“A week of what?”
Green arched his eyebrows. It was odd that Carney didn’t know their provenance, or that he pretended not to. Green opened the dry bar’s cabinet—a black Maison Jansen rip-off with chrome fixtures—and unlocked the compartment at its base. He withdrew a folder.
They’d updated the format for police bulletins since Carney stepped away. It was easier on the eyes these days. The inventory from last week’s armed robbery of J. M. Benson Fine Jewelry on Third Avenue matched Carney’s mental inventory of Munson’s goods. The suspects were four Negro men, ages twenty to thirty, average height. Taking into account inflation for the insurance, Carney had nailed his estimate of the stones’ value.
Green reiterated that Carney should call him the next time he was looking to partner, but the Benson haul was impossible. “Word is, it’s the Black Liberation Army,” he said. “They’ve been knocking over banks the last few months. Doing robberies. Between that and the policemen shootings, they’re too hot.”
Of course. Black hoods didn’t take down East Side jewelry stores in the middle of the day. Only crazy radicals and nutjob revolutionaries pulled shit like that. Green had put his back to his home borough, but the way he said “knocking over banks” struck a Brooklyn spark.
Green said, “Moskowitz said you severed your business relationship over what he called ‘high visibility merchandise.’ I apologize that we find ourselves in similar circumstances.”
“He gave me up.”
“Not very collegial,” he said, with evident disgust. “I asked him who was the most honest man he worked with, and he said you.”
“Right.”
“He died last year. Fell over in his living room like that.”
“Sounds quick.” Moskowitz had sold him out to the men who killed his cousin. Occasionally Carney had imagined the shape of his revenge, but let it go once he retired. Step away entirely or you haven’t stepped away at all.
Carney packed up the stones.
* * *
***
Out on the street, Carney decided to walk some blocks before looking for a cab. Sweet June nights like this, before the summer crashed down, were rare in the city, like honest mayors and playgrounds free of nodding junkies and broken bottles.
If Munson had to pay off his bookie tonight, it wasn’t going to be with the Benson haul. The BLA—no wonder the detective was strung out. Did Munson contract them to pull the job? Carney wouldn’t put it past him to work with cop killers, if there was money in it. But with every cop in the five boroughs looking for them? More likely he’d ripped them off. Perhaps killed them as well. There was no telling what the white man was into these days.
What Carney already knew about this mess was dangerous enough. This was his stop, time to get out. Return to 157th, give Munson back his diamonds, and call it a day. He took Eighty-third west, stopping at a phone booth to tell the kids he’d be back by ten.
Tomorrow Elizabeth was home and this brief foray into his former occupation would be behind him. She’d been gone twelve days. One night in April they were lying on the couch watching the news and she said, “Isn’t it odd I send people places I’ve never been?”
Elizabeth dispatched her clients all over the globe yet rarely strayed beyond the city limits. The family had vacationed in San Juan and Montego Bay, but that was it. The agency was practically hers now, since the founder, Dale Baker, had stepped away from the day-to-day. She had changed the company’s name from Black Star, figuring that the nationalist ring might put off their more conservative customers. As Seneca Travel & Tour prospered and her responsibilities increased, Elizabeth continued to skip the junkets and conventions, and had never set foot in their satellite offices in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago. When Carney urged her to reconsider some invitation, she shook her head. “You know me,” she said.
Part of it was traveling alone as a woman, a black woman. She arranged safe and hospitable itineraries for her clients despite her distaste for some of the destinations. “You won’t find my ass in Birmingham for a million dollars, those redneck motherfuckers.” Part of it was not wanting to leave May and John, especially when they were younger.
Then her mother Alma died. Elizabeth missed her. Carney did not. Alma had been underfoot for most of their marriage, carping about his unworthiness, insulting the store, his speech, the colorful Carney family history. Alma embodied the traditional Strivers’ Row qualities of propriety, rectitude, and gentility. Her son-in-law did not. Alexander Oakes, the fine young man who grew up with Elizabeth and now worked at city hall—now there was a worthy match for her daughter.
Carney had read an article in a magazine about the average human lifespan and figured he could endure his in-laws’ disapproval. Then Elizabeth’s parents had been forced to sell their townhouse, the home that Elizabeth had grown up in, due to a financial reversal. Carney moved into the Row a few years later. It was plain to Alma: Not content just to steal her daughter, her street nigger son-in-law had moved on to grand larceny and stolen her whole neighborhood.
Each time she came over she relived the trauma of this robbery. “It’s changed so much,” she’d grumble as she hung up her aging fur coat, with its worn hem and loose pelt. The four rows of townhouses had been a dignified oasis, protected from Harlem’s shifts in fortune. Now the local deterioration had finally jumped the ave. The younger generation divided the houses they’d grown up in into three or four apartments, hungry landlords chopped up grand residences into single-room occupancies for winos and bums. Cross Seventh Ave and there were “druggie houses,” as Alma called them, between torched tenements, and heroin dealers staked out the corners. One Christmas Eve a purse snatcher had knocked her to the pavement and broken her hip. “I barely recognize it these days.”
After Alma’s heart attack, Elizabeth tucked herself snug into her mourning. Carney didn’t know how to comfort her. He tried. Carney’s own mother had died when he was young and he had lacked the equipment to properly say goodbye. When his father passed it was a blessing; he experienced a new freedom, an alleviation of symptoms. He could only make observations on the alien process of his wife’s grief.
Elizabeth threw herself into work, returned spent, then installed herself on the parlor sofa in quiet misery until she drifted off. She had become an accomplished cusser as she entered middle age, but no longer had the energy for invective. In other ways she was not diminished at all. May and John knew her as firm and patient; Elizabeth’s new, short fuse startled them. Mother and daughter butted heads constantly, especially when one of them recognized something of themselves in the other and felt compelled to squash it.
Elizabeth proposed the work trip that spring. The itinerary: a survey of the new hotels opening in Miami, then quick stops in Houston and Chicago to spend time with ST&T staff, capped by a ride home on the Lake Shore Limited, or whatever Amtrak was calling it now. She had booked tens of thousands of people on those long train rides but had never taken one herself. “It will be an adventure,” she said.
He wondered if the trip would transport her past this sad patch. Twelve days away from home. He was no traveler, either—five days was the longest he’d ever been out of New York City. Even the corner of Eighty-third and Third was a foreign land, now that he stopped to look. The window displays were less cramped, humbly arranged, as if to spare genteel sensibilities. The lettering on the signs for the florist, the stationery store, the dry cleaner’s was classy and confident. You walk in, you’re not in for some shabby treatment. It was like the sign makers had segregated the nice letters. His own sign was due for an update. He took notes.