The mob grew throughout the afternoon. It wasn’t something Mayor Smith counted on, that the rough men of the River Ward and Southside would follow the lead of the fifty boys who first struck out to make demands. But by 5 p.m. thousands more joined in. Once the railroad men and jobbers had salved their hangovers, they heard what had started at the courthouse and wouldn’t be left out.
For a while they weren’t sure what should be done. The counterargument that all this had been set up by Milt Hoffman made its rounds again. There was some dispute whether Will Brown had really done it to Agnes Loebeck. Will Brown was a hunchback. It said this in the papers. He could barely close his hands into a fist, could hardly walk, much less spring from the bushes on a hilltop above the river. How could he rape a girl like that? It was a mystery. Folks wondered why Milt hadn’t stopped a cripple from doing things to Agnes. Milt worked for the Dennison machine. Even though he walked with a cane, Milt was a thug. He’d been known to beat a guy with that cane if his temper got the better of him.
A chorus of panic echoed over the River Ward once it started. Paddy wagons screamed by with a cop on the runner to churn the siren. Jake followed in their wake. The closer he got to the courthouse, the more fighting he saw. It was like the melee on Clandish in 1917—kids fighting police, police trying to push bystanders off the block—except the kids enjoyed fighting more than they did before. The cops were desperate. Groups of raiders formed in the mob party. Ten, twenty boys, a man to lead. They charged the courthouse doors and had to be beaten back. One group fell and another stood. There were thousands in the mob party and only a few dozen police outside. Some doughboys moved to the front to give advice. Then the mob party threw bricks at the police who guarded the courthouse doors, a bombardment, before the raiders charged. A few cops were hurt. Nobody made it inside.
Injured raiders sat along the curb when Jake reached the courthouse block on the Farnam side. These were high school kids. They sat on the pavement with hands in their hair to keep the blood in, joking about where they’d gone wrong and which one of the cops it was who got them. They talked like this was a football game with a rival team. These weren’t street kids. They wore letter sweaters and had good teeth. “Do you think it will scar?” one asked. He removed a handkerchief to show the swollen blemish over his eye where he’d been walloped by a cop. “I hope it scars.”
Bill and Ducky Sutez raised a new party, and Karel grabbed Alfred and Jimmy to follow along, the band the ballplayers made, thirty or so of them, to rush the vestibule. They surged the doors to see what they could do. Soldiers, ballplayers, boys from tenements, from the dorming house, from Jobbers Canyon, some Karel didn’t know. A German artillery cannon captured from the Argonne Forest was on display outside the courthouse—a gift from the War Department to commend the city’s enthusiasm for selling bonds. It had an eight-foot gun. The raiders lifted the hitch and wheeled the carriage as fast as they could to batter down the doors, and it worked. They rushed in and demanded Will Brown be handed over.
Karel could see only a few feet in front of himself as their bodies pushed forward. There was constantly someone stepping on his foot or pulling his shirt until it stretched off a shoulder. Police fired warning shots down the elevator shafts, and that drove the raiders crazy. Bill Sutez screamed into the atrium sky and pulled a revolver. Karel pushed anyone who came near him, whether cop or raider, because he couldn’t find his friends. A cop caught a bullet in his shoulder and screamed until another was there to hold him. Did Bill Sutez fire the shot? Karel didn’t know. A few more cops were beaten unconscious and carried out. Onlookers rushed out too, unsure why they’d gone inside in the first place. Everybody wanted outside. Formaldehyde and ammonia bombs had been thrown down the stairs. At the first scent of them, Karel ran, which was fine. It was easy. Fire hoses punched at his back, washed him and the others out the vestibule, over each other where the German artillery cannon was stuck halfway in the door. Raiders stumbled, ammonia blind, over their legs, ones at the front who’d been hit with fumes, some with dangling broken arms, until someone led off to the hospital. Cops poked hoses out the door and blasted anyone who was close.
Mist from the spray freckled Karel’s face where he stood near the curb. There were thousands on the north side of the courthouse. With hardly any space to stand, men and boys passed bootleg whiskey and swigged from tilted bottles because there wasn’t room to raise their arms. They stashed flasks in hip pockets. Hundreds of bottles out of thin air. Crates of booze had materialized at a corner newsstand.
There was shattering glass, shotgun fire, windows breaking. All of it punctuated by a woman’s carnal cheer. That was what Karel heard, the noises he had to brace himself against. The screaming and laughing of those hurt and those in the mob party. He wasn’t a kid anymore. Not now for sure. If he could find his friends, he’d tell them how he saw two people fucking in the back of a car, how he too swigged whiskey from a flask. It was all okay, whatever people put themselves to do. He let his mind cloud over with the flash of small arms, the police sirens, their useless, barking orders, the shouts of celebration and calls for revenge. He had the sense (they all must have) that whatever was going to happen would be okay, that it was sanctioned by some wanton authority.