What Do You Want?
A middle-aged man was looking around the store. Everything on display was women’s lingerie, and with female customers present, he had no idea where to rest his eyes.
“You’re here, Uncle Noh.”
Uncle Noh, with his kindly face, broke into a broad smile as he greeted me.
“Derek told me about it, but the store is even more impressive than I expected.”
“Thank you for saying so. Please, come inside.”
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I? You look busy.”
“Not at all.”
We sat across from each other in the office at the back of the store, a sofa table between us. Counting Grandfather’s birthday last January, this was our third meeting.
“Surprised I dropped by unannounced?”
“Surprised? You’re family. There’s nowhere you shouldn’t come.”
“You do have a way with words.”
Noh leaned back against the sofa and swept his gaze around the office.
“Derek mentioned it. He said it isn’t the employees running the place—it’s you and your mother.”
“Yes. We took on some investment.”
As if a mere employee could sit around in an office like this, chatting at leisure on a sofa.
Noh looked at me with fresh pride.
“The more I see of you, the more impressive you become. Your mother says the product patents and designs are all yours.”
“I got lucky.”
“That doesn’t sound like luck to me.”
A bitter edge crept into Uncle Noh’s voice.
Something was wrong.
“If there’s something you need to say, please speak freely. When Uncle Derek visits, he talks for two hours straight before he leaves.”
“He does run his mouth, doesn’t he.”
Noh laughed, then his expression turned serious. He spoke with difficulty.
“Derek also mentioned that you’re working with Isaac Rosenthal, and that you know people in the LES gangs.”
“Is there a problem with the trucking company?”
“You’re sharp, Kieran.”
Uncle Noh gave a hollow laugh.
Isaac Rosenthal was a fence who moved goods through the black market. The moment Noh mentioned his name along with the LES gangs, I naturally connected the trucking company to crime.
“I won’t dance around it. The trucking company I work for has done illegal jobs from time to time. Delivering smuggled goods, that sort of thing.”
Eastern Trucking Co.
Just as the name suggested, it covered the eastern region.
“Well, that’s the talk of it, but most of the hauls are short-distance.”
Why use a truck bouncing over unpaved roads when you had trains and ships?
Of course, there were reasons some people preferred it.
“On ordinary days we haul legitimate company freight. But the real money was delivering goods smuggled in through New York Harbor.”
The company president was Franklin Smith.
A former coworker from Noh’s previous job.
He had the drive and the eye for business, and he had recognized the shift in logistics away from ships and trains.
Trucks had started coming out of Daimler in Germany in 1896, and manufacturers had multiplied, but the early market response had been cold.
Poor roads, low fuel efficiency, constant breakdowns, and slow speeds kept them from drawing much attention.
Then, in just the last few years, everything changed.
The war in Europe, the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, and America’s entry into the war transformed distribution.
War materiel overloaded the rail system, and trucks rose as the alternative.
“Franklin saw it coming and proposed we start a trucking business. So I put in a little of the money I’d saved.”
Even a medium truck—one or two tons—cost well over a thousand dollars.
Franklin and Uncle Noh took out a bank loan, bought five trucks, and launched the business.
Business always carried risk, and the greatest danger in trucking was robbery.
It actually happened.
They were hit during a run and cleaned out completely.
Naturally there was no insurance. With high accident rates and high crime risk, no such product even existed.
“We had no choice but to compensate for the stolen goods ourselves…”
The same thing happened again a few days later.
The losses climbed past anything the bank loan could cover.
The problem was that the client who had entrusted the goods was not an ordinary company. It was a gang.
“Have you spoken with Uncle Ted about this?”
An NYPD officer in Harlem.
Uncle Ted was corrupt enough to protect a hitman like Anthony; he ought to have had options.
Noh shook his head.
“If Ted steps in, we both become targets. The police get involved and they’ll start looking at me.”
“It sounds more complicated than that.”
Noh clenched his teeth and nodded.
“I only found out a few days ago. I think Franklin cooked this up with the gang.”
Trains ran on fixed rails, but trucks had freedom of route. There were multiple ways to reach a destination, and the time required varied.
“But the robbers knew exactly which road to wait on. And more than that—”
Every shipment that got hit was contraband the gang had entrusted to them. It was impossible without an insider.
“I wondered if it might be one of the other employees. But looking at how things are playing out, Franklin is deep in it for sure. Only he and I knew the routes.”
“So the president colluded with the robbers and deliberately had the goods stolen?”
“Nothing else makes sense.”
“Then the gang that entrusted the goods was in on it too. The robbers would be that same gang.”
Unless they were insane, deliberately robbing their own smuggled goods made no sense at all.
I understood the big picture Franklin and the gang had drawn in an instant.
From the look of admiration on Uncle Noh’s face, he had reached the same conclusion.
Shall I take it further?
“The gang would have posed as a legitimate company. The stolen items would have been papered as high-value ordinary goods.”
And to cover the compensation, Franklin would have disposed of the trucks.
“By now he would have been preparing to file for bankruptcy. Am I right?”
Uncle Noh’s mouth fell open as he nodded.
“That’s—exactly right. My nephew’s a genius. How do you know all this so well?”
Crime is an old friend of mine. The methods are obvious enough.
The whole plan had clearly been drawn up from the moment the company was founded.
