The Theresa Job

By Colson Whitehead The New Yorker

 

Carney took the long way to Nightbirds. This first hot spell of the year was a rehearsal for the summer to come. Everyone a bit rusty, but it was coming back—they took their places. On the corner, two white cops re-capped the fire hydrant, cursing. Kids had been running in and out of the spray for days. Threadbare blankets lined fire escapes. The stoops bustled with men in undershirts drinking beer and jiving over the noise from transistor radios, the d.j.s piping up between songs like friends with bad advice. Anything to delay the return to sweltering rooms, the busted sinks and clotted flypaper, the accumulated reminders of your place in the order. Unseen on the rooftops, the denizens of tar beaches pointed to the lights of bridges and planes.

The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument with no one telling you what it had been about or who’d won. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying K.O.s and low blows and devising too late parries, glancing around and kneading grudges in their fists. In its heyday, the joint had been a warehouse of mealy human commerce—some species of hustler at that table, his boss at the next, marks in between. Closing time meant secrets kept. Whenever Carney looked over his shoulder, he frowned at the grubby pageant. Rheingold beer on tap, Rheingold neon on the walls—the brewery had been trying to reach the Negro market. The cracks in the red vinyl upholstery of the old banquettes were stiff and sharp enough to cut skin.

Less dodgy with the change in management, Carney had to allow. In the old days, broken men had hunched over the phone, hangdog, waiting for the ring that would change their luck. But, last year, the new owner, Bert, had had the number on the pay phone changed, undermining a host of shady deals and alibis. He also put in a new overhead fan and kicked out the hookers. The pimps were O.K.—they were good tippers. He removed the dartboard, this last renovation an inscrutable one until Bert explained that his uncle “had his eye put out in the Army.” He hung a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr., in its place, a grimy halo describing the outline of the former occupant.

Some regulars had beat it for the bar up the street, but Bert and Freddie had hit it off quickly, Freddie by nature adept at sizing up the conditions on the field and making adjustments. When Carney walked in, his cousin and Bert were talking about the day’s races and how they’d gone.

“Ray-Ray,” Freddie said, hugging him.

“How you doing, Freddie?”

Bert nodded at them and went deaf and dumb, pretending to check that there was enough rye out front.

Freddie looked healthy, Carney was relieved to see. He wore an orange camp shirt with blue stripes and the black slacks from his short-lived waiter gig a few years back. He’d always been lean, and when he didn’t take care of himself quickly got a bad kind of thin. “Look at my two skinny boys,” Aunt Millie used to say when they came in from playing in the street. 

They were mistaken for brothers by most of the world, but distinguished by many features of personality. Like common sense. Carney had it. Freddie’s tended to fall out of a hole in his pocket—he never carried it long. Common sense, for example, told you not to take a numbers job with Peewee Gibson. It also told you that, if you took such a job, it was in your interest not to fuck it up. But Freddie had done both of these things and somehow retained his fingers. Luck stepped in for what he lacked otherwise.

Freddie was vague about where he’d been lately. “A little work, a little shacking up.” Work for him was something crooked; shacking up was a woman with a decent job and a trusting nature, who was not too much of a detective. He asked after business in Carney’s furniture store.

“It’ll pick up.”

Sipping his beer, Freddie started in on his enthusiasm for the new soul-food place down the block. Carney waited for him to get around to what was really on his mind. It took Dave “Baby” Cortez on the jukebox, with that damn organ song, loud and manic. Freddie leaned over. “You heard me talk about this nigger every once in a while—Miami Joe?”

“What’s he, run numbers?”

“No, he’s that dude wears that purple suit. With the hat.”

Carney thought he remembered him maybe. It wasn’t like purple suits were a rarity in the neighborhood. 

Miami Joe wasn’t into numbers. He did stickups, Freddie said. Knocked over a truck full of Hoovers in Queens last Christmas. “They say he did that Fisher job, back when.”

“What’s that?”

“He broke into a safe at Gimbels,” Freddie said. Like Carney was supposed to know. Like he subscribed to the Criminal Gazette or something. Freddie was disappointed but continued to puff up Miami Joe. He had a big job in mind, and he’d approached Freddie about it. Carney frowned. Armed robbery was nuts. In the old days, his cousin had stayed away from stuff that heavy.

“It’s going to be cash, and a lot of jewelry that’s got to get taken care of. They asked me if I knew anyone for that, and I said I have just the guy.”

