What's the Name of That Book?
Of the men aged twenty-one to thirty who had put their names down for the draft, there were ten million.
Of those, roughly 1.37 million had been drawn by lottery.
The odds worked out to 13.7 percent.
"You beat some steep competition. Being in the upper bracket—you ought to take pride in that."
"Easy for you to say."
Even my attempt at consolation couldn't lift the gloom from Gavin and Cory's faces. They looked as lifeless as terminal patients who'd just been handed a death sentence.
"But before it's final, don't they make you take some kind of exam?"
"Yeah. Physical and fitness tests."
"Unless you're missing limbs or completely out of your mind, there's no exemption."
"If you really don't want to go, just pull out all your teeth. Or want me to help? I can dislocate a shoulder for you, no problem."
Gavin and Cory looked tempted for a second, then shook their heads.
"If we're going, we're going. Anyway, that's not why we came. Remember what you said before? That even if you get dragged onto a battlefield, there are ways to raise your survival rate."
"Is that true?"
"Did I say something like that?"
Their expressions were more serious than I'd ever seen them. They were right—I'd said it once in front of the Navy recruitment ship at Union Square. What was interesting was that they had taken the words of a seventeen-year-old seriously.
It wasn't for any simple reason, either. There was a surprisingly plausible explanation I never would have imagined.
"You trained with the independence fighters like the IRA, right?"
"!"
"That boy cadet school or whatever it was—that's the place, isn't it?"
What kind of nonsense was this?
I was stunned. How on earth had they decided I was a Korean independence army boy soldier?
And yet it wasn't completely out of left field. Until a few years ago, there had actually been a military academy in Hastings, Nebraska, training independence fighters for the Korean Empire. They called it the Korean West Point—the Young Korean Military School.
The students were either sent from the Korean Empire or the children of Hawaiian laborers. They balanced military training, academics, and manual labor while learning to become independence army officers. Then, three years ago, after accepting its sixth class, the school shut down. Japan protested to the U.S. government, and under that pressure Hastings College cut its support—that sealed it.
Over six years the school trained about 170 cadets and graduated roughly forty. Some returned home as independence fighters; others scattered across America to attend university or live as immigrants. I knew all this not only from my previous life but from the letters and notebooks left behind by my Korean father.
And somehow Gavin and Cory knew about the boy cadet school. That was thanks to the Tammany Hall politicians.
"I heard Mr. Foley talking. The way you dropped those anarchists with clean shots at your age—he said that had to come from the training you got there."
Tom Foley. That checked out. For the Democratic Party's political machine—Tammany Hall—information like that was nothing. Linking me to the boy cadet school wasn't a stretch. Compared to being an IRA secret agent, it even sounded more plausible. After a brief moment of thought, I decided to lean into the identity of a boy soldier trained by the independence army.
"That's why early education matters. But don't go spreading this around. The Japanese will come after me."
"Could be true. Still, Boss Tanner will know. He's tighter with Tom Foley than we are."
"Well, that much can't be helped. Anyway, the reason you came looking for me…"
Before shipping out, they wanted to do whatever they could to raise their odds of survival. That was why they had sought me out.
"You're used to this stuff. Shooting, conditioning—all of it. Teach us everything."
I folded my arms and stroked my chin.
"If we do it the way I was trained, you won't last. Think you can handle it?"
"O-of course. Beats dying on a battlefield, doesn't it?"
"With that kind of resolve…"
I'd have to work them like dogs.
The First World War would be over in less than a year anyway. Afterward, Gavin and Cory—returning with combat experience—would become valuable assets, even if they came back as cooks. The bizarre misunderstanding about me being a Korean Empire boy soldier was actually convenient.
"Then I need to prepare too. Let's meet in three days."
"Got it!"
"Oh, and is there anyone else? The more the better."
"Yeah? There'll be more in the gang. We'll round them up."
I came down from the roof to see Gavin and Cory off. That was when Marcus, who'd said he was running a quick errand for the family, passed in front of the tenement. Beside him walked a man—the middle-aged fellow who had given Roa candy on the steamer a few days earlier. The two of them were talking as they walked.
How did those two know each other?
I filed the question away and went upstairs.
Gavin and Cory's draft notices had accelerated my timeline. It was time to launch the "Human Remodeling Project" I'd originally planned to start once I had a solid base and more men.
I poured everything into drafting the designs on paper, then took them down to the basement factory and handed them to Mother.
"Can you make this?"
"What is this?"
