Chapter 23
LAURIE
The rotten coppers left them there in the showers, restrained and beaten and separated from each other, for nearly an hour.
It could’ve been longer. Laurie didn’t have a watch.
Chary had left his at the door. But Laurie’s nose bled steadily, so he counted drips until it decided to stop.
It took longer than he felt comfortable.
They weren’t allowed to speak nor turn around.
Laurie found himself trying to identify Chary by his pained breathing, Hiram by soft, vicious curses.
Someone was snuffling thickly into his spot of wall, tears wracked with suppressed fear.
Identifying that didn’t work, either. Laurie had never heard either man cry.
No noise, of course, was better. Meant they were being left alone.
If there had been fewer cops, it might’ve been different.
Fewer witnesses. Now they were as secure in their number as pack dogs freshly fed from the hunt.
They’d have been happier if they’d gotten more, of course, but they had their resistors to arrest, and Brasher, who had given them a fight and witnessed violence to add charges.
The cowboy had been knocked out cold in a stranglehold, tossed in a corner, and silent ever since.
The only spot of light in the whole thing was that they’d gotten almost everyone out. Out of a hundred or so men there tonight, after plotting and planning and Tjofabier Raberding spurring the charge, the police had gotten a mere fraction of the arrests they’d wanted.
If Raberding ever again showed his face to him, Laurie decided, it’d be hot-blooded murder. Personal. For Chary, for Hiram, for Irving, for himself.
Second to that, because murder was unfortunately wrong, would be exposure. Front page. TRAITOR IN THE MIDST: GLASS HEIR FAIRY SODOMITE HEADS SOCIETY AGAINST VICE. WHAT WERE HIS MOTIVES?
Sam would never, not in a thousand years, print it. Laurie probably wouldn’t get more than a sentence in, writing it, before being sick.
But what could be done about the bastard that didn’t just further misery?
Brasher and Hiram had put together that Raberding had spurred this.
Laurie believed it utterly, but wanted to know the how.
Raberding was rich but not especially influential, probably even less so to the police wards.
While the police were certainly bribable, a hundred twenty uniforms required coordination. Pre-planning.
Raberding had resources, but they couldn’t have been endless, and thus far, everything except Irving’s death had been done aboveboard, explainable away.
But if Raberding had taken on a different, more sinister kind of disguise than had the Wrights and had, as wolf in sheep’s clothing except the sheep were wolves, too, hooked himself into every anti-vice society he could find.
There were a lot of them in Gotham. He wouldn’t have had to go far.
Some rich men spread themselves—and their monies—across several societies and patted themselves on the back for being bipartisan.
Laurie suspected Raberding joined all the ones that allowed fingers to be pointed in whatever direction was opposite himself.
Laurie cursed himself that he hadn’t looked into the things Raberding was involved in initially.
Plain and simple, Laurie’s own bias had gotten in the way.
Sabotage of his fellow man was absolutely anathema to his idea of an otherized, queer person.
Not to mention Raberding had seemed entirely too self-centered to be interested in furthering “the greater good.” Whatever they were calling it these days.
Yes. He could think of no other way for Raberding to accomplish it but a one-two punch of anti-vice leadership and bribery.
Top it with a keen instinct for his ex-lover’s tendencies, foreknowledge of August’s location, and a successful attempt at smoking him out of said location…
hey presto, a lover in desperate, dire need. Some convenient casualties mixed in.
By the time Laurie was dragged up from his fold facing the wall, his knees were total knots, his ankles the opposite—stretched out like bands—and he’d bled over both, irony red mixing with copper-scented shower water to pool around him and settle in his pruney soles.
Every step was both sensitized and tingling numb.
He didn’t see Chary or Hiram, but Sidney Brasher was restrained in the corner.
He did appear to be breathing, thank god.
Two officers hauled Laurie out of the baths—past the smashed front vestibule, through the smashed front doors.
Then Laurie was totally naked outside, exposed to what felt like all of Gotham, and the only miracle there was that there were no photographers waiting outside the entrance, and no reporters, either; it had been a relatively hush-hush operation.
They’d learned from last year’s raid on Ariston.
The only notoriety that was really needed were the inevitable trials.
