“Late lunch. Why don’t you order something?”
Freddie shook his head. Freddie was in one of his lean periods, belt cinched. Carney was used to his cousin’s spells. What was new was Freddie’s indifference to his appearance. The rumpled gray polo shirt was borrowed and he needed to get his ass to D’s Barbershop. It was possible that he’d just gotten out of bed.
Reading Carney’s frown, Freddie said, “Elizabeth told me you’d be in a bad mood.”
“What?”
“I saw her on the street. She said you were in one of your moods.”
“You work hard every day, sometimes you’ll be in a bad mood.” He wondered what was on her mind—his mood or his new hours.
“I wouldn’t know,” Freddie said. They chuckled. The waitress walked over and muttered something. Freddie winked at her, plucked a sandwich crust off Carney’s plate, and gobbled it up. When she retreated, Freddie said, “What’s on around town?”
That meant gimme dirt, in his lingo. With regards to crooked characters of their mutual acquaintance, Carney told him that Lester and Birdy had been pinched and were currently cooling it in Rikers. Lester lost his head over girls, ever since they were kids. This time he wasn’t chasing tail—he’d stabbed his girlfriend’s sister at a Memorial Day barbecue in Gravesend for making fun of his pants. “The ambulance took her away and then they went back to eating that chicken.”
As for Birdy, he fell off a fire escape while sneaking out of a third-floor apartment, Carney informed his cousin. Dude was out cold on the sidewalk when the police found him, somebody else’s wallet sticking out of his pocket.
“Zippo got picked up for kiting checks,” Freddie said. “Arrested him at his mom’s house.” The cousins groaned and grimaced.
“He should stick to the movies,” Carney said.
Before Zippo fell on hard times and started bouncing checks, he took boudoir photos, or “glamour shots,” he called them, with a sideline selling stag movies to those interested in that sort of thing. Last spring he’d hired this young lady who wanted to make some extra money, and her man caught wind and made a mess. Smashed his equipment, and Zippo’s face. That was three months ago and Zippo was still trying to get back on his feet.
“How’s business with you?” Freddie asked.
Freddie hadn’t been by since the renovation, part of which involved carving out a door in the wall between Carney’s office and the street. It allowed Carney to exit onto Morningside between 125th and 126th and bypass the showroom. And have people enter that way, too, after six p.m. when he sent Rusty and Marie home.
“They think I’m a good boss because I never let them work late,” Carney said. The cousins laughed again, as if over one of their shared jokes from the old days, like quoting James Cagney from White Heat—“Top of the world!”—when some mope did something especially stupid.
He wasn’t sure if he should mention it, but he did anyway: Chink Montague had had some falling out with Lou Parks, his longtime fence, and was now referring business Carney’s way. For a cut. “So now Chink gets his weekly envelope from me and then a finder’s fee on top,” Carney said. “He’s worse than Uncle Sam.”
It was a reversal. Time was, Freddie was the one who had stuff cooking. “Good for you,” Freddie said. “If that nigger only knew.” They rarely mentioned the Theresa job, the last two years. Freddie still undertook the odd petty theft, but it was jewelry now, bracelets and necklaces, no appliances. He hadn’t brought Carney in on a job after that one time, and as far as Carney knew, hadn’t worked with a crew since. Until last winter, Freddie had been a runner for Chet Blakely, handling a nice route on Amsterdam in the 130s, with two old-age residences and traffic from the college. But Chet Blakely got clipped on New Year’s Day outside the Vets Club, and that was the end of that upstart operation. Carney didn’t know what his cousin had been up to since then. This meeting had only come to pass after he’d left half a dozen messages at Nightbirds, having tried everything else.
“You been taking care of yourself?” Carney asked.
“I should ask you that—you the one working with Chink.” Freddie caught on to the purpose of this meeting. He pursed his lips. “My mom’s been talking to you.”
Carney admitted that was why he’d invited him here. Aunt Millie hadn’t seen him in three months. Usually he dropped by sooner than that, for a meal at least.
