Slow Burn (21 page)

“I panicked. I wanted to clean up. Enzo had already started cutting her clothes off. I threw him out of there while I quickly wiped everything down. I made sure we didn’t leave any trace of anything anywhere. I’d hoped it would throw you off, so…”

I’d heard enough. I shook Chamberlain harder and said, “Where’s Jack now, damn it? Where?”

“Enzo’s got him!” he screamed. “He’s alive, I swear! We got him drunk a couple of nights ago and kept him that way since.”

This time, Loomis shoved him. “Where?”

Chamberlain couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “Two-Forty-Two Eighth Avenue. Apartment 4C. Enzo’s there with two other knock-around guys from The Chantilly Club. Friends of his.”

He kept repeating himself, but I’d already memorized the address. The scuffling in the hall had died down, but the noise from the street picked up. It was a low rumble, like the sound of an approaching subway train or the sound you heard at a ballgame between innings. Something was starting.

O
UT IN
the hallway, Mr. Van Dorn was sitting in a chair, holding his head in his hands. A shaken Gottheim stood by his side, while a half a dozen cops scurried around them.

Carmichael was carefully unloading a long-barreled .38. I knew it wasn’t police issue, and figured it was Van Dorn’s. I could smell the cordite in the air.

The Chief sighed as he handled the gun. “It’s my own damned fault for letting him listen at the door without checking him first.” He looked back at Van Dorn, who was shaking and sobbing like Chamberlain, except his tears were for a much different, deeper loss.

“Can’t blame him,” I said.

Carmichael snapped the gun’s bullet chamber closed and handed it to one of the uniforms, along with the bullets. “You get Chamberlain to give up where Jack is?”

“A place on Twenty-Third and Eighth,” I said. “A crud named Enzo’s got him. I want to…”

The crowd noise from the street rose from a rumble to a quiet roar. Somewhere, glass shattered and the roar grew louder.

“Son of a bitch,” Carmichael said. “That gunshot must’ve gotten them riled up.”

Turning to one of his men, he barked an order to get word to the mounted units. Carmichael shoved me out of the way and waved three uniforms past me into the parlor. He pointed at Chamberlain and said, “Bring this sack of shit upstairs. If the crowd storms the mansion, throw him off the roof.”

Chamberlain screamed as the cops snatched him from the chair and dragged him out of the room. One of the men twisted Chamberlain’s busted hand behind his back, making him shriek louder.

Loomis went pale. “Chief, you can’t do that.”

“I don’t have a choice. If that mob busts in here and grabs him now, they’ll gang rush every precinct in the city whenever we arrest one of these Red bastards. Whether he dies here or gets cooked in Ossining, he’s a dead man.”

I heard Chamberlain’s howls echo throughout the mansion as the men carried him upstairs. Carmichael ordered a couple other cops to bring the Van Dorns and their staff down to the basement. “There’s a thick door down there you can barricade. Loomis, get down there with them and keep them safe.”

Loomis looked more relieved than the Van Dorns did to be going downstairs. I couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t used to riots and violence.

But I was. And Carmichael knew it. “Cheer up, Charlie,” he said as I followed him to the front door of the mansion. “Looks like we’ll be doing something you’re actually good at.”

A
S
I followed Carmichael outside, it was like walking into a wall of sound. The crowd had grown by about a hundred since I’d parked the car, bringing the number to at least four hundred, maybe more. The shouts from the street grew louder, more organized. They were trying to get a chant going, but hadn’t gotten the cadence down yet. “WHAT ABOUT US? WHAT ABOUT US?”

Some of the younger cops looked scared, but Carmichael’s eyes were clear, and bluer than I’d seen them in years.

I knew the son of a bitch lived for this. The crowd noise spiked when they saw Carmichael walk through the front door.

He made a hell of a target — all six-four, two-hundred thirty pounds of him. He pulled on his hat and strode down the steps of the mansion like he owned the place. He moved at his own steady pace, galling the crowd all the more. From the steps I had a better view of the crowd, packed between the front of the mansion and the Central Park wall across Fifth Avenue. They’d been quiet when I’d first gotten there, but they weren’t now. Two chants merged and competed:

“FREE LENNON NOW!”

“WHAT ABOUT US?”