“Who?”

Freddie raised his eyebrows.

Carney looked over at Bert. Hang him in a museum—the barman was a potbellied portrait of hear no evil. “You told them my name?”

“Once I said I knew someone, I had to.”

“Told them my name. You know I don’t deal with that. I sell home goods.”

“Brought that TV by last month—I didn’t hear no complaints.”

“It was gently used. No reason to complain.”

“And those other things, not just TVs. You never asked where they came from.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“You never asked all those times—and it’s been a lot of times, man—because you know where they come from. Don’t act all ‘Gee, officer, that’s news to me.’ ”

Put it like that, an outside observer might get the idea that Carney trafficked quite frequently in stolen goods, but that wasn’t how he saw it. There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property, and Ray Carney facilitated that churn. As a middleman. Legit. Anyone who looked at his books would come to the same conclusion. The state of his books was a prideful matter with Carney, rarely shared with anyone because no one seemed very interested when he talked about his time in business school and the classes he’d excelled in. Like accounting. He told this to his cousin.

“Middleman. Like a fence.”

“I sell furniture.”

“Nigger, please.”

It was true that his cousin did bring a necklace by from time to time. Or a watch or two, topnotch. Or a few rings in a silver box engraved with initials. And it was true that Carney had an associate on Canal Street who helped these items on to the next leg of their journey. From time to time. Now that he added up all those occasions, they numbered more than he’d thought, but that was not the point. “Nothing like what you’re talking about now.”

“You don’t know what you can do, Ray-Ray. You never have. That’s why you have me.”

“This ain’t stealing candy from Mr. Nevins, Freddie.”

“It’s not candy,” Freddie said. He smiled. “It’s the Hotel Theresa.”

Two guys tumbled through the front door, brawling. Bert reached for Jack Lightning, the baseball bat he kept by the register.

Summer had come to Harlem.

At Nightbirds, Freddie had made Carney promise to think about it, knowing that he usually came around if he thought too long about one of his cousin’s plots. A night of Carney staring at the ceiling would close the deal, the cracks up there like a sketch of the cracks in his self-control. It was part of their Laurel-and-Hardy routine: Freddie sweet-talks Carney into an ill-advised scheme, and the mismatched duo tries to outrun the consequences. Here’s another fine mess you’ve got me into. His cousin was a hypnotist, and suddenly Carney’s on lookout while Freddie shoplifts comics at the five-and-dime, or they’re cutting class to catch a cowboy double feature at Loew’s. Two drinks at Nightbirds, and then dawn’s squeaking through the window of Miss Mary’s after-hours joint, moonshine rolling in their heads like an iron ball. There’s a necklace I got to get off my hands—can you help me out?

Whenever Aunt Millie interrogated Freddie over some story the neighbors told her, Carney stepped up with an alibi. No one would ever suspect Carney of telling a lie, of not being on the up and up. He liked it that way. For Freddie to give his name to Miami Joe and whatever crew he’d thrown in with—it was unforgivable. Carney’s Furniture was in the damn phone book, in the Amsterdam News, when he could afford to place an ad, and anyone could track him down.

Carney agreed to sleep on it. The next morning, he remained unswayed by the ceiling. He was a legitimate businessman, for Chrissake, with a wife and a kid and another kid on the way. He had to figure out what to do about his cousin. It didn’t make sense, a hood like Miami Joe bringing small-time Freddie in on the job. And Freddie saying yes, that was bad news.

This wasn’t stealing candy, and it wasn’t like when they were kids, standing on a cliff a hundred feet above the Hudson River, tip of the island, Freddie daring him to jump into the black water. Did Carney leap? He leaped, hollering all the way down. Now Freddie wanted him to jump into a slab of concrete.

When Freddie called the office that afternoon, Carney told him it was no-go and cussed him out for his poor judgment.

The robbery was in all the news.

hotel Theresa heist

black Harlem stunned by daring

early-morning robbery

Customers carried rumors and theories into the furniture store. They busted in with machine guns and I heard they shot five people and The Italian Mafia did it to put us in our place. This last tidbit put forth by the Black nationalists on Lenox Ave., hectoring from their soapboxes.

No one was killed, according to the papers. Scared shitless, sure. 

