The Big Apple Diner faced a row of four-story brownstones that had been built by the same developer at the end of the previous century. Identical doglegged stoops, leaf brackets and keystones, wood cornices, one after the other from one corner to the next. From across the street, the houses had distinguished themselves from one another over time through the plantings out front, the decorations behind the front-door glass, and window treatments—the accumulated decisions of the residents and modifications by the owners. One misguided soul had painted one of the exteriors a mealy peach color and now it stuck out, the rotten one in the barrel. A single blueprint—funded by speculators, executed by immigrant construction gangs—had summoned this divergent bounty.
Carney imagined beyond the facades; he was looking for something. Inside, the brownstones had remained one-family homes, or been cut up into individual apartments, and their rooms were marked by different choices in terms of furniture, paint color, what had been thrown on the walls, function. Then there were the invisible marks left by the lives within, those durable hauntings. In this room, the oldest son was born on a lumpy canopy bed by the window; in that parlor the old bachelor had proposed to his mail-order bride; here the third floor had been the stage, variously, for slow-to-boil divorces and suicide schemes and suicide attempts. Also undetectable were the impressions of more mundane activities: the satisfying breakfasts and midnight confidences, the making of daydreams and resolutions. Carney imagined himself inside because he was looking for evidence of himself. Was there an Argent wingback chair or Heywood-Wakefield armoire in one of them, over by the window, the proof of a sale he’d closed? It was a new game he played, walking around this unforgiving town: Is my stuff in there?
He was working on an equation: X Number of Items sold to X Number of Customers over X Number of Years. Business was sturdy enough that a couple of times a day, more likely than not, he passed one of his customers’ homes. Maybe not this block, but maybe the next one past the light. The stuff from his store had to go somewhere; the customers weren’t chaining it to anvils and pitching those sweet beech-armed sofas into the Hudson River. One day, given the distribution of his customers across Harlem, there might be one of his wares on every uptown block. He’d never know when he hit that milestone, but maybe he’d get a tingly feeling, a sense of satisfaction as he walked the streets.
One day.
The Big Apple Diner was on Convent near 141st Street, halfway up the block. Carney had taken one of the window tables. He waited for Freddie. His cousin was late and it was fifty-fifty whether he’d show. At least it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
The diner was a shabby operation, the cracks in the floor caulked by grime, the windows cloudy. The air smelled like burning hair, but it was not hair, it was the food they served. They probably did a nice morning trade and lunch, too, but at three o’clock the place was dead. The waitress was half in the bag, lurching and muttering. When not groaning at his gentle requests, she tipped cigarette ash into a tin ashtray on the counter and waved away the flies. The housefly traffic this time of day was brisk, but Carney doubted it covered the rent.
Carney grabbed two newspapers from the table behind him. It was his habit to consult the furniture ads to see what kind of specials the competition was offering this week. The Fischer outlet, on Coney Island, was selling patio furniture. Notable in that the company had branched out into manufacturing outdoor furniture; business was good. He didn’t sell Fischer products, but it was good to keep tabs on the big players. All-American took out a quarter-page ad—not cheap—to announce a sale on their Argent merchandise. Their sofa was ten bucks cheaper than Carney sold it for, a rare discount for them. All-American was on Lexington, though, and his customers weren’t going to make the trip. Go all the way down there and then the white salesman ignores you or treats you like you were nothing. Carney was fine. He was spending more time away from the store, leaving a lot to Rusty, but Rusty was capable. Now that the man was engaged to be married, he was eager for the commissions. And Marie had quickly taught him that he should have hired a secretary long ago.
The A1 page of the Times had a couple of columns on Mayor Wagner announcing that he was running for a third term, and tossing Tammany Hall off his back. All that city hall intrigue was over Carney’s head. Like shopping when you go into a white store—the rules were different downtown. Uptown, the machine’s man was on the ballot and that was that. He didn’t have a strong opinion on Wagner. Did the mayor like black people? He wasn’t out to get us, that was the important thing. The recent antidrug push was meant to save white people, but its immediate beneficiaries were the good people who were too scared to walk their own neighborhood, who worried over their children when they disappeared past the front stoop. Someone helps you out by accident, it’s still help.
