Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(50)
The dark wood of the big reception desk resembled the hull of a ship, with the uniformed staff at their stations peering out into the sea of the lobby. The manager emerged from an office behind reception and Pope jerked a thumb at him. “His face, right?” he said.
“What?”
“He has a racist face—you see it.”
It was true. His white hair was swept back in an elegant wave, like in a museum portrait, its color bringing out the pink in his wide face, which was knobby in lobe, chin, and cheek. The blue eyes signaled cool, barely suppressed rage. There was no doubt about it—his was a racist face, more Southern Cracker racist than New England Plymouth Rock racist. Pepper couldn’t suppress his smile at the description.
They pushed through the revolving doors. The buildings on the square generated hostile eddies of wind, funneled by the concrete and glass. Pope said, “Sometimes you see someone and they just look racist, right? They can’t help it. My money manager is this white guy, Spencer Tomlinson.” An iceberg of slow-walking tourists floated toward them. Pepper and Pope separated and reunited on the other side. Pope continued: “At the end of our first meeting, right, I say how nice it was to meet him and he goes, ‘Because of this’ and he puts his finger on his nose. And I go, what do you mean? He says, ‘That’s okay, I know I was born with a racist face.’?”
Pope checked to make sure Pepper was chuckling before he rammed him, knocking him into an old white lady carrying A&S shopping bags. Pepper and the lady were on the sidewalk, and then he was up and in pursuit. Always plenty of bystanders to help an old white lady to her feet. Old black ladies, you’re on your own. The comedian was halfway across Thirty-fourth Street, heading uptown. Pepper zigzagged around the Checker cab—tourists in the jump seats gawking—and the Exeter Moving van. He didn’t see any patrolmen but it was Herald Square so they were near. He caught up with Pope at the corner of Thirty-fifth and this time gripped him by the neck with one hand and bent the man’s arm up into the small of his back. He twisted him around and headbutted him in the nose.
Pope cursed, eyes watering. “How am I supposed to make this movie with my face all swole up, nigger?”
Pope had a couple of days to ice his nose before he hit the cameras. Pepper told him that Angela the makeup girl was pretty good. Last Monday she took ten years off the guy playing the police chief, some magical brown blend of hers.
Pepper had a headache the rest of the day and from then on remembered this morning as his retirement from headbutting. It was a young man’s game.
* * *
***
The Times Square station abounded with escape routes; Pepper kept a hand on his quarry’s arm. People in Times Square these days kept their eyes to themselves—if they hadn’t learned firsthand that the game had changed, surely the daily reports from the nightly news and newspapers and their cowed circle kept them appraised. At any moment your day might lurch into tragedy—Juilliard student shoved onto the tracks, mother of four stabbed for six dollars and a pastrami on rye. Rats hopped on the tracks fighting over discarded pizza crusts and knishes. Teenagers threw food down there to see them fight, Roman emperors overseeing the games.
On the downtown track a 2 train pulled in, its metal skin writhing with bright, multicolored symbols. A few years ago the cars were covered in grime and soot, as if the darkness of the tunnels had rubbed off. Now miscreants descended upon the cars at night in the train yards of the IRT and the Flushing Line, the terminuses of 239th Street and Coney Island, hopping chain-link to attack their canvases, loaded with shoplifted aerosol paint cans. The clack-clack of the metal ball inside that agitated the paint while they contemplated their next avenue of assault. Names, deadbeat slogans, boasts, and invective exploded on the train cars in balloon letters and sharp-angled glyphs, rainbow dispatches for the people on platforms and the bystanders on the street who saw them zipping through the air on the elevated tracks.
People complained of course, but Pepper didn’t care if some kid wrote his name on the side of a subway car, or the wall of a tenement, or a dry-cleaning van when its driver wasn’t looking. The city was covered in names, on plazas and parks and bridges, and most belonged to crooks. Whoever Remsen and Schermerhorn were, they didn’t get their names on street signs for being decent men, that’s for damn sure. The world didn’t work that way. The Transit Authority maintenance crews beat back the graffiti, hosing it off so there’d be room for the next day’s messages and handles, but the names of the crooked city fathers—the slavers, money pimps, and fat cats—would never be washed away. They were indelible.
Pepper had no beef with the graffiti kids. Let them roam.
The uptown 1 pulled in before the 2. The conductor in the lead car said, “Let ’em off, let ’em off.” The hordes shuffled. Make a cross section of Times Square, ant farm–style, and you’d see a collection of mobs—the ones huddled on the platforms below waiting for the train car doors to open, and the ones on the sidewalks above waiting for DONT WALK to become WALK. At their respective signals, both groups surged forward.
There were no seats. Pepper stood between Pope and the door. The comedian nodded, resigned after the escape attempt. Pepper had seen it before in men he’d beaten over the years, the satisfaction with a token attempt to reverse the situation. It didn’t matter if it worked as long as you could tell the fellows or yourself that you tried something.