“Cousin.”
Chink glared at Delroy. “I thought you said it was his brother,” Chink said.
“Cousin,” Delroy said.
“That right?” he asked Carney.
“Yes.”
“I want to talk to your cousin.”
“Right.”
“Not ‘right’—where? Where’s he at?”
“I haven’t seen him for months,” Carney said. “He’s hanging out with a different crowd. Just talked to his mother because of the riot—she hasn’t seen him either.”
“His mother,” Chink said. “What do you think about it? All that running around everybody did last week?”
“It’s the same old thing. They get away with it, and then people want to be heard.”
“Know what I think? I think they shouldn’t have stopped. All these angry niggers up here. Everywhere. They should have burned the whole neighborhood down and then kept going. Midtown, downtown, Park Avenue.” The mobster mimed an explosion with his hands. “Torch all that shit.”
“Bad for business,” Carney said. “At least in my line—home furnishings.”
“？‘Bad for business.’？” Chink Montague rubbed his jaw. “You know anything about playing a number? Putting some money down? I see these suckers, I take their money, I know they want to burn shit down. I say, maybe don’t play the same number all the time. Play something else, see what happens. Maybe you been playing the wrong thing this whole time.”
He nodded at Chet the Vet and Delroy. “You see your cousin, you tell me first. I want him.” Chink turned to the desk and struck up a lovelorn humming of “My Heart Is a Pasture （Theme from Miss Pretty’s Promise）。”
Out on the street, Carney started for the Cadillac. Chet said, “Boss didn’t say nothing about chauffeur service.”
“I’ll see you in the car,” Delroy told Chet the Vet. The erstwhile veterinary student spat into the gutter and crossed the street.
Delroy checked over his shoulder and waved Carney close. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “because you gave me a break on that dinette that one time for Beulah. And I want you to listen. I’ve seen that nigger pitch a bitch, I’ve seen him at war. I’ve seen him cut a nigger’s eyelids off for blinking too loud. When he talks like that—weird and calm—shit is right and proper fucked up. You see your cousin, you better step up. For everybody’s fucking sake.”
* * *
*
The Cadillac turned east. Carney waited for it to disappear. Then he cut over to Amsterdam and walked up to 171st, where he switched back to Broadway.
It had been years since Carney visited this stretch of Broadway. Since he stopped buying used furniture. Why did Freddie choose to lam it up here? Because he wasn’t going to run into anyone from the old days. Although he’d been doing a good job of keeping out of sight, downtown with Linus. Then Carney saw it—the old movie theater, the Imperial. With the nickel double features. He and Freddie would spend all day inside, watch the double—cowpoke nonsense usually—and then look at each other: Let’s do it again. No need to speak. They rarely made it through four movies, as some dirty old man usually came lurching up the row to try something, whereupon they ran out screaming and laughing into the street.
Shuttered for years from the looks of it. “The Theater Where People See Cinema.” Giving the hard sell there. The SRO was right across the street.
He had to get the briefcase out of his safe, whatever it was. Carney had considered jimmying the cheap lock but he was too good at imagining outlandish contents: heroin, gold bullion, strontium 90 in a lead case with Russian lettering. Holding it one night was enough to fulfill his family obligation. Freddie had to get his ass downtown and take it away and not come back until the heat was off.
What kind of loony bird rips off Chink Montague? Or rips off someone with enough juice to mobilize Chink on his behalf? It was Freddie who’d put Carney on the mobster’s map with the Theresa job, and now he had returned him to Chink’s attention by fucking up once more. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. That was fine when they were kids. Adult trouble was more permanent than Aunt Millie smacking you with a hairbrush or his father taking off his belt. He could still make it downtown to Union Square to check out the Bella Fontaines if he wrapped it up quick.
There had been no reason for Carney to notice the west side of Broadway and 171st, all those times he came to the Imperial. Cafeteria, tobacco store, hair salon, the insignificant front door to 4043 Broadway. It was called the Eagleton—like his childhood home, it was a building that didn’t deserve a name, despite the ambitions of its architects. Fate has a way of striking places with lightning so that you can never see them the same way again. Carney reached for the knob—in raw spots the metal door was gray beneath the red paint—as a short white man with a long, gnarled beard barged out of the SRO, one hand holding his brown trilby fast to his head.