This Is Johnny's Way
If you want to raise the efficiency of a free-for-all to its absolute limit, you need a few tricks of your own.
First: cut every wasted motion and strike only the vital points.
I jabbed the tip of my club into the throat of the man swinging an iron pipe at Gavin.
"Ghk…!"
While he clutched his neck and gagged for air, Gavin smashed the club down on his skull.
"You son of a bitch!"
Crack.
Gavin turned a thick, blood-smeared smile on me.
You heard that, right? My loyal, righteous battle cry.
Second: positioning and spacing when you're fighting more than one man.
I moved on the next target at once, light and quick.
Third: use acrobatic, unpredictable attacks to put them down before they can read you.
For that, nothing beat the Arnis I had mastered in my mercenary days — the ideal practical art for both weapons and empty hands. Knife or club, it made no difference. Arnis is built around a whole range of weapons; the point is to hit the right man at the right range. And who said a weapon had to be something in your fist? Feet, knees, elbows — all of them could cripple a man just as well. When I broke a joint and dropped someone, my people never wasted the opening; they piled onto the exposed body without hesitation. The chemistry was surprisingly good.
Crack!
And fourth: when no one is marking you exclusively, use your allies' attacks as resources of your own. That takes strategic thinking — reading how your side and theirs are arranged, then improvising cut-and-run on the fly.
Thud!
I put three of them on the floor in a single breath.
That was when the big one came for me with a knife.
"Aaah!"
Mother.
With her scream for a backdrop I twisted just enough to slip the thrust, snared his wrist out of the air, and wrenched it. His spine bowed open of its own accord — perfect angle for a knee to the face.
Thud!
Right after the knee, I drove the club down the length of his back.
Slap.
I kicked him in the gut where he lay. When he still twitched, I set my shoe on his head the way you plant a foot on a toolbox footrest and pressed down, slow and firm.
Around then the free-for-all simply stopped.
"…"
Every eye in the place locked on me.
Mother had her face buried behind a picket and was nowhere to be seen.
Johnny, still breathing hard, suddenly let the knife hang limp at his side.
"That'll do."
I fought for the day's pay. Fair enough.
His read of the room was perfect. Ten against seven to start with, and more than half of his men were already out of the fight. One by one the sluggers lowered their tools.
I took my foot off the man's head and went back to my original backup spot.
Club still in hand, I watched Johnny and his crew leave the scene. Then my own people looked at me.
Leo and Marcus…
They were frozen in the exact pose they had held when they first slung the toolbox over their shoulders. And there was an extra toolbox now. Between them stood my little brother Liam, staring blankly — until our eyes met and he slid smoothly behind Leo.
I had no idea what was going through a fifteen-year-old's head.
I pointed Leo and Marcus after Johnny and the others. We had talked it over the day before; they took off after them at once. Johnny was not the kind of man to walk away clean. We couldn't put him down here, either, so we needed eyes on whatever he did next.
The whole mess sorted itself out with surprising ease.
Gavin came toward me with blood painted across his face; anyone watching would have sworn he had fought the seven of them alone. Maybe he had heard my shout earlier. A mild smile sat on his face, and he did not care that blood was running between his lips.
"Rookie. You can throw hands."
A little more than "can," I'd say.
Maybe it just looked modest because I never went for the big, flashy moves.
"Where'd you learn to fight?"
Same line I had fed Irving once: "Got the hang of it after enough beatings."
"Shit. Then me and every kid in this neighborhood oughta fight like you. Anyway — that club's yours now."
I would use it well enough, once I wiped the blood off.
I wanted to offer him a scarf, but that was out of the question. Gavin spoke first instead.
"You. Do not take that scarf off. Not ever."
Too many watching eyes. Men like Johnny would come looking for payback and try to find my face. Had the whole "cover up, rookie" routine actually been a kind of protection? And all the Oriental talk just a clumsy cover because he was embarrassed to say so?
A flicker of unease went through me — maybe I was reading gangsters too kindly.
I was glancing up at the sky when Patrick and the others came over and asked the same question again. Fight school? "Got the hang of it after enough beatings." Short and done. Patrick looked incredulous, then went serious.
"Johnny's not the type to quit."
Who would ever have guessed the women workers would hire sluggers? He had pulled back because the numbers went against him, but he would find some way to finish the job. Would he force an attack on the ILGWU-joined march? Or try to drag the runaway rabbits back into the shop?
"Anyway — we deal with Johnny as the situation develops. That was something to watch, rookie. Now I see why Boss Tanner sent you."
With that, Patrick walked over to the rattled protesters.
"We proceed with the demonstration as planned."
"…Are you people from the ILGWU?"
"None of your business. Everybody grab a picket."
They had just watched a brutal free-for-all right in front of them; every body was still locked tight. Mother was the one who changed the air.
"Let's go!"
She strode out of the tenement house with real confidence. That was when people started coming down the stairs — Emelda, the woman who had said she was moving to San Francisco in a few days, and not only her. Women who had watched in silence finally found the courage to step outside.