The robbery was early Wednesday morning. That evening, Carney locked the door at six o’clock and was almost done moping over his ledgers when his cousin knocked. Only Freddie knocked like that. He’d done it since they were kids, knocking on the frame of the bunk bed—You still up, hey, you still up? I was thinking . . .

Carney brought him into the office. Freddie plopped onto the Argent couch and exhaled. He said, “I gotta say, I’ve been on my feet.”

“That was you with the Theresa? You O.K.?”

Freddie wiggled his eyebrows. Carney cursed himself. He was supposed to be angry at his cousin—not worried about the nigger’s health. Still, he was glad that Freddie was unscathed, looks of it. His cousin had the face he wore when he got laid or paid. Freddie sat up. “Rusty gone for the day?”

 “Tell me what happened.”

“I am, I am, but there’s something I got to—”

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“I’ll get to it in a minute—it’s just, the guys are coming here. The guys I pulled the job with,” he said. “You know how you said no? I didn’t tell them that. They still think you’re the man.”

Before Miami Joe and the crew arrived at Carney’s Furniture, there was time for monologues that ranged in tenor between condemnation and harangue. Carney expressed his rage toward, and disappointment in, his cousin, and proceeded to a dissertation on Freddie’s stupidity, illustrated with numerous examples, the boys having been born within a month of each other and Freddie’s boneheadedness an early-to-emerge character trait. Carney was also moved to share, in emphatic terms, why he now feared for himself and his family, and his regret over the exposure of his sideline.

There was also time for Freddie to tell the tale of the heist.

Freddie had never been south of Atlantic City. Miami was an unimagined land, the customs of which he pieced together with details from Miami Joe. Miamians dressed well, for Miami Joe dressed well, his purple suits—solid, or with pinstripes of different widths—masterfully tailored, complemented by his collection of short, fat kipper ties. Pocket squares jutted like weeds. In Miami, Freddie gathered, they turned out straight shooters; it was something in the water, or a combination of the sun and the water. To hear Miami Joe expound on a subject—whether it was food, the treachery of females, or the simple eloquence of violence—was to see the world shorn of its civilized ruses. The only thing he dressed up nicely was himself; all else remained as naked and uncomplicated as God had created it.

Miami Joe operated in New York City for five years after departing his home town in the wake of an escapade. He found work as a collector for Reggie Greene, maiming welshers as well as shopkeepers who were miserly with protection money, but he tired of such easy game and returned to thieving. At Nightbirds, Freddie had recounted to Carney some of Miami Joe’s more recent capers—a trailer full of vacuum cleaners, the payroll of a department store. The flashy, efficient scores were the ones Miami Joe chose to advertise, though he alluded to a host of others he kept private.

Freddie and Miami Joe drank together at the Leopard’s Spots, the last to leave, the nights unfinished until the pair had been converted into rye-soaked cockroaches scurrying from sunlight and propriety. Freddie never failed to wake with a fear of what he’d revealed about himself. He hoped Miami Joe was too drunk to remember his stories, but Miami Joe did remember—it was more evidence for his unsentimental study of the human condition. The day Miami Joe brought him in, Freddie had recently quit running numbers for Peewee Gibson.

“But you’ve never done a robbery before,” Carney said.

“He said I was going to be the wheelman—that’s why I said yes.” He shrugged. “What’s so hard about that? Two hands and a foot.”

The first convocation of the crew was held in a booth at Baby’s Best, on the brink of happy hour. In the dressing room, the strippers covered their scars with powder; blocks away, their faithful customers waited to punch out of straight jobs. The lights were going, though, spinning and whirring, perhaps they never stopped, even when the place was closed, red and green and orange in restless, garish patrol over surfaces. It was Mars. Miami Joe had his arms spread on the red leather when Freddie walked in. Miami Joe, sipping Canadian Club and twisting his pinkie rings as he mined the dark rock of his thoughts.

Arthur was next to arrive, embarrassed by the meeting place, like he’d never been in this kind of establishment before—or spent his every hour there. Arthur was forty-eight, hair corkscrewed with gray. He reminded Freddie of a schoolteacher. The man favored plaid sweater-vests and dark slacks, wore bookworm glasses, and had a gentle way of pointing out flaws in aspects of the scheme. “A policeman would spot that phony registration in a second—is there another solution to this problem?” He’d just finished his third stint in prison, thanks to a weakness for venal or otherwise incompetent comrades. Not this time. Arthur was the “Jackie Robinson of safecracking,” according to Miami Joe, having busted the color line when it came to safes and locks and alarms, generally regarded as the domain of white crooks.

