Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.

  “Goddamn it, Bill!” Sandra said. Something smoldered in one of the stoves and gray smoke, heavy with grease, floated through the window into the dining area.

  “I got it, boss!” the cook said, avoiding her eyes.

  Sandra knew how to handle herself, whether dealing with the kitchen staff or the impetuous attentions of customers. Dancing at the Apollo was a tutorial in the male animal, after all. Considering the hotel’s legend for nighttime fun, men probably bought her drinks at the bar across from the lobby, everybody hung out there in those days. Lighting her cigarettes over dreary promises. Back in the glory days—hers and the hotel’s. One time Carney asked why she quit dancing. “Baby,” she said, “God tells you it’s time to hang it up, you listen.” She took off her high heels and slipped on a waist apron, but she couldn’t quit 125th Street—you could see the Apollo from the window.

  The morning after Freddie’s Nightbirds pitch, Carney took Sandra’s words for wisdom about knowing your limitations. To wit: Even if he were crooked enough for his cousin’s proposition, he didn’t have the contacts to handle a haul from the Hotel Theresa. Three hundred rooms, who knows how many guests locking up valuables and cash in the safe-deposit boxes behind reception—he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Neither would his man Buxbaum down on Canal. Have a coronary if Carney walked in with that kind of weight.

  Sandra refilled Carney’s cup, he didn’t notice. Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition. The odd piece of jewelry, the electronic appliances Freddie and then a few other local characters brought by the store, he could justify. Nothing major, nothing that attracted undue attention to his store, the front he put out to the world. If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around. Dizzying and powerful as it was. Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you. The thing inside him that gave a yell or tug or shout now and again was not the same thing his father had. That sickness drawing every moment into its service. The sickness Freddie ministered to, more and more.

  Carney had a bent to his personality, how could he not, growing up with a father like that. You had to know your limits as a man and master them.

  Two guys in pinstripe suits, probably salesmen in the city hawking insurance schemes, came in from the bar, which separated the coffee shop from the lobby. Sandra told them to sit wherever and when she turned they checked out her legs. She had nice legs. That door. Through the door you passed from the bar and into the lobby. There were three ways into the lobby: the bar, the street, and the clothing boutique. Plus the elevators and fire stairs. Three men at the big front desk, guests coming and going all hours…Carney stopped himself. He sipped his coffee. Sometimes he slipped and his mind went thataway.

  At Nightbirds, Freddie had made him promise to think about it, knowing that Carney usually came around if he thought too long about one of his cousin’s plots. A night of Carney staring at the ceiling was enough to close the deal, the cracks up there like a sketch of the cracks in his self-control. It was part of their Laurel and Hardy routine—Freddie sweet-talks him into an ill-advised scheme and the mismatched duo tries to outrun the consequences. Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into. His cousin was a hypnotist—suddenly Carney’s on lookout while Freddie shoplifts comics at the five-and-dime, they’re cutting class to catch a cowboy double feature at Loew’s. Two drinks at Nightbirds, and then dawn’s squeaking through the window of Miss Mary’s after-hours joint, moonshine rolling in their heads like an iron ball. There’s a necklace I got to get off my hands, can you help me out?

  Whenever Aunt Millie interrogated Freddie over some story the neighbors told her, Carney stepped up with an alibi. No one would ever suspect Carney of telling a lie, of not being on the up-and-up. He liked it that way. For Freddie to give his name to Miami Joe and whatever crew he’d thrown in with, it was unforgivable. Carney’s Furniture was in the damn phone book, in the Amsterdam News when he could afford to place an ad, and anyone could track him down.

  Carney agreed to sleep on it. The next morning he remained unswayed by the ceiling and now he had to figure out what to do about his cousin. It didn’t make sense, a hood like Miami Joe bringing small-time Freddie in on the job. And Freddie saying yes, that was bad news.

