“I was there,” Pepper said. Nefertiti did not show weakness. But what about the actress, away from the cameras.
“One time,” Zippo said, “I had a client who asked me to take some pictures of this big-shot businessman.” His voice had ditched the manic, bubbly quality. “Naughty pictures, you know, to get the man in trouble. And I’m good at what I do—I see things. Most guys, blackmail pics, you’re lucky the thumb’s not over the lens half the time. But I see things, I capture them, and on that job I captured who that man was, and it ruined him. I didn’t like the way it felt. You cross to that side of the street, you take one step and another and then you never come back.”
He paused to make sure Pepper followed his point. His companion’s face remained blank. He pressed on. “I use the camera differently now. I love Lucinda—she’s a beautiful soul. When this movie comes out people will discover a part of her they’ve never seen before. I don’t even know if she knows it’s there. I’d never serve her up like that.” He nudged his food with the fork and finally took a bite.
The cashier shouted, “Family meal, four Cokes!”
It was stupid to hit up a monster like Chink Montague, period, but extra stupid when there was a woman in the mix. But people as a whole were pretty dim upstairs, and if you started dwelling on this or that person’s dimness, ranking it and measuring just how dim this or that motherfucker was, before you realize it half the day is gone. In Pepper’s experience.
They ate without speaking for a few minutes. Going to 107th Street had reminded him of when he tailed that drug dealer Biz Dixon, but it had been part of another job, surveillance of Wilfred Duke, the big Harlem banker. Former banker—that nigger was on the run with everybody’s money. Never did find him. But Pepper had helped set him up. He didn’t know who Zippo had taken blackmail pictures of, but some people, they’ve earned it. Guilt was a mug’s game, with chump stakes. Best to lay off that action.
Zippo waved to an old lady picking up her takeout order. She clutched the bag of chicken like it was her purse and she was walking down a dark alley. “We used to live in the same building,” Zippo said. “When I was little.” He wiped his mouth. “It’s weird when people know you for one thing, but that person ain’t around anymore, you know?”
Pepper shook his head.
“Like, I’m from around here and they still remember me for the fire thing, when I’m all about cinema now.”
“The fire thing.”
“That’s why they call me Zippo. I used to light fires.”
“For insurance money.”
“No, for myself.”
“You torch shit for no reason?”
“No, because I had to.”
“Had to.”
“To express myself. To put what’s inside me out there with everyone else.”
Pepper decided he didn’t understand the artistic temperament. “Next time, get in on an insurance play, make some money at the same time.”
What did Pepper have inside? Years ago he’d gone with a woman who informed him that he was, in fact, empty. “It’s like there’s nobody home.” Janet, with that apartment on Morningside and the fucking parakeet. Another ill-advised excursion to the land of the straight and narrow. Empty: At the time he had been insulted. He cut her off. The assessment stayed with him and in time its rightness sat more comfortably. Back in the war, busting his ass on the Ledo Road and ducking typhoons and typhus, he’d had plenty of time to listen to the Burmese workers expound on life. How to detach a leech from your balls, how their wives curried their chicken, their mumblings about down-home Buddha shit. He hadn’t seen a leech since, but that down-home Buddha shit continued to pop up, lit up in red neon like the facts of life. Take that bottle of Coke that Zippo was drinking. You pay a deposit on the bottle for the glass, like it’s worth something. But it’s the empty space inside, not the glass, that makes the bottle useful. Call him empty: He had put it to work.
Zippo frowned. “Chink did get weird about the movie, though,” he said. “Kept asking about when we were going to start shooting, where. I thought maybe he wanted a cameo. You ever work for him? As a bodyguard or—”
“I don’t take money from guys like that.” Foot soldier for assholes? He’d already done that in World War II. No. A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches. Are nothing. In Chink Montague’s knife-wielding days, when he did his own enforcing, he’d slashed his bloody path to the top of Harlem’s rackets. For the last twenty years or so he’d preserved his empire of bookmaking, narcotics, protection schemes, and prostitution, enduring like an incurable condition, outlasting aspiring up-and-comers, entering into an accommodation with the Italians, and keeping the right cops, judges, and politicians fed with envelopes. Notch Walker had muscled into Chink’s old territory of Sugar Hill with his grand designs, but Chink had kept the young gangster’s encroachments at bay. Most of them. He’d lost his Lenox Ave numbers operation and a couple of blocks of drug trade, but he hung on.
After the Theresa job, Chink had turned Harlem upside down to find out who’d stolen his girlfriend’s necklace. Didn’t want to lose face, but maybe it meant more to him than just a pretty gift for this month’s girl. Maybe she meant more.
Zippo asked him what he was going to do.
Pepper and Chink Montague had been in the same room before—in the back lounge of Pearly Gates, and once the big man had dropped in to preen at Corky Bell’s poker game when Pepper was working security—but he’d never had the pleasure. One evening Pepper walked down 125th to find the mobster handing out free Easter hams to whoever showed up—throwing a bone to those he preyed upon. His fellow crooks embarrassed themselves when they spoke of Chink with deference to his power or resignation at their powerlessness. The man was vermin. Why shame yourself by flattering a cockroach for being good at finding crumbs. No, they had not met, but that quirk of fate was about to end.
Fuck it. Time to meet the man.
SEVEN
The Daily News reporter covering the Lenox Avenue fire jazzed up his account with tales of the address’s colorful history. For number 347 had seen dirty business. It was built by the French Bros. during the Harlem building boom of the 1880s. Real estate is speculative because you don’t know if customers will show. The vice business isn’t speculative at all; the hungry show up day and night. For many years Lemuel Gold ran the place as a brothel, with discount days for cops and Tammany Hall swells, until they found him floating in the Gowanus Canal with a sash cord wrapped around his neck. The Gowanus Canal—such was the enormity of his killer’s contempt. Once split into apartments, the townhouse became a one-building crime wave, a multistory felony with a moonshine operation in the basement, a small-time numbers bank on the parlor floor, whores on the second, whores on the third, and an occasional opium den on the fourth with a sweet view of the Hotel Theresa. New ownership in 1953 turned it legit and a more law-abiding parade marched through the premises: poets and bricklayers, polio cripples and future aldermen. On November 15, 1973, the tenant on the top-floor apartment was a woman who took in needlework to supplement her waitressing job, monograms and light tailoring. The textiles caught quickly when the cigarette dropped from her sleepy hand.