Pepper showed up last, and they got to business. “What about this man Pepper?” Carney asked.

“Pepper.” Freddie winced. “You’ll see.”

Cocktails at the Hotel Theresa were a hot ticket, and Miami Joe often installed himself at the long, polished bar, talking shit with the rest of the neighborhood’s criminal class. He took out one of the maids every once in a while, a slight, withdrawn girl named Betty. She lived at the Burbank, a once dignified building on Riverside Drive that had been cut into single-room accommodations. A lot of new arrivals washed up there. Betty liked to stall before she let Miami Joe into her bed, which meant a lot of talking, and in due course he had enough information to plan the robbery. The idea of the job struck him the first time he laid eyes on the hotel. Where others saw sophistication and affirmation, Miami Joe recognized an opportunity, for monetary gain, and to take Black Harlem down a notch. These up-North niggers had an attitude about Southern newcomers, he’d noticed, a pervasive condescension that made him boil. What’d you say? Is that how y’all do it down there? They thought their hotel was nice? He’d seen nicer. Not that he’d be able to provide an example if challenged on this point. Miami Joe was strictly hot sheet when it came to short-term accommodations.

The hotel bar closed at 1 a.m., the lobby was dead by four, and the morning shift started at five, when the kitchen staff and the laundry workers punched in. Weekends were busier, and on Saturday nights the hotel manager ran gambling rooms for high rollers. Which meant bodyguards and sore losers—too many surly men walking around with guns in their pockets. Tuesday night was Miami Joe’s lucky night when it came to jobs, so Tuesday.

He allotted twenty minutes for the takeover of the lobby and the raid of the vault. “Vault?” Freddie asked. It wasn’t a real vault, Miami Joe told him—that was what they called the room containing the safe-deposit boxes, behind the reception desk. Since they were smashing the boxes open, Arthur wouldn’t be able to use his expertise, but he was dependable, a scarce quality. He was cool with it. He cleaned his glasses with a monogrammed handkerchief and said, “Sometimes you need a pick, sometimes a crowbar.”

Twenty minutes, four men. Baby, the eponymous owner, brought them another round, refusing eye contact and payment. The crew debated the details as the happy-hour trade grabbed stools at the bar and the music cranked up. Pepper kept his mouth shut except to ask about the guns. He focussed on his partners’ faces, as if around a poker table and not the wobbly Formica of Baby’s Best. 

Arthur thought five men was better, but Miami Joe preferred the four-way split. At the safecracker’s gentle suggestion, they plucked Freddie out of the car and inducted him into the lobby action. It was only a few yards from the street to the hotel lobby, but infinitely closer to peril. Poor Freddie. Purple-and-blue lights sliding all over the place, this gun talk—it was unnerving. He didn’t see a way to protest. Pepper glaring like that. The crew picked up on his hesitation, so, when Miami Joe said that his usual fence had been pinched the week before, Freddie gave up Carney as an offering, although he did not phrase it to his cousin this way in his retelling.

At 3:43 a.m. on the night of the job, Freddie parked the Chevy Styleline on Seventh, across from the Theresa on the uptown side of the street. As Miami Joe had promised, there were plenty of spots. The traffic at that hour was nothing. King Kong come running down the street, there was no one to see. Through the glass doors, Freddie could make out the night guard at the bell stand, fiddling with the long antenna of a transistor radio. He couldn’t see the front desk, but the clerk was somewhere. The elevator operator sat lethargically on his stool, or was on his feet directing the cab up or down, depending. Miami Joe said that, one morning, forty-five minutes had gone by without an elevator summons.

It spooked Freddie, being in the night man’s field of vision like that. He moved the Chevy closer to the corner, where the guard couldn’t see him. It was the first deviation from Miami Joe’s plan.

The knock at the window startled him. Two men got into the back seat and Freddie panicked, then he realized the disguises had thrown him off. “Settle down,” Pepper said. Arthur wore a long, conked wig and a pencil mustache that made him look like Little Richard. Shaved twenty years off him—the time he’d spent in the joint refunded. Pepper was in a Hotel Theresa bellhop uniform, which Betty had stolen from the laundry two months ago. The night she grabbed it, she asked Miami Joe to put it on and say some dialogue before she permitted him to kiss her. It was all in the overhead. 

