Maria shrugged.
Jake didn’t say more about Evie. It was Sunday and she hadn’t asked him to stay. He’d only wanted to see her again—that was why he wrote that letter asking if she’d let him come by—and he saw her. Four days he stuck close by her side. They walked and ate. There was the carnival. Evie made him sleep on the couch at night—she’d reattached a door with a lock to the hinges of her bedroom—but that was fine. This was more than he hoped for. To be near her. To hear her voice. Of course he wanted to stay. Of course he wanted to share her bed, to have her in the bathtub at least one more time. But that didn’t matter. He’d return to Lincoln that afternoon. He could go even further, all the way to California, if he wanted. These old things he told himself. Promises still valid in their ephemeral way.
It was then he saw the boys march across Clandish. He noticed the mass of them first. Teenage boys in lines a dozen wide going up the street, across lawns and abandoned, rubble-strewn lots. They blocked a streetcar. A few police kept up at the flanks, lecturing the boys, it looked like, trying to get them to turn back. Milton Hoffman manned the point. Jake recognized Milt. The boys’ mob was only half a block down Clandish, Milt shuffling along with his bad leg as he shouted some slogan.
Jake crouched in the lawn to watch. The Miihlstein girls scrambled to the porch. They understood what was happening. They didn’t have to stumble to the walkway and squint down the avenue. The girls had experience. Jake remembered when he saw their cowering. They’d come from the Eastern Front during the war. Their glassy eyes and pinched lips were what caused him to react. He told them to get inside.
“Make them stop.” Silke was on the top step, pleading with Jake. “Don’t you know those boys? Weren’t you the boss of them? Tell them to go away. We don’t want them here. We want them to leave us alone.”
“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “They’re not after you.”
“It’s Karel,” she sobbed. “Karel’s out there!”
He put them inside and had Maria clasp the locks. He heard them on the other side of the door before he followed the noise. “Is Jake going to find Karel? Is he going to make them stop?”
It was 2 p.m. when the boys got to the courthouse. They marched from Bancroft, fifty or sixty of them in the beginning, boys one and all. None were older than sixteen, except for Milt Hoffman. Some were as young as ten. They added more before they got downtown. Hundreds of boys. All feeling strong. Worthwhile and mean. Shouting school slogans and war songs they knew by heart. Karel sang along from the middle. It was boys who first battered the courthouse doors—on the north side—and demanded Will Brown be handed over.
“Give him to us!” they shouted. Some of the voices high-pitched, some cracking. “We’ll take care of him!”
The guards locked the doors. It was Sunday, the building was closed. “There’s a way these things are done,” a police detective told them. “You got to let the courts do their work.” He ordered the mob to disband. Boys laughed in his face.
A towhead named William Francis was one of the leaders. He wore the military uniform of his high school cadet squadron and riding breeches. William Francis was from Gibson—he stopped around the boys’ dormitory sometimes but never stayed—and was a good friend of Agnes, everyone knew. That gave him some authority in the matter. He was tall and slim. His hair was shaved up into a mess atop his head.
They were all friends of that brown-eyed girl, Agnes. If not before, surely now. She was pretty and modest. She worked in a steam laundry with her mother. She was a hard worker. She attended mass at St. Patrick’s, the nine o’clock service. Everybody knew these things.
Boys promised to take matters into their own hands, since the grown-ups had bungled things. It was up to the boys there. Alfred Braun and Jimmy Mac. Gangs of street kids in matching baggy suits and bowler hats, in felt caps and dark shirts dusted white with billiards chalk. High school kids from the Southside. Wide-shouldered Bohunks in denim pants. Football players in letter sweaters. Boys from slaughterhouses with hands bleached white and shriveled from pickling tanks. Leather-skinned boys who prodded sheep and cattle all summer in dung-layered stockyards. Boys of all stripe and affiliation. They chatted across the street from roadsters, traded cheap cigarettes. All sorts of boys Karel knew from baseball games. Roy Teeter, who would fight anyone and had the scars on his face and hands to prove it; Michael Hykell, who was a talker; Ernie Morris, a small fry who usually took the first punch in a fight; Nathan Shapiro, whose Jewish mother locked him out of the house for the night if she heard him swear; and Louis Weaver, whose older brother died of the flu on a transport to France. All boys like Karel, who wanted to prove they too were salty.
None of the authorities paid much mind to the boys. Mayor Smith observed from the courthouse with the city commissioners, the chief of police, the sheriff. They expected a lynch mob to come for Will Brown—an extra fifty policemen were on guard that Sunday to keep him safe until the arraignment on Monday—but when the mob arrived and it was only boys, the authorities couldn’t bring themselves to disperse the crowd. The courthouse was built with lynch mobs in mind, billed as riot proof only seven years before, with heavy stone blocks, bronze doors, and unscalable walls. Will Brown was at the top of their battlement, in the fifth-floor holding cells. They believed he’d be safe until the trial.
Jake didn’t follow the boys. He ran to Tom Dennison’s office.
His mind was a frenzy. He doubted there was anything he could do, as Silke implored him to. He needed to see Tom’s face. Only Tom could take control. Jake needed to look in the Old Man’s eyes; then he’d know what was going to happen.
The office was empty when he got there. The safe was gone, the card cabinets, the signed photographs of movie stars and pugilists. The walls bare except for nail heads sticking out. The desks and chairs gone, marks worn in the floor where they’d scraped. The place was abandoned. No bodyguards outside. No men taking hedge bets over telegraph wires. No Madge Holloran at the pinewood desk near the door. Jake was alone. The office was cleaned out, every presence deleted.
The tobacco shop still operated below. A man behind the counter waited as Jake stumbled back down the stairs.
“Where’d they go?” Jake shouted. The man knew him. Jake had passed through this shop hundreds of times before.
“What do you want me to say? There’s nothing here but my shop. You see that.”