of it. Some fast talker. Nobody important. He didn’t work for us, or for Pendergast, or anyone. Who’d even heard of him until the rumors spread? My guess is he was some loser. Some confidence man. Billy had a girl working to find out who he was, but she didn’t learn squat. Nothing important. He never stole from us, I can tell you that. He had his own money. He never did anything but draw attention to himself.”
“Why did you give the bounty then? What was the point?”
“I didn’t care who he was. The rumors were doing harm. The man was nothing. Everyone said he was getting the best of us. The longer he lived, the weaker we looked. That was all.”
Jake looked Tom in the eyes. There was gravity to his features, more than usual, this man who trafficked in human lives. He was fighting himself, clinging to something he felt was law.
“What did it hurt to give him the works? Did you think of it that way? It did us no harm to get rid of him, I’m certain. Tell me if I’m wrong. How did it hurt us?”
He came down from the ledge once the firemen spotted him, a few hours before sunrise. They lifted a ladder and he toed each rung until he was on the ground. They thought he was stuck. Karel didn’t think of it that way, even if he wasn’t certain how he’d get down. He was just sitting there, the baseball out of his pocket so he could roll it in his hands and feel the laces, the scuff marks that still held polish from Josh’s fingers. He didn’t need help. Sure, the building was burning. There was martial law. Karel saw from the ledge. How a man was burned and dragged behind a car. How the mob party went on for a while, and then it was ended by their army. Machine guns set up on corners. Lorries rumbled by with a company of soldiers who put a stop to the party. Then the fires were put out. Karel knew the courthouse wouldn’t crumble.
He was unsteady on solid ground, at the bottom of the ladder. Karel couldn’t make sense when he spoke. The firemen asked if he needed a doctor and let him go when he shook his head to say he didn’t. They must have known he was involved. Surely they could smell the smoke on him, the whiskey on his breath. And why else would a boy be four stories high—where the raiders went in—if he wasn’t deep in the bad shit? But they didn’t question him. They didn’t turn him over to the authorities, which would have meant handing over an Austrian boy to soldiers of the American army. Maybe that’s why Karel could hardly stand on his own two feet. Surely th
ese firemen had it in for him. They should have torn him apart for looking like one of the boys who’d cut their hoses. But it wasn’t like that. Karel was alone on that ledge, fourteen years old. He’d flipped his baseball in his lap when they held the spotlight on him. He was afraid, he was crying. They freed Karel. A white boy. They told him to go home.
Karel couldn’t go to the Eigler house. Not with his hands shaking. Hands that remembered when the weight of a man balled into him and they’d collapsed to the floor, up there on the secret staircase.
The first place he tried was the boys’ dorming house, but the front door was boarded over, the windows shuttered. All signs that the building had been occupied were removed. The rules posted outside. The manager, who liked to sit on the steps and smoke what smelled like chocolate cigars. All those machine recruiters were long gone. The only sign of activity was the trampled grass. Each of them rushing around like crazy until now. A curfew was in place, part of the military’s demand as they secured the city. Soldiers zipped around on motorbikes and ordered everyone home. Where were the boys who stayed in the dorming house supposed to go?
Alfred’s tenement room was close, so Karel tried there. He didn’t like the idea of imposing on the Brauns. But what else could he do?
The door inched open as Frau Braun poked her nose out and asked who it was. The bed had been moved to block the opening, this the heaviest furniture they owned, particularly with Emil lying on it. Emil Braun hadn’t recovered from what happened at the Santa Philomena. His back was broken. This was what he said. His heart too.
Emil cursed from the space in the door, edging his wife away. “It’s me,” Karel insisted. “Stop saying those things, Herr Braun. It’s Karel.”
Kings of Broken Things Page 29