Pepper had had the uniform altered. He hadn’t changed his facial appearance. He had gravel eyes that made you stare at your feet. The aluminum toolbox sat on his lap.

Thirty seconds before 4 a.m., Arthur got out of the car and crossed the median. His tie was loose, his jacket rumpled, his stride erratic. A musician turning in or an out-of-town insurance salesman after a night in the Big City—in short, a Hotel Theresa guest. The night man saw him and unlocked the front door. Chester Miller was in his late fifties, slim built except for his belly, which perched on his belt like an egg. A little sleepy. After one o’clock, when the bar closed, hotel policy was to allow only registered guests inside.

“Perry? Room 512,” Arthur told the night man. They’d booked a room for three nights. The clerk wasn’t at the front desk. Arthur hoped Miami Joe had that situation in hand.

The night man flipped through the papers on his clipboard and pulled the brass door wide. Arthur had the gun in the man’s rib cage when he turned to lock the door. He told him to take it easy. Freddie and Pepper were on the red carpet outside—the night man let them in and locked the door as directed. Freddie held three leather valises. A rubber Howdy Doody mask covered his face; the crew had bought two of them at a Brooklyn five-and-dime two weeks earlier. Pepper carried the heavy toolbox.

The door to the fire stairs was open. A crack. They were halfway to the registration desk when Miami Joe opened the door the rest of the way and entered the lobby. He’d been hiding in the stairwell for three hours. The Howdy Doody mask had come on five minutes earlier, but as far as he was concerned he’d been in disguise all night because he wasn’t wearing a purple suit. There were no hard feelings about who got masks and who didn’t. Some of the crew needed their faces revealed in order to do their jobs, and some didn’t.

The arrow above the elevator door indicated that the car was on the twelfth floor. Then the eleventh.

For most of the day, the hotel lobby hummed like Times Square, guests and businessmen crisscrossing the white-and-black tiles, locals meeting for a meal and gossip, their number multiplied by the oversized mirrors that hung on the green-and-beige floral wallpaper. The doors to the phone booths by the elevator folded in and unfolded out, weird gills. At night, the swells congregated in the leather club chairs and on sofas and drank cocktails and smoked cigarettes as the door to the bar swung open and shut. Porters ferrying luggage on carts, teams of clerks at registration handling crises big and small, the shoeshine man insulting people in scuffed shoes and arguing for his services—it was an exuberant and motley chorus.

All of that was done now, and the cast had shrunk to thieves and captives.

The night man was pliable, as Miami Joe had promised. Miami Joe knew Chester from his nights at the hotel; he would do as he was told. This was one of the reasons Miami Joe had covered his face. The mask smelled like piney ointment and pushed his breath back at him, hot and rotten.

Arthur nodded toward the bell on the desk, a signal for the night man to ding the clerk. When the clerk emerged from the offices, Miami Joe was upon him, one hand over his mouth and the other jabbing the nose of a .38 beneath the man’s ear. One school held that the base of the skull was the best spot, the cool metal initiating a physical reaction of fear, but the Miami School, of which Joe was a disciple, liked below the ear. Only tongues went there, and metal made it eerie. There was an alarm with a wire to the police station, activated by a button beneath the desk where the guestbook rested. Miami Joe stood between the clerk and the button. He motioned for the night man to come around so that Pepper could watch him and the clerk.

“Elevator on four,” Freddie said.

Miami Joe grunted and went into the back. To the left was the switchboard, where an unexpected visitor waited. Some nights, the switchboard operator’s friend kept her company. They were eating pea soup.

The weeknight operator was named Anna-Louise. She had worked at the Hotel Theresa for thirty years, since before it was desegregated, routing calls. Her chair swivelled. She liked the night work, joking with and mothering the succession of young desk clerks through the years, and she liked listening to the guests’ calls, the arguments and arrangements of assignations, the lonely calls home through the cold, cold wires. The disembodied voices were a radio play, a peculiar one in which most of the characters appeared only once. Lulu visited Anna-Louise at the switchboard every now and then. They had been lovers since high school and, around their building, referred to themselves as sisters. The lie had made sense when they first moved in, but it was silly now. No one really cares about other people when you get down to it—their own struggles are too close up. The women screamed, then shut their mouths and put their hands up when Miami Joe aimed the gun. To the right was the manager’s office. “Get the key,” he said. Pepper brought the clerk and the night man into the office area. Miami Joe stood by the wall of iron bars that separated the room from the vault, far enough away to cover both the men and the women if they tried anything funny. He didn’t think that was going to happen. They were rabbits, quivering and afraid. Miami Joe’s voice was level and calm when he spoke to them, not to soothe but because he thought it more sadistic. He felt the erotic rush he always got on jobs; it kicked in when the caper got going and dissipated when it was over, and then he didn’t remember it until the next job. Never could get ahold of it when he wasn’t thieving. It told him that his idea for the job and its practical execution were in harmony.

