We followed the guy with the notebook, who stopped one more time in front of the Moorish Theater, appearing to study the ads for exotic dancing girls. Then he made a beeline for a group of Pinkertons who’d been hired to prevent visitors from falling into the half-finished Ferris wheel steam pipe trenches late at night. I could only hear snatches of their conversation from our vantage point, behind a shuttered Pabst booth.
“…make a citizen’s arrest! This is obscene!” That was our man, yelling at the bored Pinkertons, who didn’t seem to give him the answers he wanted.
“Can’t leave our post, sir…”
One jabbed him lightly on the arm. They seemed to be urging him to move on. But the more they demurred, the more wound up he got. We heard “citizen’s arrest” a few more times, which pegged him as a Comstocker.
One of the strategies that Comstock pioneered in the Society for the Suppression of Vice was the citizen’s arrest for obscenity. He would spy on sex workers or suspected pornographers, figure out where they lived, and surprise them with handcuffs when they least expected it. Then he would declare a citizen’s arrest and drag them to the police, demanding justice. It was a technique he taught at YMCA meetings, inspiring hundreds of eager men to do the same. The Comstockers spent a lot of time discussing exactly the right handcuffs to use, and how to snatch a girl up so that she couldn’t struggle. To find their targets, they pored over fat booklets of pornography and crates of rubber dildos they’d ordered through the mail under assumed names.
Over time, Comstock amassed a huge collection of dildos and erotic postcards. These he brought with him in a steamer trunk to a congressional hearing, thus cementing his reputation as a righteous man, passionately ferreting out moral crimes of the modern age. Indeed, his campaign was so successful that the federal post office granted Comstock “special agent” status, basically giving him and his goons permission to open everybody’s mail and arrest anyone who violated obscenity laws. Under Comstock’s reign, “obscenity” included information about birth control, abortion, and sexual health. His followers were eyes on the street, and his office gave him eyes on the mail. Some offenders were jailed for years, or financially ruined. Others, as Soph had told us in her parlors, killed themselves rather than face imprisonment.
I wondered what kind of crazy bullshit this lone Comstocker had planned, if he could get the police on his side. Would he throw the whole Midway in jail for indecency? Send the women of the Algerian and Tunisian Villages back to Africa? Luckily, he was getting nowhere with his increasingly loud complaints. Pinkertons were thugs for hire. They didn’t mind smashing the skulls of strikers, but they weren’t big on arresting pretty ladies. Especially when there was no money in it for them.
The Comstocker marched away in a huff, and we tailed him down the Midway. It was getting late, and only a few clots of stragglers were left beneath the warm reddish glow of carbon filament bulbs. Outside the west entrance, he met up with another man and started yelling again. These guys were not exactly masters of spycraft. Standing nearby and pretending to admire the lights, we could hear everything they said.
“We can’t let this go on, Elliot! These dances are more lewd than anything I’ve ever seen in New York City!”
“I thought you were doing a citizen’s arrest?”
“The police are all a bunch of Chads. They won’t help. We’ve got to bring Comstock here, in person.”
My breath quickened. He was using anachronistic slang right out of the Celibate4Life forums in my time, where “Chads” were men who had fallen for women’s wiles and refused to join the fight. No way was this guy from the 1890s. Or if he was, he’d been spending time with C4L travelers. Which still made him an agent in the edit war.
Aseel and I exchanged looks and made a big show of oohh-ing and aahh-ing over the new subway entrance. She leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “I think that’s one of the fellows from the press club.”
I glanced over quickly, and sure enough, it was the creep who’d been handing out zines at the Grape Ape show. Now I had a name for him: Elliot. He scratched his muttonchops and grunted as the C4L guy continued to rant about how he was going to send a telegram to New York right now and teach everyone a lesson about virtue.
At last, Elliot cut him off. “I have a better idea.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I think we should take this to the Lady Managers Board.”
“The what?”
“You know the Woman’s Building on the other end of the Midway? It’s run by a group of upstanding women, and a lot of them are Prohibitionists. Good, faithful wives. If they get one look inside one of these places, they’ll bring the wrath of God.”
I could hear the C4L guy practically hyperventilating. “And then Comstock will have to come! He’ll have to!”
“He’ll arrest every one of those foul bitches.”
“Meet at the usual place tomorrow night, and we’ll figure it out with Ephraim.”
“Yes, sir.”
They broke apart and Elliot headed for the subway entrance. We turned our back on him and linked arms, walking at a leisurely pace like two ladies out for a stroll. When I glanced over my shoulder, Elliot had disappeared.
“We’ve got to do something to stop them.”
“Perhaps we’ll write our own song lyrics for that tune and start selling it, so those Persian Palace bints can’t claim they’re me.”
I couldn’t believe she was still obsessing about the Persian Palace. “Didn’t you hear what those men said? They’re going to bring the Lady Managers to the theater! They’re the most politically powerful women in the city, and they have Comstock’s ear.”
Aseel was angry. “Look, I know you’re on this traveler mission to stop Comstock, and I’m with you. But I can’t go back to some fancy future like you can, okay? I have to think about what’s happening right now. I can’t imagine those bumpkins coming up with a foolproof plan to stroke their own cocks. They’re idiots! I’m less worried about the Lady Managers shutting us down than I am about losing business if everybody is copying my dance.”
“But we have the jump on those guys. If we can get to the Lady Managers first, maybe they’ll ally with us and we can fight the Comstockers together.”
“You aren’t hearing me, Tess.” Aseel whirled to face me. “Didn’t you understand what you saw at the Persian Palace? Not all women are your allies. You know that, right? We have to protect the village.”
It was like we were defending a little town in the Maghreb against the Alexandrian army. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I’d been traveling too long. Times bleed together in my mind. But maybe that’s because there are always villages being ground to a pulp by somebody else’s war.
I hung my head. “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re right. You should write some lyrics. Sol could sell them for a nickel outside the theater.”
“He’ll love that.”
“But I still might visit the Woman’s Building tomorrow. If nothing else, maybe I can get them to meet with us.”
Aseel shrugged. “No harm in it.”
“What are you going to write the song about?”
“I think it should be about those two sad little Comstockers. They’ll never enjoy anything. They’ll never see the hoochie coochie.” She wiggled her hips, imitating the Persian Palace dancer imitating her.