What Caused the Smoke
As always, before you pull a job, you put your fail-safes in place.
With the Neapolitan outfits weakened, the Sicilians had been quietly swallowing their businesses piece by piece. Hit a Neapolitan gambling den and suspicion would fall on the Sicilians—but that alone wouldn't be enough.
Hissssss.
"Wh-what the hell!"
"Fire!"
Smoke billowed up through the half-basement gambling den. In seconds the windows were choked with it, and then it was pouring into the street.
Smoke grenade works just fine.
I'd confirmed it. Time to vanish.
I slipped out of the alley with the crowd pouring from the den, then melted into the throng and watched the building as smoke rose from it like mad.
"Whoa, that fire looks pretty bad."
"What the hell is going on all of a sudden?"
People swarmed in almost at once. Police and firefighters didn't show until a full five minutes after the smoke started pouring out.
"Clear the way!"
"Hose coming through! Everybody move!"
By now the grenade itself would be spent—only the smoke still trapped underground remaining. I tagged along after the fire hoses with a pack of bright-eyed neighborhood kids.
A little later, the truth came out: it wasn't a fire at all.
They found the smoke grenade on the scene, and the den's staff told the cops something had just dropped past a window.
"What kind of maniac drops a military smoke grenade for no reason?"
"How would we know?"
"'I don't know' is the end of it? Search the place. There might be more."
Just like that, it turned into a surprise raid. On a normal night they would have scrubbed the evidence clean—but with the smoke, that had been impossible.
The illegal gambling den was blown wide open.
"These bastards were running a casino!"
"Seize the evidence and arrest the manager first!"
There were cops on the take among them, no question. But the whole thing had happened too fast for anyone to get ahead of it.
The den's manager and one employee who couldn't run were arrested, and everything used for the games was hauled away as evidence.
I hadn't even been aiming this high…
Taking out a whole gambling den turned out to be this simple.
I was still tilting my head at that when I spotted Marcello. Suddenly out of a job, he stood there dazed, clawing at his hair.
Better clear the scene before I get caught myself.
A smoke grenade meant for the battlefield. I'd seen with my own eyes what happened when one went off in a crowded city center.
Next time, I should make a flashbang and try that.
"Big Brother—ta-da!"
The moment I walked in the door, Roa shoved a lump of something at me. I recoiled, and she insisted I look closer—it was my hand, she said.
"Aunt Mary told us to make one family member's hand out of clay. Roa could only think of Big Brother's hand, so she made this beautiful masterpiece."
"What's that thing the fingers are holding?"
"Mm. That's meat. For Roa."
I thought it was a turd holding a turd.
"…Nice work."
"Give me your hand. Can you tell them apart?"
"No. Not at all."
"Knew it. Then tomorrow Roa's making a foot. Stick your foot out. It might be a little hard, but—click."
Roa mimed taking a photograph so she could remember my foot.
Tomorrow there'll be one more turd in the house.
The door rattled. Mother had come home from work. Something good must have happened—exhaustion lost to the smile filling her face.
"Kieran, you know who came by this afternoon? The Gimbels manager! Last time he stormed out cursing us up and down, and today he was practically purring. You should have seen him."
Her laughter never stopped while she talked. That Gimbels had come back with its head lowered only meant the brassiere launch was a real success.
Sales were climbing on a clean upward curve. Beyond Macy's, we were already supplying product to seven boutique shops.
"The size range we launched this week seems to have gone over well. The Gimbels manager kept coming back to that."
"That's great."
"Going forward, just like you said—if we keep releasing new products by swapping materials and designs, I think it'll be huge."
The brassieres were on the right track. I wanted to make men's underwear too, but we were short on staff and the factory was too small.
I'd considered the Allen Street building I'd bought—but packing the Union headquarters and the gambling den into the same place was a risk.
I'd have to look into a new factory soon. No need to buy a building the way other garment shops did; renting would be enough.
After dinner Liam read, and Roa and I played at drawing.
"Big Brother's hands must be broken. Why do the lines look like that?"
"Keep that up and I stop."
"Sorry, sorry. But if you only say nice things, there's no progress. If Jake hadn't cursed at Roa, Roa wouldn't have gotten better either."
"That bastard curses at you?"
"Yeah. Sometimes. Of course Roa does it more often."
"What does he say…?"
"Idiot. Dummy. Moron. And—has Roa even been to Coney Island?—stuff like that."
"…"
Roa dotted the last eye on her carousel horse and then, as if drained, fell asleep. Liam nodded off over a book in bed; Mother dozed at the table over the ledgers.
I was the opposite—my nights and days flipped, my mind only growing sharper.
I laid Roa in bed and steered half-asleep Mother out of her chair and into her room.
At last, time that was mine alone.
Quietly I opened the crate, set weapons and ammunition on the table, loaded four magazines counting the spare, and fitted a suppressor to the muzzle. I prepped two pistols and packed them into a bag.
Ten-thirty.
I sat at the table and scratched notes. Separate from the gambling-den business about to unfold, my head was full of the Marginals.
Absorb Tanner's gang whole and, in a single stroke, I'd have more than a hundred men under me.
Can I actually control them?
There would have to be a culling. Anyone who only went along under duress had to be weeded out. The most efficient way was to set rules and cut down anyone who wouldn't follow them.
I scratched the particulars onto the paper.
The gambling den on Forsyth Street.
"Smoke just flooded the whole place, and the cops and firemen came pouring in."
