Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(95)

“You want to put that down?”

Carney was hugging the file drawer to his chest, his chin holding the wastepaper basket in place. He set it on the sidewalk.

“And who is this Rusty?” the marshal asked.

Once the fire was out, the cops wanted their turn. Historically, Carney avoided walking by the 28th Precinct, as his father had taught him. “Cops snatch you for some shit you didn’t do, ’cause you’re the first nigger they see.” It was Munson’s old station house. Perhaps the cop asking the questions had taken Munson’s desk. The cop was white-haired, with a drinker’s complexion and the bigot’s stunted imagination. He was surprised Carney was the landlord, and wanted to know how long he’d owned the buildings. The insurance policy—was it new? “How was business? Economy like it is—tough—we see a lot of people getting desperate.”

“Why don’t you ask if I know who did it?”

“Do you?”

“No.”

The cop looked at the file drawer and the wastepaper basket perched atop it. Carney was sitting with it between his legs, his knees locked around it.

Carney was dazed. The basement. He hadn’t thought of what shape the basement was in. All that water from the hoses if the fire didn’t destroy it first. Floor models in good condition that he’d intended to put on sale at the end of the summer. Business records going back to when he opened the store. The console radios in the musty corner, RCA jobs he never got around to junk or dump at a swap meet. His store.

The cop said, “You say you saw this man throw two firebombs into your store?”

“I saw him throw the second one.”

“What’d he look like?”

“I don’t know.”

He returned to the store. Above the broken shopwindow, above the dark hole where the showroom had been, smoke had painted his Carney’s Furniture sign black. Sooty streaks washed up the red-brick facades of 383 and 381. Fire crews had smashed the apartment windows, to rescue people who might be inside, or to shoot water through, he didn’t know. One fire truck remained. The fire department had blocked off the corner.

Rusty gave Carney a desperate hug, careful not to dislodge the file drawer and the basket. “Yeah, boss,” Rusty said. He had stepped up in Carney’s absence. Marie had gone home to be with Bonnie; she was rattled, and when the events sank in she started weeping. Robert had called his mother and she took him home. It’d be a couple of days before the fire department let anyone in the building. The inspectors had to poke around, make sure the buildings were sound.

Everybody was safe. Time slowed down. Mrs. Garcia from the bakery up the street embraced him. He barely knew her. “I’m so sorry,” she said, eyes red. Yes—a shopkeeper understood the loss the way normal people couldn’t. You run your own business, you understand what it is to build it, and to lose it. She tried to stick a bag of muffins in his hand. His hands were full.

Rusty took the muffins and pointed up Morningside.

Elizabeth waited up the ave, sitting on the back steps of St. Joseph’s. Ironically, the church had its front door on 125th, and a Morningside entrance as well, just like the store. The second entrance had been bricked up—perhaps the preachers had their own nighttime sideline at some point—but three steps remained. Elizabeth saw him and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and waited for him to come to her.

It didn’t hit him until he sat on the steps. He set down his office salvage. Down the street he saw his store from that new angle, and it was as if the building belonged to someone else. The fire someone else’s tragedy, the misfortune of a stranger he had no connection to. In the instant that the store existed outside of him, an alien object, he felt it: run over by this express of grief that left him mangled in the dark. He had worked so hard—no one knew how difficult it had been. There had been no one, no witnesses, until the hard part was done. You’ve come a long way. Working hour upon hour, enduring those waves of setbacks and reversals, sweating and suffering under the eyes of that cruel and dispassionate boss: The City. It had been him against the City for so long, tussling, until he and it finally came to an arrangement: You don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you. His own Declaration of Independence. Or so he thought. The City had reneged. The City had taken his store to add to its heap of spent tenements, burned-out townhouses, craters, and rubble-strewn lots. Another broken address on an island full of them.

They sobbed together, Carney and Elizabeth, for as long as the street let them get away with it, entwined.

“Rusty said everybody was safe,” she said.

“Yeah,” Carney said.

May and John had come when he was at the precinct. She told them they’d see him at home. He thanked her.

“He threw Molotov cocktails?”

“He did.”

“Because of your other business.”

“Yes.” It had never occurred to him to come clean. She said it, asked him straight-out, and there he was saying, Yes.

“You sell stuff that falls off a truck sometimes,” she said. “The rugs. I know that. That’s how people do it. Daddy always used to brag about getting a deal on stuff that fell off a truck. But this isn’t that, is it?”

Carney asked her how she knew about the rugs and she said she’d known for years. Back at their first apartment, he was on the phone talking to someone about “hot rugs” and she was on the couch. He thought she was asleep, but she was not.