Karel and his friends hung around the Santa Philomena all day a few weeks later. Braun arranged for them to help with a political rally. Josie Washburn was going to speak. If the boys came early to put out benches and folding chairs in the hall, he’d get them half a dollar each for their trouble, and half more if they cleaned up after. Braun assumed they’d want to see the speaker while they were there. He rambled incessantly, broken up about Josh Joseph, and swore upheaval was coming. Karel didn’t know what to think, but there were omens Braun spoke of. Word reached Omaha that week how Manfred von Richthofen—the Red Baron!—had been shot down and killed by a single bullet near the Somme. The death of Germany’s national hero, the ace of its Flying Circus, was a portent of the war’s end and revolution across Germanic domains. The Kaiser’s army was scuffling. A desperate spring offensive had moved their forces within seventy-five miles of Paris, until supply lines dwindled and they were pushed back, and were still being pushed. German cities ran out of bread in the meantime. There had been no meat for over a year. Things were even worse in Austria-Hungary. Rumors spread that the war might end. There would be disorder, disruption, mayhem. After what went down with the Bolsheviks in Russia—the Red Army, the imprisonment of Romanovs, a photo of bejeweled and fleeing tsaritsas in the papers every week—who knew what else would happen? Global revolution? Was it possible?
Here in the States the situation was difficult. The Espionage Act made it easy to convict an agitator of treason. Braun went on about this in the cellar where SOSA met. President Wilson was threatening to have the labor activist Gene Debs locked up for speaking against the war as the Sedition Act rode a rail through Congress, and Emma Goldman was already serving a two-year sentence in a Jefferson City penitentiary for urging young men to shirk the draft. So it was up to Emil to keep going, with Red Emma out of circulation. The threat was the same for all agitators, for Alexander Berkman, for Kate Richards O’Hare. “Most real leftists are locked up already,” Braun said. “Deported. Silenced.” This was why a local street screamer and reformist like Josie Washburn attracted attention. She would still speak out, something rare that spring, and the activists of SOSA weren’t going to miss hearing her.
By evening a carnival had erupted at the Santa Philomena. There was no wind or rain to move people inside, so families staked out patches of grass to eat off a blanket. Italian clans who lived nearby clustered the walkways and lawns. One stood outside with a whetstone to offer his services. Street vendors sifted through to improvise a buck—tobacco and wine kids transplanted from the flats, trays strapped over their shoulders; register girls from bakeries and delis with crates on their hips, selling half loaves of bread and sliced meat, almond cookies and empanadas. A boy from their school came into a watermelon and sold chunks of its sticky guts for two cents each, his shirt doused pink as he carried what remained on his shoulder. Closer to the hall were men of a different cast. Mill workers in greasy black overalls; slackers in felt caps sat along a brick wall with legs stretched out to reveal their shoe bottoms. A delegation of black stockyard workers, dung caked and bloodstained, trying to find something to eat. Whispers trailed them.
Some Russian warehouse workers leaned against the hall. They wore denim jackets and bit at sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, cheese and onion pressed between slices of cottage white. Smears rubbed into the bread. Between their thighs sat tin cups that brimmed over with sudsy heads of beer. Some boy flitted along with a clay jug hugged to his belly. The boy made wisecracks to the Russians. They replied in kind. To Karel, every word from a Russian sounded like an insult. These thick-chest serfs whose mouths closed in satisfaction over their vittles, whose lips curled venomously under bloodshot eyes. They were sizing Karel up, like they knew where he came from, that he was Austrian, Jewish. Even though he was just a boy, they must have pictured what it would be like to punch him in the face, and how little it would take to beat Karel and his friends. Karel hated Russians. When one whispered to another, when they leered at him and laughed in their native cackle, he too dreamed how it would go down in a brawl. He’d be beaten badly, sure—three boys couldn’t rout a dozen cruel Russians—but Karel thought it might be worth the pain to find out for certain. In reality there was nothing he could do except flip up his collar and hope the Russians ignored him.
The boys returned to the Santa Philomena and waited for the door to open so they could find a good spot. The hall couldn’t hold the hundreds wanting to get in, so they had to hurry.
It wasn’t long, waiting, before Karel saw Jake Strauss push his way to the front and order the doors open. The machine men swaggered like they had big guns tucked in their belts. Karel rushed to the front with his friends, but Jake stuck to the side of the hall, looking nervous, like he and his men had something planned. Election men were scattered all over. Karel knew some of them: Joe Meinhof, Ingo, Paul, Heinz.
“Do you see?” Braun asked, sneaking next to the boys. “Tom Dennison’s men all over. I told you this would be worth watching.”
A Sicilian gentleman popped up to the small stage to make an announcement. Karel hardly understood a word the man said. Nicosia and America, and, at slant, the name of the speaker they waited for. The emcee had an inch-thick walrus mustache that weighed down his face, the kind only a cad from some far-flung principality would wear—like the officials Karel’s father talked about sometimes, the exiled-from-Wien bureaucrats they’d been afflicted with while getting out of Galizien, officials who stole nearly all their money, Miihlstein claimed. The man onstage wore a village getup of inexplicable distinction. A yellow jacket and ruffled shirt. He raised a peculiar coat of arms—headless fish, crossed sabers, a mule. “What the hell is that?” Jimmy asked. Nobody knew.
The crowd quieted when Josie Washburn emerged at the podium, wide-eyed as the emcee helped her up from a back passage she’d been smuggled through. She was announced. Here. Signora Wauzboon. Her hair was dark, a pyramid of curls atop her squarish head. She wore a purple skirt with gold brocade, a metal amulet on a chain. Her complexion was soft, her skin a shade whiter than her blouse, her hazel eyes live and darting. There was a Danish stoutness in her shoulders and jaw, in her heavy clothes and hips. She parted her lips several times as she looked the crowd over but said nothing. She tried to wet her lips with her tongue then flushed so fierce her face turned the same purple of her skirt. Some folks in the crowd became restless in her silence. “What’s this? Why doesn’t she say something?” There was a rumble all over the hall. Dozens questioned her because she left a gap for them to. “Come on,” Joe Meinhof shouted. “We’re here! Let us have it!”
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.”