The Island Where Dreams and Hopes Live
Client (alias permitted): Armand
Request Type & Purpose: Eliminate Leonard Bourton, illegal smuggler operating out of Fulton Fish Market.
Fee & Terms: $500
Advance Payment: $50 deposit on commencement
Priority (urgency scale 1–5): 5
Additional Reward Available? (extra sum or compensation upon success): None
Reliable Referrer: —
* Envelope must be sealed.
* This request form is kept under strict confidentiality.
* Requests may be refused pending internal review.
* Any false statements on this form, or any external leak or disclosure of its contents, will be held solely against the client.
Eliminate a smuggler at Fulton Fish Market?
I turned the request over in my mind as I handed the form to Leo. He scanned it quickly, then cocked his head.
“Never mind the job itself—who the hell told him about these order sheets?”
We had specifically required a “reliable referrer” for exactly that reason, yet the field sat blank.
Still, I could guess.
“We’ve only taken two jobs so far.”
Morris Rosenberg—gambling-house owner in LES who had handed me the Tenderloin parlors—and the pharmacist, George Walcott.
Leo rubbed his chin, eyes narrowing.
“Not the pharmacist. He has nothing to do with Fulton Fish Market. But Morris is still locked up.”
“Right—when’s Morris’s sentencing?”
Leo flipped through his notebook and his eyes went round.
“October 25th. This Friday.”
“Time flies.”
“Morris would foam at the mouth if he heard you say that.”
Morris had turned himself in to the NYPD for killing an associate. That had been April—already more than six months ago.
Leo asked, “Boss, what kind of contraband even moves through Fulton Fish Market?”
“Plenty. Narcotics, weapons, counterfeit bills, cigars, stolen art or high-end jewelry. And—”
Whiskey, rum, gin—liquor of every stripe.
All of it smuggled to dodge tariffs and the dry agents.
“Perfect place to hide the stuff under a false bottom in a fish crate.”
“Yeah, I can see that. But looking at the client’s name and the guy he wants dead, both sound French. What are they actually running?”
“We’ll find out once we check.”
“You going to meet him?”
“An order sheet showed up. We can’t just ignore it.”
But first we needed intelligence.
“Leo, ask Lanza at Fulton Market what he knows about the client and the target.”
“Okay.”
On the way home I stopped by George Walcott’s pharmacy. The shop was packed with customers dropping in after work.
Two clerks were handling consultations; Walcott himself was nowhere in sight. I walked straight into the compounding room without ceremony.
Walcott, white coat on, busily filling prescriptions, looked up and smiled.
“You made it.”
“Looks busy.”
“Just the after-work rush. So what’s the occasion—want to clock out together?”
“More that I have a question. Have you mentioned the request forms to anyone?”
Walcott’s hands froze. He stared at me with a flicker of fear and shook his head.
“I haven’t told a soul. Why? Something wrong?”
“No. Nothing at all.”
He exhaled in relief and his hands started moving again, dropping pills into paper packets. Then he stopped once more and fixed me with a look.
“Kieran… how well do you know that Uni— that gang?”
“Why do you ask?”
“We’ve been working on something together lately.”
Besides the pharmacy chain, Walcott and I were preparing a disinfectant plant. The chemical-processing permits were a bureaucratic nightmare, but Big Tom Foley of Tammany Hall had smoothed the path considerably.
“Something wrong?”
“No. I just wonder if that’s how gangs usually operate. Extortion, threats, taking what isn’t yours—that’s the normal racket, right? But this feels almost like a straight business partnership.”
“Maybe even gangs need to evolve.”
“If that’s the case, great… Still, every so often I get this sudden dread that something’s going to blow up. Guns going off—ah, Jesus.”
I understood. Working with a gang carried real risk.
That didn’t mean I owed him a soothing “Don’t worry, my friend.”
How much trust could two people build in so short a time?
I believed that for any venture stitched together by pure profit, a healthy dose of unease, fear, even terror was useful. Trust could be layered on slowly afterward.
In any case, Order No. 13 from the newsstand had nothing to do with George Walcott.
That left only Morris Rosenberg, days away from sentencing.
Not wanting to interrupt his compounding any longer, I left the pharmacy.
By the time I followed the darkening streets home—
“You’re home, big brotherrrr!”
Roa came tumbling out of the living room and thrust a bottle of hand sanitizer at me. I sprayed my palms and rubbed them hard while she lay on the floor watching.
“……You haven’t been doing that all day, have you?”
“Roa was super busy. Gave Teddy a bath, rolled from room to room sweeping and mopping.”
“Then it’s Roa’s turn for a bath.”
“Yeah, but I’m cleaning again tomorrow.”
“Then you can bathe again tomorrow.”
“Ah-ha.”
She rolled all the way to the bathroom door. Lingering aftershocks of the Spanish flu—still a damned nuisance.
Liam, at least, kept up his exercise and studies even at home. He’d packed on solid muscle and shot up so fast there was hardly any height difference between us now.
“Don’t just hole up in your room. Look after Roa too.”
“I played with her this afternoon. She told me to use her as a broom, so I swept like hell. Turns out it’s pretty good arm work. You should try it, hyung. Her weight’s perfect.”
“……”
While Mother finished dinner I sank onto the sofa. A magazine lay there—the inaugural August issue of The Ledger.
Mother’s face took up half the cover.
Not my demand; Ida, the editor-in-chief, had pushed hard for it.
I flipped open the table of contents and turned to the pages on Fulton Fish Market.
