There had been a bunch of muggings lately, an old lady carrying groceries hit on the head, the kind of news Elizabeth fretted over. He took a well-lit route to Riverside Drive. He went around Tiemann Place, and there it was. Carney’d picked 528 Riverside this month, a six-story red brick with fancy white cornices. Stone falcons or hawks on the roofline watching the human figures below. He favored the fourth-floor apartments these days, or higher, after someone pointed out that the higher views cleared the trees of Riverside Park. He hadn’t thought of that. So: that fourth-floor unit of 528 Riverside, in his mind a pleasant hive of six rooms, a real dining room, two baths. A landlord who leased to Negro families. With his hands on the sill, he’d look out at the river on nights like this, the city behind him as if it didn’t exist. That rustling, keening thing of people and concrete. Or the city did exist but he stood with it heaving against him, Carney holding it all back by sheer force of character. He could take it.
Riverside, where restless Manhattan found itself finally spent, its greedy hands unable to reach past the park and the holy Hudson. One day he’d live on Riverside Drive, on this quiet, inclined stretch. Or twenty blocks north in one of the big new apartment buildings, in a high-letter apartment, J or K. All those families behind those doors between him and the elevator, friendly or not, they live in the same place, no one better or worse, they were all on the same floor. Or maybe south in the Nineties, in one of the stately prewars, or in a limestone fortification around 105th or thereabouts that squat like an ornery old toad. If he hit the jackpot.
Carney prospected in the evening, checking the line of buildings from different angles, strolling across the street and scanning up, speculating about the sunset view, choosing one edifice and then a single apartment inside. The one with the blue window treatments, or the one with the shade half down, its string dangling like an unfinished thought. Casement windows. Under those broad eaves. He wrote the scenes inside: the hissing radiator, the water spot on the ceiling where the rummy upstairs let the bath run and the landlord won’t do a thing about it but it’s fine. It’s nice. He deserves it. Until he tired of the place and resumed his hunt for the next apartment worthy of his attentions, up or down the avenue.
One day, when he had the money.
The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument and no one telling you what happened. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying KO’s and low blows and devising too-late parries. You didn’t know what it had been about or who’d won, just that nobody wanted to talk about it, they glance around and knead grudges in their fists. In its heyday, the joint had been a warehouse of mealy human commerce—some species of hustler at that table, their bosses at the next, marks minnowing between. Closing time meant secrets kept. Whenever Carney looked over his shoulder, he frowned at the grubby pageant. Rheingold beer on tap, Rheingold neon on the walls in two or three places, the brewery had been trying to reach the Negro market. The cracks in the red vinyl upholstery of the old banquettes were stiff and sharp enough to cut skin.
Less dodgy with the change in management, Carney had to allow. His father’s city disappearing. Last year the new owner, Bert, had the number on the pay phone changed, undermining a host of shady deals and alibis. In the old days broken men hunched over the phone, hangdog, waiting for the ring that changed their luck. Bert put in a new overhead fan and kicked out the hookers. The pimps were okay, they were good tippers. He removed the dart board, this last item an inscrutable renovation until Bert explained that his uncle “had his eye put out in the army.” He hung a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. in its place, a grimy halo describing the outline of the former occupant.
Some regulars beat it for the bar up the street, but Bert and Freddie hit it off quickly, Freddie by nature adept at sizing up the conditions on the field and making adjustments. When Carney walked in, his cousin and Bert were talking about the day’s races and how they’d gone.
“Ray-Ray,” Freddie said, hugging him.
“How you doing, Freddie?”
Bert nodded at them and went deaf and dumb, pretending to check that there was enough rye out front.
Freddie looked healthy, Carney was relieved to see. He wore an orange camp shirt with blue stripes and the black slacks from his short-lived waiter gig a few years back. He’d always been lean, and when he didn’t take care of himself quickly got a bad kind of thin. “Look at my two skinny boys,” Aunt Millie used to say when they came in from playing in the street. If Carney hadn’t seen his cousin, it also meant Freddie’d been staying away from his mother. He still lived with her in his old room. She made sure he didn’t forget to eat.