Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(29)
EIGHT
Ask the hungry dreamers to define jackpot and you’ll get a thousand different answers. The waitress at the hash joint playing her same three numbers every day, the safecracker squinting through sparks, the hijacker kicking the driver from the cab and steering the truck to the drop—what’s a jackpot? One says, hitting the jackpot means escape, the exit from miserable circumstances. Another offers that a jackpot is enough money that you never have to worry about money again, logic so circular as to be impregnable. Others might interpret jackpot in light of a different sort of fortune—good fortune, like a comfortable life, or a loving family, or a surfeit of luck in a terrible world. As he helped Munson bring the haul up to the 157th Street pad, Carney arrived at a more practical definition: If you need two men to carry it, it’s a jackpot.
Heavy money. Carney held his briefcase. It contained the jewelry-store goods and the bodega cash. Munson carried the two black sample cases from the barbershop, into which the bottle-club money had been added. It had started raining, a tentative drizzle, foretold by cool winds around corners since the Aloha Room.
The front door of the building on Edward M. Morgan Place didn’t lock. As Carney waited in the vestibule for Munson to open the second door, he checked out the ceiling. A new habit of his since he visited Aunt Millie one day and stumbled on a guy shooting up in the entrance. To flush the syringe of blood, junkies aimed upward and pushed the plunger. Over time the ceilings of certain vestibules and bathroom stalls and elevators—whatever removed you from the eyes of the world for a minute—became mottled with crimson spots. They lurked above everybody’s heads, unseen, these sordid constellations.
Carney and Munson crossed the black-and-white tile of the lobby to wait for the elevator. It was a loud one, rattling in the shaft like a coffee can full of nails. “Don’t apologize when you frisk someone,” Munson said, “it’s poor form. Hold a gun or don’t. Frisk a man or don’t.”
“I sell home furniture.”
The detective tested the weight of the cases, pleased. “The point is, choose—you’re in or you’re out.”
“When did you choose to take out Buck?”
Munson shut up the whole elevator ride. When they got to the apartment, he said, “He wasn’t the same man. They would have broken him.”
The detective lit a cigarette. The briefcase and the sample cases perched on the coffee table like primitive totems. “Anyway, it’s after midnight,” Munson said, “so that’s a yesterday thing. Today is about waiting for the man who’s bringing me a new name and a new ID. We hit the airport and I’m out of your hair. Can you handle that?”
Carney said yes.
Munson made like he was going to open one of the cases and count the money. He looked at Carney and stopped himself. “There’s a twenty-four-hour joint up the block on Broadway—why don’t you pick up some sandwiches?”
“I won’t run?”
“We both know that. And some beer—more beer.”
Carney was the only person on the street. The streetlight changed with a foreboding thunk, and a handful of cars surged forward. Out this late, he was usually more aware of what was going on around him, per his father’s lessons. In Mike Carney’s world, the city was overrun with nasty characters out to “knock you upside your head.” Vigilance was paramount. After a few hours of being Munson’s partner, he’d take getting knocked upside the head.
Two men killed tonight. Munson had stopped his rampage after dropping Popeye—no one, including Munson, had known which way it was going to go. Carney emptied the barbershop safe and they were out on the street a minute later. No curses or oaths from the remaining men followed them, just the chipper harmonies of the Jackson 5 singing “Stand!”
A few hours earlier, Munson didn’t permit Carney to be alone in the car with the keys. At the bottle club and the bodega, he let Carney keep them. Now Carney was solo, headed up Broadway to the only establishment open on this stretch, a corner bodega with a red-and-yellow awning and blinking lights: El Charrito Grocery Deli.
Maybe he and Munson were partners now, after all Carney had seen. Certainly Carney was sick of him, one of Munson’s signs. He recalled that first ride with the cop in ’64, when Munson bragged about infiltrating activist groups. Who would Carney tell? Family man like him, with vulnerabilities. Who would listen? Munson was invincible.
He gestured to the clerk through the bulletproof glass and waited for the two ham and cheese and the two six-packs of Rheingold. El Charrito was the terminus of the leash, the boundary of the game. The rain snuck under his collar.
How did Freddie put it? “It’s not the same if you don’t cheat a little.”
* * *
***
They gobbled up the sandwiches, Carney on the couch and Munson slouching in the director’s chair. “The guy’s a genius,” Munson said. “Forge anything—I’ve seen it. From the Ukraine, now he lives out by Coney Island. He’s always going on about Nathan’s. His granddaddy used to make sausage, and he says the Nathan’s hot dog is a perfect forgery of what he used to get back home. He aspires to the art of Nathan’s.” He dislodged a nugget of gristle from his teeth. “Anything in the world, you can find in this city. Or that used to be true.”