Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(14)
The True Americans have purchased the office for him, and even if the voters don’t hand it to him on a silver platter, I’m sure they’ll see fit to have him installed. One way or another. Over my dead body, I’m sure—if I were to suggest it. They’d be delighted.
No, tempting as it may seem to surrender, I can’t let it come to that.
I can’t just die, and let them have this place. There are too many others who need an advocate, now more than ever as their voices are stripped and silenced, block by block. Good men remain here still, though our numbers dwindle in the face of constant abuse, threats, and harassment. If we all give up, then what’s to come of the colored men and women? The immigrants? The Catholics and Jews? And for God’s sake, when I lay it out like that, you’d think we’d have greater ranks to call upon. Our troops are not legion, but they are not . . . they’re not nothing, either.
But when all’s said and done, they’re not enough.
The election is tomorrow, and I will lose it, and nothing will stand between that miserable bastard and the decent people I’ve served to the best of my ability. I am outraged, yes. I am sorrowful, yes. I feel betrayed—by those whose support I thought I deserved, and by those who damn well ought to know better.
Also, and here’s the thing I mustn’t say aloud: I’m frankly terrified.
Something is happening here, something worse than mere politics—these filthy tricks are the tip of some iceberg of awfulness, the scope of which is yet unclear. But I do not doubt, not for a single second, that the recent deadly incidents and the impending ballot box disaster are related.
The targets are the same, after all.
The immigrants. The blacks. The poor. Those who would dare to intermingle.
? ? ?
The first axe murder happened over a year ago, depending on how you figure it—because some say that the true first incident was almost a year before that, and maybe it’s so; there was an Italian woman whose death I suspect that I ought to include in the roster, but so many people die every day . . . more of them by the blade of a hatchet or axe than you’d really expect. But this much is certain: Once Adam Besler was killed, the other assaults came quickly after. So if his death was not the first of all, it was definitely the first of a cluster.
Besler was a clerk at a haberdashery belonging to the Mangione family, down at the juncture where the streetcar lines cross and connect at Five Points South Circle. It looked like a robbery gone bad, and a poor attempt at cover-up, besides. The man was hacked about the head and shoulders, the store’s cash was removed, and the place was set on fire. Fortunately for investigators, the fire was none too expertly set—and it was easily extinguished before all evidence was lost to us, including the axe itself. Whoever attacked him left it on site to burn with everything else.
Therefore, our police chief, Martin Eagan, set off looking for a murderous burglar. The neighborhood went on alert, the streets were given greater patrol, and everyone trusted that this unfortunate (but surely isolated) incident would be brought to a satisfactory solution before long.
Except that it wasn’t.
One week later, Joe and Susie Baldone were killed in a similar manner while closing up their small restaurant, just a few blocks away from where Besler died. There was no fire this time, and no murder weapon obligingly left behind, but the crime bore all the same hallmarks of the Besler killing. Then two days later, at the other end of Five Points, Gaspera Lorino was attacked—though he survived, and still struggles to recover his full capacities, or so his sister relayed when I inquired last month. He was not able to describe his attackers, though witnesses put the blame on a pair of black men who’d leaped out of an alley, and we received a similar report in the wake of what happened to Carlo Canelli and his wife, Anna. (Anna survived, but Carlo did not.)
It sounded suspicious to me, and not purely because Eagan told me in confidence that he thought the witnesses were lying.
There’s rumor of an organization, you see—they call it “the Black Hand,” and it’s known to give grief to immigrant business owners, extorting money and favors by threats (and application) of violence. Up to that point, all the victims had been Italians, or in the employ of an Italian, so that was the focus of the investigation—and the accusations of negro attackers sounded like a quick story, concocted to throw suspicion aside and prevent retaliation by any Black Hand members.
But then the victims changed.
There was Will Conway and his girlfriend, Betsey Frye, walking home from the pictures—both attacked, both killed. No witnesses. Neither one an immigrant, but Betsey was a mulatto, and there’d been some talk about Conway stepping out with her. Next came Mellie Hayes and her beau, Travis Foster. Same as Will and Betsey, though Travis did survive—and remembered nothing about the incident, or so he says. Likewise Jennie Heflin, who made it out of the fray alive, but injured.
None of the later victims had any ties to the immigrant community, and all were what could politely be described as engaged in “mixed” relations. It was an entirely different population under siege, and there were no witnesses to confirm or deny the reports of black men on a rampage—but again, I never really believed that in the first place, and neither did Eagan.
We didn’t believe the whispers that came next, either . . . though I confess that sometimes, at night, lying alone in my bed and praying to God for guidance . . . I wondered. The stories couldn’t possibly be accurate, but there was a certain . . . symmetry to them. A sense that they may not be precisely accurate, but they say something true nonetheless.