Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  “Good riddance. Everybody talked so nice about her, it made me so mad.”

  The last time he’d been to Mam Lacey’s, it had been closed for some time, a ruin. He and Pepper had been looking for a lead on the loot from the Theresa heist and ended up there. Mam Lacey had died and her junkie son Julius had turned the place into a shooting gallery. There was a broken statue of a white stone angel in the back garden and Julius was lying on a bench in a drug stupor, the legs of the statue sticking up without a body and the torso and wings erupting next to it out of hardy Harlem weeds. Had the statue been in one piece when Miss Laura looked down from that room? And what broke it in two? He didn’t know why he thought of it—him, Julius, and Miss Laura in a triangle at Mam Lacey’s and gazing on the statue, each of them with their own view. Look at it from one way, it was not a place for an angel, look at it from another and maybe it was a place that needed an angel. And another view was that if it were beautiful, it wouldn’t last long there.

  He was going to mention the kid, Julius, then nixed the idea.

  Miss Laura said, “You come here to tell me what I want to hear?”

  “Not yet,” Carney said. There was a holdup.

  Last Thursday, the cop Munson had picked up his Thursday envelope. Carney reminded him of his proposal vis-à-vis Biz Dixon. “I said I’d work on it,” the detective told him. “Like I said, these people have friends. That in itself is not insurmountable, but it complicates. Everybody has to get pinched now and then, regardless of what they’re laying out, to keep things democratic. This is America.”

  Carney had considered giving Munson something more to sweeten the deal, but what did he have? Second-story men. Half-assed crooks. What would his father have thought, him feeding shit to the cops? Working on being a full-time rat.

  Even if he could explain the delay to Miss Laura, she was not the sympathetic sort. “A ‘hold up’?” she said. She mashed her cigarette into an L in the ashtray beside her. Lit another. “Then what good are you?”

  Bottom line, they had a deal and Carney hadn’t delivered. If the windows had been open, the smell of the flowers and her cigarettes would have been less cloying. It’s a telegram, he said to himself. A saying of his mother’s, about nights like this. She only got telegrams when it was bad news, and so his mother called that chilly night at the end of August a telegram, to warn you summer was over. Rip it up and throw it in the trash but you got the message.

  Miss Laura pulled her robe tight around her neck.

  “You asked me if my aunt is still in town?” she said. “She left our place one day, two months behind on the rent. Didn’t say a word. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She didn’t take me to Mam Lacey herself, but she made it so I had no choice but to go to Mam Lacey. That was the start of it. Now we’re here.”

  She was working up to an ultimatum. Making moves in this midnight time of the watch, like Carney. He imagined that she’d had her first sleep, too, and was getting her accounts done before she lay down for her second. All over the city there were people like them, a whole mean army of schemers and nocturnal masterminds working their rackets. Thousands and thousands toiling and plotting in their apartments and SROs and twenty-four-hour greasy spoons, waiting for the day when they will bring their plans into the daylight.

  Miss Laura rose to show him out. “Time goes by,” she said, “and a girl’s got to wonder if a man like Willie’d like to know that someone’s dogging him. He’s a fucking miser, but surely that’d be worth something. Right? To know that someone is out to get you.”

  She called down to him when he put his hand on the door to the street.

  “Get it done, Carney. You get it done.”

  SIX

  Marie gave Carney the message that his aunt expected him at four o’clock. Also told him that she and Aunt Millie had ended up talking and now his aunt was visiting the store next week for a sandwich lunch. “When she said she hadn’t seen the store since you did all this work, I made her promise.” Carney, in turn, hadn’t been to his aunt’s house in a long time. Most of their interaction these days centered around her panicked calls over Freddie. Where is he? Have you seen him? Now she wanted Carney to leave work early, in the middle of preparations for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. What kind of mess was his cousin in now? The last time he’d seen Freddie was in the Big Apple Diner, back in June.

  Aunt Millie had lived on 129th since before Carney was born. It was two blocks from where he’d grown up. Back then, the Irving sisters had dinner with the boys most Sundays—their husbands usually who knows where—and usually at Millie’s. Big Mike was unpredictable and rarely happy to come home and find people in his kitchen, family or no.

