It was a good question. The photographer was mercurial.
Carney brought Zippo in on the Duke job last. It was clear that he needed someone to take the photographs. He purchased the Pathfinder because Polaroid advertised it as easy to use. More important, the film didn’t need to be sent out to be developed. One look at the pictures he planned to take and they’d call the vice squad.
Practice runs with the Polaroid proved him useless. “Some people are good at some things and not others,” Elizabeth said. Meant in the nicest way. She and the kids were patient with his various attempts to be one of those capable fathers in TV and magazine ads, capturing the major and minor life moments. He failed before the entrance of the furniture store, with the family name emblazoned above; in Riverside Park, as the serene Hudson whispered past; in front of the old fire watchtower in Mount Morris Park, after guiding his family past the place where he’d dumped Miami Joe’s body in a Moroccan Luxury rug.
He needed to bring on another hand.
It’d have to be Zippo.
Zippo—part-time check-kiter and full-time purveyor of boudoir shots and blue movies—knew Freddie from around, but Freddie was scarce. Linus had bailed Carney’s cousin out of jail when he got picked up with Biz Dixon for mouthing off. Freddie didn’t call Carney or his mother for help; he called the white boy. He checked in with Aunt Millie once he got out, to tell her that he was okay, and disappeared underground again.
Elizabeth had been horrified to hear he’d spent a night in the Tombs. The city jail was notorious. “Oh, that’s a terrible place!” Carney hoped it hadn’t been too rough. The last thing Carney wanted when he came up with the setup was to see his cousin hurt. How could he know that Freddie would get entangled in it? It was bad luck is all—though it’d be swell if Freddie took it as a sign to straighten up and fly right. Hardheaded as he was, something good might come out of it.
One of Carney’s regulars—he had a magic well that produced new Sony portable TVs, apparently—was buddies with the photographer and arranged a meet at Nightbirds. How many times had his father met his cronies in this place? To plan a job, or to celebrate one.
Zippo arrived with his limp-dishrag posture, lanky and loose, the sleeves of his blue button-down shirt too short. Carney hadn’t seen him in years. He still rolled with that odd energy of his, defiant and jumpy, like a Bronx pigeon.
“You have a camera these days?” Carney asked. Last he’d heard, a model’s irate boyfriend had put Zippo out of business.
“That was a temporary setback,” Zippo said. “If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a ‘setback.’？”
Carney had never heard jail described that way. It came back, how Zippo veered every which way, like a drunk driver peeling down the street at three a.m. One person one second, and another the next. Deranged competency is how Carney put it later.
“I’m back to work,” Zippo said. He checked over his shoulder to prove his discretion. “You and the missus want some pictures taken—”
“My wife is not—it’s something else. It’s the stuff you do, boudoir stuff.”
“Right, right.”
“But one person is asleep.”
“Sure, there’s a whole market in that. Ladies pretending to be dead. Men pretending to be graves. Cemetery scenes…”
To curtail further explanation, Carney explained the job in detail. The photographer had no qualms once he named the mark.
“I hate that fucking Carver Federal,” Zippo said. “You know they put my name on a list?” He’d busied himself with ripping a coaster to bits and now made a mound of white shreds.
How old was Zippo—eighteen? Nineteen? Too young for this job?
“It might be in flagrante,” Carney said.
“In flagrante, out flagrante, you’re the boss.” Zippo emphasized his superiority to the assignment. “When I was younger, I was more ‘fine art,’ if you know what I mean.” Certainly not the first Nightbirds customer to wax over the promise of bygone days, and not the last. “I wanted to be one of the great chroniclers,” he said, “like Van Der Zee. Carl Van Vechten. Harlem life, Harlem people. But my luck has always been rotten. You know that. Any chance I get, I piss it away. Now it’s tits. And people pretending to be dead.”
“I think you’ll like the money,” Carney said.
“It’s not the money,” Zippo said. He scraped the coaster detritus into his hand and asked when it was going down. They did a deal for the photography and the processing.