Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(83)

Carney said he appreciated the invitation and got up for a glass of club soda. They stayed at the Subway Inn for another ten minutes. Green was heading to Maxwell’s Plum to meet a German contact who’d read about the place in a magazine. “He thinks he’s going to do coke in the bathroom with Bianca Jagger.” Carney was off to catch up with Pierce at the club. The lawyer wanted some advice.

They shook hands outside. The express was right there, but before he went underground Carney couldn’t help but notice the dead lights above Bloomingdale’s loading dock across the street. He wondered if someone was coming back in the wee hours for unauthorized shopping. Negligible foot traffic after midnight. Perhaps the lights had merely reached the end of their life. It was not a crime to recognize opportunities.

These East Side stations—so far underground in places. Something to do with the schist, maybe, the rock determining where the subway lines can run. All that stuff you can’t see that shapes how you live every day, and you know nothing about it. He waited on the platform next to an ad of revolutionaries lobbing crates of tea into Boston Harbor: Keep the Lipton, Dump the Rest.

A very precious stone. Carney broke down his meeting with Green on the train uptown. Green declined to specify what his colleague was after. Emeralds, a specific family of diamond? There had been something in the papers about a big robbery in France last week, some famous emeralds in the haul.

It didn’t matter. Carney had no interest in the front end. Thieves removed an item from the straight world and converted it to stolen merchandise. Whereupon the fence helped transform the stones and gold coins and necklaces into legit goods again. Fences versus finishers. What did a finisher do? They took something from the straight world—a four-story tenement, a three-story row house—and delivered it into the dark side through fraud, arson, injury, death. The wrecking ball came, took the structure down to the crater, and the developer returned the site to the straight world again. On the voyage between the legit and the not-legit there were plenty of opportunities for enterprising individuals to wet their beaks. Like the subway, the trip depended on where you hopped on.

Carney was going to stick to what he knew. Solid and dependable. Like rock. Green had always been careful in his work with Carney. If he was changing his business, exposing himself to new dangers, perhaps it was time for Carney to find a new contact.



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As men set upon Pepper with baseball bats, Carney was humming “Afternoon Delight” and bopping up the stairs to the Dumas Club. The time was 7:55. The after-work crowd in the parlor was clearing out for Friday-night engagements with wives or mistresses. The older men, the stray Montys and Rutherfords, nestled in their favorite club chairs and sofa spots, emptying small dishes of mixed nuts and tumblers of peaty scotch. Carney discovered Pierce in his favorite chair by the window, reading the Real Estate section of the Times. Pierce beckoned the waiter.

Pierce needed to work out a problem. “Remember that lady I was telling you about—works in my office?” Carney remembered something about his partner’s secretary—they were messing around, she had a fiancé in Boise, what if his partner got wind of it? In the meantime, this CPA had moved into the suite across the hall, and there was a young woman at reception he’d been chatting up. “Am I crazy?”

“Man, what do I know about that?” Carney said. Pierce didn’t want advice, he wanted to bray.

Pierce opened his mouth but the fire engine’s wail stepped on his lines. Ambulance sirens and fire-truck sirens sang all day, but since the torching of 371 Carney pictured what they were rushing toward, what unfolding misfortune awaited.

“?‘Where’s the fire?’?” Pierce said, chuckling.

“You’ve heard of finishers?” Carney said.

The lawyer waved his hand. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” he said. Deliberately set fires only accounted for a tiny fraction of the problem, he told Carney, less than ten percent. The real reason was the deteriorating city itself.

Before the current fiscal crisis and all the cutbacks, Pierce said, there were decades of urban renewal projects that obliterated communities and industrial zones in the name of progress. “Ramming the highways through, bulldozing so-called slums, but they were places people lived—black, white, Puerto Rican. Knock down the factories and warehouses, and you wipe out people’s livelihoods, too. The white people take advantage of those new highways out to the suburbs and flee the city into homes subsidized by federal mortgage programs. Mortgages that black people won’t get. And the blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods. But now those good blue-collar jobs are gone. Can’t buy a house because the lenders have designated the neighborhood as high-risk—the redlining actually creates the conditions it’s warning against. Unemployment, overcrowded tenements, and you get overwhelmed social services. It’s started—the breakdown.”

“What does that have to do with the fires?” Carney liked his idea of bad men skulking about with their cans of gas—sociology, or whatever this was, seemed like a cop-out.

“It’s not arson—it’s years of shitty urban planning biting us in the ass. You see it in Harlem,” Pierce said, “not two blocks from where we’re sitting. One system fails and then the next. The slumlord takes over a building, doesn’t keep it up. Boiler busted, no heat. Cheap space heater overloads the old wiring—that’s a fire. Junkies and winos move into an empty apartment, get loaded and drop a match—that’s a fire. Teenagers fucking around in an abandoned building. The building next door goes up, too, and now the whole block is getting sick. One after another. RAND looked at the numbers.” An uptick in fires, they found, was preceded by a spike in public-school enrollment. Chased out of one neighborhood by slum clearance and fires, their next stop becomes the new overcrowded crisis zone. Counting down to the next collapse. “It’s a chain reaction. There’s arson, yes, but it’s just a small part.”