Motherless Brooklyn (35 page)

My first act was to drop in next door. I found the original doorman, Dirk, asleep on his stool.

I lifted his head up with my hand and he jerked awake and away from my grasp. “Hello!” he shouted.

“You remember me, Dirk?” I said. “I was sitting in a car. You told me I had a message from my ‘friend.’ ”

“Oh? Sure, I remember. Sorry, I was just doing what I was told.”

“Sure you were. And I suppose you never saw the guy before, did you—
dirtyworker, dirketyname?”

“I never saw the guy before.” He breathed out, wide-eyed.

“He was ery big man, yes?”

“Yes!” He rolled his eyes upward to show it. Then he held his hands out, begging my patience. I backed off a little and he stood and neatened his coat. I helped him with it, especially around the collar. He was too sleepy or confused by my questions to object.

“He pay you or just scare you into giving me the bum steer?” I asked more gently. My anger was wasted on Dirk. Anyway, I felt vaguely grateful to him for confirming the giant’s existence. My only
other sure witness was Gilbert, in jail. Kimmery had begun to make me doubt my eyes.

“A man that big doesn’t have to pay,” said Dirk honestly.

One of the stolen keys got me inside. This time I held on to my shoes as I passed the sitting room and headed upstairs, past the floor where Kimmery and I had sat at tea, up to the Roshi’s private quarters—a.k.a. Gerard Minna’s hideout. The halls were darker the higher I climbed, until at the top I could only grope my way toward a thin margin of light squeezed out underneath a sealed door. I turned the handle and pushed the door open, impatient with my own fear.

His bedroom had the integrity of his self-reinvention. It was bare of furnishings except for a long low shelf against the wall, a board, really, propped on bricks and bearing a few candles and books, a glass of water and a small bowl of ashes, decorated with Japanese script, presumably some kind of tiny shrine. The spareness reminded me of Kimmery’s empty studio apartment but I resented the echo, not wishing to see Kimmery as influenced by Gerard’s Zen pretensions, not wishing to imagine her visiting his private floor, his lair, at all. Gerard sat propped on pillows on a flat mattress on the floor, his legs crossed, the book at his knees shut, his posture calm, as though he’d been waiting for me. I faced him head on for what might have been the first time—I don’t know that I’d ever addressed him directly, stolen more than a glance as a teenager. In the candlelight I first made out his silhouette: He’d thickened around the jaw and neck, so that his bald head seemed to rise from his round shoulders like the line of a cobra’s hood. I might have been overly influenced by that bald head but as my eyes adjusted I couldn’t keep from understanding the difference between his features and Frank Minna’s as the same as that between Brando’s in
Apocalypse Now!
and
On the Waterfront
.

“Thehorrorthehorror,”
I ticced.
“Icouldabeenacontender!”
It was like a couplet.

“You’re Lionel Essrog, aren’t you?”

“Unreliable Chessgrub,”
I corrected. My throat pulsed with ticcishness. I was overly conscious of the open door behind me, so my neck twitched, too, with the urge to look over my shoulder. Doormen could come through open doors, anyone knew that. “Is there anyone else in the building?” I said.

“We’re alone.”

“Mind if I close this?”

“Go ahead.” He didn’t budgfrom his position on the mattress, just gazed at me evenly. I closed the door and moved just far enough into the room not to be tempted to grope behind me for the door’s surface. We faced each other across the candlelit gloom, each a figure out of the other’s past, each signifying to the other the lost man, the man killed the day before.

“You broke your vow of silence just now,” I said.

“I’m finished with my sesshin,” he said. “Anyway, you brought silence to a rather conclusive finish during today’s sitting.”

“I think your hired killer had something to do with that.”

“You’re speaking without thinking,” he said. “I recall your difficulties in that area.”

I took a deep breath. Gerard’s serenity called out of me a storm of compensatory voices, a myriad possible shrieks and insults to stanch. A part of me wanted to cajole him out from behind his Zen front, expose the Lord of Court Street lurking, make him Frank’s older brother again. What came out of my mouth was the beginning of a joke, one from the deepest part of the made-Frank-Minnalaugh-once archive:

“So there’s this order of nuns, right?”

“An order of nuns,” Gerard repeated.

“Ordinary nunphone!
—an order of nuns. Like the Cloisters. You know, a monastery.”

“A monastery is for monks.”

“Okay, a nunastery.
A plannery, a nunnetarium!
—a nunnery. And they’ve all, these nuns, they’ve all taken a vow of silence, a lifetime vow of silence, right?” I was driven, tears at the edges of my eyes, wishing for Frank to be alive to rescue me, tell me he’d heard this one already. Instead I had to go on. “Except one day a year one of the nuns gets to say something. They take turns, one nun a year. Understand?”

“I think I understand.”

“So the big day comes—
Barnamum-big-nun! Domesticated ghost-phone!
—the big day is here and the nuns are all sitting at the dinner table and the one who gets to talk this year opens her mouth and says ‘The soup is terrible.’ And the other nuns all look at each other but nobody says anything because of the vow of silence, and that’s it, back to normal. Another year of silence.”

“A very disciplined group,” said Gerard, not without admiration.

“Right. So a year later the day comes and it’s this other nun’s turn. So they’re sitting and the second nun turns to the first and says ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think the soup’s that bad’—and that’s it, silence. Another year.”

“Hmmm. Imagine the states of contemplation one could achieve in such a year.”