  This wasn’t stealing candy, and it wasn’t like when they were kids, standing on a cliff a hundred feet over the Hudson River, tip of the island, Freddie daring him to jump into the black water. Did Carney leap? He leapt, hollering all the way down. Now Freddie wanted him to jump into a bunch of concrete.

  He paid Sandra. She winked a practiced wink. When Freddie called the office that afternoon, Carney told him it was no-go and cussed him out for his poor judgment. That was that, for two weeks, until the heist went down and Chink Montague’s goons came to the store looking for Freddie.

  * * *

  * * *

  The robbery was in all the news. He had to ask Rusty what Juneteenth was, and he was right, it was some country thing.

  “Juneteenth is when those slaves in Texas found out slavery was over,” Rusty said. “My cousins used to throw a party to celebrate.”

  Finding out you were free six months after the fact didn’t seem like something to celebrate. More like it was telling you to read the morning paper. Carney read the Times, the Tribune, and the Post every day to stay informed, bought them from the stand on the corner.

  hotel theresa heist

  black harlem stunned by daring

  early morning robbery

  The cops blocked off the traffic outside the hotel ’til past noon. A different sort of sidewalk performance unfurled outside the hotel—detectives and insurance men running in and out, newspaper men and their shutterbug buddies trying to get the scoop. Carney had to get his morning coffee at the scruffy diner down the street.

  Customers carried rumors and theories into the furniture store. They busted in with machine guns and I heard they shot five people and The Italian Mafia did it to put us in our place. This last tidbit put forth by the black nationalists on Lenox Ave, hectoring from their soapboxes. That’s why they picked Juneteenth, to mess with us.

  No one got killed, according to the papers. Scared shitless, sure. Carney called his aunt to make sure his cousin wasn’t involved—he’d heard Freddie was back home—but the phone just rang.

  The robbery was early Wednesday morning. Chink’s men came into his store the next day around noon. Rusty said, “Hey!” when one of them bucked him out of the way. The two men moved in a lumbering prowl, like escapees from the wrestling league who’d strapped themselves into suits. Brown jackets hung over their forearms, ties loose, big sweat circles under their pits. I don’t owe any money, was Carney’s first thought. The second was, Maybe I do.

  He waved Rusty off and closed the door to the office. The man with the handlebar mustache had a scar that dug from his lip to the middle of his cheek, as if he’d wriggled free from a fisherman’s hook. He eyed the sofa but didn’t sit, as if to do so was to breach protocol, it might get back to a higher-up. The other man had a shaved bullet head beaded with perspiration, and a woman’s made-up eyebrows. He did most of the talking.

  “You Ray Carney?”

  “Welcome to the store. You thinking of a new living-room set? A dinette?”

  “Dinette,” the bald man repeated. He squinted through the office window, only now registering what kind of store it was. “No.” He swabbed his brow with a blue handkerchief. “We work for a man you know. Heard of. Name of Montague?”
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  “Chink Montague,” the man with the scar offered.

  “What can I do for you?” Carney asked. Something to do with Freddie, then—his cousin owed money? Was he supposed to pay it or they’d start beating him? He thought of Elizabeth and May, that these men knew where he lived.

  “We know you handle stuff sometimes—jewelry, stones?”

  Too shaken to play dumb. He checked—Rusty lingered by the front door with his arms crossed, nervous. Carney nodded at the men.

  “The robbery yesterday at the Theresa,” Baldy said. “Mr. Montague wants the word out that there’s something he wants back. A necklace with a big ruby—big. He wants it back so much, that’s why we’re going around all over talking to people who know about that kind of thing. He says anyone comes across it, he’d like to hear about it, keep him appraised.”

  It was the wrong word, but here it fit. “I sell furniture, Mr….?”

  The man shook his head. His partner followed suit.

  “But if I come across it, I’ll tell you,” Carney said. “That you can be certain of.”

  “Certain of,” Baldy said.

