It was Linus’s, from the L.M.P.V.W. embossed on the leather. A gift from someone who’d once believed in his prospects. Carney popped the briefcase’s latch with the letter opener his downstairs neighbor had given him as a college graduation gift. Because she saw that he had no one to look out for him and pitied him, or because she believed in his prospects.

Inside the briefcase were some personal papers, miscellany of private importance—a Valentine’s Day card from one Louella Mather, a 1941 Yankees Double Play baseball card featuring Joe DiMaggio and Charley Keller—and the biggest cut emerald Carney had ever seen. The gem was set in a diamond-studded platinum necklace and flanked by six smaller, equally splendid emeralds on either side; held up by either end of the necklace, the center stone was the head of a gorgeous bird of prey, the smaller stones curving up like wings. Carney shut the briefcase and took a step back. When he’d joked that it contained strontium 90 he had not been far off; he had been bathed in ancient radiation.

His phone call from Aunt Millie Tuesday morning forced him to finally open it. He had slept poorly again. When Aunt Millie rang at six a.m., he had drifted off. They let it ring the first time. When Elizabeth answered the second time, Carney heard his aunt squawk from the other side of the bed: Her house had been ransacked. He dressed.

Aunt Millie had been sobbing; he recognized the puffy eyes from Pedro-related squabbles. But she had stopped and progressed on to Angry Millie, the Terror of 129th Street. As she told it, she got off her late shift at four a.m. and returned to shambles. “You know if I hadn’t been at work,” she said, “I’d have kicked that little nigger’s ass. Come in my house. Come in my house and make a mess like this.” Aunt Millie permitted a quick, reassuring hug, which made her flinch, for she did not want to be reassured. She wanted to fight.

Whoever had tossed the place had been thorough. They had slashed the cushions, pulled the dime novels off the living-room shelves, pried up the squeaky floorboard in the hallway to see if it contained secrets. The kitchen was a horror—every container bigger than a Campbell’s Soup can had been emptied and rooted through. Flour, beans, rice, and pickled pig’s feet made a repugnant mound on the old checkerboard kitchen tile. In the bedroom, Carney slid the dresser drawers back into place as Aunt Millie gathered up ungainly armfuls of clothes.

She could have kicked the ass of a druggie or the ne’er-do-well nephew of her upstairs neighbor—her mastery of her weapon of choice, the hairbrush, went unchallenged—but whoever had done this was not some two-bit crook. They had a purpose. They were completists. Looking for something in particular.

A rotten feeling reared up as they toured the mess; she beat it back. Aunt Millie struggled over what they might have taken. “Why would they do this?” She clutched Carney’s arm, whispered, “Do you think Freddie is mixed up in something again?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Carney said. “I haven’t heard anything.” His standard response now to all the interested parties, who increased by the hour, or so it seemed.

“Like father, like son,” Aunt Millie said. “Into the world somewhere.” Pedro was a rover. When Carney was young, Freddie’s father spent maybe a third of the year in New York City and the rest somewhere having his adventures. His own father, Carney gathered, had made a performance of being dependable and legit when he wooed Carney’s mother. Pedro had been a rolling stone when he met Millie and never made a show of being otherwise. Neither Aunt Millie nor his cousin had ever expressed any emotion over Pedro’s “travel,” and Carney had learned at a young age not to inquire about it. It was one of the few times his mother had scolded him. “Other people got their business, you got yours.”

Freddie idolized Pedro. You knew when he was in town because it was all Freddie talked about, and when he was down South, it was as if his father didn’t exist. On and off like a switch. Until Freddie became a teenager, and chasing girls became more important—or following Pedro’s ladies’-man ways became a means of worshipping the man. From Freddie’s dishevelment these days, it seemed women were no longer his foremost priority.

Aunt Millie picked up a table lamp and set it right. “At least you didn’t take Mike as an example,” she said.

Carney nodded. He made sure there was no one hiding under the bed or in the closet. “These druggies,” Carney said. “They have to get their sick kicks somehow.”

Gladys from next door appeared with a broom and Carney said he’d ask Marie to pitch in with the cleanup. His aunt and his secretary went to the movies occasionally, when Rock Hudson’s name was above the title. It wouldn’t be terrible to have Marie away from the office. Too many unexpected parties dropping in these days.

He went straight to the store, beeline to the safe. He had feared discovering packets of—what? heroin? reefer—in the briefcase. The emerald necklace was worse; drugs explained themselves. Freddie had stopped coming to Carney to fence jewelry or gold, and he’d never showed up with anything near that quality. Had he and Linus ripped off Linus’s family, taken the literal family jewels, as the cops insinuated? Or was that some separate beef between Linus and his relatives, and Freddie and his friend had ripped off some heavy players who were after payback? Even if Carney returned the briefcase to his cousin and told him to fuck off, he was still in somebody’s sight for being close to Freddie. It was too late: Carney was in.

