If she said no, she didn’t know Carney’s identity. She could find out, but that would take time, and there were other ways to get at the banker. Carney had a notebook full of stratagems. The first two schemes had not panned out. So this was the next contender.
Sitting in her apartment, searching her narrow brown eyes, he couldn’t read her.
In the end, he didn’t have to go into a big pitch at all. What you want in his trade, that most perfect thing, is a product that sells itself, an item of such craft and novelty that it renders the salesman superfluous. He had barely begun his spiel when it was clear that Fucking Over Duke, it turned out, sold itself.
“Lay it out like that, all cool,” she’d said. “Like you’re selling me a couch.”
“You in the market for a couch?”
“What’s my end?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
The number impressed. “Who are you?” she asked.
He didn’t say.
“Right. Men come up here,” Miss Laura said, “I’ll take any name they want to give. Take their money, too.” She sipped her beer. “But this is real business, and I need to know the name of my partner. Like how a bank needs to know.”
It was like Freddie and the Theresa job—there’s being outside in the car, and being in the thick of it. “Raymond Carney. I own that furniture store on 125th—Carney’s Furniture?”
“Never heard of it.”
In many negotiations, a pause opens up, a silent interval in which both parties consider the next move and its implications. Like the pause before a kiss or before a hand reaches into a wallet.
She said, “I knew you wasn’t no friend of Willie’s. Know how?”
“How?”
“Willie doesn’t like to share.”
She smiled at him for the first and last time, to say she saw through him and delighted in her superiority. Her lips curved then, her eyes containing a mean brand of delight, and they did a deal for the Duke job.
* * *
*
The first sleep was a subway train that dropped him off in different neighborhoods of crooked behavior and the second sleep returned him to normal life with a rumble. The Dorvay Express? That was too fancy, galloping and gleaming in the moonlight. Here was a local: rattling, grimy, and it didn’t take you anywhere you hadn’t been before.
Carney woke to the first summer night that was more fall than summer, with a breeze that sent you to shut the windows and snap open a musty blanket. Elizabeth didn’t stir when he dressed. The children were spread-eagled, with their faces nestled into the crooks of their arms. All the Carneys slept like that, as if still shrinking from some primeval ugliness.
He didn’t know Convent at night so he took Amsterdam, in and out of stretches of liveliness and desolation—men drinking beer on aluminum folding chairs, clacking dominoes, and then blocks of cratered emptiness, rowdy night spots next to tenements torched for insurance money—until he got to 141st.
His first encounter with Miss Laura took place in July, and they had met a few times since then. Now it was almost a month later, and she had summoned him. He had an inkling why, and it was nothing good. She buzzed him in quickly. Carney had suggested the diner more than once but she wouldn’t meet him during the day. It was near midnight.
Her irritated nod served as a welcome. Miss Laura wore a thin blue robe and her hair was tucked with bobby pins. She was slender, and the robe made her look slighter still, exposing the line of her collarbone and a splash of freckles below her throat.
Out of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village. Freddie could have identified who was playing, and on what basement bebop nights he’d seen them, but whenever Carney heard those sounds he felt trapped in a room of lunatics. Down the hall, the bathtub was running and his host told him to hold on. She disappeared into the back.
Carney’s nose wrinkled at the unctuous aroma that underlay the cigarette smoke. He determined that it came from the purple flowers in the vase on the fireplace. Miss Laura returned and caught him taking a whiff. “My mother kept a garden full of them,” Miss Laura said. “Back in Wilmington. The flower place on Amsterdam has them this time of year.”
“That’s where you’re from?”
She rubbed her fingertips together.
After that first meeting, she made him pay for their conversations, even though it was just talk. Business. Sometimes ten bucks, sometimes thirty, he never knew. Carney asked her to explain the variance and she told him that not everything costs the same. Tonight he handed her a twenty, guessing.