Still Meaningful After All
I eliminated the boss and swept the money into a bag.
The cash was one thing, but what truly got my blood pumping was the Colt M1911 tucked inside the boss’s satchel. John Browning’s legendary semi-automatic pistol—the very design that completed modern firearms technology—now rested in my hands.
Two guns in a single day.
I suppose guns really were my lifelong companions.
I could already picture the road ahead: collecting companion pieces, modifying them, and occasionally putting them to violent use.
I packed the pistols and ammunition into the bag as well.
The real problem was the ledger and the stack of mail sitting on the dining table. How to deal with them?
I was framing the loan sharks as the culprits, yet evidence of collusion with them was sitting right there in plain sight? That would never do.
If I wanted to pin this on the swindler, the evidence had to disappear.
Besides, unlike the gang corpses found in the alley, this case would draw a completely different level of attention. The victim was a capitalist, after all. Lawyers, real-estate men, and gangs were tangled up in this crooked bastard’s death—maybe even a bank that had helped him file for bankruptcy.
More than anything, I didn’t trust the police. Far too many of them in this era were neck-deep in corruption. Leave the evidence with them and it might simply vanish.
Right now those papers didn’t seem useful as evidence. Better to put them to work myself.
After a brief moment of thought I stuffed the ledger and the mail into the money bag, then stripped the gold ring, necklace, and wristwatch from the boss’s body.
I deliberately unlocked the front door with the key as well. When Mother and her coworkers arrived in the morning, they would find the corpse easily enough.
Before slipping out I checked the street through a window. When the darkness felt deepest, I followed the route I had scouted earlier and left the townhouse behind.
On the way home I moved carefully, determined not to get tangled up with any gangs.
Then—
Bang! Bang!
A few gunshots cracked from somewhere in the streets of Lower Manhattan.
I had heard them from home often enough that it wasn’t startling. What made tonight different was the simple fact that I myself had just stepped into the hunt that played out in this urban jungle.
Creak, clack.
Damn it. Maybe I ought to oil the hinges.
I eased the front door open and shut it again with care.
Mother was slumped over the table, lamp still burning—had she waited up for me all night?
I hung her scarf back on the doorknob, stripped off my blood-stained clothes, and stuffed them into the bag I had brought. Father’s heirloom revolver went into the cupboard, carefully hidden.
The bag was the real problem. Where to stash it?
I glanced around and spotted a wooden crate in the kitchen corner, the one that somehow always stayed full of potatoes no matter how many we ate. Quietly I lifted them out and laid the bag underneath.
I finished tidying and was about to slip past the table when Mother raised her head.
“Kieran, just getting in?”
“...Nah, I came back a while ago.”
She flicked a glance at the wall clock. One in the morning.
Whatever thought struck her, she suddenly stood and held out her hand.
“You—where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“You know what!”
Afraid of waking the younger ones, she growled the words low. I calmly took the revolver I had just hidden from the cupboard.
Mother snatched it as if reclaiming stolen property and flipped open the cylinder to check the loads. A long breath of relief left her.
“Do you have any idea how hard my heart was pounding, wondering if you’d gone and done something dangerous?”
I used a knife, Mother.
My lips moved, then I simply shut them. She would learn tomorrow. Not tonight.
I yawned as if sleepy. Pity softened her face.
“We’ll talk in the morning. Go to bed.”
“Yes. Good night.”
Mother went to her room; I headed for the bed.
From the top bunk I felt Liam’s gaze.
“Don’t tell me I woke you.”
He turned over without a word.
Brat.
I dreamed a long dream—falling into the Prohibition era, living in a sewer of a place, shooting and knifing people, finally dying with a bomb in my arms…
Even my dreams were garbage.
When I opened my eyes it was barely dawn. A thin shaft of light through the little window painted the cramped living room red and caught Mother’s back as she sat at the table.
The rage and bitterness that had driven her to grab a gun the night before had settled. She sat quietly now, shoulders slumped, as if the strength had gone out of her.
She wasn’t bustling about the kitchen the way she usually did. Just… sitting.
There are times when you feel that if you stop moving you’re nothing but a broken clock, that if you aren’t doing something your very existence is useless. I wondered if that was how Mother felt.
