Pepper folded his newspaper flat when Carney appeared in Donegal’s doorway. He nodded at the bartender, who shambled to the other end of the bar, by the street. The bartender wore a sleeveless undershirt gone yellow. It exposed his massive arms and the bawdy Betty Boop tattoo that started on one bicep and continued on the other. Labeled before and after below his elbows.

Carney gestured to the stool. Pepper granted his permission. He hadn’t changed his uniform; the faded dungarees might have been the same pair he wore the first time they met, after the Theresa, a dark speck of Miami Joe’s blood on the hem.

“Buford thought you were serving papers,” Pepper said. “Policy is, officers of the court get the bat he keeps under there, in case.”

“You look the same,” Carney said.

“You got some more legwork for cops you need done?”

“I didn’t see it that way.”

“No other way to see it.”

Carney was about to say that he’d been doing the community a service by yanking a weed like Wilfred Duke, but three years on he was comfortable with the fact it had been revenge. “I didn’t think of the larger picture when it came to you, that is correct.”

Pepper cracked his neck. “It was nice to see all those upstanding Negroes get theirs, I have to admit. That dude really run off with all their money?”

“They say he’s in Barbados. Has some family down there.”

“Bajan niggers will rip you off in a New York minute,” Pepper said.

Outside, Donegal’s green neon sign had given Carney a twinge. Now that he was inside he was sure he’d been there many years before. The grotesque, disembodied grin floating on the good beer with good friends sign. The dusty jar of hard-boiled eggs that contained the same hard-boiled eggs from decades before. Pepper had been one of his father’s running partners so it made sense. Carney had carried this fantasy idea of Donegal’s from Pepper’s talk of the place, when he’d already seen it. He’d envisioned gunsels in zoot suits, block-browed experts in blunt force trauma, but the Wednesday-afternoon crowd looked like the bickering geezers who played chess in parks, trading pawns and grievances. Although in Donegal’s they drank from mugs instead of flasks.

Carney had been a child—had his father left him there while he conducted some business? Watch my kid while I break this guy’s legs? Perched on a stool, his head barely clearing the cloudy varnish of the bar. Very young, if his father hadn’t left him in the apartment. Where was his mother? Anyone who could clarify things was dead.

“You used to come here with my father,” Carney said.

“Plenty. This was where—” Pepper cut off the anecdote. His smiles were rare and he terminated this smile precisely. “The bartender in those days was a crook,” he said, “like us. So if we finished a job late he’d open up and celebrate. Dawn coming in through the windows there. Newspaper trucks rumbling. That was Ishmael, before he got shot. He’s been dead, I don’t know, ten years?” His expression soured. “What do you want? Trying to sell me a couch?”

Carney didn’t make the same mistake he made last time. He gave Pepper the rundown, from Freddie’s friendship with Linus and his rich family, to the interrupted robbery and everything that happened after it. The crook knew about the Theresa, the Duke job—no one else had as much dope on Carney’s other life. No reason not to come clean.

Carney finished. Pepper scratched his neck, looked at the ceiling thoughtfully. He said, “Like the expressway.”

“A lot of people think it’s Wick.”

Pepper shrugged. A gun battle broke out on the afternoon movie, a Lee Marvin picture, and everyone in the bar stopped talking to check out the TV. For tips? To critique? The getaway car sped off and Donegal’s patrons returned to their affairs. “Using the riots,” Pepper said. “If I had something cooking, I would have done the same thing. Everybody running around like chickens with their heads cut off, you can pull a job.”

“People weren’t acting crazy over nothing. They had good reason,” Carney said.

“Since when do white people care about reason? They gonna put that cop in jail?”

The bartender looked up from his racing form. “Put a white cop in jail for killing a black boy? Believe in the fucking tooth fairy.”

“Buford knows what’s up,” Pepper said.

“Newspapers talking about ‘looting,’ ” Buford continued. “Should ask the Indians about looting. This whole country’s founded on taking other people’s shit.”

“How’d they fill their museums? Tutankhamun.”

“Right? I’m glad they stood up,” Buford said. “I’m saying a week later it’s like it never happened.” He decamped to the other end of the bar again and relit his cigar.