When the elevator door opened, its two occupants saw a lean young man in a silly mask at the desk, looking at them. He nodded hello. Arthur swept around, his gun out. He waved the elevator operator and the passenger out of the cab and directed them behind the registration desk. By now, Pepper had taken the key to the manager’s office from the clerk and was conducting the four other captives into the room.

Rob Reynolds, the manager of the hotel, had arranged a nice refuge for himself. There were no windows, so he’d created some—tasselled curtains, identical to those in the finest suites upstairs, framed painted Venetian scenes. After the afternoon rush, he liked to imagine that was him under the hat, steering a gondola down salty boulevards in silence. An overstuffed sofa matched the ones in the lobby, though this one had endured less wear and tear; one man’s naps and quickie fucks with past-due long-term residents couldn’t compete with the weight of hordes. Autographed photos of famous guests and residents covered the walls—Duke Ellington, Richard Wright, Ella Fitzgerald in a ball gown, long white gloves up to her elbows. Rob Reynolds had provided exemplary service over the years, the standard amenities and the secret ones. Late-night smack deliveries, last-minute terminations via the Jamaican abortionist who kept two rooms on the seventh floor. It was no surprise in some quarters when the gentleman turned out not to be a doctor at all. In many of the pictures, Rob Reynolds was shaking hands with the Hotel Theresa’s celebrity visitors and grinning.

Miami Joe checked the desk drawer for a gun—this had just occurred to him. He didn’t find one. He asked the clerk where they kept the cards that tracked the safe-deposit boxes. The young clerk had gone by Rickie his whole life but these days wanted folks to call him Richard. It was a tough haul. His family and those he grew up with were a lost cause. New acquaintances switched to the nickname as if they’d received instructions by telegram. The hotel was the only place where people called him Richard. No defections so far. This was his first real job, and each time he walked through those front doors he stepped into himself, into the man he wanted to be. Clerk, assistant manager, top dog, with this office to call his own. He pointed to a metal box that sat on the desk, between the phone and Rob Reynolds’s nameplate. 

Miami Joe directed the captives to the rug beside the couch: Lie there with your eyes closed. Freddie covered them from the doorway. Freddie wasn’t a gunman, but Miami Joe figured he was jumpy enough that he’d get off a shot if anyone moved; it didn’t matter if he missed so long as it bought the rest of the crew time to put down an insurrection.

The team hit their marks. They wore thin calfskin gloves. Pepper, in his bellhop uniform, took up his station at the front desk. Arthur had unlocked the door to the vault, and now he and Miami Joe stood before the bank of safe-deposit boxes. The brass-colored boxes were a foot tall and eight inches wide and deep enough for jewelry, bundled cash, cheap furs, and unsent suicide notes. Arthur said, “This is all Drummond. You said they were Aitkens.”

“That’s what I heard.”

Aitkens took three or four good whacks before there was enough purchase for a crowbar. Maybe that was why they’d replaced them with Drummonds, Arthur thought, which required six to eight whacks. The take had been cut in half, if they stuck to the timetable. Miami Joe said, “Seventy-eight.” Arthur got to work with the sledgehammer. The index cards recorded the box number, the name of the guest, the contents, and the day of deposit. The manager had sissy handwriting that was easy to read. Arthur got into Box 78 after six blows and started on the next while Miami Joe cleaned it out. The contents matched what was on the card: two diamond necklaces, three rings, and some documents. He put the jewelry into a black valise and searched the cards for the next box to hit.

