“I don’t know you,” Pepper said.
“So?”
“You’re telling me all this.”
“I don’t get the impression you have a lot of people to gossip about me with.”
Which was mostly right. He liked to talk to Carney at Donegal’s, drinking beer. Carney wasn’t like those other mopes. There were some other people he didn’t mind spending time with. She was mostly right.
They reached Weehawken and the corkscrew of lanes in advance of the tunnel. The toll booth attendant took his money without looking at him. He had a racist face, as Roscoe Pope put it, but made no indication that he noticed Pepper’s skin. Maybe shit jobs were the true path to equality, so numbing and dull that there was no room left in the brain for bigotry.
“Remember when they got that woman toll collector?” he said. “People were pissed.”
Lucinda nodded, staring ahead at the tunnel.
One time he drove through with Gus Hooks, that old thief. Came from Alabama so he had that Southern shit running through his head all the time. Gus handed the lady toll collector the coins and yelped. “I accidentally touched her hand,” he said.
“They ain’t going to lynch you,” Pepper said.
Gus was unconvinced. “You don’t know,” he told him.
Lucinda jabbed at the radio buttons again. Dead signal in the tunnel. Under the river, halfway through. Pepper asked her if she wanted to go to the McAlpin.
“Are they on location today?”
“Past few days, they set up, get what they can, and wait for you.”
“I’d like to work,” she said.
He pulled over at the first pay phone on the other side and called the Grotto. “Uptown,” he informed her on his return.
“Where else?”
The West Side Highway was a hard grind. Traffic either way. He assumed another section had collapsed, it happened all the time, dropping cars and trucks through the roadway onto unsuspecting people below. The newspaper said one family was suing the city.
“？‘You’d be my princess—like Jackie O,’？” Lucinda said. “That’s what he told me in his car. Jackie O? What’s that make him, JFK? JFK got his ass shot.”
Chink was beyond worldly distractions like love lost. You can’t go back and do it over. Pepper pulled jobs for a living. The alarm goes off, somebody ratted to the cops, a hothead starts shooting—that’s how it went down and you can’t go back. Hazel. Even for her, even the possibility of being with Hazel again wasn’t enough to make him believe otherwise. Most you can do is look from afar. Grab a look from your car and watch them come out those doors and disappear up the street, but you can’t invite them in. The alarm’s gone off, delivered its loud and final report, and there’s no going back to how it was before it went wrong.
Although there was that one time in Edison when the wire tipped the precinct and they still pulled it off, but it was just that one time and you can hardly steer by miracles. Right?
Lucinda spoke. “Driver’s up front, me and Chink in the back. Talking. We got to my hotel and I said, See you around. What did he want? What was he going to do to me? Then to have it be just, I need you, baby, it was almost funny. He let me go. I made it inside, counting every step, but he didn’t stop me.”
He asked why she tore up her hotel room. The room wasn’t messed up because she’d been partying with a bunch of druggies, and her ex-boyfriend hadn’t busted up the joint in a rage. Why do you smash a mirror? Because you don’t like what you see.
“They thought it was Chink? No. It was putting on that ridiculous wig every day. That’s what it’s riding on? My comeback? This fucking wig? Then seeing Chink and Ros—to see how you’ve lived your life. Like—dumb. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to see Roscoe. He used to get coked up, fueled up—then get mean.”
A semitrailer honked, startling her. Pepper lifted an eyebrow—that dude better not have been honking at him.
“I couldn’t hit them, so I hit the room,” Lucinda said. “You ever do that?”
“Sure. But I hit them, too, later.”
“I never do stuff like that,” she said. “Then I looked at the mess I made and did what any sensible woman would do: popped a Valium and hopped in a taxi. Overpaid the driver to take me home in the middle of the night.” Hopping in a taxi was the cure for most of life’s problems, she said. And a little something to get you through the night was a close second.
She looked classy in her outfit today. And comfortable and not at all like Nefertiti. He thought of Zippo moaning about the old gang fixing him in place, as the person he was before. Lucinda or Leanne had successfully ditched her old world. Now she wanted it back. For a time.
“You know what?” she said. “Sometimes you just want to go home and see your family.”
As with the rejuvenating powers of California, the sentiment was alien, but he allowed the possibility.
He snagged a parking spot across the street from the church. They were shooting inside the Canaan Baptist Church on 116th, a low brick building off Lenox. Nefertiti seeking guidance from the old reverend before the big finale. The church was the former home of Diego’s Candy & Cigarettes, if Pepper was not mistaken, as that fried-fish place was two stores over. Diego had been a go-between for a Ukrainian scratcher out in Coney Island. Pepper had never needed his services but everybody vouched. Yeah, a fake passport was not in his future. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“I told them you wanted to work,” Pepper said.
“Flew all this way,” she said.
Pete the Grip spotted them and waved his arms up and down like a fool. Lola waited for the plumbing van to pass and dashed across the street. Two Vikings retrieved Lucinda’s things from the trunk, the actress hugging the pictures to her chest so no one could see.
A chubby teenage girl, her Afro tucked under a bright red applejack, bounded over the electrical cables and intercepted Lucinda in front of the glass doors to the church. Lucinda bent down to hear her better. She smiled and signed the autograph.
Pepper locked the Charger and joined the set. The job was over, time to go back to work. They’ll put her in her Nefertiti costume and wig and big white boots and the continuity girl will make sure everything matches how it was on the day she left. What about his own continuity? He checked: His scars were still where they were supposed to be. He was the same. Harlem was the same. Chink had been wrong about that—Harlem was the same place it had always been. It’s the people who come and go, and the buildings, but Harlem never budges.
The sound guy leaned against the church wall smoking a cigarette. Troy, the director of photography, hollered at him. They better have his stool somewhere, Pepper thought, or these hippies were going to have a goddamn problem. All that running around, to have a job where you can sit on your ass.
NINE
Secret Agent: Nefertiti finished its North American run in Times Square on a double bill with Invasion of the Bee Girls. It had crisscrossed the country in various markets since January and ended up at the Royalton Playhouse. Zippo sat in the eighth row for the three-forty-five showing, five seats from the left. He questioned the pairing at first but after seeing the films back-to-back saw the case for it: the Insurgent Feminine. People were lining up to see Jaws around the corner but porn houses dominated this stretch of Forty-second and it turned out that this was also the last day for the Playhouse as a （more or less） mainstream venue. Tomorrow marked the U.S. premiere of Swedish Breakfast, a two-week engagement.