A Guy I Know
I stepped into the pharmacy wondering if there was anything worth buying for my siblings.
The air hit me at once—a sharp reek of medicines, menthol cut with lavender oil, and the faint ghost of alcohol drifting from somewhere deeper in the store.
Tall display cabinets lined the walls, packed with bottles and tins. Behind a counter that looked more like a saloon bar than a pharmacy counter, a man in a white coat sat hunched over, head buried in his hands as if he were wrestling with some private agony.
"Excuse me?"
The pharmacist jerked upright, then did a double take the moment he saw my face.
"Oh—the fellow from the second floor…"
"Kieran Graves. So this is your pharmacy?"
It wasn't pure chance that I'd wandered in. When I signed the lease on the townhouse, the realtor had already mentioned the place.
"Looking for something?"
"Potassium nitrate and sulfuric acid."
I'd been mulling over what to buy when the ingredients for a homemade bomb floated up in my mind. Any pharmacist worth his salt would know those two chemicals were key components of gunpowder—but they had other uses as well.
"For tanning leather," I added.
"Right. Your mother runs a garment factory, doesn't she?"
He pulled brown bottles from the cabinet and set them on the counter. While Walcott wrapped them in paper and slipped them into a bag, I asked,
"You run other pharmacies as well?"
"I've closed the rest. This is the only one left."
"Business isn't easy, I take it."
A bitter smile crossed Walcott's face. Protection money wasn't the only problem weighing on him—I could sense it—but prying further felt wrong, and he didn't look ready to answer anyway.
"When do you close?"
"Soon. You?"
"Heading home myself after work."
"You work at your mother's company?"
"In a manner of speaking. I deal in undergarments."
As I paid, a customer walked in.
"I'll wait. We can leave together."
I ignored Walcott's uneasy look and wandered the shop.
I had my reasons for taking an interest in a pharmacist.
During Prohibition there were still places that could handle alcohol legally—medicinal, sacramental, industrial. A doctor's prescription let you buy medicinal whiskey at a pharmacy. That single loophole had caused pharmacist licenses to explode overnight.
Whiskey was prescribed for everything: fever, pain, disinfection, coughs, nerves, circulation. The whole era treated it like a miracle cure.
If I meant to walk the line between legal and illegal, it paid to hold both ends. I already had plans to build a clean chain: medicinal-whiskey distilleries, hospitals, and pharmacies.
Closing time brought a steady stream of customers. For those seeking cold medicine, Walcott handed out quinine—normally a malaria drug—or aspirin.
"Drink plenty of fluids, don't overdo it. Keep the room aired out and mind your hygiene."
Standard advice. The trouble was that personal hygiene in this era boiled down to soap and water. Hand sanitizer would have been a godsend—if it existed.
Hand sanitizer.
I'd been meaning to make some for a while. The concept of a personal disinfectant simply didn't exist yet, outside of hospital solutions.
The ingredients were no problem. Even a weaker version needed only glycerin, distilled water, and ethanol.
But what kept circling in my mind wasn't the finished product—it was the raw material: rubbing alcohol.
Yes, denatured alcohol laced with toxins was different from drinking alcohol. The critical point was that both started from the same grain—corn, wheat, whatever. Get a legal permit for a hand-sanitizer plant, then quietly divert the base alcohol into whiskey. Perfectly feasible.
I was scratching notes into my pocketbook when Walcott's voice cut in.
"Sorry to keep you waiting."
He had already shed his coat and was settling his hat.
"I lost track of time looking around the shop."
"You must like medicine."
"Not medicine. Pharmacies."
The shutter rattled down. Only after he locked it did we start walking.
"Why pharmacies?"
"They make good money."
"Not always. Where's your underwear shop, by the way?"
"Allen Street."
"Rough stretch. You managing?"
"Aside from the protection money, more or less."
I tossed the subject out casually—shared pain between shopkeepers. Walcott's sigh came first.
"Our place pays five dollars. A pharmacy would be around seven, right?"
"…I pay more than that."
I'd tried to keep things fair. I'd set reasonable rates by trade and size so the units couldn't just shake people down at random. And these idiots were gouging him?
What bothered me more was Walcott's face—resigned, as if he already knew he was being fleeced and had simply given up.
"Strange. Why only your pharmacy?"
"There are… reasons."
Something he couldn't tell a neighbor. Pressing a gloomy man further felt wrong. Maybe I could just lean on the unit and find out that way.
We reached the townhouse. Another idea struck me—the one clean contact channel the Union maintained with the street, available only at certain newsstands.
I pulled an envelope from my bag and held it out.
"If you ever run into real trouble, use this order form."
"Order form?"
Order No. 13
Hester and Forsyth Street intersection.
Fill out the form and find the newsstand papered with Flea Market newspapers next to the bakery.
"And some fixer will take the job?"
"That's what I heard."
Walcott barely listened. He stuffed the envelope into his pocket, waved toward the townhouse, and kept walking.
Two little girls stood at the entrance—Walcott's daughter Elia and my sister Roa.
"Daddy!"
The gloom vanished from Walcott's face as he scooped his daughter up. At the same moment—
"Big brother!"
Roa charged as if she meant to throw herself into my arms, then stopped dead. She stared at the small paper bag of potassium nitrate and sulfuric acid in my hand.
"Why's the meat bag so tiny?"
"Meat? These are chemicals…"
"Big brother, did you forget what day it is? It's Friday—meat day. Roa's tummy has gone all hollow waiting. Want to see?"
Since when was Friday meat day? I caught her hand before she could lift her shirt and steered her up the stairs.
Walcott and I traded a quick nod. The front door opened and Liam came trotting out.
"Hyung, why's the bag so small?"
"Not you too."
"Wait—are we broke from the move? Should I start shining shoes?"
