Jake looked at Karel again. His face fell in embarrassment. There was nothing Jake would do to stop this. He turned out from the circle to the door.
“Wait!” Karel grabbed his arm. Jake was red and sweaty. He tried to say something, but Karel couldn’t hear what. “Make the cops stop them,” Karel begged. “Do something.”
“I can’t,” Jake said.
“You’re lying.”
“I got to go. I’m sorry for your friend, but there’s nothing I can do.”
Jake pulled away and left. Where was he going? Why did he get involved with all this just to leave once it got hot?
Emil Braun was going to get it. Ingo and Rudi shoved him into the ring. Meinhof jabbed him with a cane he picked off the floor. They shouted, “Did you hear? He cursed America! I heard!” This was a lie—or maybe it wasn’t, who knew with Braun?—but the chorus was ready to agree. “Get him! Teach him a lesson!” All it took was a second. A stockyard worker pulled off his shirt. The crowd, hungry for a rout, pushed Braun in. They had him corralled. They smacked him when the rhythm compelled. Members of all groups closed in. It didn’t matter who they were, if they’d heard Emil Braun give a talk in the cellar of a saloon, if they’d sung “The Internationale” to the tune he set. They wanted blood—that was what mattered.
He was quiet, they all were. A terrible quiet. Braun was silent, except for his wet breathing, his soaked shirt unsticking from his skin as his diaphragm expanded.
The boys had helped carry Braun up the tenement stairs. There weren’t enough volunteers to convey a mobbed and beaten man. For what if the mob came back, then what would happen? “What about the hospital?” Jimmy asked. But there was no money. Braun gave everything the family had for Josh’s funeral, the coffin, the choir. There was nothing left. There was sad little to begin with. If they did more harm than good bumping his broken body up the stairs, the boys were sorry. There was no other way. In the room was a table where they could lay him at least. An old woman could be called. Maybe not a doctor, but a wise old woman. Maybe not wise, but at least old.
The old woman and Braun’s wife toweled off blood. Where something was broken they tied tight with a dressing ripped from his clothes.
All the election men gathered in a switchyard southwest of the German tenements, near Twenty-Fourth and Hickory. They leaned on the fenders of cars that straddled the tracks until the wall of their bodies fractured so Dennison’s Olds 45 could pass through to their middle. Jake watched from inside the car. He was afraid of what was going to happen.
It was up near Capitol Avenue where Tom found him. He had a suitcase and was going to Evie. They would buy train tickets. He had the thousand-dollar bill. They’d get away. He believed this. His heart still raced in his ears, his hands alive where he’d struck Braun. It was Maria’s suitcase, an old leather one he’d stuffed some clothes in. She’d wrapped a sandwich in wax paper and sent him on his way once he told her what he was planning.
The sky was overcast as he rushed north. Searchlights danced on the screen of low, churning clouds from the army’s balloon training field north of the city. It was in the dailies how there would be elevations and maneuvers throughout the night to practice for surprise blimp attacks on the Western Front. The searchlights made Jake skittish. Clandish Street itself resembled a military zone after the fight at the Santa Philomena. Cops pacing walkways. Paddy wagons stationed at intersections. The streets nearly deserted save for nervous police.
Jake was going to Evie. He’d always been trouble. Falling for her was different. He’d marry her, and that would be the first useful thing he’d do.
But up on Capitol Avenue he heard the growling motor, the squirming rubber against the curb. He looked to the sky, saw the clouds, hoary and gray, and searchlight circles dancing. He heard the door unlatch. Jake slipped inside the Olds next to Tom, next to Tom’s machine gun.
They didn’t say a word in the car. Not even Harry. The car drove south out of downtown and in the silence Jake was left to guess what was going to happen. On the night Tom’s men finished off the Cypriot, Jake had heard, they’d taken the body down this way.
It was Joe Meinhof who opened the door when the Olds stopped at the switchyard. The way Meinhof smiled, his spiteful eyes, Jake thought he was finished. They’d caught him going to Evie. If they searched his pockets, they’d find the thousand-dollar bill.
Jake rushed into the men once he was free from the car. He ducked around, trying to hide. Dozens of men in the crisscross beams of headlights. They cleared away where he walked. No one let him get close. Jake needed to stand next to someone, but the men kept moving away. Dennison was following Jake—that was why he couldn’t hide. The men made way for Tom.
Tom went right up to Jake. He said, “Don’t forget your luggage,” and held out the suitcase. “You wouldn’t want to be without extra shorts on the trip tonight. Might need those.” The others laughed at Jake. Tom staring him down. Jake couldn’t look into those steel and flint eyes, so he looked at the scar on the Old Man’s face instead. Fighting back tears, he was so scared.
“I was worried you couldn’t hack it with the dirty work.” Tom spoke in his big voice so everyone heard. “But they tell me you broke up the reception tonight, Jake. Almost started a riot single-handed.” The men laughed like Jake was one of them, he realized. “Some union stooge tried to give you grief and you brought the hammer down. I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Tom put his hand on Jake’s shoulder and spoke softer. “You’re in the truck to Red Oak. Then I want you at Mecklenburg’s tomorrow. I haven’t forgotten you.”
Jake caught his breath and grinned back. It was the night before the election. Tom wouldn’t be worried about him and Evie now. They were safe for the moment.
Tom moved to the center of the cars, where Billy Nesselhous waited. The priority of the moment was to cross into Iowa to retrieve the hired votes. Every rental car in the city had been reserved for this purpose, with only men on the payroll having access. Jake and Evie couldn’t have gotten a car anyway, even if Jake had tried renting one for their escape. So Jake learned. Every man in the machine had a job to do. Jake was to ride in a flatbed truck with Joe Meinhof.