Between bodega takes, Pepper summoned Pete the Grip. “Let me see that,” he said.
“Here you go, Mr. Pepper,” Pete the Grip said. Pepper’s voice never failed to startle the young white boy and he almost dropped the walkie-talkie on the pavement. Pete had yet to find his Harlem sea legs, heading uptown when he wanted to go south and losing track of subway entrances as if they shifted moment to moment, three-card monte style. It didn’t help that Pepper gave incorrect directions when asked.
Pete’s Windsor walkie-talkie was a new model, sturdy. Pepper tested its weight, how it hung in the pocket of his windbreaker. Volume knob wide enough for purchase if you wore gloves. The old Windsors cracked like eggs when they slipped out of your hand onto concrete. He returned the device to the kid. It was entirely possible that Pepper hadn’t kept abreast of advances in portable short-range communication. Next free day, he’d check out the hobby magazines for the latest.
The hippie Vikings covered the front windows of Carney’s Furniture with black sheeting and the constant barking of instructions and epithets migrated to the back of the store for the office shoots. Chip the Soundman sank into one of the mushy couches, reading a Doctor Strange comic and reeking of reefer. One of those Greenwich Village types you only saw uptown when they were handing out leaflets about Vietnam or Cambodia and lecturing folks about getting more involved. Getting in black people’s business.
“We’re almost ready,” Lola said, then five minutes later she said, “They need more time.” We when it was good news, they when it was bad. Pepper was accustomed to the pace by now, the rickety subway of a film set. Workers tended to failures in the dark and things lurched forward again until the next breakdown.
Lola appeared to have taken over Marie’s office, darting in and out like a rat. Pepper hadn’t seen Marie all day. They had closed the store to customers when the movie people arrived. Perhaps she’d already left by the time he got there.
Pepper relocated his roost to the Morningside door, where they’d trained lights and filters on the interior of Carney’s office. In time to catch Carney when he returned from cooling off. He was more relaxed and gave Rusty a thumbs-up for maintaining order. Carney told Pepper that May’s basketball team had a game in Brooklyn but that John was coming by to watch.
“Done with school?” Pepper said.
“It’s seven o’clock at night,” Carney said.
So it was. Pepper hadn’t seen the boy since the summer, when he ran into Carney on 125th outside Chock Full o’Nuts and walked away with a dinner invitation.
“What are you having?”
“Chicken?”
Nothing else going on. En route to the Carney household that evening he passed a cart on Eighth Avenue and picked the least-shabby bouquet, a challenge. Pepper hadn’t bought flowers since he was with Hazel.
He rang the doorbell. Boys tossed a football in the street and hollered at one another. He still wasn’t used to coming in the front door on Strivers’ Row. He’d snuck through the back way plenty, looting, those rear alleys practically begging.
Elizabeth opened the door and her face livened at the flowers. She thanked him and went for a vase. Mrs. Carney had figured out he was crooked years ago. Pepper knew this because she had stopped asking questions about his life and because of her general bemused attitude toward him. She didn’t hold it against him. He wondered what she knew about Carney’s various sidelines.
May was playing loud music upstairs—that funk stuff, from the bass. John read a book on the sofa in the front room. “Hello, Uncle Pepper,” he said.
“Pepper,” he corrected, as he always did.
“Sure, Uncle Pepper,” John said, grinning. Years before, Pepper had promised himself he would not manhandle them for sassing him. He had remained true to his word.
Pepper asked to see the book’s cover: Planet of the Apes. He recommended seeing the movie, it was faster. John said he’d already seen it five times. The boy wanted to see what they’d changed from the book.
Pepper nodded. Sometimes when Carney talked a certain way, and the words had an edge, he saw Big Mike before him, the old crook returned to Harlem for a moment. Now there were times when John opened his mouth and Pepper recognized young Carney in the intonations and attendant gestures. A glimpse of Carney before he stepped into himself.
A couple of years ago, Carney had asked Pepper when they had first met. Carney had this idea that he’d been a little kid when Pepper used to hang around their old apartment on 127th Street. He corrected him—Carney was in high school when Pepper started pulling jobs with his old man. Carney’s mother was dead, and it was just him and Big Mike. Teenage Carney would greet his father and his crew, eyes to the floor, and then hide out in his room until the men left for that night’s caper, an armored car rip-off, a payday-eve raid on a department store. Scared of the crooks or embarrassed by his father or merely wanting to be left alone.
Carney got home from the store soon after Pepper arrived and they had a nice meal, a chicken thing Elizabeth had clipped from the Times. He didn’t see Carney again until November. The furniture salesman visited the bar every so often to catch up. At first it was business—Carney had to put the squeeze on a dealer who’d pulled a Houdini without paying, or needed a bodyguard at a meet with some trifling bitches. On occasion something more complicated. Then Carney retired the fencing sideline and he visited the bar to shoot the shit. Next thing Pepper knew, Easter with the Carneys was an annual affair and the kids called him Uncle.
* * *
***
That November night when Carney showed up, Donegal’s was half empty and the TV was cranked up with some Ray Milland picture. It wasn’t clear what Milland’s character had done; he was a weasel type who sweated a lot, embezzler or guilty hit-and-runner. They watched the movie for a while, not talking. Pepper didn’t discuss business as a rule—you were in on the job or you weren’t. But the Gillette commercial came on and Pepper mentioned that he’d spent his last score and that it was time to rustle up another. Carney said if he wanted something easy, he knew a man who needed muscle. “He’s scruffy but professional,” Carney said, and explained how he’d come to get involved in the movie business.
Carney had known the director since he was a teenager, when the kid hung around with his cousin Freddie. He hustled small-time for a while—kiting paper, selling blue movies—and now he was a director, making one of those black movies. As it happened, John and May loved those ghetto flicks, silly and violent as they were, and Carney had come into some money.
“Money what?” Pepper said.
“Watches.”
“Sure.”
Carney fell for Zippo’s spiel, like one of those people who entered his furniture store to ask for directions and got sweet-talked into a new credenza. Zippo had grown up to be a good salesman—maybe that was part of being a good director, steering people into the roles you want them to play. Carney went in for points. That’s how they financed movies these days, Carney said—points. A bunch of dentists make a consortium, or it’s a businessman looking for a place to put money. The movie takes off, you make a bundle.