Munson beckoned from the sidewalk.

Carney locked up the store. It was half past noon. From now on, Rusty and Marie were on paid leave from Carney’s Furniture; opening hours were whenever Carney felt it was safe to leave the front door open. By way of explanation, he blamed the lack of foot traffic after the riot and exaggerated the likelihood of another round of violence. “I’ll see you when things get back to normal,” he told his employees.

It relieved him more than he anticipated to have them safe.

The detective sat on the hood of his dark brown sedan, lighting a Winston with the smoldering end of the previous one. Carney hadn’t seen him in daylight in a long time. The cop was pale and puffier, threadbare from the mileage. His face maintained the record of his boozing, rouged and speckled by popped capillaries. Free meals from local merchants and shady clients had ruined his build.

He was in his customary carefree mood. “I figured you’d be calling,” Munson said. “Why don’t you ride along while I pick up the mail?”

The mail: his recent coinage about his envelope route. “Neither rain, nor sleet,” Munson said as Carney slid into the passenger seat. “Riots though, they’ll throw you off schedule.”

“We’re all in the same boat.”

“You don’t want people to think you have a forgetful nature. I got to collect before they think it’s their money and they spend it.” Munson tilted his head toward the furniture store. “You made it out okay.”

“Most of it was this way.” Meaning, east on 125th.

“Yeah, I was there.” He drove one block and parked outside a hole-in-the-wall newsstand Carney had never stepped in. Grant’s Newspaper & Tobacco, across from the Apollo. For years, the dingy red, white, and blue streamers across the storefront had snapped ferociously on winter-swept mornings, and hung limp on hot days like this.

“Buck Webb on vacation again?” Carney said.

“Yeah, gone fishing.” It was Carney’s standard joke: Where’s Buck? Since Munson’s shakedowns—one assumed—fell outside his official police duties, Carney rarely saw Munson’s partner. Buck was probably off tending to his own envelopes.

Munson said he’d be out in a sec and entered the tobacco store.

The marquee of the Apollo promised the Four Tops, but a big white canceled sign crossed the ticket window. Look at him, sitting in the front seat of a cop’s car. He wondered how many black boys Munson and his cronies had worked over and then tossed into the backseat on the way to the station house. Carney’s fingers slid on the vinyl: EZ wipe. Munson’s line of work was not the kind where you wanted fabric upholstery.

“You ever play in that game?” Munson said on his return.

Carney didn’t know what the cop was referring to.

“Grant—Grant’s son, now—has been hosting one of longest-running craps games in Harlem in the back. You never threw in?”

Carney rubbed his temple.

“One block away and you never got in on it?” Munson said. “No, you ain’t the kind. Grant’s kid told me he kept the game running the whole time of the riot. No one wanted to leave, and when they did, someone was always knocking, trying to get a piece. All hell breaking loose out here, back there business as usual.”

Carney bought his newspapers elsewhere; Grant’s run-down facade discouraged outsiders, as intended. A whole gambling operation back there—Freddie probably knew about it. The cop’s car had made Carney into a country bumpkin, like his own street didn’t belong to him.

Munson drove another block and stopped short of Lenox. The detective darted into Top Cat Dry Cleaning. The place had been there as long as Carney could remember. He’d never patronized this place, either; Mr. Sherman’s up the street was more welcoming. Perhaps he’d known Top Cat wasn’t legit in some way, in his bones, and he’d avoided it because of his solid-citizen side. To disavow the crooked inclinations of his nature.

Munson got back in the car and said, “He takes numbers for Bumpy Johnson.”

“You take your piece from Bumpy and leave him high and dry, too?” Carney said.

A man lurched toward Munson’s car as he exited a Checker cab. The detective honked. “I was waiting for you to say something like that,” Munson said. “Look, I fucking apologize. Take a gander at my Fucking Apology Face—it’s like Medusa, you only ever see it once.”

With that, the detective gave Carney his account of the riot days, as a prelude for why he failed to run interference with the homicide detectives.

“I knew shit was going to blow up,” Munson said, “the second I heard about it on the radio. Kid got shot? Heat wave like that? That ain’t a powder keg—it’s the munitions factory.” Munson was set to go on vacation—down to Rehoboth in Maryland with some buddies who came up with him on the force. One of them had an uncle who owned a bungalow off the beach. Word had it there were some local ladies who liked to have a drink now and then. “He said this one gal likes to dance in the altogether, does a whole show where she wears cha-cha heels and sings Patti Page songs.” Then the kid got shot and nobody was going nowhere.

