“How did you know Raymond’s father?” Elizabeth asked.
“He knew Grandpa?” May said. Having experienced the one, she was curious about the other.
“From work,” Pepper said.
“Oh,” Elizabeth said.
“Not that,” Carney said, before the broken kneecaps grew too vivid. “Remember I told you my father used to work at Miracle Garage sometimes.”
“The garage,” Elizabeth said.
“I wouldn’t work with Pat Baker,” Pepper said. “More crooked than a country preacher.”
Elizabeth squinted at Carney but let it drop. “What sort of work do you do now?”
Pepper looked at Carney. Not for a tip on how to respond but to communicate that his rate had gone up. Carney might have to throw in a side table, to hold a beer or a bowl of grapes. Pepper said, “Odd jobs.”
“Can you pass the potatoes?” Carney said. “Just how I like them.”
Despite the slow start, Elizabeth got more out of Pepper than Carney ever had. Where he lived now (off Convent), where he grew up (Hillside Avenue in Newark), if he had a lady he liked to take out on the town (not since he got stabbed in the gut, mistaken identity, long story). John moved over to sit on May’s lap and asked their guest his favorite color. He said, “I like that shiny green that parks get around here in the spring.”
To Elizabeth, he was another colorful character from Carney’s Harlem, a place not entirely congruent with her Strivers’ Row version. Pepper was one of the stranger walk-ons she had encountered, but she tended to enjoy that variety more.
Elizabeth put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers. “What was Raymond like?” she asked. “When he was little?”
“Much the same. Smaller.”
“Whenever Pepper came over,” Carney said, “he always brought me something—a stuffed animal, a wooden caboose. It was very sweet.”
John cackled at this, picking up on the absurdity, then the rest of them. Pepper’s downturned mouth straightened into a tight line, his version of amusement.
Elizabeth said that the phones at the office had started ringing again. Business with out-of-town clients had remained the same, but the New York City calls went to zero the week of the protests. “No one wants to go on vacation when the house next door is on fire,” she said.
Carney told Pepper that Elizabeth worked for Black Star Travel, which they then had to explain, as Pepper was “not one to vacation much.”
On the one hand, it was everyday word of mouth, what people shared in the neighborhood for mutual survival. That cop Rooker who hangs out on Sixth is out to get black people. Don’t show your face on the Italian block after seven o’clock. They’ll snatch your house for a late payment. But Black Star and other travel agencies, the various Negro travel guides, took that crucial local information and rendered it national and accessible to all who needed it. On the wall at Elizabeth’s office they had a map of the United States and the Caribbean with pins and red marker to indicate the cities and towns and routes that Black Star promoted. Stay on the path and you’ll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.
That was how Carney put it to himself, as his wife gave Pepper her standard client pitch. Pepper took in Elizabeth’s spiel patiently. He chewed, savoring, squeezed in between John and May like an eccentric uncle. He was a relative, this crook, part of his father’s clan. Carney raised his Schlitz and made a toast to the chef. It was Wednesday night, family supper, both sides of him at the table, the straight and the crooked, breaking bread.
SEVEN
She grabbed his arm and startled him—Sandra from Chock Full o’Nuts. He was headed for the subway, downtown to Moskowitz’s. The emerald in his leather satchel made him suspect everybody on the street had X-ray vision. On the lookout for a gunman or an anvil-chinned heavy with a five-o’clock shadow, he didn’t catch the waitress’s approach.
Outside of the coffee shop, Sandra was just as chatty and vivacious. She asked after his family; he had shown her pictures over the years, courtesy of his Polaroid Pathfinder. Sandra told him she’d made it through “all that drama last week okay.” Some roughneck had lobbed a brick through the Seventh Avenue window of the restaurant so they boarded up the place until the protests subsided. They were back in business now. “People need their coffee,” she said.
Carney apologized for being too busy to come by. She touched his arm again and said they weren’t going anywhere.