"…Sorry we're late. Even if I'm leaving soon, I'll stand with you today."
Shameless opportunists. Someone might have cursed them for it. Mother and the others welcomed them with bright smiles instead.
The women still hiding inside the house had surely seen that, too.
Find the courage, ladies.
From the tenement house to Union Square was roughly 2.2 kilometers.
Women marched the streets with pickets covered in every kind of slogan.
Not for Bankruptcy Fraud — Fight for Justice!
Our Machines, Our Rights!
Mother of Seven — No Pay for Seven Weeks!
The crowd's reaction was mixed. Some nodded in sympathy; others pointed and muttered about women making a scene. At least the fierce-looking sluggers at the head of the line kept anyone from shouting insults outright.
I held the rear beside Gavin, whose bandage stuck out under the brim of his hat.
"Rookie. After watching you work, I figure we oughta put you on a real job soon. Chasing after a bunch of women's skirts is bad for a man's pride."
"I'm fine with this."
"This kid's got weird tastes. They're all married with kids. You into that?"
What the hell is this lunatic thinking.
Maybe the cracked skull was talking. Or maybe he simply did not know my mother was among them. I decided to be generous.
"What kind of 'real job' are we talking about?"
"Debt collection, armed robbery, opium smuggling, gunrunning, gambling dens, club bouncing — the list goes on."
"This still looks better to me."
"I made one dollar today for a broken head. You want that, or one clean score for a few hundred?"
"I'll take the dollar and the punching."
"…I'm the idiot who got hit."
Gavin shoved the loose bandage back under his hat and pouted.
"Anyway — what about those women tomorrow? Boss Tanner only paid us for today."
"Depending on how it goes, we might work tomorrow too."
"Yeah? Who the hell is actually writing the checks?"
Tanner Smith kept his mouth tighter than I had expected. He had said nothing about me and nothing about the employer who was paying. Looked at another way, it felt like a test — how far I would go, and how carefully he would watch.
Union Square is the park where Broadway meets the Bowery. By the time we reached the protest site, people were packed in like a cloud of locusts. Crowds in a park are nothing strange. Today, though, it was not only civilians — police and men in naval uniform were everywhere.
At the center of the throng rose a massive shape. Only when I saw it did I understand.
Hard as it is to believe, it was a warship: a wooden vessel built not on the sea but in the heart of a Manhattan park.
"What you are looking at is the USS Recruit — two hundred feet from stem to stern, forty-foot beam — constructed to provide the berthing necessary for Navy and Marine Corps recruiting!"
A sailor in uniform was addressing the crowd right on cue.
"From the bridge tower to the two high cage masts and the funnel, she is a faithful wooden replica of a real battleship. Inside you will find a radio room, officers' quarters, crew spaces, a sick bay, and more…"
There was a reason to build a warship in a park. Before the United States decided to enter the Great War, the Navy needed far more men. Early on, the mayor of New York had boldly promised two thousand new sailors and come up with a miserable nine hundred. Faced with that humiliation, the head of a Navy research office had a stroke of twisted genius:
If you can't bring New Yorkers to the ships, bring a ship to the center of New York.
A complete reversal of thinking. The vessel they had been building in Union Square since the year before was the USS Recruit — overwhelming scale, three twin turrets mounting fourteen-inch guns, even the five-inch secondary batteries for torpedo defense. A precision fake built to lure young men into the Navy.
And by pure coincidence, today — May 30th — was the USS Recruit's launch ceremony. The mayor and every kind of celebrity had turned out for the celebration, giving the whole square the air of a pre-draft festival for the mass conscription only five days away.
Gavin and the other draft-age men stared at the ship as if hypnotized. Somewhere among them, I thought, someone was deciding to enlist right now.
Gangsters who went to the Great War. What would they do when they came home?
I ran the years forward in my head and suddenly remembered something I had been overlooking. The war would end soon enough, and Prohibition would follow hard on its heels. Young men who had handled guns and tasted combat would come home asking themselves what to do next. And the gangs of the Prohibition years would need soldiers exactly like them. The timing lined up almost too neatly. There was a reason the 1920s would be called the Roaring Twenties.
"You're the Blank company employees joining the demonstration, correct?"
A man in a neat suit greeted the protesters — an ILGWU staffer.
"Yes, that's right!"
"Please follow us!"
He led the column a little way off from the warship. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union had more men than you might expect. Nothing like the women in numbers, but the real posts — president, secretary — were all held by men. And the way those men looked at the sluggers was not exactly warm.
Gavin disliked the stares enough to open with a double curse.
"Shit, those eyes of theirs. They say they prefer peaceful, organized methods — what a load. What the hell would they have done today without us?"
He was not wrong. Realistically, though, peaceful and organized was all they had.
A little later, Mother and her coworkers stood with the workers the ILGWU had brought and raised their pickets and their voices.
"Union! Unity! Justice!"
"We want justice, we want pay!"
