Harlem Shuffle(38)
Fifth floor, Duke did indeed have a nice view of the Bronx. On the other side of the Harlem River, industrial buildings and warehouses and then sturdy tenements steamed in the heat, poking into the yellowish smog that got worse every year.
Framed on one wall, centered among numerous diplomas and citations and testaments to his character, hung a large drawing of Duke as Napoleon, one too large to have run in the Gazette. He must have commissioned it from the newspaper cartoonist himself. Godzilla-sized, George Washington Bridge behind him as he forded the Hudson with one big foot poised to stomp the West Side Highway. French general’s hat in its proper place instead of the beanie.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you, Raymond,” Duke said when they were seated. “In the end, I’m only one voice of many.”
“You ripped me off.”
“How’d you expect it to turn out, Raymond?”
“For you to respect the terms.”
“I said I’d move your name to the front and that’s what I did.”
“You take a sweetener, it’s a guarantee.” The yellow smog—it was like you saw everybody’s bad thoughts lurking in the air.
“Where you from, man?”
“127th Street.”
“One of those places. How’d you think it was going to go?” Duke was practiced in conversations like this. At the bank snatching back loans, foreclosing on hope. Here were passionless statements of fact.
Carney said, “I’ll take my money.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Like I said.” He stood.
Duke regarded the visitor on the other side of his desk as if peering over the parapet of a castle. His eyes sparkled. Since he left the bank, it was only once or twice a day that the world handed him such opportunities for malice. Three times if he was lucky. He barked at the front office. “Candace, can you call the precinct?”
“Call the police on me?” Carney said.
Candace cracked the door. “Are you all right, Mr. Duke?”
Carney’s father was the one you called police on, not him.
Duke stared at Carney and slowly opened the top drawer of his desk. He slipped his hand inside as if a pistol waited. Harlem bankers, they are prepared.
Out on the pavement, Carney could barely see. The people on the street were shadow-shapes moving around him. It was a normal afternoon and he’d been shunted outside it. A cabbie pounded on his horn at an old biddy jaywalking and she cursed him out, dragging a battered green suitcase. One of the street preachers yelled, “I’m saving souls here!” and raised his arms as if parting seas. Down the block, two newsboys from rival papers fought over the turf in front of a cigar store. Their dropped tabloids fanned out on the sidewalk and trembled in the exhaust of a city bus. Carney squinted. Here was every street corner in this city, populated by noisy, furious characters who were all salesmen, delivering dead pitches for bum products to customers who didn’t have a fucking nickel anyway. He moved one foot then the other.
Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.
His father—how would he have phrased it? “I’ll burn that nigger’s house down while he sleeps.” In more innocent days, Carney preferred to think of that as a figure of speech; it was more than likely that his father had done that thing once or twice. Wilfred Duke lived in a fine and stately eight-story building on Riverside Drive, the Cumberland, and the complexities of burning it down were numerous and varied, even if Carney had arson in his repertoire. Which he did not.
No. Fire was too quick. And Carney by nature was more of the biding type.
TWO
The Big Apple Diner faced a row of four-story brownstones that had been built by the same developer at the end of the previous century. Identical doglegged stoops, leaf brackets and keystones, wood cornices, one after the other from one corner to the next. From across the street, the houses had distinguished themselves from one another over time through the plantings out front, the decorations behind the front-door glass, and window treatments—the accumulated decisions of the residents and modifications by the owners. One misguided soul had painted one of the exteriors a mealy peach color and now it stuck out, the rotten one in the barrel. A single blueprint—funded by speculators, executed by immigrant construction gangs—had summoned this divergent bounty.
Carney imagined beyond the facades; he was looking for something. Inside, the brownstones had remained one-family homes, or been cut up into individual apartments, and their rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint color, what had been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. In this room, the oldest son was born on a lumpy canopy bed by the window; in that parlor the old bachelor had proposed to his mail-order bride; here the third floor had been the stage, variously, for slow-to-boil divorces and suicide schemes and suicide attempts. Also undetectable were the impressions of more mundane activities: the satisfying breakfasts and midnight confidences, the making of daydreams and resolutions. Carney imagined himself inside because he was looking for evidence of himself. Was there an Argent wingback chair or Heywood-Wakefield armoire in one of them, over by the window, the proof of a sale he’d closed? It was a new game he played, walking around this unforgiving town: Is my stuff in there?