Unpaid wages. Sudden unemployment. On top of that she had been caught holding a gun, and her eldest son had announced he was going to “change things” and take even more from the world. Her heart must have been a tangled mess.
When I heard her long sigh I sat up. At almost the same moment the upper bunk creaked.
Half-risen Liam met my eyes.
“Go back to sleep.”
“Who’s fault is it I woke up at dawn?”
“That’s why you should sleep more. Your body still needs to heal.”
“I’m fine now.”
“Want me to check?”
I reached for his arm; he recoiled in disgust.
“W-what are you doing? Like you’d know anything.”
“I do. Looks okay, actually.”
Uncle Larry’s splint had already been removed. Watching Liam move the arm, I saw no sign the bone was still damaged.
“So you’re planning to start work today?”
“Yeah. I have to—”
“Just rest, Liam.”
Mother, who had risen early without our noticing, looked at her two sons with a gentle smile.
“We have a little breathing room today, so I should make a proper breakfast. It’s all right if it’s a bit late?”
“I don’t mind. Time’s the one thing I’ve got plenty of.”
I was as much of a jobless bum as she was. No reason to object.
Liam, on the other hand, stayed silent, face dark. Did he know how bad things were for her?
“Since it’s a special day, breakfast should be special too!”
Mother stood as if turning over a new leaf and rolled up her sleeves.
It would still be potatoes, of course. Boiled potatoes, potato soup, mashed potatoes. Potatoes, potatoes…
There was even a joke that went around:
An Irish seven-course meal: a potato and a six-pack.
You could accept that the food of poor Irish immigrants was monotonous, but the Italian and Jewish families next door certainly didn’t live like that.
Speaking of potatoes…
The money bag I had hidden under the endlessly multiplying potatoes flashed through my mind.
I quickly started lifting them out of the crate.
“I’ll peel these.”
Not long after breakfast Mother threw on some clothes and was called to a meeting.
“Mom’s got something to take care of. I’ll be back.”
The workers who had lost both their wages and their jobs were finally going to the boss’s house, it seemed.
They would find out soon enough.
The moment she left I started pulling on my own clothes.
Roa came trotting over.
“Big brother going out too?”
“Yeah. Exercise.”
“Then what was that just now with Roa!?”
“Warm-up.”
Leaving Liam and Roa at home, I stepped into the street for a run.
They say a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.
As if drawn by a magnet, I found myself examining the alley where the earlier killings had taken place.
According to criminal profilers, when a perpetrator leaves the scene in a hurry he often comes back to check whether he dropped any clues. In my case it was simple curiosity.
“Waking up to find people dropping dead one after another… how’s anyone supposed to live around here?”
“Just gangs killing each other. Whether they fry or boil, it’s none of our business.”
The police had already come and gone; no bodies remained. Only a cleaner washing the blood from the stones and a few passersby were left.
Nothing special. Once the cleaner vanished, the alley bore no trace of the night’s events.
People freely assumed it had been a gang shoot-out. As long as you weren’t the one caught in it, it remained a private war in someone else’s world. The term “underworld” hadn’t been coined for nothing.
While talk of gangs still floated around, a knot of men appeared and began nosing about the scene. Sensing something off, the bystanders cut their conversations short and hurried on—a wise choice.
More of them kept arriving: gangsters by the look of them, yet clearly from different outfits. And every mouth spoke the same name.
“Fucking Marginals.”
So the ones who had been hunting last night’s corpses belonged to the Marginals. Exactly as I had planned—they were being cast as the prime suspects. No one even dreamed the real killer was a shoeshine boy.
The police wouldn’t be any different.
Then a few of the thugs spotted me and raised their eyebrows.
“The hell’s that ching-chang-chong doing here?”
“Yellow coolie bastard hanging around first thing in the morning—bad luck.”
“Get lost, you goddamn chink.”
So many ways to call me Chinese. Shouting that I was from the Korean Empire wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference.
I had simply been standing there, yet a whole rainbow of racial slurs poured out. In my previous life I had been dragged through courts and finally blown to pieces with a bomb for exactly this kind of situation.
PTSD no longer tormented me, and in an era when racism was everyday currency I couldn’t deliver a lesson every single time. That meant I would have to hear the same filth until the day I died—words that would still be around a hundred years from now.
