Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  * * *

  * * *

  Pepper hadn’t been himself lately. It probably had something to do with getting stabbed in the stomach on the Benton’s rip-off. The job had started fine. A routine hijacking, trailer full of overcoats, sleepy Sunday night. Dootsie Bell brought him in on it. In former times, Dootsie Bell had been an ace stickup man. Prompt, with a bogeyman voice that kept the squares in check. Then he went on the needle and the only cure that took was the Bible. Sure, a little Jesus is good for some individuals but you don’t want Do unto others riding shotgun on a job. Dootsie had assured Pepper the driver was tied up tight. The blade got him deep.

  A week in the hospital on this dopey ward. Chumps rotated in and out. The day after he returned to the apartment on 144th, the boiler quit. The landlord gave him excuses for weeks until Pepper gave him an or-else. Hard weeks, the kind where you realize you’ve engineered it so that nobody has anything on you, and that means nobody has anything for you: help, a kind word. He had plenty of time to think about that and decided he wouldn’t change a thing about how he’d lived his life, but going forward a man was allowed to make changes if he saw fit.

  His gut bothered him worse than he’d admit. He couldn’t work. The first job that came his way was a payroll rip-off, a glass factory in New Brunswick. Working with Cal James—his girl’s cousin worked there and had the inside dope. Half an hour into casing the place for security patterns, his stomach started twisting and he passed out in the car. Somehow he got back into the city and had to spend a week in bed. Sorry, Cal. He didn’t sign up for anything after that. A voice kept saying, Are you sure you want to do that? His commonsense voice that had saved his hide many times. It was out of his hands.

  He spent a lot of time at Donegal’s. Used to be he walked in and there were men he liked, or at least had worked with—they had something in common. These days he didn’t know where everybody’d gone. Jail, the graveyard, sure, but besides that. There were no pension plans for retired safecrackers, for heisters and hustlers. Looking around Donegal’s, he realized everyone in the bar was a washed-up crook—too old to play the game anymore, brains scrambled after ten years in the joint, or so luckless that no one would work with them. Those guys, plus him. Which is why he was glad that afternoon when Carney walked in. Sometimes Big Mike’s face lurked in his son’s face, in the eyes and the frown, and his friend was returned to him.

  They were in Donegal’s one night, him and Big Mike, and Pepper was sharing some thoughts about the nature of the universe. Big Mike said, “You know what your problem is?”

  Pepper said, No, please tell me.

  Big Mike said, “You don’t like anybody.”

  Pepper told him, I like plenty of folks, I just don’t like people. He liked Big Mike. Any resemblance between father and son was dispelled pretty damn quick when the furniture salesman opened his trap, but it was nice to see that glimmer. However briefly. Pepper’d work for the man, if he wasn’t going to take his advice and cut his loser cousin loose. Pepper’s convalescence had confirmed the void in his life. A recliner would fill it handily.

  He was on the clock as soon as he hit 125th Street. Pepper rolled up the store’s grate and flipped the keys in his hand after the one for the front door. Behind him, a reedy voice asked, “Why’s he got his store closed all day?”

  It was not a customer. The sunglasses and hepcat demeanor fit Carney’s description of Chet the Vet, one of Chink Montague’s thugs. Pepper ignored him and unlocked the front door.

  “You igging me? I’m talking to you.”

  Pepper faced the man, with the resignation of a man discovering his toilet is still busted after the plumber had left.

  “Who are you?” said Chet the Vet.

  “I’m the night man.”

  “I’m looking for your boss.”

  “I’m here.”

  Chet the Vet squinted into the gloom of the store. He took stock of Pepper. The man’s attitude bewildered him. “I’ll come back,” he said.

  “Store ain’t going nowhere.”

  Chet the Vet took off. He glanced back twice, and twice turned away quickly from Pepper’s glare.

