Chapter 213: Stressing Out
?A Day Later, the Christmas decorations had not yet been cleared from the grand staircase, but the festive warmth of the holidays had already been buried beneath stacks of crisp white paper, ink-stained blotters, and long working hours.
?In the quiet privacy of his second-floor office, Ricky sat behind his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows, staring down at a blank requisition form. Across the room, Evelyn worked at a small side table, her pen scratching steadily against parchment as she drafted a standardized personnel register. In the corner, Phil and James McClain were knee-deep in sorting requisition procedures and departmental guidelines, their brows furrowed in concentration.
?They were attempting to write the administrative DNA for an empire.
?Every department head appointed the previous day had departed the estate with a title, a mandate, and a charter. What they had not departed with—because it had never existed before—was a manual on how to run it.
?The core difficulty was simple: the men chosen to lead the new branches were experts in their fields, but none of them had ever managed an organization of this scale. John Caldwell knew how to position security teams and evaluate threats, but he had never maintained a formal personnel register or processed institutional expense reports. Tom Murphy understood numbers, but he had never audited a multi-tiered corporate syndicate. Patrick and Sean Williams knew how to move freight, but they had no experience with standardized inventory requisition forms or interdepartmental shipping ledgers.
?As a result, the Central Directorate was effectively writing every rule, form, and procedure from scratch.
?Ricky dragged a hand through his hair, leaving a faint smudge of black ink across his forehead. He picked up his pen and began drafting yet another explanatory note detailing how interdepartmental expense transfers should be recorded and signed off.
?Phil McClain glanced across the room, eyeing another towering stack of unfinished drafts on his desk. He dropped his pen with a soft sigh. "I thought we were establishing independent departments, Ricky. Somehow, we’ve created a second, full-time occupation for every department."
?James McClain looked up from his papers, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. "At this rate, we’re going to need an entirely separate department just to manage the paperwork for the other departments."
?Ricky didn’t look up from his ledger. He dipped his nib into the inkwell. "Don’t tempt me. I’ll appoint the two of you to run it."
?A brief, tired chuckle moved through the room, cutting the heavy tension for a moment before the scratching of pens resumed.
?The joke broke the silence, but the underlying problem remained untouched. Ricky had designed the organization around delegation, decentralization, and shared responsibility. Yet here he sat, acting as the ultimate bottleneck because he remained the only person who understood how all the pieces fit together. Until the directors learned how to govern their own branches, the Central Directorate had to provide the scaffolding.
?Evelyn kept the process from dissolving into chaos. She moved methodically from desk to desk, reviewing forms to ensure that uniform rules were being applied across the board, preventing every department from inventing its own conflicting bureaucracy.
?Building an institution, Ricky realized, was infinitely less glamorous than founding one.
?While the paperwork piled up in the main office, another critical task demanded attention: evaluating and sorting candidates for the third batch of Pound Ridge recruits.
?The formalization of eight operational departments had created an immediate, voracious demand for human capital. The Intelligence Department needed quiet observers, cryptographers, and analytical clerks. Communications required disciplined message handlers and telegraph operators. Logistics needed sharp minds who understood inventory control, scheduling, and warehouse management. Welfare required empathetic, steady-going individuals capable of organizing relief work and interacting directly with vulnerable families.
?Yet Ricky refused to fall into the trap of treating every new recruit as a blunt instrument.
?Late that afternoon, Ricky, Evelyn, and the McClain brothers gathered in the West Wing conference room to review the dossiers of forty incoming candidates who had completed their initial vetting in Westchester and Greenwich Village. It was the first time they had to recruit someone not from Greenwich Village, except for the prostitutes which they had rescued from De George’s previous operations.
?"We can’t treat every man or woman who walks through our doors as a field operative," Ricky said, flipping through a candidate’s file. "Look at this one—Arthur reports he failed his physical endurance drills twice. But his background is three years as a junior clerk at a commercial import house in Brooklyn, and his handwriting is immaculate."
?Evelyn reviewed the margin notes. "We can put him in Communications or Logistics. We need men who can track a manifest without losing their minds."
?"You’re right," Ricky nodded. "The organization’s strength isn’t just in the people who can handle themselves in a street fight. It’s in the people who keep the machinery greased behind the scenes."
