In April, the papers covered a delegation of mayors who came to town for a conference, with a field trip to Brownsville. Elizabeth read out quotes, using her Caucasian voice for the outraged visitors:
Kevin White of Boston said the twenty-block area “may be the first tangible sign of the collapse of our civilization.”
“God, it looks like Dresden,” said Wesley C. Uhlman of Seattle.
…and most of them said it reminded them of home.
Ha ha. That last quote became a punch line when she and Carney were out for a stroll and encountered tokens of neighborhood decrepitude. A pervert squatting on a park bench, ladling goo out of an iron bucket; an alley cat with its head smashed flat; a baby’s grimy doll missing half a face: It reminds me of home!
The east side of Edgecombe was Coogan’s Bluff, and the top of the stairs to the old Polo Grounds. Bums camped in the park beyond the stone wall, in shanties nestled against the rocks. Sheet-metal walls held up by pipe. One of the residents had taken a pet: a mutt with matted fur, tethered to a concrete block by a long, curly telephone cord. A few blocks over from Munson’s hideout and he’d crossed the border into a different city.
Munson whistled at the dog and received an indifferent response. He got back in the car.
“This is a stakeout?” Carney said.
“In that we’re waiting. Not similar in that there’s no mystery.”
No mystery because they waited for his partner. Munson had reached out to Webb from a pay phone three blocks down from the 157th Street apartment. When he turned to dial, Carney weighed the pros and cons of running. Elizabeth was safe out of town, scoop up the kids and split before this night got worse. Because it was getting worse minute by minute, like he was a nail being pounded deeper and snugger and stuck. Two white cops being pursued by the Justice Department, black radicals with submachine guns, Notch Walker. This was unsustainable. His assessment: It was Tuesday night, a warm pleasant night in Washington Heights with people around, witnesses, and Munson couldn’t stop him if he ran.
“Carney.” Munson cupped his hand over the transmitter. “Don’t even think about it.”
He got off the phone and informed Carney they were headed to Highbridge Park to square things with Buck. “Maybe even get him to apologize for belting you. What’d he, hit you in the kidney?”
“I don’t know what you call it.”
Munson shrugged and told him his car was around the corner.
Carney drove the Cadillac over to 158th and Edgecombe, one block south of the meet. Fifty-fourth and Lex, 157th. “How many hideouts you have?” he asked.
“They’re like women—you got to have a few spares.”
Carney only had the one. He’d been deliberating, but now there was no question he was taking tomorrow off to meet Elizabeth. The kids wouldn’t be home until after four. He’d have to explain the knot on his head and the bruises blooming on his stomach. Last time he got a black eye on extralegal business, he told Elizabeth that a druggie had socked him and run off. “It’s crazy out there!” This time around, he was going with mugged, given the state of the city these days. If Alma were still alive, he’d have picked a mugging location to irritate her—in front of her church, broad daylight, or outside Broken Wing, that orphan charity she was on the board of. For the first time, he felt her loss.
“I know Chink,” Carney said, “but haven’t met Notch Walker. He started in Sugar Hill?”
“Until it got too small for him,” Munson said.
Carney had been out for four years, but Notch Walker’s name came up plenty among the old crooked bunch at Nightbirds or the Blossom. Hookers, heroin, numbers. Like Elizabeth, Notch was a kind of travel agent, trafficking in escapes: sex, intoxication, the dream of a jackpot. The products sold themselves, so he directed his promotional campaigns at competitors: chaining lieutenants of rival crews to benches in Riverside Park and setting them aflame; a shootout at an after-hours club that clipped a bunch of civilians and made the national news. A running gunfight with Chink’s crew up Lenox one blustery Christmas Eve forever ruined caroling for more than one bystander. It was an aggressive rollout.
The Amsterdam News ran a picture of Notch strutting out of Sylvia’s, imperial grin on his mug. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed that day in tight brown-and-white houndstooth slacks and a double-breasted leather trench that made him look like a Negro pirate. Bumpy Johnson in his natty Harry Olivier pinstripe suit and Homburg hat were relics of a bygone Harlem. Notch was the type of gangster the streets stamped out these days: flashy, lethal, and remorseless.
Munson lit a cigarette. Every couple of years a new player came on the scene and tried to make his name, he said. “The old guard smothers him in the crib, or doesn’t. The new guard becomes the status quo, and then they’re the ones the young guys are gunning for.” He clocked a Cadillac DeVille that coasted up Edgecombe. The driver was a long-haired Spanish guy with healthy muttonchops. Munson said, “Notch is the crab that got to the top of the barrel.”
In his retirement, Carney had joined the good and decent folk, pulling the drapes tight when shots rang out down the street and tsking at the turf battles and bloody rumbles in the morning paper. Just another square. He liked standing with his back to the window, ignorant of whatever dumb drama occupied the warring clans that week. Why then did he drop by Nightbirds, not so often but often enough, and Donegal’s, too, and the Blossom, where a face from crooked days never failed to appear? It didn’t take much for them to spill the latest, and a free drink did the trick with reluctant correspondents. Why did he go there, and why did he keep Green’s card when he was happily, resolutely retired?
Silence in the Cadillac. Both men traveling the rut of their thoughts. Munson rushed in: “Did you guys play ringolevio uptown?”
“It’s not a foreign country, Munson.” There was stickball, there was handball, and there was ringolevio. Carney had loved the game. It was like tag, but bigger and more monstrous. One team hunted and the other was pursued. “Jail” was a front stoop, or the trunk of a car owned by somebody who wouldn’t beat you for touching their ride. To capture an opponent, you had to hold on for the time it took to scream Ringolevio, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Necks were hooked, shirts ripped as the enemy tried to wriggle free. If the stoop started filling up, a jailbreak was in order. Those first heists, where you dashed in to spring your pals—All free, all free, one-two-three, one-two-three—without getting nabbed. This last part involved pulling your best Fred Astaire shit, leaping and twisting.
Most of the time Carney and his buddies played outside Freddie’s house on 129th Street. Depending on appetite and enthusiasm, the boundary was a couple of blocks or the playing field encompassed the entire city, wherever your feet took you. Once everyone was imprisoned, you switched roles and started again. There were legends of games that went on for days, pausing at dinnertime when everyone was called home to their grim tenements—the drunken fathers or indifferent mothers or whatever miserable arrangement had claimed them—until the next morning, when the game resumed.
Carney said, “It was always kids with older brothers that told stories about the all-day games. An older-kid thing.”