  Carney avoided the block he grew up on. He only found himself there if he was preoccupied with the store, or money, and his homing mechanism misfired. Safer to direct nostalgia for those days toward his cousin’s place on 129th Street. He knew 129th between their house and Lenox Ave by heart and still considered it his kingdom, even if no one paid him tribute. New neighbors were identified by the different curtains and lamps and Jesus paintings visible through the windows, the emergence of an intrepid plant on a sill, a Puerto Rican flag limping on a fire escape. The landlord of number 134 had finally sprung for some new trash cans. He and Freddie had busted up the old ones with firecrackers July 4, 1941. The cousins had never run so fast and never would.

  “Look at you,” Aunt Millie said, taking stock in the apartment hallway. She pulled him in and kissed him. “Those little kids rubbing off on you—you look great.” She was one to talk. He did the math—if his mother, Nancy, was born in 1907, and her sister was two years older, Aunt Millie was fifty-six. It clicked when he smelled that cake. This wasn’t about Freddie. It was his mother’s birthday.

  “You know the way,” she said, meaning the kitchen. Of course he did. For two years, this had been his home. When his mother died, his father tore off on one of his jaunts, only he didn’t come back after a day or a week. He dropped Carney off here and didn’t resurface for two months. Now that Carney thought about it, he might have been doing some jail time. When he returned, Aunt Millie suggested that Carney stay with them. He didn’t protest.

  It was fun. Uncle Pedro built a bunk bed for Freddie’s room. He was around more then and did fatherlike things, like take them to the park or the pictures. Aunt Millie was a good cook, and Carney didn’t have that blessing in his life again until he married Elizabeth. The best part was Freddie and him living like brothers. Freddie’d kick the top bunk to wake him: Hey, you up? Can you believe the look on his face? I got another idea…They had devised a jokey shorthand and way of looking at the world. When they shared a room it was like that private mythology was carved into stone tablets, by dancing fire, like in The Ten Commandments.

  Carney cried the day his father came for him and took him those two blocks home. The same building and same apartment layout, but two floors lower. Same crummy everything else.

  Carney and Aunt Mille took their old places at the kitchen table. Freddie’s seat was piled up with magazines, last week’s Amsterdam News on top. Aunt Millie wore a simple blue dress and her hair was pulled back in a bun, which meant that Pedro was away. She only fixed herself up when her husband was home for a visit; who else was there to look pretty for? Lately he spent most of the year in Florida, where he had another woman and a young daughter.

  Aunt Millie had made a butter cake with a cherry glaze. Carney complimented her energetically.

  She asked after the children and he gave her a May and John update. Elizabeth’s father had made a demeaning comment at their wedding, and now it was hard to get his aunt and his wife in the same room. The four of them, him and Elizabeth and the kids, had run into Aunt Millie on the street on July 4th, which was nice. “You at the hospital tonight?” he asked.

  “Six o’clock.” She’d take day shifts for a long stretch, the
n switch to night shifts. A few years ago she’d been promoted to some supervisory role, but most of her job was still nursing.

  “I liked talking to that Marie. She comes in all the way from Brooklyn?”

  “Every day.”

  “Raymond! With employees who take the subway in from Brooklyn!” She told him his mother would be proud—of his education, his store, the way he took care of his family. By implication: as opposed to how his father had conducted his life.

  His mother died of pneumonia in ’42, and the next year these birthday get-togethers started, at this kitchen table, Millie and the boys. Nothing fancy, nothing long, sometimes they didn’t even mention Carney’s mother at all. Jawed about movies. Freddie was the first to miss one, four years ago. Last year Carney missed it because of bronchitis. This time he’d forgotten it altogether.

  Shamed, he said, “Freddie?” To divert attention to the one who hadn’t shown up at all.

  “He doesn’t call me back,” Aunt Millie said. “I’ll run into someone, they’ve seen him at this place, they’ve seen him at some other place. He doesn’t call me back.”

  “He looked okay when I saw him.”

