Carney stiffened. “Did he say the man has a furniture store that’s a front for his fencing operation?”
“Sounded like,” Pepper said.
Carney walked into his office and ordered everybody out except for Zippo. Troy, the director of photography, scowled and took a seat on a showroom Sterling. Pepper extended a don’t-worry-about-it shrug to John. The set was clear, but the electrical cables propping the doors allowed those nearby to hear the tirade.
Zippo called everyone back in. “So he’s a bookie,” he explained to Mr. Shakespeare. “More ZIPPO.”
They shot the scene where Larry lets her in and set up for Nefertiti’s confrontation with the bookie. Still quiet on Morningside at this hour. Once the night orchestra struck up with gusto, they’d have to contend with a full menu of racket from outside. Pepper shooed away a wino and the man hooked a U-turn toward 126th, crooning mangled Motown. Most passersby crossed the street to avoid their setup, uninterested. The movie lamps pushed out a cold and unsettling light, an eerie bubble onto the street. 125th was its standard hurly-burly but up Morningside the streetlights were busted, the lights in the church across the street were out, the abandoned tenements down the block dark, and no one was home in the house on the corner. Like the street was a darkened theater, and the rectangle of the office door the glowing movie screen. Soon they’d be done shooting and on to the next location and then finished altogether and where would Pepper be then? In the dark seats again, between shows.
Zippo called for one last take and it was a wrap.
Carney took John home after the boy wrangled autographs for him and his sister. Pete the Grip and his fellows loaded the van and it chugged around the corner. The wind had come up. Pepper split for the subway. How was the take? Let’s go for one more take. Like they were ripping off a bank. Filmmaking was a heist, same animal. To knock over a warehouse or hijack a truck or shoot a scene you had to wrangle all the variables, the landscape, the players, and bend them to your will. Setup and execution broken down into pieces. What’s the quality of light at that time of day, the access points, the pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Everybody’s got their special role, following the script. One guy to punch out the safe, another at the wheel. Wardrobe, lighting, boom mike. The obsession with the clock—after money, time was the favored currency, in a bank vault and on location. Do you have enough time to pull it off? And if you pull it off, is it the jackpot you thought it was?
All the work they put in. On a film if you fucked it up, you got to do it over. They weren’t going to shoot you in the face.
And like a heist, just when you think it’s going according to plan, everything goes to shit. The day after Carney’s they set up outside one of the CCNY gates. Nefertiti enters campus, and then there’s a bit in an empty classroom where she consults with Dr. Beryl Boyle, a professor of nuclear physics, about sinister diagrams on microfilm. The crew was anxious, it was in the way they moved and spoke to each other. Pepper registered the trembling web like a spider. No Zippo. He asked Pete the Grip what was up. “It’s Miss Cole,” he said. “She’s missing.”
THREE
Pepper took the film job because he was low on cash and he was low on cash because the Anson job crapped out. Church Wiley’s prep work had been top-notch. It usually was. Church couldn’t remember the names of his own kids, but ask him the average speed of Anson Freight’s driver on the Jersey Turnpike and he’d mumble, “Fifty-seven miles per hour, sixty if it’s cloudy.” He only had two kids.
The Thursday driver was named Phil Burgher and he drove the Alexandria-to-Newark run every week to ensure that the Magnavox warehouse made its Friday deliveries. Phil was steady, steady as in predictable, the best kind. He permitted himself one stop on his route, at the Pedricktown service area just over the border from Delaware. “It’s a real ‘Welcome to Jersey’ place,” Church said. Two diesel pumps, a big pile of gravel, and a greasy spoon called Teddy’s Place. The name of the joint winked in and out in a hum of busted red neon. Burgher had a thing for the waitress. She was a beehive hairdo with a bent cigarette sticking out of it. The trucker typically lingered after his meal in luckless flirtation and hit the head before the final push to Newark. There were two stretches on the turnpike that suited their purposes before you reached population centers.
West Side Garage had been raided by the larceny squad a few times, but Pepper preferred Tom Gerald over any other shady outfit. He’d never heard of one of Gerald’s cars getting traced back and it was almost twenty years now Pepper’d been buying wheels from him. Pepper headed over to 165th off Broadway. Tom was getting on; his last bid upstate had turned his hair white and his bones creaky. He came out of his office to greet Pepper but quickly retreated to let his son take over. Billy took after his mother, with his oval face and long lashes. From his accent they spoke Spanish around the house.
Billy vouched for the two cars, the Dodge Dart and the El Camino, both ’67. He rapped the hood of the Dart and said it was a little monster that could handle any curves and action that might come up. Pepper said, yeah. More interested in the Camino: “Got that cover for the bed?” Billy was about to make a joke about it being extra, but thought better of it once he looked at Pepper’s face. He threw in the cover for free. They didn’t use it in the end. A cut-up square of brown carpet did the job just fine.
Thursday night was soft and sugary, one of those perfect objects that summer doled out once in a while to torture you with how it could be all the time, if it cared. Pepper had known women like that, women stingy with the better parts of themselves, and perhaps there were those who’d say the same of him. He shrugged and sipped the sweet night air. Church and Pepper were in the El Camino, parked a few yards over from the concrete cube housing the public toilets. Across the lot, the truck driver Burgher hunched in the diner window, clocking the waitress as she bused the next table.
Gus Burnett and Burt Miller waited in the Dodge, next to the dumpster behind the restaurant. Pepper didn’t know them; they were Church’s guys, from Alabama. Twenty, twenty-one, greyhound lean and not too talkative. This time tomorrow they were supposed to be back down South, sucking crawdads or plucking homemade banjos or whatever they did down there. They appeared to follow simple instructions fine and gave correct answers when Pepper quizzed them on the setup. Solid enough.
Pepper had worked with Church a bunch and held no doubts about his abilities. Before the action, Church always chatted like a lonely aunt. Pool sharks and card hustlers talked a lot when they worked, probing for weaknesses and weaving distractions. Church’s talk was the opposite—he was testing himself to get the kinks out.
He was behind the wheel of the El Camino tonight. “Pedricktown,” he said, drawing out the syllables in boredom. He pointed at the gravel pile and said, “That’s the mayor.”
Pepper exhaled and checked the service area in the rearview.
“You’re good at, uh, ‘nonverbal communication,’？” Church said.
The side of Pepper’s mouth curled. A tumbleweed cloud skidded above.
“Here we go,” Church said. He tapped his door to signal the men in the Dodge.