Carney asked if he’d ever joined his father on a fire job.
Pepper never criticized Carney’s father in front of him but didn’t hold back a blink of disgust. “You do something, maybe you don’t do something else.” Big Mike Carney put a match to a motherfucker’s house on occasion, but that was personal, not business. He glanced at Toomey. Toomey was tight, he wasn’t going to run his yap to anybody, but he was less adept than Buford at pretending not to eavesdrop. “But it wasn’t like it is now,” Pepper resumed. “In the Bronx you have to sleep with your shoes on. People setting fires every night, and not just guys in it for the insurance.”
Carney had heard about that—blowback from another dumb city policy. If you were on welfare and wanted to move from your vermin-infested, crumbling-down, city-owned apartment into another, you could qualify for a couple of grand for moving expenses and furniture—if your place burned down. Says it right there on big signs at the welfare office, like instructions. What was a striving soul to do? As with everything in the city, there were small-time plays and big-scale scams, and the savvy player knew which ones deserved your attention.
A redheaded walrus capered around the ring, surprisingly fleet-footed, bells drooping on his big jester’s hat. “Who’s that?” Pepper asked. The wrestler threw his hat into the crowd and beat his chest King Kong style.
“The Big Fink,” Toomey said. “New guy out of somewhere.”
Pepper kept his eyes on the match. “I don’t have a handle on what you’re asking me, Carney,” he said.
Carney explained again about Mrs. Ruiz’s son, and the hospital, and his rage that whoever torched the place was getting away with it. “I want you to find out who did it.”
“Why?”
“For the kid.”
Toomey sensed Pepper’s gaze on him and resumed stacking the coasters.
“Just curious,” Carney said.
“Nobody’s just curious. People only say ‘just curious’ when they’re the opposite of that. Doing legwork for cops again?” This was a reference to the first time Carney had retained Pepper’s services, which had involved shadowing a drug dealer named Biz Dixon. It ended with Pepper giving Carney a black eye.
“I’m not going to the cops,” Carney said. “It’s for the kid. He lives upstairs. He deserves better.”
“Everyone deserves better. This guy you mentioned—Oakes? You figure to nail him for it?”
“No, he used to work downtown and probably looked the other way when someone asked him, but I mentioned him because he’s the type of person who would do something like this. Get this—Elizabeth and May are campaigning for him.”
Pepper sighed. “And when I come up with the guy who did it?”
“I got it.”
“Got what?”
“Let’s start there.”
Pepper finished his beer and Toomey poured him another. “How much?” Pepper said.
They did a deal for the Arson Job and caught the next match, a Terry Sanchez and Huck Jablonsky tag team against two pikers in gold spandex. Carney tried to figure out what differentiated a wrestling outfit from a ballerina outfit. Flummoxed.
John had called Carney into the living room two weeks ago when Muhammad Ali made a surprise appearance on Championship Wrestling. The setup was Gorilla Monsoon grappling with Baron Mikel Scicluna while Ali watched from the front row. Supposedly Monsoon weighed four hundred pounds, but that had to be PR, for there was no way that black leotard could have contained such abundant majesty. The Baron went down and Ali, outraged at the shenanigans, ripped off his tie and shirt and climbed into the squared circle to taunt Monsoon. They danced around each other like sleepy bears, Ali tossing a few jabs, until Monsoon swooped in, snatched the heavyweight, and lifted him onto his shoulders for some airplane spins, round and round…It was all promo for the upcoming “The War of the Worlds,” a money-grab match between the boxer and Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.
The question sat there: How does a big walking dink like Monsoon take out the Greatest?
“So he’s in on it,” John said. “It’s all rigged?”
The boy was catching on.
“It’s a show. They’re all in on it.” The wrestlers, the promoters, the audience, too. If the audience is in on it, too, is it rigged or merely the world as it is?
Carney finished his Budweiser. On the wrestling program it appeared as if the heels had replaced the ref with their own evil ref while the good guys were distracted.
It was customary when he and Pepper did a deal to move on to other matters of importance, such as a dissection of commonplace frustrations of city life. Disappointing mass transportation experiences, price hikes in everyday staples, the new vermin. Carney turned from the wrestling show and said, “？‘You do something, maybe you don’t do something else.’？” But why do that?”
Pepper shrugged. “That’s how it goes down sometimes.”
“It’s not right.”
“No. But that’s how it goes down sometimes.”
The next afternoon they were eating lunch in Marie’s office. It was Carney, Larry, Marie, and Robert, who’d gone out to Ricci’s for sandwiches. Larry was reeling in his nephew with a tall tale that was about to swerve off-color, and Carney realized he hadn’t thought about the boy in the hospital, or the fire, or the slight at the fundraiser all day. Getting it off his chest had been helpful. Distracted by images of the boy waking in the dark apartment alone, he’d been seized by a kindred terror, but the feeling had receded. He had noticed that sometimes if he shared a fear or regret or a thing that gnawed at him—told Freddie, Elizabeth, and now Pepper—it relinquished some of its power, slunk back to where it came from. Disburdened him. Indeed, he might have forgotten about the job until whenever Pepper asked to get paid, had not that meeting in Donegal’s initiated a series of events that neither man was able to contain, with lethal results.
THREE
The most famous arsonist in New York City history was Isidore Steinareutzer, aka Izzy Stein, aka Isaac Chernick, aka “Itchia der Warcher,” aka Izzy the Painter, after his habit of posing as a house painter when purchasing kerosene, one of his accelerants of choice. Izzy was the head of what the cops called the Arson Trust, a network of fraudsters responsible for hundreds of fires all over the city. Undercover fire marshals tailed Izzy the Painter for seven months, posing as hucksters, plumbers, gasmen, and Yiddish peddlers, before they arrested him in the summer of 1912.
When he came down from Sing Sing to testify at the Manhattan courthouse, the newspapers were aghast at his “Startling Revelations of Incendiarism.” The Trust, Izzy said, consisted of the “mechanics” who lit the blazes, insurance agents who wrote the inflated policies, public adjusters who wrote off small fire damage as a total loss, police lookouts, tipped-off firemen who quickly arrived on the scene, and nobodies who provided alibis for a price—“the cogs in the wheel of the big conspiracy.” Izzy himself specialized in Jewish Harlem, but he ran firebug gangs across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Ratted them all out and still got twenty-four years. Landlords hit up Izzy for his services, but so did tenants—rent a room, throw in some junk furniture, and then cash in the pumped-up claim. He carried benzine in a whiskey flask, sprinkled it on bedding and clothes, and then beat it outside to the street to catch the show. Izzy liked the money, he confessed on the stand, but also “liked to watch the fire engines.”