Harlem Shuffle(10)
The band entered the lobby in a hepcat line as if strutting onstage, for this display was as much a gig as any of their nightly concerts, a show of glamour, an affirmation of Negro excellence. Show over, the audience split and the sidewalk was quiet until the next celebrity landed. Aunt Millie liked to read out Theresa items from the gossip columns: We hear a certain velvet-voiced Lothario kicked up quite a ruckus last week at the fabulous Hotel Theresa with one of the Savoy’s beige beauties. Seems his wife decided to surprise him for his birthday and blew out all the candles on that little cake…Carney lived with his aunt and Freddie for a couple of years after his mother passed. He was in the kitchen when Aunt Millie squealed at the Courier’s coverage of the Calloway orchestra’s arrival, even if the account puzzled her. “I don’t think there were hundreds of people there, do you?”
The night Carney signed his lease on the store, the movie studio Twentieth Century-Fox held their premiere party for Carmen Jones at the hotel. Three blocks over on Seventh, the massive spotlights tilted and swerved. The traffic down 125th was honking molasses, cops angrily waving at the cars. The white light coming around that corner was so bright it made you think the earth had split open, like some miracle eruption was underway. Carney’s new arrangement with Salerno Properties Inc. received less fanfare. It didn’t make the papers, but he chose to believe it was momentous in its own way. Like all those bright lights were for him.
The sidewalk action was rare these days. Downtown hotels recognized the profit in opening to black patrons and the years of sordid carousing, late-night gambling, and gossip-page shenanigans diminished the hotel’s reputation. At the bar, you were more likely to find yourself bending elbows with a pimp or a working girl instead of Joe Louis or a grande dame of Negro society. The coffee shop where Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used to charm the waitstaff was bought out by Chock Full o’Nuts. The coffee was better and so was the grub, so Carney figured no big loss. It was still the Hotel Theresa, headquarters of the Negro world, and its thirteen floors contained more possibility and majesty than their parents and grandparents could’ve dreamed of.
Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.
“Goddamn it, Bill!” Sandra said. Something smoldered in one of the stoves and gray smoke, heavy with grease, floated through the window into the dining area.
“I got it, boss!” the cook said, avoiding her eyes.
Sandra knew how to handle herself, whether dealing with the kitchen staff or the impetuous attentions of customers. Dancing at the Apollo was a tutorial in the male animal, after all. Considering the hotel’s legend for nighttime fun, men probably bought her drinks at the bar across from the lobby, everybody hung out there in those days. Lighting her cigarettes over dreary promises. Back in the glory days—hers and the hotel’s. One time Carney asked why she quit dancing. “Baby,” she said, “God tells you it’s time to hang it up, you listen.” She took off her high heels and slipped on a waist apron, but she couldn’t quit 125th Street—you could see the Apollo from the window.
The morning after Freddie’s Nightbirds pitch, Carney took Sandra’s words for wisdom about knowing your limitations. To wit: Even if he were crooked enough for his cousin’s proposition, he didn’t have the contacts to handle a haul from the Hotel Theresa. Three hundred rooms, who knows how many guests locking up valuables and cash in the safe-deposit boxes behind reception—he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Neither would his man Buxbaum down on Canal. Have a coronary if Carney walked in with that kind of weight.
Sandra refilled Carney’s cup, he didn’t notice. Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition. The odd piece of jewelry, the electronic appliances Freddie and then a few other local characters brought by the store, he could justify. Nothing major, nothing that attracted undue attention to his store, the front he put out to the world. If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around. Dizzying and powerful as it was. Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you. The thing inside him that gave a yell or tug or shout now and again was not the same thing his father had. That sickness drawing every moment into its service. The sickness Freddie ministered to, more and more.
Carney had a bent to his personality, how could he not, growing up with a father like that. You had to know your limits as a man and master them.
Two guys in pinstripe suits, probably salesmen in the city hawking insurance schemes, came in from the bar, which separated the coffee shop from the lobby. Sandra told them to sit wherever and when she turned they checked out her legs. She had nice legs. That door. Through the door you passed from the bar and into the lobby. There were three ways into the lobby: the bar, the street, and the clothing boutique. Plus the elevators and fire stairs. Three men at the big front desk, guests coming and going all hours…Carney stopped himself. He sipped his coffee. Sometimes he slipped and his mind went thataway.
At Nightbirds, Freddie had made him promise to think about it, knowing that Carney usually came around if he thought too long about one of his cousin’s plots. A night of Carney staring at the ceiling was enough to close the deal, the cracks up there like a sketch of the cracks in his self-control. It was part of their Laurel and Hardy routine—Freddie sweet-talks him into an ill-advised scheme and the mismatched duo tries to outrun the consequences. Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into. His cousin was a hypnotist—suddenly Carney’s on lookout while Freddie shoplifts comics at the five-and-dime, they’re cutting class to catch a cowboy double feature at Loew’s. Two drinks at Nightbirds, and then dawn’s squeaking through the window of Miss Mary’s after-hours joint, moonshine rolling in their heads like an iron ball. There’s a necklace I got to get off my hands, can you help me out?