  She exhaled. Once they got Freddie out of the way, Carney and his aunt did what relatives and friends do sometimes—pretended that time and circumstance had not sent them down different paths, and that they were as close as they had ever been. The performance was easy for Carney; he was scheming so much these days. For his aunt, it was likely a welcome refuge. She told him that a Puerto Rican had taken over Mickey’s Grocery and filled it with these Spanish foods and drinks; Miss Isabel from upstairs had moved into the new public housing complex on 131st, where Maybelle’s Beauty used to be; and don’t eat at that new place across from the Apollo, Jimmy Ellis had a bad meatloaf there and had to get his stomach pumped.

  Things she would’ve told her husband, her son, her dear little sister, if they were around. But there was just Carney.

  To sell his enthusiasm for the annual get-together, he asked to see the photo album. Aunt Millie rummaged but couldn’t place it. When she called later that night, he thought it was to tell him she’d found it. Instead she said Freddie had been picked up. The police came for Bismarck Dixon, and he’d been there and mouthed off, you know how he does. So they took Freddie, too.

  * * *

  * * *

  Pepper was the first person Carney brought in on the Duke job. Early June, three days after the furniture salesman’s unsuccessful attempt to retrieve his five hundred dollars. Pepper occasionally used the store as an answering machine. This time he got a job out of it.

  What happened was, Pepper called Carney’s Furniture to get rendezvous instructions for his last job, a warehouse rip-off. The job had gone off without a hitch. A rug wholesaler on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, Royal Oriental, received a shipment from a particular overseas supplier twice a year. Ship comes into port, sits at customs, they off-load the rugs and carpets and what have you, and Royal Oriental forks over the dough. The night before they pay for all that inventory the warehouse safe is full of cash, foreign rugs being a notorious way to wash money.

  Some jobs, it was like Burma again. People whose faces you never saw, who you never talked to, plan the setup and you have to hope they have their shit together. When you know they don’t. He never met the bankroller of the Brooklyn robbery, or the finger, the man inside with the info on the wholesaler’s cash flow. Pepper’s partner was Roper, a lock man he’d worked with a couple of times. Roper had his head screwed on straight; that it went south that one time had been no fault of his. The brains behind the setup brought Roper in, Roper brought Pepper in, and if Pepper didn’t get the other names on this job it was fine as long as he got his share.

  The moon was full. A breeze huffed out humid air to Jersey. It was a beautiful night to be out in the city and up to no good. Pepper subdued the night man and got him out of the way. Roper punched out the safe. There was a guard dog at some point. The main thing being that nothing went sideways, they were back in the Chevy Bel Air and on the bridge like that and two days later when it was time for Pepper to pick up his cut, he used Carney as an answering machine. Pepper only used the furniture store when things were in the clear. As in the clear as things could be, given his line of work. He didn’t want to mess things up for Carney if he could help it. If he couldn’t, fuck it, point was he wasn’t going out of his way to bring down heat on the man.

  Roper had left the address for Pepper’s money. Carney delivered the instructions. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to bring you in on a job.”

  “What, you need to move a couch?”

  “No, it’s a job.”

  Pepper said he’d head over. After he picked up the money.

  He checked in on the store occasionally. If he was going to go-between Carney from time to time, it behooved him. Plus, it was Big Mike’s son.

  The expansion looked smart—the furniture side was doing well for Junior. Rusty, the employee, had got himself a gal who looked like she’d snuck out in the back of a potato wagon. Pure country. The new secretary carried a wounded look on the street but put on a smile when she opened the door to the store. Pepper would have done the sign different, though. Make the letters blockier, so you can see it, put some red in there. He read an article that said red was a color favored by nature to make animals take notice, and you had to be part animal to live in New York City. Made sense to use red in signs, Pepper thought. But no one was asking him.

  The door Carney put onto Morningside Avenue was handy, providing another exit. He refrained from commenting on the safe.

  “That other rug had to go?” Pepper said. Carney most likely rolled up Miami Joe in it and dumped him in Mount Morris. That’s what he would have done.

  “Yes, it’s a new rug,” Carney said.

  The furniture salesman explained the job. At first, it didn’t sound like Carney. But then, Big Mike had tended his crop of grudges like a farmer, inspecting the rows, taking care they got enough water and fertilizer so that they grew big and healthy.