The first two days, Munson ran a surveillance team that made the rounds of Negro groups—the churches, the NAACP—to get a handle on their response. CORE, of course, loud as they were these days. “Two of my men are college types, look like Jewish civil rights agitators, and the other two are young Negroes who walk around with copies of The Fire Next Time in their back pockets. You hear old-timers grumbling about the number of Negro cops, but who else is going to go inside? Some fat, red-faced Mick who hasn’t done a day’s work in years? Me? My guys take a seat and no one’s looking at them twice.” He paused. “I know you’re not political, that’s why I’m telling you.”

There were known activists and agitators who required a once-over. Downtown wanted to know if they were exploiting the situation, fanning the flames. Munson’s team attended the CORE protest at Wagner Middle School on Friday afternoon and popped up at the funeral home on Saturday afternoon, mixing with the crowd, identifying the players. Nodded their heads at the common sense from Black Muslims holding forth on a corner of 125th. Files were added to. Files were opened. “Had to make sure nobody was getting ideas.” Munson said his wife helped paint the protest signs. She taught art to first graders.

“The ideas, we already got,” Carney said. “Too late for that.”

Munson shrugged. “Harlem, Harlem, Harlem,” he said. He started the car. “Then Saturday night happened.” Once everything blew up on Saturday, Munson was in the trenches with everyone else, putting out flare-ups, rousting the troublemakers. “With one of those dumb helmets on my head so I don’t get my brains turned into scrambled eggs.”

Needless to say, it delayed mail service, the circulation of envelopes. Five days later things were still not back to normal, as Chief Murphy and his lieutenants hustled to prevent another round of protest and vandalism. If it had been a normal week, Munson would have heard about homicide detectives from Washington Heights coming down to the 28th to investigate a body. “Come into my house, you best say hello,” he said. “I would have talked to them first, informed my colleagues that you were a solid citizen. As one can plainly see from your furniture showroom. And I would have given you a heads-up.”

“I had an important meeting—they busted it up.”

“They had a Park Avenue corpse, what do you want? That’s the other part.” This time he parked outside Beautiful Cakes, half a block down 125th. The store was a cherished punch line of Elizabeth’s, as every demo plastic cake and confection in the window was adorned with dust and attended to by dead flies. Look farther into the gloom and the baker’s smoking a cigarette and cutting her nails.

Where’d you get this beautiful birthday cake?

Beautiful Cakes, of course!

Munson darted inside after bowing for a young woman steering a baby carriage. She had a prodigious ass. He let her pass, smiling, and winked at Carney.

Gibbs. Carney hadn’t heard from the man since the aborted meeting. The hotel switchboard took his messages, which went unanswered. Bella Fontaine headquarters in Omaha only offered that he was out of town on business. When Carney got back from Aunt Millie’s apartment, he rang up Wilson at All-American, to see if Gibbs had made it to their sales meeting. Carney had to endure some Condescending White Man humor about uptown mayhem. “Heard you had some weather the last few days…” Once that was out of the way, the midtown salesman offered no insight. “No, he didn’t mention anything. How’d it go? He’s a straight shooter, isn’t he?”

What was Carney going to tell Gibbs, anyway? The dead man was my cousin’s junkie partner, but it was an accidental OD—unless it wasn’t—and as you can see the foot traffic on 125th Street is quite impressive.

The white cop dallied longer in the bakery than he had in his previous stops. Carney remembered Pepper taking him on his hunt for Miami Joe, the fronts and hideouts the crook had exposed during their search for the double-crosser. That time, places Carney had never seen before were suddenly rendered visible, like caves uncovered by low tide, branching into dark purpose. They’d never not been there, offering a hidden route to the underworld. This tour with Munson on his rounds took Carney to places he saw every day, establishments on his doorstep, places he’d walked by ever since he was a kid, and exposed them as fronts. The doorways were entrances into different cities—no, different entrances into one vast, secret city. Ever close, adjacent to all you know, just underneath. If you know where to look.

Carney chuckled and shook his head. The way he phrased it, like he wasn’t a part of it. His own stores, if you knew the secret knock, were hip to the password, granted you entrance to that criminal world. You could never know what was going on with other people, but their private selves were never far away. The city was one teeming, miserable tenement and the wall between you and everybody else was thin enough to punch through.

Munson returned, burping and rapping his chest with his fist as if stricken with heartburn.

“Cakes,” Carney said. “Let me guess—it’s a whorehouse?”

