Chapter 24 #2
The roughs stepped forward. Sumner stayed back, solemn beneath an umbrella. The deadly look was back.
“I don’t!” Raberding shrieked, heels kicking. “I lied! I don’t have a gun! Don’t any of you touch me—”
“Chary!”
Chary turned. Laurie spilled out of a cab on the corner, hardly waiting for it to stop. He left his editor to settle the coins and limped forward. He looked wonderful.
“Reckless bastard,” he said, “crashing the car like that with you in it—you could’ve been killed.” He put his hands carefully up to Chary’s face. “You all right, Chary? You haven’t hit your head again or been sick? Are you cold?”
Chary let himself be held for a moment, then pulled Laurie’s hands away. He wouldn’t want to touch him, not if he knew the truth. “I’m all right. It was only a tumble from my seat. Raberding took the brunt of it.”
“Hope he broke his nose,” Laurie said viciously.
Chary couldn’t really disagree. “Are you all right? Your ankle...”
Laurie shrugged out of his jacket and put it over Chary. “It’s fine,” he said. “Got stomped a few times. Could’ve been worse. You see Sumner?”
The suit jacket was toasty warm, brown wool. “He looks awful.”
Mr. Sumner himself sniffed. “Superficial hematomata. And speaking of…”
“Hema-tomato-what?” Laurie asked.
Sumner rolled his eyes, handed them the umbrella, and strode forward.
“I’m so sorry,” Chary said.
“Nah,” Laurie said. “You didn’t know what it would be like. Those of us who did should’ve warned you better.”
“I don’t think there would have been any true preparing.”
“No. There isn’t.” Laurie’s hand twitched south, nudged at Chary’s fingers. “I’m sorry.”
“Mr. Tulley!” Raberding wailed. “New York’s witness to injustice—won’t you see what they’re doing to me?”
Laurie raised the umbrella and glanced over.
Chary looked, too. Raberding, whether he had been armed or not, was now half-naked, having been stripped to a half-removed, wetly transparent union suit.
Other than that, no one seemed to have touched him, though he was surrounded; he had pinned himself to warehouse brick like a hair-raised cat.
Mr. Sumner was approaching him, unhurried, and Raberding had frantic eyes locked on him.
“I don’t see anything,” Laurie said mildly. “Do you, Sam?”
Sam Sullivan, who had ambled over, smoothed his mustache. “I see a rich man robbed of his five-thousand-dollar automobile.” He paused. “And possibly a pocket watch.”
“And we’re cooperative, aren’t we, the press and the gangs?”
The editor put his hands in pockets and nodded. “Newspaper Row’s a block away from Five Points,” he said reasonably.
“Yeah. An Irishman guarding the threshold every night. Kinda gotta be cooperative.” Laurie shrugged. “I had a different kind of exposure in mind for you,” he called to Raberding, “but this will do nicely to start.”
Raberding moaned.
Mr. Sumner had reached him. He took the man’s broad chin in hand and turned it to the side. Raberding shook, otherwise motionless against the brick, as though being held by all four mob men and awaiting a right hook.
Sumner did nothing but slap him, softly, like a kiss. The slap slid and left no mark at all.
Raberding sneered through Sumner’s grip on him. “That’s the best you can do? The famous fairy?”
“No,” Mr. Sumner said. “But it’s the most you can handle.” One-handed, he tossed Raberding aside, and the man crumpled down to concrete. “Run home, Tjo.”
August’s companions herded the man, nudging him crablike along the wall to the corner.
“I—I can’t— I need my shoes— It’s raining— Please— At least my shoes—”
“Wait.” August himself came forward. He had the man’s shined wingtips, one in each hand.
“August,” Raberding whispered. “August, my love. I take it all back—it was you I wanted; that’s all I’ve ever wanted—”
In response, August hocked and spat: into one shoe, directly inside. He must’ve known precisely what disgusted Raberding, right on target; the man made a noise. Beside Chary, Laurie chortled like a boy. “Aw, hell,” he whispered. “That’s foul.”
“I don’t need you, Tjo,” August said. “I don’t want you.
” He spat again, into the other shoe, then crouched to drop the pair at Raberding’s feet, lining them up neat and straight and shiny-wet.
“I never have needed you. And if you come to our home again, or try to buy us out, or so much as speak to Chary, I’ll shoot you off the doorstep and throw you in the East River.
You’ll be the dead one this time. Understand? ”
Raberding breathed hard for a moment, then all fear dropped away.
“You always were an untamed animal. Start looking over your shoulder, my love. If you can hire these lowlifes, then so can I. I’ll hire anyone.
You remember how short a trip it is to Bellevue gates.