Like it never happened? This struck Carney as pure cynicism. For instance, after the riot of ’43, the pants his father had looted from Nelson’s had lasted two years before the knees gave out. That was something.

They saw things differently, him and Pepper, but Carney had come to Donegal’s—risking a punch in the face—because the man had another angle on how the world worked. Which is what Carney required at the moment. Five years after the Theresa, another necklace had brought them together, one that made Lucinda Cole’s look like it rolled out of a gumball machine. “I’d like to hire you for security,” Carney said. “In case anyone else comes knocking.”

“Sounds like someone might, one or another,” Pepper said. “Look, you don’t want my advice. You’re not an advice-taker and I don’t give a shit. But—cut him loose. He’s a loser. It’s already done.”

“It’s not done. He’s splitting.”

“Trouble’ll find him again. Your father would say, fuck him. Even if he is family. Even if it was you.”

“That’s why,” Carney said.

Pepper grimaced and gestured for another beer. “What are you going to do with the loot? The shit from the safe—who are you going to lay it off on?”

“I have a guy who can handle it.”

“Deals with that heavy shit.” Pepper sipped his Rheingold. “If he deals with that heavy shit, he covers his ass. What if covering his ass means hanging niggers out to dry?”

“He’s solid.”

“Nothing solid in the city but the bedrock.”

He took the questions to mean that Pepper was in. Pepper did not disabuse him of that assumption.

Carney mentioned a figure. Pepper said he had a mind for something from the store.

“Whatever you need. What’s your current home situation?”

“Situation?”

“With regards to furniture—eat-in kitchen? Do you have a separate place for dining?” Carney knew not to say, How often do you entertain?

“Do I look like I want people knowing what my house is like?”

“A couch, then.”

“That flips back when you put your feet up, with a lever.”

“A recliner.”

“That’s it—a recliner.” They did a deal for the security and miscellaneous manhandling.

Carney laid down some bucks on the bar for Pepper’s beer and stood to go.

Pepper said, “He used to say that you were going to be a doctor, you were so smart, but that you were smart enough to know you make more money being crooked.”

“Who’d want to be a doctor?” Carney said.

The shade outside their apartment, down the hill from Grant’s Tomb, provided a cool retreat from the day’s heat. Traffic was light on Riverside. When Carney tried to relax in his living room after a long day at the store, the squeal of the kids in the park below usually set him on edge, but today they were a token of normalcy. Gangsters strong-arming him into sedans, white cops disrupting his business, riots and real estate barons and what have you—it was nice to pretend his world remembered the old, stable orbit.

Then Pepper said, “I’m here,” and Carney’s planet went awobble again. He handed Pepper the keys to the furniture store, as they had arranged. Ever since the Donegal’s meeting earlier that afternoon, the image of Pepper sitting at his desk on watch duty had made him chuckle. You’ll take the matching ottoman and fucking like it.

“You got your boy on ice somewhere?” Pepper asked.

“Out in Brooklyn,” Carney said. Freddie’s new hidey-hole was a rattrap off Nostrand.

“I don’t want him underfoot.”

Neither did Carney. Would Freddie appreciate his efforts when Carney packed him into the train, or bus, with all that get-out-of-town money? Before the bus pulled out of Port Authority—maybe the Newark Greyhound depot was a better bet—and Freddie disappeared Out West, would he give a proper thanks, or see it as something owed him?

The goddamned park squirrels had been brazen all summer—that was a whole nother story—so that’s what Carney thought the pressure on his leg was, a squirrel. “Daddy!” John said, wrapping his arms around his thighs. From the dirt on their clothes and the scrape on John’s knee, it looked like Elizabeth had taken them on a playground excursion.

Carney introduced Pepper as a friend of his father—a mistake, as Elizabeth invited him to join them for dinner. She insisted when Carney made an excuse. “We have plenty.” She was disappointed the leftover pot roast (often dry, per statistics) usually went unconsumed by her family and welcomed help in polishing it off.

Pepper didn’t put up the fight that Carney expected—a residue of politeness or curiosity—and that was that. The crook extended formal handshakes to May and John, like they were bank managers reviewing his loan application.