  Guard duty commenced with an egg salad sandwich and a milkshake from Lionel’s on Broadway. Wednesday night was quiet, allowing him to contemplate the relative merits of the Argent recliner and its advertised smooth hydraulic action. A fine piece of furniture overall, he decided, although he preferred upholstery with a little more texture.

  The Argent was a bite of the forbidden apple. The next day he took advantage of watch duty to peruse some of the man’s promotional material. Get a sense of what was out there, recliner-wise. His sentry station was Carney’s office, with the lights out. He had the blinds open a fraction, allowing him to see into the showroom and out to the street, but not the other way around. He held the catalogs up to his face in the dimness. Locking wheels, stainproof, lever action. There was one newfangled model had a built-in TV tray that flipped up over your lap, which he reckoned might come in handy if he ever got a TV set.

  Had it been three years since he stopped using this place as an answering service? The furniture looked different—changing with the popular tastes—but Carney had kept the place up and running. He’d done a good job. His father would be proud, even if it was a straight job. Like his father in one way, and not like him in another. Which is why he didn’t hold a grudge for the thing with Duke and the drug peddler and the cops. Big Mike had never been able to resist some payback, and he’d passed that down.

  He stretched. There was something in the back pocket of his overalls. One of the activist leaflets they were handing out last week on 125th:

  cool it baby

  the message has been delivered

  We have been screaming for jobs, decent schools, clean houses, etc. for years.

  Some folks just wouldn’t listen.

  We’ve been telling them that all hell was liable to break loose unless Negroes saw real progress.

  Some folks just wouldn’t listen.

  Today everybody’s listening—with both ears.

  The Message Has Been Delivered

  This young brother laid it on him, a sit-in type wearing one of those African shirts they’re selling nowadays. “You have a look,” he told Pepper, like he was some Southern hayseed who had to be educated about the ways of the Big City. Pepper’s heat vision sent him scurrying. Cool it baby. Ain’t nobody listening. Do you listen to what the roach says before you step on him? He almost tossed the leaflet in the trash, but returned it to his back pocket instead.

  At 3:32 p.m., two white men strolled up to the front door. Customers turned around on seeing the closed sign, but these two cupped their eyes and pressed their faces to the glass to see inside. They were clean-cut young men, in gas company uniforms that were not theirs. They weren’t meatheads, like a lot of muscle, panting after a few punches. These dudes were fit and clean, like astronauts. That new generation. Half his age. Pepper grabbed the spot in his belly where the knife had gone deep. It already hurt from the fighting he was going to do.

  They split up. One astronaut, the redhead, walked to the corner and looked up Morningside, to the side door of the office. The blond astronaut walked the other way, to the wall between the store and the bar next door. They returned to the front door, conferred, and left.

  Five minutes later they were back. The redheaded astronaut bent down to pick or pop the lock on the grate and rolled it up while the other pretended to consult a clipboard. On a job, wearing the clothes of a waiter or porter gave Pepper free passage among white people. Same way a white man in an official-looking uniform in a Negro neighborhood can get into a lot of places, no sweat. A cop uniform sends one message, a utility man’s another, long as they’re not there to turn off the electricity. The redheaded astronaut picked the front door without a fuss and his companion wheeled a met
allic box over the threshold. Acetylene torch, most likely.

  Once inside, their movements turned slow and they entered the hunt. In tandem: one step, pause and survey, another step. The redhead taking Carney’s office and the blond heading for Marie’s. Halfway into the store, the blond let go of the box and the both of them reached for their pistols, Colt Cobras. They continued toward the back of the store with predatory attention.

  Pepper was at a disadvantage in that he was not armed. His last gun had been the throwaway he used in the hijack, and he’d last seen it on the floor of Dootsie Bell’s Cadillac before Dootsie dumped him in front of Harlem Hospital. Pepper had a meet-up with Billy Bill scheduled that evening to buy a piece. What he had on hand now was a baseball bat and a hunting knife.