  Carney asked for a phone number. Like he was asking a customer for home information. Baldy said, “You live around here, you know how to get in touch. And I’d recommend you do that.”

  On their way out, the man with the scar paused by one of the boomerang tables, a low model with a multicolored starburst design hovering in the glass top. Scar checked out the price tag and started to ask something, but thought better of it. It was a nice coffee table and Carney had spent a lot of time on where to put it so you didn’t miss it.

  Rusty came over. “Who was that?” If he’d been mad about being pushed, he’d crossed over into hick-in-the-big-city wonder.

  “Selling flood insurance,” Carney said. “I said I already got some.” He told the Georgia boy to take a lunch break.

  Carney called Aunt Millie again and asked her to have Freddie get in touch. That night he’d hit Nightbirds, go to Cherry’s and the Clermont Lounge, all of his cousin’s spots until he tracked him down. Freddie in trouble and Carney chasing him down, like they were teenagers again. “Handle stuff sometimes”—nobody knew about his sideline except his cousin. His cousin, and the few guys who came around sometimes with items that had materialized in their vicinity, stuff in fine shape, stuff he’d feel okay about selling to customers. Not merely okay—proud to sell. But just those guys. Plus his man Buxbaum on Canal. Carney’d kept his head down and Freddie put his name out there.

  He locked the door at six o’clock and was almost done moping over his ledgers when his cousin knocked. Only Freddie knocked like that, since when they were kids and he knocked on the frame of the bunk bed—You still up, hey, you still up? I was thinking…

  “You got these hooligans coming around my store,” Carney said, hooligans being an Aunt Millie word for bogeyman. Hooligans defaced the subway entrance, hooligans beat her to the last bottle of milk at the grocers, it was an invasion.

  Freddie’s voice was a squeak: “They came here? Jesus!”

  Carney brought him into the office. Freddie plopped onto the Argent couch and exhaled. He said, “I gotta say, I’ve been on my feet.”

  “That was you with the Theresa? You okay?”

  Freddie wiggled his eyebrows. Carney cursed himself. He was supposed to be angry at his cousin—not worried about the nigger’s health. Still, he was glad Freddie was unscathed, looks of it. His cousin had the face he wore when he got laid or paid. Freddie sat up. “Rusty gone for the day?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I am, I am, but there’s something I got to—”

  “Don’t leave me hanging.”

  “I’ll get to it in a minute—it’s just, the guys are coming here.”

  “Those thugs are coming back here?”

  Freddie appeared to probe a sore tooth with his tongue. “No, the guys I pulled the job with,” he said. “You know how you said no? I didn’t tell them that. They still think you’re the man.”

  Before Miami Joe and the crew arrived at Carney’s Furniture, there was time for monologues that ranged in tenor between the condemnation and the harangue. Carney expressed his rage toward, and disappointment in, his cousin, and proceeded to a dissertation on Freddie’s stupidity, illustrated with numerous examples, the boys having been born within a month of each other and Freddie’s boneheadedness an early-to-emerge character trait. Carney was also moved to share in emphatic terms why he feared for himself and his family, and his regret over the loss of his sideline’s anonymity.

  There was also time for Freddie to share the tale of the heist.

  FOUR

  Freddie had never been south of Atlantic City. Miami was an unimagined land, the customs of which he filled in with details from his acquaintance with Miami Joe. Miamians dressed well, for Miami Joe dressed well, his purple suits—solid, others of pinstripes in different widths—masterfully tailored, complemented by his collection of short, fat kipper ties. Pocket squares jutted like weeds. In Miami, Freddie gathered, they turned out straight shooters, it was something in the water, or a combination of the sun and the water. To hear Miami Joe expound on a subject—whether it was food, the treachery of females, or the simple eloquence of violence—was to see the world shorn of its civilized ruses. The only thing he dressed up nicely was himself; all else remained as naked and uncomplicated as God had created it.