I wasn’t living like that.
I left the alley crawling with gangs and headed for the scene of the next crime.
A neighborhood of middle-class Jewish families. A once-quiet townhouse was already noisy with early-morning crowds. The death of a solid middle-class man clearly drew far more public interest than a few dead gangsters on the street.
I slipped into the throng and eavesdropped on the briefing the police were giving the reporters.
Mother and her coworkers stood off to one side, faces grim.
“Who made the first report?”
“Employees of the garment factory run by the deceased, Blank.”
The reporters scribbled while eyeing the workers.
“At the scene the victim wrote ‘took all’ in his own blood just before dying. That seems like a fairly important clue. Is there anyone who can be specifically identified from it?”
“We’re not at the stage to release that.”
At that point the angry women watching the briefing shouted.
“If it wasn’t the loan sharks, who else would kill the boss?”
“Find the sewing machines those men stole!”
Most of them were Jewish or Italian immigrants long used to discrimination. They watched the police with open distrust, doubtful a proper investigation would even happen.
Irritated by the attitude, the officer scowled and shut the scene down.
“Gentlemen of the press, I’m sure you have many questions, but we ourselves arrived only a short while ago. The department will arrange a proper briefing later. That will be all for now.”
Once the perfunctory session ended, the reporters turned their microphones on the employees.
“We understand wages were unpaid. Do you believe that has anything to do with this case?”
“We’d like to hear exactly what happened last night when the loan sharks took the sewing machines.”
Something like “Why Did Angry Workers Storm the Boss’s House First Thing in the Morning?” would make a fine headline for tomorrow’s papers.
Meanwhile Mother, taking part in the interviews, spotted me. Our eyes met.
She quickly hid her startled expression. Then, with a complicated look, she silently asked the question: Was this you? Did you do this?
I nodded without hesitation.
Her face changed color; she turned away in shock and never looked at me again, staring only at the reporters.
It’s all right, Mother. No one is paying attention to me.
I had no intention of hiding my actions from her. Far more was going to happen. Keeping every secret forever didn’t suit my nature—and besides, what was I supposed to do with the money still buried under the potatoes?
I watched a little longer, then turned toward home.
When Mother came home she still hadn’t recovered from the shock. One day her eldest son simply became a murderer—how could she not be shattered?
She put on a brave face for the younger children’s sake, but the way she looked at me had changed.
I had committed two murders, yet nothing happened. The alley killings were pinned on the Marginals; the boss’s death was blamed on the loan sharks. The investigation concentrated on them.
That afternoon Mother returned from meeting a lawyer with her coworkers. She spoke with a bitter expression.
“It doesn’t look like we’ll get any compensation.”
Blank’s family back in Pennsylvania was fairly wealthy, but no redress could be expected from them. The loan sharks named as suspects denied every criminal charge and insisted the sewing machines had been rightful payment for the debts the boss owed.
For men who had engineered the whole fraud, they were shameless. The entire scheme had been designed to strip him bare from the start.
While I was quietly refining the next steps of my plan, Mother misread my blank face as shock and took my hand. Then she said something I never expected.
“The outcome isn’t good, but it was still a meaningful thing you did.”
“...What?”
“If you think about it, it’s no different from a soldier going off to war. You took down a truly evil enemy. That boss was worse and more vicious than any German.”
Even if we never saw a cent of compensation, finishing the revenge was enough. And she had compared the method to a soldier fighting the German army in the Great War.
I knew soldiers and civilians were fundamentally different. To Mother, though, there was no real distinction. Life itself had been a battlefield.
Her unbreakable will to understand and justify her son’s actions…
It was time to repay her.
“It wasn’t completely useless.”
I rummaged through the potato crate and pulled out the bag. The moment she opened it and saw the contents—
“!”
“Fourteen hundred dollars.”
Roughly seventeen times the unpaid wages.
Mother sucked in a sharp breath and covered her mouth with both hands.
“There’s more.”
I poured out the ledger and the mail.
She looked faintly disappointed, as if she had expected more cash. But then—
“This is evidence of everything the boss was doing.”
“Evidence…?”
With trembling hands she leafed through the letters. Horror slowly flooded her face.