Freddie returned. Handing off the briefcase to Carney improved their moods. Even with Washington Heights as a boundary, their Saturday night was something out of the old days, like when Linus sprang Freddie from the Tombs. They hit each place when it started taking off and left before it got dead, and found like-minded hedonists and lushes at every stop. “It wasn’t a full-moon night, but it was like we were the full moon, making everybody act crazy.”
“First big night after the protests,” Carney said. “People were ready to cut loose.”
“You got to ruin that, too?”
Freddie went out to the Greek place for breakfast Sunday morning and gave himself permission to sit and enjoy the paper like a normal citizen. “Fooling myself.” Gone long enough for Linus to OD. “He’d been laying off while planning the job, like I said, but once we got uptown, he was back with gusto.” Freddie was hitting the booze so he didn’t feel he had a right to say anything.
“Do you think it was an accident?”
“Fuck you.”
“I didn’t mean he did it on purpose,” Carney said, “but was someone else in the room when you were out.” He told Freddie about Aunt Millie’s apartment getting tossed, and the homicide cops who came around the store, getting orders from above. “You stirred somebody up.”
“No one would do that to Linus.” They sat with the implications. “I don’t know what to do,” Freddie said.
“You have to split. It’ll take money.”
Freddie nodded to the safe. “It’ll take that.” The emerald.
“I got it,” Carney said.
He needed help, however. He needed Pepper.
SIX
Pepper folded his newspaper flat when Carney appeared in Donegal’s doorway. He nodded at the bartender, who shambled to the other end of the bar, by the street. The bartender wore a sleeveless undershirt gone yellow. It exposed his massive arms and the bawdy Betty Boop tattoo that started on one bicep and continued on the other. Labeled before and after below his elbows.
Carney gestured to the stool. Pepper granted his permission. He hadn’t changed his uniform; the faded dungarees might have been the same pair he wore the first time they met, after the Theresa, a dark speck of Miami Joe’s blood on the hem.
“Buford thought you were serving papers,” Pepper said. “Policy is, officers of the court get the bat he keeps under there, in case.”
“You look the same,” Carney said.
“You got some more legwork for cops you need done?”
“I didn’t see it that way.”
“No other way to see it.”
Carney was about to say that he’d been doing the community a service by yanking a weed like Wilfred Duke, but three years on he was comfortable with the fact it had been revenge. “I didn’t think of the larger picture when it came to you, that is correct.”
Pepper cracked his neck. “It was nice to see all those upstanding Negroes get theirs, I have to admit. That dude really run off with all their money?”
“They say he’s in Barbados. Has some family down there.”
“Bajan niggers will rip you off in a New York minute,” Pepper said.
Outside, Donegal’s green neon sign had given Carney a twinge. Now that he was inside he was sure he’d been there many years before. The grotesque, disembodied grin floating on the good beer with good friends sign. The dusty jar of hard-boiled eggs that contained the same hard-boiled eggs from decades before. Pepper had been one of his father’s running partners so it made sense. Carney had carried this fantasy idea of Donegal’s from Pepper’s talk of the place, when he’d already seen it. He’d envisioned gunsels in zoot suits, block-browed experts in blunt force trauma, but the Wednesday-afternoon crowd looked like the bickering geezers who played chess in parks, trading pawns and grievances. Although in Donegal’s they drank from mugs instead of flasks.
Carney had been a child—had his father left him there while he conducted some business? Watch my kid while I break this guy’s legs? Perched on a stool, his head barely clearing the cloudy varnish of the bar. Very young, if his father hadn’t left him in the apartment. Where was his mother? Anyone who could clarify things was dead.
“You used to come here with my father,” Carney said.
“Plenty. This was where—” Pepper cut off the anecdote. His smiles were rare and he terminated this smile precisely. “The bartender in those days was a crook,” he said, “like us. So if we finished a job late he’d open up and celebrate. Dawn coming in through the windows there. Newspaper trucks rumbling. That was Ishmael, before he got shot. He’s been dead, I don’t know, ten years?” His expression soured. “What do you want? Trying to sell me a couch?”