"No more fraud! Pay our wages!"
On the other side, the draft agitators were working just as hard. A Navy recruiting officer would shout the line and the crowd would roar it back.
"For Liberty! For Democracy!"
"Join the Navy! Save the world!"
"Uncle Sam needs you!"
What hit hardest of all was the slogan I had first heard the day I landed in this world.
"Wake up, America!"
The roar swallowed the protesters' voices and rolled across Union Square. Fortunately the launch chants were one-time affairs; the protesters' slogans found their strength again. Police formed a cordon to keep the march from spilling into the ceremony grounds.
When the event ended, ILGWU officers sought out local dignitaries, shook hands, and traded small talk. Reporters began to take an interest in the protesters. Which of them would actually write a proper story? I did not expect much.
The demonstration itself went as peacefully as the ILGWU had hoped. Even a lunatic like Johnny would not be reckless enough to hit a protest in a park thick with police, soldiers, and celebrities.
I was not the only one thinking that way.
"Rookie — in a little while they'll let people up on the ship for a look. You coming?"
"No interest."
The sluggers had gone soft. Some wandered the park on their own; a few bought candy from the street vendors. And so the first day's protest, riding the warship launch, managed to catch the public eye. The ILGWU decided to press the advantage with a street march tomorrow.
"You've all worked so hard today! This is only the beginning — go home and rest well!"
The sun was fully west. Time to head back. The scattered escorts gathered again to guard the column. The moment we left the park, Patrick's eyes sharpened on every street and alley.
"If I were Johnny, this is when I'd hit. Stay sharp, all of you."
Grand and Bowery.
Leo and Marcus had spent half a day glued to Johnny's heels. Furious that the job had gone sideways, Johnny had headed for an underground saloon. Then half the crew that had planned and moved with him peeled off and went somewhere else.
"They're definitely out to scrape up more of the Five Points Gang. Leo — how about you take their trail?"
After seven years in prison, Johnny had no power base of his own. That was why he had hired a slice of the Five Points Gang in the first place. To raise numbers on short notice he would have to cut a new deal with a gang boss. Leo agreed with Marcus.
"I'll find out how many, where, and how they gather."
Marcus planted himself outside the saloon where Johnny had gone to ground. Lunch came and went. By afternoon, Johnny walked out with two men. A little later, following them, Marcus frowned in confusion.
Johnny and his companions had arrived at the tenement house where Kieran lived.
Why come back here?
Watching their backs disappear inside, Marcus could not shake the bad feeling.
Johnny climbed to the third floor of the tenement and knocked on a door.
Knock, knock.
"Police. Mrs. Nora."
No answer. Johnny pressed a cold ear to the wood.
He had been through every kind of union strike imaginable. The morning plan had been wrecked by the unexpected appearance of sluggers, but that was hardly the only method on the board. Success stories crowded his head — including the time he had burned a protester's house. That had been a free-standing home, though. Setting fire to a tenement packed with hundreds of people? Even an employer would faint at the idea. Inefficient, and the risk was enormous. So arson was out.
Next option: kidnapping. Taking the family of a key strike leader hostage was always the most effective play. His information said the ringleader was an Irish widow raising three children — Nora Graves. Today's march was already underway, so he had built a two-pronged plan for tomorrow: snatch any one of the three kids as a hostage, then seal the tenement entrance at dawn with a much larger crew. A perfect plan.
This was Johnny's way.
The problem was that nobody was home.
"Damn it. Nothing's ever easy."
If they just stood there, residents climbing and descending the stairs kept glancing at Johnny and his men.
"Send the boys out looking, Johnny. The two sons are shoeblacks, right? Should be easy to—"
Talking in low voices, they came down to the ground floor. The whole time they descended, Marcus watched the tenement entrance with a tight chest.
There is no good reason they went in there.
He was still staring when Johnny and the others reappeared. Marcus jerked his eyes away and fussed with the inside of his toolbox. There were thousands of shoeblacks in Manhattan. He was just one more.
Johnny seemed to notice him anyway.
"Hey. Shoeblack."
Damn. I stared too hard.
Johnny and his men closed in and ringed him. Marcus's heart hammered. He gripped the toolbox hard to hide the shake in his hands, swallowed, and managed:
"Shine your…?"
Johnny spat on the ground, ignored the question, and glanced at a scrap of paper.
"You know the brothers who live here? Kieran and Liam?"
Marcus rolled his eyes once, then nodded. He worked his mouth, searching for the safest answer, and said:
"I know 'em… Those two bastards again? What'd they do this time?"
He made a point of sounding unfriendly. That seemed to please Johnny; the man smiled and held out a dollar.
"Point me to them and there might be more."
Marcus's eyes rolled again. The calculation was short.
"What if I bring them myself?"
From a third-floor window of the tenement, a pair of large eyes looked down on the scene.
Do not open the door for anyone, no matter who knocks. Just because they say "police" doesn't mean they are police. Understood?
"Roa didn't open the door, big brother!"