In early September two seemingly unrelated items appeared in New York City papers. One small, the other more widely covered and consequential.

The smaller item concerned the arrest of a Harlem pimp named Thomas Andrew Bruce, also known as Cheap Brucie. “No stranger to law enforcement,” Thomas Bruce was arrested in a sting operation at a local nightclub and charged with promoting prostitution in the fourth degree. The story rated three paragraphs in the Amsterdam News, the only paper to mention it.

The bigger item, days later, concerned the disappearance of prominent banker Wilfred Duke, late of Carver Federal Savings. “There’s been no word,” Mrs. Myrna Duke, the missing person’s wife, told one reporter. “Not a one.” Mr. Duke was a well-known Negro businessman, and his disappearance made the white papers downtown.

Few people understood the link between those two stories. Three of them—Ray Carney, Miss Laura, and Zippo—were inside or near 288 Convent Avenue on Wednesday, September 6, at nine-thirty p.m. The meeting had been hastily arranged.

Detective Munson had told Carney that he’d give him a heads-up when they were going to pinch Cheap Brucie. The deal that Carney had proposed in his office weeks before—the drug dealer for the pimp—neared closure.

But Munson didn’t call him in advance. The pimp was arrested late Tuesday night, and Munson called Carney shortly after three p.m. the next day. “I’ve been busy, what can I tell you?”

Carney rubbed his temple and paced his office. Now he had to scramble. “When does he get out?”

“Tomorrow earliest, he gets bond. I don’t know.”

Beyond the office window, Marie circulated in the showroom, recording the serial numbers of the Argent display models. She waved. Carney waved back.

The detective exhaled loudly into the receiver. “You don’t sound appreciative. You did me a solid, I got you back.”

From Carney’s vantage, Munson was not the only one who’d benefited mightily from the raid on Biz Dixon’s places of business.

A few weeks prior, the detective told Carney that no one in the 28th Precinct was inclined to touch Dixon, the kind of ice he was spreading around. Given the quality of his product, Dixon was fronting for an Italian gentleman who was circumventing his clan’s narcotics prohibition and didn’t want his name out there. But a Dixon bust might play better elsewhere, Munson opined, with other parties. At Centre Street, under pressure from Wagner to produce results for Governor Rockefeller’s antidrug initiative. With the Narcotics Bureau itself, where they were keen to arrest a crook who wasn’t paying tribute, or enough tribute, or had a rival who’d pay to have them kneecapped. Even the mayor, put to the test by his primary challenge next month. To punish Wagner for splitting from the machine, the Tammany bosses were pulling out the stops for their man Arthur Levitt. The mayor could use a friendly headline.

On August 31, a week before the primary, the junk agents raided Biz Dixon. Twenty-two arrests for possessing narcotics with intent to sell, selling to policemen, and other narcotics misdemeanors. Fourteen thousand dollars in cash confiscated, with who knows how much more pocketed by the cops on the scene. So what if in the end the product seized was no record-breaker, and the dope on the table had to be supplemented with contraband from other busts so it looked good for the cameras? It made the papers and the nightly news. The pictures turned out swell. They’d look nice in a frame and hung on the wall against the industrial sick-green paint of a municipal office.

What did Munson get out of it? Carney could only speculate what made the deal attractive to the detective in the end. Burnish his reputation as a player. Appease Dixon’s competitors who gave him envelopes. At any rate, he retailed the Dixon info to Narcotics, they followed up with undercover buys and their own surveillance, and everything was copacetic.

“They want to know who my informant is,” Munson told him. “Let ’em speculate. This week they love me. Next week? But this week they love me.” He said he’d honor the arrangement and get Cheap Brucie picked up.

“You want to know why,” Munson said.

Carney said he was curious, yes.