The front door to a brownstone across the street opened. Two teenage girls in brightly striped shirts skipped down the stoop and turned uptown.
“What are you looking at?” Freddie asked.
Carney shook his head: nothing. “I told Aunt Millie I hadn’t seen you for a while.” If Freddie wondered why they were meeting at the Big Apple, as opposed to one of their regular joints, he didn’t say. “Where you sleeping these days?”
“I’ve been bunking with my friend Linus. Over on Madison.”
“Who’s that?”
“You know, he’s this cat I met in the Village.”
Freddie told the story as if it were a caper. It was at the apartment of some rich white chick at NYU, after an open showcase at a MacDougal Street coffeehouse. “The Magic Bean or the Hairy Toledo or something.” Freddie was the only Negro in attendance, and after some conversation (“What’s it like, growing up colored?” “My daddy worked on the Scottsboro Boys case”), he got hip that he was there to perform, put on a show of some authentic uptown magic. What was a night in New York City without a trip to the theater?
“I coulda just pulled out my johnson,” Freddie said, but the reefer had made him goofy. There was some good reefer floating around the Village that month. He asked if they’d ever heard of three-card monte. The white chick set up a steamer trunk, produced a deck of cards, and lit some votive candles. All those white chicks had those little candles. Freddie did not, in fact, know how to run three-card monte—“You know me, all those cards flying around make me dizzy”—but he was having too much fun. He reeled off some jive he’d heard over the years on 125th Street and tried not to break out in laughter at their gee-whiz excitement.
Then Linus stepped up. Every three-card monte game needs a ringer to set up the rubes, and suddenly here was this shaggy white boy playing along, throwing down dollar bills onto the trunk. He knew what was up—Freddie’s role and everybody else’s—and covered for Freddie’s lapses in technique. It was hard work picking the wrong card time after time, but Linus was diligent. Out on the street, after it was apparent that nobody was getting laid, show or no show, Linus produced a joint and him and Freddie had a good laugh walking around until the sunrise. Freddie even gave him back his money, such was the feeling of bonhomie.
Linus had just got out of a stint in a sanatorium for “inverted tendencies,” Freddie said. Linus’s family was rich and patient and thought he’d made some progress after the electroshock treatments, even though it was an act on his part. Easier to act normal and cash the checks. “That electroshock? They tie you down and then zap the shit out of you ten times.”
“White people.” Carney shrugged.
“White people torturing white people—talk about your equal opportunity.”
This Linus character sounded like a head case, but on the whole it was a typical Freddie scenario: half-assed but harmless. Carney steered them back. “Aunt Millie says you’ve been hanging out with Biz Dixon lately,” he said.
Biz Dixon’s mother, Alice, was in the same church group as Aunt Millie. The women had looked after each other’s kids back when they were little, and continued to do so now that those kids had grown into crooked men. The euphemism for Biz these days among that generation was that he was spending time with a “bad element.” Another way would have been to say that Biz was a peddler. He’d been to prison twice already for selling junk, and each time he got out he returned to the streets with renewed dedication, chasing criminal renown the way musicians pu
rsued Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. From Freddie’s stories over the years, Carney knew that Biz liked to keep his spots at the lower edge of Harlem, near the subway so it was easy for white customers to score. Five minutes and they were back on the platform waiting for the train downtown. Five minutes that felt like five hours if they got that jones.
Biz sold to folks from the neighborhood, too, of course. Guys they grew up with, anyone who needed a taste. More than one of the crooks who came by the furniture store went straight to Biz’s after hitting Carney up.
Carney tried to figure out if Freddie’s appearance was on account of too many good times, or too many bad.
“Biz is around,” Freddie said. “He’s always around. So what?”
“He’s sloppy,” Carney said, “and it’ll only be a matter of time before he gets nabbed again. He sells that stuff on the playground.” That last part was solid-citizen hokum, but he couldn’t help it.
