Freddie dimly recalled some race problem from the news last summer. It turned out St. Augustine was smack-dab in the middle of the rights movement. “If I had known,” Freddie said, “I would have told Linus to keep on driving—drive on the fucking rims. These teenage kids—fourteen, fifteen years old—had a sit-in at the Woolworth’s, and the judge gave them six months in reform school. Some dudes got beat up for protesting a motherfucking Klan rally—and the deputies arrested them for getting beat up! One night we were drinking beers in this one spot and the KKK marched up the street, all brazen. I’m from New York, I’ve never seen that shit before. Niggers really live like that down there? KKK walking around, no big deal?” Freddie sighed. “You can’t go anywhere these days without stumbling into a hotbed.”

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference made their usual fuss all winter, the NAACP. On the street, those fucking crackers mistook him and Linus as part of the college-kid contingent who came down to protest, when anyone could see they were way too ragged. “Give me a break, man,” Linus told the grocery clerk who ordered him off the premises. “I’m just trying to buy some mixers.”

The last straw was when they heard Martin Luther King was going to visit. King, cracker cops, the KKK. “I said, Time to split, Linus. He said no problem—his family had cut him off anyway and he had to return to New York to dance for his money.” Plus the bartender at the bar got busted for statutory rape, bye-bye connection. Freddie checked the weather. New York City was warm again. “I was making time with this kindergarten teacher, she was nice, but what are you going to do—argue with Mother Nature?”

They weren’t over the Georgia line before Linus brought up the setup. “I’d told him about the Theresa thing, back when,” Freddie said.

“The whole thing?” Miami Joe in a rug?

“We were brothers. I told him everything.” Freddie didn’t apologize. “He’d ask me questions: How’d you keep track of who was on duty? What about the elevator operator? Pulling the job in his mind. Knocking over his own family, he was stuck on it. Who knows what it meant for him—he wanted to stick it to them, he wanted the money, the thrill. They owed him. And his allowance wasn’t going to cover it.”

“Did you see Pedro when you were down there?” Carney asked.

“It didn’t occur to me.”

Linus rented a pad on Park and Ninety-Ninth Street, overlooking the subway tracks. Eleven blocks up the ave from his parents but a different city. At some point he started writing stuff down. The names of doormen, which elevator man had a bladder condition, how many doors between the service gate on the street to the back stairs. Laying off the dope. “Enough to keep from getting sick,” as he put it.

Freddie looked away from Carney to shove the feeling down—Linus in the tub, Linus cold and still. Carney sat back in his chair and gave him his time.

“We didn’t, you know, sit outside with a stopwatch and track all the comings and goings,” Freddie said, “but we were thorough. I didn’t see any holes in it. Turns out it’s a lot easier when you’re breaking into your own house.”

They sketched out the setup but put it off. Excuses: Some theater types Linus knew from college were having a rent party; they were too hungover; it looked like it might rain. “Then the kid got shot. By the cop. There were police all over, but they were worried about shit popping off uptown.” The radio said they dispatched a hundred cops to the CORE demonstration at the dead boy’s school and were deploying teams all over Harlem to put down any disturbance. Park Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street was as open as it was ever going to be.

“Let’s do it tonight,” Linus said. It was Friday afternoon. His mother and father had a fundraiser for polio survivors and would be out until eleven p.m., easy. “They keep the liquor flowing to loosen the checkbooks.” The Van Wycks’ old housekeeper, Gretchen, used to live in the apartment—when Linus was little he’d slip into her gassy bed on bad-dream nights—but she passed three years prior. The new girl lived in the Bronx and left at seven p.m. The plan called for Linus to ride up with the elevator man at eight-thirty, hop down the fire stairs, prop open the alley door, and leave the service gate open a whisper.

At 8:41 p.m. on Friday, July 17, Freddie started his trip uptown. Freddie stuck out on Park Avenue for obvious reasons, so killing time leaning against a phone booth was out of the question. He sat at the counter at Soup Burg on Seventy-Third and Madison, contemplating the small orange bubbles of fat on the surface of chicken noodle soup until his watch said it was time. The Action Watch for Active People. On the way up he pondered the big imponderable of the day: Was Linus capable of not fucking this up? Freddie had seen the man sloppy, nodding out, observed him puke himself and shit the bed. Last summer he found Linus twitching and blue and overdosing and had to drop him off in front of Harlem Hospital—a cop stopping him at the wheel of a white man’s car would have meant his ruin. Did Linus have the heart and balls to pull off a job like this? His family will know he ripped them off—was he ready to cash out? If the service gate didn’t budge…

He took the long way up Lexington, rounded the corner, and didn’t break his stride when he pushed the service gate. It was unlocked, ajar half an inch, and he was in. It was 9:01 p.m.