“He cuts women. I’d never take money from a fucking pimp, or cover for one,” Munson told Carney, “and I got no respect for guys who do.” Which sounded too pat. It wouldn’t be the first time that self-righteousness covered for a self-serving impulse. A few years later—when the game had changed, and the stakes, and a long-term relationship with a fellow you understood was an invaluable asset—Munson admitted to Carney that Cheap Brucie had a guy in the precinct looking out for him, and Munson hated this guy for stealing his lunch out of the icebox one time. Egg salad sandwich he’d been looking forward to all day. “Motherfucker has the nerve to call himself a cop.”

Maybe it wasn’t envelopes the city ran on, but grudges and payback.

Carney got off the phone with the detective. It was three-thirty p.m. If Cheap Brucie got sprung tomorrow, they had one night to pull it off. It was Wednesday, not Tuesday or Thursday, the days Duke typically had his appointment at 288 Convent Avenue.

Miss Laura was determined, Carney knew. She’d pull it off if she had to drag it on her back, up Broadway all the way from the Battery to the Cloisters.

Carney informed Rusty and Marie he’d be out the rest of the day.

“Okay, boss,” Rusty said. “It’s looking better today.”

“Yeah, it does,” Marie seconded.

He touched the lump under his right eye. The day had been so hectic he’d forgotten about his black eye.

Last Friday, the furniture salesman had stepped out of his apartment building’s vestibule and was immediately felled. He crashed against the front door and slid down. Pepper had socked him magnificently. He was not enthused with the purpose to which Carney had directed his labor.

“You got me doing legwork for cops?” Pepper said.

Carney was dizzy. Across the street two teenagers stopped dribbling their basketball to gawk. Carney looked up at the crook and tried to sit up. The last time someone socked him like that, it had been his father. For what, what did he do wrong that time, he couldn’t remember.

“If you weren’t Mike Carney’s son I’d choke the shit out of you,” Pepper said.

Then he was gone. The right side of Carney’s face pulsed with heat. He staggered back upstairs. Elizabeth was out with the kids. The area around the eye was livid and discolored. What would he say? All the junkie shit going down these days, he opted to blame it on the drug trade. Some druggie punched him in the face, yelling something, kept going, didn’t even try to take his wallet. Someone should do something about all these pushers. An enactment of how decent people felt these days: things are off-kilter, the world is overtaken by shadow.

His eye closed up the first day. The skin bulged, turned purple and motley-toned. He couldn’t open the eye for twenty-four hours. Carney was a sight; Rusty handled the customers for the Labor Day Weekend Savings Bash. Two days after the sale, they nabbed Cheap Brucie and the clock started ticking on the Duke job, whether he was ready or not.

Before Carney went up to Convent Ave, he paused to take in his sign. carney’s furniture. If he were arrested, would they seize the store? He’d spent so much time trying to keep one half of himself separate from the other half, and now they were set to collide. But then—they already shared an office, didn’t they? He’d been running a con on himself.

Miss Laura met him at the Big Apple Diner. That’s how he knew the caper was almost over: She agreed to meet him at the greasy spoon. Today’s waitress was the third nested Russian doll, with identical features on a diminished scale. The magnitude of disdain for Carney remained the same. When he sat down, the waitress asked Miss Laura, “You know this guy?”

She said, “Not really.” The women chortled.

“The waitresses…” Carney said.

“They’re sisters,” Miss Laura said. “What’s that?” Meaning the black eye.

“I got punched in the face.”

She pursed her lips in disdain. Then rubbed her fingertips in the pay-me gesture. He forked over twenty bucks.

Before they figured out how they were going to play it, Miss Laura had to cuss him out for the time they’d lost. Carney blamed it on Munson and let her vent. Underneath her irritation, she was afraid. Had been for a long time. The man could be out as soon as tomorrow, and needed girls to take out his wrath on. She’d roll over on Duke, but only if Carney took care of Cheap Brucie first—that was her demand that day in July when they did the deal. Get Cheap Brucie out of the picture, and I’ll do it.

Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee. “How do we get him here on a Wednesday?” he said. “At night.”

“That’s the problem.”