"…"
Moving hadn't changed the children's schools, though Liam's night school was now a long trek. We were looking for something closer.
Over dinner the talk turned to school. I asked Liam,
"Luka Romano—how’s his arm?"
"Fine."
"You two still good?"
"Same as always. He didn't show up today, though."
"Why?"
"Dunno. Stuff happens."
In the Lower East Side a kid could vanish from school overnight and no one batted an eye. Nothing new under the sun.
At Antimo, the first-floor shop in the twin buildings, I was arranging underwear brought over from Mother's factory when Ida tossed a remark my way.
"They're just taking up space. Nothing's moving."
"What isn't?"
"Those."
She pointed at the mountain of lucky boxes and face masks piled in the middle of the floor. My chest ached a little.
"The lucky boxes I can live with, but the masks will fly off the shelves soon enough."
"Maybe I should just stick wings on them myself."
"Give it a few months and you'll eat those words."
Ida answered in a deflated monotone. That was when Cale, who handled the units, came looking for me.
Upstairs in the office he reported on the previous night. On my orders he had leaned hard on the Essex Street crew that collected protection.
What they dug up about Walcott's pharmacy was interesting.
"The pharmacist's in deep. He was dealing opium, cocaine, and morphine under the table. The boys got wind of it and jacked his rate."
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 had tightened the screws; you couldn't sell those drugs without proper prescriptions. And Walcott had been selling them illegally?
"Anything else?"
"He tried expanding—some kind of chain. Rival pharmacies hired gangs to wreck his places."
Chain pharmacies cut costs through bulk buying and sometimes dumped prices to build the brand. Aggressive tactics like that made enemies of every independent drugstore in the neighborhood. I could picture the rest: independent owners hiring muscle, the muscle hitting Walcott's stores one by one.
"Any debts?"
"Couldn't dig that far. Anyway, I told them if they don't drop his rate they'd better be ready."
The units' biggest problem was loyalty—or the lack of it. Most of the kids were young, restless, impulsive. If I wanted the sharp ones to join the Union for real, they needed incentive. That was one reason I'd drawn up a hierarchy in the first place.
We currently ran twelve units under the Union banner.
"Let's give the leaders the rank of Linker and pay them two dollars a week."
"Linker? What's that?"
"Someone qualified to join the Union proper."
I still hadn't published the full org chart. The titles were new; better to roll them out in front of everyone at once and kill the rumors before they started.
Cale and I were still talking when someone knocked.
"Come in."
Joseph Lanza stepped through the door. I had sent him to the Fulton Fish Market; he came back looking like a pufferfish—face and eyes swollen purple, bruises blooming dark.
"What the hell happened to you?"
"Sorry, Boss. I need help."
Trouble had landed on the Romano Brothers' fish stall where Lanza worked.
"It didn't blow up overnight. There are three Italian factions in the market. Two of them teamed up and crushed the third."
The factions were unofficial unions formed for self-protection inside the market. Bad luck for the Romanos—they belonged to the crushed side. It had happened roughly two months earlier.
"After that the protection rates went sky-high. They tried to start a new faction of their own, and things only got worse."
I remembered the thugs who had torn through the stall the day I visited. Lanza kept talking.
"Working there taught me something: those market unions are just gangs with a fancy name. You bid only at the stalls they pick, you buy ice only from them. Refuse and the payback is instant."
The real reason the unions were squeezing the Romano Brothers ran deeper.
"They want them out of the market entirely. Plenty of people are eyeing that spot."
The Fulton Fish Market Lanza described was a miniature of the Lower East Side—pure power politics. Weak outfits like the Romanos got eaten alive.
"Lanza, if we step in, can we pull the Romano brothers into our orbit?"
"Right now they'd sell their souls to the devil. The youngest got stabbed."
"Luka Romano?"
"Yes. He's in the hospital."
So that was why he hadn't shown up at school.
I confirmed a few more details with Lanza, then turned to Cale.
"Looks like we'll need the units for this. Let's test the Linkers—stir up a little competition among them."
Separately I told Lanza to gather everything he could on the opposing side.
The very next day he returned with a dossier, as if he'd prepared it in advance. It listed the key Italian-union shops and the men who ran them.
"Just float the idea to the Romanos. Tell them you asked for help."
"Understood, Boss!"
After Lanza left I sat with the papers. This wasn't my work—it was Lanza's kill list. Trust aside, I wanted a second look.
I handed the file to Leo and Marcus.
"Cross-check everything. While the units run wild, put eyes on every name on that list."
Fulton Fish Market.
"Whoa—what's the occasion?"
"No kidding. Place is packed."
The market swarmed with people. Oddly, the crowds clustered only around certain Italian stalls, and every newcomer was a young man with fire in his eyes.
Union units, all of them.
"Stay sharp from here on. We do not get shown up by those Orchard Street punks. I climb, you climb. Got it?"
"Okay!"
Benedicto, boss of the Essex Street unit, was burning with ambition. A few nights earlier Cale had torn him a new one over Walcott's pharmacy, but that was fine. He had the Linker rank now. He still wasn't sure what it meant, only that it was a ticket upward.
"Smash everything!"
Customers turned into gangsters in a heartbeat. On Benedicto's signal dozens poured into the stalls.
It was also a contest between units—who could wreck a place harder and vanish cleaner. Orchard, Essex, Allen, Hester—each street crew hit only the shops belonging to key union figures.
"Who the hell are these bastards?!"
"Where'd these maniacs come from?!"
Staff scrambled for knives and clubs. Brawls erupted everywhere; the market dissolved into chaos.
Watching the sudden storm of violence, Vito Romano turned to Lanza and asked,
"Just who did you ask for help?"
"…A guy I know."
Lanza scratched his head and answered.