The Van Wyck residence was a duplex on the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. The walk up the fire stairs was a miserable hump but Linus waited at the back door. His gleeful expression reminded Freddie of other capers: when his family accidentally sent his check twice and they went out for steaks and shrimp; that time they walked by the Cha Cha Club during a delivery and snatched a box of schnapps. Tonight’s take was bigger. So was Linus’s smile.

The back door opened onto the kitchen. Freddie had been in these big six-room, seven-room spreads before. Above Ninety-Sixth they were cut up into three apartments, and below Ninety-Sixth they were dark warrens, dusty and rife with cat hair and books, the apartments of the parents of college chicks he picked up downtown. The Van Wyck residence was so complicated it needed two floors to tell itself and twice as many rooms. Twelve feet floor to ceiling, paneled walls, parquet floors in Masonic arrangements. Here was a floating mansion.

Noticing Freddie’s reaction, Linus said, “Check this out.” He pulled back a heavy, mustard-colored curtain in the dining room. “On nights like this…” The humidity transformed Park Avenue, the moisture in the air bestowing warm halos to the lights on the street and in the rows of apartment windows. It made the street less stuck-up. Inexplicably kind, like a white cop who cuts you slack for no reason you can figure. Park Avenue creeped Freddie out: The buildings had an attitude, a comfort in and assurance of their own power. They were judges, decreeing that all that you called your own, what you fought for and dreamed of, was merely a cheap imitation of what they possessed. Tonight the street looked kind. From that angle, anyway.

“I was thinking about how you used to talk about Riverside Drive,” Freddie told Carney, “how much you love it. The edge of the island, looking out across the water, like putting it all in perspective. There’s us, there’s water, and then there’s more land, we’re all a part of the same thing. But Park Avenue, with those big old buildings facing one another, full of old white people, there’s none of that feeling, right? It’s a canyon. And the two sides don’t give a shit about you. If they wanted, if they so decided, they could squeeze together and crush you. That’s how little you are.” That night, he conceded, it was gorgeous.

Linus led him through the apartment. The paintings on the walls were what they called modern art; the rest of the decor was Rich Mummy.

The safe was in the library. The books on the shelves and inside the glass cases were dignified and elegantly bound. As Linus moved around the large, walnut executive desk, Freddie got a gander at one line of volumes. A lot of The Complete Letters of Sir Baron St. So-and-so, Vol. 6 and nary a Jailbait Kitties or Murder Was Her Right in sight.

Behind the desk hung a portrait of Robert A. Van Wyck, first mayor of the newly incorporated New York City. It was hinged. Push, click, and it swung to reveal the round door of the wall safe.

“What kind?” Carney asked.

“Fuck should I know.”

Linus knew the combination. His father had let him play with the safe when he was younger and allowed him to store baseball cards. His father being Ambrose Van Wyck, the patriarch, the shadow drawing everything within the icy cape.

“Everybody says Van Wick,” Carney said.

“That’s dumb. It’s Van Wyck.”

Linus asked Freddie to hold open the briefcase as he scooped. “I thought there was more,” he said.

Then Freddie got a load of the necklace. “I had a heart attack,” Freddie told Carney. “You should see the size of the thing.”

“I have.”

“Oh.”

At 9:31 p.m. the night of the robbery, Linus’s father said, “Put that down.”

Van Wyck the Elder stood in the doorway in his pajamas. The same kind as Linus’s favorite pair—red with white piping, monogrammed, but less faded. His father was in his seventies, Linus being a late addition to the dynasty. Skinny, shriveled all over, above the shoulder blades downright scrotal, but he had mean blue eyes and Freddie remembered Linus’s story about the time he’d said “Can I?” instead of “May I?” and Ambrose took off his loafer and slapped him across the face with it seven times.

He held a glass of milk. Ambrose Van Wyck kept his beechwood walking stick one story below in the foyer umbrella stand. He didn’t use it in the house, which was unfortunate because he dearly wanted to poke his son in the chest with it, to punctuate each syllable of the diatribe rising in himself. The sight of his son used to cause him pain—wincingly so—but that had been years before. He was at peace with his son’s failure now. Gnaw on a disappointment long enough and it will lose all flavor. Linus would never occupy Ambrose’s corner office on the twenty-fourth floor, sit for a conference-room portrait to hang next to those of his ancestors. Ambrose’s partners’ sons—that cohort of Aryan dipshittery—were in place to steer VWR into the future and with Ambrose’s death the firm would cease to be a Van Wyck concern. So be it. The man-child before him was a technicality; Ambrose Van Wyck regarded the structures as his true offspring. The skyscraping pillars, bustling office hives, global HQs, mixed-use complexes blocks wide and so full of families that they were villages unto themselves. When Ambrose looked out of the dining-room window onto Park Avenue and beyond, he recognized his own features in the white brick apartment houses and silver deco steeples, found his face returned to him in the pitiless steel and concrete of the city. The birthmark of the clan was a brass plate bolted by the lobby entrance, affirming paternity: VWR. This man before him? A stranger he might come across on the subway. If he took the subway. Which he didn’t. It was a filthy cage for filthy people.

