Before the dorming house opened it wasn’t so easy for a kid out on his own. In summertime there were doorways a boy could lean in, or managers of lunch counters who didn’t mind if a kid laid his head on a tabletop so long as he cleared out for the rush. Winter was more complicated. A boy could rent a man’s bed during the day if that man worked a day shift, but that cost money. A boy might even stay home a few days if he forgot why this was his worst option.
Karel stuck to the quiet end of the loft. At the other end boys played cards or threw dice or learned to curse in a dozen languages. All of them smoked corncob pipes, another amenity the house provided. Those boys stayed up all night talking from nicotine. The misfit boys of Clandish. But Karel came here to sleep. At home in the Eigler attic he couldn’t find peace. After Anna was taken away, Miihlstein rehung many of the wire monstrosities she’d made. In the dark Karel could see their silhouettes hang, the jagged legs of a wire elephant, the gaping hole among the cords of a raven’s middle. He couldn’t stand to be haunted.
Karel wished the feeling he had on the ballfield could somehow follow him home, but it couldn’t. There was too much weight in familiar places. The stuff about his mom he didn’t want to believe. What happened with Braun and, not long after, Jake being run out of town in disgrace, a thug, a thief, good riddance. And Anna.
Karel switched on a lamp to take off his shoes and tuck them under the mattress. The light might annoy those around him. They could roll over and grumble for all he cared. They could say, “Oh, you again.” He’d tell them to fuck off.
Karel sat in the lamplight. That was all. The room looked strange to him, the way shadows took hold in corners, under beds, in the airy loft above him where the rafters crossed. The room reminded Karel of when he’d visited Anna at the state home. She too slept in a hall like this one. The two rows of beds. All strangers to one another, which made them compatriots in a way. It was always lonely to fall asleep in a row of beds, particularly if you were bracketed by silent neighbors. If he couldn’t hear his breathing, Karel feared that the boy next to him had died in the night, what he’d feared years before when he shared a bed with Anna, when he fell asleep to her delicate snore but awoke to silence, her snoring stopped. The terror of that.
Karel would stay up late and stare into the rafters. He’d listen to the cardplayers. This night he’d leave the light on.
Something wicked must have come over Tom Dennison after they lost the vote. He always hated losing—he’d gone red-faced and toppled faro tables in Denver as a young man when he lost at cards—and was even worse as he aged. Losing left him speechless. He had no idea what to tell Frank and the others about Jim Dahlman and the whole coalition falling. That this was expected? That there was nothing he could have done to change things? Why people voted like they did wasn’t always something Tom could explain. Maybe it rained too much that spring, or too little. Maybe it was too cold for their liking, or too hot. Maybe they lost a job or found out their wife was cheating or their in-laws wanted to move into the spare room or their boss was a prick. Men had this effective weapon—the vote—but rarely understood how to use it. Tom took advantage of this when he could, but that didn’t mean he could say why people voted one way or another. The only hard fact of the matter was that they did. This was shown in numbers. The reform slate carried six of seven spots on the board. Tom’s Square Seven took only one.
Things would change in Omaha. There would be upheaval in city hall, in the police department, on the bench. Almost every seat of control they had was in disarray.
Frank didn’t say much when Tom saw him on election night. Frank fingered the foil tops of unopened champagne bottles and flipped his class ring from one finger to another. He barely even nodded when Tom said hello, and Tom knew enough not to push against the mood of his benefactor. Frank could look pure evil when mad, in his finely tailored suits, his unamused, aristocratic glower. Tom had clashed with Jay Gould before and could attest that Gould had nothing on Frank.
Of course, it was Billy who broke the silence—“We lost. What’s to say about it?” Frank shrugged. “Isn’t that what we pay you for, Billy? To talk?”
Tom admitted that he couldn’t make heads or tails of losing. “Give me a week,” he said. “I’ll decide what to do.”
He paced the brick drive outside his house that week, thinking. Bullet straight and tree lined, the drive gave the impression of something extraordinary as his house slipped into view. The house was wood framed with finishes of granite at certain edges, the cellar and foundation limestone, highlights of plaster festoons above the front door. Off the second-floor bedrooms were balconies as wide as the patios below, where tiered gardens overlooked the industrial valley. There were pergolas holding grapevines, arbors abloom with creeping red ivy. Everything here was made for looking at, for admiring, like it was unreachable, a mirage. Years before, an enemy left a bomb on Tom’s doorstep. An ingenious design, the bomb, a simple wooden crate with six sticks of dynamite and a pistol inside. A string was tacked to the porch and connected to the trigger of the pistol. If someone had lifted the box—Tom’s wife or daughter—the whole house would have been blasted clean off the earth, his wife and daughter too. Frances found the crate. A smart girl, she didn’t touch anything. Tom noticed the trip wire when she brought him to see. He had police dismantle the device. After that Tom closed the grounds. Bodyguards were kept outside around the clock. You had to be a close friend, a known friend, if there was such a thing, or else you couldn’t get close. The bomb changed things. That was when Tom put a machine gun across his lap in the car. That was when everything here, all this bounty he’d won, started being lonely.
He wouldn’t give up what he’d earned. No matter if it was lonely. He wouldn’t go out on a loss. The mere idea drove him nuts. He could only think of one thing: how to get back what was taken from him.