Carney had finished his ham and cheese when Freddie finally showed up.
“Ain’t you supposed to be at work?” Freddie said.
“Late lunch. Why don’t you order something?”
Freddie shook his head. Freddie was in one of his lean periods, belt cinched. Carney was used to his cousin’s spells. What was new was Freddie’s indifference to his appearance. The rumpled gray polo shirt was borrowed and he needed to get his ass to D’s Barbershop. It was possible that he’d just gotten out of bed.
Reading Carney’s frown, Freddie said, “Elizabeth told me you’d be in a bad mood.”
“What?”
“I saw her on the street. She said you were in one of your moods.”
“You work hard every day, sometimes you’ll be in a bad mood.” He wondered what was on her mind—his mood or his new hours.
“I wouldn’t know,” Freddie said. They chuckled. The waitress walked over and muttered something. Freddie winked at her, plucked a sandwich crust off Carney’s plate, and gobbled it up. When she retreated, Freddie said, “What’s on around town?”
That meant gimme dirt, in his lingo. With regards to crooked characters of their mutual acquaintance, Carney told him that Lester and Birdy had been pinched and were currently cooling it in Rikers. Lester lost his head over girls, ever since they were kids. This time he wasn’t chasing tail—he’d stabbed his girlfriend’s sister at a Memorial Day barbecue in Gravesend for making fun of his pants. “The ambulance took her away and then they went back to eating that chicken.”
As for Birdy, he fell off a fire escape while sneaking out of a third-floor apartment, Carney informed his cousin. Dude was out cold on the sidewalk when the police found him, somebody else’s wallet sticking out of his pocket.
“Zippo got picked up for kiting checks,” Freddie said. “Arrested him at his mom’s house.” The cousins groaned and grimaced.
“He should stick to the movies,” Carney said.
Before Zippo fell on hard times and started bouncing checks, he took boudoir photos, or “glamour shots,” he called them, with a sideline selling stag movies to those interested in that sort of thing. Last spring he’d hired this young lady who wanted to make some extra money, and her man caught wind and made a mess. Smashed his equipment, and Zippo’s face. That was three months ago and Zippo was still trying to get back on his feet.
“How’s business with you?” Freddie asked.
Freddie hadn’t been by since the renovation, part of which involved carving out a door in the wall between Carney’s office and the street. It allowed Carney to exit onto Morningside between 125th and 126th and bypass the showroom. And have people enter that way, too, after six p.m. when he sent Rusty and Marie home.
“They think I’m a good boss because I never let them work late,” Carney said. The cousins laughed again, as if over one of their shared jokes from the old days, like quoting James Cagney from White Heat—“Top of the world!”—when some mope did something especially stupid.
He wasn’t sure if he should mention it, but he did anyway: Chink Montague had had some falling out with Lou Parks, his longtime fence, and was now referring business Carney’s way. For a cut. “So now Chink gets his weekly envelope from me and then a finder’s fee on top,” Carney said. “He’s worse than Uncle Sam.”
It was a reversal. Time was, Freddie was the one who had stuff cooking. “Good for you,” Freddie said. “If that nigger only knew.” They rarely mentioned the Theresa job, the last two years. Freddie still undertook the odd petty theft, but it was jewelry now, bracelets and necklaces, no appliances. He hadn’t brought Carney in on a job after that one time, and as far as Carney knew, hadn’t worked with a crew since. Until last winter, Freddie had been a runner for Chet Blakely, handling a nice route on Amsterdam in the 130s, with two old-age residences and traffic from the college. But Chet Blakely got clipped on New Year’s Day outside the Vets Club, and that was the end of that upstart operation. Carney didn’t know what his cousin had been up to since then. This meeting had only come to pass after he’d left half a dozen messages at Nightbirds, having tried everything else.
