“It’s from France,” Miss Laura said.
Pop. The flashbulb’s combustion was an unsettling crunch, the sound of a monster splintering bones. Miss Laura and Zippo’s mundane conversation—Hold his head up, Can you lift that leg—maddened Carney. Was this his normal world now? He pressed the lump under his eye until it hurt.
Pop. Carney traced the line between the Dumas reception early in the summer and this evening of lewd payback. The petty thieves, drunk burglars, and nutjob criminals he’d transacted with since he started selling the odd TV and gently used lamp were no preparation for his ragtag crew tonight. Is this what revenge looked like, the grotesque choreography underway in Miss Laura’s pad? Did it feel like revenge? It did not feel like revenge to him.
Zippo said, “He’s actually very photogenic.”
Pop. Miss Laura’s skin glowed. Now, she was what revenge looked like: fierce and full of purpose, alien to mercy. Humiliation: that’s the word Elizabeth had used to describe Carney’s Dumas rejection. Duke could do what he wanted because he held the money. Foreclose on your property, sit on your business loan, take your envelope and tell you to go fuck yourself.
Pop. That’s how the whole damn country worked, but they had to change the pitch for the Harlem market, and that’s how Duke came to be. The little man was the white system hidden behind a black mask. Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.
“What I really want to get into,” Zippo said, “is movies.”
Carney ducked out after ten minutes and hung around in the hallway. When Zippo called him inside, the banker was asleep under blue satin sheets, the armoire shut and latched. Miss Laura had changed into blue jeans and a dark blue gingham shirt. A big red suitcase lay at her feet. Cheap Brucie had introduced her to Duke. When the banker woke, he’d complain to management. She surveyed the apartment and said, “This shit is done.”
Zippo finished packing his equipment. “I’ll make some nice, pretty prints,” he said. “And then bring them to the guy at the newspaper.”
“We’ll start there. See what happens.”
“And leave him up here like that?” Zippo asked.
Miss Laura made a dismissive noise.
“He can sleep it off like we discussed,” Carney said. “Sometimes you wake up and sleep has taken you to the darndest places.”
Zippo jetted off once the trio hit the street, rounding the corner to 142nd, softly crooning. “My truck’s over there,” Carney said. He reached for the suitcase but Miss Laura rebuffed him. She dropped it in the truck bed and clambered into the passenger seat.
Carney started up the truck and gave one last look at the apartment, at the window with curtains wide. Damn. We should have put a little Napoleon hat on him.
EIGHT
It was a warm, resplendent Saturday afternoon in September. Elizabeth’s plan was to fetch Carney at the store around noon and for the four of them to head to Riverside Park for a picnic. Unleash the kids upon the Claremont Playground. It’d be nice to do something together on a weekend for a change. “You’re the boss. The store will be okay.”
Carney checked his eye in the office bathroom. It was looking better. Good enough for the picture. When he came out the delivery men were ready for him to sign for the safe.
“Built to last, that one,” the foreman said.
“Outlast us, anyway,” Carney said.
The Hermann Bros. safe resembled a piece of military ordnance, lethal in its black imperturbability. He spun the five-spoke handle; it flowed like water. The shelves inside were bare, but if he wanted to get the walnut drawers lined with something soft, there was no shortage of places on 125th that would oblige.
It was in the perfect spot, describing a triangle with the Collins-Hathaway sofa and sling-back chair. Unlike those two, the Hermann was not going to be upgraded every year. It took weeks of searching until he found the dealer in Missouri who had two in the corner of his warehouse. Made the Ellsworth look like a pygmy. He gave the delivery guys a few bucks to take the old safe with them.
A man should have a safe big enough to hold his secrets, Moskowitz had told him. This would do for now.
Elizabeth and the kids arrived and he corralled Rusty into taking a picture. Rusty knew his way around the Polaroid Pathfinder, had one himself. Coney Island was a favorite trip for him and Beatrice and he had several beach shots tacked up above his desk. Rusty walked Carney through the process step-by-step as he posed them out front. “You have to wait,” he said. “You can’t pull the backing off too soon.”
