Harlem Shuffle(12)

On their way out, the man with the scar paused by one of the boomerang tables, a low model with a multicolored starburst design hovering in the glass top. Scar checked out the price tag and started to ask something, but thought better of it. It was a nice coffee table and Carney had spent a lot of time on where to put it so you didn’t miss it.

Rusty came over. “Who was that?” If he’d been mad about being pushed, he’d crossed over into hick-in-the-big-city wonder.

“Selling flood insurance,” Carney said. “I said I already got some.” He told the Georgia boy to take a lunch break.

Carney called Aunt Millie again and asked her to have Freddie get in touch. That night he’d hit Nightbirds, go to Cherry’s and the Clermont Lounge, all of his cousin’s spots until he tracked him down. Freddie in trouble and Carney chasing him down, like they were teenagers again. “Handle stuff sometimes”—nobody knew about his sideline except his cousin. His cousin, and the few guys who came around sometimes with items that had materialized in their vicinity, stuff in fine shape, stuff he’d feel okay about selling to customers. Not merely okay—proud to sell. But just those guys. Plus his man Buxbaum on Canal. Carney’d kept his head down and Freddie put his name out there.

    He locked the door at six o’clock and was almost done moping over his ledgers when his cousin knocked. Only Freddie knocked like that, since when they were kids and he knocked on the frame of the bunk bed—You still up, hey, you still up? I was thinking…

“You got these hooligans coming around my store,” Carney said, hooligans being an Aunt Millie word for bogeyman. Hooligans defaced the subway entrance, hooligans beat her to the last bottle of milk at the grocers, it was an invasion.

Freddie’s voice was a squeak: “They came here? Jesus!”

Carney brought him into the office. Freddie plopped onto the Argent couch and exhaled. He said, “I gotta say, I’ve been on my feet.”

“That was you with the Theresa? You okay?”

Freddie wiggled his eyebrows. Carney cursed himself. He was supposed to be angry at his cousin—not worried about the nigger’s health. Still, he was glad Freddie was unscathed, looks of it. His cousin had the face he wore when he got laid or paid. Freddie sat up. “Rusty gone for the day?”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I am, I am, but there’s something I got to—”

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“I’ll get to it in a minute—it’s just, the guys are coming here.”

“Those thugs are coming back here?”

Freddie appeared to probe a sore tooth with his tongue. “No, the guys I pulled the job with,” he said. “You know how you said no? I didn’t tell them that. They still think you’re the man.”

Before Miami Joe and the crew arrived at Carney’s Furniture, there was time for monologues that ranged in tenor between the condemnation and the harangue. Carney expressed his rage toward, and disappointment in, his cousin, and proceeded to a dissertation on Freddie’s stupidity, illustrated with numerous examples, the boys having been born within a month of each other and Freddie’s boneheadedness an early-to-emerge character trait. Carney was also moved to share in emphatic terms why he feared for himself and his family, and his regret over the loss of his sideline’s anonymity.

    There was also time for Freddie to share the tale of the heist.





FOUR


Freddie had never been south of Atlantic City. Miami was an unimagined land, the customs of which he filled in with details from his acquaintance with Miami Joe. Miamians dressed well, for Miami Joe dressed well, his purple suits—solid, others of pinstripes in different widths—masterfully tailored, complemented by his collection of short, fat kipper ties. Pocket squares jutted like weeds. In Miami, Freddie gathered, they turned out straight shooters, it was something in the water, or a combination of the sun and the water. To hear Miami Joe expound on a subject—whether it was food, the treachery of females, or the simple eloquence of violence—was to see the world shorn of its civilized ruses. The only thing he dressed up nicely was himself; all else remained as naked and uncomplicated as God had created it.

Miami Joe operated in New York City for five years after departing his hometown in the wake of an escapade. He found work as a collector for Reggie Greene, maiming welshers and shopkeepers who were miserly with protection money, but he tired of such easy game and returned to thieving. At Nightbirds Freddie had recounted to Carney some of Miami Joe’s more recent capers—a trailer full of vacuum cleaners, snatching the payroll of a department store. The flashy, efficient scores were the ones he chose to advertise, alluding to a host of others kept private.

    Freddie and Miami Joe drank together at the Leopard’s Spots, the last to leave, the nights unfinished until the duo had been converted into rye-soaked cockroaches scurrying from sunlight and propriety. Freddie never failed to wake with a fear over what he’d revealed about himself. He hoped Miami Joe was too drunk to remember his stories, but Miami Joe did remember—it was more evidence for his unsentimental study of the human condition. The day Miami Joe brought him in, Freddie had recently quit running numbers for Peewee Gibson.

“But you’ve never done a robbery before,” Carney said.