The election men Jake worked with made the most of their nastiness. That was part of the job—making sure people out in the suburbs were afraid to mess with a machine man from the city. Foreigners made boundaries obvious; members of a ladies’ club would avoid the River Ward if they thought it was full of the Hun. Who cared if society ladies hated them? It didn’t matter. On the Ward, where things did in fact matter, there was some stature in being one of Tom Dennison’s men. Foremen let them alone in Jobbers Canyon. They had friends on the police force. Joe Potash, the detective in charge of organizing raids on saloons and brothels, was a Dennison man through and through. Same with Harry Buford, who drove Dennison’s car as part of his police duties, not to mention the police chief himself, Gentleman Jack Pszanowski. Election workers did what they wanted on the Ward. Cops winked complicit no matter what. It was an astonishing identity for a young man to take on, especially if he was the wrong kind of person. Ingo Kleinhardt, as a case, had a dark complexion and divots around his eyes. A long scar veined his jaw, something he got during a disagreement with a tenement deacon. Ingo was in disagreement a lot, with people he shouldn’t have been. He had four young kids but didn’t mind getting hurt so long as he got to hurt the other guy too. Ingo was never going to be what anyone considered the cream of the cream in decent society, but men like him were the bread and butter of a political organization. Hard-drinking, chain-smoking, whore-mongering men who’d landed where they belonged.
There were a dozen of them in their election crew. Dennison gave the job to Jake and let him bring his friends along. Joe Meinhof took to the work right away, but Reinhold begged out after a week, preferring life as a tunneler. Charlie turned Jake down flat. He enlisted in the army because he was tired of being called both a slacker and a Hun. He didn’t want to listen to it anymore and would be on a battlefield in Flanders by the spring of 1918. Others were happy to join up with the machine. Konrad, Paul, Rudi, and Albert left their jobs as dairymen. From the warehouses came Ingo and Heinz. It didn’t take long for a daylighter in Jobbers Canyon to figure his fortunes would be brighter working nights for Tom Dennison than pleading with a hiring manager each morning. If you worked hard for Tom, he’d at least be loyal. That was a hell of a lot more than any other job promised.
Jake didn’t even try to argue with the logic. Those days the machine was perfect.
He sifted in waves of daylighters late that February. It was a cool morning. Men scattered along Tenth Street in a broken single file toward the mills. Jake took aim on them, set his shoulders wide so they couldn’t slip by. These were repairmen for the Union Pacific. The world’s largest welding yard was close by. Its workers wore patched overalls, denim jackets, floppy felt hats made heavy by oil and soot. They stared at Jake through tired eyes, annoyed because he strode headlong against their current, a footstool in his arms. He liked facing workers alone. There was a thrill in their menacing looks when they turned to see why Jake, square jawed and blond, had made himself vulnerable.
“Have you given any thought,” he shouted, “to what will happen to your jobs if the ticket of Edward Parsons Smith takes the ballot this year?”
He wore new trousers, a starchy shirt, black suspenders clamped to his belt line. His hair was trimmed neat up the side of his head. Madge Holloran, Tom Dennison’s secretary, took him to the Brandeis department store the morning he started. He got a whole wardrobe. Madge paid cash. Navy and gray wool suits, matching vests and shoes, a pocket watch, a half-dozen shirts with underclothes. He was given brass money clips for his new reserves of cash. One for his own stash and another for what belonged to the machine.
Some jobbers stopped on the walkway to inspect the gold chain that hung from his vest. The jobbers were jug-eared. Their skin burned red from arc flashes and showers of sparks. Some chewed bread crusts.
“You got the chance to improve your life,” Jake told them. “The fine luck of choosing between two slates of very different men. If you want blue laws down here, vote for the other guy. If you want a closed-up town, vote for Ed Smith. It won’t make anything better. It won’t stop crime, no matter what any brass band reformer says.”
Stumping like this was dangerous. The war was on. Every day more boys returned from overseas crippled or limbless, or with some twitching neurosis caused by mustard gas and shell shock. To mount a stool on a street corner for any purpose other than proclaiming America’s greatness was risky. That was why men stopped to watch. They looked at him with half grins and raised eyebrows, waiting to see if a fight broke out. If there was no fighting the men spoke up with complaints. A few of them pulled on Jake’s sleeve. “Is there a party? With girls?” “Don’t you have any whiskey?” “How about silver dollars?”
Evie Chambers was at the back of the crowd that morning. Jake spotted her, her body an apparition among the shoulders of jobbers. He lost his words when he saw her. The brown curls and sloping neck, the way her eyes flashed desperation.
“Give us something!” the jobbers shouted, angry at being ignored. “Can’t you get me a better job?” “Yeah! How’s about yours? You’re not doing it!”
Jake didn’t hear the men laughing. He stared at Evie. A black cap secured by pins was nearly swallowed in the mass of her hair as she pushed through the crowd. “Don’t you know what you did?” she asked. “I know it was you. You’re the one.”
This is how Jake met Evie. She thumped his chest with her fists until he stumbled off the footstool to an uproar of cruel jobber laughter.
“You’re the one who took him,” she said. “You owe me something for that.”
Jake tried to lay hands on her shoulders but she slapped him away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Yes, you do. There was a bounty. That’s why you did it.”
Jobbers shoved him against her. “Go on, honey. Take what’s yours! Beat it out of him!”
“You have the wrong guy,” Jake insisted. The way she looked at him was pitiful. Her lips pale with sorrow, two flat curls of hair not quite covering her ears.
“I should say it’s you. You’re the one who did it. Everyone knows that.”
Another girl came rushing down the sidewalk.
“Evie! They’re putting you out! All your stuff and everything! I knew they’d do it the moment you left.”
He followed them north of Dodge Street, the confrontation conveniently displaced. He couldn’t stop watching the girl. Her name was Evie. That was what the other one called her. Jake repeated it under his breath to remember.
She argued with a man at the top of a stoop, slapped a clutch of papers out of his hands. As the man bent to pick them up, Evie chased after two brawny black men with a dresser hefted between their arms. She told them to put it back. The two acted like she wasn’t there, careful not to touch her, to not look in her eyes.