“In flagrante, out flagrante, you’re the boss.” Zippo emphasized his superiority to the assignment. “When I was younger, I was more ‘fine art,’ if you know what I mean.” Certainly not the first Nightbirds customer to wax over the promise of bygone days, and not the last. “I wanted to be one of the great chroniclers,” he said, “like Van Der Zee. Carl Van Vechten. Harlem life, Harlem people. But my luck has always been rotten. You know that. Any chance I get, I piss it away. Now it’s tits. And people pretending to be dead.”

“I think you’ll like the money,” Carney said.

“It’s not the money,” Zippo said. He scraped the coaster detritus into his hand and asked when it was going down. They did a deal for the photography and the processing.

Now the job had snuck up on them, without warning. Five o’clock. The phone number on the business card he gave Carney was out of service. On the back, Zippo had penciled in an address. He took a taxi.

Photography by Andre was located on 125th and Fifth, above a flower store. The stairwell creaked in such a way that if it collapsed, no one could say there’d been no warning. Carney knocked on the studio’s door and a nervous middle-aged woman rushed past, her face turned so he couldn’t identify her.

The studio was one big room, with a ratty couch and chairs by the door, and then the shooting space with lights on stands, a reflector, an umbrella. Toward the back, assorted props and illustrated backdrops leaned against one another. A beach scene of blue skies and blue water half covered a library backdrop of bookshelves crammed with leather volumes.

Zippo was unfazed by Carney’s presence. A black cat ran to his feet and he picked it up and held it to his chest. “Just finished,” Zippo said. “Little lady’s husband is in Germany on an air force base and asked her to send some photos to remember her by.”

“Have you been smoking that stuff?”

“She was so uptight, I thought it’d loosen her up,” Zippo said. “And it did! To give oneself to the camera, it’s a complicated dance. Society burdens us with these hang-ups—”

“It’s tonight,” Carney said. “It’s on for tonight.”

Zippo nodded solemnly. “I got to lock up. This place ain’t mine, its Andre’s. That’s why his name is on everything.”

Carney and Zippo walked four blocks to the lot where Carney kept his truck. He got a feeling it was a pickup-truck night, a try-to-outrun-bad-luck night. Might he need the truck bed? Carney didn’t like the notion of dumping bodies in the back of his truck, deceased or not deceased or any which way. Once is bad luck; twice and it looks like you’re getting accustomed.

The photographer lugged a big vinyl bag over his shoulder. It had already been packed when Carney showed up, even though Zippo couldn’t have known it’d go down tonight.

“Oh, I had a feeling,” he explained. “Half my art is trusting my instincts.”

Zippo fiddled with the radio and found a beatnik DJ wandering the lower bands, mumbling desultorily. They parked across the street from Miss Laura’s apartment, where Carney could see her window from the driver’s seat. The open curtains meant she was alone, according to their signal. He told Zippo to stay put and walked over to Amsterdam for a pay phone.

“He says he’s going to try to come over,” Miss Laura told him.

“Try? He is or he isn’t.”

“That’s it. He said he had a meeting.”

He updated Zippo when he got back to the truck.

“Waiting,” Zippo said, “always waiting. I do work sometimes for this white divorce lawyer—Milton O’Neil? He’s on all those matchbooks? The job is to catch them in the act. There’s a lot of waiting.”

“Zippo.”

“Yeah?”

“You still light fires?”

Zippo’s most famous fire was the one that consumed the empty lot on St. Nicholas. Some rags in the garbage caught, it all went up, and the whole neighborhood came out to watch the firemen do their thing. The primitive glow of the fire and the hypnotic fire-truck lights capered across the abandoned buildings and vacant faces and rendered them beautiful. Zippo was fourteen, fifteen. His mother’s uncle lived in Riverdale and had money from a patent, those toothbrush mounts set into everybody’s bathroom tile above the sink. A real immigrant-makes-good story. He paid for Zippo’s treatment.

“I lit fires because I didn’t know back then it was enough to see it in my head,” Zippo said. “I didn’t have to do it. That’s why people dig my boudoir photographs. Seeing it can be the same thing as doing it.”

“That’s what you’ve learned?” His patronizing tone, usually reserved for Freddie, cast Zippo as a lost soul who needed to get wise.

“I wasn’t going to bring it up,” Zippo said, “since it’s none of my business, but since you’re asking me shit that’s none of your business—what happened to your eye? Your eye is all fucked up. You look like shit.”

“I got punched in the face,” Carney said.

“Oh, that happens to me all the time,” Zippo said.

At a quarter past eight, Wilfred Duke, wearing a light brown pinstripe suit and whistling happily, rang the buzzer to the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent. Her thin hands drew the curtains shut.

The furniture salesman and the photographer waited. It was the first night Carney had skipped the first sleep since June. In the coming days, he tried to determine when the Duke job actually got underway. Did it begin with the arrest of the drug dealer, that endgame maneuver? With the return of dorvay, and Carney’s nocturnal scheming all those summer nights, or the day the banker committed an offense that called for payback? Or had it been summoned from their natures, deep in their makeup? Duke’s corruption. The Carney clan’s worship of grudges. If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.

“Let’s go,” Carney said. He shoved Zippo. The man was asleep.

Zippo looked up at her window and the curtains thrown wide. “I had a dream I was sitting in a truck,” he said.

Miss Laura buzzed them in. As he rounded the landing to the second floor, Carney thought: She killed him. Duke’s lying on that four-poster bed with his brains spilling out and now he and Zippo have to help her cover it up. If she hasn’t already called the cops and split out the back and left them holding the bag. It had been her setup all along, not his.