What real capital did Franklin and Uncle Noh, a pair of former coworkers, have?
Most of the money would have come from the bank loan, not their own investment.
“In the end, they quietly hand the trucks over to the gang, file for bankruptcy, and swallow the bank loan whole.”
“……You’re right. Damn it. Franklin had already moved all his assets out.”
“So you’ll be left holding part of the bank debt.”
Regardless of the initial investment, a partner was as good as a guarantor.
A head of household suddenly caught in a scheme that had wrecked his family bowed his head, and tears fell.
But he quickly wiped his eyes, looked up at the ceiling, and when he faced me again he forced a smile.
“So, Kieran. Could you ask that gang you know for a favor?”
“Of course.”
Setting family aside, the case itself had caught my interest.
I happened to need a logistics company just then.
“What do you want?”
The partner who stabbed you in the back eliminated?
Or shall I smash the gang for you?
— For now, pretend you know nothing so the president doesn’t catch on. The gang will handle the rest.
Noh walked down Allen Street with a cigarette between his lips. In the warm spring sunlight, his own shadow looked more somber than usual.
With every step, the reasons his relationship with his younger sister had been so strained flashed through his mind like a lantern show.
He had never felt as ashamed as he did today of the man who had raged and opposed his sister when she said she would marry an Oriental.
Coldly speaking, Kieran seemed sharper than his own son and daughter. His thoughts, his speech, every single action were clean and decisive beyond his years.
“You raised him well on your own.”
The words were for his sister Nora.
The guilt and regret of a brother who had failed to help her had become shame, and it pressed down on Noh’s heart.
Then young men cutting through the middle of the street caught his eye.
Shoulders squared, eyes carrying the look of men who meant to overturn the world. Confidence, passion, spirit—and recklessness.
“I used to be like that.”
There had been a time when he and his brothers Larry and Ted had run the LES. A time when beating people and taking what they wanted was daily life.
But the gang he had belonged to then left not even a trace now.
The members who had run with him were dead, in prison, or else scraping by somewhere on the border of legal and illegal.
The gangsters brushing past Noh—the young blood of the LES—would not have a very different future.
Suddenly he wondered which unit the gang Kieran had spoken of belonged to.
He had heard that the Five Points, which had ruled the LES for more than a decade, had fallen, and that a rising new gang was surging up fast.
“That unit, maybe.”
The Flea Market, second floor of the Rotten Building at the Grand–Eldridge Street intersection.
When I went up to the office, the atmosphere was unnaturally heavy. The members who saw me hurriedly buried their faces in their desks.
These bastards won’t even acknowledge me?
At least the new recruits still held their heads up. Their eyes, which should have been full of passion, spirit, and enterprising challenge, looked somehow cloudy and dull.
And what the hell happened to that one’s face? You don’t get a face like that without being stung by a bee.
This atmosphere was a complete mess.
Click.
When I entered the vice president’s office, Brian shot to his feet in surprise.
“Y-you already heard?”
“Heard what?”
Brian’s eyes were rolling more than usual today.
I stared him down until he finally confessed.
It was nothing major, really.
“If you didn’t know, you could have just walked in. You didn’t thrash them over it for no reason, did you? The new guys will start getting suspicious.”
There was to be no connection whatsoever between the Flea Market and the gang—especially the Union.
“I was going to start advertising the masks soon anyway. We’ll run it all year, so keep ad space open for Mother’s company.”
“Okay!”
“And this.”
I took a paper from my pocket and handed it over. It had the location of Uncle Noh’s trucking company written on it.
“Go there and land the ad contract.”
“That’s East Village, not LES.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
The trucking company sat near the East River in East Village, which bordered LES to the north.
It was outside the Flea Market’s sales territory, but when had we ever worked by those rules?
I gave Brian a rough outline of the situation.
“Wow, he stabbed the Boss’s family in the back? This son of a bitch doesn’t get to die clean.”
“Go find out which gang is involved and what President Franklin is up to. Gather every scrap of information you can.”
“Then we’ll need a lot of guys. New recruits left out, of course.”
When I opened the bag, Brian swept the cash from the safe into it.
I left with the heavy bag and glanced at the new recruit whose face was swollen like a balloon.
So it was that bastard.
It hadn’t been a bee sting.
When our eyes met, he glared as if to ask what I was looking at. I let my gaze slide past him and walked out of the Flea Market office.
“Senior, who the hell was that guy just now, walking in and out of here with a scarf over his face?”
The new recruit Ruben asked, his speech slurred around a candy in his mouth.
“Shit, what now?”
“No, the way he looked at me was seriously pissing me off. I oughta make his face look like mine.”
The senior stared at Ruben for a long moment before speaking.
“I’m serious. Maybe you should look for another job.”
“……Why?”
“Because at this rate you’re going to get yourself killed.”
When Ruben tilted his head, the senior let out a sigh.
“I’ll lay it out clean. If you still don’t get it after this, you’re really dead. The president of Free Your Body is close with the vice president. And the man who just left is that lady president’s son.”
“Ah…… so he and the vice president are having an affa—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, this crazy bastard!”
The senior was still cuffing him across the head when Vice President Brian slammed the door open and shouted,
“Everyone except the new recruits—gather up!”
The next day, ten Flea Market reporters descended on Eastern Trucking Company.