  “You want dirt to blackmail him,” Pepper said.

  “Blackmail is when you try to get something from somebody,” Carney answered. “I want to burn his house down.”

  “But not really torch it. You want to fuck him up.”

  “Yes, not an actual torching, but a real burning down.”

  “Didn’t know you did it like that.”

  Carney shrugged.

  Like father, like son. They did a deal for the stakeout and the general surveillance.

  Pepper had never heard of this Duke character. “Guess we run in different circles,” he said to himself. Leaning against the greasy spoon opposite the Mill Building on 125th, he had a clear shot of the banker’s office window and the entrance to the building.

  His grandpa Alfred had kept a steel-drum smoker out back in Newark, on Clinton Ave. He’d do ribs, brisket, make his own sausage. Grandpa Alfred’s father had been a butcher and cook on an indigo plantation in South Carolina and passed down the mysteries. “You throw chops on some coals,” Pepper’s grandfather said, “that’s one way to cook a piece of meat. Few minutes later, you got that black on it, you’re done. But barbecue is slow. Put it in that smoke, you got to be ready to wait. That heat and smoke is going to do its work, boy, but you got to wait.”

  One was fast and one was slow, and it was the same for stickups and stakeouts. Stickups were chops—they cook fast and hot, you’re in and out. A stakeout was ribs—fire down low, slow, taking your time.

  Pepper was a gourmand in that he liked chops and he liked ribs. He hadn’t planned a job in years, with the legwork that entailed: casing the place; clocking passenger and vehicle traffic, and how often the prowl car made the rounds; the schedule of the staff, managers, and security guards. Figuring out when to take a piss. He’d enjoyed that side of things once—c
onception, pulling it all together, choosing a crew. Nowadays he let the ebb and flow of jobs take him. He wasn’t as sharp or as hungry as he used to be. Stuff fell into his lap, or didn’t. Some cat got out of Dannemora and wanted back in, or another dude was cooking up a big score. Maybe Pepper wasn’t as sharp these days, but the quality of hood they turned out now? He was sharp enough. No, he hadn’t made ribs in a while but it came back quick.

  Waiting and watching on Carney’s dime. He found his old stash of tiny notebooks he used for planning jobs. The good weather helped. Those weeks in June were hot but it barely rained at all. The first two days Pepper borrowed Tommy Lips’s Ford Crestliner, but lucky for him it turned out Duke was a walker, one of those short guys who had a complex about size and had to rooster-strut everywhere. Little head poking up over a car’s steering wheel probably made those bully taunts come back. Lucky because Pepper hated Tommy Lips’s Crestline, it was a fucking lemon.

  The days passed. A new version of this corner of 125th had sprung into being when he wasn’t looking, with a lot of old hangouts erased and sleek cafeterias and electronics stores and record stores popping up. Not the most sentimental of men, Pepper nonetheless allowed himself a reminiscence of his last visit to the Mill Building. Or he tried to reminisce. Pepper had definitely dangled the mope out the window by his ankles (black wing tips and black socks held up by garters) and threatened to drop him on Madison Avenue (the window had an eastern exposure), that much he was sure of. He recalled the man’s name, Alvin Pitt, and that he was an osteopath by profession, but for the life of him Pepper couldn’t get a handle on why he was bracing the guy. He was at a loss. Perhaps when this job was over, he’d pay Alvin Pitt a visit, ask the man himself what the fuss had been about.

  Weekdays at noon Duke departed to dine with muckety-mucks of equal rank. Pepper recognized some of them from the papers: judges, lawyers, politicians. They ate at famous Harlem places Pepper had never set foot in, chowing down on lobster thermidor at the Palm and beef Wellington at the Royale, and drinking brandy at the Orchid Room in the Hotel Theresa. Then it was back to the Mill Building. The banker belonged to the Dumas Club on 120th Street, which observation proved to be a variety of shitheel factory. Duke’s rooster-strut wobbled after a Dumas Club visit, so Pepper assumed there was a rich man’s happy hour going on. Then it was back home to Riverside Drive, one of those monument buildings with a sleepy doorman and service entrance with a broken lock. Once Duke returned home, he was in for the night.