Duke told everybody to have a drink and he wound his way through the room to commence his inspection of the applicants. Carney was one of the last to be collared. Pierce gave Carney a wink and slinked off.
They were next to the window, which allowed a slight cross ventilation. “Raymond!” Duke said. “It’s hard to believe we haven’t met before.” The hand was clammy and the cologne first-rate. “How’s Elizabeth—and you have two children?”
“Great.”
“You tell that lady of yours her uncle Willie says hello.”
The street caught his attention. “That’s terrible.” He nodded below, where a disheveled young man staggered and patted his pockets in a grotesque pantomime. The Junkie Shake, that new dance, all the rage. “It’s a scourge,” Duke said. “Some places, lots where I used to play handball as a kid, I wouldn’t walk past at night.”
“Wagner’s talking about that drug task force,” Carney said. He didn’t believe it, but it was something to say.
“That fool’s looking to get himself reelected. Against those Tammany hacks? He’ll say anything.”
“It’s a mess,” Carney said, and reminded himself to call Freddie.
Duke put his back to 120th Street and asked after the furniture store. Carney assumed the banker already knew all he needed to know about him, but he told him about the expansion into the old bakery next door, just completed. His new secretary was working out fine, although he found it hard to give up tasks he’d been doing on his own for so long.
“You say goodbye to old challenges and welcome new ones.”
“That’s being an entrepreneur,” Carney said.
“Giving that old Jew Blumstein a run for his money, I hope.” Duke had had plenty of dealings with the big department store over the years, starting back with the protests in ’31 over the lack of Negro clerks and cashiers. He was a young man during the Buy Where You Can Work boycott, but even then he knew the importance of the long game. “Blumstein’s wasn’t going nowhere, and neither were we!” he told Carney. It had the ring of a well-used line.
Duke checked over Carney’s shoulder and adopted a tone of confidence. “I’m glad you’re here, Raymond. We’re trying to broaden our ranks around here—so it’s not the same type. We can only accept a few men each year, that’s what’s hard about it.”
Carney got a feeling.
“Being that selective, sometimes a man, if he wants to head to the front of the line, he’ll add a sweetener. So he doesn’t get overlooked.”
“How sweet?”
“That depends on the man and how front of the line. Last year we had a fellow—I won’t say his name, I’m discreet, you have to be in banking—arrived at the number five.”
After having bona fide criminals put the bite on him—dirty cops, dudes who cut people’s faces off—Duke’s genteel shakedown almost made him chuckle. Like last week when May got mad because he wouldn’t let her jump on the couch and she punched him in the arm—was that supposed to hurt? There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.
Carney asked for Duke’s card. The banker had leased an office in the Mill Building, on Madison, after he resigned from Carver Federal to start the community bank. The forces in the room changed vector and Duke was carried to another part of the room. To put the bite on someone else. Or were sweeteners only for the sons of crooks?
Five hundred dollars. Crooked world, straight world, same rules—everybody had a hand out for the envelope. A five-hundred-dollar investment in the future of Carney’s Furniture if business kept rolling in like it was. A second store, a third? The members of the Dumas Club circulated around him in the room: whiskey in hand, elbows in ribs. They were a collection of chumps, but he’d need these Dumas chumps for permits, loans, to keep the city off his back. To give the okay one day down the line, or as bagmen for kickbacks to inspectors, to men in departments downtown he’d never heard of. Department of Skimming a Little Off the Top, Office of the Occasional Shakedown.
John wasn’t even two yet. By the time his son was old enough to help out with the family business—in a real way, not as a stock boy, as Carney’d gotten his start—the seeds of what he planted with the Dumas Club will have blossomed. It was a betrayal of certain principles, sure, a philosophy about achieving success despite—and to spite—men like these. Condescending Leland types, Alexander Oakes and his lapdog buddies. But these were new times. The city is ever-changing, everything and everyone must keep up or fall behind. The Dumas Club had to adapt, and so did Carney.