I’m sure they have two beds in the mental ward to spare. ”
“Two?” Laurie drawled. “Not as long as I’m alive.”
August said nothing. He, too, was trembling. You remember. What had Raberding meant by that?
Raberding snatched up the shoes. “We’ll see what you need from me then. If I’ll answer. Look for your name in the morning editions.” He fled down East 8th—toward Tompkins Square.
“It’s an empty threat,” Chary tried. “Surely.”
“An unoriginal one, at that,” Laurie said.
“When he’s got enough money to start his own house for the insane and throw away the key.
” His unshaken nonchalance was strangely soothing.
“Does he speak any German, d’you know? The language of his forefathers?
” He said something in German, which, like Latin, and Greek, and French—he felt a little hysterical—Chary did not speak.
“I beg your pardon? What did you say? I have no idea.”
“Nein,” August said curtly, in passing, beelining for the car. “He does not.”
Laurie laughed. “Better learn quick, if he’s to run undressed through Little Germany.”
Nowhere felt safe, not in the whole of New York. Chary had never felt his infamy or his queerness more keenly. His vulnerability.
Look for your name in the morning editions. There would be no hiding from that, would there?
August didn’t seem to want to speak about the threats, and it seemed hardly the right time for Chary to bring up the machine-made jam jars.
August did offer to drive the five of them, squashed into Raberding’s hulking gold automobile, to their respective destinations: Sam Sullivan to Newspaper Row, and Chary, Laurie, Mr. Sumner, and himself to the Algonquin Hotel —infamous for turning the cheek, and his own favorite hotel besides.
There, they could speak. It was as good an option as anything else.
Their Fifth Avenue place was out of the question.
Before starting the auto, August paid his ruffian friends, exchanging handshakes and grateful shoulder thumps.
Chary wondered if what he’d said to Raberding was true, if he had known these men professionally, once upon a time.
If it mattered. What seemed to matter was that August was correct: he wasn’t alone.
He didn’t need Tjofabier Raberding. He might not even need Chary.
Perhaps, Chary thought, he never had needed Chary at all.
“Is your brother in with the mob—truly?” Laurie asked. “Only curious,” he said quickly, as Chary gave him an exasperated look through the cracked partition. “I don’t give a fig. In either circumstance, I can’t write about it, y’know. He’s your brother, and, well… cooperative.”
“I don’t know,” Chary said honestly. “But… you don’t give a fig?”
Laurie looked away, caught, sheepish, but smiling. He tugged at his cap. “Aw, hell. I can’t still find him fascinating? Was he really a prostitute?”
“Leave it, L,” Sumner said, sharply.
“Well, I would be happy to see a Wright tableau,” Sam Sullivan piped up beside him. He, Mr. Sumner, and Chary shared the back seat, elbows and knees jangling. “But I suspect Mr. Raberding has us rather beat to that punch.”
Laurie hummed agreement. “Pro’ly. Or it’s more talk.”
“Ironic, if you consider it could’ve been his bounty to begin with.”
“It could’ve what?!” Laurie jerked around to stare. “Sam! You didn’t. A press bounty?”
“Five hundred dollars, yes. But no, that is only a theory, after all. It may be it isn’t his. And I didn’t take it, did I?”
“If only because I refused to write it!”
Chary realized then—once again—that Laurie had been telling the truth the whole time. Neither his editor nor his office-mate knew about the gaffer deaths or what story Laurie was really looking into. He had refused to write Chary’s story.
Sam Sullivan sighed. “I can try to put out a kill on it, boys, but… no promises. Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Raberding will have gone with the World.”
Laurie groaned. “As if I don’t owe you enough, Sam. You can’t get into it with Pulitzer!”
The engine rumbled to a start, and August hauled himself up into the car. He said nothing before throwing it into gear. Chary tried to catch his eye, to get any inkling of how his brother was feeling.
Nothing.
They dropped Sam Sullivan off at Newspaper Row, and then he and Laurie were left at the doors of the Algonquin.
They booked four rooms, exchanged the numbers, and then August promised to take the auto back to Raberding’s carriage house—with Sumner’s help—and return.
Chary and Laurie went off to their respective accommodations to shower and rest.
Chary bathed but couldn’t sleep. It was deathly quiet.
Alone with his own mind, it felt like he was waiting for the end of the world.
Or at least the telegram that would announce its coming.
What would become of their lives once exposed?
Would they have any peace ever? Would August remain a free man? Would he?
More than anything, he was antsy to speak to his brother.
Eventually, it was well into the afternoon; the room’s mantel clock told him he’d been trying to sleep for hours, and August hadn’t knocked. He put on a robe, went out into the hall, and himself rapped on the door of the room August was meant to be occupying. No answer.