“You’re reading too many papers,” Freddie said. “Does he try to make a buck? He doesn’t try to hide anything. Put on a costume, like you. Suit and tie every day, pretty wife and kids, trying to hide shit. He’s out there trying to run a hustle the same as you.”
“You working for him?”
“What?”
“Are you working for him?”
“How could you ask me that?”
“Are you?”
“We grab some food at the Chinaman’s and hang out. We go out drinking—so what? You know we’ve always been tight.” Freddie turned his face to the street and when he looked back at Carney he’d found his disgust. “I’m pushing for him, sure,” Freddie said. “Playgrounds and churches, everywhere. I find a baby, I stick that junk in their puss. I’m shooting up fucking nuns. They lift their skirts and they’re hollering for Jesus.”
Behind the counter, the waitress hacked up something wet from her lungs and the cook said, “Oh, boy.”
Freddie said, “Asking me that.”
Carney searched his face. Maybe that was Freddie’s lying voice, maybe it wasn’t. He wasn’t sure. You can change up your lying voice and lying face if you worked at it. “You make it so I have to,” Carney said.
“Asking me that,” Freddie said. “The fucking nerve. You’re the one who should be watching out. I got a little hustle, but you don’t see me on 125th Street, got me a big sign up that says, ‘Here I am, come and get me.’ ”
An apparition appeared and banged and smacked on the glass next to them—a lanky white dude with long, greasy blond hair, dressed in a denim vest and trousers. He waggled his fingers at the window and grinned. His teeth were white and perfect.
Freddie gestured for him to wait outside. “That’s Linus. I gotta split.”
“That’s Linus?” Give him some bongos and he’d be a beatnik out of Life magazine.
“That’s what he looks like,” Freddie said. “Everybody gotta look like something.” His chair made a noise on the linoleum as he pulled away. He stopped in the doorway and said, “Now you can tell my mom you’ve seen me.” Freddie slapped Linus five and the duo swayed down the street.
The waitress had been staring. She caught Carney looking at her, raised an eyebrow, and wearily resumed refilling a napkin dispenser.
The cousins had diverged. Their mothers were sisters, so they shared some of the same material but had bent their different ways over the years. Like the row of buildings across the street—other people and the years tugging them away from the original plans. The city took everything into its clutches and sent it every which way. Maybe you had a say in what direction, and maybe you didn’t.
Almost four o’clock. This was his third visit to Big Apple. Was he a regular? This was not Chock Full o’Nuts, and the waitress was no Sandra. The staff decided when you were a regular, not you. Perhaps one day, she’d act more friendly. Recognize him, at the very least. Up here, he was not going to run into Pierce. It had been three weeks since he got the envelope from the Dumas Club. He’d pinned their note under the window to the showroom, next to the yellow slips identifying delinquent customers and installment plans gone awry. The paper made an exhibit of money owed him, debts to be honored. Customers, vendors—there’s some delinquent money, a hitch in the order, but once you get paid it’s back to business as usual. Other times, you get what’s yours, and you’re done with them.
At one minute before four o’clock, Wilfred Duke stepped out of one of the brownstones, number 288. The banker straightened his tie and patted the pockets of his gray pinstripe pants after his wallet. Some people, they walk out of a place they shouldn’t be and they look around to see if anyone has caught them. Slink away. Not Duke. He glanced at his watch and walked south in the direction of his office.
Carney had hired a man to shadow the banker and the information checked out: Tuesday and Thursday at three p.m., never more than an hour. He paid the check. Carney was a fast walker. He switched over to Amsterdam so he wouldn’t overtake the banker on the way downtown. Plus there was that new furniture store on 130th. Never hurt to size up the competition.
No, not a wasted trip at all.
THREE
The last time he was in Times Square, the air-raid siren howled and suddenly the good citizens of Manhattan were cockroaches after God had flicked on the kitchen light. They skittered into the lobbies of buildings and theaters, crouched inside subway entrances, wedged shoulder to shoulder in doorways. Another tedious drill robbing ten precious minutes from their lunch hour. The last civilians off the street were cabbies and truckers and motorists, who squeezed in with the rest after pulling over. Carney thought this last part strange—keeping the roads clear for evacuation. Soviets drop the bomb, Broadway traffic is the least of your hassles.
