“A boy got hurt in the fire. I know his father.” The lie popped into Pepper’s head, he didn’t know why. Carney had never told him the boy’s name. “Little Remmy.”
“Little Remmy?”
Pepper nodded.
Mose sighed. “You never want to hurt someone.”
One of Mose’s victims in that Christmas fire had been a newborn, Pepper recalled. Mose said in the old days, a lot of the fires were set up by tenants. They set them in the afternoon, when the guy—or gal, ’cause women got in on the action, too—was at work, and had an alibi. “Now it’s night work, and you never know who—”
“And you, Mose? You done with fires?”
Mose gestured at the pool room. The lights ticked overhead. “If I go to jail who’s going to mop up the vomit?”
Pepper asked him what he was drinking. Mose looked at his empty Yoo-hoo and asked for a seven and seven.
The drink arrived. Mose stopped Pepper as he headed for the door. “What happened to that girl you used to step out with? Schoolteacher?”
Shit, that was a long time ago. No need to think about that. Pepper said Mose had him mixed up with someone else.
* * *
***
After Mose, his misfit census began in earnest. He got the names of firebugs who turned out to be in prison, out West, in the ground, retired. People directed him toward young wild-eyed men of the pyro school and slow-talking geezers who fantasized what he’d look like covered in gasoline. Some men had been victims of their own fires, their skin an inventory of evil works. He pressed them or employed “polite persuasion.” He got nowhere.
Take Wilmer Byrd. Mose had left his name at Donegal’s. Byrd worked for two finishers—a Ukrainian who owned a fleet of limousines and had a taste for dilapidated Harlem townhouses, and an Italian guy whose destroyed Bronx properties, when plotted on a map, looked like a worm’s route through an apple. Byrd used the same kind of firebomb as the one on the 118th job and the same top-floor rear apartment placement. The firebug had made it known he was looking for work.
Byrd lived in a flophouse on Ninety-third off Amsterdam and in the afternoons hung around the Off Track Betting parlor a few blocks over on Broadway. Pepper beat it down there at eleven, before the first race at Aqueduct. He buzzed a series of apartments and mumbled into the intercom when someone answered. They let him in. Most of the hallway lights were shattered, thin wire filaments poking from broken glass. Usually, the radio or TV was blared out from apartments when you walked through a dead-end joint like this, but Byrd’s building was eerily quiet. Last stop, everybody off.
The firebug lived on the third floor. “Exterminator,” Pepper said.
“Exterminator,” Byrd repeated. Such a fanciful notion. The door opened an inch and Pepper pounced.
The walls of Byrd’s apartment were grimed, adorned with peeling wallpaper that sagged like waning bouquets, but the place was classily furnished, from the dark green Oriental rug to the tasseled lampshades to the polished dark wood of the end tables. Fucking doilies abounding. It was the neatest flophouse room Pepper had ever seen. “Huh,” he said, impressed.
Byrd cringed in anticipation of impending violence. He had a pigeon’s physicality, a fine-boned vulnerability. “I have the money,” he said.
Pepper frowned. Gamblers. He explained he wanted the line on the fire last week, 118th Street.
“I don’t mess with fires,” Byrd said.
Byrd knew how to take a punch. Punch, singular. He was soon forthcoming.
Sure, he did fires for people, Byrd conceded. Different parties. But he wasn’t uptown that day. That was the day of Victor Wilson’s funeral out in Jersey. The wake went on past midnight—Victor’s brother worked at one of the Newark breweries. Did he know him?
Pepper did. The man had been utterly useless in life but had found a small amount of utility in death by providing Byrd with an alibi. He’d verify. Pepper asked him what he knew about the fire, who were the players these days.
“Who are you?”
Pepper said he worked for the insurance company. “I hate insurance fraud,” he declared. “Everything about it.”
Byrd gave him leads that turned out to be worthless. Pepper ran around Harlem like a donkey. A lot of these guys had straight jobs, something on paper for their parole officer, and he had to interrupt them at work. Straight jobs in all kinds of places. He’d never stepped inside a bridal store before—the punk in question knew firebombs and sewing machines, versatile—and couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bowling alley. Pepper chased the guy down Lane Seven, that fucker blubbering and clomping on the wood the whole way. No one came off well that afternoon.
By Friday, Pepper decided he was ditching this gig once he hooked up with Church Wiley, whether he nabbed the guy or not. He finds the firebug—then what? The next stage of whatever Carney had planned, like that time he had Pepper tail the banker and the drug dealer. At Donegal’s, Carney had kept bringing up this Oakes character he disliked. What was their beef about? An idea occurred to Pepper, immediately shaming him—Elizabeth had been nothing but decent with him all these years. On the one hand Carney thought Oakes was shady enough, and on the other too cowardly to get his hands dirty. As if part of Pepper’s job was to prove Oakes didn’t do it, to demonstrate that the guy was too stupid or chickenshit. Like a reverse detective.
Perhaps his was not a temperament suited to this kind of assignment, with the finessing and the gently plying and such. His encounter with Leon Drake, for instance. A running buddy at Nathaniel Barber gave Pepper the name of a guy who in turn led him to the man. “That nigger’s flammable.”
Although Pepper was not aware of it, Leon Drake shared a characteristic with Izzy the Painter in his well-defined hunting grounds. Izzy had worked a swath between Ninety-sixth and 106th on the East Side, a teeming immigrant outpost with its own language and God. At the time of his arrest, the firebug had been on these shores for ten years, long enough to study the hostile world beyond his streets. America called them across the water and then chewed them up. Survival meant manipulating flaws and outwitting the system. You’ll let me insure four bucks of furniture for three thousand dollars, sight unseen? Done. Whether the new arrivals were crooked or straight, whether the idea was a rationalization or a hope, they believed that if they made it through, their children faced less dire calculations.
Leon Drake, too, grew up under an antagonistic order but never summoned much interest in striving upward on its terms. His aspirations lay in ash. There were strivers next door, across the street, Harlem was full of strivers but Leon was not one of them. The arsonist had a supernatural acquaintance with his home turf. He knew it all, it was the crucible of his personality—every storefront, which sidewalk grates clanged underfoot, the alleys, fire escapes, the getaway exits through basement doors and their distance from the street, which tenements hit max occupancy and which townhouses had rotted through, the proximity of the fire hydrants and fireboxes. He knew every crack and corner, and the more he understood, the more he hated. 116th to 125th between Morningside Ave and Park! Leon despised every inch, from the grimmest of the grim subbasements to the tips of the bent television antennas piercing the sky. 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. Such was his antipathy that if his employers stopped paying him tomorrow, he’d torch ’em for free—a building here, a building there, slow torture.