Carney was relieved to see Wilfred Duke on the shiny red sheets, arms spread wide, mouth open and chest quietly rising and falling. He was still dressed in his pinstripe suit with his wing tips on, though his shiny yellow tie was wide, as if his head were being slipped into a noose. He appeared to smile. Miss Laura had her arms crossed, her gaze fixed on the banker. She took a sip from her can of Rheingold.

“Okay,” Zippo said. He rubbed his hands together. “It’s a graveyard scene? That’s not really a burying suit.”

“Enough with the cemetery stuff,” Carney said. “I was clear about that. We have to pose him, though.”

“This fucker,” Miss Laura said. The knockout drops were good for a couple of hours. “I gave him a double dose,” she said. “To be sure.”

“You don’t want to poison him.”

“He’s breathing, ain’t he?”

“You heard of Weegee?” Zippo said. “You’ve seen his stuff even if you don’t know his name. He did crime-scene—”

“Zippo, can you help me with this leg?”

Miss Laura leaned against the fireplace, contemplating Duke and tapping ash on the Heriz rug.

Carney, weeks before, had suggested they confine themselves to a few shots of Duke in bed with his arms around a suggestively dressed Miss Laura. A few scandalous poses would suffice. Enough to shame and disgrace, excommunicate him from a segment of Harlem society. Lose some business. Nothing too distasteful. She agreed. Then she thought upon it.

“That’s not who he is,” she told Carney in their next meeting. “I think we should show him as he really is.”

“What’s that?”

“It should be a bunch of pictures showing different sides of him, like in Screenland when they have Montgomery Clift for pages and pages in different scenes.”

“We’ll be pressed for time,” Carney said.

“Different scenes and props, I think.”

“That’s—”

“That’s how we’re doing it,” Miss Laura said. “After all this thinking you put into it? This is what you want,” and she took charge of the choreography, the way the wheelman attends to the getaway, and the vault is the lock man’s remit.

It was time to get to business. Miss Laura stubbed out her cigarette. “You ready?”

“Can I put a record on?” Zippo asked. She waved her beer can toward the Zenith RecordMaster. He dropped the needle on Mingus Ah Um.

Zippo opened his bag of equipment. Laura went for hers.

The Burlington Hall company out of Worcester, Massachusetts, had been in the furniture business since the mid-eighteenth century and was revered the world over for its peerless craftsmanship and exquisite details. It’s said that Prince Afonso of Portugal had one of their canopy beds hauled five hundred miles through swamps and across ravines, over mountains, to his vacation residence on the Amazon, so that his heir would be conceived on the most luxurious bed in one of the world’s sacred places. His wife was barren it turned out, but the prince and his wife enjoyed the most magnificent slumbers of their short lives. If Francis Burlington, the founder of the company, could see the array of erotic paraphernalia that Miss Laura stored in their 1958 lacquered armoire, with its regal silhouette and masterful cabinetwork, he would’ve been appalled.

Or pleasantly delighted. As a salesman, Carney knew better than to make assumptions about a stranger’s tastes. He tried not to speculate what the objects were used for, or where. They hinted at a domain beyond the missionary, off his map. He removed Duke’s shoes as Zippo worried over his lenses and camera, and Laura plotted the order of events.

“Where’s that from?” Zippo asked. “I saw something like it in Crispus Catalog.”

“It’s from France,” Miss Laura said.

Pop. The flashbulb’s combustion was an unsettling crunch, the sound of a monster splintering bones. Miss Laura and Zippo’s mundane conversation—Hold his head up, Can you lift that leg—maddened Carney. Was this his normal world now? He pressed the lump under his eye until it hurt.

Pop. Carney traced the line between the Dumas reception early in the summer and this evening of lewd payback. The petty thieves, drunk burglars, and nutjob criminals he’d transacted with since he started selling the odd TV and gently used lamp were no preparation for his ragtag crew tonight. Is this what revenge looked like, the grotesque choreography underway in Miss Laura’s pad? Did it feel like revenge? It did not feel like revenge to him.

Zippo said, “He’s actually very photogenic.”

Pop. Miss Laura’s skin glowed. Now, she was what revenge looked like: fierce and full of purpose, alien to mercy. Humiliation: that’s the word Elizabeth had used to describe Carney’s Dumas rejection. Duke could do what he wanted because he held the money. Foreclose on your property, sit on your business loan, take your envelope and tell you to go fuck yourself.

Pop. That’s how the whole damn country worked, but they had to change the pitch for the Harlem market, and that’s how Duke came to be. The little man was the white system hidden behind a black mask. Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.

“What I really want to get into,” Zippo said, “is movies.”

Carney ducked out after ten minutes and hung around in the hallway. When Zippo called him inside, the banker was asleep under blue satin sheets, the armoire shut and latched. Miss Laura had changed into blue jeans and a dark blue gingham shirt. A big red suitcase lay at her feet. Cheap Brucie had introduced her to Duke. When the banker woke, he’d complain to management. She surveyed the apartment and said, “This shit is done.”

Zippo finished packing his equipment. “I’ll make some nice, pretty prints,” he said. “And then bring them to the guy at the newspaper.”

“We’ll start there. See what happens.”

“And leave him up here like that?” Zippo asked.

Miss Laura made a dismissive noise.

“He can sleep it off like we discussed,” Carney said. “Sometimes you wake up and sleep has taken you to the darndest places.”

Zippo jetted off once the trio hit the street, rounding the corner to 142nd, softly crooning. “My truck’s over there,” Carney said. He reached for the suitcase but Miss Laura rebuffed him. She dropped it in the truck bed and clambered into the passenger seat.

Carney started up the truck and gave one last look at the apartment, at the window with curtains wide. Damn. We should have put a little Napoleon hat on him.