Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(19)
“I know Chink,” Carney said, “but haven’t met Notch Walker. He started in Sugar Hill?”
“Until it got too small for him,” Munson said.
Carney had been out for four years, but Notch Walker’s name came up plenty among the old crooked bunch at Nightbirds or the Blossom. Hookers, heroin, numbers. Like Elizabeth, Notch was a kind of travel agent, trafficking in escapes: sex, intoxication, the dream of a jackpot. The products sold themselves, so he directed his promotional campaigns at competitors: chaining lieutenants of rival crews to benches in Riverside Park and setting them aflame; a shootout at an after-hours club that clipped a bunch of civilians and made the national news. A running gunfight with Chink’s crew up Lenox one blustery Christmas Eve forever ruined caroling for more than one bystander. It was an aggressive rollout.
The Amsterdam News ran a picture of Notch strutting out of Sylvia’s, imperial grin on his mug. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed that day in tight brown-and-white houndstooth slacks and a double-breasted leather trench that made him look like a Negro pirate. Bumpy Johnson in his natty Harry Olivier pinstripe suit and Homburg hat were relics of a bygone Harlem. Notch was the type of gangster the streets stamped out these days: flashy, lethal, and remorseless.
Munson lit a cigarette. Every couple of years a new player came on the scene and tried to make his name, he said. “The old guard smothers him in the crib, or doesn’t. The new guard becomes the status quo, and then they’re the ones the young guys are gunning for.” He clocked a Cadillac DeVille that coasted up Edgecombe. The driver was a long-haired Spanish guy with healthy muttonchops. Munson said, “Notch is the crab that got to the top of the barrel.”
In his retirement, Carney had joined the good and decent folk, pulling the drapes tight when shots rang out down the street and tsking at the turf battles and bloody rumbles in the morning paper. Just another square. He liked standing with his back to the window, ignorant of whatever dumb drama occupied the warring clans that week. Why then did he drop by Nightbirds, not so often but often enough, and Donegal’s, too, and the Blossom, where a face from crooked days never failed to appear? It didn’t take much for them to spill the latest, and a free drink did the trick with reluctant correspondents. Why did he go there, and why did he keep Green’s card when he was happily, resolutely retired?
Silence in the Cadillac. Both men traveling the rut of their thoughts. Munson rushed in: “Did you guys play ringolevio uptown?”
“It’s not a foreign country, Munson.” There was stickball, there was handball, and there was ringolevio. Carney had loved the game. It was like tag, but bigger and more monstrous. One team hunted and the other was pursued. “Jail” was a front stoop, or the trunk of a car owned by somebody who wouldn’t beat you for touching their ride. To capture an opponent, you had to hold on for the time it took to scream Ringolevio, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Necks were hooked, shirts ripped as the enemy tried to wriggle free. If the stoop started filling up, a jailbreak was in order. Those first heists, where you dashed in to spring your pals—All free, all free, one-two-three, one-two-three—without getting nabbed. This last part involved pulling your best Fred Astaire shit, leaping and twisting.
Most of the time Carney and his buddies played outside Freddie’s house on 129th Street. Depending on appetite and enthusiasm, the boundary was a couple of blocks or the playing field encompassed the entire city, wherever your feet took you. Once everyone was imprisoned, you switched roles and started again. There were legends of games that went on for days, pausing at dinnertime when everyone was called home to their grim tenements—the drunken fathers or indifferent mothers or whatever miserable arrangement had claimed them—until the next morning, when the game resumed.
Carney said, “It was always kids with older brothers that told stories about the all-day games. An older-kid thing.”
“No, it was true,” Munson said, “we played for days on end.” He lit a cigarette. “They should have called it cops and robbers. Collaring the other team, or running around trying to stay out of jail: cops and robbers.”
Carney said, “We called it jail because it was a place you didn’t want to go.” If his father heard him say he was playing cops and robbers, he would have taken off his belt. Shit, take Carney’s belt, too, and whup him double.
“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again. It didn’t matter how you saw yourself, you were both at the same time,” Munson said. “We’d run all over Hell’s Kitchen. All over the city. All day. Take a break and buy a soda and then one of the guys snatched you and went, Ringolevio! I was, Wait—we’re still playing? Of course you were playing, the game never ended.” He grunted. “Next day, start all over.”
Buck Webb floated past in a dark green DeVille. Webb and Munson shared a nod that Carney took as silent cop signal. Webb pulled over up the block.
The partners drove the same make. Munson’s was red. “You buy them together?” Carney said.
“I know a guy.” Munson picked up the vinyl bag at his feet. He flexed his injured arm. “Going to apologize to the man, explain, and give him his half.” He tapped the vinyl bag. “Then we’ll do that errand I mentioned.”
“I thought this was the errand.”
“This? This is just Buck.” Munson exited and walked up to the DeVille. He bent to speak through the window and got inside.