Harlem Shuffle(89)

    That was how Carney put it to himself, as his wife gave Pepper her standard client pitch. Pepper took in Elizabeth’s spiel patiently. He chewed, savoring, squeezed in between John and May like an eccentric uncle. He was a relative, this crook, part of his father’s clan. Carney raised his Schlitz and made a toast to the chef. It was Wednesday night, family supper, both sides of him at the table, the straight and the crooked, breaking bread.





SEVEN


She grabbed his arm and startled him—Sandra from Chock Full o’Nuts. He was headed for the subway, downtown to Moskowitz’s. The emerald in his leather satchel made him suspect everybody on the street had X-ray vision. On the lookout for a gunman or an anvil-chinned heavy with a five-o’clock shadow, he didn’t catch the waitress’s approach.

Outside of the coffee shop, Sandra was just as chatty and vivacious. She asked after his family; he had shown her pictures over the years, courtesy of his Polaroid Pathfinder. Sandra told him she’d made it through “all that drama last week okay.” Some roughneck had lobbed a brick through the Seventh Avenue window of the restaurant so they boarded up the place until the protests subsided. They were back in business now. “People need their coffee,” she said.

Carney apologized for being too busy to come by. She touched his arm again and said they weren’t going anywhere.

A few minutes later he was on the subway, humming the shop’s theme song: Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy…What can a millionaire’s money buy: everything else. Cops and city hall and faceless thugs to do your bidding. Carney recalled the fear of those days after the Theresa job, the fear that Arthur’s killer might come for him, his family. Now Freddie and Linus had unleashed trouble of another magnitude, pissed-off rich people who were as bent as gangsters but didn’t have to hide. They did it out in the open, notarized their misdeeds or engraved them into bronze plates for building facades.

    Sure, when this was over he’d return to Chock Full o’Nuts for a nice, solid cup of coffee, but he had to get this racket going first. Pepper had signed up, so Carney was spared the tricky business of hitting up one of his customers on the fencing side to see if they had a name. He was not impressed with Harlem’s thugs overall. Whether you were talking construction, poetry, or women’s pumps, the Walt Whitmans, the Peppers, of a given field were hard to come by. It was no different in the violence-and-mayhem trade; the majority of practitioners were average or subpar. Carney was grateful Pepper had forgiven him, even if he suspected it was only out of an old obligation to his father, ancient blood-oath shit.

After their initial discussion of the job, Pepper hadn’t tried to talk him out of helping Freddie. Carney had enough doubts with outside encouragement. The debacle of Bella Fontaine and Mr. Gibbs aside, Freddie had brought danger close again. When they were children, when he’d brought down parental wrath and they sat in the bedroom waiting for the belt, Freddie would croak out a pitiable, “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” It never occurred to him that things would go wrong, that the caper would go sideways and there would be consequences. There were always consequences.

Carney didn’t have to do it anymore. Freddie was a grown man. What to call this operation: the Freddie job, the Van Wyck job? Maybe it was the Carney job, because he wanted to prove that he could move a big rock like that, stick it to the rich bastards again. Rich white bastards this time. This wasn’t a broken radio some strung-out loser had grabbed from a widow’s apartment. This necklace was mythic, a piece out of legend.

He scored a seat on the train. Carney pulled out the flyer and unfolded it—he’d rediscovered it in his wallet when he bought tokens. Last week in the middle of the protests, this young woman, college kid, had stopped him as he surveyed 125th Street. It was Monday morning and Carney was getting his first real look at the weekend carnage. She wore white slacks with a green-and-white-striped top. Given the uneasy mood on the street, her cheer and purpose were a declaration of principles. She grabbed his wrist and tucked a leaflet in his hand:


INSTRUCTIONS:

ANY EMPTY BOTTLE

FILL WITH GASOLINE

USE RAG AS WICK

LIGHT RAG


TOSS

AND

SEE THEM RUN!



When he looked up she had vanished. Who’d print such a thing? It was dangerous, the product of a demented mind. Back at the office he folded the flyer and tucked it away. He wasn’t sure why.

The white lady next to him on the subway read it over his shoulder. She frowned. That’s why you shouldn’t read over people’s shoulders. He returned the paper to his wallet. No harm in keeping it. As a talisman or a crooked hymn kept close for reference.

Back to the setup: Freddie was lamming it in Brooklyn, Pepper minded the store in case anyone showed up. Next up was Moskowitz. Did the man have enough cash in that Hermann Bros. safe of his or did Carney have to wait a few days? He had kept it cryptic on the phone; that plus the uncustomary afternoon meeting would warn the jeweler that it was serious.

In midtown there was no indication that New York City had been besieged one week prior. The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.

    Moskowitz’s was busy—Carney passed four customers as he went up the stairs. Ari, the nephew who sat next to Carney during his lessons, nodded hello and excused himself from the young couple gawking at the diamond necklaces. There was another man by the Ventura display buying something for his mistress. One of Moskowitz’s more engaged lessons had dissected the differences in posture when a customer was buying something for a wife versus a mistress, and how to adjust one’s sales pitch. Ari rapped on the office door and stuck his head in, then waved in Carney.