Page 114

He looked at Fulmar, who nodded his agreement.

Canidy said into the phone, “Okay, then. Thanks, Frank.”

As he hung up the receiver, there was a knock at the door.

“That must be your lunch,” he said, and saw that Fulmar had the duck call back in his hand.

Fulmar grinned and blew a soft quaaack…quaaaaaack.

Canidy reached the door and raised an eyebrow that asked, What?

Fulmar shrugged.

“You’re dealing with Murder, Inc.,” he said solemnly. “Just wondering when the dust settles who’s going to be the real dead ducks….”

[ FOUR ]

Fulton Fish Market

New York City, New York

1750 7 March 1943

The cab carrying Dick Canidy and Eric Fulmar, both now in casual clothes, turned south off of Beekman Street and slowly rolled up in front of the market. The long, two-story white building of concrete and brick had a series of street-level doorways that served as the entrance to the individual fish resellers. Signs were affixed above the wide doorways, each advertising the business therein: FAIR FISH CO. INC., S&R SEAFOOD, MANHATTAN FISH CO., and more than a dozen others.

Heavily clothed workers were moving about busily, carrying boxes and pushing two-wheel dollies. Trucks, both local delivery and over-the-road tractor trailers, were being steadily loaded.

“There it is,” Canidy said, pointing to a doorway five businesses down. The sign above it read: SAMMY’S WHOLESALE SEAFOOD CO.

A forklift carrying a pallet with a four-foot-tall wooden bin piled high with iced-down fish was moving quickly into Sammy’s. The cab dodged it and pulled up outside the doorway, its brakes squealing to a stop.

Canidy paid the fare, and they got out and started toward the doorway. Canidy carried his attaché case with the Sicily books and charts.

Fulmar sniffed and made a face. “Rather rank, huh?”

Canidy inhaled deeply—but didn’t gag, which surprised Fulmar.

“This?” Canidy said. “This is nothing. You should go around back, where the boats come in. It’s really raw there.”

They walked through the large doorway and stepped around the back of the forklift that now was putting down its load beside a wo

oden table thirty feet long and topped with a sheet of dented, bloodstained galvanized tin.

Behind the table stood four men with long, thin-bladed filet knives. They began to methodically pull fish from the just-delivered box, and, with surgical skill—remarkable both for their spare efficient motions and for their ability to completely remove all useful flesh—began to separate tissue from bone.

The large filets were then slid down the tin tabletop, where another worker put them in a twenty-gallon scoop that hung by chain below an enormous scale suspended from a steel ceiling beam.

When the scale’s long black needle rotated on the dial face to the number 20, the worker then packed the fish filets with shaved ice into smaller boxes, these made of heavy waxed cardboard and imprinted with: PERISHABLE FRESH SEAFOOD—20 LBS.—SAMMY’S WHOLESALE SEAFOOD CO. NYC.

The full boxes were then stacked on a new pallet, which, when full, the forklift would carry out to one of the delivery trucks.

All around the open-air facility, workers moved fish in various states of processing—from full carcasses to just head and bones—by spiking them with handheld two-foot-long gaffs (cold steel hooks on short shafts). Occasionally, a couple of workers would wheel around dollies carrying forty-gallon galvanized tubs of squid and octopus.

The forklift driver—a fat, squat, rough-looking Italian with coal black eyes set deep in a weathered face—put the lift in reverse, inched it backward, and, when the forks were clear of the pallet of fish, raced the engine and manipulated a lever that very noisily brought the forks a foot off the ground. Then he very quickly backed the lift outside, where he switched off the engine and jumped free as it slowed and then came to a stop all by itself.

He walked back inside the large doors and looked at Canidy and Fulmar.

“Help you guys?” he asked agreeably.