Slick motherfucker. Pepper didn’t trust him for dog catcher. If he wasn’t running for something now, he would be soon.
* * *
***
Pepper arrived at the chicken joint five minutes early. New Country Kitchen was packed, but Viola saw him squeeze through the doors and shooed away a young couple making for the last table by the window. She assured them something would open up momentarily. They were unconvinced.
Viola brought Pepper a lemonade. “You look like shit,” she said.
The metronome clop of his headache was likely loud enough for others to hear. “Pays the rent.”
Viola shrugged and returned to the kitchen, pausing to snap at the waitress to refill the napkin dispensers on the unsteady tables. The new girl was a meek little creature who shrank at Viola’s voice. She wouldn’t last long. They rarely did at New Country Kitchen.
From his spot in the window Pepper couldn’t help but check out how Lady Betsy’s fared across the street. The restaurant was half full, its patrons older than New Country’s, regulars for decades no doubt. He caught a glimpse of Lady Betsy herself, hand on her hip, gabbing with customers. More stooped than in former days, and she had stopped dyeing her hair, which whorled like a white rose, but still in business.
Lady Betsy had owned that corner since before the war, an uptown chicken legend since the Great Depression. She presided over her operation with a blend of frank, backwoods wit and urban practicality, a pioneer in that particular New York City philosophical school. The paper place mats contained a biographical sketch adjacent to the menu, whose item updates and price increases Lady Betsy scratched in by hand, rather than waste cash on a new print run. According to the story, when Lady Betsy left her native Alabama to venture North, all she had was a bus ticket and a hatbox full of secret recipes. The red-and-white-striped hatbox remained on display in a glass case above the register like the jawbone of a saint.
In the midst of the daily Jim Crow tribulations and humiliations, Lady Betsy’s family had assembled the instructions for an eternal feast. A refreshing scorpion spike of heat lay hidden in the collards, and the mac and cheese was a symphony of competing textures, but the chicken was divine, fried in the very skillet of heaven. The house dredge was no mere spicy dusting of cornmeal but a crispy concoction of buttermilk, flour, and dream stuff. To penetrate that wall of batter and gain the meat inside was to storm the keep of pleasure. Local politicians and famous songsmiths posed with the owner in photographs, amid framed citations and plaques from the spectrum of Harlem organizations—the big, the small, and the spurious. A tour bus used to make a special trip uptown and white people from all over the country—perhaps kin to the same white people who had persecuted Lady Betsy down South—poured out of the vehicle to partake, until an incident in which a neighborhood rummy exposed himself in an especially aggressive anatomical display. That put an end to the anthropology.
You had to get there early. In the old days, before the restaurant took over the palm reader next door and expanded the kitchen, Lady Betsy sold out of wings and thighs and drumsticks by nine P.M. So many people lined up you’d think Count Basie was playing inside. If Pepper was not mistaken, Carney’s father was the first person to take him there—Big Mike was a proponent of a proper meal before a robbery. Breaking a guy’s leg or casing a warehouse didn’t necessarily require nutritional prep, but a robbery called for a hearty sit-down, without fail. Pepper, reluctant to offer praise on anything or anybody, privately assessed that it was the best chicken he’d ever tasted.
Then Viola Lewis opened her joint across the street in 1965. She was a slim, dark-eyed lady of indeterminate age and overdetermined mystery. She hailed from a witchy backwater in Louisiana, showed up in New York City with a carpetbag of money—it was said she’d enchanted the heir of a colored beauty product dynasty with a handful of goofer dust—and set herself up on the corner of 138th and Amsterdam. The grand opening was less than spectacular. How could this upstart compete with Lady Betsy’s precious morsels? Eventually curiosity, and the oddly alluring scent from the New Country Kitchen’s exhaust pipe, won out. （Rumor had it an additive to the fumes charmed the nose.） The surprising verdict: They did a bird pretty good in there. Existential arguments over which establishment fried the best chicken became a barbershop staple. Each joint converted its disciples, but Harlem is a sentimental place and set in its ways, and when the white world can take away you and yours in an instant some folks hold on to the sure and the same. Lady Betsy’s maintained the advantage.
Opening a chicken joint across from a fabled Harlem landmark was a provocation. “It’s a free country,” Viola told Pepper. “I don’t see what the big deal is, really,” she said, lying breezily. Her voice was low and husky and she cut her syllables with the precision of a butcher. “If her chicken is that good, it shouldn’t matter if a dozen chicken joints open up on the block.”
This conversation happened in Donegal’s one foggy night in the summer of ’68. Somehow Viola had materialized next to him at the bar without him noticing—witchy. Her black hair was woven into long Indian braids that lay across her white linen blouse like two serpents. He recognized her. He’d supped in New Country a few times when the line was too long across the street, but had remained loyal to Lady Betsy. More or less. “I hear you pull jobs,” she said.
She acknowledged the facts of the case: She and her competitor were stalemated in their struggle for control over the mid-Harlem chicken trade. “I stand by my product and believe it to be superior to my competitor’s. But this war must end—definitively, once and for all, kaput.” To that end she wanted to retain Pepper’s services for a heist. There was a rogue ingredient in Lady Betsy’s chicken among the paprika and cayenne and garlic powder, an Element X, that Viola could not identify, try as she might. “Last night I woke up in a tremble, certain that it was pickle juice in the buttermilk brine. It was not.” As long as this variable eluded her, the war continued.
In his decades uptown, Pepper had stayed out of Harlem’s innumerable turf battles and gangster intrigues. He disdained the mainstream criminal class for its insipid codes, grubby designs, and the low-quality individual it attracted: Fuck ’em. Viola’s contest with Lady Betsy was as urgent as any mob war, with casualties measured in customers lost instead of soldiers fallen. He was stirred by her proposal, in his heart and by a tug in his groin. Those eyes—he wondered later if her acquaintance with dark powers was more than a rumor. They did a deal for the chicken job, shook hands, and the restaurateur disappeared into the Broadway mist.
As far as setups went, it was straightforward. The only wrinkle was that his employer wanted no trace of the break-in. Pepper retained the services of the best uptown lock man available, Enoch Parker. Enoch owed Pepper for a botched job a couple of years back, when the getaway car refused to start and they had to hoof it from the warehouse, lugging chinchilla coats up Sixth Ave, looking like runaway bears. “That shit’s a breeze,” the safecracker announced once the parameters were explained: pick the lock to Lady Betsy’s basement door and the one safeguarding the recipe without damaging them. Both were cheap combination deals. Viola had bribed or beguiled a former Lady Betsy’s waitress who had reported that the sacred recipes were kept in a tiny metal box in the back office.