The article traced the market’s history from 1822, when it sold every kind of grocery and farm produce, all the way to becoming New York’s largest wholesale fish market. The second half covered internal feuds and the gangs tangled up in them.
I’d already read it once, so I focused only on the murders of Cardone and Russo.
A passage I had skimmed before suddenly stood out.
The slain Italians had founded an unofficial labor union and taken the lead in protecting the rights of merchants and workers. At the same time, evidence emerged that they were deeply involved in illegal smuggling.
In fact, one of the victims had been in the middle of a deal with a smuggler immediately before he was killed; police arrested and detained the individual roughly a month later.
A market official states: “If Fulton Fish Market is ever to escape the lure of organized crime…”
What caught my eye was the claim that the smuggler who had been dealing with Russo had been arrested.
If my guess was right, that man had almost certainly made contact with Morris Rosenberg in prison.
The meeting place with the client was a basement building on Forsyth Street.
After my men searched him, a man stepped into the dank underground chamber. Masked, eyes tight with tension, he looked at me already seated in the chair.
“Are you…… the Boss?”
“Who the hell are you that the Boss himself has to show up? Some high federal official? Rockefeller or Morgan class?”
“……”
The man wiped his forehead and sat down.
“You’re the client—Armand?”
“Yes.”
“When did you get out?”
I floated the probe. Sure enough, Armand flinched; his pupils jittered behind the mask.
“H-how did you know?”
“Everything’s in the palm of my hand.”
Armand swallowed hard and pressed on.
“I don’t know how much you’ve already learned…… but the request is exactly as written. Please eliminate Leonardo Bourton.”
Armand’s English was clumsy; he had clearly been born and raised in France.
“By the way—what’s your connection to Morris?”
“W-we were cellmates. He was the one who told me about the request forms.”
“Did he tell you who we are?”
Armand shook his head, hesitated, then answered.
“Morris never said it outright, but I could guess. You’re the Union…… aren’t you?”
“Why would you think that?”
“In LES, the only gang that could run something like this is yours.”
I stared hard into Armand’s eyes.
I still couldn’t tell whether he had come purely for the job or to size up the Union itself.
“Spell out the request. Why do you want Leonard Bourton dead?”
“That bastard ratted me out to the police.”
“Why?”
“For years I moved contraband through Fulton Fish Market with Cardone and Russo. And that day…… the day Russo died, I was there.”
He said Russo had been shot right in front of him.
So the man dealing with Russo on the pier the day I made the sniper shot had been Armand.
This world really was that small.
“So you want us to kill the snitch for revenge? We don’t take those jobs.”
Armand shook his head vigorously.
“It isn’t about revenge. He had another reason for turning me in. I handled Manhattan; Leonard handled Brooklyn.”
Once Russo was gone, Leonard had set his sights on Fulton Fish Market as well.
“Frankly, none of this would be possible unless an Italian gang was backing Leonard.”
“In plain English, the Italians dumped you and picked Leonard.”
“……That’s right.”
One more question nagged at me.
Why both of them French immigrants in the first place?
“What contraband are you running?”
“Liquor.”
Oh. Liquor.
“What kinds?”
“Whiskey, rum, gin, wine—cognac too.”
“Brands?”
Wine from France and Italy.
Whiskey: Canadian Club from Canada; from Scotland, Haig, Dewar’s, Johnnie Walker.
Champagne: French Piper-Heidsieck.
Gin: British Gordon’s.
Cognac: Hennessy, Martell, Rémy Martin, Courvoisier, Delamain, and the rest.
“That’s the general lineup…… but since the war the shipments have been hit-or-miss. Europe’s a mess, you know.”
A new question formed.
Normally liquor either came hidden aboard freighters straight from Europe or filtered in through the nearer routes—Canada, Cuba, the Bahamas. Every bottle filling Rosenthal’s warehouses had originated from one of those places.
“Where do you bring the stuff in from?”
“That’s……”
Armand clamped his mouth shut.
My mistake.
I had let the hunger for liquor show too clearly.
The way the bastard’s eyes were rolling confirmed it.
“You do realize this is the room of truth, right?”
“……How the hell would I know that?”
His tone had edged toward insolence.
“I keep the questions nice and easy and you start thinking I’m an idiot?”
Why would Italian gangs bother partnering with French smugglers?
Canada.
Even though it was British territory, Montreal and Ottawa in Quebec were thick with French-Canadian population.
Canada was the obvious answer.
And he was sealing his lips like it was some great secret?
“Ca—”
“Not Canada.”
“Ba—”
“Not the Bahamas either. Not Cuba.”
Then where the hell?
My eyes narrowed of their own accord.
I stared at the face of the man fidgeting through twenty questions. Sensing the killing intent rolling off me, Armand hurriedly opened his mouth.
“An island. A French island.”
An island. Could it be that one?
The tiny archipelago clinging to the northeast of Newfoundland.
“Saint Pierre and Miquelon?”
Most people had never even heard of the place.
I would have bet ordinary Americans—and even the merchants of Fulton Fish Market—had no idea it existed.
Armand’s reaction proved it.
His eyes flew wide; his mouth dropped open so far the center of the mask caved in.
“Can you even breathe like that? Get yourself a decent mask like mine. This one’s double-filtered.”
“……That isn’t the point. How do you even know about that island?”
How?
It was the greatest liquor-smuggling hub of the entire Prohibition era.
The place Al Capone himself had visited to crack open the distribution network. The island where my dreams and hopes still lived and breathed.
A golden goose that would connect me straight to Saint Pierre and Miquelon had just rolled right into my lap.