Rusty gave Carney a desperate hug, careful not to dislodge the file drawer and the basket. “Yeah, boss,” Rusty said. He had stepped up in Carney’s absence. Marie had gone home to be with Bonnie; she was rattled, and when the events sank in she started weeping. Robert had called his mother and she took him home. It’d be a couple of days before the fire department let anyone in the building. The inspectors had to poke around, make sure the buildings were sound.
Everybody was safe. Time slowed down. Mrs. Garcia from the bakery up the street embraced him. He barely knew her. “I’m so sorry,” she said, eyes red. Yes—a shopkeeper understood the loss the way normal people couldn’t. You run your own business, you understand what it is to build it, and to lose it. She tried to stick a bag of muffins in his hand. His hands were full.
Rusty took the muffins and pointed up Morningside.
Elizabeth waited up the ave, sitting on the back steps of St. Joseph’s. Ironically, the church had its front door on 125th, and a Morningside entrance as well, just like the store. The second entrance had been bricked up—perhaps the preachers had their own nighttime sideline at some point—but three steps remained. Elizabeth saw him and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and waited for him to come to her.
It didn’t hit him until he sat on the steps. He set down his office salvage. Down the street he saw his store from that new angle, and it was as if the building belonged to someone else. The fire someone else’s tragedy, the misfortune of a stranger he had no connection to. In the instant that the store existed outside of him, an alien object, he felt it: run over by this express of grief that left him mangled in the dark. He had worked so hard—no one knew how difficult it had been. There had been no one, no witnesses, until the hard part was done. You’ve come a long way. Working hour upon hour, enduring those waves of setbacks and reversals, sweating and suffering under the eyes of that cruel and dispassionate boss: The City. It had been him against the City for so long, tussling, until he and it finally came to an arrangement: You don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you. His own Declaration of Independence. Or so he thought. The City had reneged. The City had taken his store to add to its heap of spent tenements, burned-out townhouses, craters, and rubble-strewn lots. Another broken address on an island full of them.
They sobbed together, Carney and Elizabeth, for as long as the street let them get away with it, entwined.
“Rusty said everybody was safe,” she said.
“Yeah,” Carney said.
May and John had come when he was at the precinct. She told them they’d see him at home. He thanked her.
“He threw Molotov cocktails?”
“He did.”
“Because of your other business.”
“Yes.” It had never occurred to him to come clean. She said it, asked him straight-out, and there he was saying, Yes.
“You sell stuff that falls off a truck sometimes,” she said. “The rugs. I know that. That’s how people do it. Daddy always used to brag about getting a deal on stuff that fell off a truck. But this isn’t that, is it?”
Carney asked her how she knew about the rugs and she said she’d known for years. Back at their first apartment, he was on the phone talking to someone about “hot rugs” and she was on the couch. He thought she was asleep, but she was not.
Rugs. He didn’t remember the conversation but no matter. Elizabeth thought his rugs were hot: fine. Some had been, in the old days, before he stepped up his fencing sideline. He used to sell appliances that Freddie had ripped off—she knew those were hot, Freddie being Freddie. Uptown rules—rules get bent in the name of survival. She was okay with that. When he had to duck out suddenly at nine P.M. to deal with a shady character, she let it pass. It wasn’t a woman, because he knew she would’ve castrated him in his sleep if he messed around. She assumed his hot merchandise was harmless, small-time stuff because her husband wasn’t built for anything heavy. For all her insight into him—which he cherished, which he was grateful for—the nature and scope of his criminal operation escaped her. The part of his character that made it possible was too foreign.
Rugs, then. “Maybe it’s the rugs,” Carney said. “I don’t know what happened. Harlem today—”
“People don’t do that. Just walk into a place and do that.” She took his hands. “Are you being safe? Are you keeping us safe?”
No. If they knew where he worked, they knew where he lived. It had been a long time since bad men threatened to steal his life from him, take Elizabeth and the kids from him. They’d taken his store today. If they’d wanted to go after him the other way, they would have. His family was safe tonight. Tomorrow?
Carney said, “It’s okay. Yes, some of the stuff in my store has fallen off a truck. You’re right, that’s how it works up here. Sometimes the guys who pick it up when it falls off a truck are not the most upstanding members, but this is—I don’t know what this is.”
“You all could have been killed,” she said. “Robert.” The kids. May and John weren’t working there this summer but they could have.
“There are quicker ways if you want—” He squeezed her hand. “They weren’t trying to hurt me.”
“They? So it is somebody you know.”
He shook his head.
“Somebody who knows Pepper?”
“I don’t know. But we’re safe now.”
* * *
***
At his urging, Elizabeth took a cab back to Strivers’ Row with the things he’d saved from the fire. Carney told Rusty he had to split downtown to deal with the insurance company—could he stick around in case something came up?
He turned the pay phone on 125th and Broadway into his temporary office. Had they hit Pepper, too? He lived over that funeral home. There was no answer at Pepper’s, but the funeral home picked up after the operator put him through, which meant it was not a pile of ash. Carney tried Donegal’s. Buford was on tonight, thank God. Pepper had run out, Buford said, but if you called, you were supposed to come uptown. “I don’t know—sounds heavy,” he said. It was worrisome that the bartender had departed from his standard indifference.
The walk uptown was a numb march. Every few blocks he slumped to the benches of the Broadway median, exhausted. He wanted to run back to the store, knock past the barricade and into the showroom. His office. What if the buildings are beyond saving? The fire inspector will deliver his report. Pepper was right. He’d come to think of himself as impervious. The apartment on 127th Street, the madness of Harlem, the white world and its quick, mean hands—he’d had to grow a concrete skin for a concrete city. Not concrete, something harder, like schist. But the fires had been drawing near. Every siren since the city started falling to pieces had been a countdown to the siren that was coming for him. Maybe the fires had been coming since his father first struck a match and threw it into a pool of kerosene on some unlucky tenement floor. It catches up with you.
Instead of going inside when he got to Donegal’s, he split for a bench to collect himself. The fire at the store leeched his energy. Some asshole kept honking. Carney turned to curse at the guy and saw Pepper in the Buick.