Flip-a-thon! Fuck-a-door! Flipweed! Fujisaki! Flitcraft!—the special day comes around again. This third nun, it’s her turn—
Nun-fuck-a-phone!
—so this third nun, she looks at the first nun and the second nun and she says ‘Bicker, bicker, bicker.’ ”

There was silence, then Gerard nodded and said, “That would be the punch line.”

“I know about the building,” I said, working to catch my breath. “And the Fujisaki Corporation.”
Unfuckafish
whispered under my palate.

“Ah. Then you know much.”

“Yeah, I know a thing. And I’ve met your killing machine. But you saw that, when he dragged me out, downstairs. The kumquat-eater.”

I was desperate to see him flinch, to impress him with the edge I had, the things I’d learned, but Gerard wasn’t ruffled. He raised his eyebrows, which got a lot of play across the empty canvas of his forehead. “You and your friends, what are their names?”

“Who? The Minna Men?”

“Yes—Minna Men. That’s a very good description. My brother was very important to the four of you, wasn’t he?” I nodded, or not, but anyway he went on.

“He really taught you everything, I suppose. You sound just like him when you speak. What an odd life, really. You realize that, don’t you? That Frank was a very odd man, living in a strange and anachronistic way?”

“What’s
cartoonistic
about it?”

“Anachronistic,” said Gerard patiently. “From another time.”

“I know what it means,” I said. “I mean what’s so
akakonistic
about it?” I was too wound up to go back and repair the tic-pocked surface of my speech. “Anyway,
enactoplasmic
as opposed to what? A million-year-old mystical Japanese cult?”

“You wear your ignorance as aggressively as Frank,” said Gerard. “I suppose you’re making my point for me.”

“Point being what?”

“My brother taught you only what he knew, and not even all of that. He kept you charmed and flattered but also in the dark, so your sense of even his small world was diminished, two-dimensional. Cartoonistic, if you like. What’s astonishing to me is that you didn’t know about the Park Avenue building until just now. It really must come as a shock.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Surely you’ve got my brother’s money in your pocket even as we speak, Lionel. Do you really believe that it came from detective work, from those scuffling little assignments he contrived to keep you children busy? Or perhaps you imagine he speech.pped money. That’s just as likely.”

Was
crapped
a chink in Gerard’s Zen façade, a bit of Brooklyn showing through? I recalled the elder monk proclaiming the worthlessness of “Bowel Movement Zen.”

“Frank consorted with dangerous people,” Gerard went on. “And he stole from them. The remuneration and the risk were high. The odds that he would flourish in such a life forever, low.”

“Talk to me about
fool-me-softly
—Fujisaki.”

“They own the building. Minna had a hand in managing it. The money involved would dazzle your senses, Lionel.” He gave me an expectant look, as though this assertion ought to dazzle me in the money’s stead, ought to astonish me right out of my investigation, and his bedroom.

“These people, their other home is an island,” I said, quoting the Garbage Cop—not that the phrase was likely to have originated with him.

Gerard smiled at me oddly. “For every Buddhist, Japan is his other home. And yes, it is an island.”

“Who’s a Buddhist?” I said. “I was talking about the money.”

He sighed, without losing the smile. “You are so like Frank.”

“What’s your role, Gerard?” I wanted to sicken him the way I was sickened. “I mean, besides sending your brother out into the Polack’s arms to die.”

Now he beamed munificently. The worse I attacked him, the deeper his forgiveness and grace would be—that’s what the smile said. “Frank was very careful never to expose me to any danger if he could help it. I was never introduced to anyone from Fujisaki. I believe I have yet to make their acquaintance, apart from the large hit man you led here yesterday.”

“Who’s Ullman?”

“A bookkeeper, another New Yorker. He was Frank’s partner in fleecing the Japanese.”

“But you
never met the guy
.”

I meant him to hear the sarcasm, or rather Frank Minna’s sarcasm
in quotation. But he went on obliviously. “No. I only supplied the labor, in return for consideration equal to my mortgage here on the Zendo. Buddhism is spread by what means it finds.”

“Labor for what?” My brain tangled on
spread by means it finds, fed in springs by mimes, bled by mingy spies
, but I shook it off.

“My students performed the maintenance and service work for the building, as part of their training. Cleaning, cooking, the very sort of labor they’d perform in a monastery, only in a slightly different setting. The contract for those services in such a building is worth millions. My brother and Ullman tithed the difference mostly into their own pockets.”

“Yes. Doormen, too.”

“So Fujisaki sicced the giant on Frank and the bookkeeper.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“And he just happened to use the Zendo as his trap yesterday?” I aired out another Minna-ism: “Don’t try to hand me no two-ton feather.” I was dredging up Minna’s usages on any excuse now, as though I could build a golem of his language, then bring it to life, a figure of vengeance to search out the killer or killers.

I was aware of myself standing in Gerard’s room, planted on his floor, arms at my sides, never moving nearer to him where he sat beaming Zen pleasantness in my direction, ignoring my accusations and my tics. I was big but I was no golem or giant. I hadn’t startled Gerard in deep sleep nor upended his calm with my griefy hostility. I wasn’t holding a gun on him. He didn’t have to answer my questions.

“I don’t really believe in sophisticated killers,” said Gerard. “Do you?”

“Go-fisticate-a-killphone,”
I ticced.

“The Fujisaki Corporation is ruthless and remorseless—in the manner of corporations. And yet in the manner of corporations their violence is also performed at a remove, by a force just nominally under their control. In the giant you speak of they seem to have
located a sort of primal entity—one whose true nature is killing. And sicced him, as you say, on the men who they feel betrayed them. I’m not sure the killer’s behavior is explicable in any real sense, Lionel. Any human sense.”