  The bat to start. Pepper popped the redhead below the rib cage with the head of the baseball bat, then brought it down with gruesome force on the base of the man’s skull. He’d left the office door ajar and pounced when the man got in range, had the astronaut seeing stars. There were scarce seconds before his scream attracted his partner. Go for the gun or use the fallen astronaut? The Colt Cobra had bounced and skittered on the floor—where? The sounds of its passage had muffled, so across the rug. No time to scramble for it.

  Pepper pressed the hunting knife to the redhead’s throat when the other one appeared in the doorway. His body was half shielded by the redhead. A certain kind of man would have fired anyway, but the blond wasn’t that breed.

  “Move on back, buddy,” Pepper said. The redhead yelped as Pepper increased the pressure on his neck. “We’re getting up, right?” They rose. Pepper sensed the man trying to figure out his opening. He steered him a foot closer to the entrance. The astronaut moved deliberately, to force an opportunity. Pepper reached out to slam the office door shut and rammed the man into it. He hit the button on the doorknob to lock it.

  The astronaut elbowed Pepper in the stomach, then slugged him in the jaw. Pepper had been protecting his stomach where he got stabbed, angling his body, and it gave the man his chance. The other man tried the lock, then rammed his shoulder into the door to break it down. The redhead tackled Pepper and brought him down.

  The office window shattered inward before the weight of the Collins-Hathaway ottoman the other astronaut hurled against it. The blinds were twisted up. The rug: Pepper saw the butt of the fallen pistol. So did the redhead. They crawled over each other to get it. Pepper got there first and twisted and fired at the shape in the office window. He missed. He brought the butt down on the redhead’s cranium.

  Last time it was bloodstains on the man’s rug, this time his window.

  The window gaped. “Cool it, baby,” Pepper said. “Anything pops up, I’m shooting it.” He got ahold of the redheaded astronaut and continued to address the man’s partner. “You get on back to the front window. I’m coming out with this motherfucker.” He instructed the redhead to open the office door.

  It was odd—the white man’s silhouette against the 125th Street scene, which proceeded as if their violent drama did not exist. On the opposite sidewalk, a teenage girl tried to master her Hula-Hoop. The gunshot hadn’t attracted the stepped-up police patrols. So far.

  From the way he aimed the gun, the blond astronaut’s ambitions lay in the vicinity of a headshot. Maybe two in the belly as a chaser.

  “You can drop that,” Pepper said. “Unless you want to leave him here.”

  The astronaut bent low to place the gun on the floor and put his hands up.

  “Now get the fuck out of here,” Pepper said.

  The message had been delivered, as the young people of Harlem liked to say.

  * * *

  * * *

  Carney saw the broken glass and ran to his office phone. Elizabeth didn’t answer. At the store, the park, no telling.

  “I know a guy who’ll buy the torch, you don’t want it,” Pepper said.

  “The what?”

  “Over there. They were going to torch the safe.” He paused. “No, J.J. got pinched. I’m sure there’s another guy.”

  “Look, I have to get home.”

  He removed Linus’s briefcase from the Hermann Bros. safe. Pepper told him to leave the safe open. “So they wouldn’t bust it open if they came back.” Carney took the cash—Freddie needed it now that fencing the necklace was no longer on the table.

  He had a quick look at the papers inside the briefcase. Blueprints for a big office complex on Greenwich Street downtown—important, perhaps, but hardly irreplaceable. Beneath the blueprints were legal documents, real estate stuff with Linus’s name on them and the family corporation. One of them granted Mr. Van Wyck power of attorney over his son. Was that what it was all about? Later, Carney could figure out what had the Van Wycks so uptight. Now he had to check on his family.

  As Carney locked up, Pepper asked if he still had his father’s truck. It would come in handy, he said. They got the truck out of the lot and beat it to Riverside Drive.

  It hit Carney anew: The necklace was gone. He had handed it over, like that. And they didn’t even care about it. He honked the horn at the red light. Elizabeth and the kids. “They’re okay,” Carney said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Freddie.” The way Carney used to say it when they were kids and he’d put them in line for an ass-whipping. Freddie.

