Firo Prochainezo, a young member of New York's small Martillo Family, is working his way toward the ceremony that will make him a made man in Prohibition-era America. His city also holds alchemists who won immortality from a demon's elixir two centuries earlier and can die only by being devoured by one of their own, and when that elixir surfaces again among the bootleggers, thieves and mafiosi of 1930, everyone chasing it converges at once. Blundering gleefully through the middle of the mess are the fugitive robbers Isaac and Miria, oblivious to the carnage around them.