A few minutes later he was on the subway, humming the shop’s theme song: Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy…What can a millionaire’s money buy: everything else. Cops and city hall and faceless thugs to do your bidding. Carney recalled the fear of those days after the Theresa job, the fear that Arthur’s killer might come for him, his family. Now Freddie and Linus had unleashed trouble of another magnitude, pissed-off rich people who were as bent as gangsters but didn’t have to hide. They did it out in the open, notarized their misdeeds or engraved them into bronze plates for building facades.
Sure, when this was over he’d return to Chock Full o’Nuts for a nice, solid cup of coffee, but he had to get this racket going first. Pepper had signed up, so Carney was spared the tricky business of hitting up one of his customers on the fencing side to see if they had a name. He was not impressed with Harlem’s thugs overall. Whether you were talking construction, poetry, or women’s pumps, the Walt Whitmans, the Peppers, of a given field were hard to come by. It was no different in the violence-and-mayhem trade; the majority of practitioners were average or subpar. Carney was grateful Pepper had forgiven him, even if he suspected it was only out of an old obligation to his father, ancient blood-oath shit.
After their initial discussion of the job, Pepper hadn’t tried to talk him out of helping Freddie. Carney had enough doubts with outside encouragement. The debacle of Bella Fontaine and Mr. Gibbs aside, Freddie had brought danger close again. When they were children, when he’d brought down parental wrath and they sat in the bedroom waiting for the belt, Freddie would croak out a pitiable, “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” It never occurred to him that things would go wrong, that the caper would go sideways and there would be consequences. There were always consequences.
Carney didn’t have to do it anymore. Freddie was a grown man. What to call this operation: the Freddie job, the Van Wyck job? Maybe it was the Carney job, because he wanted to prove that he could move a big rock like that, stick it to the rich bastards again. Rich white bastards this time. This wasn’t a broken radio some strung-out loser had grabbed from a widow’s apartment. This necklace was mythic, a piece out of legend.
He scored a seat on the train. Carney pulled out the flyer and unfolded it—he’d rediscovered it in his wallet when he bought tokens. Last week in the middle of the protests, this young woman, college kid, had stopped him as he surveyed 125th Street. It was Monday morning and Carney was getting his first real look at the weekend carnage. She wore white slacks with a green-and-white-striped top. Given the uneasy mood on the street, her cheer and purpose were a declaration of principles. She grabbed his wrist and tucked a leaflet in his hand:
INSTRUCTIONS:
ANY EMPTY BOTTLE
FILL WITH GASOLINE
USE RAG AS WICK
LIGHT RAG
TOSS
AND
SEE THEM RUN!
When he looked up she had vanished. Who’d print such a thing? It was dangerous, the product of a demented mind. Back at the office he folded the flyer and tucked it away. He wasn’t sure why.
The white lady next to him on the subway read it over his shoulder. She frowned. That’s why you shoul
dn’t read over people’s shoulders. He returned the paper to his wallet. No harm in keeping it. As a talisman or a crooked hymn kept close for reference.
Back to the setup: Freddie was lamming it in Brooklyn, Pepper minded the store in case anyone showed up. Next up was Moskowitz. Did the man have enough cash in that Hermann Bros. safe of his or did Carney have to wait a few days? He had kept it cryptic on the phone; that plus the uncustomary afternoon meeting would warn the jeweler that it was serious.
In midtown there was no indication that New York City had been besieged one week prior. The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.
Moskowitz’s was busy—Carney passed four customers as he went up the stairs. Ari, the nephew who sat next to Carney during his lessons, nodded hello and excused himself from the young couple gawking at the diamond necklaces. There was another man by the Ventura display buying something for his mistress. One of Moskowitz’s more engaged lessons had dissected the differences in posture when a customer was buying something for a wife versus a mistress, and how to adjust one’s sales pitch. Ari rapped on the office door and stuck his head in, then waved in Carney.
Moskowitz stood at the window, taking in the manic boil of Forty-Seventh Street. Two fans were trained on his executive chair, they swiveled to and fro and nudged the hot air. The jeweler let down the blinds and greeted Carney with his usual reserve.