If the banging rattled Pepper, he didn’t show it. He’d been at the desk for one minute when he concluded that working registration was a lousy job. Most straight jobs were, in Pepper’s estimation, which was why he hadn’t held one in many years, but this gig was spectacularly bad. What with all the people. The constant yipping and complaints—my room’s too cold, my room’s too hot, can you send up a newspaper, the street noise is too loud. Fork over thirty bucks and suddenly they’re royalty, ruling over a twelve-by-fourteen-foot kingdom. Shared bathroom down the hall unless they pay extra. His father had worked in a hotel kitchen, cooking chops and steaks. He came home stinking every night, in addition to his general sense of worthlessness, but Pepper would take that work over desk duty any day. Talking to these fucking mopes.

Bang bang bang.

Arthur attacked the safe-deposit boxes. Pepper got the first call about the noise five minutes later. The switchboard buzzed, and Freddie told the operator to get up and answer it. Anna-Louise put Room 313’s call through. “Front desk,” Pepper said. It was the voice he used when he was telling a joke and making fun of white people. He apologized for the banging and said that they were fixing the elevator but they’d be done soon. If you come to the front desk in the morning, he added, we’ll give you a voucher for ten per cent off breakfast. Negroes do love a voucher. The mezzanine floor was offices and a club room, shut now, and the Orchid Room occupied most of the third, or else they’d be getting a lot more calls. Mr. Goodall, in Room 313, had a voice like a chipmunk, whiny and entitled. Fry chicken all day in that kitchen heat over this goddam job.

“Tell her to stay at the switchboard in case there’s more,” Miami Joe said. Freddie stood in the doorway of the manager’s office. He’d sweat through his shirt and into his black suit. The eyeholes in the mask made him think something outside his range of vision was about to clobber him. The men and women on the floor didn’t move. He said “Don’t move!” anyway. His mother did that all the time—tell him not to do something right before he was about to do it, like he was made of glass and she could see inside. But so many things lived in his head that she never suspected; he hadn’t had that little-boy feeling in a long time. Till tonight. He’d jumped off the Hudson cliffs, but instead of hitting the river he kept falling. Freddie wasn’t able to pull the trigger, so he hoped the captives would do what they were supposed to. At her station, Anna-Louise covered her face with her hands.

Bang bang bang.

The rug was freshly vacuumed, which suited the captives, who had their faces in it. The elevator passenger, the man from the twelfth floor, was named Lancelot St. John. He lived two blocks away, and his occupation was sitting at the hotel bar until he lit upon a suitable lady from out of town. If his quarry picked up on his euphemisms, Lancelot straightened out the money before he undressed her; if not, afterward he mentioned a present he wanted to buy for his mother, but he was a little short this week.

In the service industry, you shift your approach depending on the customer. Tonight’s lady had flown in from Chicago to speak to a real-estate lawyer about a brownstone she’d recently inherited. Her mother had passed. Perhaps that explained the tears. He’d walked into robberies before—he’d be in bed soon enough. It was almost time for the Theresa to wake to the day, and the criminals had to wrap it up. 

The elevator operator had done time for stealing a car, and later that day, when questioned by detectives, he said he didn’t see a goddam thing.

Arthur smiled. It was good to be out, it was good to be stealing again. Even if a quick glance told him that half the jewelry was paste. Half of it was real, fine-quality stones. He measured his prison time in terms not of years lost but of scores missed. The city! And all its busy people and the sweet things they held dear in safes and vaults, and his delicate talent for seducing these items away. He’d bought farmland in Pennsylvania through a white lawyer, and it was waiting for him, this green wonder. Arthur had put the pictures the lawyer sent him up in his cell. His cellmate asked him what the hell it was, and he told him it was where he’d grown up. Arthur had grown up in a Bronx tenement fighting off rats every night, but, when he finally retired to the nice clapboard house, he’d run through the grass like he was a kid again. Every hammer blow like he was busting through city concrete to the living earth below. 

They got two more calls about the banging. It was loud, rebounding on the vault walls, vibrating in the very bones of the building. The excuse about the broken elevator came about after they decided to keep the operator on ice in the office. How many people would call for the elevator between 4 and 4:20 a.m.? Maybe none, maybe plenty. How many would take the stairs down and be ushered by Pepper in his gentle way into the office with the other captives? Just one, it turned out, at four-seventeen, a certain Fernando Gabriel Ruiz, a Venezuelan national and a distributor of handcrafted crockery, who would never visit this city again, after what had happened last time and now this, fuck it. And how many guests knocked on the front door to be let into their rooms? Also one—Pepper unlocked the door and marched Mr. Leonard Gates, of Gary, Indiana, currently staying in Room 807, with its lumpy bed and the hex from the guy who’d had a heart attack there, into the back with the rest. Plenty of room in the manager’s office. Stack them like firewood or standing room only, if need be.