  “I’ll sit on your house tonight in the truck,” Pepper said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring on another guy to watch your family.”

  A big pothole rocked the truck, one of those craters with its own zip code, and Pepper winced. He laid his palm on his belly, below his heart.

  “They work you over?” Carney told him he looked like crap.

  Pepper mumbled something about spacemen.

  When they got to the apartment, Elizabeth was lying on the couch and the kids were pinching each other. “Pepper,” she said.

  “Helping me move some furniture,” Carney said, “since Rusty is out.” He’d explained the closure of the store by telling her that Marie and Rusty deserved a break after last week, plus people were too unsettled to think about home furnishings.

  Elizabeth made a joke about being his secretary, too, since Marie was off.

  “What do you mean?”

  She got the message pad. “You got a call from Ed Bench. He said he gave you his card?”

  Carney called the lawyer from the phone booth around the corner.

  They had Freddie.

  EIGHT

  He took Park down. It made sense to him, to trace the line of soot-streaked uptown tenements to where they terminated abruptly at Ninety-Sixth and became the world-famous regiments of grand residential buildings, which in turn gave way to the corporate behemoths in the Fifties and below. Park Avenue was like a chart in one of his economics textbooks illustrating a case study of a successful business, Manhattan street numbers on the x axis and money on the y. This is an example of exponential growth.

  “It’s Fifty-First,” Carney said.

  “That’s what you said,” Pepper said.

  Carney still wasn’t used to seeing the Pan Am Building looming at Forty-Fifth Street, cutting off the sky. They keep going up—the buildings, the piles of money.

  The orange safety cones were where Ed Bench promised, halfway between Fifty-First and Fiftieth on the west side of the ave. Pepper moved them and Carney parked.

  Across the street was 319 Park, behind a plywood fence festooned with posters for the new Frank Sinatra record with Count Basie. The building was more than thirty stories high, clad in light blue metallic panels. The panels stopped halfway up; construction was still ongoing. Far enough along that the elevator worked and the fifteenth floor had a floor in place, according to the lawyer’s instructions.

  When Carney had stepped out of the phone booth, he recounted the conversation to Pepper. The bloodless voice, the calm declaration of facts. Th
ey had nabbed Freddie outside his mother’s house.

  “I told you he’d fuck it up,” Pepper had said.

  “Yes,” Carney said. Knowing his cousin, he wanted a glimpse of Aunt Millie to tide him over. If Moskowitz had been quick with the necklace money, Freddie would have beat it on a bus without seeing her.

  Ed Bench told him to bring “Mr. Van Wyck’s property” to a certain Park Avenue address at ten p.m. His cousin would be returned in exchange. Ed Bench handed over the phone to Freddie, who had time to croak “It’s me” before the lawyer took the receiver back.

  “On their turf,” Pepper declared. “They control the scene.”

  “Will they do it?”

  Pepper grunted. What were they capable of? They had ransacked Aunt Millie’s, vandalized Sterling Gold & Gem, come to his place of business with guns. They had not killed Linus—Linus would have given up the location of the briefcase if they’d braced him. From Pierce’s account, they’d murdered the witness in a criminal suit before he could testify. If Pierce was to be believed. The question remained: What would they do to Freddie, and would they return him?

  “I’m starving,” Pepper said.

  “What?”

  “We should eat before,” Pepper said.

  “He didn’t say bring somebody.”

  “Did he say don’t bring somebody? We’re old friends, me and those Van Wyck dudes.”

  They drove to Jolly Chan’s on Broadway. It was getting dark, every day as summer contracted it grew dark earlier. Dinner service at the restaurant was in full swing. At the door, a young woman in one of those long Chinese dresses welcomed “Mr. Pepper.” She had an air of brusque confidence and led them to where Pepper and Carney had sat last time, pulling out the table so that Pepper could take his preferred seat. Back to the wall, as Carney’s father used to say, so nothing can sneak up on you. Carney hadn’t appreciated the wisdom until recently.