When they buried Ninety-first it was like they buried those days too, the good parts and otherwise. No going back. The platform remained even if the street entrance was covered by concrete. Walking on the sidewalk above, he forgot it existed. In the tunnel he sped through it and some rides—not every time—he stared into that harbor carved into the rock. What’s been happening in there, among the advertisements for discontinued products and posters of forgotten motion pictures and Broadway flops? Punks sneak in to paint graffiti over what other guys threw up last week, layer over layer, like the buildings above—put it up, knock it down, another takes its place. But what’s been happening that can’t be captured in the five seconds when his train shudders through? As a crook he knew that everybody gets up to something when nobody’s looking.
The ghost station remained. They passed it. One day when he had time he’d walk down the tunnel from Ninety-sixth and visit. Up close, see it for real, what it’s been up to lately.
“I told her to fire her manager,” Pope said. “She was doing this TV shit, Dragnet and Adam-12, glamorizing the pigs. Man, she was Sister Josephine from Miss Pretty’s Promise—you don’t put her up for chump shit like that! It’s a modern-day plantation out there. I got these white directors sucking my dick right now because I’m hot. Got to make a splash while I can. But when they stop giving a shit, I still have my jokes. What does Lucy have, except what they decide to give her? Ten years after Miss Pretty and they got her playing nurses.” He stopped to glower at a white man in a tan overcoat who disapproved of his colorful language. “When we were together, she still thought that big role was just around the corner. You come from the ghetto like she did, you have to believe that. The way out. That’s why I felt bad when I saw her at the hotel. She didn’t have that fire anymore. She looked beaten.”
This young white guy with long wavy hair and a hippie beard was eavesdropping, his smile growing more and more broad as the rhythms of speech and turns of language proved that yes, the famous comedian walked among them. Was in fact standing over him. “Roscoe?”
“What?”
“What are you doing taking the subway, Roscoe?”
“This big nigger done kidnapped my ass, what you think I’m doing on the subway, motherfucker?”
The white guy looked up at Pepper. Pepper nodded.
Pope stepped forward and turned his body. “Buy your record, they think they own you,” he said. He stared out into the indifferent void of the tunnel.
FIVE
There were a hundred ways to announce that you were crooked and a hundred ways to un-announce it. You can peacock it up like a pimp, hang your shingle in polyester plumage. Push the latest high on a street corner, signaling customers with a furtive yet defiant air. You can un-announce like a banker, tucked into a double-breasted suit, installed behind a desk with your name on a plaque. Establish a front: Outfit a bodega or stationery store to hide the dice game out back. Or a furniture store. This was Quincy Black’s method, catering to his clientele behind the facade of a renovated Harlem brownstone.
Many of the brownstones and townhouses uptown bore the metropolitan weather in chipped stoops, networks of stains and fissures, the marks of rascally vandalism. Hooligans’ names carved into scuffed wooden doors, half-jimmied locks with cranky tumblers. Quincy Black’s townhouse on 107th between Broadway and Riverside stuck out in its ramshackle row. With its precisely restored exterior, new double-leaf mahogany doors and matching shutters, number 316 aspired to detach and crab-walk over to a nicer block. In better weather the window boxes likely exploded with colorful arrangements, in contrast to the Thunderbird bottles and cigarette butts decorating the stoops next door. The brass fixtures gleamed. When Pepper pressed the doorbell, it sang proud and deep.
They waited. Pepper had ordered Pope to call the peddler from a pay phone outside the 110th Street station. Quincy Black was home. Now that there was no wriggling free, the comedian had grown excited about this unexpected expedition. He said, “I’m from Kansas, Jim. This is a trip. I knew big-time Hollywood movies had guys like you—fixers—but a low-budget job like this? Sheee-it.”
Pepper clocked the tall Spanish man on the corner in the black overcoat. Earmuffs, cigarette. Was he looking at them? The man continued up Broadway, out of sight.
“You ever been to California?” Pope said.
“No.”
“Where you from? The city?”
“Newark.”
“Then you know what time it is. Quincy grew up in the Bronx, but then he went out to LA to live with his aunt. Her old man was in Nat King Cole’s band, played on the TV show. Remember that shit? First black man with his own show. You know they shut that down quick.” Quincy maintained that Hollywood was his finishing school, Pope said. Taught him how to run a game, not get played himself. Back in New York, he struck up with Notch Walker. “He won’t, like, spell it out, but his shit comes from Notch. Good stuff, too.” Pope mimed swirling a wineglass under his nose—“King of the World with a slight paranoid undertone.”
107th Street. As far as Pepper recalled he had never committed a crime on 107th Street. No rush. He tried to remember the name of that peddler he set up that one time back in ’61. The guy had his crew dealing on the corner of 103rd, stash house on 105th: Biz Dixon. Why had Pepper been tailing him? Right, another offbeat Carney deal, like this movie job. Digging up dirt on that big Harlem banker from Carver Federal, with the drug peddler as a side play. Never did get a handle on why Carney had been after them—after he slugged Carney in the face for getting him mixed up in it, Pepper had moved on to the next job. The furniture salesman will get you into trouble, like his old man. At least his wife was nice, and the two kids.
Quincy Black opened the door, decked out in brown corduroy trousers and a white silk shirt embroidered with tiger heads. He was younger than Pepper had imagined, slim and long-limbed, with plucked eyebrows and a pencil mustache. He gushed. “Roscoe! You look great! Congratulations.”
Pope smiled. “For what?”
“For all of it, brother! All of it!” Pepper and Pope stepped into the vestibule. Quincy gave Pepper a once-over.
“I’m Pepper.”
“Good to meet you, brother.” Quincy pointed to the low bamboo rack by the foot of the stairwell. “They go there.”
Pope was acquainted with the house rules and bent down to take off his sneakers. He signaled for Pepper to join him.
Yet Pepper did not remove his shoes.
He was thinking about the patches of light on the polished banisters, the freshly vacuumed hallway runner—staff. How many people did Quincy employ to keep up the place and where were they now?
Quincy regarded Pepper’s black brogues and said, “Thanks, brother,” as if Pepper had heeded his request. Which he hadn’t. Quincy added, “In Oriental cultures it’s part of the arrangement between host and guest.”
Yet Pepper did not remove his shoes.
A large man emerged from the back of the townhouse, tiny-headed and round-bellied like a ten pin, lumbering from the kitchen. He wiped his left hand on his yellow apron and peered down the hall at them, taking the measure of the situation. His other hand held a butcher knife. Cartoon salt-and-pepper shakers cavorted across the body of the apron.