Page 79 of By Any Means

Chary squeezed his eyes shut; he couldn’t look. Not physically, since he was so contorted, nor willingly. What hurt worse? Laurie discarding his principles of equality for the sake of Chary or that Chary wished, shamefully, that it might work?

Once Chary was restrained in handcuffs, face down, his shorts rucked up and over his buttocks but unable to fix it, the police were content to leave him there on the floor, surrounded by the threat of shiny, blacked shoes. Brasher still fought and, from the sound of it, was absorbing nightstick blow after blow like a grunting mannequin, refusing to go down. Sumner wasn’t audible in the din. Chary hoped, illogically, that he’d escaped somehow.

“Geez. Didn’t think fairies came built like that.” A patrolman, like observing a boxing match, loud enough he didn’t care if any of them heard.

“How about that?” another agreed. “Oop—there he goes. Timber!”

Laurie had been pulled far away from Chary’s line of sight, but another man had been pushed down and handcuffed a short distance away: one of the men from the Russian bath, hair and body wet. He stared past Chary, unseeing, nothing moving on him but a trembling mustache. Catatonia and disbelief.

“It’s all right,” Chary said, though it wasn’t. “It’s going to be all right.”

Shiny black leather jabbed in his side. Chary’s breath whoofed out of him. “Shut your mouth or I’ll smash it in.”

He did as he was told. Everything he possessed felt tensed and vulnerable. Breakable as a hollow-stemmed succulent. Bluebell flowers—Mertensia virginica—were described like that; a storm could snap them, never to recover. How many beatings could one survive in a week?

And the man hadn’t seemed to hear him, anyway.

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?”