Lunch hour on Rector and Broadway. The office workers spilled out and sloshed around the avenues. Curbside hot dogs, Automat specials, bloody steaks for big shots at their reserved tables. Why today? The contract with Bella Fontaine, for one thing. Mailing the contract to Bella Fontaine’s Omaha headquarters brought back everything about that sticky July. The killing of James Powell and the riots, and then the dangerous urgency of the following week—the heat that came down and what happened to Freddie. Signing up with Bella Fontaine after eighteen months of renewed pursuit of Mr. Gibbs made those events into a mirage.
He reconsidered: The consequences remained, but the reasons had turned spectral, insubstantial. Harlem had rioted—for what? The boy was still dead, the grand jury cleared Lieutenant Gilligan, and black boys and girls continued to fall before the nightsticks and pistols of racist white cops. Freddie and Linus were gone, their heist unwound as if it had never happened, and Van Wyck kept throwing up buildings.
Freddie hung on for two months in a coma. Pressure on the brain. His last words: “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.” He had been jealous of Harlem Hospital, Carney knew, for the hours it had deprived him of his mother, the double shifts and night shifts over the years. He liked to think Freddie sensed and savored the warmth of her hand those final days and nights that the hospital reunited them on the fourth floor. There was no running out to the night spot, no lying about where he’d been. No vanishing acts. Pedro came up when he got the news. He stuck around for two days after the funeral and then split back to Florida.
Death took Freddie from Carney and mourning returned to him a visitation, an invisible companion who shadowed him everywhere, tugging at his sleeve and interrupting when he least expected: Remember what my smile looked like, Remember when, Remember me. Its voice grew quiet and Carney didn’t hear it for a while and then it was loud again: Remember me, This is your job now, Remember me or no one else will. At times it seemed the grief was powerful enough to shut down the world, cut off the juice, stop the earth from spinning. It was not. The world proceeded in its mealy fashion, the lights stayed on, the earth continued to spin and its seasons ravaged and renewed in turn.
Munson came by for his envelope two nights after the visit to 319 Park. Given the heat on Freddie, the authorities accepted Carney’s story that he’d showed up at the store, beaten half to death by someone he’d crossed. Munson didn’t indicate whether he believed the story or not, merely relayed that there was no interest in pursuing it further. Via the New York Post, Centre Street let it be known that the Linus Van Wyck case was closed: death by misadventure. Carney handed over the envelope to the detective and their business resumed.
Delroy, too, visited the office for Chink’s envelope like everything was copacetic. Whoever had put their foot on Chink Montague’s neck had relented. Things were awkward between Carney and Delroy—beyond the coerced protection-money aspect—until the hood started seeing this Jamaican gal with a lackluster dining situation. Carney was happy to move another Collins-Hathaway dinette set, ten percent off for loyal customers.
August arrived. Carney didn’t know if it was over, if Van Wyck was done with him. Business deal concluded, blood on both sides, aggravations mounting—these things were usually enough to terminate a mob war, and they appeared to end the hostilities in this case as well. Mr. Van Wyck got what he wanted, after all. Carney lost sleep for a long time afterward, but come morning Elizabeth was in bed next to him, the kids were making noise down the hall, and his world was intact. For now. When Pepper came by to pick out his recliner, Carney asked him if he thought they were done. Pepper had lost weight during his convalescence, but retained his malevolent aplomb: “I’d take a dim view if it wasn’t.”
Carney arrived at Barclay and Greenwich. At the intersection, a Checker cab clipped a green sedan and the drivers leapt out into the street to bully each other. Two red-faced white guys making like jungle apes. Carney followed the plywood fence around the corner to Barclay, where it was calmer. The sign on the fence around the construction site announced van wyck realty: building the future. A big yellow crane hoisted a large section of steel tubing through the air. It wobbled like a surfer and disappeared below the fence.
Carney made his way to the tiny window in the plywood. He’d always thought of those site windows as kid stuff—May never let them pass one without making him lift her for a glimpse of the hidden operation. Here he was, pressing his nose to the glass. The hole went four stories deep, deeper than he’d ever seen. Underground parking? Or is that how far down you have to go to get these big skyscrapers up these days? A simple fact of physics. All that dirt and rock were already accounted for. Read those articles about the city’s Battery Park scheme and you know it’ll take a million tons of landfill to expand the footprint of the island that much. They had to dig down ever deeper to build ever higher, then make more island to fit the other stuff they wanted to put up. It was a racket, the whole thing.