Each side kept getting louder. And louder. The crowd was too big and too restless for me to spot individual faces. It was a blur of beards and moustaches, hats, bald heads, upraised fists and angry eyes — bodies packed together and yelling, despite the glare of the August sun.

O’Hara right was where I knew he’d be: down in front with the uniforms, bolstering the men while citizens yelled and spat. He might’ve been a Tammany toadie, but he was a good man to have in a riot.

He had positioned a squad into a semi-circle around the mansion, three deep, nightsticks at their sides. They wouldn’t get flanked that way and would keep the mob from rushing the mansion if it came to that. They’d hold the crowds off for a little while, at least until the mounted units got there. Hopefully.

Something coursed through the crowd, an energy that was building toward something. Something bad.

I thought someone called my name, just as a blur flew out of the crowd and nailed me clean on the right temple. My head snapped back and I went down. Everything went fuzzy for a second or two, but I wasn’t knocked out. A bottle smashed against the wall above where I’d been standing, covering me in glass.

The crowd roared and shoved forward. Carmichael bellowed an order. And all hell broke loose.

I’
D BEEN
in combat situations before. I’d seen my share of action in France during the war. On another hot day, in Belleau Wood near the Marne, the air had been filled with gunpowder and blood and broken, screaming men. I’d trampled and crawled over my own dead and wounded, just so I could kill the Kraut bastards who were trying to kill me.

There was a time when I dreaded the sounds of combat, when I hated the feel of plunging a bayonet into another man’s body. But there was also a time when I began to love it.

I wanted to do it again and again, and keep on doing it for as long as I could. If I was still killing, I was still alive. And I wanted to be alive.

The stately corner of Sixty-Sixth and Fifth is just about as far away as you could get from any battlefield in France. But on that particular August afternoon, with an angry mob bearing down on my position — on my men — it wasn’t that far at all.

So I did what I’d done back there: I got up off my ass. I attacked. I pulled my sap from the back of my pants, and saw the left of O’Hara’s line buckle back toward the mansion beneath the crush of the mob.

The shutterbugs who’d blocked the entrance were caught in the middle and got the worst of it. Pieces of busted cameras were scattered all over the street. A big bearded bastard clubbed one of the uniforms up front with an axe handle, cracking his head open. The line gave a little as the poor kid fell back. The crowd sensed the weakness and surged toward the opening. The bastard with the club led the way.

I leapt toward the break and nailed him with my jack. This time, he fell back into the crowd, knocking a couple of others back with him. I vaulted through the hole and over to the other side of the line.

I waded into the mob, swinging at anything in front of me. My sap connected with heads and necks and arms thrown up to defend themselves. I threw elbows and punches, and I cracked men in the ribs. Screams and yelps went up as men buckled and fell all around me. It only made me swing and club all the more.

A rallying cry rose behind me as the blue line surged forward. Somehow, I picked up a nightstick and tucked my slap jack away. I swung and I prodded and I made people bleed. I took my share of shots in the bargain, but I kept going anyway.

The sound of wood hitting bone drove me on. I stepped on arms and legs and belted men trying to get to their feet. I hit everything that faced me until I saw the backs of their heads as they ran. But I wouldn’t stop. I didn’t dare. I ran them down and kept swinging and clubbing everything that moved because as long as I swung, I was still alive. It was Belleau Wood, over and over and over again.

I swung at the backs of knees and at the heads of men as they ran away from me. I can’t remember taking a backward step. Not once. And neither did the cops around me. A whistle blew as the mounted units rode through whatever was left of the mob. I kept running after them, swinging at anyone I could reach. I closed in on one Red bastard who’d started to stumble as he broke into the clear.

I brought my club back to slam him in the kidney when someone grabbed the nightstick out of my hand. As I pulled my jack from the front of my pants, ready to brain the dumb bastard who’d stopped me, a man not much bigger than me threw his arms around me and pulled me close.

“Easy, Charlie, easy,” O’Hara laughed. “You’ve done enough. They’re on the run, now.”

When O’Hara let me go, I saw his hat was gone and blood ran freely from his nose. Some of it was already drying on his moustache. He was bleeding from a gash high up on the side of his head. He was missing a front tooth on the left side. “Christ, you’re as fierce as ever,” he told me. “A sight to behold.”