Paromita’s Reviews > Crook Manifesto > Status Update

She was silent then as Riverside Drive scrolled past. They’d revisit this topic soon. He didn’t have that much money put away but he knew where to get some. What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?

It had been him against the City for so long, tussling, until he and it finally came to an arrangement: You don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you. His own Declaration of Independence. Or so he thought. The City had reneged. The City had taken his store to add to its heap of spent tenements, burned-out townhouses, craters, and rubble-strewn lots. Another broken address on an island full of them.

He had worked so hard—no one knew how difficult it had been. There had been no one, no witnesses, until the hard part was done. You’ve come a long way. Working hour upon hour, enduring those waves of setbacks and reversals, sweating and suffering under the eyes of that cruel and dispassionate boss: The City.

The city was burning. It was burning not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it. Every night you heard the sirens. Pierce blamed years of misguided policy, but Carney rejected that narrow diagnosis. From what he understood about human beings, today’s messes and cruelties were the latest version of the old ones. Same flaws, different face

Numbers can’t be racist, right? But the data can be dumb or wrong, though, and if you feed shit into the computer, it gives you shit right back. The whiz kids got their heads up in the clouds so they can’t see street-level shit—like traffic.

The old city sat on one corner, opposite the new city. How did Carney used to put it: Churn, baby, churn. Atop the unchanging schist, the people replaced each other, the ethnic tribes from all over trading places in the tenements and townhouses, which in turn fell and were replaced by the next buildings. The city will condemn... distressed properties down the line, raze them, and throw up new housing.

High-rises—with their staggering tons of steel, concrete, and glass—can only stand where the schist is close enough to the surface to bear the weight. “Look at the skyline, Dad, there are skyscrapers on Wall Street and midtown, but not in Greenwich Village—the bedrock’s too deep down.” The spine of the city, keeping it all together. You can’t see it except in magical spots where it will not be contained.

Then again, Pepper himself had visited ten of these United States—eleven if you count Connecticut—and he couldn’t say they’d made a big impression. A cup of coffee costs the same all over and the person who serves it is miserable in the same way, so maybe when you think you’re moving around you’re marching in place.

He was doing this for money. And what else? To retrieve someone who had gotten off at the wrong stop. It was best to stick to your stations, he had learned, where you belong. Otherwise you’ll get mixed up with people you shouldn’t. It was true for squares, and it was true for crooks.