Harlem Shuffle(40)
“How’s business with you?” Freddie asked.
Freddie hadn’t been by since the renovation, part of which involved carving out a door in the wall between Carney’s office and the street. It allowed Carney to exit onto Morningside between 125th and 126th and bypass the showroom. And have people enter that way, too, after six p.m. when he sent Rusty and Marie home.
“They think I’m a good boss because I never let them work late,” Carney said. The cousins laughed again, as if over one of their shared jokes from the old days, like quoting James Cagney from White Heat—“Top of the world!”—when some mope did something especially stupid.
He wasn’t sure if he should mention it, but he did anyway: Chink Montague had had some falling out with Lou Parks, his longtime fence, and was now referring business Carney’s way. For a cut. “So now Chink gets his weekly envelope from me and then a finder’s fee on top,” Carney said. “He’s worse than Uncle Sam.”
It was a reversal. Time was, Freddie was the one who had stuff cooking. “Good for you,” Freddie said. “If that nigger only knew.” They rarely mentioned the Theresa job, the last two years. Freddie still undertook the odd petty theft, but it was jewelry now, bracelets and necklaces, no appliances. He hadn’t brought Carney in on a job after that one time, and as far as Carney knew, hadn’t worked with a crew since. Until last winter, Freddie had been a runner for Chet Blakely, handling a nice route on Amsterdam in the 130s, with two old-age residences and traffic from the college. But Chet Blakely got clipped on New Year’s Day outside the Vets Club, and that was the end of that upstart operation. Carney didn’t know what his cousin had been up to since then. This meeting had only come to pass after he’d left half a dozen messages at Nightbirds, having tried everything else.
“You been taking care of yourself?” Carney asked.
“I should ask you that—you the one working with Chink.” Freddie caught on to the purpose of this meeting. He pursed his lips. “My mom’s been talking to you.”
Carney admitted that was why he’d invited him here. Aunt Millie hadn’t seen him in three months. Usually he dropped by sooner than that, for a meal at least.
The front door to a brownstone across the street opened. Two teenage girls in brightly striped shirts skipped down the stoop and turned uptown.
“What are you looking at?” Freddie asked.
Carney shook his head: nothing. “I told Aunt Millie I hadn’t seen you for a while.” If Freddie wondered why they were meeting at the Big Apple, as opposed to one of their regular joints, he didn’t say. “Where you sleeping these days?”
“I’ve been bunking with my friend Linus. Over on Madison.”
“Who’s that?”
“You know, he’s this cat I met in the Village.”
Freddie told the story as if it were a caper. It was at the apartment of some rich white chick at NYU, after an open showcase at a MacDougal Street coffeehouse. “The Magic Bean or the Hairy Toledo or something.” Freddie was the only Negro in attendance, and after some conversation (“What’s it like, growing up colored?” “My daddy worked on the Scottsboro Boys case”), he got hip that he was there to perform, put on a show of some authentic uptown magic. What was a night in New York City without a trip to the theater?
“I coulda just pulled out my johnson,” Freddie said, but the reefer had made him goofy. There was some good reefer floating around the Village that month. He asked if they’d ever heard of three-card monte. The white chick set up a steamer trunk, produced a deck of cards, and lit some votive candles. All those white chicks had those little candles. Freddie did not, in fact, know how to run three-card monte—“You know me, all those cards flying around make me dizzy”—but he was having too much fun. He reeled off some jive he’d heard over the years on 125th Street and tried not to break out in laughter at their gee-whiz excitement.
Then Linus stepped up. Every three-card monte game needs a ringer to set up the rubes, and suddenly here was this shaggy white boy playing along, throwing down dollar bills onto the trunk. He knew what was up—Freddie’s role and everybody else’s—and covered for Freddie’s lapses in technique. It was hard work picking the wrong card time after time, but Linus was diligent. Out on the street, after it was apparent that nobody was getting laid, show or no show, Linus produced a joint and him and Freddie had a good laugh walking around until the sunrise. Freddie even gave him back his money, such was the feeling of bonhomie.
Linus had just got out of a stint in a sanatorium for “inverted tendencies,” Freddie said. Linus’s family was rich and patient and thought he’d made some progress after the electroshock treatments, even though it was an act on his part. Easier to act normal and cash the checks. “That electroshock? They tie you down and then zap the shit out of you ten times.”
“White people.” Carney shrugged.
“White people torturing white people—talk about your equal opportunity.”
This Linus character sounded like a head case, but on the whole it was a typical Freddie scenario: half-assed but harmless. Carney steered them back. “Aunt Millie says you’ve been hanging out with Biz Dixon lately,” he said.
Biz Dixon’s mother, Alice, was in the same church group as Aunt Millie. The women had looked after each other’s kids back when they were little, and continued to do so now that those kids had grown into crooked men. The euphemism for Biz these days among that generation was that he was spending time with a “bad element.” Another way would have been to say that Biz was a peddler. He’d been to prison twice already for selling junk, and each time he got out he returned to the streets with renewed dedication, chasing criminal renown the way musicians pursued Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. From Freddie’s stories over the years, Carney knew that Biz liked to keep his spots at the lower edge of Harlem, near the subway so it was easy for white customers to score. Five minutes and they were back on the platform waiting for the train downtown. Five minutes that felt like five hours if they got that jones.