“I have to be more patient,” Carney replied.
It turned out wonderfully. Carney and Elizabeth stood side by side, May and John in front. May mustered a serviceable smile. John’s wide-open eyes betrayed the strain of standing immobile, but you had to really look to notice it. Behind them, beyond the plate glass, the fall season’s floor models were barely visible in shadow, like lithe animals emerging from tall grasses. The sunlight transformed the sign’s letters into a regal proclamation.
Marie picked up a suitable frame a week later and the photograph remained on the wall of his office for many years. The reminder of this day gave Carney a boost when he felt rotten.
“See?” Rusty said. “It’s easier than you think.”
Carney thanked him and they walked west to the park.
“How is your father holding up?” Carney asked.
“It’s not good,” Elizabeth said.
To be sure, these were times of tribulation for much of the Negro elite. The Harlem Gazette, Duke’s local nemesis, was very fond of the photographs from Miss Laura’s apartment. Once again, you didn’t have to sell people on fucking over Duke; the proposition sold itself. The Gazette published three of the photos in Friday’s edition, front page, and teased another release for Saturday: banker’s bizarre love nest. The naughty stuff—and Laura’s face—was covered with black stripes, which let one’s imagination compose its own salacious truth.
It was natural for a fellow to lie low after that, especially one as vain and controlling as Wilfred Duke. The last time he was seen was on Thursday, when he left his Mill Building office. Candace, his secretary, reported nothing out of the ordinary.
The Gazette published what came to be called the “Safari” series on Saturday. The accompanying articles quoted disgruntled Carver customers as they described how Wilfred Duke had ruined their lives, stolen their homes from under them. The photographs, even obscured, proved a neglect of mental hygiene; the customers’ words testified to a moral corruption overall.
On Monday the newspapers covered Duke’s disappearance, and on Tuesday they reported that Duke had embezzled the funding capital for the charter of Liberty National. Duke had raised more than two million dollars from early investors, most of them upstanding members of the Harlem community, his friends and business partners and club buddies for decades. How much the banker absconded with was not immediately evident; an early accounting suggested he’d made off with most if not all of the seed money. The cops sent out an APB over the wire. The Dukes owned a property in Bimini; Bahamian authorities were on the lookout.
Carney and his family waited for the light to change. “He and Mommy might have to sell the house,” Elizabeth said. “He tied up all their money in Liberty and they were already overextended. A lot of their friends put their money in, it was so surefire. Dr. Campbell told my mother they might have to file for bankruptcy. It’s just so stupid.”
“Who’s stupid?” May asked.
“Your grandfather and his friends,” she said.
Carney said, “You’re pals with someone for so many years, you think you know them.”
“Of course he took their money,” Elizabeth said. “He’s always been a crook.”
“It’s a big deal to break out like that and start your own thing,” Carney said. “I should know.
He must have been under a lot of pressure.”
In Miss Laura’s apartment that night, the execution of the plan had made him queasy. It didn’t feel like revenge, it felt like debasement; he had descended rungs into the sewer and become another shabby player in the city’s sordid theater. Pornographers, hookers, pimps, peddlers, killers—these were the fellow members of his new ensemble. Add to that: embezzlers.
But this—this felt like revenge. Sustaining, without flaw. It was the sun on your face on a Saturday afternoon, it was the world smiling briefly upon you. He hadn’t foreseen Duke lamming it, but was not disappointed with this turn. Not just one man, but a whole lot of them, where it hurt. It was unfortunate that the banker would never know it was his setup, but that was the deal from the get-go. Had Pierce invested? Carney should ring and see if he’s available for lunch. He’d have information that wouldn’t be in the papers. Who got hit the hardest, who’s on their last legs. It had been too long since they’d had a meal together.
