Chicago in February was bitter cold.
The year was 1943. Half a world away, the greatest war in human history raged across Europe and Asia, swallowing nations whole. But here in Chicago—one of America's most vital industrial centers, yet safely removed from any battlefield—life carried on with an almost surreal normalcy.
The streets bustled with traffic during the day. Shop windows gleamed with merchandise. Men in fedoras and women in fashionable coats hurried past one another, their breath misting in the frigid air. If not for the recruitment posters plastered on every other lamppost—Uncle Sam's stern finger pointing at passersby—you'd hardly believe the deadliest conflict in human history was happening at all.
None of which mattered to Josie.
He walked down the busy street in an ill-fitting coat, shoulders hunched against the wind, until he pushed through the door of a roadside shop. A bell chimed overhead.
"Have a look around!" the elderly shopkeeper called out without glancing up. He was hunched over the counter, fiddling with the guts of an old radio.
The place was a general store—the kind that sold everything from scissors and cutlery to radios and vinyl records, all arranged in neat rows on wooden shelves that had probably been there since the last century. But Josie wasn't here to buy.
He was here to sell.
"I heard you buy gold," he said, walking straight to the counter.
The old man finally looked up. His eyebrows rose slightly when he saw a boy of fifteen or sixteen standing before him, but he nodded anyway.
Without hesitation, Josie pulled a small pouch from inside his coat and set it on the counter. He loosened the drawstring and let the contents spill out: gold jewelry, crude but unmistakably real.
"Huh." The shopkeeper leaned forward, examining the pieces with a practiced eye. "Looks almost like Native American craftsmanship. But not quite. Where'd you get this?"
"Does Native American work pay better?" Josie asked, deflecting the question.
"No. Doesn't fit the mainstream taste." The old man shrugged. "Rich ladies don't go for that rough style. This'll all get melted down anyway."
"How much?"
"Hold on, hold on. Let me check it proper first."
The shopkeeper shuffled to the back and returned with a collection of tools—a measuring cup, water, and a balance scale. Josie waited patiently. He'd done his homework before coming here. This was Old Hawke's place, a well-established shop that had been in the neighborhood for decades. It also operated as a pawnshop on the side, which meant discretion was part of the business.
What Josie was selling wasn't strictly illegal. Well—technically, private gold transactions had been banned under Roosevelt's executive order a decade ago, and the law wouldn't be fully repealed until Nixon's time. But with the war on and refugees flooding into the country, the government had bigger concerns. Small-scale gold trading was common enough if you knew where to go.
The legal route was to sell to a bank at the official rate: thirty-five dollars per ounce. But only a fool would do that.
On the black market, gold fetched fifty dollars an ounce.
Fifteen dollars difference per ounce. That didn't sound like much until you considered what fifteen dollars meant in 1943. A proper restaurant meal—coffee, meat, vegetables, the works—cost maybe sixty cents. A hamburger was twenty. Fifteen dollars could feed a man like a king for over a week.
Josie had brought ten ounces. That was a hundred and fifty dollars he'd be leaving on the table if he went to the bank. Two or three months' wages for an average worker.
Average. That was a funny word. The statisticians liked to say the average American income had topped a thousand dollars a year by now. But averages meant nothing when factory workers scraped by on seven or eight hundred, and that was considered good money. Why else did so many young men sign up for the war? A private earned fifty dollars a month. Make sergeant, and you were pulling in a hundred, plus benefits.
A hundred and fifty dollars was real money. Josie wasn't about to hand it over to the Bank of America out of an abundance of caution.
The shopkeeper finished his measurements. "Purity's not great. About eighty percent. Best I can do is forty per ounce."
"Deal."
Josie had expected as much. The gold's purity couldn't be high—the metallurgy of that world was primitive at best. Barbarian gold from people who could barely smelt steel. Forty dollars an ounce was more than fair.
"Good lad." The old man seemed pleased by Josie's quick acceptance. He turned, pulled a roll of bills from somewhere behind the counter, peeled off two, and handed the rest over. "Nine-point-eight ounces total, but I'll round up to ten. Four hundred dollars. Count it."
Josie did. Eight fifty-dollar bills, crisp and real. In an era before credit cards, big bills weren't unusual—not like in the future, where fifties were practically extinct.
"Can you break one of these?" He pushed a fifty back across the counter. "Fives would be best. Tens work too."
The shopkeeper nodded and exchanged it for a roll of smaller bills. Josie counted again, tucked the money into his coat, and turned to leave.
"Come back anytime you've got more," the old man called after him. "Old Hawke's got a good reputation around here."
Josie paused at the door, glancing back. "I'll keep that in mind."
The bell chimed again as he stepped out into the cold.