He reconsidered: The consequences remained, but the reasons had turned spectral, insubstantial. Harlem had rioted—for what? The boy was still dead, the grand jury cleared Lieutenant Gilligan, and black boys and girls continued to fall before the nightsticks and pistols of racist white cops. Freddie and Linus were gone, their heist unwound as if it had never happened, and Van Wyck kept throwing up buildings.
Freddie hung on for two months in a coma. Pressure on the brain. His last words: “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” He had been jealous of Harlem Hospital, Carney knew, for the hours it had deprived him of his mother, the double shifts and night shifts over the years. He liked to think Freddie sensed and savored the warmth of her hand those final days and nights that the hospital reunited them on the fourth floor. There was no running out to the night spot, no lying about where he’d been. No vanishing acts. Pedro came up when he got the news. He stuck around for two days after the funeral and then split back to Florida.
Death took Freddie from Carney and mourning returned to him a visitation, an invisible companion who shadowed him everywhere, tugging at his sleeve and interrupting when he least expected: Remember what my smile looked like, Remember when, Remember me. Its voice grew quiet and Carney didn’t hear it for a while and then it was loud again: Remember me, This is your job now, Remember me or no one else will. At times it seemed the grief was powerful enough to shut down the world, cut off the juice, stop the earth from spinning. It was not. The world proceeded in its mealy fashion, the lights stayed on, the earth continued to spin and its seasons ravaged and renewed in turn.
Munson came by for his envelope two nights after the visit to 319 Park. Given the heat on Freddie, the authorities accepted Carney’s story that he’d showed up at the store, beaten half to death by someone he’d crossed. Munson didn’t indicate whether he believed the story or not, merely relayed that there was no interest in pursuing it further. Via the New York Post, Centre Street let it be known that the Linus Van Wyck case was closed: death by misadventure. Carney handed over the envelope to the detective and their business resumed.
Delroy, too, visited the office for Chink’s envelope like everything was copacetic. Whoever had put their foot on Chink Montague’s neck had relented. Things were awkward between Carney and Delroy—beyond the coerced protection-money aspect—until the hood started seeing this Jamaican gal with a lackluster dining situation. Carney was happy to move another Collins-Hathaway dinette set, ten percent off for loyal customers.
August arrived. Carney didn’t know if it was over, if Van Wyck was done with him. Business deal concluded, blood on both sides, aggravations mounting—these things were usually enough to terminate a mob war, and they appeared to end the hostilities in this case as well. Mr. Van Wyck got what he wanted, after all. Carney lost sleep for a long time afterward, but come morning Elizabeth was in bed next to him, the kids were making noise down the hall, and his world was intact. For now. When Pepper came by to pick out his recliner, Carney asked him if he thought they were done. Pepper had lost weight during his convalescence, but retained his malevolent aplomb: “I’d take a dim view if it wasn’t.”
Carney arrived at Barclay and Greenwich. At the intersection, a Checker cab clipped a green sedan and the drivers leapt out into the street to bully each other. Two red-faced white guys making like jungle apes. Carney followed the plywood fence around the corner to Barclay, where it was calmer. The sign on the fence around the construction site announced van wyck realty: building the future. A big yellow crane hoisted a large section of steel tubing through the air. It wobbled like a surfer and disappeared below the fence.
Carney made his way to the tiny window in the plywood. He’d always thought of those site windows as kid stuff—May never let them pass one without making him lift her for a glimpse of the hidden operation. Here he was, pressing his nose to the glass. The hole went four stories deep, deeper than he’d ever seen. Underground parking? Or is that how far down you have to go to get these big skyscrapers up these days? A simple fact of physics. All that dirt and rock were already accounted for. Read those articles about the city’s Battery Park scheme and you know it’ll take a million tons of landfill to expand the footprint of the island that much. They had to dig down ever deeper to build ever higher, then make more island to fit the other stuff they wanted to put up. It was a racket, the whole thing.
Across the street the New York Telephone Company Building hunkered in art deco splendor, a graceful, granite rebuke to the steel-and-glass upstarts around it. The peasant structures formerly occupying the construction site had posed no threat to its dignity. A row of unremarkable three-story commercial buildings, they had been vestiges of the old downtown. Carney had looked it up: According to the Hall of Records, Linus Van Wyck had owned three of them since 1961: Barclay Street numbers 101, 103, and 105. The Van Wyck corporation acquired them on August 2, 1964, eight days after his death, the same day that it closed on six adjacent properties on Greenwich. This time next year, the consolidated parcel would be the home of a fifty-six-floor office building, the most ambitious VWR project to date. Open for business well before the World Trade Center was completed and poised to take advantage of the megadevelopment one block south. The World Trade Center was going to transform the city, if you believed the hype from Rockefeller and the newspapers in Carney’s pocket.
