Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(79)
Perhaps his was not a temperament suited to this kind of assignment, with the finessing and the gently plying and such. His encounter with Leon Drake, for instance. A running buddy at Nathaniel Barber gave Pepper the name of a guy who in turn led him to the man. “That nigger’s flammable.”
Although Pepper was not aware of it, Leon Drake shared a characteristic with Izzy the Painter in his well-defined hunting grounds. Izzy had worked a swath between Ninety-sixth and 106th on the East Side, a teeming immigrant outpost with its own language and God. At the time of his arrest, the firebug had been on these shores for ten years, long enough to study the hostile world beyond his streets. America called them across the water and then chewed them up. Survival meant manipulating flaws and outwitting the system. You’ll let me insure four bucks of furniture for three thousand dollars, sight unseen? Done. Whether the new arrivals were crooked or straight, whether the idea was a rationalization or a hope, they believed that if they made it through, their children faced less dire calculations.
Leon Drake, too, grew up under an antagonistic order but never summoned much interest in striving upward on its terms. His aspirations lay in ash. There were strivers next door, across the street, Harlem was full of strivers but Leon was not one of them. The arsonist had a supernatural acquaintance with his home turf. He knew it all, it was the crucible of his personality—every storefront, which sidewalk grates clanged underfoot, the alleys, fire escapes, the getaway exits through basement doors and their distance from the street, which tenements hit max occupancy and which townhouses had rotted through, the proximity of the fire hydrants and fireboxes. He knew every crack and corner, and the more he understood, the more he hated. 116th to 125th between Morningside Ave and Park! Leon despised every inch, from the grimmest of the grim subbasements to the tips of the bent television antennas piercing the sky. When he walked the streets, he superimposed his own perfect city over the misbegotten one before him, it was a city of ash and cinder heaped hundreds of feet high, emptied of people, wonderfully dead and still. Such was his antipathy that if his employers stopped paying him tomorrow, he’d torch ’em for free—a building here, a building there, slow torture.
The man was not running for head of the block association, in other words.
Word had it Leon put two buildings on the south side of 118th to the match, diagonal from 371, where Carney’s tenant was injured. He worked at Cooper’s Fish on 125th. At lunch and supper their line went up the block. Every five years Pepper gave their fish sandwiches another chance and each time he got sick. No one else complained. Cooper’s was also a fishmonger, with rows of porgies, snapper, and flounder on ice that slowly melted and dribbled pink water into white buckets. Winter days the reek bordered on unholy and come summer descended into full blasphemy, despite the exertions of three gigantic standing fans.
Leon worked the fryer. Sweat-sheened, twitchy, and beady-eyed, he did little to rebut a negative firebug stereotype. Pepper had been informed of the man’s frequent cigarette breaks, when Leon padded out two doors down to smoke and stink of fry oil. His target soon stepped outside.
It was two on a Friday afternoon, just after the lunch rush, the sidewalks of 125th a furious stream. Sometimes it was prudent to brace a man when there was no one around and other times it was nice to slug him in front of witnesses to underscore the desperation of the man’s position—an entire Apollo’s worth of people could be watching and no one would help. Pepper and Leon hadn’t even gotten into it and already men and women were clearing a spot, just picking up on vibes, alerted to impromptu mayhem by their city survival systems.
“Leon!” The cook tried to place Pepper. He immediately apprehended the nature of this encounter. There was no hiding Pepper’s personality, which was December when the days got shorter and shorter: cold and relentless. Inevitable. He didn’t like Christmas trees, or babies, or owing anybody anything. Any smile that broke out on his face was a mutiny swiftly put down. He was not there to present you with an oversized check from the sweepstakes company or a dinner invitation from Raquel Welch. Pepper was an emissary from the ugly side of things, to remind you how close it was.
Leon didn’t wait for Pepper to speak. He ripped off his hairnet and snarled.
Pepper blinked. Toe-to-toe with a fry cook on the One-Two-Five. Thanks, Carney. The firebug emitted a stench of hot oil and sweat, and Pepper was momentarily back in Newark, a little boy watching his stinking father return from a shift in the hotel kitchen. With the smell in Leon’s corner, it was two against one. Leon charged. Pepper gave in to his fate, took one on the chin. The arsonists he’d met this week had not been fighters. Starting with an intimation of violence set the stage for a quick confession. Not here. Leon knew how to fight. They danced around. Passersby formed a doughnut. How many tussles did 125th see every day, how much blood? He got a few licks in. Leon dove for a Coke bottle in the gutter. Pepper did not approve and brought his sneaker down on the firebug’s head. His old black shoes would’ve been more useful, he noted.
The crowd whooped. An old man threw a carrot into the ring. Muffin crumbs flew from a church lady’s yap: “Show him! Show him!” Rooting for him or for Leon?
Pepper’s back held up, that was the main thing. Nary a twinge.
“The fuck do you want, anyway?” Leon said.
Pepper stared down the crowd. They got the hint. He helped Leon to his feet and they withdrew under the green canopy of Triple-A Travel. Pepper told him what he was after.