After studying the drawings for a long while, Mother said she would make them herself. Her eyes lit up with open greed.
"Son, I've never seen a design like this. Shouldn't we file a patent? If we tone the color down a bit, it could work."
"You recognize quality when you see it. Colors can come later in variety. Just think of this as a sample and make it."
"All right. My son really is an idea bank. Looking at things like this, he takes after me completely."
Ho-ho-ho.
Time to haul fabric.
I helped Leo move the loads, and just before lunch I packed underwear for a delivery a few blocks away to a client. On the way back I bought a five-cent hamburger from a street vendor. Bread, patty, a little pickle and onion—nothing more. It was decent enough.
I'd thought about the hamburger business once. But places run by people like Louis Lassen and Fletcher Davis were already going, and street vendors sold them everywhere. Sure, I could aim for the spot McDonald's would occupy twenty years from now, but we weren't there yet. Even a refrigerator still cost a fortune.
I was walking back to the company, turning over the question of how to make money easily and fast, when I ran into Marcus.
"What about the man you were with?"
"You saw us? He's a friend of my father's."
"Interesting. I saw him a few days ago on the steamer coming from Coney Island to Manhattan."
"Yeah? His place is in Brooklyn, so he usually takes the steamer."
Marcus rattled on about his father's friend as if it were nothing special.
"He used to live in the same part of Germany as my father—Karlstadt. They even immigrated together on the same Eider steamer. After that their paths split hard."
A bitter look crossed Marcus's face. They had come to America together, he said with a sigh, but his own family was still stuck in the Lower East Side.
"Is he rich?"
"Not really. He tried a little of everything, even ran a barbershop on Wall Street, then quit that and now manages the Medallion Hotel on Twenty-Third Street."
Up to that point I hadn't thought much of it. Then:
"Come to think of it, he used to live in the same tenement as you. Before we were born, so it's pretty old history."
A man who had once lived in my tenement at 76 Forsyth Street.
Suddenly I remembered what Roa had said when they parted.
"Bye-bye, Uncle Trump!"
I asked Marcus just to confirm.
"Frederick Trump. Why? What's up? Not the kind of name you'd bother remembering."
He was right. Right now the man wasn't anyone important. Donald Trump would matter; his grandfather was just…
In my previous life, whether I liked it or not, I sometimes watched the documentaries that came on television. Especially in election years, every network ran programs digging into candidates' profiles and family histories, and Donald Trump was no exception. From what I could recall, the Trump family story always started the same way: a German immigrant who settled in America, scraped together money through every kind of work, and bought real estate. But the real wealth from property only began with Donald's father. The grandfather had died young, forcing the son to start working early.
What mattered here wasn't the fortune—it was how the grandfather died. He was an early victim of the Spanish flu. Roughly a third of the world's population—half a billion people—would eventually be infected by that pandemic, and he had died of pneumonia right as it was beginning to explode. That day was no longer far off.
Frederick Trump's appearance made me realize the Spanish flu would hammer the entire United States in less than a year.
"Marcus, do you know any reporters?"
"Of course… no."
"Then any newspapers or reporters you like?"
Marcus just blinked at the sudden question.
Ever since my shoe-shine days I had been turning over one problem: how to make the things I said—things that would sound like nonsense right now—carry weight and credibility. How to move beyond a single person and influence many. After meeting Edgar Hoover the idea had sharpened. In the end I had settled on newspaper articles. And Marcus, who believed information was power, read more papers than anyone I knew.
"I don't know any reporters, but I do have a favorite paper and a favorite writer. The New York World. The reporter is Herbert Bayard Swope."
The New York World was the paper Joseph Pulitzer—the man behind the famous Pulitzer Prize—had bought. Even six years after his death it remained one of the most influential newspapers in America. And Swope was one of its writers.
"Why do you like that reporter?"
"He's German, same as me."
"If that's the only reason, I'm disappointed."
Marcus raised his voice, insisting there was a real reason.
"If you read his pieces you'd think the same. Not long ago he wrote an article called 'Inside the German Empire.' Nobody understands the war situation better than he does."
The piece had cut sharply into Germany's internal and external condition—analyzing the empire in depth to read the balance of the war. That lined up almost exactly with the opening of a certain kind of prophecy I intended to write.
"What's the name of that book?"
For the first time since landing in Manhattan, I walked into a bookstore and bought an actual book.
Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War
I sat at the table, straightened my posture, and began working through more than four hundred pages. Roa watched me from the side as if she were seeing something alien.
"Big Brother, is that really you? Really?"