“Tell him you’re in trouble? You’ll tell his wife?”

She shrugged. “He don’t care if I’m in trouble or need money. And he don’t care about his damn wife.” She tipped her cigarette into the tin ashtray. “You can’t threaten him because it only gets him hot and bothered—trust me.”

He looked up at her apartment. If they pulled it off, that’s where it would go down.

She said, “I’m going to tell him to come because I want him.”

“Just that?”

“Just that.”

There was the problem of Zippo. Carney had to track down Zippo and tell him it was on.

“You know where that nigger’s at?” Miss Laura asked.

It was a good question. The photographer was mercurial.

Carney brought Zippo in on the Duke job last. It was clear that he needed someone to take the photographs. He purchased the Pathfinder because Polaroid advertised it as easy to use. More important, the film didn’t need to be sent out to be developed. One look at the pictures he planned to take and they’d call the vice squad.

Practice runs with the Polaroid proved him useless. “Some people are good at some things and not others,” Elizabeth said. Meant in the nicest way. She and the kids were patient with his various attempts to be one of those capable fathers in TV and magazine ads, capturing the major and minor life moments. He failed before the entrance of the furniture store, with the family name emblazoned above; in Riverside Park, as the serene Hudson whispered past; in front of the old fire watchtower in Mount Morris Park, after guiding his family past the place where he’d dumped Miami Joe’s body in a Moroccan Luxury rug.

He needed to bring on another hand.

It’d have to be Zippo.

Zippo—part-time check-kiter and full-time purveyor of boudoir shots and blue movies—knew Freddie from around, but Freddie was scarce. Linus had bailed Carney’s cousin out of jail when he got picked up with Biz Dixon for mouthing off. Freddie didn’t call Carney or his mother for help; he called the white boy. He checked in with Aunt Millie once he got out, to tell her that he was okay, and disappeared underground again.

Elizabeth had been horrified to hear he’d spent a night in the Tombs. The city jail was notorious. “Oh, that’s a terrible place!” Carney hoped it hadn’t been too rough. The last thing Carney wanted when he came up with the setup was to see his cousin hurt. How could he know that Freddie would get entangled in it? It was bad luck is all—though it’d be swell if Freddie took it as a sign to straighten up and fly right. Hardheaded as he was, something good might come out of it.

One of Carney’s regulars—he had a magic well that produced new Sony portable TVs, apparently—was buddies with the photographer and arranged a meet at Nightbirds. How many times had his father met his cronies in this place? To plan a job, or to celebrate one.

Zippo arrived with his limp-dishrag posture, lanky and loose, the sleeves of his blue button-down shirt too short. Carney hadn’t seen him in years. He still rolled with that odd energy of his, defiant and jumpy, like a Bronx pigeon.

“You have a camera these days?” Carney asked. Last he’d heard, a model’s irate boyfriend had put Zippo out of business.

“That was a temporary setback,” Zippo said. “If you call an opportunity to take stock and really think about how you can make your life better a ‘setback.’ ”

Carney had never heard jail described that way. It came back, how Zippo veered every which way, like a drunk driver peeling down the street at three a.m. One person one second, and another the next. Deranged competency is how Carney put it later.

“I’m back to work,” Zippo said. He checked over his shoulder to prove his discretion. “You and the missus want some pictures taken—”

“My wife is not—it’s something else. It’s the stuff you do, boudoir stuff.”

“Right, right.”

“But one person is asleep.”

“Sure, there’s a whole market in that. Ladies pretending to be dead. Men pretending to be graves. Cemetery scenes…”

To curtail further explanation, Carney explained the job in detail. The photographer had no qualms once he named the mark.

“I hate that fucking Carver Federal,” Zippo said. “You know they put my name on a list?” He’d busied himself with ripping a coaster to bits and now made a mound of white shreds.

How old was Zippo—eighteen? Nineteen? Too young for this job?

“It might be in flagrante,” Carney said.