“What?” Then Pepper got it—Carney knew his tells at this point.
He didn’t want Pepper to snuff the guy for beating him with a baseball bat. The blood spilled here, the blood to come, was his fault. Reece and Hickey had nothing to do with putting the kid in the hospital—they ambushed Pepper because they thought he was nosing around old business across the street. Carney had flipped a switch. A machine turned on and it was making a lot of noise but he didn’t know what it did or made or when it was going to finish what it was doing. “You do this, maybe you don’t do that,” Carney said.
Pepper cracked his neck. He told Hickey they were going to put him on ice for a couple of days. For his own good. “When we catch up with Reece he’s going to know it was you that snitched. We wouldn’t want you warning him, making him mad at you.”
The bagman considered his surroundings, the stains and remnants of brutalities, and looked forlorn.
“You hit me here?” Pepper asked, indicating the lump over his eye.
Hickey’s face made the truth plain.
Pepper gave him tit for tat.
* * *
***
Enoch Parker waited for them on the corner of Broadway and 118th. He got in the backseat of the Buick. “I had to tell my wife I came into Mets tickets. If she knew I was doing this…” That explained the Tom Seaver jersey. The safecracker was tall, with a long face and wide, alert eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses. His fingers were slender and delicate, an evolutionary advantage for a safecracker. Enoch’s canvas Ringling Bros. bag sagged on its straps—heavy gear inside.
Pepper introduced Carney. “He’s the wheelman.”
“So I see,” Enoch said. They headed north.
According to Pepper, Enoch had retired from safecracking and now taught chemistry at Carver High School. “Some of those kids really have a knack for the sciences.” They’d pulled jobs together back when. In the spring of 1970, Enoch had a close shave after going twelve rounds with a mattress-factory safe and swore off the life. When Pepper let him.
“Whenever you need something, you say I owe you.”
“You do,” Pepper said.
“Doesn’t mean it’s fair to lord it over everybody.” It was an act. The tremble in his voice said he was excited to join this excursion. Carney imagined it helped that the safecracker didn’t know what they’d been up to that afternoon.
“This yours, Pepper?” Enoch asked. Hickey’s porkpie hat had fallen to the floor in the backseat.
“No.”
“It didn’t look like you.”
Once they handcuffed Hickey to the radiator, Pepper had informed Carney that he wanted to go after Oakes’s records. “See what this slick motherfucker’s been up to.” They were in the Buick, departing the domain of the elevated highways and their shifting planes of gloom. Carney was busy consigning the biscuit-factory episode to the category of tall tale or dream. Would Pepper have killed Hickey? Did Carney really walk into the office next to reception and pluck handcuffs from the cardboard box marked “Candles”—and what was in those other boxes? When the hideout’s planners bought the bucket at the hardware store did they say, “Excuse me, I’m looking for a hostage toilet, about yea big?”
Carney asked him, “You get the records and then what? The Feds?”
It was Pepper’s turn to withhold the larger plan. If there was one.
“Blackmail?” Carney offered.
Pepper adopted a thoughtful expression. He told Carney to pull over at that pay phone and he called Enoch.
Enoch leaned into the front seat and put on 1010 WINS. “I want to hear the weather,” he said. “Hey, Pepper, when’s the last time we—”
“That fried-chicken thing,” Pepper said.
“That was something.”
The office of Oakes for Borough President was on Seventh Ave, two doors in from 135th. The bottom floor of a four-story townhouse, it sat between Brights Laundry and Hotline Records & Tapes. Red, white, and blue bunting bowed over the front window. The laundromat was still open but devoid of patrons except for an old biddy doing a crossword on the bench by the dryers.
Carney parked across the street. There was more action than he liked, a bodega over yonder, red and yellow lights blinking, and a takeout Chinese joint with a bedraggled Grand Opening sign. Not too close to campaign headquarters, but places that attracted foot traffic.
Enoch piped up when he got a load of the big poster of Oakes’s smiling face in the window. “Wait, this is that dude on TV?” he said. “He’s running for mayor.”
“Borough president.”
“Same shit,” Enoch said. “You’d think he’d have a bigger office.”
A prowl car cruised the intersection ahead. Pepper got out and stared at the cops as they moved down 135th, which Carney realized was the right move if you wanted to “act naturally.”
Enoch grabbed his bag. “He ain’t coming back?”
Carney shook his head. Elizabeth had told him that the Women for Oakes gang was meeting the candidate at a midtown fundraiser, liberal white-lady group. It was ten o’clock, and the event was likely breaking up, but he didn’t count on Oakes returning tonight.
Enoch picked the front-door lock so swiftly he might have used a key. He and Pepper slipped fluidly inside. Carney lost the men in the darkness. Light from the street guided them. He was sure they were in the back office by now.
Oakes wouldn’t be back—too much dirty work to do around town. From Hickey’s stories, he was turning the city’s routine corruption into a fat, legendary score. A real jackpot. He didn’t think the boy had it in him.
Pierce’s inside dope on the fire epidemic was news to Carney, but his explanation of the borough president’s powers was no surprise: Of course it works like that. There are always secret rackets underway that you know nothing about, even as they run your life. One racket brought mayhem, like the scams and rip-offs steering the city into decline, and another invisible racket held everything up so things didn’t completely go to hell, like schist. They battled each other, they took turns at the wheel—bottom line, the world was a mess.
What was Carney going to tell Elizabeth about his day with Pepper? He’d stolen a moment earlier to call home and tell John he’d be out, but their weekend guest’s behavior required more explanation. He gets beat up, is laid up, then he’s out of bed and out all day with her husband. She knew Pepper was shady; he was Big Mike’s running buddy. She’d never said anything. It was harder to keep your tongue still when “whatever he’s into” is dropped on your doorstep. Elizabeth will poke at Carney, for sure. Like this gem from Saturday night:
“What do you do at that bar you guys go to?”
“Drink beer.”
“Yeah?”
“Watch a game.”
“Hmm.” Insinuating. Not insinuating.
A trio of young ladies made their way up Seventh on the way to a night spot. They stalled before the campaign office, laughing over a joke, grabbing on to one another for support. Carney shrank in the front seat until they resumed and rounded the corner.
If Oakes suffered a misfortune and Pepper’s name came up, that was harder to manage. For all of Carney’s resentments, the campaign was important to Elizabeth, and so was Oakes. He put on a good show; she believed in her friend and the better city he promised. Oakes hadn’t been involved with the fire that hurt Albert, but he’d engineered plenty of others, and a host of other crooked stuff. It’s how he was taught. Carney thought of the portraits on the walls of the club, that crooked old crew of Dumas Founding Fathers who grabbed all they could and then tutored their sons. The sons put their daddies’ faces on canvas and hung them in the club to remind themselves, the way white men slapped the names of their own master crooks onto street signs. Of course Dale was going to hand off Seneca to his nephews after Elizabeth’s hard work—there’s a code of how to keep running things, and they stick to it.