South Ferry 306, which claimed as its domain fourteen miles of the IRT line between South Ferry and Van Cortlandt–242nd Street, was scheduled to pull into the Fiftieth Street station at 3:36 p.m. but was delayed after a signalman reported a figure shambling among the tracks at Herald Square. Subsequent investigation determined the shape in question to be an addled raccoon. It happened sometimes, a wrong turn. The train screeched into Fiftieth Street at 3:45 p.m., nine minutes behind schedule. The station’s Forty-Ninth Street exit was convenient and popular. A train car collects specimens, the station releases them from captivity. Men and women stepped from the cars, bumped turnstiles, and mounted stairs to feed the maddening flux of Broadway.
Carney ran, availing himself of this confluence. He ran as if Freddie had stolen a comic book from Mason’s display racks and Old Man Mason himself pursued them down Lenox with a machete, he ran as if he and his cousin had dropped a fistful of firecrackers into the aluminum garbage cans outside 134 West 129th and rattled the whole street. He ran like a kid convinced that the whole grown-up world with its entire grown-up might was going to beat him silly. There were people and cars. He danced and darted and zipped through, weaving around frumpy salesmen and limping matrons, threading himself between slow-walking rubes and briskly moving sophisticates as if he were a piece of celluloid navigating the rollers of a gigantic movie projector, lost footage from a B movie.
He shook Ed Bench and Mr. Lloyd after two blocks—not the God of Speed after all—and kept going another ten, although not as fast, trotting some, for he was out of shape. They’d finished construction on another segment of Lincoln Center and the south entrance of the Sixty-Sixth Street stop was open again.
The necklace was gone, like that. Yes, you can have all sorts of craziness in your head and people will sit right next to you on the train as if you are a normal person. He felt safe on the train, all the way up, until he got to the store and saw Pepper.
* * *
*
Pepper hadn’t been himself lately. It probably had something to do with getting stabbed in the stomach on the Benton’s rip-off. The job had started fine. A routine hijacking, trailer full of overcoats, sleepy Sunday night. Dootsie Bell brought him in on it. In former times, Dootsie Bell had been an ace stickup man. Prompt, with a bogeyman voice that kept the squares in check. Then he went on the needle and the only cure that took was the Bible. Sure, a little Jesus is good for some individuals but you don’t want Do unto others riding shotgun on a job. Dootsie had assured Pepper the driver was tied up tight. The blade got him deep.
A week in the hospital on this dopey ward. Chumps rotated in and out. The day after he returned to the apartment on 144th, the boiler quit. The landlord gave him excuses for weeks until Pepper gave him an or-else. Hard weeks, the kind where you realize you’ve engineered it so that nobody has anything on you, and that means nobody has anything for you: help, a kind word. He had plenty of time to think about that and decided he wouldn’t change a thing about how he’d lived his life, but going forward a man was allowed to make changes if he saw fit.
His gut bothered him worse than he’d admit. He couldn’t work. The first job that came his way was a payroll rip-off, a glass factory in New Brunswick. Working with Cal James—his girl’s cousin worked there and had the inside dope. Half an hour into casing the place for security patterns, his stomach started twisting and he passed out in the car. Somehow he got back into the city and had to spend a week in bed. Sorry, Cal. He didn’t sign up for anything after that. A voice kept saying, Are you sure you want to do that? His commonsense voice that had saved his hide many times. It was out of his hands.
He spent a lot of time at Donegal’s. Used to be he walked in and there were men he liked, or at least had worked with—they had something in common. These days he didn’t know where everybody’d gone. Jail, the graveyard, sure, but besides that. There were no pension plans for retired safecrackers, for heisters and hustlers. Looking around Donegal’s, he realized everyone in the bar was a washed-up crook—too old to play the game anymore, brains scrambled after ten years in the joint, or so luckless that no one would work with them. Those guys, plus him. Which is why he was glad that afternoon when Carney walked in. Sometimes Big Mike’s face lurked in his son’s face, in the eyes and the frown, and his friend was returned to him.
They were in Donegal’s one night, him and Big Mike, and Pepper was sharing some thoughts about the nature of the universe. Big Mike said, “You know what your problem is?”