Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(55)
By the time Pepper got back uptown, his headache had evolved into an insistent, malevolent throb. Ideally a headbutt demolished the victim’s soft tissue—the nose was the most popular target—but he’d caught the plane of Pope’s forehead and knocked something loose inside his own thick noggin. He swallowed a bunch of aspirin, staggered into bed, and when he opened his eyes the street work was done and it was night.
He cut across 143rd and down Amsterdam to meet Zippo. His time on Secret Agent: Nefertiti made him think the massive lights on the south side of 140th Street were part of a film. A different sort of production was underway. The red, white, and blue banner strung from the eaves of the five-story buildings read HOMES 4 HARLEM. Ribbon-cutting ceremony on a new city housing development that wasn’t supposed to look like public housing, as if using orange brick instead of red would confuse people.
David Dinkins jabbered at the podium. He was one of Charlie Rangel’s and Percy Sutton’s cronies, probably bucking for a city hall job now that Beame was in charge. Pepper’s distaste for Dinkins owed to the man’s na?ve opinions on “the crime problem.” Crime isn’t a scourge, people are. Crime is just how folks talk to each other sometimes.
The sidewalk civilians were good, law-abiding types, churchy-looking men and women in their fifties and sixties. A few young moms thrown in. He assumed they were mothers—what else could motivate them to stand in the cold but the possibility that their loved ones might get it better than they had it?
Dinkins wrapped it up and gave the mic to a man he introduced as former district attorney Alexander Oakes. Pretty boy. Pepper had seen him on the news a few times, applauding the white man beside him at appropriate moments. He’d ditched his dark pinstripe suit in favor of a man-of-the-people work coat with the H4H logo stitched into the breast.
“And I’d like to thank Jake’s and the Amsterdam Gardens for providing the food tonight,” Oakes said. “I asked good Mr. King if he’d made enough cobbler for all the people we expect and he said, ‘You’ll see.’ There are going to be a lot of disappointed faces, that’s all I’m going to say, brother. You know black people can eat some cobbler.” Oakes smiled and the crowd chuckled.
The prim line of buildings had gone up in a blink. Pepper remembered the row of abandoned tenements, half of them sootened and hollowed by fires, the burned-out buildings like black gaps in a rickety smile. Then the empty lot, with its indecent glimpse of the city’s innards. Now this five-story housing, nothing fancy, but respectable and—if they hadn’t cut corners and had kept the construction grift within a reasonable range—a decent place for people to live.
“Before we head into the community room for the first time and you see what a wonderful job they did, I want to get serious for a moment.” Oakes waited for the ambulance and its siren to pass. “Some people say Harlem’s on its way out. The whole city is going down the tubes. Can’t get a decent wage, landlords got us in a vise grip, and city hall’s an empty suit.” The crowd murmured, surveying their private complaints. “Drugs on every corner, kids growing up with the wrong kind of role models. It doesn’t have to be this way,” Oakes said, “unless we let it. It starts here. On these streets, in places like this. You used to walk past this block all the time, past the buildings that used to stand here, and be reminded about how bad they let things get. These houses, and the others like them, will finally provide a safe place for working New Yorkers to raise a family.” Hokey enough for multiple amens even if they were only in it for the cobbler.
Slick motherfucker. Pepper didn’t trust him for dog catcher. If he wasn’t running for something now, he would be soon.
* * *
***
Pepper arrived at the chicken joint five minutes early. New Country Kitchen was packed, but Viola saw him squeeze through the doors and shooed away a young couple making for the last table by the window. She assured them something would open up momentarily. They were unconvinced.
Viola brought Pepper a lemonade. “You look like shit,” she said.
The metronome clop of his headache was likely loud enough for others to hear. “Pays the rent.”
Viola shrugged and returned to the kitchen, pausing to snap at the waitress to refill the napkin dispensers on the unsteady tables. The new girl was a meek little creature who shrank at Viola’s voice. She wouldn’t last long. They rarely did at New Country Kitchen.
From his spot in the window Pepper couldn’t help but check out how Lady Betsy’s fared across the street. The restaurant was half full, its patrons older than New Country’s, regulars for decades no doubt. He caught a glimpse of Lady Betsy herself, hand on her hip, gabbing with customers. More stooped than in former days, and she had stopped dyeing her hair, which whorled like a white rose, but still in business.
Lady Betsy had owned that corner since before the war, an uptown chicken legend since the Great Depression. She presided over her operation with a blend of frank, backwoods wit and urban practicality, a pioneer in that particular New York City philosophical school. The paper place mats contained a biographical sketch adjacent to the menu, whose item updates and price increases Lady Betsy scratched in by hand, rather than waste cash on a new print run. According to the story, when Lady Betsy left her native Alabama to venture North, all she had was a bus ticket and a hatbox full of secret recipes. The red-and-white-striped hatbox remained on display in a glass case above the register like the jawbone of a saint.