The night of the job, Viola sat in her darkened restaurant across the street, watching Pepper and Enoch’s swift entrance into the basement through the sidewalk doors. To be sure her path to this moment had been complicated and strange. Sometimes she stepped back from her life and regarded it as if it were a painting in a black museum, populated by murky figures, its caption gibberish. She smoked French cigarettes as she waited and ruminated to herself in a forgotten tongue. The streets were empty. 2 A.M. The thieves were in and out in ten minutes.
“Any problems?” she asked, locking the door behind them.
The “small metal box” described by the disgruntled waitress had turned out to be a late-model Aitkens wall safe behind a painting of the Statue of Liberty, but Enoch had dispatched it with aplomb. “No,” Pepper said.
Pepper and Enoch followed Viola into the back office. She flipped through the black binder of recipes after fried chicken lore, nodding here and there to register a random insight. “Two drops of white vinegar.” “Steam the beans until defeated they are defeated.” She found what she was looking for. Her mouth moved as she pored over the fried chicken recipe. She stopped. Looked up at Pepper and Enoch, and smiled. The crooks crept away and returned the binder to the wall safe.
Viola made her move two weeks later via a big Labor Day promotion: two-for-one family buckets and a complimentary side. By the next Friday, word came down—New Country Kitchen was on top, and there it remained. Whether Element X was a spice, an oil temperature, or an interval of brining or resting or cajoling, when added to her own formidable recipe, Viola surpassed her nemesis. Plus, Pepper couldn’t help but notice, she changed her frying oil more frequently, you could taste it.
Pepper’s take came out to free chicken for life, once a week. （Negotiated down from free chicken for life, period.） Big Mike would have crossed the street, too, given the simplicity of the question: Who did the better bird? He had been a practical man.
A memory sprang upon Pepper, as he sat with his forearms glued to the slightly tacky Formica table, of a time many years ago when he and Big Mike were wound up after a job. Payroll rip-off, Sunshine Bakery in Secaucus. The bars had closed but Big Mike said he had a bottle at his house. This was when he and his son, Ray, still lived at that place on 127th Street. Big Mike went to fetch glasses from the kitchen and started hollering and cursing. He stomped down the hallway and dragged his son out by the ear. They stood in the doorway to the kitchen. “Look at all this shit in the sink! What’s your job?”
Young Carney was so skinny he was a walking twig. His father twisted and he buckled under the pain. “Keep the house clean,” Ray said.
“Does this look clean? Clean it up!”
Middle of the week, the kid had to get up for school in two hours. Pepper was about his age when he first walloped his old man and put an end to scenes like this. Carney Jr. wasn’t the type, and Carney Sr. wasn’t the type to abide such a thing, but you have to put that feeling somewhere and Pepper figured he’d seen it leak out from time to time during Ray Carney’s jobs and schemes: the cold thrust of the knife.
Big Mike set down the whiskey on the coffee table. Pepper drank it as fast as he could without getting his host into a lather, and split. He couldn’t see him, but in the kitchen the kid was still scrubbing.
* * *
***
Zippo spotted him from outside. Pepper’s head dipped imperceptibly in greeting. The director was shrouded in black again, black trousers and a shimmering blouse underneath a black overcoat. “Smells the same,” he said. He sat down opposite. “I love this place. People talk about the chicken, but the coleslaw is bananas. Sometimes I grab a tub and that’s all I eat for days.”
Pepper waved over the young waitress, who kept looking over her shoulder as if her mistakes were under constant tally. Which they probably were. Pepper ordered six wings and potato salad. Zippo went for two side orders of slaw.
Zippo asked if he’d found anything. Pepper asked him how much Chink Montague was in for on the movie.
It was Pepper’s mistake for not figuring out the Chink Montague piece earlier. He’d forgotten the gangster’s relationship with the actress. It had been fourteen years since the Hotel Theresa job, when Miami Joe had put together a crew to knock over the safe-deposit boxes. The haul hadn’t been as big as promised, which was not uncommon. More rare was the discovery that Chink Montague’s girlfriend had been a victim of the robbery—a young aspiring actress named Lucinda Cole. Local girl plucked from the gutter and cleaned up by a powerful hood, one who didn’t cotton to having his gift ripped off. Add Miami Joe’s double-cross and the whole episode was best buried.
Except for the part where it brought Ray Carney back into Pepper’s path after so many years, his buddy’s son all grown up and in the game. When Carney hipped him to the security job on the film, he’d mentioned uptown businessmen going in for points. If legit types were signing on, why not some of the more crooked operators, laundering dirty money through the well-cooked books of a low-budget film? When he was younger, Zippo had done his time on small-time grifts, kiting checks and hawking blue movies. He knew how to reach the local players. Hitting up Chink Montague took balls, though.
Zippo hunched at the reference to the gangster, shoulders hiking up to his ears: Don’t mention his name in here. “Silent partner, that’s a sacred trust.”
“So a lot?”
“You think he took her?”
“It’s not a druggie thing. Her dealer says she hit him up for sleeping pills. That doesn’t fit with the mess in her hotel room.” When Pepper visited her hotel room, he’d expected the aftermath of a party—wine stains on the couch, cigarettes put out in the plants, some broken glass. But the damage wasn’t from a good time. It was from a bad time.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Zippo said. “Kidnap her.”
“Why? It’s not ZIPPO?” Pepper didn’t know if he was more disgusted by his employer’s stupidity or his na?veté. Chink had run most of Harlem at one point. He’d ordered kidnappings, done worse, and he knows he gets away with it. “What’d you, pimp her out? Tell him if he comes on board you’ll offer her up?”
Their food arrived. Pepper dug in. Zippo crossed his arms and pursed his lips, as if he spied a big curly hair sitting atop his slaw. “That’s not me.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I knew they’d stepped out together, I didn’t know he’d do something like this.”
They were making a movie about dirty Harlem and then the real thing came up and bit them in the ass. “More than step out,” Pepper said. “He set her up, bought her fancy clothes.” Gave her a ruby necklace that got two men killed, one of them by Pepper’s hand. Gave her a present made Pepper realize: Today was his birthday. “Something went down in that hotel room,” Pepper said. “A few hours after the shoot at Carney’s Furniture.”
Zippo made sure no one eavesdropped. “Lola’s in the office, says there’s someone on the phone who wants to speak to me. I figure it’s an overdue invoice. It’s Chink. He wants to talk to Lucinda. What am I supposed to do? I wasn’t pimping—it was an investor on the phone wants to say hi to what he’s investing in. A simple hello.” The conversation was brief, Zippo told him. “Five minutes later we were rolling. If she was upset, you’d never know.”