He wondered where Miss Laura had made it off to. The night of the job, he’d dropped her at Thirty-Sixth and Eighth as instructed. Port Authority or Penn Station. Did buses and trains run this late, or was she going to spend the night in a hotel? If she had wanted him to know, she would’ve told him.
“I couldn’t have packed a bag if I knew he was out there,” she said, “ready to jump out and cut my throat. He makes you watch what he does to other girls, to advertise what he can do to you.” She lit a cigarette with a brass lighter. “He’ll have too much on his plate to look for me. And I won’t be the only one who runs once they find out he’s locked up.” She wasn’t talking to Carney; it was not clear whom she addressed. She checked her face in the rearview mirror and got out to grab her suitcase. He joined her.
Here it was: the last envelope. He gave her the five hundred bucks and she stuffed it in her bra.
She said, “I checked you out, you know.” Just them on the street corner, in one of those New York City eddies that clears the stage for a minute. “After that first time we met. I thought, now what does a man like him have against Duke? Then I said to myself, he ripped you off like he does everybody else. That’s why you’re mad.”
“He did.”
“I asked myself, what am I gonna get out of this? What do I want out of it?” She waved her hand at the dirty city heaped up around them in concrete and cold steel. “Can’t stay here and can’t go home. Which leaves everywhere else.” She looked at him. “You go,” she said. So he did.
Miss Laura was right about Cheap Brucie having his hands full. Once the pimp made bail, he fixated on one of his girls to blame for setting him up. Emboldened by his arrest earlier that week, she went to the cops and they picked him up again, this time for battery. This news via Munson. Brucie wasn’t getting out for a while.
Carney hoisted John onto his shoulders. The boy covered Carney’s eyes and he pretended to totter, Oh no! He was grateful to Elizabeth for proposing this outing. He wasn’t getting home for dinner every night, but the four of them still ate together more often than they had before. It was nice. The night of the job he stayed awake through the first sleep, working the job, and when he got home from dropping Miss Laura off he was too energized to sleep. He finally went down near dawn and when he woke he was back on schedule, in sync once more with the straight world. Cast out from the forgotten land of dorvay, as if he’d never been there. What had they meant, those dark hours? Maybe it was a way to keep the two sides of him separate, the midnight him and the daytime him, and he didn’t need it anymore. If he ever had. Maybe he’d invented a separation where none existed, when it was all him and always had been.
When they passed Nightbirds, he checked if Freddie was sitting there at the bar, wisecracking. He didn’t see him.
As his little boy tugged his ears, Carney added up the cost of the setup. The initial five hundred to Duke, that went into the overhead with the rest of the envelopes. He was out the cash to Pepper, Miss Laura, and Zippo. Tommy Lips and the car. Throw in Rusty’s commissions, the ones he wouldn’t have had to pay the man if he’d been around the office. By Carney’s inner accounting—if not in the actual books—was there any way to write off the money for the job as a business expense?
Even a half-assed audit would reveal his sins. Black eye aside, it had been all pleasure.
COOL IT BABY
1964
“…maybe don’t play the same number all the time. Play something else, see what happens. Maybe you been playing the wrong thing this whole time.”
ONE
547 Riverside Drive faced the park on a stretch that was quiet more often than not. Until they moved, the Carneys had no inkling of how shallow the elevated train had kept their sleep. As with many things in the city—traffic noise below, quarrelsome neighbors above, a dark walk from the corner to your front door—its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone. The train was like a bad thought or bad memory in that way, a persistent poke and constant whisper. In the spring, the baby pigeons hatched on the roof of 547 and a prodigious cooing woke the household most mornings, but who wouldn’t prefer that to the elevated, prefer new life over the screech of metal.
It was a third-floor apartment opposite the north end of the small hill where they’d stuck Grant’s Tomb. Instead of the Hudson River, their windows overlooked a splash of oak leaves for most of the year, and a scrabbly brown slope the rest.
