Chapter 64: Ghost Supplier
The heavy iron rims of five black spring-wagons ground steadily over the sunlit cobblestones of Greenwich Village, a synchronized fleet moving with absolute, unbothered confidence.
Returning the operation to the daylight had changed the entire atmosphere on the street. The shopkeepers and grocers, exhausted by the paranoia of midnight alley drops, were openly relieved to see the crisp black suits and the familiar dapple-gray horses pulling up to their front curbs in the middle of the afternoon.
For the Williams brothers, the forged Atlantic & Pacific Trading House manifests resting in their inner coat pockets acted like an invisible shield. Armed with a legitimate corporate identity and flawless paperwork, Jimmy and Sean went all in. They didn’t just walk into storefronts; they captured them. Jimmy practically slapped the crisp, stamped shipping papers onto the counters, his gap-toothed grin charming the hesitant merchants while steamrolling the competition.
Rival wholesale spotters from Soho and Brooklyn stood on the street corners, clutching their notepads in sheer, useless frustration. They tried pitching their own discounted flour and hardware, but nobody in the Village was biting. The commission boys had ingrained themselves into the neighborhood’s daily rhythm. Their supply was too consistent, their quality too high, and their unique, no-minimum-order business style had spoiled the merchants. Every shop owner now expected the Soho houses to match the Syndicate’s convenience, and when they couldn’t, the merchants simply waved them away.
By the time the sun dipped low behind the Hudson River, the numbers in the master ledger were staggering. Across the five routes, the crew had taken down 107 new orders and successfully delivered 67 bulk payloads in a single day—shattering their previous record of 89.
The day ended in total, undeniable success.
Down in the warm, amber-lit basement lounge beneath Washington Street, the atmosphere was thick with the smell of roasted peanuts, cigar smoke, and spilled beer. For Arthur, Frank, and Tom Murphy, the shift back to daylight hours was a physical blessing. Their sleep schedules had finally stabilized, and the dark circles under their eyes were beginning to fade. They could finally end their shifts together, pull up a wooden chair, and drink a cold beer without fighting exhaustion.
Arthur leaned back against a wooden post, wiping a ring of foam from his upper lip as he looked around the crowded card tables.
"Now that everything’s back to normal," Arthur said, tossing a peanut shell onto the floor, "the boss is up in Midtown with Marek, rubbing elbows with hotel managers and guys in silk hats. You think we can really hold the fort without him?"
Frank paused, a wet rag in his hand behind the bar. "We can run the wagons fine, Art. But every time a real problem popped up, Ricky solved it. What if something goes sideways with the coppers or the Dusters, and it’s just us and his mistress secretary upstairs?"
A low chorus of chuckles rippled through the basement. Everyone in the crew knew Evelyn was completely, undeniably head-over-heels for Ricky. But Ricky, being completely obsessed with his logistics and empire-building, either didn’t notice or simply didn’t care. Instead of batting her eyelashes or acting seductive, Evelyn had channeled her affection into becoming the most ruthlessly efficient, indispensable administrator in the building.
"She’s scarier than any woman I’ve ever met," Frank muttered, shaking his head. "She’s got this cold, calm face, snapping out orders and counting silver like a bank vault door. But she’s actually crazy in love with the boss. How odd is that?"
Patrick Williams laughed around the rim of his glass. "Let’s just say we don’t know the first thing about women, Frank."
"Fair enough," Frank conceded, tossing the rag onto the counter.
John Caldwell tapped his cigarette against a tin ashtray, bringing the conversation back to the ground. "Never mind the secretary. What about the physical stock? We moved sixty-seven loads today, and we’ve got over a hundred orders on the books for tomorrow. The numbers are only going up. How do we contact Ricky for additional supplies if he’s stuck uptown for a week? Will the shed hold out?"
Jimmy Williams leaned back in his chair, resting his boots on an empty crate. He offered a sharp, knowing smirk.
"If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the boss," Jimmy said smoothly, "it’s that we don’t drop maximum bulk every single day. The boss likes to drive the prices down to make the customers entirely dependent on our supply. Once they’re hooked, he artificially limits the order capacity for ’supplier reasons’."
Jimmy tapped his temple. "That drives the street panic up, and it drives our prices up. Ricky told me himself—if you’re in a competitive market, you harvest the fields, but you always leave some scraps for the vultures. If we take every single nickel in the Village, the Soho houses will bring an army down here. So, we throttle back on Wednesday. We limit the supply, let the competitors fight over the scraps, and keep our own stock manageable."
Danny, the newly appointed Warehouse Manager, took a slow sip of his whiskey from the corner table.
"You don’t have to worry about the inventory, John," Danny said quietly, his voice cutting through the banter. "The current stockpile in the main shed is more than enough for a week. The boss already calculated that the daylight routes would spike our volume up to two hundred drops a day. Plus... he showed me another shed."
Arthur sat up a little straighter. "Another shed?"
"Yeah," Danny nodded. "Right next to ours on Gansevoort. It’s locked tight, but he showed me the inside before he left for Chelsea. It’s packed to the damn rafters with flour, hardware, sugar, liquor and what have you. Just in case he gets tied up in Midtown for more than a week."
Simon Chamberlain, the young field agent who had grown much closer to the core crew over the last few days, was sitting quietly near Tom. He looked down at his boots, then back up at Danny, his brow furrowing with a heavy, innocent confusion.
He asked the one question that had been quietly haunting the back of everyone’s minds.
"Hey..." Simon said, his voice dropping into a hesitant whisper. "Have any of you... actually seen the boss’s suppliers?"
The clinking of beer glasses stopped. The shuffling of playing cards ceased.
"I mean," Simon continued, shrinking slightly under the sudden weight of the room’s attention, "I see the storage sheds filled to the brim every morning. But I’ve never seen any personnel. I’ve never seen a river barge pull up, or a freight crew, or an actual delivery wagon bringing the goods into our yard."
The silence in the basement was absolute, heavy, and suddenly very cold. No one answered him. Arthur stared at his beer. Jimmy looked at the ceiling. John Caldwell took a slow, silent drag from his cigarette.
"Did I..." Simon swallowed hard, looking around at the older boys. "Did I violate an unwritten rule?"
Frank leaned over the wooden bar, his face dead serious. "Let’s leave it at that, kid. It’s best not to ask questions about it."
Deep down, almost every man in the room shared the exact same assumption. Ricky was a nineteen-year-old kid from out of state, yet he had endless capital, pristine stock, military-grade shotguns, and a mind for corporate warfare. To the street-hardened boys of 1910 New York, there was only one logical explanation: Ricky was backed by a massive, incredibly dangerous, international shadow syndicate.
If they had never seen a single delivery man, a single wagon, or a single boat dropping goods at the Gansevoort shed, it simply meant Ricky’s backers were ghosts. They moved in the dead of night, they left no paper trail, and they were lethal enough to operate completely undetected by Tammany Hall and the NYPD.
Not a single man in the lounge even entertained the impossible idea that Ricky could simply manifest the crates out of thin air. They just knew that whoever was loading those sheds in the dark was powerful enough to own the city, and smart enough to kill anyone who asked too many questions.
"Drink your beer, Simon," Arthur said quietly, breaking the tension with a low, rough exhale. "As long as the crates are there at dawn, we don’t care if ghosts brought ’em."