Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(34)

Local signs of an ongoing collapse. Sometimes when Carney got wind of the latest outrage—a bloody slaughter in a Vietnamese hamlet, a rash of lethal ODs from a bad batch, an unarmed teenager cut down by cops—he suspected the revolution had already happened, only nobody could see it and no one had come along to replace what had been overthrown. The old order was rubble, bulldozed into a pile with the long-held assumptions and rickety premises, and now they waited for someone to tell them what was next. No such person appeared.

“Good night, New York City! We love you!”

The boys from Gary, Indiana, were a soft touch for an encore. The Jackson 5 started up “Never Can Say Goodbye” and Carney thought of the death of Munson. The bassist and the guitarist—Tito, whoever—tumbled into the wistful melody as their brothers swayed and sang between them, three bodies expressing a single lament. May looked up to the stage and crooned with Michael, preserving every pause and intonation from the vinyl; she had summoned them to her city through her devotions. She grabbed Carney’s hand. It had been years since she’d taken his hand in hers. Carney found himself mouthing the words, though the song was a lie. It wasn’t hard to say goodbye at all. As the days smeared into each other it only got easier.





NEFERTITI


   T.N.T.


   1973




“City like this, it behooves you to embrace the fucking contradictions.”





ONE


The furniture was not to Zippo’s taste—it was perfect. The sleek silhouette that had been omnipresent a few years before, all those jet-age lines and tapers, was yesterday’s news. Overflowing sofas, chubby ottomans, and plush, bulging armchairs surrounded him in the showroom. Country in a recession, everybody feeling the pinch, but you can enjoy your comfy throne at home. Couches like that orange-and-brown behemoth along the wall were what real people sat on, the great unwashed audience. Zippo had walked past Carney’s Furniture all the time when he lived uptown but had never been inside. Look at this stuff. His hunch had been correct: The store was perfect.

This slick young brother popped out from a back office and zeroed in on him. Downtown, Zippo’s ensemble would have repelled the staff of most stores. Who’s this hippie-ass Negro in snakeskin pants and megawatt yellow blouse? Uptown, he was not so novel. Downright square in some circles. He asked the salesman if the owner was around.

Zippo plopped down on a big mustard-colored sofa while he waited. Black-and-white-striped leather boots on the zebrawood coffee table, crossed at the ankle. As a rule, he only dug uncomfortable, minimal designs from Europe—leather pinned by chrome, densities of curvilinear plastic—but he had to admit this sofa made an eloquent case for owning comfortable furniture.

“Zippo,” Carney said. He looked the same. Humble merchant, upstanding muckety-muck in the community. Having worked for the man back in the day, Zippo knew otherwise. “What can I do for you today?” As if it hadn’t been years. Like he’d sold Zippo a rug the day before.

“I have a business offer,” Zippo said.

“I’m not in the market for photos,” Carney said.

He frowned. “I don’t do that anymore. I’m a director now. Movies.”

Zippo watched the man cook up distasteful scenarios. “Not that kind,” Zippo said. “Hollywood movies.” He cranked up his work smile. “I’m going to put you in pictures.”



* * *



***

Nine years ago the Harlem Gazette ran the best pics from Zippo’s Miss Laura–Wilfred Duke series, with prominent play on the cover and in the spread inside, credited to “Anonymous.” What was the point of getting his work out there if no one knew it was his? Usually people called pics like that blackmail stuff, “compromising photographs,” but Zippo considered them just the opposite: uncompromising. They didn’t flinch from the primitive mechanics of desire, the hardwired yearnings. The black bars across his subjects’ faces turned them into vessels for the viewer’s erotic truth. When the cheap newspaper ink smudged on your fingers you understood you were implicated. Yes: A precise and uncompromising art.

Zippo restrained himself from badgering the newsstand guy: “I did this.” He thrilled to see his work in the world, in the hands of a faceless but approving public. Out in the open—unlike his boudoir work, stashed under the mattress or hidden in the sock drawer and occasionally pulled out for dreamy appreciations or masturbation fuel. He owed Carney for this realization, for hiring him in his scheme to ruin the banker Wilfred Duke.

After the Duke job, Zippo continued the boudoir work, posing shy wives and compliant girlfriends and budding exhibitionists, and laid off—more or less—check kiting and other illicit activities. He added pet portraits to his services. The pet sideline was lucrative and generated strong word of mouth, as opposed to the risqué stuff. In a few months he’d gone legit.

It took Uncle Heshie’s death for him to make a change. Zippo had always been the old man’s favorite. “You see things cockeyed, like me,” he told the boy as he shared his latest tinkerings, the sketches and doohickeys that populated his workshop. Herschel Lefkowitz was an inventor, a father of patents. He was born in Odessa and settled on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in 1906; his family’s house had been burned down the previous October. Pogroms, massacres. America was in the massacre racket, too, Heshie observed, but they concentrated on Negroes and Indians for the most part. He figured they’d come for him once they ran out, but that might take years.