The smell of the cooking meat filled the hallway outside the elevator. “Damn,” Pepper said, in pleasure, and he did not apologize for the blaspheming in front of little children because it did not occur to him. Pepper didn’t speak as Carney showed him around the apartment, until they reached the living room and he gave his verdict: “Nice setup.” He registered the rooms’ dimensions and checked out the angles from the window as if appraising the defensive and offensive possibilities of a hideout. Elizabeth went to get the pot roast out of the oven.

The children, as they often did before dinner, lazed on the rug with their comics and toys, occasionally sharing with the grown-ups an urgent non sequitur. Carney normally leaned back in his spot on the Argent sofa but he didn’t want to appear too casual in front of their guest, who might judge his middle-class indulgences. Pepper took his time before he finally sat in the armchair. He crossed his arms.

For the most part, the men sat in silence. At one point, John brought over his souvenir program to show it off and Pepper said, “World’s Fair—what will whitey think of next?”

Elizabeth told May to get the good napkins and they sat down to eat. She had cooked the roast with potatoes and carrots and made cornbread earlier in the day. Elizabeth nodded in approval as Pepper helped himself to a healthy serving. Carney brought two cans of Schlitz to the table.

“How did you know Raymond’s father?” Elizabeth asked.

“He knew Grandpa?” May said. Having experienced the one, she was curious about the other.

“From work,” Pepper said.

“Oh,” Elizabeth said.

“Not that,” Carney said, before the broken kneecaps grew too vivid. “Remember I told you my father used to work at Miracle Garage sometimes.”

“The garage,” Elizabeth said.

“I wouldn’t work with Pat Baker,” Pepper said. “More crooked than a country preacher.”

Elizabeth squinted at Carney but let it drop. “What sort of work do you do now?”

Pepper looked at Carney. Not for a tip on how to respond but to communicate that his rate had gone up. Carney might have to throw in a side table, to hold a beer or a bowl of grapes. Pepper said, “Odd jobs.”

“Can you pass the potatoes?” Carney said. “Just how I like them.”

Despite the slow start, Elizabeth got more out of Pepper than Carney ever had. Where he lived now (off Convent), where he grew up (Hillside Avenue in Newark), if he had a lady he liked to take out on the town (not since he got stabbed in the gut, mistaken identity, long story). John moved over to sit on May’s lap and asked their guest his favorite color. He said, “I like that shiny green that parks get around here in the spring.”

To Elizabeth, he was another colorful character from Carney’s Harlem, a place not entirely congruent with her Strivers’ Row version. Pepper was one of the stranger walk-ons she had encountered, but she tended to enjoy that variety more.

Elizabeth put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers. “What was Raymond like?” she asked. “When he was little?”

“Much the same. Smaller.”

“Whenever Pepper came over,” Carney said, “he always brought me something—a stuffed animal, a wooden caboose. It was very sweet.”

John cackled at this, picking up on the absurdity, then the rest of them. Pepper’s downturned mouth straightened into a tight line, his version of amusement.

Elizabeth said that the phones at the office had started ringing again. Business with out-of-town clients had remained the same, but the New York City calls went to zero the week of the protests. “No one wants to go on vacation when the house next door is on fire,” she said.

Carney told Pepper that Elizabeth worked for Black Star Travel, which they then had to explain, as Pepper was “not one to vacation much.”

On the one hand, it was everyday word of mouth, what people shared in the neighborhood for mutual survival. That cop Rooker who hangs out on Sixth is out to get black people. Don’t show your face on the Italian block after seven o’clock. They’ll snatch your house for a late payment. But Black Star and other travel agencies, the various Negro travel guides, took that crucial local information and rendered it national and accessible to all who needed it. On the wall at Elizabeth’s office they had a map of the United States and the Caribbean with pins and red marker to indicate the cities and towns and routes that Black Star promoted. Stay on the path and you’ll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.

That was how Carney put it to himself, as his wife gave Pepper her standard client pitch. Pepper took in Elizabeth’s spiel patiently. He chewed, savoring, squeezed in between John and May like an eccentric uncle. He was a relative, this crook, part of his father’s clan. Carney raised his Schlitz and made a toast to the chef. It was Wednesday night, family supper, both sides of him at the table, the straight and the crooked, breaking bread.