Duke checked over Carney’s shoulder and adopted a tone of confidence. “I’m glad you’re here, Raymond. We’re trying to broaden our ranks around here—so it’s not the same type. We can only accept a few men each year, that’s what’s hard about it.”
Carney got a feeling.
“Being that selective, sometimes a man, if he wants to head to the front of the line, he’ll add a sweetener. So he doesn’t get overlooked.”
“How sweet?”
“That depends on the man and how front of the line. Last year we had a fellow—I won’t say his name, I’m discreet, you have to be in banking—arrived at the number five.”
After having bona fide criminals put the bite on him—dirty cops, dudes who cut people’s faces off—Duke’s genteel shakedown almost made him chuckle. Like last week when May got mad because he wouldn’t let her jump on the couch and she punched him in the arm—was that supposed to hurt? There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.
Carney asked for Duke’s card. The banker had leased an office in the Mill Building, on Madison, after he resigned from Carver Federal to start the community bank. The forces in the room changed vector and Duke was carried to another part of the room. To put the bite on someone else. Or were sweeteners only for the sons of crooks?
Five hundred dollars. Crooked world, straight world, same rules—everybody had a hand out for the envelope. A five-hundred-dollar investment in the future of Carney’s Furniture if business kept rolling in like it was. A second store, a third? The members of the Dumas Club circulated around him in the room: whiskey in hand, elbows in ribs. They were a collection of chumps, but he’d need these Dumas chumps for permits, loans, to keep the city off his back. To give the okay one day down the line, or as bagmen for kickbacks to inspectors, to men in departments downtown he’d never heard of. Department of Skimming a Little Off the Top, Office of the Occasional Shakedown.
John wasn’t even two yet. By the time his son was old enough to help out with the family business—in a real way, not as a stock boy, as Carney’d gotten his start—the seeds of what he planted with the Dumas Club will have blossomed. It was a betrayal of certain principles, sure, a philosophy about achieving success despite—and to spite—men like these. Condescending Leland types, Alexander Oakes and his lapdog buddies. But these were new times. The city is ever-changing, everything and everyone must keep up or fall behind. The Dumas Club had to adapt, and so did Carney.
* * *
* * *
When he told Elizabeth about Pierce’s invitation, she said, “Hmm.” The Dumas was out of character, as any survey of his comments about the club over the years would attest. Part of him thought she’d be pleased. Surely it was a sign of maturity to set aside cherished animosities in the name of pragmatism. To shed some armor. No New Frontier stretched before him, endless and bountiful—that was for white folks—but this new land was a few blocks at least and in Harlem a few blocks was everything. A few blocks was the difference between strivers and crooks, between opportunity and the hard scrabble.
She had more to share when Carney returned from the mixer and told her that he was going for one of those rings.
“Why in the world would you do that? Those men are terrible.”
“You said raise my profile.” He tugged his tie loose. “This is raising.”
“Not like that. There are some real SOBs in that club, I’ve been around them my whole life.”
“Like Uncle Willie?”
“He’s the worst of those shitheels,” she said.
Elizabeth’s vocabulary was saltier these days. She’d returned to Black Star Travel six months after John was born and the work had changed in her absence. They still served their old client pool, but now the company handled bookings for civil rights groups, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality, navigating safe travel and lodging for their excursions into the most hostile and backward places. The stakes were different. One of their mainstay hotels in Mississippi had been firebombed. It was a warning—nobody got hurt. But they could have been. Just last month, the Klan stopped a bus of Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, and tried to burn them alive inside. An undercover cop on board waved his gun around and scared the mob off before the gas tanks exploded. The pictures were in the papers, testimony to the pure white madness she’d sent people into. Black Star hadn’t set up that Anniston trip, but they’d organized plenty others like it. Yes, she was saltier now. It suited her.
“It’ll be good to have some of them in my corner,” Carney said.
“Hmm,” Elizabeth said. “Should I ask my father to put in a good word? Have you told him?”
“Said he was glad to see me there.” He told her she didn’t need to bother him with it. Then one of the kids started wailing, and that was that.
At their next Chock Full o’Nuts lunch, Pierce said he hadn’t heard of anyone handing over an envelope before. “I’d say it was a test of whether or not you’d do it, but I know that nigger likes money too much.” He shrugged. “We’ve been to the circus enough times to know how people do—even ‘Mr. Community’ Dukes.” Pierce didn’t say pay it. And he didn’t say not to. They hailed Sandra for another cup of joe.
