His father—how would he have phrased it? “I’ll burn that nigger’s house down while he sleeps.” In more innocent days, Carney preferred to think of that as a figure of speech; it was more than likely that his father had done that thing once or twice. Wilfred Duke lived in a fine and stately eight-story building on Riverside Drive, the Cumberland, and the complexities of burning it down were numerous and varied, even if Carney had arson in his repertoire. Which he did not.
No. Fire was too quick. And Carney by nature was more of the biding type.
TWO
The Big Apple Diner faced a row of four-story brownstones that had been built by the same developer at the end of the previous century. Identical doglegged stoops, leaf brackets and keystones, wood cornices, one after the other from one corner to the next. From across the street, the houses had distinguished themselves from one another over time through the plantings out front, the decorations behind the front-door glass, and window treatments—the accumulated decisions of the residents and modifications by the owners. One misguided soul had painted one of the exteriors a mealy peach color and now it stuck out, the rotten one in the barrel. A single blueprint—funded by speculators, executed by immigrant construction gangs—had summoned this divergent bounty.
Carney imagined beyond the facades; he was looking for something. Inside, the brownstones had remained one-family homes, or been cut up into individual apartments, and their rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint color, what had been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. In this room, the oldest son was born on a lumpy canopy bed by the window; in that parlor the old bachelor had proposed to his mail-order bride; here the third floor had been the stage, variously, for slow-to-boil divorces and suicide schemes and suicide attempts. Also undetectable were the impressions of more mundane activities: the satisfying breakfasts and midnight confidences, the making of daydreams and resolutions. Carney imagined himself inside because he was looking for evidence of himself. Was there an Argent wingback chair or Heywood-Wakefield armoire in one of them, over by the window, the proof of a sale he’d closed? It was a new game he played, walking around this unforgiving town: Is my stuff in there?
He was working on an equation: X Number of Items sold to X Number of Customers over X Number of Years. Business was sturdy enough that a couple of times a day, more likely than not, he passed one of his customers’ homes. Maybe not this block, but maybe the next one past the light. The stuff from his store had to go somewhere; the customers weren’t chaining it to anvils and pitching those sweet beech-armed sofas into the Hudson River. One day, given the distribution of his customers across Harlem, there might be one of his wares on every uptown block. He’d never know when he hit that milestone, but maybe he’d get a tingly feeling, a sense of satisfaction as he walked the streets.
One day.
The Big Apple Diner was on Convent near 141st Street, halfway up the block. Carney had taken one of the window tables. He waited for Freddie. His cousin was late and it was fifty-fifty whether he’d show. At least it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
The diner was a shabby operation, the cracks in the floor caulked by grime, the windows cloudy. The air smelled like burning hair, but it was not hair, it was the food they served. They probably did a nice morning trade and lunch, too, but at three o’clock the place was dead. The waitress was half in the bag, lurching and muttering. When not groaning at his gentle requests, she tipped cigarette ash into a tin ashtray on the counter and waved away the flies. The housefly traffic this time of day was brisk, but Carney doubted it covered the rent.
Carney grabbed two newspapers from the table behind him. It was his habit to consult the furniture ads to see what kind of specials the competition was offering this week. The Fischer outlet, on Coney Island, was selling patio furniture. Notable in that the company had branched out into manufacturing outdoor furniture; business was good. He didn’t sell Fischer products, but it was good to keep tabs on the big players. All-American took out a quarter-page ad—not cheap—to announce a sale on their Argent merchandise. Their sofa was ten bucks cheaper than Carney sold it for, a rare discount for them. All-American was on Lexington, though, and his customers weren’t going to make the trip. Go all the way down there and then the white salesman ignores you or treats you like you were nothing. Carney was fine. He was spending more time away from the store, leaving a lot to Rusty, but Rusty was capable. Now that the man was engaged to be married, he was eager for the commissions. And Marie had quickly taught him that he should have hired a secretary long ago.