“You been taking care of yourself?” Carney asked.
“I should ask you that—you the one working with Chink.” Freddie caught on to the purpose of this meeting. He pursed his lips. “My mom’s been talking to you.”
Carney admitted that was why he’d invited him here. Aunt Millie hadn’t seen him in three months. Usually he dropped by sooner than that, for a meal at least.
The front door to a brownstone across the street opened. Two teenage girls in brightly striped shirts skipped down the stoop and turned uptown.
“What are you looking at?” Freddie asked.
Carney shook his head: nothing. “I told Aunt Millie I hadn’t seen you for a while.” If Freddie wondered why they were meeting at the Big Apple, as opposed to one of their regular joints, he didn’t say. “Where you sleeping these days?”
“I’ve been bunking with my friend Linus. Over on Madison.”
“Who’s that?”
“You know, he’s this cat I met in the Village.”
Freddie told the story as if it were a caper. It was at the apartment of some rich white chick at NYU, after an open showcase at a MacDougal Street coffeehouse. “The Magic Bean or the Hairy Toledo or something.” Freddie was the only Negro in attendance, and after some conversation (“What’s it like, growing up colored?” “My daddy worked on the Scottsboro Boys case”), he got hip that he was there to perform, put on a show of some authentic uptown magic. What was a night in New York City without a trip to the theater?
“I coulda just pulled out my johnson,” Freddie said, but the reefer had made him goofy. There was some good reefer floating around the Village that month. He asked if they’d ever heard of three-card monte. The white chick set up a steamer trunk, produced a deck of cards, and lit some votive candles. All those white chicks had those little candles. Freddie did not, in fact, know how to run three-card monte—“You know me, all those cards flying around make me dizzy”—but he was having too much fun. He reeled off some jive he’d heard over the years on 125th Street and tried not to break out in laughter at their gee-whiz excitement.
Then Linus stepped up. Every three-card monte game needs a ringer to set up the rubes, and suddenly here was this shaggy white boy playing along, throwing down dollar bills onto the trunk. He knew what was up—Freddie’s role and everybody else’s—and covered for Freddie’s lapses in technique. It was hard work picking the wrong card time after time, but Linus was diligent. Out on the street, after it was apparent that nobody was getting laid, show or no show, Linus produced a joint and him and Freddie had a good laugh walking around until the sunrise. Freddie even gave him back his money, such was the feeling of bonhomie.
Linus had just got out of a stint in a sanatorium for “inverted tendencies,” Freddie said. Linus’s family was rich and patient and thought he’d made some progress after the electroshock treatments, even though it was an act on his part. Easier to act normal and cash the checks. “That electroshock? They tie you down and then zap the shit out of you ten times.”
“White people.” Carney shrugged.
“White people torturing white people—talk about your equal opportunity.”
This Linus character sounded like a head case, but on the whole it was a typical Freddie scenario: half-assed but harmless. Carney steered them back. “Aunt Millie says you’ve been hanging out with Biz Dixon lately,” he said.
Biz Dixon’s mother, Alice, was in the same church group as Aunt Millie. The women had looked after each other’s kids back when they were little, and continued to do so now that those kids had grown into crooked men. The euphemism for Biz these days among that generation was that he was spending time with a “bad element.” Another way would have been to say that Biz was a peddler. He’d been to prison twice already for selling junk, and each time he got out he returned to the streets with renewed dedication, chasing criminal renown the way musicians pursued Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. From Freddie’s stories over the years, Carney knew that Biz liked to keep his spots at the lower edge of Harlem, near the subway so it was easy for white customers to score. Five minutes and they were back on the platform waiting for the train downtown. Five minutes that felt like five hours if they got that jones.
Biz sold to folks from the neighborhood, too, of course. Guys they grew up with, anyone who needed a taste. More than one of the crooks who came by the furniture store went straight to Biz’s after hitting Carney up.
Carney tried to figure out if Freddie’s appearance was on account of too many good times, or too many bad.
