Carney was going to stick to what he knew. Solid and dependable. Like rock. Green had always been careful in his work with Carney. If he was changing his business, exposing himself to new dangers, perhaps it was time for Carney to find a new contact.
* * *
***
As men set upon Pepper with baseball bats, Carney was humming “Afternoon Delight” and bopping up the stairs to the Dumas Club. The time was 7:55. The after-work crowd in the parlor was clearing out for Friday-night engagements with wives or mistresses. The older men, the stray Montys and Rutherfords, nestled in their favorite club chairs and sofa spots, emptying small dishes of mixed nuts and tumblers of peaty scotch. Carney discovered Pierce in his favorite chair by the window, reading the Real Estate section of the Times. Pierce beckoned the waiter.
Pierce needed to work out a problem. “Remember that lady I was telling you about—works in my office?” Carney remembered something about his partner’s secretary—they were messing around, she had a fiancé in Boise, what if his partner got wind of it? In the meantime, this CPA had moved into the suite across the hall, and there was a young woman at reception he’d been chatting up. “Am I crazy?”
“Man, what do I know about that?” Carney said. Pierce didn’t want advice, he wanted to bray.
Pierce opened his mouth but the fire engine’s wail stepped on his lines. Ambulance sirens and fire-truck sirens sang all day, but since the torching of 371 Carney pictured what they were rushing toward, what unfolding misfortune awaited.
“？‘Where’s the fire?’？” Pierce said, chuckling.
“You’ve heard of finishers?” Carney said.
The lawyer waved his hand. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” he said. Deliberately set fires only accounted for a tiny fraction of the problem, he told Carney, less than ten percent. The real reason was the deteriorating city itself.
Before the current fiscal crisis and all the cutbacks, Pierce said, there were decades of urban renewal projects that obliterated communities and industrial zones in the name of progress. “Ramming the highways through, bulldozing so-called slums, but they were places people lived—black, white, Puerto Rican. Knock down the factories and warehouses, and you wipe out people’s livelihoods, too. The white people take advantage of those new highways out to the suburbs and flee the city into homes subsidized by federal mortgage programs. Mortgages that black people won’t get. And the blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods. But now those good blue-collar jobs are gone. Can’t buy a house because the lenders have designated the neighborhood as high-risk—the redlining actually creates the conditions it’s warning against. Unemployment, overcrowded tenements, and you get overwhelmed social services. It’s started—the breakdown.”
“What does that have to do with the fires?” Carney liked his idea of bad men skulking about with their cans of gas—sociology, or whatever this was, seemed like a cop-out.
“It’s not arson—it’s years of shitty urban planning biting us in the ass. You see it in Harlem,” Pierce said, “not two blocks from where we’re sitting. One system fails and then the next. The slumlord takes over a building, doesn’t keep it up. Boiler busted, no heat. Cheap space heater overloads the old wiring—that’s a fire. Junkies and winos move into an empty apartment, get loaded and drop a match—that’s a fire. Teenagers fucking around in an abandoned building. The building next door goes up, too, and now the whole block is getting sick. One after another. RAND looked at the numbers.” An uptick in fires, they found, was preceded by a spike in public-school enrollment. Chased out of one neighborhood by slum clearance and fires, their next stop becomes the new overcrowded crisis zone. Counting down to the next collapse. “It’s a chain reaction. There’s arson, yes, but it’s just a small part.”
Carney had heard of the RAND Corporation. On 60 Minutes, something about the Soviet Union. Nuclear war? Pierce explained it came out of World War II—engineers, physicists, and military planners who started a think tank after the Axis surrendered. “They had to find something to do with themselves, right? They call themselves ‘systems analysts’ but they’re just the usual gang of egghead white guys who want to run shit. The U.S. government is their main client, and they’re plugged in everywhere. Nuke scenarios against the Russians, how to fuck over Castro. In Vietnam, they analyzed Viet Cong attacks and troop patterns and told the army where to drop the bombs and send soldiers. All done by computer. Mayor Lindsay—you remember—he’s walking around Harlem in ’68 during the riots, looking at Detroit and Watts and getting the willies and he’s like, what if we took all this American know-how that can send a rocket to the moon and use it to solve the problems of the urban city? He makes some calls and that’s how we get the New York City–RAND Institute, studying the police department, fire department, health, housing. All paid for by your tax dollars.”
“How’d you get so up on all this?”
“How do you think? I sued their asses.” He toasted: to billable hours. “I’m an expert on this shit now. RAND moves in, the city gives them carte blanche, they wheel in their charts and big mainframes and start looking at the city the way they looked at fallout patterns and the NVA. What to do about the fires, they’re asking each other.”
“Didn’t they close down fire stations?” Carney asked. He caught the protests on Eyewitness News. Part cutbacks, part “efficiency.” They did all these studies on how to fix the fire department, and ended up closing station houses in the very neighborhoods most afflicted by the runaway fires. Which led to more fires and more destroyed blocks.
“Rich neighborhood,” Pierce said, “they hear the city wants to shut down the firehouse down the block, next day they’re on the phone nipping that in the bud. South Bronx doesn’t have that kind of juice. We got hired by community organizations to stop the closures.
“I sued them three times. First two times, the judge dismissed the cases once the city trotted out those RAND studies. Numbers can’t be racist, right? But the data can be dumb or wrong, though, and if you feed shit into the computer, it gives you shit right back. The whiz kids got their heads up in the clouds so they can’t see street-level shit—like traffic. What if the reasons two firehouses have different response times isn’t bad performance but traffic? Some neighborhoods got it, some don’t. On Park Avenue, the hydrants work. A mile up in East Harlem, the pipes are still disconnected from unfinished road work from ten years ago. You can’t see it from the clouds. Wrong assumptions, they add up, and everything gets worse.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. Sitting before Carney was the Pierce that he hadn’t seen for years, the civil rights crusader, Black David standing up to the White Goliaths. Pierce shared the closing arguments he’d rehearsed but never got a chance to deliver. “Third time I sued them,” Pierce said, “I was working for Uptown Gardens. Run by Kwame Miller, this Black Panther who continued with the grassroots stuff after the big split in the party a couple of years ago.” Pierce named some good works—a school-lunch initiative, a sports program. “Solid stuff.”