It was early enough in the summer that the concrete and asphalt hadn’t begun to radiate stored-up heat all night. The breeze carried a pleasant smell that was not that of garbage or gutter water. A more learned man would have been able to identify the species of plant, but the best Carney could offer was that it smelled “like trees”—those intermittent sidewalk plantings hanging in there, making a go. Carney hadn’t walked this stretch of the East Side in years. If he hadn’t been carrying a briefcase full of stolen jewelry, he would’ve walked home. No: There were too many fucked-up stretches between here and home. Still, it was a nice thought, that the city had once been safe enough to walk where one pleased.
Uptown, Carney played a game, Is My Stuff in There?, where he tested various models of how far his furniture had dispersed in Harlem. X many pieces sold to X many customers over X many years, adding complicating variables as time passed—dilution by new apartment construction, ebb and flow of uptown population, frequency of redecorating. He had a mental map, like on a cop show, full of red pins demarcating clusters, thin spots, dead spots. Where was the southernmost red pin, the edge of his enterprise? Ninety-fourth Street? How far east? Where did it start, the invisible barrier that separated his city from the white city.
The first blow to his skull sent him buckling. The next one to his kidneys drove Carney forward into the side of a parked van. Sullivan Furniture Repair and Reupholstery. The wheel well was rusted—in his quick zoom in, it was like a mouse had nibbled a cracker. The man lifted up Carney and shoved him against the blue van. Carney looked for help—no one in either direction on Eighty-third—and then into the face of his attacker. He couldn’t place him until he spoke. “Thought I lost you.”
From what Carney recalled, Munson started working with Buck Webb when he transferred uptown from vice. Munson’s affability undercut the power inequities between white cops and those they were paid to serve. Buck Webb didn’t see the advantage in ceding ground. He was an old-school Harlem cop, bull-necked and burly. A black boy grows uptown, over the years he creates a composite of a white cop. Buck Webb was faithful to the loathsome image formed by a generation of black boys. Times changed. Men like Buck Webb did not.
Carney had occasionally seen the partners together—hassling some brother across the street, looming over a hood—but got his proper introduction inside Nightbirds one night. The cops had just braced some hustler at the back of the bar, left the man humiliated with a busted snout. Webb’s natural tint was a fish-belly white that turned completely scarlet when he got angry, like a lizard on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. He was scarlet as the partners made their way to the door, flushed with violence. Munson stopped to say hello and introduced Carney to his partner. Hello as in “See you tomorrow,” it being Envelope Day Eve.
“Carney?” Buck Webb said. “Son of Michael Carney?”
Carney blinked.
Webb laughed. “Munson, I busted that nigger so many times I needed a turnstile. What’s his story?”
Munson placed a hand on Carney’s shoulder to cool it down. In the history of time itself, no black man had ever struck a white cop in Nightbirds, but the gesture signified. “He’s an upstanding citizen,” Munson said. “We should be going.” He gave Carney a neutral look, which in this situation served as sympathy.
“Called him Big Mike, I think,” Webb said. He turned to the door. “He wasn’t so big.”
That was that. Carney rarely saw Webb. If Munson was with his partner, it meant he was on the job, doing actual police work or a higher-level grift, so it had nothing to do with Carney. Munson tapping him on the shoulder, on his own, is when he had to watch his wallet. Webb was so scarce that Carney used to joke, “Where’s Webb?” Making fun of Munson’s shakedowns, but also not wanting Webb anywhere near him with that white cowboy shit.
Now here he was, a nightmare on Eighty-third. Buck Webb picked up the briefcase. “You have my shit?” The case’s weight told him all he needed to know. “You got out of that cab and went straight into the building—I thought I was screwed.” He shook it again.
At the corner an old white lady paused her shopping cart to take in the tableau. Webb gave her the thumbs-up. He turned to Carney. “You’ve got that ‘Munson screwed me’ face. No mistaking.” He socked Carney in the stomach. “You tell Munson he knows where to reach me. We can straighten it all out quickly. Straighten it out like two white men.”
FOUR
When the furniture salesman returned, Munson was at the window in a sweat-soaked undershirt, left forearm swaddled in bandages. Bloody fingerprints dotted the white gauze like rose petals. He crunched a can of National Bohemian, tossed it in the direction of the kitchen, and gingerly stuck his wounded arm into his oxford shirt. “I had to collect from somebody,” Munson told his visitor. “We tussled. You?”
The detective watched Carney walk stiffly to the cheap couch, hand on his stomach. Carney caught him up while he tenderly probed the back of his head.
“That’s a setback,” Munson announced. He lit a cigarette. The furniture salesman told the truth—he bore the earmarks of a Buck Webb Special, heavy on the gut work.
The director’s chair creaked when Munson sat down. The view brought him back to ringolevio again. Twice in two days—he hadn’t thought about the game since he was a kid. The Memorial Day holiday reminded Munson first, the warm afternoons and slow pace conjuring the old pastime, those long-ago days playing ringolevio through the endless blocks and shadows of Hell’s Kitchen. Hide-and-seek and cops and robbers, with a twist. Munson made himself slim behind mailboxes, tried not to get creamed by buses as he darted into traffic, hunched in the darkness of piss-soaked stoops while they searched for him. On the run, like a rehearsal.
Munson chuckled, remembering how the grown-ups shook their fists at him and his crew, this tribe of juvenile delinquents cutting them off on the sidewalk and skidding about. Those outside the game couldn’t see it, even as it unfolded around them with anarchic purpose. Then one of the brats collared someone on the other team and shouted Ringolevio, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three! and the game broke through to the civilian world in a burst of noise. Old biddies dropped their grocery bags in surprise, deliverymen swerved their hand trucks and cursed.
The only non-players hip to what was happening were those watching from above—the shut-ins, weirdos, and geezers who spent their lives at the window, chests and arms perched on dingy pillows that rested on the sill. Every block had them, these silent judges. Their stories circulated: got beaned his first at-bat with the Brooklyn Robins and now his brains were scrambled; drank a bottle of nerve tonic after she got left at the altar and ever since she got out of the booby hatch she watches and waits for her man to come for her. They saw the whole thing from up there, the feints and reversals, the gambits and misbegotten sprints. When young Munson crouched behind a milk truck, he’d look up and see the former shortstop gaze down at him, face empty.
Now Munson was one of them, watching from his 157th hideout, ejected from the game. Once you’re out, you can see the system in its entirety, make out where gears bite gears, how the mechanism works, and scheme accordingly.