By the time Pepper arrived, the entire structure was engulfed. Flames geysered from windows—hell had sprung a leak. Policemen shooed the evacuees farther away and the firefighters expanded their perimeter. Four buildings down, the patrons of Earl’s Satin exited the premises for a look. The squares lingering to gawk and the crooked splitting the scene in the face of police presence. The club hadn’t shut its doors yet. He hoped Chink was still inside.
Pepper had called Donegal’s, relayed his request, and called back ten minutes later for the skinny: Chink Montague liked the Thursday action at Earl’s Satin, the club he’d stolen from Smiling Rick many years before, along with the man’s other operations. Not many people remembered Smiling Rick. Pepper did, without fondness. He doubted that Rick’s customers noticed the change in management, whether they played numbers or had a hankering for unlicensed booze or pussy. Ask the runners, waitresses, and working girls and they’d probably acknowledge that of the two bad men, Chink put more effort into being wretched.
The city specialized in accumulated miseries and women in trouble. Women in trouble wasn’t Pepper’s usual line of work, but here he was again, second time in as many years. At least he was getting paid this go-around.
His job for Marie had been a freebie. He’d always respected her, the way she conducted herself at Carney’s Furniture, her kindnesses to the Harlem characters who passed through the door, some of them decent people and some of them rotten. She didn’t ask questions when Pepper used the store as an answering machine; his messages got through and his business proceeded unimpeded. Too smart not to know about her boss’s side action and cool enough to hold her tongue, even if she was a straight arrow.
For a brief time, her husband, Rodney, had pretended to decency. Carney hired a series of sweetly incompetent secretaries when Marie left to have her daughter, Bonnie, and all concerned were relieved when Rodney allowed her to start working again. He was having trouble finding a job, she told Carney. No one believed he tried very hard. She started wearing long sleeves on hot days and big sunglasses—Shiner Specials—to hide her black eyes, but it wasn’t Pepper’s business how she lived her life. Until she asked it to be.
One day last October, when Pepper left Carney’s office after some business, Marie touched his arm and asked for a word. She had a hard time spitting it out. They walked around the block. It was one of those October days when the cold sneaks up on you like a pickpocket. She stopped him in front of an abandoned tenement and made her request.
“You want him gone, or gone?” Pepper asked.
She hesitated. “Gone,” Marie said, preferring the less ominous intonation.
He said, suit yourself.
Pepper intercepted her husband in the pool room off Nostrand where he spent his days. Rodney was tall, with a mouth perpetually on the verge of a leer and a shiny, shaved head reminiscent of a doorknob. They talked. Pepper made it clear he was to refrain from contact with his wife, and that he was permanently banned from New York State—no, make that the tri-state area. Rodney was skeptical of Pepper’s resolve and required a demonstration of his depth of purpose, but Rodney was not accustomed to people who hit back, and none of the pool-room men intervened. Far as he knew, Rodney hadn’t resurfaced since that day.
Pepper made a half-hearted show of being offended when Marie offered to pay him. Neither of them mentioned the matter again, and he assumed Carney remained ignorant. It was between the crook and the secretary.
On this job the actress didn’t even know his name. He was doing this for money. And what else? To retrieve someone who had gotten off at the wrong stop. It was best to stick to your stations, he had learned, where you belong. Otherwise you’ll get mixed up with people you shouldn’t. It was true for squares, and it was true for crooks.
Something collapsed inside the burning building with a crackling finality. The crowd shrank back, gasping. It looked like the tenements on either side were going to go next. The lights of the fire trucks zipped across the facades in red and white. A burly fireman worried the controls of the truck’s pump panel, directing the aerial ladder toward 347 as his comrades scrambled to their places, attending to the hose lines and advancing on the building. Let’s get on with it. Pepper walked a bow around the crowd and into Earl’s Satin.
The layout hadn’t changed. Standard bar arrangement in the front room, a smaller lounge area beyond it, followed by the back-room office. Deeper you went, the more crooked. The bartender was an old-school player—Pepper recognized the tired, sullen gaze. Bartending for a Chink Montague spot seasoned you good and mean, accelerating the city’s natural processes.
“You see what’s happening out there?” the bartender said. “We’re closed.”
Pepper said he was here to see Chink.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Pepper reached up to pull the man over the bar but before he could lay a hand on him, he took a quick nap.
* * *
***
Historically, Pepper was unable to admit when he had been rendered unconscious. Whether coming to in the trunk of a Chevy sedan speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike or underneath a cocktail table in an after-hours joint or slumped on a wooden chair in the back office of Earl’s Satin, Pepper preferred to describe his brief absence from the world as “closing his eyes for a second,” as if he were some geezer who’d fallen asleep during All My Children and not an outlaw who’d suffered a blow to the head in the line of duty.
One thing Pepper couldn’t deny or ignore was his headache, which had assumed a new horrific magnitude. He envisioned his brain as a roulette wheel, the pain a lead ball that bounced heavily in and out of the grooves, round and round.
He knew he was in Earl’s because they’d kept the old black-and-white sign when they upgraded to neon out front. It hung on hooks above the dry fish tank, a few feet away from the red metal door that led out back. Most men who stuck centerfolds on the walls of their office didn’t go to the trouble of framing them. Chink, or whatever flunky worked there most of the time, had honored the Playboy spreads of Jennifer Jackson and Jean Bell, the first and second Afro American playmates, with smart brass frames. Pepper didn’t recognize the third naked girl so enshrined. Black Firsts—First Black Heart Surgeon or First Black Governor or First Black Playmate—got the glory, Black Seconds dwelled in the light of a dimmer fame, and rare was the Black Third who received anything near the respect due their office. If Pepper made it out of there, perhaps there’d be time to check out her name and other virtues.
There were three other men in the room. The bartender slouched against the filing cabinets, his demeanor grown more surly in the interval. The other man, presumably, was the one who’d induced Pepper to close his eyes. They called him Delroy. Pepper recognized him from around. The scar was distinctive, a ragged crescent in his cheek like a second mouth. Both men aimed their pistols at Pepper. Pepper moved his hand slightly to see if he felt the weight of his own gun in his jacket pocket. He did not.
Chink Montague was stationed behind the big gray metal desk, one of those two-ton Panzer deals from the ’40s. Pepper hadn’t seen the man in a while. Empire had exacted its price: The gangster looked like a doped-up lion in a shitty zoo.