“Biz is around,” Freddie said. “He’s always around. So what?”
“He’s sloppy,” Carney said, “and it’ll only be a matter of time before he gets nabbed again. He sells that stuff on the playground.” That last part was solid-citizen hokum, but he couldn’t help it.
“You’re reading too many papers,” Freddie said. “Does he try to make a buck? He doesn’t try to hide anything. Put on a costume, like you. Suit and tie every day, pretty wife and kids, trying to hide shit. He’s out there trying to run a hustle the same as you.”
“You working for him?”
“What?”
“Are you working for him?”
“How could you ask me that?”
“Are you?”
“We grab some food at the Chinaman’s and hang out. We go out drinking—so what? You know we’ve always been tight.” Freddie turned his face to the street and when he looked back at Carney he’d found his disgust. “I’m pushing for him, sure,” Freddie said. “Playgrounds and churches, everywhere. I find a baby, I stick that junk in their puss. I’m shooting up fucking nuns. They lift their skirts and they’re hollering for Jesus.”
Behind the counter, the waitress hacked up something wet from her lungs and the cook said, “Oh, boy.”
Freddie said, “Asking me that.”
Carney searched his face. Maybe that was Freddie’s lying voice, maybe it wasn’t. He wasn’t sure. You can change up your lying voice and lying face if you worked at it. “You make it so I have to,” Carney said.
“Asking me that,” Freddie said. “The fucking nerve. You’re the one who should be watching out. I got a little hustle, but you don’t see me on 125th Street, got me a big sign up that says, ‘Here I am, come and get me.’ ”
An apparition appeared and banged and smacked on the glass next to them—a lanky white dude with long, greasy blond hair, dressed in a denim vest and trousers. He waggled his fingers at the window and grinned. His teeth were white and perfect.
Freddie gestured for him to wait outside. “That’s Linus. I gotta split.”
“That’s Linus?” Give him some bongos and he’d be a beatnik out of Life magazine.
“That’s what he looks like,” Freddie said. “Everybody gotta look like something.” His chair made a noise on the linoleum as he pulled away. He stopped in the doorway and said, “Now you can tell my mom you’ve seen me.” Freddie slapped Linus five and the duo swayed down the street.
The waitress had been staring. She caught Carney looking at her, raised an eyebrow, and wearily resumed refilling a napkin dispenser.
The cousins had diverged. Their mothers were sisters, so they shared some of the same material but had bent their different ways over the years. Like the row of buildings across the street—other people and the years tugging them away from the original plans. The city took everything into its clutches and sent it every which way. Maybe you had a say in what direction, and maybe you didn’t.
Almost four o’clock. This was his third visit to Big Apple. Was he a regular? This was not Chock Full o’Nuts, and the waitress was no Sandra. The staff decided when you were a regular, not you. Perhaps one day, she’d act more friendly. Recognize him, at the very least. Up here, he was not going to run into Pierce. It had been three weeks since he got the envelope from the Dumas Club. He’d pinned their note under the window to the showroom, next to the yellow slips identifying delinquent customers and installment plans gone awry. The paper made an exhibit of money owed him, debts to be honored. Customers, vendors—there’s some delinquent money, a hitch in the order, but once you get paid it’s back to business as usual. Other times, you get what’s yours, and you’re done with them.
At one minute before four o’clock, Wilfred Duke stepped out of one of the brownstones, number 288. The banker straightened his tie and patted the pockets of his gray pinstripe pants after his wallet. Some people, they walk out of a place they shouldn’t be and they look around to see if anyone has caught them. Slink away. Not Duke. He glanced at his watch and walked south in the direction of his office.
Carney had hired a man to shadow the banker and the information checked out: Tuesday and Thursday at three p.m., never more than an hour. He paid the check. Carney was a fast walker. He switched over to Amsterdam so he wouldn’t overtake the banker on the way downtown. Plus there was that new furniture store on 130th. Never hurt to size up the competition.
No, not a wasted trip at all.