Carney scraped the money together. Put a dent in the apartment fund, on top of the recent expansion costs, but he’d replenish it. The savings account devoted to the new apartment—no more hiding cash in boots under his bed—waxed and waned. Knocking out the wall between his store and the bakery cost more than the estimate. Every extra dollar extracted by Gray he experienced as a pain. Plus Marie’s salary every other Friday. Elizabeth wasn’t up to a move when she was pregnant, then John’s arrival made it complicated, and things kept coming up. Maybe wait until Elizabeth gets settled back at work. Maybe best to hold off until construction is done. Whenever the fund shrank, so did their apartment: The hallway pressed on him, the living room squeezed. Elizabeth thought the kids’ room was plenty big, but Carney could barely fit between May’s and John’s twin beds, stepping over those damn toys. And the bathroom, he felt like a crowbar every time he went take a piss.
The money from the fencing side kicked in when he needed it, though. Business was doing nicely there, with his new contact. More crooked in one direction and more legit in the other—careful you don’t split yourself in half, Carney. He tucked the five bills into a manila envelope, wrapped the string around the button, and folded it over three times.
* * *
* * *
Carney visited the Mill Building twice that month. The first time was to drop off the envelope, and the second was to get it back.
The Mill, on the corner of Madison and 125th, was where respectable Negro gentlemen hung their shingle these days. Names in gold paint on frosted glass. Doctors had their floor, dentists another, and Duke installed himself in a corridor of lawyers, corner office. Carney had to imagine the view, as he only made it as far as the small reception room. The secretary Candace was a perky young gal in a red-and-white-checked dress, bouffant hairdo like an extra Supreme. Duke was married—his wife was a bigwig in Negro society, summoning the usual crowd for charity events that got written up in gossip pages—but he had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Carney made an assumption.
Candace poked her head into her boss’s office. Carney didn’t catch the exchange.
“Mr. Duke says you can leave it with me,” she said, closing the door as if sneaking out after putting a baby to sleep.
“He did?”
She nodded. Carney understood a predilection for middlemen, being one himself. He gave her the envelope.
A week later, a messenger appeared at the door of Carney’s office. Carney recognized him from the mixer, one of the young bartenders, paying dues. He took the envelope and tipped the kid a dollar for his trouble.
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Sometimes you order something from a Sears catalog and when it arrives, it’s not what you paid for. He had not paid for what he held in his hands: a letter from the Dumas Club expressing regret that they could not extend an offer of admission.
Carney spent the next hour in his office. When the phone rang, Rusty answered it and told him Pierce was on the line. He waved his hand in dismissal.
He walked to the Mill. Candace answered his knock with a “Come on in.” They’d finished lunch, sandwiches, empty wax-paper squares open like sunflowers. Duke sat on the corner of Candace’s desk, eating jelly candies from a glass jar she kept next to a small brass lamp. He gestured to his mouth—can’t talk—and brought Carney along into his office.
Fifth floor, Duke did indeed have a nice view of the Bronx. On the other side of the Harlem River, industrial buildings and warehouses and then sturdy tenements steamed in the heat, poking into the yellowish smog that got worse every year.
Framed on one wall, centered among numerous diplomas and citations and testaments to his character, hung a large drawing of Duke as Napoleon, one too large to have run in the Gazette. He must have commissioned it from the newspaper cartoonist himself. Godzilla-sized, George Washington Bridge behind him as he forded the Hudson with one big foot poised to stomp the West Side Highway. French general’s hat in its proper place instead of the beanie.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you, Raymond,” Duke said when they were seated. “In the end, I’m only one voice of many.”
“You ripped me off.”
“How’d you expect it to turn out, Raymond?”
“For you to respect the terms.”
“I said I’d move your name to the front and that’s what I did.”
“You take a sweetener, it’s a guarantee.” The yellow smog—it was like you saw everybody’s bad thoughts lurking in the air.
“Where you from, man?”
“127th Street.”
“One of those places. How’d you think it was going to go?” Duke was practiced in conversations like this. At the bank snatching back loans, foreclosing on hope. Here were passionless statements of fact.
Carney said, “I’ll take my money.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Like I said.” He stood.
Duke regarded the visitor on the other side of his desk as if peering over the parapet of a castle. His eyes sparkled. Since he left the bank, it was only once or twice a day that the world handed him such opportunities for malice. Three times if he was lucky. He barked at the front office. “Candace, can you call the precinct?”
“Call the police on me?” Carney said.
Candace cracked the door. “Are you all right, Mr. Duke?”
Carney’s father was the one you called police on, not him.
Duke stared at Carney and slowly opened the top drawer of his desk. He slipped his hand inside as if a pistol waited. Harlem bankers, they are prepared.
Out on the pavement, Carney could barely see. The people on the street were shadow-shapes moving around him. It was a normal afternoon and he’d been shunted outside it. A cabbie pounded on his horn at an old biddy jaywalking and she cursed him out, dragging a battered green suitcase. One of the street preachers yelled, “I’m saving souls here!” and raised his arms as if parting seas. Down the block, two newsboys from rival papers fought over the turf in front of a cigar store. Their dropped tabloids fanned out on the sidewalk and trembled in the exhaust of a city bus. Carney squinted. Here was every street corner in this city, populated by noisy, furious characters who were all salesmen, delivering dead pitches for bum products to customers who didn’t have a fucking nickel anyway. He moved one foot then the other.
Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.
His father—how would he have phrased it? “I’ll burn that nigger’s house down while he sleeps.” In more innocent days, Carney preferred to think of that as a figure of speech; it was more than likely that his father had done that thing once or twice. Wilfred Duke lived in a fine and stately eight-story building on Riverside Drive, the Cumberland, and the complexities of burning it down were numerous and varied, even if Carney had arson in his repertoire. Which he did not.
No. Fire was too quick. And Carney by nature was more of the biding type.
TWO
The Big Apple Diner faced a row of four-story brownstones that had been built by the same developer at the end of the previous century. Identical doglegged stoops, leaf brackets and keystones, wood cornices, one after the other from one corner to the next. From across the street, the houses had distinguished themselves from one another over time through the plantings out front, the decorations behind the front-door glass, and window treatments—the accumulated decisions of the residents and modifications by the owners. One misguided soul had painted one of the exteriors a mealy peach color and now it stuck out, the rotten one in the barrel. A single blueprint—funded by speculators, executed by immigrant construction gangs—had summoned this divergent bounty.
Carney imagined beyond the facades; he was looking for something. Inside, the brownstones had remained one-family homes, or been cut up into individual apartments, and their rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint color, what had been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. In this room, the oldest son was born on a lumpy canopy bed by the window; in that parlor the old bachelor had proposed to his mail-order bride; here the third floor had been the stage, variously, for slow-to-boil divorces and suicide schemes and suicide attempts. Also undetectable were the impressions of more mundane activities: the satisfying breakfasts and midnight confidences, the making of daydreams and resolutions. Carney imagined himself inside because he was looking for evidence of himself. Was there an Argent wingback chair or Heywood-Wakefield armoire in one of them, over by the window, the proof of a sale he’d closed? It was a new game he played, walking around this unforgiving town: Is my stuff in there?
He was working on an equation: X Number of Items sold to X Number of Customers over X Number of Years. Business was sturdy enough that a couple of times a day, more likely than not, he passed one of his customers’ homes. Maybe not this block, but maybe the next one past the light. The stuff from his store had to go somewhere; the customers weren’t chaining it to anvils and pitching those sweet beech-armed sofas into the Hudson River. One day, given the distribution of his customers across Harlem, there might be one of his wares on every uptown block. He’d never know when he hit that milestone, but maybe he’d get a tingly feeling, a sense of satisfaction as he walked the streets.
One day.
The Big Apple Diner was on Convent near 141st Street, halfway up the block. Carney had taken one of the window tables. He waited for Freddie. His cousin was late and it was fifty-fifty whether he’d show. At least it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
The diner was a shabby operation, the cracks in the floor caulked by grime, the windows cloudy. The air smelled like burning hair, but it was not hair, it was the food they served. They probably did a nice morning trade and lunch, too, but at three o’clock the place was dead. The waitress was half in the bag, lurching and muttering. When not groaning at his gentle requests, she tipped cigarette ash into a tin ashtray on the counter and waved away the flies. The housefly traffic this time of day was brisk, but Carney doubted it covered the rent.
Carney grabbed two newspapers from the table behind him. It was his habit to consult the furniture ads to see what kind of specials the competition was offering this week. The Fischer outlet, on Coney Islan
d, was selling patio furniture. Notable in that the company had branched out into manufacturing outdoor furniture; business was good. He didn’t sell Fischer products, but it was good to keep tabs on the big players. All-American took out a quarter-page ad—not cheap—to announce a sale on their Argent merchandise. Their sofa was ten bucks cheaper than Carney sold it for, a rare discount for them. All-American was on Lexington, though, and his customers weren’t going to make the trip. Go all the way down there and then the white salesman ignores you or treats you like you were nothing. Carney was fine. He was spending more time away from the store, leaving a lot to Rusty, but Rusty was capable. Now that the man was engaged to be married, he was eager for the commissions. And Marie had quickly taught him that he should have hired a secretary long ago.
The A1 page of the Times had a couple of columns on Mayor Wagner announcing that he was running for a third term, and tossing Tammany Hall off his back. All that city hall intrigue was over Carney’s head. Like shopping when you go into a white store—the rules were different downtown. Uptown, the machine’s man was on the ballot and that was that. He didn’t have a strong opinion on Wagner. Did the mayor like black people? He wasn’t out to get us, that was the important thing. The recent antidrug push was meant to save white people, but its immediate beneficiaries were the good people who were too scared to walk their own neighborhood, who worried over their children when they disappeared past the front stoop. Someone helps you out by accident, it’s still help.
Carney had finished his ham and cheese when Freddie finally showed up.
“Ain’t you supposed to be at work?” Freddie said.
Harlem Shuffle Page 12