Then there was just a cop standing in the empty intersection, policing the nothing.
Doomsday rehearsal. At the siren, Carney darted into the Horn & Hardart and took a spot by the window with the rest of the refugees. At least in a bomb shelter, in a skyscraper basement, you could kid yourself you’d have a chance. What protection was plate glass against the Big One? Carney pictured the windows of the high-rises bursting into shards, ripping the air. The Automat’s slots were tiny apartments for sandwiches and soup, and he made their windows explode, too, onto the scuffed linoleum. Everybody staring at the street. That’s what they did during air raids: stare dumbly into the street. As if this time something might happen. Carney jammed in with white strangers: in elevators, trains, and on doomsday. The old white lady next to him cradled a poodle and said, “I hope they do drop it.” The dog stuck out its tongue.
The siren stopped and the massive contraption of the city chugged and shuddered as it resumed operation. Carney proceeded to his appointment with Harvey Moskowitz, and on his way back home he saw Ernest Borgnine on the uptown train eating two hot dogs.
Tonight he was on another Moskowitz rendezvous, but Times Square ’round midnight was a different creature, an incandescent, stupefying bazaar. White bulbs rippled on and off in waves across the bold marquees, thin neon tubes capered and pranced—a pink martini glass, a galloping horse—among a clamor of honks and whistles and big-band brass out of dance halls. The last screening of A Raisin in the Sun let out across the street (he’d promised to take Elizabeth but it hadn’t worked out yet), next door to The Guns of Navarone (which would have been a Ray and Freddie opening-day special, but no more), and their audiences stepped onto the glistening, hosed-down concrete. Some drained to subway platforms and others were only starting the evening pursuit, peeling off to side-street saloons and knock-twice unmarked clubs. High up on Forty-Fourth Street, the big, busted Timex advertisement was working again, the mechanical arm with the space-age watch on its wrist chopping up and down: The Action Watch for Active People. The Great White Way was full of Active People to be sure, theater mavens and gamblers, goons and drunks—and also crooks, crooks aplenty in service to the
next big score.
Midnight, rise and shine. He’d been keeping crooked hours since he slipped into dorvay again, after all these years. Carney first heard the word in his financial accounting class, which had been held in a dingy lecture hall in the basement of the Economics Building. One was not assigned this room if one was held in high esteem, Carney gathered, but Professor Simonov was accustomed to indignities from his former life in a never-specified eastern European country. Occasionally the professor shared anecdotes of that period: surveillance, gallows humor in bread lines, a bedridden wife. The secret police were called “The Muntz” or “The Mintz,” Carney couldn’t be sure. Whenever the radiator clanged in interruption, Simonov halted his lecture until the pipes relented before his murderous gaze. Word had it that he never gave anything less than an A, as if to deliver one constant in the world’s capricious order.
One day in October, while impressing the importance of scrupulous vigil over one’s accounts, Simonov recommended that they pick one time every day for bookkeeping and stick to it. “It doesn’t matter when you do it, but get it done.” His father, a textiles merchant back in the old country (Romania? Hungary?), preferred the dorvay, that midnight pasture, for squaring his accounts. “We’ve forgotten now, but until the advent of the lightbulb, it was common to sleep in two shifts,” Simonov said. “The first started soon after dusk, when the day’s labor was done—if there were no lights to see, what was the point of staying up? Then we woke around midnight for a few hours before the second phase of sleep, which lasted through the morning. This was the body’s natural rhythm, before Thomas Edison let us make our own schedule.”
The British called this wakeful interval the watch, Professor Simonov explained, and in France it went by dorvay. You went over your accounts, whatever they may be—reading, praying, lovemaking, attending to pressing work, or overdue leisure. It was a respite from the normal world and its demands, a hollow of private enterprise carved out of lost hours.
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