What a Coincidence
Who had been impersonating the Union?
The Unit could be regarded as their own independent gang of sorts. Planning crimes and carrying them out was their business. It was entirely possible they had been hired by the pharmacies and had actually gone on a rampage.
But we had never told the Units that we were the Union.
And yet they had gone around advertising themselves as Union?
Two possibilities presented themselves.
Either our members had run their mouths to the Units, or those bastards had simply been bluffing.
I decided that the moment I got back I would look into exactly which crews the pharmacies had hired.
Walcott’s story continued.
“Once the pharmacies kept running in the red, Roselli made a quiet proposal. He said he’d supply illegal drugs and we should try selling them.”
“You weren’t selling any before that?”
“……A very little. Anyway.”
Walcott stole a glance at my face and pressed on.
“I was desperate for money, so I had no choice. I started selling the illegal stuff Roselli was supplying. The first month or two it actually made decent money. Then that son of a bitch Roselli suddenly stabbed me in the back.”
He had demanded seventy percent of the profits from the illegal sales.
“Naturally I refused. That was when the blackmail and threats started. You know why Archie ‘Black Hand’ Roselli is called Black Hand?”
Roselli used a black-ink palm print as the signature on his extortion letters.
It was a direct imitation of the methods used by the Italian gangs of the Black Hand.
“At first I thought it was just about the money. But what he really wanted was the pharmacies themselves. He meant to sell the illegal drugs directly out of the stores I’d worked so hard to build.”
Two of them had already been taken by Roselli. All that remained was the single pharmacy on Essex Street.
“And even that one looks like it’ll be gone soon. Between the bank loans and Roselli’s threats, I can’t hold out any longer. Lately he’s even started showing up at my house…… I can’t……”
At the end of the sentence George Walcott’s tears fell.
I held out a handkerchief; he thanked me and blew his nose.
Putting it all together, Archie Roselli was a meticulous operator. It was even possible that the rival pharmacies had never hired any gang at all—that Roselli himself had staged the whole thing. Looking at how thoroughly he had entangled Walcott, it was almost certain.
Either way, Walcott’s commission was clear: the death of the man who was seizing pharmacies and threatening families—Roselli.
“I’ll take the job.”
“You mean it?”
“On one condition. Instead of a fee, I’d like you to work with me.”
Walcott flinched and stared at me, tense.
“W-what kind of work?”
“A pharmacy chain.”
Walcott’s eyes blinked rapidly.
A café on Norfolk Street.
At a window table a man dressed like Sherlock Holmes was sipping coffee while reading a Sherlock Holmes novel. When a shadow fell across the page, Raymond looked up.
“You’re here.”
“Still the same, Raymond.”
The man took a seat and asked,
“I hear you’re starting a new business.”
“Yeah, I already have. How about you these days?”
“I’m dying. So what’s this about?”
Raymond slid across a slip of paper with an address and a name.
“This new work of yours is private detective work?”
“It’s what I was already doing. What else am I supposed to do? Anyway—you were still investigating LES loan sharks until recently, right?”
“That’s right. But why Archie Roselli? He’s a well-known loan shark.”
“So you do know him.”
Raymond gave the man a deep smile.
The man was Edwin Bryce.
A detective with the Manhattan branch of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
His main work involved corporate espionage in Manhattan, union busting, and more recently assisting the Bureau of Investigation in hunting spies.
Until the unpleasant incident that got him thrown out of Pinkerton, Raymond had been Edwin’s fellow detective.
“Archie Roselli is a famous loan shark in that world.”
“Famous for what?”
“Once he gets his hooks into you, he sucks you dry—sweet juice and salt water both. An utterly vicious bastard.”
“Any connection to the German side?”
Edwin shook his head.
Some Pinkerton detectives were currently tracking funds that had flowed in from the German Empire on behalf of the Bureau of Investigation.
A few places had already been hit with that suspicion and a string of people arrested.
