That was the day after Munson’s jackpot. Once the kids left for school, he’d hit Three Brothers for an egg sandwich and picked up a stack of papers at the corner. Webb’s murder had made the morning edition. Martin Diaz Jr. of Edgecombe Avenue was out walking his terrier when he discovered the dead cop in the Cadillac. Around midnight—was Munson robbing the bodega at that point? Carney’s recollections of that night were disintegrating. The bruises on his chest provided physical proof. A week later they were gone.
The first reports pegged Webb’s death as another cop killing by radicals. Carney searched for more, but the newspapers dropped the story after Thursday’s update that Munson had disappeared—ditched town, or dead. With the Knapp Commission probing the two partners, downtown must’ve been going nuts. If there was an investigation underway, it happened away from public scrutiny. Carney no longer had a source in the police department, and it would be years before he got another one. By then, Munson’s and Webb’s activities were dwarfed by the abuses of the Special Investigations Unit. Times change and you have to keep up. Shaking down a poker game was a failure of imagination compared to stealing millions of dollars of dope out of the evidence room and selling it back to the peddlers you’d confiscated it from.
The Jackson 5 shook off the last song and readied for another sortie. The smallest Jackson movement, every tremble, elicited a wave of squeals from the Garden.
“I’d like to talk to y’all tonight,” Michael said, “about the blues.”
Carney chuckled—the kid was ten.
“The blues?” Marlon or maybe Jermaine asked.
“Yeah, the blues. Don’t nobody have the blues like me. I may be young, but I know what it’s all about.”
The boys bit into “Who’s Lovin’ You” and the building rattled. The girls screamed. There were rumors about guys the mob had rubbed out and buried in the concrete foundation below. The noise would’ve woken them up. Carney shouldn’t have laughed. What ten-year-old black child didn’t know the blues?
Friday night, three days after Munson’s uptown tour, the police apprehended suspects in the Jones and Piagentini murders and the attacks on the two policemen who’d been protecting DA Hogan’s residence. Social-club stickup on Park and 171st in the Bronx, one of the victims sneaks away and rings the cops. Two of the robbers, Richard Moore and Edward Josephs, had been Panther 21 defendants, but jumped bail and fled to Algeria for a while.
Reading the Times, Carney couldn’t tell if they were Panthers or ex-Panthers who’d joined the Liberation Army. One resembled Malik Jamal’s sidekick, the guy who’d dragged out Munson’s crate of weapons. Carney followed the story but never came across a better picture of him. When Malik Jamal knocked over that bank in Secaucus, New Jersey, did he have Munson’s shotgun in his hands? Munson had ripped them off and ended up underwriting the revolution.
The other half of the jackpot went to Notch Walker. Notch stopped in Carney’s store that autumn with a satchel containing six Panerai Radiomir watches from the 1940s. Miraculous devices. Carney’s go-to watch man couldn’t handle that kind of weight, but Green had mentioned a contact who specialized, an old Polish guy. Green was turning out to be a good connection. It was nice to tuck away bricks of cash into the old safe again.
Munson was right: You’re in or you’re out.
Notch could have sent one of his men. He came in person. In the daytime, he dressed more conservatively, and might have been any young man on his way to an office job downtown—charcoal flannel suit, white shirt, and bland necktie. His bodyguard waited in the showroom and appeared to be in the market for a new floor lamp. Larry descended upon him.
Notch and Carney did a deal for the watches and shook hands. There was no mention of a bounty. Perhaps it had slipped Notch’s mind, and on subsequent occasions as well. The gangster took his leave. He stopped in the office doorway and gestured at the display models.
“You pay Chink to operate?”
“Yes.”
“For now.”
The next week when they firebombed the Satin Room, one of Chink Montague’s after-hours joints, Carney assumed the mobsters were embroiled in another war. Eyewitness News on Channel 7 ran footage of the firemen “bravely battling the blaze,” which had overtaken the surrounding tenements. The dispossessed formed a crescent at the edge of the twirling lights, haggard in their pajamas, clutching whatever they could rescue.
Local signs of an ongoing collapse. Sometimes when Carney got wind of the latest outrage—a bloody slaughter in a Vietnamese hamlet, a rash of lethal ODs from a bad batch, an unarmed teenager cut down by cops—he suspected the revolution had already happened, only nobody could see it and no one had come along to replace what had been overthrown. The old order was rubble, bulldozed into a pile with the long-held assumptions and rickety premises, and now they waited for someone to tell them what was next. No such person appeared.
“Good night, New York City! We love you!”
The boys from Gary, Indiana, were a soft touch for an encore. The Jackson 5 started up “Never Can Say Goodbye” and Carney thought of the death of Munson. The bassist and the guitarist—Tito, whoever—tumbled into the wistful melody as their brothers swayed and sang between them, three bodies expressing a single lament. May looked up to the stage and crooned with Michael, preserving every pause and intonation from the vinyl; she had summoned them to her city through her devotions. She grabbed Carney’s hand. It had been years since she’d taken his hand in hers. Carney found himself mouthing the words, though the song was a lie. It wasn’t hard to say goodbye at all. As the days smeared into each other it only got easier.
NEFERTITI
T.N.T.
1973
“City like this, it behooves you to embrace the fucking contradictions.”
ONE
The furniture was not to Zippo’s taste—it was perfect. The sleek silhouette that had been omnipresent a few years before, all those jet-age lines and tapers, was yesterday’s news. Overflowing sofas, chubby ottomans, and plush, bulging armchairs surrounded him in the showroom. Country in a recession, everybody feeling the pinch, but you can enjoy your comfy throne at home. Couches like that orange-and-brown behemoth along the wall were what real people sat on, the great unwashed audience. Zippo had walked past Carney’s Furniture all the time when he lived uptown but had never been inside. Look at this stuff. His hunch had been correct: The store was perfect.
This slick young brother popped out from a back office and zeroed in on him. Downtown, Zippo’s ensemble would have repelled the staff of most stores. Who’s this hippie-ass Negro in snakeskin pants and megawatt yellow blouse? Uptown, he was not so novel. Downright square in some circles. He asked the salesman if the owner was around.
Zippo plopped down on a big mustard-colored sofa while he waited. Black-and-white-striped leather boots on the zebrawood coffee table, crossed at the ankle. As a rule, he only dug uncomfortable, minimal designs from Europe—leather pinned by chrome, densities of curvilinear plastic—but he had to admit this sofa made an eloquent case for owning comfortable furniture.
“Zippo,” Carney said. He looked the same. Humble merchant, upstanding muckety-muck in the community. Having worked for the man back in the day, Zippo knew otherwise. “What can I do for you today?” As if it hadn’t been years. Like he’d sold Zippo a rug the day before.