“Now we get to add indecent exposure,” one copper whispered. “Sick inverted fucks.”
Standing weary and bloodied in the dark of West 25th, waiting to be shoved naked into a police wagon alongside a man he didn’t know, Laurie changed his mind. Let them document it, so long as they dared. I’ll document it, you fuckers. I’m still here.
It’d been a short morning walk for Sam Sullivan—300 Mulberry Street was not too terribly far from Newspaper Row—but it looked like, at least, a hurried one; his mustache was askew on his lip, and his suit his office emergency spare.
Laurie didn’t have the heart to tell him about the mustache.
Hiram, who definitely would have said something, was out for the count, sleeping beside him on the charge-room bench.
Laurie said, “Thank god for you, Sam.”
“What am I going to do with you boys?” Sam put his hand on Laurie’s (clothed, even if black-and-white jumpsuited) shoulder. He lowered his voice. “Any luck passing it off as undercover newsmen?”
“I have no clue,” Laurie said frankly. “Can’t hardly see straight, to be honest.” Then he added, “’Twas us leading ’em out.”
Sam pressed his lips together, but nodded. “All right. That’s a later consideration, then.” He patted a briefcase on his hip. “Brought your spares, both of you. And some of Maud’s honey cake.”
Maud was his wife of some twenty years and exceptionally kind. This, on top of furnishing the ludicrous amount of bail for both of them. Laurie could’ve honestly cried. “Thanks, Sam. I don’t know how to repay you.”
Sam shushed him, waving. “Write me something worth printing, Laurie dear, as usual. That’s how.” He handed Laurie his spares.
Laurie gratefully got rid of the jumpsuit and pulled on the trousers, a winter-wool pair he hadn’t remembered to switch out from his desk.
Summer heat or no, he thought it’d be a while before he’d take them off voluntarily in public.
“I don’t know if— D’you know if they’ve let out Chary? Mr. Wright.”
Sam’s surprise at the familiarity was apparent even while he was turned politely aside. “Mr. Wright? I don’t. But Mr. Sumner left me an address in case of emergency; I’ve telegrammed there.”
Laurie’s exhausted heart picked up speed.
August. August could not come there. For one, he was supposed to be dead.
For two, Tjofabier Raberding hadn’t yet shown his face, but would shortly realize his prey wasn’t included in the net and would come looking nowhere else but where he thought August would be: rescuing his brother. August knew that, didn’t he?
“You haven’t given it to anyone, have you?”
“The address? No. The telegram? Yes. I shan’t apologize. What’s an emergency if not finding your two best writers arrested?”
Laurie snorted. “Oh, come on. Hiram’s a society writer.”
Sam laughed. “I’ll take that to mean you’re decent again?”
“Yeah.” He reached back to lightly scritch at Hiram’s hand. He was hesitant to touch anywhere else; the policeman Hiram had taken down to the Russian-baths floor had gotten him back and then some, with the help of his friends.
Brasher had been bailed out long since. He hadn’t been booked longer than an hour when a troupe of suits and badges came in, silently oppressive, and carried him out again over their shoulders.
Laurie wasn’t sure it had been liberation over reincarceration—they were feds if Laurie had ever seen one—but Brasher had gone willingly enough.
Hiram hadn’t said a word about it. Neither had he seemed upset. Laurie definitely had questions.
Hiram woke, jerking his head up. He stared wildly, unfocused, before spotting Sam.
“Hullo, Sam.” He yawned. “I thought Laurie got this kind of preferential treatment from you exclusively.”
Sam scowled, but it was insincere. “Why would it be exclusive, Mr. Sumner? Don’t you sell just as many copies?”
“I couldn’t say. We’re in the same issues.”
Laurie laughed.
“Letters to the editor, then,” Sam said, dogged.
Laurie tossed Hiram his suit. “Get dressed, H. We’re outta here.”
Hiram dressed quickly, unselfconscious. The bruising beneath the jumpsuit wasn’t as bad as Laurie feared. The worst was the face they hadn’t spared: the work of insecure men with biases worn right on their bloodied sleeves. Hiram was unrecognizable. One carefully shaped eyebrow was splitting.
