Page didn’t make the premiere but most of the crew and the above-board investors showed up at the New Yorker Theatre. Zippo didn’t like parties per se. He made an exception. He invited folks from the old days—people like his babysitter Pru and Miss Naughton, the social worker who’d helped him out when his life turned weird—and they cheered and hooted at the right moments. They seemed to like it, the movie, that fraction of him on view. If they liked that part, maybe they liked him, too. Everyone got good and loaded at the after party. Carney even showed up with the missus. He said they’d done a good job of making his office look like a real criminal hideout. Zippo was about to point out that they hadn’t changed a thing when Carney added, “I’m proud of you, Zippo. You did good.” Fatherly-like. His wife said it was past their bedtime and steered the furniture salesman to the door. Yes, it was a good night.
There was some kind of protest up ahead on Broadway—Save the Bomb, Ban the Earth, what have you—so Zippo veered west on Forty-sixth. One last errand before his flight. If he remembered correctly Ninth Ave in the Fifties had a bunch of old-school hardware stores and perhaps one of them stocked White Fox Turpentine. Costello Hardware & Paint used to sell it when he lived on 132nd uptown. Cans were hard to find but worth the search. It never failed to bring him back, the heat of a White Fox Turpentine fire on his face, and it was like he was a kid again, just starting to understand the shape of his sadness. Out of step even then, lost among the tall buildings.
THE
FINISHERS
1976
“When he walked the streets, he superimposed his own perfect city over the misbegotten one before him, it was a city of ash and cinder heaped hundreds of feet high, emptied of people, wonderfully dead and still.”
ONE
It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven. Summer in New York that bicentennial year was full of promise and menace in every sign and wonder, no matter how crummy or small. How Ray Carney’s day ended up taking such a turn, he had no idea. To be surrounded by people who ate their pork ribs with a knife and fork.
Yes, the Dumas Club, at a fundraiser for Alexander Oakes, newly declared candidate in next year’s race for Manhattan borough president. Never too early to turn on that money spigot.
Carney popped a deviled egg in his mouth. He plucked his shirt—it was getting warm in there with the windows closed to the street noise. Across 120th a chubby gentleman in a white mesh tank top washed his Cadillac and played salsa at an impertinent volume. So moved that he sang along, soaping. His buddy hunched on an aluminum beach chair on the pavement, slapping his thighs and smoking a cigarillo.
Twenty years ago the block had comported itself differently. Now plywood covered the windows of two burned-out brownstones opposite and a troupe of shabby men rotated through the stoops to sip Ripple from brown bags. What’s the word? Thunderbird! Ambrose Clarke, the current Dumas Club secretary, regularly called the cops about the shooting gallery up the block, to no avail. To be ignored by the police as if he were some ordinary Negro—the humiliation. Elizabeth had hired a jazz combo called the Robert McCoy Trio for today’s event, and their music smothered most of the car washer’s hit parade. Oakes frowned when the car radio harassed them between jazz standards.
Jimmy, Carl, Hink—the old waiters and bartenders circulated, muttonchopped and deathless, murmuring “Of course, sir,” and sharing a conspiratorial nod when you ordered your usual. Some of the plants had died and been replaced, and they had to dump the carpet when Clemson Montgomery had a stroke in the middle of the Founder’s Night recital and splashed claret hither and yon, but other than that the room was unchanged. The leather club chairs where a generation of Harlem dignitaries had honed a hundred grubby schemes sat well polished and waiting. The same oil portraits of deceased members hung on the walls; no member of note had kicked the bucket lately, or no one big enough to dislodge the pantheon.
Carney twisted his Dumas club ring on his finger. He’d been scarce in recent years. He attended the mixers for prospective members to boost those without the usual bourgie pedigrees—first-generation college guys like him, the bootstrappers and self-made men. Occasionally he and Calvin Pierce had a drink. Pierce refused to meet anywhere else; once Carney split for home the lawyer prowled the premises on the intelligence-gathering missions that were the foundation of his work. Carney was settled and secure now, in every aspect of his businesses, and had less need for the Dumas contacts. He’d never had the stomach for all the glad-handing theater and self-congratulation, and now was too old to fake it. Sometimes he had a hard time remembering the whole fuss about joining, it was so remote.
Ten minutes in, the place was packed. A sightline opened. Elizabeth was across the room talking to Pat Miller, who introduced herself to everybody as Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s “favorite cousin.” Carney’s wife raised her eyebrows: checking in. She knew him too well to fall for one of his practiced salesman smiles—It’s the perfect accent piece or Think of it as an investment in joy—so he mustered a simple all is good wink. Relieved, Elizabeth returned her attention to Pat Miller and bobbed her head at the woman’s nonsense.
She’d been fussing over the arrangements for weeks, in charge of corralling the engaged women of her circle, the advisory-committee types and habitual board-sitters, while her father Leland made sure the Dumas mainstays made an appearance, checkbooks or IOUs in hand. Elizabeth and her father fundraising for the Oakes boy—one Strivers’ Row family saluting another. Leland had been ill last winter with a case of pneumonia that got complicated, but tonight he looked better than he had in a long time. The opportunity to toast Oakes—who would have been his son-in-law if the world made any kind of sense, if Elizabeth had any sense—had rejuvenated him. That or the Geritol. Carney heard his cackle and turned to see Leland with Abraham Lanford, the son of Clement Lanford, the onetime Harlem fixer and statesman. Reminiscing over a colorful grift or cherished embezzlement in bygone days.
Fundraisers were one of the few occasions where women were allowed in the club （not including the girlfriends and mistresses smuggled in after hours by the few potentates with keys）。 Carney was glad Elizabeth’s friends had shown up—Candy Gates, out in public for the first time since that “Casanova con man” ran off with her life savings, and Elena Jackson, also out in public for the first time since Bernard ran off with that exotic dancer from Baby’s Best. Some of the ladies from the travel agency were there, identifiable by their puzzlement over some Dumas member’s eccentricity.
Calvin Pierce elbowed Carney. “So much for testing the waters.”
Carney shrugged. Alexander Oakes wouldn’t have announced this early if his handlers hadn’t worked out the angles. Carney’s gaze fell on the jazz band over by the parlor fireplace. The drummer nodded at him. Carney couldn’t place him.
Pierce was unsteady. His cheeks were flushed. Carney pictured the lawyer’s busy day: three-martini lunch, followed up by a pass-out nap on the DeMarco sofa in his office （ten percent discount from Carney’s Furniture）， then a subway ride up to the Dumas Club to start the next round. The lawyer had left Willis, Duncan & Evans last year to go solo. Signed the lease on a nice office suite in the Pan Am Building looking south, a change of view to mark his change in views, as he now represented the companies he formerly worked to destroy. He still shook them upside down to see what change fell out of their pockets, but he no longer divvied up with their victims, the survivors of the scaffolding collapse, the widow whose husband had expired after the surgeon forgot the forceps next to the spleen. The money was better. It usually was when you crossed the street, but the host of new demands left him exhausted, the ones Pierce owned up to and the others. Pierce had stopped bragging of sexual temptations resisted, which Carney interpreted as temptations indulged. Run you ragged, all those responsibilities.