Now the job had snuck up on them, without warning. Five o’clock. The phone number on the business card he gave Carney was out of service. On the back, Zippo had penciled in an address. He took a taxi.
Photography by Andre was located on 125th and Fifth, above a flower store. The stairwell creaked in such a way that if it collapsed, no one could say there’d been no warning. Carney knocked on the studio’s door and a nervous middle-aged woman rushed past, her face turned so he couldn’t identify her.
The studio was one big room, with a ratty couch and chairs by the door, and then the shooting space with lights on stands, a reflector, an umbrella. Toward the back, assorted props and illustrated backdrops leaned against one another. A beach scene of blue skies and blue water half covered a library backdrop of bookshelves crammed with leather volumes.
Zippo was unfazed by Carney’s presence. A black cat ran to his feet and he picked it up and held it to his chest. “Just finished,” Zippo said. “Little lady’s husband is in Germany on an air force base and asked her to send some photos to remember her by.”
“Have you been smoking that stuff?”
“She was so uptight, I thought it’d loosen her up,” Zippo said. “And it did! To give oneself to the camera, it’s a complicated dance. Society burdens us with these hang-ups—”
“It’s tonight,” Carney said. “It’s on for tonight.”
Zippo nodded solemnly. “I got to lock up. This place ain’t mine, its Andre’s. That’s why his name is on everything.”
Carney and Zippo walked four blocks to the lot where Carney kept his truck. He got a feeling it was a pickup-truck night, a try-to-outrun-bad-luck night. Might he need the truck bed? Carney didn’t like the notion of dumping bodies in the back of his truck, deceased or not deceased or any which way. Once is bad luck; twice and it looks like you’re getting accustomed.
The photographer lugged a big vinyl bag over his shoulder. It had already been packed when Carney showed up, even though Zippo couldn’t have known it’d go down tonight.
“Oh, I had a feeling,” he explained. “Half my art is trusting my instincts.”
Zippo fiddled with the radio and found a beatnik DJ wandering the lower bands, mumbling desultorily. They parked across the street from Miss Laura’s apartment, where Carney could see her window from the driver’s seat. The open curtains meant she was alone, according to their signal. He told Zippo to stay put and walked over to Amsterdam for a pay phone.
“He says he’s going to try to come over,” Miss Laura told him.
“Try? He is or he isn’t.”
“That’s it. He said he had a meeting.”
He updated Zippo when he got back to the truck.
“Waiting,” Zippo said, “always waiting. I do work sometimes for this white divorce lawyer—Milton O’Neil? He’s on all those matchbooks? The job is to catch them in the act. There’s a lot of waiting.”
“Zippo.”
“Yeah?”
“You still light fires?”
Zippo’s most famous fire was the one that consumed the empty lot on St. Nicholas. Some rags in the garbage caught, it all went up, and the whole neighborhood came out to watch the firemen do their thing. The primitive glow of the fire and the hypnotic fire-truck lights capered across the abandoned buildings and vacant faces and rendered them beautiful. Zippo was fourteen, fifteen. His mother’s uncle lived in Riverdale and had money from a patent, those toothbrush mounts set into everybody’s bathroom tile above the sink. A real immigrant-makes-good story. He paid for Zippo’s treatment.
“I lit fires because I didn’t know back then it was enough to see it in my head,” Zippo said. “I didn’t have to do it. That’s why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.”
“That’s what you’ve learned?” His patronizing tone, usually reserved for Freddie, cast Zippo as a lost soul who needed to get wise.
“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” Zippo said, “since it’s none of my business, but since you’re asking me shit that’s none of your business—what happened to your eye? Your eye is all fucked up. You look like shit.”
“I got punched in the face,” Carney said.
“Oh, that happens to me all the time,” Zippo said.
* * *
*
At a quarter past eight, Wilfred Duke, wearing a light brown pinstripe suit and whistling happily, rang the buzzer to the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent. Her thin hands drew the curtains shut.