Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(72)
A plane dragged black letters through the air: Happy Birthday America—200 Years of Liberty and Independence. Who paid for it? He couldn’t tell, so he added: Love, Buckwheat. The words zipped over the line of tenements, disappeared over the eaves of 371 West 118th. Cinder blocks sealed the front door and windows on the first floor. No more intruders until the wrecking ball came through. Case closed—certainly the cops were never going to investigate who put the boy in the hospital. If Oakes was serious about helping the city, he would’ve taken down the arson racket when he worked in the DA’s office, instead of letting it get out of control. You pocket some fat envelopes working down there, Munson’d had plenty of stories.
Carney cut across Morningside Ave, into the park and toward the stairs that led up the ridge to Columbia’s domain. The trees and scrabbly brush had mustered some green business, weeds drooped between the hexagonal paving stones, and the ancient rock dominated all with its craggy arrogance. Growing up he and his cousin Freddie had clambered and leapt from it in wild exuberance, detonated firecrackers and scraped their knees on its unforgiving planes, but he’d never known its name: Manhattan schist. Didn’t exist anywhere else in the world, as John had explained it to him last spring. Morningside Park, one of the places where the bedrock foundation poked through, had been John’s homework assignment for a unit on city landmarks.
“It’s four hundred million years old!” John told him, poking the illustration in his library book. The result of two plates in the earth colliding under terrific, elemental pressure to heave up mountain ranges. The mountains were long gone but the unique rock remained, twinkling in the sunlight from embedded mica, holding the city aloft. High-rises—with their staggering tons of steel, concrete, and glass—can only stand where the schist is close enough to the surface to bear the weight. “Look at the skyline, Dad, there are skyscrapers on Wall Street and midtown, but not in Greenwich Village—the bedrock’s too deep down.” The spine of the city, keeping it all together. You can’t see it except in magical spots where it will not be contained. Carney admired the dedication.
Since this uptown stretch of schist was too pricey and complicated to excavate, the neighborhood got a park out of it, and Columbia University claimed its royal perch over Harlem to the east, looking down on the peasantry below. Carney made a survey when he topped the staircase, like one of those long-dead city planners figuring out where to lay the grid.
These days Morningside Park was a no-man’s-land separating the Ivy League kingdom from the residents on the other side. The park had always been dicey, but in the last ten years the muggings and assaults had ascended to myth: Welcome to Fear City. Last year Mayor Beame, staring down the city’s impending bankruptcy, had threatened to lay off police and corrections officers, and the cops retaliated by handing out Fear City pamphlets to horrified tourists. When they warned visitors to “restrict your travel to daylight hours” and “remain in midtown areas,” it was places like Morningside Park they drew their monstrous exaggerations from. The university warned its students to circumnavigate the park rather than take the stairs up the hill, and today Carney appreciated the advice. Bunch of money in his pocket, plus out of breath because he was out of shape. Why had he come this way? He never came this way. At the stone retaining wall, he returned his attention to the townhouse below and it clicked: He and the intersection had a history.
Opposite 371 was 370 West 118th Street, a five-story yellow brick building that had gone up a few years ago, affordable housing. He and Rusty had argued about it after Carney questioned the delivery address of a Sterling dinette. “There’s no 3C in 370, I know the building. It’s Front and Rear. Has to be 3F or 3R.” The Sterling drivers—these crackers from Massapequa—always bitched over their Harlem deliveries and Carney wanted to forestall any complaints.
Rusty made the sad face he put on when Carney challenged his capabilities. “Ray, I double-checked it: 3C.”
“I’m telling you.”
Rusty crossed his arms. “Look for yourself.” He and his wife, Beatrice, had been arguing lately, according to Marie. Carney figured this defiance echoed new household postures.
Back when Carney drove his father’s truck he made the occasional delivery of a used sofa or bureau. He remembered the dingy marble steps of 370, the splintered black-and-white tile on the floor and the mismatched light fixtures. He had paid one of the neighborhood guys five bucks to help carry a quite pristine Collins-Hathaway couch up to the second floor. He’d forgotten the name of the customer but recalled the sunlight pulsing through the living room windows and the vista of the park. A year or two later, he had to chase the first-floor tenant around when the guy fell behind on his installment plan, Argent lounger. He was well acquainted with 370. On his way over he practiced his rant. “Make me get up from my chair and drag my ass down there…”
But the old tenement with the tight and tormenting stairwell was gone. This yellow-brick building had replaced eight townhouses, certainly big enough to have a 3C, even a 3M or N. Rusty produced a satisfied smirk when Carney returned. His pissy new orientation was regrettable. Beatrice had always been such a quiet little creature. Georgia peach. This place will help you find your voice if it doesn’t break you first.
371, 370. The old city sat on one corner, opposite the new city. How did Carney used to put it: Churn, baby, churn. Atop the unchanging schist, the people replaced each other, the ethnic tribes from all over trading places in the tenements and townhouses, which in turn fell and were replaced by the next buildings. The city will condemn 371 and the other three distressed properties down the line, raze them, and throw up new housing, like they were doing all over now. “Urban renewal”: You have to clear the dead stuff before the fresh growth can prosper. Sure, shady landlords get their big payouts from the crooked insurance adjusters while the law looks the other way, and then the construction firms grease the palms of city officials for contracts, nice paychecks for everybody out of the misery, but people need places to live. Right? Mrs. Ruiz’s boy is in the hospital, who knew if he was going to get out, but the clever men got paid. How fat were the envelopes when Oakes worked in the DA’s office?