Working for the machine lost all propriety without the veneer of the election. They’d lost the vote and reality came crashing back. Reformers cleaned out the police department and held judges to task. There were crackdowns in ethnic zones, from Clandish to the neighborhoods surrounding the stockyards. With Ed Smith as the new mayor and Dean Ringer calling the shots for the police, the city focused on cleaning out the River Ward. Ringer established something called the Morals Squad, a coalition of his own cronies who were tasked with throwing out Dennison’s cronies. There were outrages in the dailies with all relevant clergy and politicians consulted—the same confederacy that won the vote—and something had to be done. Paddy wagons were filled with bartenders to be booked on charges of public depravity. Kegs of beer were chopped in the gutter for newspaper photographers. There would be no drinking for a night, but by morning a machine captain would make bail for the bartenders and pay their fines. New kegs could be procured. Business would be back to normal by shift change at the mills. It was all theater.
Sometimes Jake was the guy who made bail. That July, 1918, a kid came to get him early one morning. It wasn’t even five yet. Jake could tell from the way the kid rambled that he’d been up all night, sick on chewing tobacco and snuff. The kid said there’d been trouble with the cops.
The courthouse was elegant early in the morning, when it was quiet. Jake waited inside the bronze doors to see the vaulted dome. Its panes glowed like emeralds in the first light. He paced the rotunda and stared up at the murals, waiting for a judge, and lit a cigarette to see its tails of smoke twist in still air, one of the few times he liked to smoke, alone like that, the building alive with morning sun. He felt that the space belonged to him. In a way it did. If the clerks weren’t there, or the nuts debating their fines, or all the real estate people and lawyers, the cops and government men, the street girls being held up to fork over a percentage of what they’d made. Jake stared at the murals—mosaic plowmen, broad-shouldered balers of hay, a Sioux chief in headdress defending a teepee camp—but a judge never came. A police captain did. The police captain said to follow him to a fourth-floor room. Inside was a body on a table bound in a wool blanket.
Jake walked to the end of the room and stared out the window, not even slowing when he passed the body. His fingertips were on the glass before the captain had the door closed. He faced south and could see a long way. There was the library across the street, the Flatiron and its tan bricks, a red boardinghouse that looked like a barn, Clandish Street and the tenements south of there, then freight lines and long, winding boulevards that led to Deer Park and South Omaha.
The police captain thought Jake was stupid. “You still sleeping?” Jake grinned like a clodhopper, in no rush to reveal how he was feeling, to let his face twist up or cry or shout and take a swing at the police captain in revenge. He just wanted to run out the door, to not have to face that body in the blanket. His chest was tight; he could hardly breathe, holding all that in, making himself grin.
The captain explained how there was a fight. Men from Jake’s crew were caught with alcohol outside a club downtown. When confronted by police, they refused to surrender the liquor. One of them took a swing at a cop. That’s what cops always said, and it was probably true. Most machine workers weren’t afraid of reform cops. But the skirmish went too far this time. Shots were fired.
Jake asked who it was. “See for yourself,” the captain said. He was there to transfer custody of the body. Jake was to take the body away and arrange for burial. “We won’t make a big deal out of this,” the captain said, “if you and your boss don’t either.”
Jake lifted the blanket. It was Ingo Kleinhardt. Ingo was a man Jake hired. The cops shot Ingo through the mouth. His teeth were shattered.
Jake lost his stomach for the work after they buried Ingo. He went up to the office above the tobacco shop and told Tom Dennison he wanted to quit. Jake expected Tom to try and talk him out of leaving, but Tom did nothing like that. Tom was as bitter about how things had turned out as Jake was.
“Those men are your responsibility,” Tom said. “Whether you’re running the crew anymore or not, you hired him. You brought him in.”
“You got to leave,” Billy Nesselhous said. “Either do something to get back at Ed Smith or get the hell out of town. We don’t need useless men.”
“What should I do?” Jake looked at Tom like they were the only two in the room. Other men lined the walls, the toughs. Their heads dipped as they glared at Jake.
“Do your job,” Tom said. “This wouldn’t of happened if you were on top of it.”
“Make up your mind and get in the game,” Billy goaded him, “or we have no use for you anymore.”
“I can quit? I can leave?”
Jake leaned forward in the chair opposite Tom’s desk, hands in his lap.
“It’s not that easy,” Billy said. “There’s the money you owe.”
“The thousand,” Tom said. “What about that? You think you should get to keep it?”
Jake couldn’t have paid back a tenth of what he’d siphoned off, and he’d left the thousand at Evie’s the last time he’d seen her. She’d probably spent it. Jake knew it wasn’t right to take that money. Nobody had to tell him that. But so much of what they did was questionable. It was all illicit money they trafficked in. All under-the-table, all off the books. There were worse things he could have done.
He kept his mouth shut about Evie. What Jake said was that he’d give back everything he had left. He emptied his pockets onto Tom’s desk. “There’s thirty here, some change.”
“What about that ring?” Billy picked out what was once supposed to be Evie’s ring. The silver band with a diamond chip. “This too.”
“It isn’t worth much,” Jake said.
“It’s something.”
Jake didn’t mean to dump the ring, but it was too late to take it back. “Fine. There’s all this. Another fifty in my room. You can sell the clothes.”
“There were others like you.” Tom swept the money back across the desk to Jake. Billy kept the ring. “There were others with promise. You ended like they all did. A disappointment.”
Jake couldn’t believe it. Were they really going to let him walk?
“Am I done?” he asked. “Can I leave?”
“If you can live with it, keep what you owe.” Tom motioned to a trio of thugs along the wall. “Get him out of here,” he said.
“To the train station,” Billy added. “That’s fair. If you had what you owe us, we’d be square. Since you don’t, you got to leave town. That squares us.”