Laurie wondered how Chary had fared. The sound of his face hitting the floor—his limpness after, defeated, taken completely by surprise by the violence—
Yeah. That might revisit his nightmares after all.
A patrolman, expression bored, led the three of them out of the charge room and down the wide marble stairs.
The boys in blue had been recently insistent a new, fancier station was needed.
A larger one, they said; the police force had quadrupled.
(After experiencing a hundred police coming down on one small bathhouse filled with a quarter as many men, it sure as hell seemed to have quadrupled.) Construction had begun earlier this year.
Laurie had seen the plans. Greek columns and a dome.
The finest building in New York for New York’s Finest. Gotta impress the oppressed. Scare away the non-whites.
In the lobby—peaceful and empty this morning—they were obliged to check out with the clerk, who stood at a safe separation of about ten feet, a wrought-iron fence, and a desk.
Sam signed something or other that affirmed their payoff had been properly furnished, and then they were free citizens once more, at least until trial.
When they were nearly to the double doors, Hiram touched his wrist.
“What?” Laurie muttered. Newly fearful, he looked behind him. The police had changed their mind. More charges, new bail, another jumpsuit.
No: worse. Tjofabier Raberding was leading Chary Wright down the marble stairs into the lobby, an arm around him. Chary looked drugged. Their escort was no lowly patrolman, either: none other than the Headquarters’ Chief Inspector, leaning to listen to Raberding speak.
That fucker. Laurie took one furious step, quickly aborted; Hiram pulled him back, his grip like iron.
“No,” Hiram said fiercely. “Don’t you dare. Where you are you right now?”
Laurie glared.
Sam glanced between them. “Boys?”
“Mr. Wright.” Hiram nodded.
Sam said, “Ahh.”
Both Chary and Raberding looked over. Chary stumbled when his eyes met Laurie’s, and then he jerked his face away, as if ashamed.
His bruising wasn’t as thorough—or deliberate—as Hiram’s, but the preexisting contusion had swollen back to hard and round and re-purpled itself; it looked horrific.
Raberding held him tighter, murmured something, and pulled him over to the fencing before the desk.
There, he glanced over his shoulder to Laurie, smirking his victory.
Laurie’s vision blurred. But he stayed put, Hiram’s hold anchoring him. Leading him. “We’re going to sit,” Hiram said. “There’s a bench. Sit. Down. There you go. Sit.”
Laurie sat.
Raberding signed the same thing Sam had, with a little more flourish, murmuring to the Chief Inspector: “…vicious rags’ rumors and nothing more, of course… absolutely ridiculous. I would suspect… union involvement… Irish… entrapment by certain publications…? Anything for an exposé, you understand.”
The Inspector was nodding along, placid agreement, and then Raberding was signing something else, something he’d pulled casually from an interior suit pocket. A bank cheque. Supplementary palm-greasing.
Sam harrumphed. He nudged close a handkerchief of dense, gooey-looking honey cake, and muttered from the corner of his mustache, “Eat so you don’t apoplexy.”
Laurie did, reluctantly; he wished he could give it to Chary instead. Chary stood slightly aside from Raberding, one hand on wrought iron, his tall form weaving like a bulrush. He might as well have been miles away.
Hiram went abruptly to his feet and, without a word, strode out the station door. Odd; he wasn’t prone to tempers. But Laurie could only spare him a glance. If Chary passed out like he had outside his 2nd Street apartment…
The honey cake in his mouth turned dry and hard to swallow.
“Doing well, my lad,” Sam murmured. He patted Laurie’s knee.
“…so much for your understanding,” Raberding said.
“The Committee Against Vice will be happy to see you personally at the next meeting, Chief Inspector. By then, I believe, Mr. Wright and I will have gone public with our joint business, and all outside motivations behind this unfortunate incident will have shone through quite clear.”
The Inspector agreed, enthusiastically, and the two men shook hands.
Got you, Laurie seethed. I see you. You think you can hide in plain sight, Tjofabier Raberding? I see you.
Raberding took hold of Chary again, and without a hint of acknowledgement toward Laurie—naturally, given his big speech to the policeman declaring them the enemy—they walked out the doors and down the front stair.
Soon, all of New York would see him too. Laurie vowed it.