Evie locked her windows at the sash, and her doors too, to head out in search of Jake, although she wouldn’t have admitted that. She walked a few blocks to see what was going on up near the courthouse. She heard the noise echo between the buildings long before she could see anything. All those people. The puffs of smoke. The sun setting behind the buildings in all its fall glory. These people were gruesome. Evie knew she should hurry back to her rooms—that she should be smarter; she had too much to lose trying to pass through a lynch mob to find Jake. What if someone in the mob picked her out? Jake Strauss would be fine. Evie should get out of there, because she was shaking and should listen to her fear, and it was no secret what kind of blood the mob wanted to spill.
She stayed only a minute. Climbed with wobbly legs to the top of a stoop outside the Omaha Building to look for Jake. She couldn’t see him in among the thousands of hats and faces and flops of styled hair in the mob party. This was no surprise. What was Evie going to do if she found him anyway? Drag him out of there? She just wanted to see what he was doing. If he was part of the mob or not. If he incited the crazies on or tried to talk them out of what they were going to do. Like this would show who Jake really was.
Evie had no hope of spotting him. She snuck away as fast as she could. Looking for Jake wasn’t worth the risk of being caught up in something bad, she told herself. She had to get out of there.
Jake noticed boys going in and out of the Bee Building. All these boys hustled up the front steps and through the door and nobody stopped them. The building was guarded by private security. Nobody in the mob touched it, their attention focused in the opposite direction, on the courthouse. Except for those boys who hurried in and out—boys who weren’t rioting. Jake recognized one of them, then another. All these boys were runners for the machine. Billy Nesselhous’s boys, in dungarees and short wool jackets, with grime-smudged faces and penny cigars. A boy army that worked for nickel tips. The runners bound in and out of the Bee Building. It was Chip Lee who was at the door to keep out unwanteds, Chip who normally guarded the door to Dennison’s office.
It didn’t take much to get inside. Chip had always liked Jake and let him pass. He chased the boys up to the top floor. Billy and Meinhof were there, waiting to hear what was going on.
Billy jabbed Meinhof in the shoulder and winked when he saw Jake on the landing.
“I won’t make trouble,” Jake promised.
“Great,” Billy laughed. “He won’t bother us, he says. What a relief.”
A small group of men were in a sparsely furnished office, backs turned to peer out the windows. Tom Dennison was at their middle. “What do you think?” he asked, grinning. “Would something like this happen if we ran things?”
Jake didn’t answer. A space opened at the window and Tom bid Jake to stand next to him. He put an arm over Jake’s shoulders as they watched what unfolded. All of them were drunk, even Tom. All of them festive for the occasion. A crate of the same booze from the street was up here, half-empty by then. They pointed out what looked interesting from the window. A fistfight. A woman who bared herself to raiders and made promises. The sunset made spectacular by the smoke. Anything the men said was half covered by the racket. Mostly it was Billy talking to boy runners who rushed up three steps at a time to tell what happened:
How a black was chased down Seventeenth Street and caught outside the Omaha National Bank. A mob tried to lynch him, but police stopped it. Tom shook his head as he heard. How a black was pulled off a streetcar on Farnam, this one with a pistol in his belt. He holed up in the basement of an iron foundry until police removed him to the city jail for his own good.
Around 8 p.m. a runner told how the Townsend Gun Company had been raided, and that street kids had broken the windows of sporting goods stores to scout for baseball bats and weapons. Several doughboys filched guns and ammunition from pawn shops, and soon they began firing on the courthouse.
The women prisoners were released. Over ten thousand citizens were trying to destroy the courthouse and murder a man—whatever these women had done couldn’t be worse than that.
A sixteen-year-old leader of a mob party was killed in a gunfire exchange with police, or from friendly fire. An insane man escaped from the prisoners and dashed to the river. Taxis ran hot, packed. Thousands hustled in from neighborhoods nearby before they missed the lynching.
And then word came about what happened to Mayor Ed Smith. The runners were barely coherent they were so excited. Smith was inside the courthouse doors amid the sound of gunfire when he fired at a rogue doughboy in uniform. The doughboy confirmed this, holding up his quivering, bloody hand where the bullet went through. When Smith emerged, he held a small pistol. The mob became unglued at his holding a gun.
Smith was going to talk some sense into the crowd. That was why he came outside in the first place. “Lynch me if you got to lynch someone!” He was hit on the head with a baseball bat before he could say more then struck with the butts of revolvers. They slipped a rope around the mayor’s neck and dragged him to the corner and before long had him hanging from a light pole at Sixteenth and Harney, hatless and bloody, his feet clear of the ground, his eyes bugging out of his skull. This was the mayor. Two men tugged the rope to lift him higher.
Three police detectives cut down the mayor and rushed him away. His head was badly beaten. There were rope burns on his neck and he could hardly breathe. He might die at the hospital.
Tom’s mouth shrunk as he heard what happened to Ed Smith. His eyes narrowed. He felt the change in his face and couldn’t control it like he’d always been able to control his expression. He was dumbfounded, he wanted to be less drunk. He tried to figure out the balance that was being created. A calculation he couldn’t figure. Could he repay what he owed? And to whom would he tender compensation? How could he even imagine he could square this chaos?
Tom fell into a state his men had never seen before and needed to compose himself. He was a man who valued control over all else, a gambler aware of the angles. Anarchy wasn’t something he stomached easily. “All we did was have Milt march with the boys,” he said.
“We sure did,” Billy said. “The taxis, some liquor. But goddamn. Look at this! Who would of guessed it?”
Some in the mob complained how they’d let Mayor Smith get away. They were angry with how those detectives slipped in and cut Smith down from the rope and drove off with him. Some yelled about how they should have done more. When they had the mayor in hand, they should have finished him off, because he protected that Will Brown.
They rocked a police car back and forth until it tipped. They put a match to a stream of gasoline so the car exploded. A group of boys fled around the corner, hair singed off.