As for his son’s companion…Ambrose had lived in this apartment his whole life and in all his seventy-five years, as far as he knew, this was the first time a nigger had set foot in it.

“You’re here,” Linus said.

“When I heard we were sitting with the Laphams, I was staying home, of course.”

This was some blueblood vendetta shit, Linus explained later. His mother had had an affair with the husband, or his father had had an affair with the wife, perhaps both things had occurred simultaneously or one had happened later in retribution, and his father was still sore over how it’d shaken out.

“I thought I heard something,” Ambrose Van Wyck said. “I should have guessed. I’m too tired to deal with your foolishness right now. Put that back and wait in your room until your mother gets home.”

Linus hesitated, then closed the safe. “We’re leaving,” he said.

There are things a parent can utter to a child that should not be heard by others. Verdicts and spiky assessments, pettiness masquerading as principle and magnified by time, grudges that have taken root in the bones. A witness can render these things indelible and real in a way that they wouldn’t be if there were no one else around. No, it’s best not to hear your grown friend talked to the way Ambrose Van Wyck addressed his son. The humiliation splashes everywhere. You’ll get it on you and it’ll become your own bad time, the bloody resurrection of your own childhood sadnesses. In two minutes, Freddie was five years old again, back on 129th Street, cowering under the kitchen table as his father enumerated his mother’s shortcomings with sadistic flair.

A specific reference compelled Linus to lunge, putting an end to Ambrose Van Wyck’s harangue: “It’s like that day on Heart’s Meadow all over again.” The glass of milk fell to the carpet. It would not be accurate to say that the two men fought or wrestled. “More like they gripped each other’s upper arms and shook.” Linus held back so as not to hurt the old man, and the old man despite his fury was too old to give the conflict much gas. It was a low-key battle, a mutual trembling. Freddie crept past them into the hallway. In a limp rush, Linus overcame his reticence, pushed, and the old man tumbled into a large, red leather club chair, panting.

At 9:41 p.m., Linus and Freddie ran down the back stairs.

At no point did Ambrose Van Wyck acknowledge Freddie’s presence.

The riots hadn’t started yet but the night was full of sirens. A scuffle on a subway platform, kids running wild in a cafeteria: the preface to the next night’s unrest. In the original plan, Linus’s family wouldn’t know of the theft until the next day at the earliest. They wouldn’t immediately tie it to their rascal son, so the thinking went. Now the head start was gone.

They packed up some clothes at the Ninety-Ninth Street apartment. “Where to?” Linus asked.

Freddie thought of the Eagleton first thing. Miami Joe had asked him to pick up a gun from one of the residents once, for a job. He didn’t tell Freddie what it was, but its heft in the brown paper bag made an announcement. Freddie shook all the way down the stairs—and out on the street. The Imperial was right there. “We used to hang there every day,” Freddie said.

“The rats,” Carney said.

“Loving that popcorn.”

The association with the old movie palace made the SRO stick in Freddie’s head. It was a natural place to lam it. Freddie got the bed. Linus slept on the floor, with the briefcase and his wadded-up robe for a pillow. When Freddie woke the next morning, Linus was gone, with the briefcase. Had he gone to score? Back to his family to beg forgiveness? Either way Freddie was too jazzed to stay inside. The Unsinkable Molly Brown was the first ad he saw in the movie section on the way downtown. Plus it had Debbie Reynolds. Freddie had already told Carney the rest—Saturday night, the first night of the riots.

Back at the Eagleton, Linus was on the nod, leaning against the wall, sitting on the briefcase so that he’d wake if anyone tried to grab it. In the run-up to the robbery, Linus had talked of his grandmother’s diamond necklaces, gem-encrusted bracelets, a box full of gold coins, a variety of pirate treasure that had passed through the safe. The only notable item they’d walked away with was the emerald necklace, and between the cops, the crazies, the protest days, unloading it was unworkable. The emerald was too big for the fences Freddie knew, Abe Evans and the Arab. “I wasn’t going to bring you in, don’t worry.”

They had to lie low until the heat was off. And 171st and above felt safe—from rioting Negroes with pitchforks, cops, and “my father’s men,” which Linus had never mentioned before. Private detectives? Ex-army guys? “They do work for him, make sure things get done.” After a brief scout, Freddie and Linus found an Irish bar on 176th that catered to marginal clientele, and a Greek diner with decent grub and broken tabletop jukeboxes. They made forays.

Monday afternoon, Freddie had an itch at the back of his mind and called Janice, their next-door neighbor on Ninety-Ninth. She was relieved to hear from him—Linus’s apartment had been broken into and robbed. The subway roared in the earpiece as it passed outside Janice’s place, like suspense music—crazy violins—in an action picture. The super had called the cops after discovering their front door hanging on one hinge. Freddie told her they were behind on their installment payments to the Britannica company, they play for keeps.