"Couldn't even clean up with all that smoke."
"Fucked, right? I heard the manager there got hauled in by the police."
Every customer who walked in had the same story. The smoke incident from earlier that evening was already gossip among the gamblers.
"But what caused the smoke?"
"I heard it's something they use on battlefields, but I don't really know."
"It's a smoke grenade, you idiots. The Sicilians are denying everything, but they skim military surplus all the time—this is nothing new. Had to come from them."
That was how the staff here—and the Neapolitan gangsters—were reading it.
In truth, skimming military goods was a game the Neapolitans had started before the Sicilians. In the early days, while the Sicilians were having fun with counterfeit bills, the Neapolitans had been raiding warehouses at the New York docks and stacking cash.
Plenty of the longshoremen were Italian immigrants. Bribe a couple of crooked officials on top of that and you could siphon military goods, food, tobacco, whiskey, precious metals—whatever sat on the piers.
So a smoke grenade ending up in Sicilian hands wasn't strange in itself.
What they meant to do with it, though—and why they'd been stupid enough to set it off and get arrested—that was the mystery.
Pacifico, the owner of the den, had been shut in his office all evening, bursting into hollow little laughs.
"Did they all take something? Why set off a smoke grenade in there?"
He looked at the cigar smoke he was blowing, then slapped his knee as if he'd had a revelation.
"Don't tell me—the cigarette smoke wasn't enough!? You wanted a bigger hit, you chicken-brained bastards?"
Pacifico shook with laughter. The underling on the sofa cocked his head.
"What bothers me more is why they even had a smoke grenade. Nowhere to use one."
"Ahh, my head hurts. They were probably trying to fence them and couldn't move the stock, so they were sitting on it. Either way—if a Sicilian den went up in smoke, that's a win for us."
Gamblers didn't care whether a place was Neapolitan or Sicilian. After that evening, the customers had definitely come in thicker.
"Anyway, when something goes down, you run first. You stand there staring at the smoke, the cops grab you."
"The cops must've been rattled too. Went in for the smoke and ended up doing a raid by accident."
"The ones on the take must've been really rattled. Anyway—drink up. To the dumb Sicilians."
"Cheers."
While Pacifico and his man laughed and talked, the clock edged toward midnight.
At the craps table, Lenny Goldstein grew calmer the closer the appointed hour came.
He checked his wristwatch and flicked a glance downward.
Dice and card switches happen under the table. There's a space for the dealer's legs, screened on every side by a cloth or wooden panel so no one can see. Here, to save money, they used tablecloth. Most dealers kept a bag and the tools for working the game inside; tonight Lenny had something special hidden there.
Midnight. A hand had just finished.
Lenny raked in the dice and the stakes with his stick. When he set the stick back down, he peeled free a thread stuck to the underside of the table and took it in his hand.
"Just going to wash my face a moment."
Seven meters from the table to the staff-room door. He could make that distance without anyone stopping him.
The slack thread dragged along the floor; as he neared the door it began to draw taut. Under the table, the thread cinched tight around a small ring and yanked the smoke grenade free.
The grenade rolled out from under the cloth and caught exactly where he'd planned—wedged between a table leg and a chair leg.
As he opened the staff-room door, he felt the tension of the thread against his finger. Lenny swallowed hard—and the instant the door swung open—
Ting.
The taut line went suddenly slack.
At the same moment came a hiss, and smoke began to pour out where Lenny had been standing.
"Wh-what the hell!"
"Fire!"
Lenny left the staff-room door wide open and sprinted for the opposite exit instead. In seconds the room was solid with smoke; customers and dealers tangled together and bolted for the street.
"Cough—cough—this isn't fire, it's a smoke screen! Smoke!"
"Clear everything before the cops get here!"
"I have to be able to see to clear it! Where the fuck is the door even!"
The den dissolved into chaos.
Pacifico and his right hand had come charging out of the office the second they heard the noise—or tried to. The smoke exploded outward so fast they could barely find the door.
"Fuck! Just run! Everybody out!"
No time to grab the money. Pacifico had only one image circling his skull: the Sicilian manager the police had already collared.
He stumbled out the back door with his sleeve pressed over his mouth and nose. Outside, the smoke clinging to his collar dissolved into the night air—and a muzzle appeared in front of his face. Strangely large.
Pssh.
Pacifico's forehead snapped back and he dropped. The men spilling out behind him went the same way.
Pssh. Pssh.
By the time I'd finished the ones who came boiling out, Lenny appeared. He saw the bodies, eyes going wide—then counted them and the corner of his mouth lifted.
For a second, a flash of something unhinged showed through.
"You really up for this?"
At my words Lenny gave a grim nod. With hands still shaking he frisked Pacifico's corpse and took the gun.
"Wait on the roof."
The words were barely out before Lenny threw himself back into the smoke-choked passage. That took real guts.
I climbed the iron stairs of the building next door that I'd already scoped, crossed onto the lower roof, then came down that building's fire escape.
Manhattan is a jungle in its own way.
When I emerged from the opposite direction, a few people were already running toward the smoke.
I slipped into a dark alley—and someone called out to me.
"Whoa, where the hell did this bastard pop out of?"
"Hey, scarf. Who the fuck are you?"
Three shadows in the dark.
I left the gun where it was, drew the knife at my waist, and closed the distance in a blink.
"Che altro, il Mietitore Siciliano—what else? The Sicilian Reaper."
Thuk. Thuk.
I drove the blade in and cut.