Nice to get in early. You don’t have to be first, the Van Wyck philosophy went, merely have an eye for what’s coming down the road.
Carney only had city records and Freddie’s secondhand info to go on. The family business puts the property in Linus’s name as a tax dodge—listening to his father-in-law gloat about screwing over the government had taught Carney about rich people and how they hold on to their money. To keep his allowance, Linus signs where they tell him to, and the power of attorney keeps things cool through his various hospitalizations. Was the break-in about getting that piece of paper and freeing himself, with the jewelry angle to get Freddie to help him out? Or did Linus only realize what he had once he got uptown to the Eagleton, and then try to use that leverage? Rings up Dear Old Dad and makes a threat, light extortion with a side of childhood grudge. Then his overdose—how did that change things?
Say Pepper was right that the numbers in the envelope referred to overseas bank accounts. Judging from the timing of the Greenwich Street deal, maybe VWR needs the money they’ve stashed in order to pull it off. Heart’s Meadow. Ambrose Van Wyck puts the account numbers in an old love letter that reminds him of how things could have gone differently for his son. Reminds him of the shape of Linus’s life if he’d dug women instead of men—and all the things his boy might have built for himself.
Maybe it was all over a baseball card, a 1941 number featuring Joe DiMaggio and Charley Keller. Worth some money if you were a fan, meaningless to everyone else.
It was like trying to decode a mystery from childhood, like why a man leaves his young son alone on a stool in a run-down bar. Anyone who knew the story was dead or wasn’t talking. That left the repercussions and your feeble attempts to make sense of it.
A patrolman dispelled the confrontation in the intersection. The angry drivers went on their way and traffic resumed. Carney looked at his watch. Time to wrap this up.
While he was downtown, he wanted to see Aronowitz’s place one last time. For old times’ sake. He’d seen the protests on the local news. Irate citizens marching between the big bins of radio parts before the courts ruled against them: no eminent domain for private gain. save downtown. Stenciled prayers on cardboard. Carney was too late, as he discovered when he turned onto Greenwich. They’d already knocked it all down.
The neighborhood was gone, razed. Everything four blocks south of the New York Telephone Building and four blocks east of the miserable West Side Highway had been demolished and erased for the World Trade Center site, down to the street signs and traffic lights. This was the aftermath of a
ruinous battle. Block after teeming block of Radio Row, the textile warehouses and women’s hat stores and shoe-shine stands, the greasy spoons, even the indentations in the sidewalk where the struts of the elevated tracks had been riveted to the concrete—rubble. The buildings of the old city loomed over the broken spot, this wound in itself.
It was unreal to have your city turned inside and out. He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people of Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.
The wrecking balls had moved on to their next unravelings. The dump trucks and construction trailers dotted the broken plain, waiting for the next phase—excavation. More dirt and more rock to make more island for more buildings. One day they’ll fill in the rivers altogether and everything will be just more Manhattan.
Aronowitz & Sons had shuttered long before. Carney had dropped by to say hi once—he hadn’t needed the man’s services in years—and a TV shop had taken its place. electric city. Purple neon lightning bolts for emphasis, blinking. The new owner, a fast-talking man with a honking Bronx accent, had assumed Aronowitz’s lease but had no information on where he’d gone after he handed over the keys. “He didn’t look that healthy,” the man said.
“He never did,” Carney said.
Carney gave the WTC site one last look. The next time he was here it’d be something totally different. That’s how it worked.
He headed for the train. He had to have a quick chat with his rare-gem connection, telephone out of the question. The man’s office was on Ninetieth off Second and the subways were a mess today, water main explosion on the East Side.
Then it was off to meet Elizabeth. There was an open house for a place on Strivers’ Row and he wanted to take a look. Distress sale. Riverside Drive was nice, but it was hard to turn down a chance at Strivers’ Row. If you could swing it. It was such a pretty block and on certain nights when it was cool and quiet it was as if you didn’t live in the city at all.
about the author
Colson Whitehead is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
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Harlem Shuffle Page 31