“It’s a lot this time,” Carney said.
“I gathered,” Moskowitz said. “Your uptown associates getting ambitious?”
Carney didn’t like the tone. He opened the satchel and set the Van Wyck necklace on Moskowitz’s desk blotter next to the overflowing ashtray.
The jeweler withdrew. “Put it away,” Moskowitz said.
“What?”
“I had to see it, but I don’t want to look at it. You know why.”
Carney returned the necklace to the leather satchel.
“It’s too hot,” Moskowitz said. “People are inquiring. You must know that. I couldn’t move that five feet.”
“You had a visit?”
“Anybody who can move that knows not to touch it. Toss it in the East River and don’t look back. I’d say return it and ask forgiveness, but I don’t think it would be forthcoming.”
You might say it wasn’t a rosy picture. “That’s it?” Carney said.
“It’s best you don’t come back.”
Ari waved goodbye as Carney departed. Carney didn’t notice.
It had gotten hotter outside. Carney wiped his neck with his handkerchief in the middle of the sidewalk stream. You can have all sorts of craziness in your head and people will walk right by you as if you are a normal person. Moskowitz. He’d been threatened. Had someone linked the two of them or had they come at him because he handled heavy weight?
At the corner of Seventh Ave, Carney heard his name. The intonation was that of a dispassionate clerk, engaged but too overworked to offer more than the perfunctory. “If you have a minute, Mr. Carney.”
The man was tall and thin, with sharp features—Carney thought of museum statues cut from cold white stone. Hermes, the God of Speed. Or was it Mercury? May had brought home a book on Roman gods from the library. This guy looked like he relaxed at home with a chalice and one of those laurel-wreath crowns around his head.
He shook Carney’s hand as if they’d been doing business for years. “The name’s Bench—Ed Bench. I’m with the law firm of Newman, Shears & Whipple.” He gave Carney his card. Heavy stock, dignified typeface.
Carney said he didn’t understand.
“I represent the Van Wyck family.” He tilted his head. “I’m here with Mr. Lloyd.”
Presenting Mr. Lloyd, the muscle, neck and head a solid column atop his barrel chest. Carney doubted he’d taken the bar exam. The man’s right hand was in his jacket pocket, pointing a revolver at Carney. He wore a fake, dumb smile to camouflage him as one of the tourists gee-whizzing at the Big City.
“Let’s walk, Carney,” Ed Bench said. Carney looked back at Mr. Lloyd, who kept pace, gun at an angle, same smile. Carney’s heart pounded and the street noise—the honking and backfiring and cussing—doubled in volume, as if by radio knob.
“How’s your cousin, Carney?” Ed Bench said.
“I haven’t seen him.”
“That’s unlikely. We hear you’re like brothers. Do anything for each other. Can I have that, please?”
Mr. Lloyd coughed for emphasis. Carney handed over his satchel.
Ed Bench performed a quick look-see for confirmation. He said, “The rest?”
“That’s it. If somebody’s saying something else, they’re wrong.”
“The other items. I’m referring to the other items.”
The dont walk sign at the corner of Forty-Ninth and Seventh kept them put. Carney tried to get a handle on what was happening. Had they followed him from uptown? Straphanging two feet away while he dreamed of wheeling and dealing? This Van Wyck lawyer—the one who handled their dirty stuff, he supposed—was more concerned with the other things Linus had swiped from the family safe. Carney had been so distracted by the fact of the emerald he hadn’t gone over the papers thoroughly.
“I don’t have them.”
“Carney,” Ed Bench said.
Mr. Lloyd jabbed the nose of the pistol into Carney’s back.
Ed Bench made a gesture and Mr. Lloyd backed off. The lawyer led them to the opposite corner. “A hundred years ago,” he said, “this was a cow pasture—all of this. Midtown. Times Square. Then someone had an idea, and built, and bought more land, and built. Some things pan out. Some things don’t. The Van Wycks didn’t build here on Seventh Avenue. They built there.” He pointed toward Sixth. “The one on the east corner. If this was a cow pasture, that was a mud puddle. Now look at it. You don’t have to be first. Second is fine. If you have an eye for what’s going to pan out, second is fine.”
