Candace poked her head into her boss’s office. Carney didn’t catch the exchange.
“Mr. Duke says you can leave it with me,” she said, closing the door as if sneaking out after putting a baby to sleep.
“He did?”
She nodded. Carney understood a predilection for middlemen, being one himself. He gave her the envelope.
A week later, a messenger appeared at the door of Carney’s office. Carney recognized him from the mixer, one of the young bartenders, paying dues. He took the envelope and tipped the kid a dollar for his trouble.
Sometimes you order something from a Sears catalog and when it arrives, it’s not what you paid for. He had not paid for what he held in his hands: a letter from the Dumas Club expressing regret that they could not extend an offer of admission.
Carney spent the next hour in his office. When the phone rang, Rusty answered it and told him Pierce was on the line. He waved his hand in dismissal.
He walked to the Mill. Candace answered his knock with a “Come on in.” They’d finished lunch, sandwiches, empty wax-paper squares open like sunflowers. Duke sat on the corner of Candace’s desk, eating jelly candies from a glass jar she kept next to a small brass lamp. He gestured to his mouth—can’t talk—and brought Carney along into his office.
Fifth floor, Duke did indeed have a nice view of the Bronx. On the other side of the Harlem River, industrial buildings and warehouses and then sturdy tenements steamed in the heat, poking into the yellowish smog that got worse every year.
Framed on one wall, centered among numerous diplomas and citations and testaments to his character, hung a large drawing of Duke as Napoleon, one too large to have run in the Gazette. He must have commissioned it from the newspaper cartoonist himself. Godzilla-sized, George Washington Bridge behind him as he forded the Hudson with one big foot poised to stomp the West Side Highway. French general’s hat in its proper place instead of the beanie.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you, Raymond,” Duke said when they were seated. “In the end, I’m only one voice of many.”
“You ripped me off.”
“How’d you expect it to turn out, Raymond?”
“For you to respect the terms.”
“I said I’d move your name to the front and that’s what I did.”
“You take a sweetener, it’s a guarantee.” The yellow smog—it was like you saw everybody’s bad thoughts lurking in the air.
“Where you from, man?”
“127th Street.”
“One of those places. How’d you think it was going to go?” Duke was practiced in conversations like this. At the bank snatching back loans, foreclosing on hope. Here were passionless statements of fact.
Carney said, “I’ll take my money.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Like I said.” He stood.
Duke regarded the visitor on the other side of his desk as if peering over the parapet of a castle. His eyes sparkled. Since he left the bank, it was only once or twice a day that the world handed him such opportunities for malice. Three times if he was lucky. He barked at the front office. “Candace, can you call the precinct?”
“Call the police on me?” Carney said.
Candace cracked the door. “Are you all right, Mr. Duke?”
Carney’s father was the one you called police on, not him.
Duke stared at Carney and slowly opened the top drawer of his desk. He slipped his hand inside as if a pistol waited. Harlem bankers, they are prepared.
Out on the pavement, Carney could barely see. The people on the street were shadow-shapes moving around him. It was a normal afternoon and he’d been shunted outside it. A cabbie pounded on his horn at an old biddy jaywalking and she cursed him out, dragging a battered green suitcase. One of the street preachers yelled, “I’m saving souls here!” and raised his arms as if parting seas. Down the block, two newsboys from rival papers fought over the turf in front of a cigar store. Their dropped tabloids fanned out on the sidewalk and trembled in the exhaust of a city bus. Carney squinted. Here was every street corner in this city, populated by noisy, furious characters who were all salesmen, delivering dead pitches for bum products to customers who didn’t have a fucking nickel anyway. He moved one foot then the other.
Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.