Among them had been the editor and reporters of an Iranian socialist magazine; their former office was now occupied by the neighborhood paper that ran the Flea Market.
“Anyway, that’s all I know.”
“Okay. That’s enough.”
“But have you completely washed your hands of the union side? That work paid well.”
At Edwin’s words Raymond’s expression turned bitter.
Anyone who knew anything knew that for decades Pinkerton had been hired by corporations to crush unions.
And in the process more than a few illegal things had happened. Pinkerton detectives, acting on purely personal initiative rather than for the organization, had kidnapped or assassinated union leaders, or gone into business with gangs.
Raymond himself had been one of those corrupt detectives. He had served as a messenger between companies and unions, and at times maintained close ties with the labor sluggers who ran the strikes.
Then last year everything had started to unravel.
“I can understand Johnny Spanish getting killed. That bastard had plenty of enemies.”
The real problem was Nathan Kaplan.
Also known as Kid Dropper.
“Why the hell would a Jewish bastard suddenly become a bomb-throwing terrorist for the German Empire? I still don’t get it.”
“That one really was a mystery.”
Because Kid Dropper had been branded a spy, the Bureau of Investigation had torn through Pinkerton as well.
In the process Raymond’s cozy relationship with the labor sluggers had come to light.
“Come to think of it, people who get mixed up with you tend to die in droves.”
“So you’d better be careful too.”
Edwin tossed the question at the chuckling Raymond.
“So who wanted the information on Roselli?”
“Client confidentiality. Anyway, there’s an interesting kid involved.”
“A kid?”
Raymond’s mouth curved upward into an odd smile.
The client was an employee at the lingerie shop on the first floor of the Pumpkin Dance Hall—Kieran Graves.
One of the witnesses to Johnny Spanish’s murder.
Friend of the suspect who had killed Kid Dropper in a moment of chance and then walked free on self-defense.
What a coincidence this was.
It was two days after the incident before the newspapers finally began running articles on Cardone.
According to the articles, the NYPD was treating the word written in blood beside the body as a key piece of evidence and was questioning every blond employee in the market.
“Good thing I disguised myself.”
The apron had helped, and so had Ida’s advice.
I decided I should ask her for that kind of counsel more often.
The door rattled open.
Leo and the members came into the office carrying a large load—the chalkboard I had ordered a few days earlier.
“Boss, where do you want this?”
“Behind the conference table.”
Whiteboards and markers were still a long way off, and I had no idea how to make them anyway.
A chalkboard would have to do.
It was big enough to cover half a wall.
We drove nails into the wall and hung it. I set a cloth eraser and chalk on the wooden ledge, stepped back, and liked it even better.
“Nice and open.”
“But do we really need this? Having that black thing stuck on the wall just makes the place look gloomy.”
“I already told you paper is too small for my thoughts. Honestly even this is small.”
“Yeah, yeah. Your head must be packed with every kind of nonsense under the sun. I’ll give you that.”
Once the members finished the installation and left, I picked up the chalk and wrote on the board for the first time.
“Looking at it like this, it’s impressive.”
Leo stuck out his tongue at the board.
Businesses I had either taken over or founded in less than a year. The number looked large, but to my eyes they still seemed modest.
“We’ve still got a long way to go.”
I was in the middle of writing down the additional ventures we needed when Ida came upstairs. She looked at the board and whistled.
“Looks like a school.”
“Suddenly feel like studying?”
“Not really. Oh—guests are here.”
I considered erasing the board, then decided to leave it. A moment later a group of people filed into the office.
“How’s my nephew been?”
“Welcome.”
Uncle Nora, Uncle Derek, the fence Rosenthal. For once the core figures of Silver Chain Logistics had come to see me. And Uncle Ted, who ought to have been on patrol in Harlem.
“It’s my day off, so I figured I’d drop by. That all right?”
“Of course.”
