Motherless Brooklyn (36 page)
Read Motherless Brooklyn Online
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Gerard’s persuasiveness was a variant of the Minna style, I saw now. I felt the force of it, moving me authentically. Yet his foray against the notion of a sophisticated killer also made me think of Tony mocking Detective Seminole with jokes about Batman and James Bond supervillains. Was it a giveaway, a clue that Gerard and Tony were in league? And what about Julia? I wanted to quote Frank’s conversation with Gerard the night he died:
She misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong
, find out what he meant. I wanted to ask about Boston, and I wanted to ask about Frank and Julia’s marriage—had Gerard been at the ceremony? I wanted to ask him about whether he missed Brooklyn, and how he got his head so shiny. I searched for a single question that could stand for my thousands and what popped out was this:
“What’s human sense?”
“In Buddhism, Lionel, we come to understand that everything on this earth is a vessel for Buddha-nature. Frank had Buddha-nature. You have Buddha-nature. I feel it.”
Gerard allowed a long minute to pass while we contemplated his words.
Buddha nostril
, I nearly blurted. When he spoke again, it was with a confidence that sympathy flowed between us untrammeled by doubt or fear.
“There’s another of your Minna Men, Lionel. He’s pushing his way into this, and I fear he may have aroused the killer’s ire. Tony, is that his name?”
“Tony Vermonte,” I said, marveling—it was as if Gerard had read my mind.
“Yes. He’d like to walk in my brother’s footsteps. But Fujisaki will be keeping a keener eye on their money from this point, I’d think. There’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost. Perhaps you’ll have a word with him.”
“Tony and I aren’t exactly … communicating well, since yesterday.”
“Ah.”
I felt a surge of care in me, for Tony. He was only a heedless adventurer, with a poignant urge to imitate Frank Minna in all things. He was a member of my family—L&L, the Men. Now he was in above his head, threatened on all sides by the giant, by Detective Seminole, by The Clients. Only Gerard and I understood his danger.
I must have been silent for a minute or so—a veritable sesshin by my standards.
“You and Tony are together in your pain at the loss of my brother,” said Gerard softly. “But you haven’t come together in actuality. Be patient.”
“There’s another factor,” I said, tentative now, lulled by his compassionate tones. “Someone else may be involved in this somehow. Two of them, actually—
Monstercookie and Antifriendly!
—uh, Matricardi and Rockaforte.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do.”
“You can’t know how sorry I am to hear those names.”
Never say those names!
warned Minna in the echo chamber of my memory. Gerard went on, “Those two are the prototype, aren’t they, for my brother’s tendency to dangerous associations—and his tendency to exploit those associations in dangerous ways.”
“He stole from them?”
“Do you recall that he once had to leave New York for a while?”
Did I recall! Suddenly Gerard threatened to solve the deepest puzzles of my existence. I practically wanted to ask him,
So who’s Bailey?
“I’d hoped they were no longer in the picture,” said Gerard reflectively. It was the nearest to thrown I’d seen him, the closest I’d come to pushing his buttons. Only now I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Avoid them, Lionel, if you can,” he continued. “They’re dangerous men.”
He returned his gaze to my face, batted his lashes, moved his
expressive eyebrows. If I’d been in striking distance I’d have tried to span his head with my hands and stroke his eyebrows with my thumb tips, just to soothe this one small worry I’d raised.
“Can I ask one more thing?” I nearly called him Roshi, so complete was my conversion. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”
Gerard nodded.
The High Lama will grant you an audience, Mrs. Gushman
.
“Is there anyone else
—Zonebone
!—anyone else at the Zendo who’s involved in this thing? Anyone—
Kissmefaster! Killmesooner! Cookiemonster
!—anyone the killer might target? That old hippie, Wallace? Or the girl
—Kissingme
!—Kimmery?” I tried not to divulge the special freight of tenderness and hope behind this query. Whether the string of shrieks I issued in the course of its delivery made me appear more or less blasé, I couldn’t say.
