A bullet sliced the rope. The body fell from the traffic signal and was tied to the bumper of a police car and dragged down the street. Karel was back on his ledge to watch where the car went. Down Harney to Thirteenth. Thirteenth to Douglas. Douglas to Fifteenth, on and on. Karel heard praise for the parading car. He heard guns, alone with his back against the burning building. The granite scalded him, but he didn’t pull away. He leaned into the heat.
He caught a glimpse of the car as it came down Seventeenth Street. He saw the body dragged behind. The driver went slow so others could run along or pose for a photograph.
A boy sold pieces of the noose for ten cents. He sliced off segments with a knife.
Will Brown burned in the middle of Dodge, on Seventeenth. The car stopped and a pyre was built. Pallets were smashed to pieces and thrown in a pile. Brown was put on top. He was doused with coal oil from a street lantern and lit.
They dragged the grist until martial law was declared and troops from Fort Omaha and Fort Crook flooded the city. The boys went home. What remained of the body was found hung in front of the Beaton Drug Company store at Fifteenth and Farnam, just around the corner from where Tom Dennison once kept an office above a tobacco shop.
Jake stayed with Tom Dennison the whole night. They sat next to the window. They watched embers smolder through the smashed-in maws of the courthouse and heard the hammering of pistons from the car with Will Brown’s body behind it, the motor echoes between buildings, the victive ovations of teenage hooligans. They smelled wisps of burning flesh in the breeze. They watched as soldiers trucked in, as machine-gun nests were built on street corners.
Jake twisted an early edition of the Bee in his hands. In the years after he would deny even being in the city during the riot—claiming he was in Lincoln that night.
There were thousands of questions Jake could have asked once it was over. Why did Milt Hoffman lead the boys’ mob? Why did the taxis run for free? Who supplied the liquor? Why didn’t the machine do anything to stop this? Why was Tom Dennison in this office to watch, this front-row seat?
Jake didn’t ask Tom any of these questions. He asked about the Cypriot.
“What are you talking about?”
“The Cypriot,” he said. “Ugo Daniel. Why was there a bounty?”
Tom didn’t laugh, as Jake thought he might. He looked Jake in the eyes. He was tired, his flinty eyes ancient. There was a scorched smell even though it rained. Firemen searched the courthouse for cinders that still flickered in dark rooms. A boy sat on a ledge, rocking himself.
“Who was the Cypriot?” Jake repeated. “What did he do?”
“He was nobody.”
Tom turned to look out the window. He was quiet a long time, as if remembering that morning two years ago when he arrived at his office to the news that the Cypriot had got the works. He walked in to see Jake Strauss waiting, the kid who’d taken care of it.
“I don’t know who he was. That’s the truth of it. Some fast talker. Nobody important. He didn’t work for us, or for Pendergast, or anyone. Who’d even heard of him until the rumors spread? My guess is he was some loser. Some confidence man. Billy had a girl working to find out who he was, but she didn’t learn squat. Nothing important. He never stole from us, I can tell you that. He had his own money. He never did anything but draw attention to himself.”
“Why did you give the bounty then? What was the point?”
“I didn’t care who he was. The rumors were doing harm. The man was nothing. Everyone said he was getting the best of us. The longer he lived, the weaker we looked. That was all.”
Jake looked Tom in the eyes. There was gravity to his features, more than usual, this man who trafficked in human lives. He was fighting himself, clinging to something he felt was law.
“What did it hurt to give him the works? Did you think of it that way? It did us no harm to get rid of him, I’m certain. Tell me if I’m wrong. How did it hurt us?”
He came down from the ledge once the firemen spotted him, a few hours before sunrise. They lifted a ladder and he toed each rung until he was on the ground. They thought he was stuck. Karel didn’t think of it that way, even if he wasn’t certain how he’d get down. He was just sitting there, the baseball out of his pocket so he could roll it in his hands and feel the laces, the scuff marks that still held polish from Josh’s fingers. He didn’t need help. Sure, the building was burning. There was martial law. Karel saw from the ledge. How a man was burned and dragged behind a car. How the mob party went on for a while, and then it was ended by their army. Machine guns set up on corners. Lorries rumbled by with a company of soldiers who put a stop to the party. Then the fires were put out. Karel knew the courthouse wouldn’t crumble.
He was unsteady on solid ground, at the bottom of the ladder. Karel couldn’t make sense when he spoke. The firemen asked if he needed a doctor and let him go when he shook his head to say he didn’t. They must have known he was involved. Surely they could smell the smoke on him, the whiskey on his breath. And why else would a boy be four stories high—where the raiders went in—if he wasn’t deep in the bad shit? But they didn’t question him. They didn’t turn him over to the authorities, which would have meant handing over an Austrian boy to soldiers of the American army. Maybe that’s why Karel could hardly stand on his own two feet. Surely these firemen had it in for him. They should have torn him apart for looking like one of the boys who’d cut their hoses. But it wasn’t like that. Karel was alone on that ledge, fourteen years old. He’d flipped his baseball in his lap when they held the spotlight on him. He was afraid, he was crying. They freed Karel. A white boy. They told him to go home.
Karel couldn’t go to the Eigler house. Not with his hands shaking. Hands that remembered when the weight of a man balled into him and they’d collapsed to the floor, up there on the secret staircase.
The first place he tried was the boys’ dorming house, but the front door was boarded over, the windows shuttered. All signs that the building had been occupied were removed. The rules posted outside. The manager, who liked to sit on the steps and smoke what smelled like chocolate cigars. All those machine recruiters were long gone. The only sign of activity was the trampled grass. Each of them rushing around like crazy until now. A curfew was in place, part of the military’s demand as they secured the city. Soldiers zipped around on motorbikes and ordered everyone home. Where were the boys who stayed in the dorming house supposed to go?
Alfred’s tenement room was close, so Karel tried there. He didn’t like the idea of imposing on the Brauns. But what else could he do?
The door inched open as Frau Braun poked her nose out and asked who it was. The bed had been moved to block the opening, this the heaviest furniture they owned, particularly with Emil lying on it. Emil Braun hadn’t recovered from what happened at the Santa Philomena. His back was broken. This was what he said. His heart too.
Emil cursed from the space in the door, edging his wife away. “It’s me,” Karel insisted. “Stop saying those things, Herr Braun. It’s Karel.”
“I know who it is. Do you think I can’t smell a rat?”