“You call that a seasonal view,” Alma said. She’d been pouting ever since John had refused “a hug for Grandma.” In general John was compliant when it came to grown-ups’ unearned demands for affection, so Carney took it as a sign of good character.
“In the winter all those green leaves will be gone,” Leland said.
“Yes,” Carney said. “That’s what happens with trees.” He made a quick prayer for Elizabeth’s return from the kitchen with the cookies. He asked his in-laws how they were enjoying Park West Village, the complex off Columbus that they’d moved into.
“We love it,” Alma said. “There’s a Gristedes opening up.”
It was their third apartment since they’d sold the Strivers’ Row house. They left the first because the block transformed into a drug bazaar once the weather changed. They’d toured it on a snowy afternoon and it had seemed sleepy enough.
The second apartment was in a nice clean building on Amsterdam. Next door to a judge and down the hall from a pastor. Six months into the lease, the Joneses were alarmed by an odd smell. They assumed a mouse had expired in the walls. A reddish-brown liquid dripped from the ceiling and sent them running to the super, who after a quick investigation identified the substance as the upstairs neighbor’s putrefying remains. Such unchecked seepage through the substandard flooring pointed to larger structural issues in the building, on that point everyone agreed. The Joneses stayed at the Hotel Theresa until they landed at Park West Village. As for the upstairs neighbor, he had chased away his friends and family over the decades and the city buried him on Hart Island one unexceptional Sunday afternoon.
There had been plenty of relocations and pullings-up of stakes recently. Leland moved his firm from Broadway and 114th to a more affordable space on 125th. Carney and Elizabeth finally made proper use of the apartment fund and split for the river and the boulevard of Carney’s aspirational dreams. The building was integrated, with a lot of black families with children moving in. Elizabeth had made two friends already. Historically, turnover had been low, with little wear and tear to speak of in the individual units. The common areas were well-lit and well-maintained. There was a laundry room in the basement with a bank of brand-new Westinghouse machines, an active tenants’ group, and of course the park was right there.
The furniture store remained where it was, an anchor on 125th and Morningside, and continued to flourish in areas aboveboard, and below.
The new living room had plenty of space for the kids to sprawl. On the thick M
oroccan Luxury rug, May flipped through her Richie Rich comics and disjointedly hummed Motown tunes while John harassed a Matchbox fleet with the toy brontosaurus. This year Carney went Argent with regard to his home furniture, opting for the three-piece sectional with the kiln-dried hardwood frame and Herculean blue-and-green upholstery. As he sat on the couch with his legs extended and his ankles crossed, taking in the room and the greenery outside, Carney grudgingly allowed himself a contented moment. He rubbed his fingertips across the tweed cushions to calm himself as his in-laws prattled.
At last Elizabeth arrived with the cookies. The kitchen in the new place was more hospitable than the last one, granting a survey of an uptown battalion of rooftops as opposed to the dead-end air shaft. Marie had been sharing recipes, and this had to be one of hers, so thoroughly did the aroma bend them to its will. Elizabeth gave Carney a smile to reward his forbearance.
The children jumped up for dibs on the best cookies.
“He get that at the World’s Fair?” Leland asked. The little dinosaur.
Carney said yes. They’d taken the subway to Flushing to check out the exhibition last May. “This is what they call ‘Queens,’ guys.” The publicity machine had plugged it so much that it was bound to disappoint, and the editorial pages had wrung their hands over how the city’d pay for it, but the whole production was top-notch. Years from now May and John would look back on it and understand they’d been a part of something special. Sinclair Oil had handed out plastic versions of their brontosaurus mascot at the Dinoland pavilion. John slept with it under his pillow.
“We’d still like to take them,” Leland said. “Max and Judy said that Futurama was something else.” May and John squealed. The fairground was too vast, too stuffed to take in on one visit. The grandchildren provided an alibi for Alma and Leland to mix with the commoners.
Harlem Shuffle Page 20