Given that only two souls had intruded on their scheme, Miami Joe said “Keep going” when Arthur told him twenty minutes was up.

He wanted to push their luck.

Arthur kept swinging. Freddie became aware of his bladder. Pepper said, “It’s time.” It wasn’t his visceral distaste for the front desk and the interaction it represented. You tell Pepper it’s twenty minutes, it’s twenty minutes. Arthur kept swinging.

Pepper could take care of himself if it went south. He didn’t know about the rest of the crew, and he didn’t care. When the fourth complaint about the noise came in, he told Room 405 that the elevator was being fixed and if they bothered him again he’d come up there and beat them with his belt.

Pepper permitted them to empty four more deposit boxes. He said, “It’s time.” It was not his white-boy voice.

They’d filled two valises. Miami Joe said, “Now.” Arthur packed the toolbox, and Miami Joe put the index cards inside, too, to mess up the next day’s sorting out. He almost left the empty valise, then remembered that the cops might trace it.

Pepper cut the wire to the police station, and Freddie yanked the office phone out of the wall. They weren’t neutralizing the switchboard, so this didn’t change their chances materially, but it was a show of enthusiasm that Freddie hoped would serve his cause in the postmortem. In Baby’s Best, Miami Joe might mention it and affirm him. Those melancholy lights roving over him, red and purple. Miami Joe recited the names of the staff—Anna-Louise, the clerk, the night man, the elevator operator—and shared their addresses. If anyone so much as twitched before five minutes was up, he said, it was their job to stop that person because he knew where they lived.

The bandits were a mile away when Lancelot St. John sat up and asked, “Now?”

The thieves were overdue at Carney’s store. Carney had a notion to turn out the lights and hide in the basement.

“And what do you expect me to do when they get here?” Carney said. “Check out the stash? Pay them for it?”

Freddie bent over to tie his shoes. “You always want in, in the end,” he said. “That’s why I gave them your name.”

Carney stopped himself from saying what he’d been thinking the whole time: “You must have been scared.” They weren’t hoods. Freddie was a petty thief. Carney moved previously owned items on to their next destination. They didn’t hold people hostage and keep lists of places to buy untraceable Howdy Doody masks.

But, as his cousin talked, Carney hadn’t recognized himself in the innocents who’d been swept up in it, the switchboard operator and the rest. He’d thought about how he would have pulled it off. Most mornings, after all, he grabbed breakfast at the Chock Full o’Nuts on the first floor of the Theresa. One day, after he and Freddie had talked, he’d put down his Collins-Hathaway catalogue—“New Modular Living for Fall”—and found himself casing the joint. Through that door, you passed into the cocktail bar and then into the lobby. There were three ways into the lobby: the bar, the street, and the clothing boutique. Plus the elevators and fire stairs. Three men at the big front desk, guests coming and going all hours. . . . Carney stopped himself. He sipped his coffee. Sometimes he slipped and his mind went that away. 

He’d never robbed anything in his life, yet there he was. He was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and in ambition. The odd piece of jewelry, the electronic appliances that Freddie and then a few other local characters brought by the store, he could justify. Nothing major, nothing that attracted undue attention to his store, the front he put out to the world. If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around. Dizzying and powerful as it was. Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw—what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you. The thing inside him that gave a yell or a tug or a shout now and again was not the sickness Freddie ministered to, more and more.

Fact was, he didn’t have the contacts to handle the take from the Hotel Theresa. Neither did his man Buxbaum down on Canal. Have a coronary if Carney walked in with that kind of weight. The crew wouldn’t be happy when they discovered that he was not the man Freddie had described.

The front door buzzed. The thieves had arrived.

“I got it,” Freddie said. He rose.

Carney sat up and straightened his tie. He couldn’t blame his cousin. He always said yes, didn’t he? He’d been in on the Theresa job since Nightbirds, even if he didn’t want to admit it. When they used to stand on the cliff over the Hudson, Carney had always eventually jumped.

The thieves buzzed again.

They took their places. The wheelman, the muscle, the safecracker. But it wasn’t a heist until the fence stepped in. He got to work. ?

 

Published in the print edition of the July 26, 2021, issue.