Harlem Shuffle(9)

Put it like that, an outside observer might get the idea that Carney trafficked quite frequently in stolen goods, but that’s not how he saw it. There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property, and Ray Carney facilitated that churn. As a middleman. Legit. Anyone who looked at his books would come to the same conclusion. The state of his books was a prideful matter with Carney, rarely shared with anyone because no one seemed very interested when he talked about his time in business school and the classes he’d excelled in. Like accounting. He told this to his cousin.

“Middleman. Like a fence.”

    “I sell furniture.”

“Nigger, please.”

It was true that his cousin did bring a necklace by from time to time. Or a watch or two, top-notch. Or a few rings in a silver box engraved with initials. And it was true that Carney had an associate on Canal Street who helped these items on to the next leg of their journey. From time to time. Now that he added up all those occasions they numbered more than he thought, but that was not the point. “Nothing like what you’re talking about now.”

“You don’t know what you can do, Ray-Ray. You never have. That’s why you have me.”

A bunch of hoods with pistols and what they got with those pistols was crazy. “This ain’t stealing candy from Mr. Nevins, Freddie.”

“It’s not candy,” Freddie said. He smiled. “It’s the Hotel Theresa.”

Two guys tumbled through the front door, brawling. Bert reached for Jack Lightning, the baseball bat he kept by the register.

Summer had come to Harlem.





THREE


He preferred the street-side booths but Chock Full o’Nuts was busy. Maybe a convention upstairs. Carney hooked his hat on the stand and sat at the counter. Sandra was on patrol with her pot and poured him a cup. “What else can I get you, baby?” she asked. In younger days she’d danced in the top revues, Club Baron and the Savoy, head girl at the Apollo. You’d still think she danced professional from the way she glided on the cheap gray linoleum. Certainly she hadn’t quit show business, waitressing being a line of work where you had to play to even the cheapest of seats.

“Just the coffee,” he said. “How was your son’s visit?” The Hotel Theresa’s Chock Full o’Nuts had been part of his morning routine since he opened the store.

She sucked her teeth. “Oh, he came. Not that I saw him. Hanging out with those friends of his the whole time.” She let the pot dangle without spilling a drop. “Left me a note.”

The hot spell was unbroken, which was unfortunate. The heat from the kitchen made it worse. From his stool, Carney got a view of Seventh Avenue, where the hotel entrance hopped with checkouts. Bellboys blowing whistles, yellow cabs pulling up in staggered approaches.

Most days Carney wouldn’t notice the hotel’s patterns, but his meeting with Freddie had him twisted. He’d been with his cousin the first time he’d witnessed the sidewalk choreography in front of the Hotel Theresa, during an outing with him and Aunt Millie. Carney must have been ten or eleven, if she was minding him. That unsettled stretch in his life.

    “Let’s see who it is everybody’s fussing over,” Aunt Millie had said. She’d taken them for ice-cream sodas at Thomforde’s to celebrate, Carney couldn’t remember what, and they were walking home. The crowd outside the Hotel Theresa’s blue canopy drew her in. Young men in their hotel uniforms corralling gawkers and then the big bus pulling up. They went over to see.

The red carpet outside the Waldorf of Harlem was the theater for daily and sometimes hourly spectacles, whether it was the sight of the heavyweight champ waving to fans as he climbed into a Cadillac, or a wrung-out jazz singer splashing out of a Checker cab at three a.m. with the devil’s verses in her mouth. The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.

Management had no choice but to open its doors, and well-to-do Negroes had no choice but to stay there if they wanted the luxury treatment. All the famous Negro athletes and movie stars slept there, the top singers and businessmen, taking supper in the Orchid Room on the third floor and throwing soirees in the Skyline Ballroom. From the Skyline’s thirteenth-floor windows you could take in the lights of the George Washington Bridge one way, the Triborough another way, and the sentinel Empire State Building to the south. Top of the world. Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, and the Ink Spots lived upstairs. So went the lore of the place.

That Thomforde’s afternoon with his aunt marked the return of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. A public relations firm—or a concierge on tabloid payroll—tipped photographers to ensure an adequate commotion. The bandleader’s name flowed across the side of the tour bus in gigantic white letters, stained faintly where crackers had thrown eggs at them in some Podunk, could’ve been worse. The bystanders screamed when the musicians stepped onto the sidewalk, dapper and cool in their powder blue suits and bug-eye sunglasses. Freddie joined in—flashy dressers impressed him even then. Cab himself arrived later that night. He kept a lady in D.C. who had a knack for down-home breakfasts and other early-morning pleasures, or so it was said.