To Elizabeth, he was another colorful character from Carney’s Harlem, a place not entirely congruent with her Strivers’ Row version. Pepper was one of the stranger walk-ons she had encountered, but she tended to enjoy that variety more.
Elizabeth put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers. “What was Raymond like?” she asked. “When he was little?”
“Much the same. Smaller.”
“Whenever Pepper came over,” Carney said, “he always brought me something—a stuffed animal, a wooden caboose. It was very sweet.”
John cackled at this, picking up on the absurdity, then the rest of them. Pepper’s downturned mouth straightened into a tight line, his version of amusement.
Elizabeth said that the phones at the office had started ringing again. Business with out-of-town clients had remained the same, but the New York City calls went to zero the week of the protests. “No one wants to go on vacation when the house next door is on fire,” she said.
Carney told Pepper that Elizabeth worked for Black Star Travel, which they then had to explain, as Pepper was “not one to vacation much.”
On the one hand, it was everyday word of mouth, what people shared in the neighborhood for mutual survival. That cop Rooker who hangs out on Sixth is out to get black people. Don’t show your face on the Italian block after seven o’clock. They’ll snatch your house for a late payment. But Black Star and other travel agencies, the various Negro travel guides, took that crucial local information and rendered it national and accessible to all who needed it. On the wall at Elizabeth’s office they had a map of the United States and the Caribbean with pins and red marker to indicate the cities and towns and routes that Black Star promoted. Stay on the path and you’ll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.
That was how Carney put it to himself, as his wife gave Pepper her standard client pitch. Pepper took in Elizabeth’s spiel patiently. He chewed, savoring, squeezed in between John and May like an eccentric uncle. He was a relative, this crook, part of his father’s clan. Carney raised his Schlitz and made a toast to the chef. It was Wednesday night, family supper, both sides of him at the table, the straight and the crooked, breaking bread.
SEVEN
She grabbed his arm and startled him—Sandra from Chock Full o’Nuts. He was headed for the subway, downtown to Moskowitz’s. The emerald in his leather satchel made him suspect everybody on the street had X-ray vision. On the lookout for a gunman or an anvil-chinned heavy with a five-o’clock shadow, he didn’t catch the waitress’s approach.
Outside of the coffee shop, Sandra was just as chatty and vivacious. She asked after his family; he had shown her pictures over the years, courtesy of his Polaroid Pathfinder. Sandra told him she’d made it through “all that drama last week okay.” Some roughneck had lobbed a brick through the Seventh Avenue window of the restaurant so they boarded up the place until the protests subsided. They were back in business now. “People need their coffee,” she said.
Carney apologized for being too busy to come by. She touched his arm again and said they weren’t going anywhere.
A few minutes later he was on the subway, humming the shop’s theme song: Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy…What can a millionaire’s money buy: everything else. Cops and city hall and faceless thugs to do your bidding. Carney recalled the fear of those days after the Theresa job, the fear that Arthur’s killer might come for him, his family. Now Freddie and Linus had unleashed trouble of another magnitude, pissed-off rich people who were as bent as gangsters but didn’t have to hide. They did it out in the open, notarized their misdeeds or engraved them into bronze plates for building facades.
Sure, when this was over he’d return to Chock Full o’Nuts for a nice, solid cup of coffee, but he had to get this racket going first. Pepper had signed up, so Carney was spared the tricky business of hitting up one of his customers on the fencing side to see if they had a name. He was not impressed with Harlem’s thugs overall. Whether you were talking construction, poetry, or women’s pumps, the Walt Whitmans, the Peppers, of a given field were hard to come by. It was no different in the violence-and-mayhem trade; the majority of practitioners were average or subpar. Carney was grateful Pepper had forgiven him, even if he suspected it was only out of an old obligation to his father, ancient blood-oath shit.