Before they even sat down, every eye went to the chalkboard. Ted scanned the businesses one by one, then blinked and asked,
“Those…… are all under your management? Wait—what’s this Tenderloin gambling den?”
“I acquired it recently.”
“That’s a fair distance. Can you actually run it?”
Roughly five kilometers from here. Not as far as it sounded, but if something that needed an instant response ever happened, it would be a hard distance to cover.
“I was going to ask you about that, Uncle Ted. Do you know any cops over there?”
“Sure. It’ll cost money, though.”
“Then I’ll leave it to you.”
Even after they sat, no one could tear their eyes from the board. Only when I brought up the subject of SCL did the meeting properly begin.
“We’re buying whiskey steadily and storing it in the warehouse, but I think we need to disperse the warehouses.”
That was Rosenthal. At present the warehouses were concentrated on the eastern side of the LES along the East River.
For the future we needed storage in other districts as well.
Suddenly I remembered the Neapolitan gang’s warehouse I had taken out with a sniper shot some time ago. The Newtown Creek area in Brooklyn, crowded with factories and thick with industrial waste, looked suitable.
“Look into warehouses along Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.”
“Accessibility there wouldn’t be bad.”
Next was Uncle Nora’s turn.
SCL’s own logistics alone were not enough to keep the trucking service afloat, so they had been expanding retail delivery contracts from liquor wholesalers.
The problem was the hijackers who hit the trucks.
That was why they had come to see me.
“Two days ago another trucking company got cleaned out by hijackers over on East 13th Street.”
It was an era of frequent truck hijackings. That was why any vehicle carrying expensive cargo usually had an armed guard riding beside the driver—what they called riding shotgun.
The term came from the Western frontier days, when a guard sat next to the stagecoach driver with a shotgun to protect the coach.
Portable revolvers and pistols required permits, but shotguns were comparatively lightly regulated.
Politicians argued about it constantly, but for now the law was still more concerned with concealed weapons than open ones. Almost no one got arrested simply for carrying a shotgun.
SCL currently ran ten trucks.
We agreed to put an armed escort on every one of them. Plenty of members were sitting around idle; it was time to put them to work one by one.
As the meeting was winding down, Ida came back upstairs.
“A guest. Says he’s a detective?”
Apparently Raymond Kane had come looking for me.
Since the meeting was finished anyway, Uncle Ted stood and asked,
“Why a detective?”
“I need someone looked into. Do you know a Raymond Kane?”
“Hmm. Rings a faint bell, but I’m not sure. Private detective agency?”
“He just opened.”
“Then he might be out of one of the private firms.”
Besides Pinkerton, which had its headquarters in Chicago, there were Burns, Baldwin-Felts, William J. Flynn, and any number of other private detective agencies operating vigorously across the United States.
I slipped out the back door to see the others off. As we passed through the alley I glanced at the window; Raymond was already scanning the shop.
Uncle Ted tapped my arm.
He had been looking in the same direction.
“Ah, the Sherlock Holmes getup gives it away. That’s the detective you mentioned?”
“That’s him.”
“He’s a Pinkerton detective out of the Manhattan office.”
Ted said he had run into him once while investigating the same case up in Harlem.
“I don’t know the details, but he probably got fired for backroom deals with labor sluggers.”
“Labor sluggers……?”
“You might know the names. Johnny Spanish, Kid Dropper. That sort.”
Uncle Ted of course had no idea of my connection to either of them.
Anyway—what a coincidence this was.
“I’ll be going then. Call if you need anything.”
Starting with Uncle Ted, the others spoke to me in turn.
“Kieran, always take care of yourself. You know you’re the hope of this family.”
“And don’t work yourself to death.”
When the goodbyes were finished I stepped into the shop.
Raymond smiled at me.
“You got here faster than I expected.”
“This much is nothing.”
“Let’s go inside.”
All the way into the back-office Raymond’s eyes never stopped moving, cataloguing everything around him.