?They spent hours reorganizing the lists. A candidate lacking raw physical strength but possessing a calm temperament and a talent for arithmetic was quietly moved away from intelligence fieldcraft and earmarked for Tom Murphy’s Treasury department. Another recruit with a background in nursing was flagged for the welfare branch.
?The exercise reinforced a foundational reality: the Syndicate was no longer recruiting for Ricky’s personal circle of surviving street friends. It was building a permanent, specialized institution.
?And with that growth came a new set of practical risks. More departments meant more personnel. More personnel meant more training, more housing, more supervision—and exponentially more opportunities for human error.
?Meanwhile, Gary Schuffman was discovering what it meant to supervise a growing network rather than merely execute tasks himself.
?Inside the estate’s communications room—which served as the central node for the entire system—Gary and his core team were working frantically to maintain order. Telegraph lines clicked softly, couriers arrived every hour from the White Plains railyard and the Pound Ridge camp, and coded letters awaited decryption.
?For months, Gary had handled nearly every message personally. He knew every pigeon loft, every sympathetic hotel desk clerk, and every trusted railway porter by name.
?Now, sitting behind an oak desk cluttered with cipher books and incoming dispatch tubes, he realized he could no longer keep track of everything with his own eyes.
?A junior clerk hurried into the room, holding a pink telegraph slip. "Mr. Schuffman, a routine inventory update just arrived from the White Plains warehouse, but it’s marked with a secondary routing code. Should I forward it straight to Marek’s office or log it here first?"
?Gary rubbed his tired eyes, looking at the slip. He had spent the last three hours answering similar questions.
?"I can keep track of every message myself," Gary muttered, half to himself, "but I can’t keep doing that once the network doubles in size."
?Evelyn, who had ridden down to inspect the central communications hub that afternoon, stood quietly near the doorway. She walked over, looking down at his cluttered desk.
?"Then your job is no longer to handle every single message," Evelyn said evenly. "It’s to make certain the people handling them do their jobs correctly."
?Gary looked up, letting out a dry breath. He recognized the truth in her words. His promotion wasn’t just a reward for past service; it required him to stop working like an individual clerk and start thinking like the head of a major department.
?He immediately set to work implementing stricter protocols. He divided incoming communications into strict tiers: routine matters went directly to the responsible department office; sensitive intelligence, potential security breaches, and multi-department reports were routed straight to the Central Directorate for assessment. More importantly, he began training ten trusted subordinates to handle routine dispatch verification, stepping back to retain oversight only over the critical nerve paths.
?The communications network was evolving into the nervous system of the Syndicate—and Gary was finally learning how to let it breathe without his hands on every single pulse.
?In Greenwich Village, in the abandoned MacDougal Alley storehouse, John Caldwell was experiencing his own growing pains.
?The MacDougal Alley warehouse—once the humble hideout—now served as the temporary headquarters for the Department of Intelligence and Special Operations.
?John stood in the center of the familiar stone room, his arms crossed over his chest, watching half a dozen field agents move through the space. The location was practical because of its familiarity and lack of foot traffic, but it lacked the compartmentalization a formal intelligence bureau required.
?"We need a hard wall built right there," John instructed a field agent, pointing toward the corner near the loading dock. "Separate the administrative desks from the debriefing room. I don’t want everyone walking in off the street staring at active case files."
?Davis walked in from the back courtyard, carrying a clipboard filled with training rosters. "The second company is ready for assignment inspection, John. Where do you want them bunked?"
?"Put surveillance on the upper floor, and keep the tactical squads in the basement quarters," John muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.
?Caleb and Eli Morgan stepped out of the newly designated archive room, both looking slightly out of place amid the rising tide of paperwork.
?"John," Eli said, holding up a stack of weekly observation logs. "Arthur says we have to fill these out in triplicate and log every time we check in with an informant. Since when do we need three copies of a street report?"
?"Since the boss wrote a charter, Eli," John replied dryly, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced himself.
?John was far more comfortable managing men in the field, tracking targets, or handling immediate tactical crises than he was maintaining a growing department’s bureaucratic archives. Yet, as he looked around the bustling warehouse, he understood why Ricky had insisted on formal structures. Without reliable reporting channels, an intelligence network would drown in a sea of unverified rumors, unable to separate noise from actionable truth.
?The warehouse was no longer just a place where Ricky’s people gathered to hide out. It was becoming the first recognizable center of an underground intelligence service—operating silently in the heart of New York while the city above remained entirely blind to its existence.