Harlem Shuffle(60)

One of Carney’s regulars—he had a magic well that produced new Sony portable TVs, apparently—was buddies with the photographer and arranged a meet at Nightbirds. How many times had his father met his cronies in this place? To plan a job, or to celebrate one.

Zippo arrived with his limp-dishrag posture, lanky and loose, the sleeves of his blue button-down shirt too short. Carney hadn’t seen him in years. He still rolled with that odd energy of his, defiant and jumpy, like a Bronx pigeon.

“You have a camera these days?” Carney asked. Last he’d heard, a model’s irate boyfriend had put Zippo out of business.

“That was a temporary setback,” Zippo said. “If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a ‘setback.’?”

Carney had never heard jail described that way. It came back, how Zippo veered every which way, like a drunk driver peeling down the street at three a.m. One person one second, and another the next. Deranged competency is how Carney put it later.

    “I’m back to work,” Zippo said. He checked over his shoulder to prove his discretion. “You and the missus want some pictures taken—”

“My wife is not—it’s something else. It’s the stuff you do, boudoir stuff.”

“Right, right.”

“But one person is asleep.”

“Sure, there’s a whole market in that. Ladies pretending to be dead. Men pretending to be graves. Cemetery scenes…”

To curtail further explanation, Carney explained the job in detail. The photographer had no qualms once he named the mark.

“I hate that fucking Carver Federal,” Zippo said. “You know they put my name on a list?” He’d busied himself with ripping a coaster to bits and now made a mound of white shreds.

How old was Zippo—eighteen? Nineteen? Too young for this job?

“It might be in flagrante,” Carney said.

“In flagrante, out flagrante, you’re the boss.” Zippo emphasized his superiority to the assignment. “When I was younger, I was more ‘fine art,’ if you know what I mean.” Certainly not the first Nightbirds customer to wax over the promise of bygone days, and not the last. “I wanted to be one of the great chroniclers,” he said, “like Van Der Zee. Carl Van Vechten. Harlem life, Harlem people. But my luck has always been rotten. You know that. Any chance I get, I piss it away. Now it’s tits. And people pretending to be dead.”

“I think you’ll like the money,” Carney said.

“It’s not the money,” Zippo said. He scraped the coaster detritus into his hand and asked when it was going down. They did a deal for the photography and the processing.

Now the job had snuck up on them, without warning. Five o’clock. The phone number on the business card he gave Carney was out of service. On the back, Zippo had penciled in an address. He took a taxi.

    Photography by Andre was located on 125th and Fifth, above a flower store. The stairwell creaked in such a way that if it collapsed, no one could say there’d been no warning. Carney knocked on the studio’s door and a nervous middle-aged woman rushed past, her face turned so he couldn’t identify her.

The studio was one big room, with a ratty couch and chairs by the door, and then the shooting space with lights on stands, a reflector, an umbrella. Toward the back, assorted props and illustrated backdrops leaned against one another. A beach scene of blue skies and blue water half covered a library backdrop of bookshelves crammed with leather volumes.

Zippo was unfazed by Carney’s presence. A black cat ran to his feet and he picked it up and held it to his chest. “Just finished,” Zippo said. “Little lady’s husband is in Germany on an air force base and asked her to send some photos to remember her by.”

“Have you been smoking that stuff?”

“She was so uptight, I thought it’d loosen her up,” Zippo said. “And it did! To give oneself to the camera, it’s a complicated dance. Society burdens us with these hang-ups—”

“It’s tonight,” Carney said. “It’s on for tonight.”

Zippo nodded solemnly. “I got to lock up. This place ain’t mine, its Andre’s. That’s why his name is on everything.”

Carney and Zippo walked four blocks to the lot where Carney kept his truck. He got a feeling it was a pickup-truck night, a try-to-outrun-bad-luck night. Might he need the truck bed? Carney didn’t like the notion of dumping bodies in the back of his truck, deceased or not deceased or any which way. Once is bad luck; twice and it looks like you’re getting accustomed.

The photographer lugged a big vinyl bag over his shoulder. It had already been packed when Carney showed up, even though Zippo couldn’t have known it’d go down tonight.

    “Oh, I had a feeling,” he explained. “Half my art is trusting my instincts.”

Zippo fiddled with the radio and found a beatnik DJ wandering the lower bands, mumbling desultorily. They parked across the street from Miss Laura’s apartment, where Carney could see her window from the driver’s seat. The open curtains meant she was alone, according to their signal. He told Zippo to stay put and walked over to Amsterdam for a pay phone.

“He says he’s going to try to come over,” Miss Laura told him.