“Tough break,” Pepper said when Carney slid into the passenger seat. He’d been buying insoles for his tennis shoes and the drugstore clerks were talking about a fire down the street. “I got a feeling.”
Carney didn’t speak.
“Tough break,” Pepper said again, clearing his throat. Gruff sympathy.
Carney’s mind went somewhere.
Pepper said, “You’re in shock.”
“Yeah.”
He told him that Reece had called the bar. Reece wanted to meet. Both of them. “He said next time, it won’t be your store.”
Carney made his hands into fists on his lap. “How’d they put me with you?”
“All types of hustlers and losers in there,” Pepper said. Meaning Donegal’s. “Reece asks after me, I’ve been getting messages at the bar. Anybody hangs out there, they know we associate.”
And when Oakes hears Carney’s name, he knows it’s no coincidence.
“He wants what I took from the safe, and he wants us to bring it to that club of yours.”
“What?”
Pepper shrugged. “Tonight after hours.” The old crook started up the Buick. He had an idea to check in on their guest at the biscuit company, see if he had any insight as to what they were walking into. “You bring him food?”
“Who?”
“The guy.”
“Before or after my store burned down?”
“Slipped my mind, too. Thought maybe you got it.”
“I did not.”
Pepper rubbed his jaw wearily. He pulled over and ducked into a bodega. He returned with a paper bag full of candy bars and pork rinds.
Carney felt bad that neither he nor Pepper had remembered to leave the lights on at the biscuit factory. At the scrape of the security gate, Hickey yelped for help. The bagman was weeping when they entered the reception room. “I heard things moving,” he said. Snot ran down over his lips. If the bagman had any complaints about the menu, he did not share them.
Pepper told Hickey if he was helpful, he’d be out tomorrow.
This struck Hickey as a reasonable proposition. “That was Leon,” he said, in regards to the firebombing. Reece had used him for a similar play last winter on one of the Puerto Rican crews, pool-hall surprise. “Like I said, Leon likes his work. Broad daylight, middle of 125th Street—that’s like psycho pyro Christmas.”
Carney said, “Who’s going to be at the club?”
Pepper said to him, “You’re waking up.”
“Reece likes that joint, acting like he’s some upper-crust nigger. Which is why Oakes takes him there.” Reece grew up in the Frederick Douglass Houses on Amsterdam, Hickey said. His position in Notch Walker’s organization elevated him to neighborhood swell: “I’m the biggest thing to come out of that place.” Until a dude he grew up with, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, got cast in Cooley High and Welcome Back, Kotter, with his face on magazines and lunch boxes. Took him down a peg. “I hate that goddamn Kotter. Everywhere I look I see him.”
The Dumas Club subscribed to BusinessWeek and Black Enterprise, Carney thought. Reece was not likely to be reminded of his friend’s success inside its walls.
“Late night when it’s closed, they talk business,” Hickey said. “Smoke those Cuban cigars.” They brought Hickey along once, to show off. “Nice place.”
“Yes it is,” Carney said. “I asked, who’ll be there.”
It will be Reece, Oakes, and one of Reece’s boys. Clarence or Bollinger, his muscle. Not much going on upstairs, but loyal and sadistic, qualities not to be underestimated. Hickey said, “Notch doesn’t know about this side business with Oakes, so Reece has to keep it close.”
“What would Notch do if he got wind of it?”
“He would not be happy,” Hickey said. “Everything above 110th Street, that’s his, way he sees it. Gotta cut him in. And he ain’t getting his cut of the fire business.”
Carney gathered that initiative and independence were not management qualities Notch Walker valued. He knew Notch. The gangster sent a flunky by the store two or three times a year with stones and Carney liquidated them, usually through Green. High-quality stuff. Would Notch interpret someone messing with a lieutenant like Reece as messing with him, too? Punish everyone for bucking his authority, including those who exposed it—sure. Carney’s arrangement with Notch wouldn’t save him. There’s always another fence.
Notch—and the Black Liberation Army general Malik Jamal—had taken care of Munson. Carney had set up the detective. Was there a way to put the mobster in play again? He’d never told Pepper about that night—it had been too nightmarish to dwell on. He’d gotten lucky. Judging from today, his luck had run out.
Pepper mentioned to Hickey that they’d broken into Oakes’s safe last night, and that’s why Reece wanted the meet.
“You niggers are crazy.”
Pepper stiffened, insulted. “That just hit you?”
“You don’t get it,” Hickey said. “These are heavy dudes—city hall, big money.”
“I get it,” Carney said. The more he sat with it, the more Oakes’s opportunities multiplied. It was like Oakes had opened a shoe store that got big and branched out and expanded until it was a department store. He was the Gimbels of Graft at this point. First Floor, Arson Payoffs, get off on Three for Redirected Development Funds. In the DA’s office he got envelopes from landlords and firebugs, plus a cut from the padded insurance payout, which he parleyed into brokering fires, since he knew all the players. At Homes 4 Harlem he lined his pockets with urban renewal money, handing out construction and management contracts while continuing the arson-brokering piece from his prosecutor days. As borough president, he could aim that firehouse of Albany money where he liked, but also have the juice to plot where new housing goes in the future, which run-down lots and tracts will be fancy new developments years from now, whether ravaged by arson or accidental fires or bad luck. Shell company picks up the fucked-up property, loads up on insurance, and after the fire the city buys out the lot to redevelop. That’s a lot of envelopes if you got your hand out at every step.
If you know what the future holds, what it will look like, you can buy it cheap today. What was the motto of Van Wyck Realty? Building the Future. Van Wyck bought up property next to hotspots-to-be, like Lincoln Center and the World Trade. Men in city hall determined where those projects happened before the Van Wycks even got wind. If Oakes was doing half this shit, he was raking it in. Top Floor, get out here for Crazy Power Broker Schemes and Home Appliances, careful on the way out.
Hickey said, “You’re not going to tell Reece I said anything?”
Carney looked at Pepper: Time to go. Pepper nodded. When they got to the door to the street, Carney said, “See you tomorrow,” and turned off the light. Hickey screamed in the darkness.
It occurred to Carney that if things went sideways and they didn’t come back, Hickey was in for a rough time. If things went sideways, they all were.
EIGHT
320 West 120th Street, the home of the Dumas Club, was built in 1898 by Mortimer Bacall, a German immigrant who made his fortune in patent medicines. His most popular tonic was advertised under many names, the most well known of which was Dr. Abraham’s Pills, which purported to cure “city ailments” caused by urban living, the “noxious air,” “insalubrious plumbing,” and “excessive proximity of one’s neighbors.” The modern city was a new animal requiring new remedies. Bacall possessed the dexterity to invent both the infirmity and the cure.