How will she react if she discovers Pepper is involved? She gets on to Pepper, she’s on to Carney. No explanation would suffice.
It was too late. He was in too deep.
He was here tonight because a boy he didn’t know was caught in a fire, and a spark had caught Carney’s sleeve. To avenge—who? The boy? To punish bad men? Which ones—there were too many to count. The city was burning. It was burning not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it. Every night you heard the sirens. Pierce blamed years of misguided policy, but Carney rejected that narrow diagnosis. From what he understood about human beings, today’s messes and cruelties were the latest version of the old ones. Same flaws, different face. All of it passed down.
It was in Carney, too. In his words and deeds, in a thousand tiny moments, his father had provided lessons in how to be in the world, and Carney had taken notes without knowing it. Or he knew it but didn’t accept it. His father was a crook and he was a crook. When Mike Carney died, Ray Carney inherited his old Ford truck. It got around decently and helped with deliveries and pickups those early years with the store. More significant—his father had stashed thirty grand in the spare tire. His bank, containing one big score or what he put away over time from hijackings, heists, muscle work, stickups, and the occasional torch job. Carney had used the cash to open the store.
Fire money. Carney built his business on his smarts, his industry, his refusal to fail. Fire money was in there, too.
Pepper opened the passenger door, startling him. He carried a big black garbage bag.
Enoch got in the back. “Wheelman’s supposed to keep the car running.”
“That was quick,” Carney said.
“Enoch does his job,” Pepper said. Carney and Enoch appreciated this as Pepper’s highest compliment.
They were on Broadway headed downtown when Carney asked about the bag. Did Pepper swipe the petty cash on his way out? There was more than a ledger in there.
“When I figure it out I’ll let you know,” Pepper said.
Enoch chuckled.
What was he doing? Carney pulled over on 122nd next to a fire hydrant and got out. Left the keys in the ignition.
He lived in the other direction.
* * *
***
The next morning was a Tuesday, but Carney was going to pretend that it was a normal Monday and that Pepper’s latest tour of his dark world hadn’t happened. He fell asleep enumerating the things he’d accomplish at the office and woke up eager and committed. Carney had initiated a series of events, but the old crook had assumed responsibility, is the way he saw it. The impulse—to hold someone accountable for once in this miserable city—had been laudable. It was time to step away. The boy was on the mend. Yesterday Carney had been an accomplice. Today he was a salesman of fine furniture and home decorations, a card-carrying member of the 125th Street Business Association, and this year’s sponsor of the Convent All-Stars, a Little League team of negligible ability and less distinction. He was going to act like it.
A rich blue sky had moved in after the evicted clouds. Rusty had already opened the store when Carney arrived. He heard Carney and waved and tucked in his shirt. Rusty offered to close more often and was usually the first one in lately. Trying to avoid the family, Carney gathered. Beatrice hadn’t visited the store in a long time, kids neither. He’d read an article about white churches hosting weekend trips where battling couples work things out with a priest, get shit off their chests and whatnot. Was that a white-church thing and not a black-church thing? He and Rusty were overdue for a meal at any rate. Maybe that new seafood place on Broadway.
Marie popped her head into his office as he sat down to review the ad material from the Amsterdam News. “You get what you needed done?” she asked. He nodded. Carney hadn’t explained yesterday’s absence apart from a cryptic “I have some stuff on my plate.”
In the old days, Marie wouldn’t have referred to such an irregularity. She never commented on the odd things she encountered in a typical day at Carney’s Furniture, whether it was a cryptic message from Pepper about a hijacking or a wild-eyed visitor clutching a leather satchel and declaring, “I got to talk to the Big Man about something.” Or Detective Munson’s weekly envelope pickup.
Marie had blossomed since Rodney left her. “Some ladies, their husband runs out on them, they give up,” as Larry unfortunately put it one day. Her vivacious turn made Carney realize how much of her good cheer all those years had been an act; the real thing, the real Marie, was twice as compelling. He loved to look up from some horror on his desk to catch a customer’s face after she squared them away—“No problem, sometimes the bank makes a mistake, it happened to me last week”—and see their gratitude that someone in their wretched day took the time to be kind. Marie ran the store’s day-to-day and shepherded the rentals with dedication, but at six on the dot she was out the door to get home to Bonnie. She was dating an industrial plumber named Dennis she’d met during her church’s toy drive. They played in a bowling league apparently; Carney tuned out when she talked about it.
Carney said, “All taken care of.”
Marie said, “Good.”
Weekday mornings were slow. An orchestra tuning up, hitting stray notes, getting some blood in the joints. Rusty attended to the few customers. Carney arranged the ad templates on his desk so they resembled panes, scenes in a stained-glass window. Lady Liberty summoning immigrants hither. The Founding Fathers huddling around the Declaration like it was a Tijuana Bible. The musician trio from The Spirit of ’76 slogging through bullets and blood. It shouldn’t be this difficult—he had twenty years of slogans and sales come-ons to repurpose—but he found it impossible to play along like everyone else. To pretend that what they meant by freedom was the same thing he meant. As ever, he didn’t fit the templates.
Two hundred years. A hunk of rock had more history.
Robert showed up five minutes early. The boy was always a few minutes early, which Carney took as a sign of fine character. That, and his interest in sales. One slow day last week Larry was bitching about “rainy-day commissions” and Robert asked how commissions work. Carney launched into the philosophy of revenue sharing, salary-commission compensation arrangements, the ramifications of the court case Martini Shoes v. Carson. The boy yawned only once.
With his new red polo shirt tucked into his Levi’s, the boy looked like a Junior Sales Associate. Robert told him that yesterday Marie had started him on the files downstairs. Should he continue? Carney said, “Sure,” and opened the trapdoor to the basement.
“I like it because it’s cool down there,” the boy said. He descended the wooden steps.
Marie knocked on Carney’s open door. She asked if he got her message about the boy upstairs. “You want to send that card you’ve been talking about?”
He was about to say “Yes,” when the first firebomb exploded.
SEVEN
The glass shattered on the birch Egon coffee table and the wick ignited the burst of gasoline. Last week Carney had rearranged the showroom, swapping out the DeMarco leather sofa—less inviting in summer months—so that the new Egon sectional, upholstered in a dark mustard cotton-acrylic blend, stood in complement to the low, squat coffee table. It had been an elegant display. The cotton blend went up like that, as did the Modern Arabia rug beneath it, and the thick True America curtains on the wall, which Rusty had forced Carney to install “to make a real living room scene.” The flames poured up the drapes and the wall and spilled along the ceiling like a backward waterfall.