Munson said, “You don’t want to know, Carney. Which reminds me of the other reason you’re on your own with Fitzgerald and Garrett.”

“A minute ago you were sorry and now I’m on my own?”

“You read the paper today?”

“What makes you think we read the same papers?”

Munson reached back for the Tribune. He flipped to page 14 and gave it to Carney.

Police are investigating the death of Linus Millicent Percival Van Wyck, of the Van Wyck real estate dynasty. Van Wyck, 28, a cousin of Robert A. Van Wyck, who served as New York City’s first mayor in 1898, was found dead in a Washington Heights hotel Sunday night…

Hotel—that was a kindness. Raised in Manhattan, a graduate of St. Paul’s School and Princeton University, and last employed by the law firm Betty, Lever and Schmitt. Some fancy old-school outfit, Carney gathered, worthy of a monogrammed leather briefcase. How long ago? Before Linus met Freddie. The exact cause of death has yet to be determined, but authorities have characterized it as suspicious in nature. Any information…The picture accompanying the article depicted a teenage Linus with a crew cut and a smug, yacht-club grin.

Millicent Percival—enough to turn even the hardiest among us to narcotics.

“That’s the public version,” Munson said. “What you don’t see is the mayor getting chewed out in his office by the Van Wyck family counsel. Your cousin’s friend—he’s Park Avenue. Was.” He shrugged. “And now they’re applying pressure. Applying pressure like, when I step on a cockroach with my shoe I am applying pressure. Mayor’s office rings up Centre Street to chew them out, and then the commissioner makes his own call, to his own men, all pissed off. Shit rolls downhill. They want Van Wyck’s friend and what he stole.”

Van Wike—Munson pronounced it correctly, as Pierce had. “Stole what?” Carney said.

“You tell me.”

It hit him: Munson had been interrogating him this whole time.

“Why not walk?” Carney said. “Why are we driving one block, parking, going another block. It’s dumb.”

“I have a car—what am I going to do? Walk around like some asshole? I don’t understand the question.”

“I’m out.” Carney turned over the newspaper and reached for the door handle.

“Hey—Mr. Furniture.”

“What?”

“This shit is heavy, no joke. I don’t want to be your cousin right now. Don’t want to be you either.”

Carney opened the door. Munson said, “You hear about Sterling Gold?”

Sterling Gold & Gem was a venerable jewelry store on Amsterdam, ten blocks up. The dusty orange bulbs in the sign out front blinked on and off to simulate movement, like a greyhound dashing around a track. Young lovers knew the engagement rings and wedding bands out front, while the drawers of uncut stones and hot merch in the back catered to a more disreputable clientele. Given his insulting rates, the owner, Abe Evans, was a fence and shylock of last resort, but he had a policy where he granted delinquent accounts a one-week grace period before his muscle came over to break a leg or appendage of the client’s choice. No one had heard of such a marketing gimmick before, this à la carte maiming, although one time in Nightbirds Carney overheard a man declare it a hallmark of an offshoot of the Estonian mob. Fancy that.

“Someone broke in and busted up the joint,” Munson said. “No—not looters. Happened last night. Trashed, it’s a big mess, busted-up display cases, alarm goes off, but get this—Abe Evans says nothing was taken.” The detective clocked a portly man with a porkpie hat who walked behind Carney’s shoulder, then returned his attention.

“So what’s the point?” Carney said.

“You tell me,” Munson said. “Maybe the point is to send a message to illegal operations that someone is lifting up the rock to see what scurries out. Someone with money and a lot of reach is saying, I’m looking for what’s mine.”

Carney slammed the car door. The three blocks back to the store was faster on foot.

The front door to the store was unlocked. The lights were out, but the door was unlocked. It wasn’t Rusty or Marie, come back to get something.

The baseball bat was in his office, next to the safe. He crept along the wall to the back of the store. He paused by the Argent recliner and listened. He called out.

Freddie yelled from the office, “Hey, Ray-Ray!”

His cousin sat on the sofa eating an Italian sandwich from Vitale’s, bottle of Coca-Cola resting on the safe. Chink Montague, homicide detectives, and rich people’s hired muscle looking for this motherfucker and he’s eating a goddamn sandwich in his office.

“I have a key,” Freddie said. He chewed. “Remember when May was being born and you had to rush to University Hospital? Before Rusty came on. You asked me to lock up. Gave me the key.”

Carney said, “That was seven years ago.”

“You never asked for it back so I assumed you wanted me to hold on to it. Why are you looking at me like that?” Freddie grinned. “Be glad you never gave me the combination to the safe.”