"Who else would it be?"
"Big Brother reading a book… that's not Roa's big brother."
I gave a short laugh and let her see the real me I had been hiding.
"This big brother of yours—if I go a single day without reading, the inside of my mouth breaks out in sores."
"Whoa."
"…Right. So you need to get friendly with books too. Pretty but empty-headed? Then you're not my sister."
"Kieran-ssi?"
"…No. At times like this you're supposed to say you read too."
"But Roa doesn't have any books to read. I've already read the ones at home a thousand million times. Once upon a time there was a pretty princess who disappeared. You've seen it, right? You know the whole thing?"
This damn house. Roa didn't even have books of her own.
Anyway, I couldn't concentrate.
"Liam. I'll lift the ban for a little while."
"Okay. Let's play with Big Brother."
"You going to give Roa airplane rides again today?"
Vroom.
Liam flipped Roa onto the bed. His shoulder-throw technique was getting natural. Roa looked satisfied, laughing as she begged him to keep going until he was exhausted.
It took me two days to finish the book.
The core of it was Germany's military situation, its economic hardships and the resulting public mood and war-weariness, and the internal conflicts born of Kaiser Wilhelm II's lack of leadership. Overall it stressed that while the German Empire looked powerful from the outside, cracks had already formed within and were steadily widening.
Swope had earlier written a newspaper article under the same title that became the foundation of the book. Timing mattered: the article had appeared around the moment America decided to enter the war. Its purpose had been to strengthen the case for intervention and boost Allied morale.
Reporter Swope's analysis was sharp enough to match almost everything I already knew. If I sent him a letter containing my own precise predictions—true foresight—what then? Like Edgar Hoover, he would probably ignore me at first. But I was certain he would come looking for it soon enough.
I laid on the praise for Swope with Marcus.
"So you read the article too? I think almost everything he wrote is right."
"Agreed. I'm so taken with him I might even send a fan letter."
"That seems a little much."
It didn't matter. I wrote down the New York World's address and Herbert Bayard Swope's name in my notebook, ready to send something the moment he wrote an editorial that caught my eye.
Separately, I added one more product to the drawings for the Spanish flu. In a pandemic, masks would be essential. This was for my family as well.
When I handed the new design to Mother, she brought up patents again.
"I've never seen a mask like this. But a triple-layer build will cost more. Will people actually pay for it?"
"It'll take time. Even if we don't make money right away, it'll help the workers."
How much dust did they breathe all day in a basement with no ventilation? For their health alone, masks were mandatory. If it came to it, I could even give one to Grandpa Trump.
"Oh, and I finished this one. But no matter how I look at it the color's too gaudy. Why on earth…"
"It's fine. Everything has its purpose."
An empty lot on Ludlow Street, a few blocks from my tenement.
At the appointed time and place, Gavin and Cory showed up. Not just the two of them—five others as well. Every one of them had beaten the same brutal lottery odds and been selected for the draft. Two of them, they said, weren't even Marginals but from a neighboring gang.
"First, everyone gather over here."
True to gang form, their attitudes were thoroughly insolent. They drifted over like limp octopus tentacles.
"Form a single rank."
"What's that?"
They still didn't know. I kindly explained that a single rank meant lining up in one long straight line.
"From this moment, anyone who refuses my orders or gets a bad feeling about this can leave."
Pfft.
Some bastard snorted.
"…I'll say it again. If you want to raise your survival rate in combat, you need to arm your mind first. If you're going to quit the moment it gets hard, drop out now."
Pfft.
The same idiot snorted at the end of every sentence. Word had spread inside the Marginals, but these neighboring-gang types had no concept of respect. When I looked at Gavin and Cory, who had brought him, their faces went sour.
"I'll count to ten. Anyone leaving, leave now."
I counted helpfully. Naturally none of them intended to walk yet.
"I'll take that as everyone participating in the training."
I pulled the hat Mother had made from inside my coat and jammed it on my head. Everyone froze, eyes locked on the hat as if they'd been hit by a truck.
"As of this moment this instructor assigns numbers. From the left: Number One. Be ready to call out your number."
"Hey, but—what the hell is that blood-red hat? It's so fucking funny, how are we supposed to take training seriously?"
I swept my gaze quickly from left to right.
"Trainee Number Five."
"Whoa, that was me? But why?"
"Step forward."
Pfft.
There's a saying that if you break one man at the start, the rest of the training goes smoothly. I had coined it myself back when I was a mafia training instructor in my previous life.