They’d work together one more time. Six months later, Uncle Rich hired Brooklyn boys for muscle at a meet. Day of, the men rubbed out everybody who showed up and made off with the cash and the goods, but that was Brooklyn for you. Uncle Rich got his face blown off. Some of the Donegal’s crowd held that he’d faked his death—“How do you know it was him?”—and split to Mexico, but Pepper had little time for crook gossip.
The Bulldog had been a real job, not like chasing down some damn firebug. Pepper checked the address Toomey gave him. 104th Street this far east was a gauntlet of dreary, final-lap tenements and junkie beachheads. He’d made good time—it wasn’t dark yet. Number 159 was in the middle of the block.
No, they didn’t make them like the Bulldog job anymore. It was an entirely different game nowadays, he thought, as the baseball bat clopped him at the base of the skull. They hit him two more times before he went down, and hit him again.
FOUR
It was 6:27 P.M. when Toomey delivered the ambush message to Pepper. At that moment Carney and Martin Green were at the Subway Inn in midtown drinking beer. Martin remarked upon the narrowness of Lexington Avenue sidewalks.
Carney said, “It’s true.”
“Rush hour, all those delivery trucks, you have to take a number for the right of way.”
“If you’re an avenue, act like an avenue. Not a side street.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
Two drinks in, Green’s Brooklyn accent broke the surface. He had mentioned Sheepshead Bay over the years. Carney didn’t know much about the neighborhood except that it was toward the end of the subway line, where the city ran out. Every borough had those spots where the tracks stopped and then you were stuck. Not Staten Island, he corrected. Staten Island had moved in next door one day and hung around. It didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the block, no one knew what to do with it, but there it was—leaning over the chain-link fence during the cookout, giving unsolicited advice about weed killer, and mooching another beer.
This was Carney’s first visit to the Subway Inn. According to the framed article next to the register, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio had a favorite booth back in the day, but it was difficult to imagine that the famous still frequented the place. Red neon glinted on the aluminum frames of the chairs, the bottle regiments at the bartender’s back, and the glass curving over the jukebox’s guts. A few women in light summer blouses and pencil skirts sloshed gin and vodka in thick glasses, jackets off in the heat, but today’s happy hour had attracted a mostly male clientele. Carney knew hustlers when he saw them, and the bar was two-deep with white-collar hustlers, pink-faced and shouting over the black music from the Wurlitzer—good old Motown, not “that disco stuff”—scheming after the big score that would deliver them to middle management. Raised in segregated hives on the Island and in Jersey—and yes, Staten Island—they congregated here and un-noosed neckties, rolled up sleeves, the daily dread descending upon them without office chores to distract them. After a couple of drinks and confessions they’d disappear home down a side pocket or corner pocket but now they ricocheted against the walls, the bar, and one another, clacking and clacking.
Carney and Green met at the gem broker’s apartment in the East Eighties for business, but once a year the man invited Carney out for a drink. He was pleasant company. The last few years had seen him grow more conventional, ditching the Aztec amulets and red-lensed sunglasses in favor of bespoke blazers and khaki slacks. Martin had even started referring to a girlfriend, Ally, who sold fancy paper at an ooh la la stationery store on Madison. “She keeps me grounded,” he said. “How is your Elizabeth?”
“Keeping busy.” Seneca was still booking a lot of summer travel, and the campaign took more of her time. This week was an exception for Carney; the nights when he ducked out for a drink, or to meet a crook under cover of ducking out for a drink, were more rare. Elizabeth was now the one who went out evenings, meeting friends or working for Oakes. Last evening she and May had passed out buttons and caps outside the 135th Station and collected signatures. The replacement pens were coming in next week, after the first run spelled the candidate’s name as “Oates.”
“I don’t know who Oakes is, but he can’t be worse than these jokers we have now,” Green said. He looked over his shoulder. The jukebox cranked out “Jailhouse Rock” and a bunch of drunks sang along, butchering Elvis’s moves. No one heard Green when he leaned in and said, “I have an idea I’d like to share.”
He had a Swedish colleague who was interested in a very specific precious stone, he said. Quantities of it. The stone in question was elusive at the moment in most markets, but the Swede had identified three American sources. The Americans were not inclined to sell. The Swede was drawing together plans to intercept—
“Intercept?” Carney said.
“His word. He wishes to execute a plan to intercept the stones and he asked me to help facilitate that. I thought of you.”
“That’s not what I do.” He finished his beer.
“Of course not. It’s straying for me, too. You know people that no one else knows. They might be the right people.”
“That’s not up my alley.”
Green smiled. “I had to ask. Some people get an itch and a notion to branch out.”
Carney said he appreciated the invitation and got up for a glass of club soda. They stayed at the Subway Inn for another ten minutes. Green was heading to Maxwell’s Plum to meet a German contact who’d read about the place in a magazine. “He thinks he’s going to do coke in the bathroom with Bianca Jagger.” Carney was off to catch up with Pierce at the club. The lawyer wanted some advice.
They shook hands outside. The express was right there, but before he went underground Carney couldn’t help but notice the dead lights above Bloomingdale’s loading dock across the street. He wondered if someone was coming back in the wee hours for unauthorized shopping. Negligible foot traffic after midnight. Perhaps the lights had merely reached the end of their life. It was not a crime to recognize opportunities.
These East Side stations—so far underground in places. Something to do with the schist, maybe, the rock determining where the subway lines can run. All that stuff you can’t see that shapes how you live every day, and you know nothing about it. He waited on the platform next to an ad of revolutionaries lobbing crates of tea into Boston Harbor: Keep the Lipton, Dump the Rest.
A very precious stone. Carney broke down his meeting with Green on the train uptown. Green declined to specify what his colleague was after. Emeralds, a specific family of diamond? There had been something in the papers about a big robbery in France last week, some famous emeralds in the haul.
It didn’t matter. Carney had no interest in the front end. Thieves removed an item from the straight world and converted it to stolen merchandise. Whereupon the fence helped transform the stones and gold coins and necklaces into legit goods again. Fences versus finishers. What did a finisher do? They took something from the straight world—a four-story tenement, a three-story row house—and delivered it into the dark side through fraud, arson, injury, death. The wrecking ball came, took the structure down to the crater, and the developer returned the site to the straight world again. On the voyage between the legit and the not-legit there were plenty of opportunities for enterprising individuals to wet their beaks. Like the subway, the trip depended on where you hopped on.