Carney spied a patrolman across the street, drinking a Coca-Cola through a straw with bovine serenity. For a moment, he entertained the ridiculous proposition of a Negro calling a cop to complain he was being threatened by two white men.
Ed Bench saw the policeman give a sympathetic frown at Carney’s plight. “You’re a smart man, Carney. An entrepreneur. I wonder if you’ve recognized your current venture isn’t going to pan out.” The lawyer showed his teeth. “Have you considered what will happen? To you? Your family?”
Moskowitz had tipped off the Van Wycks and sold Carney down the river. They visit the jeweler’s store, brace him, and tell him to give a heads-up if the necklace appears. Because whoever has that emerald has the briefcase and the rest of its contents.
Back when Buxbaum got pinched, Carney and Moskowitz had sweated over whether or not he’d squeal. Buxbaum, weak sister or no, had kept his trap shut. He was still up at Dannemora, doing time. Moskowitz, the old gentleman, the professor, was the one who ratted him out in the end.
Fuck this.
Ed Bench said, “Hey!”
Johnny Dandy starring Blake Headley and Patricia De Hammond had been running on Broadway at the Divinity Theater since Memorial Day weekend. Critics had meted their blows and yet. The dialogue and action were so shrouded in euphemism, so opaque in meaning and intention, alternately dull and worrisome, that no one could decide what the play was about, if they understood it, let alone enjoyed it. Was this tragedy or farce? Such a faithful reflection of existence proved irresistible. Every night a pantomime of modern life unfurled before a sold-out house. Dandy’s run was cut short when Blake Headley slipped a disk; his understudy’s inert line readings broke the spell. The play was never produced again, save for an avant-garde attempt in Buenos Aires that closed during the first intermission (arson). Its author moved to Los Angeles and made a name in TV Westerns. Every afternoon the matinee ended at 3:42 p.m., eject
ing hundreds of distracted theater mavens into an already congested Forty-Ninth Street.
South Ferry 306, which claimed as its domain fourteen miles of the IRT line between South Ferry and Van Cortlandt–242nd Street, was scheduled to pull into the Fiftieth Street station at 3:36 p.m. but was delayed after a signalman reported a figure shambling among the tracks at Herald Square. Subsequent investigation determined the shape in question to be an addled raccoon. It happened sometimes, a wrong turn. The train screeched into Fiftieth Street at 3:45 p.m., nine minutes behind schedule. The station’s Forty-Ninth Street exit was convenient and popular. A train car collects specimens, the station releases them from captivity. Men and women stepped from the cars, bumped turnstiles, and mounted stairs to feed the maddening flux of Broadway.
Carney ran, availing himself of this confluence. He ran as if Freddie had stolen a comic book from Mason’s display racks and Old Man Mason himself pursued them down Lenox with a machete, he ran as if he and his cousin had dropped a fistful of firecrackers into the aluminum garbage cans outside 134 West 129th and rattled the whole street. He ran like a kid convinced that the whole grown-up world with its entire grown-up might was going to beat him silly. There were people and cars. He danced and darted and zipped through, weaving around frumpy salesmen and limping matrons, threading himself between slow-walking rubes and briskly moving sophisticates as if he were a piece of celluloid navigating the rollers of a gigantic movie projector, lost footage from a B movie.
He shook Ed Bench and Mr. Lloyd after two blocks—not the God of Speed after all—and kept going another ten, although not as fast, trotting some, for he was out of shape. They’d finished construction on another segment of Lincoln Center and the south entrance of the Sixty-Sixth Street stop was open again.
The necklace was gone, like that. Yes, you can have all sorts of craziness in your head and people will sit right next to you on the train as if you are a normal person. He felt safe on the train, all the way up, until he got to the store and saw Pepper.
Harlem Shuffle Page 28