  Miami Joe operated in New York City for five years after departing his hometown in the wake of an escapade. He found work as a collector for Reggie Greene, maiming welshers and shopkeepers who were miserly with protection money, but he tired of such easy game and returned to thieving. At Nightbirds Freddie had recounted to Carney some of Miami Joe’s more recent capers—a trailer full of vacuum cleaners, snatching the payroll of a department store. The flashy, efficient scores were the ones he chose to advertise, alluding to a host of others kept private.

  Freddie and Miami Joe drank together at the Leopard’s Spots, the last to leave, the nights unfinished until the duo had been converted into rye-soaked cockroaches scurrying from sunlight and propriety. Freddie never failed to wake with a fear over what he’d revealed about himself. He hoped Miami Joe was too drunk to remember his stories, but Miami Joe did remember—it was more evidence for his unsentimental study of the human condition. The day Miami Joe brought him in, Freddie had recently quit running numbers for Peewee Gibson.

  “But you’ve never done a robbery before,” Carney said.

  “He said I was going to be the wheelman, that’s why I said yes.” He shrugged. “What’s so hard about that? Two hands and a foot.”

  The first convocation of the crew was held in a booth at Baby’s Best, on the brink of happy hour. In the dressing room the strippers covered their scars with powder; blocks away, their faithful customers waited to punch out of straight jobs. The lights were going, though, spinning and whirring, perhaps they never stopped, even when the place was closed, red and green and orange in restless, garish patrol over surfaces. It was Mars. Miami Joe had his arms spread on the red leather when Freddie walked in. Miami Joe, sipping Canadian Club and twisting his pinkie rings as he mined the dark rock of his thoughts.

  Arthur was next to arrive, embarrassed by the meeting place, like he’d never been in this kind of establishment before, or spent his every hour there. Arthur was forty-eight years old, hair corkscrewed with gray. He reminded Freddie of a schoolteacher. The man favored plaid sweater vests and dark slacks, wore bookworm glasses, and had a gentle way of pointing out flaws in aspects of the scheme. “A policeman would spot that phony registration in a second—is there another solution to this problem?” He’d just finished his third stint in prison, thanks to a weakness for venal or otherwise incompetent comrades. Not this time. Arthur was “the Jackie Robinson of safecracking,” according to Miami Joe, having busted t
he color line when it came to safes and locks and alarms, generally regarded as the domain of white crooks.

  Pepper showed up last and they got to business.

  “What about this man Pepper?” Carney asked.

  “Pepper.” Freddie winced. “You’ll see.”

  Cocktails at the Hotel Theresa were a hot ticket, and Miami Joe often installed himself at the long, polished bar with the rest of the neighborhood’s criminal class, talking shit. He took out one of the maids every once in a while, a slight, withdrawn girl named Betty. She lived at the Burbank, a once-dignified building on Riverside Drive that had been cut to into single-room accommodations. A lot of new arrivals washed up there. Betty liked to stall before she let Miami Joe into her bed, which meant a lot of talking, and in due course he had enough information to plan the robbery. The job struck him the first time he laid eyes on the hotel. Where others saw sophistication and affirmation, Miami Joe recognized opportunity, for monetary gain, and to bring black Harlem down a notch. These up-North niggers had an attitude about Southern newcomers, he’d noticed, a pervasive condescension that made him boil. What’d you say? Is that how y’all do it down there? They thought their hotel was nice? He’d seen nicer. Not that he’d be able to provide an example if challenged on this point. Miami Joe was strictly hot sheet when it came to short-term accommodations.

  The hotel bar closed at one a.m., the lobby was dead by four, and the morning shift started at five, when the kitchen staff and laundry workers punched in. Weekends were busier, and on Saturday nights the hotel manager ran gambling rooms for high rollers. Which meant bodyguards and sore losers—too many surly men walking around with guns in their pockets. Tuesday night was Miami Joe’s lucky night when it came to jobs, so Tuesday.