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.