An instant camera was fine, Carney decided. Pick it up tomorrow during business hours. Normal-people business hours.
Down the street, the Times Square light show blazed, half power at this time of night but still magnificent. He’d never seen it from this angle before, from Forty-Seventh—the light emerging from the bend on Seventh Ave as if cast from some terrible radiant creature lurching into view. He had this constant sense these days of pushing through into somewhere else. Step outside your known streets and different laws apply, crooked logic. His thoughts turned to those kids’ stories about toys waking to their true lives once their masters go to sleep, and wondered what silent switcheroos unfolded on those big marquees and billboards when no one was looking.
He descended into the subway, hustling at the wail of the arriving train. Perhaps on the street above, as in a story for children, the big black letters rearranged themselves into new names and words, and ten thousand blinking lights expounded in an unseen, after-hours performance. Spelling out philosophical declarations. Statements of universal truth. Cries for help and understanding. And maybe among them, an affirmation intended for him and him alone: a perfect message of hate, inscribed upon the city itself.
FOUR
Marie’s mother liked baked goods. Cakes, cookies, cobbler, seasonal pies redolent of her Alabama youth. Marie obliged her. Ever since she came on as secretary, Carney’s Furniture provided a small supply of baked goods for Carney and Rusty, delighted customers, crooks, and the occasional white policeman. Most mornings, Marie left a glass plate on the small table outside her office door, and last night’s labor was crumbs by lunchtime. Her specialty was a lemon-orange chiffon cake.
Detective Munson was a fan. When Carney showed up for their meeting that August morning, the cop was already there, trying to ease the recipe out of Marie. In the man’s arsenal of interrogation methods, today’s was among the most gentle, and of his various investigations, this was certainly the sweetest. Marie didn’t crack. “Mostly you pay attention to what you’re doing,” she told the cop with a tight smile. Carney was on time for the meeting, Munson was early. It was unclear whether the cop was jockeying for position or merely hungry.
The treat supply was not the only improvement to Carney’s Furniture in recent months. Sable Construction had delivered an eye-watering bill for their services, but they’d done a splendid job; there was no indication that the showroom had once been half the size. The latest lines from Argent and Collins-Hathaway, the gazelle-limbed dining chairs and boomerang side tables, posed elegantly in the bakery’s former counter and seating area. The ovens, stoves, and various other equipment had been sold to a junk dealer, and the new robin’s-egg blue paint job turned out to be a fine complement to this season’s palette, which was heavy on pastels. As he led his customers through the space, Carney had started telling them, “If you can’t find it, you don’t need it,” and the reaction—a small smile and an expansion of their stroll through the store—had made him add the line to his newspaper advertisements. At the back of the store, he’d allocated space for Marie and the ever-multiplying file cabinets. Given her love for baking, Marie’s hire was almost a tribute to the vanished establishment.
Carney kept his office in the same place, with the addition of the door to Morningside Avenue, that side entrance for special clientele.
They knew to come at night, the thieves, by appointment only, and if they came knocking during store hours Carney cut them out—find another dealer. Any questions Rusty and Marie had regarding Carney’s shady visitors, they kept them to themselves. Rusty was preoccupied with his impending marriage and scraping together a proper nest egg for him and his future bride. She was a prim little thing, Beatrice, a soft-spoken hummingbird who’d grown up two towns over from Rusty back in Georgia. They’d discovered each other in the church choir last year while lining up for punch. Their favorite places back home overlapped, and up here they’d found a common melody in the city. She laughed at Rusty’s weird hayseed humor and he called her “my pet,” out of some movie. Rusty did not complain when Carney asked him to step up at work the last few weeks.
For Marie’s part, Carney gathered she was too grateful for the job and too exhausted to be curious. She lived on Nostrand Ave in Brooklyn with her mother and younger sister. One was lame, the other ailing; it was hard to keep track. Marie was the only one bringing home a paycheck. Any tentative picture of her home life came solely from quotes from her mother: “My mother says these cookies can get tricky if you don’t use shortening,” “My mother says you need to let it rest near an open windowsill, so the breeze can pitch in.” Carney recognized her air of rehearsed competency from his own high-school days, after his mother had passed, his father was out slinking, and he was raising himself. That burden of carrying an apartment on your back; you stagger sometimes but you take the weight, what else can you do? Twenty-two young women answered his ad. Marie’s diploma from the Executive Typing School on Forty-Fourth Street clinched it. “Training Fingers for Industry.” She carried it in a fake leather folder.