Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(76)
The question sat there: How does a big walking dink like Monsoon take out the Greatest?
“So he’s in on it,” John said. “It’s all rigged?”
The boy was catching on.
“It’s a show. They’re all in on it.” The wrestlers, the promoters, the audience, too. If the audience is in on it, too, is it rigged or merely the world as it is?
Carney finished his Budweiser. On the wrestling program it appeared as if the heels had replaced the ref with their own evil ref while the good guys were distracted.
It was customary when he and Pepper did a deal to move on to other matters of importance, such as a dissection of commonplace frustrations of city life. Disappointing mass transportation experiences, price hikes in everyday staples, the new vermin. Carney turned from the wrestling show and said, “?‘You do something, maybe you don’t do something else.’?” But why do that?”
Pepper shrugged. “That’s how it goes down sometimes.”
“It’s not right.”
“No. But that’s how it goes down sometimes.”
The next afternoon they were eating lunch in Marie’s office. It was Carney, Larry, Marie, and Robert, who’d gone out to Ricci’s for sandwiches. Larry was reeling in his nephew with a tall tale that was about to swerve off-color, and Carney realized he hadn’t thought about the boy in the hospital, or the fire, or the slight at the fundraiser all day. Getting it off his chest had been helpful. Distracted by images of the boy waking in the dark apartment alone, he’d been seized by a kindred terror, but the feeling had receded. He had noticed that sometimes if he shared a fear or regret or a thing that gnawed at him—told Freddie, Elizabeth, and now Pepper—it relinquished some of its power, slunk back to where it came from. Disburdened him. Indeed, he might have forgotten about the job until whenever Pepper asked to get paid, had not that meeting in Donegal’s initiated a series of events that neither man was able to contain, with lethal results.
THREE
The most famous arsonist in New York City history was Isidore Steinareutzer, aka Izzy Stein, aka Isaac Chernick, aka “Itchia der Warcher,” aka Izzy the Painter, after his habit of posing as a house painter when purchasing kerosene, one of his accelerants of choice. Izzy was the head of what the cops called the Arson Trust, a network of fraudsters responsible for hundreds of fires all over the city. Undercover fire marshals tailed Izzy the Painter for seven months, posing as hucksters, plumbers, gasmen, and Yiddish peddlers, before they arrested him in the summer of 1912.
When he came down from Sing Sing to testify at the Manhattan courthouse, the newspapers were aghast at his “Startling Revelations of Incendiarism.” The Trust, Izzy said, consisted of the “mechanics” who lit the blazes, insurance agents who wrote the inflated policies, public adjusters who wrote off small fire damage as a total loss, police lookouts, tipped-off firemen who quickly arrived on the scene, and nobodies who provided alibis for a price—“the cogs in the wheel of the big conspiracy.” Izzy himself specialized in Jewish Harlem, but he ran firebug gangs across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Ratted them all out and still got twenty-four years. Landlords hit up Izzy for his services, but so did tenants—rent a room, throw in some junk furniture, and then cash in the pumped-up claim. He carried benzine in a whiskey flask, sprinkled it on bedding and clothes, and then beat it outside to the street to catch the show. Izzy liked the money, he confessed on the stand, but also “liked to watch the fire engines.”
But now it was 1976, and the city had cut back on most services, including larger-than-life crooks, to say nothing of legendary incendiarists. It was hard to generalize about criminals, Pepper had learned. He’d worked with shaky, pencil-necked dudes who went stone-cold when they kneeled before a safe, and bloodthirsty hit men who were thoroughly henpecked. But every firebug he’d met—save Big Mike, who was a generalist—had been furtive and squirrelly both on and off the job. The profession attracted nutjobs. The type of guys Pepper sought were single-room-occupancy men, hot-plate men, shitty tippers who never passed a pay phone without checking for errant dimes, and they dreamed of fire.
Pepper took a run at the finisher first. The New York Post article named the shady owners: Excelsior Metro. Right there in the phone book. They rented an office above a TV repair shop on Broadway and 135th, the same space Sammy Johnson used to operate out of before the lawyer got put away for extortion. Sammy had bankrolled a few jobs Pepper had been involved with, fronting the setup money for a cut. Ghostly black-and-gold paint on the windowsill spelled out I’ll See Them in Court on the half-moon window.
Pepper went on stakeout for a couple of hours—the bench in the Broadway median had a sad elm for shade—before he went up and picked the lock for a look-see. The two rooms were a front. Blank walls, rolled-up carpet, the desk drawers and rusty file cabinets empty except for mouse droppings and misspelled travel brochures, probably from the tenant between Sammy and Excelsior Metro. Some addresses were made for crime. Crooked lawyer, fly-by-night travel agency, slumlord HQ—it was like how certain soil was good for producing wine because of the minerals, or so he’d read. Suite 2 of 3341 Broadway produced a rich grift vintage.
The owner of the repair shop waved bills in Pepper’s face when he asked about the neighbors upstairs: “You tell them I got their mail!”