“No.” Gerard spoke benevolently. “I compromised myself personally, but not my students or my practice as a teacher. Wallace and Kimmery should be safe. It’s kind of you to be concerned.”
I’m concerned about Pinched and Indistinct, too
, I wanted to say. I doubted students could get any more compromised than that.
And then there was that nod of complicity I saw pass between Gerard and the giant.
The three of them—Pinched, Indistinct, and the nod—were three sour notes in a very pretty song. But I kept my tongue, feeling I’d learned what I could here, that it was time to go. I wanted to find Tony before the giant did. And I needed to step outside the candle glow of Gerard’s persuasiveness to sort out the false and the real, the Zen and the chaff in our long discussion.
“I’m going now,” I said awkwardly.
“Good night, Lionel.” He was still watching me as I closed the door.
On second thought, there
is
a vaguely Tourettic aspect to the New York City subway, especially late at night—that dance of attention, of stray gazes, in which every rider must engage. And there’s a lot of stuff you shouldn’t touch in the subway, particularly in a certain order: this pole and then your lips, for instance. And the tunnel walls are layered, like those of my brain, with expulsive and incoherent language—
But I was in a terrible hurry, or rather two terrible hurries: to get back to Brooklyn, and to sort out my thinking about Gerard before I got there. I couldn’t spare a minute to dwell in myself as a body riding the Lexington train to Nevins Street—I might as well have been tele-ported, or floated to Brooklyn on a magic carpet, for all that I was allured or distracted by the 4 train’s sticky, graffitied immediacy.
The lights were burning in the L&L storefront. I approached from the opposite sidewalk, confident I was invisible on the darkened street to those in the office—I’d been on the other side of that plate of glass only two or three thousand nights in preparation for the act of spying on my fellow Men from the street. I didn’t want to go waltzing into a trap. Detective Seminole might be there or, who knew, maybe Tony and a passel of doormen. If there was something to learn at a distance, I’d learn it.
It was almot two-thirty now, and Bergen Street was shut up tight, the night cold enough to chase the stoop-sitting drinkers indoors. Smith Street showed a bit more life, Zeod’s Market lit up like a beacon, catering to the all-night cigarette cravings, to the squad-car cops in need of a bagel or LifeSaver or some other torus. Four L&L cars were scattered in parking spots near the storefront: the Minna death car, which hadn’t moved since Gilbert and I returned from the hospital and parked it, the Pontiac in which Tony had shanghaied me in
front of The Clients’ brownstone, a Caddy that Minna had liked to drive himself, and a Tracer, an ugly modernistic bubble of a car that usually fell to me or Gilbert to pilot. I slowed my walk as I drew up even with the storefront, then turned my neck. It was pleasing to have a good solid reason behind turning my neck for once, retroactive validation for a billion tics. As I passed, I made out the shapes of two Men inside: Tony and Danny, both in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Danny seated behind the counter with a folded newspaper, radiating cool, Tony pacing, radiating cool’s opposite. The television was on.
I walked past, to the corner of Smith, then swiveled and went back. This time I set up shop on the brief stoop of the big apartment building directly across from L&L. It was a safe outpost. I could duck my head and watch them through a parked car’s windows if I thought they were in any danger of spotting me. Otherwise I’d sit back in the wings and study them in the limelight of the storefront until something happened or I’d decided what to do.
Danny—I gave Danny Fantl a moment of my time. He was sliding through this crisis as he’d slid through life to this point, so poised he was practically an ambient presence. Gilbert was in jail and I was hunted high and low and Danny sat in the storefront all day, refusing car calls and smoking cigarettes and reading sports. He wasn’t exactly my candidate for any plot’s criminal mastermind, but if Tony conspired with or even confided in anyone inside L&L’s circle, it would be Danny. In the present atmosphere, I decided, there was no way I could take Danny for granted, trust him with my back.
Which meant I wasn’t going inside to talk with either one of them until they were apart. If then—the image of Tony pulling his wobbly gun on me was fresh enough to give pause.
Anyway, something happened before I’d decided what to do—why was I not surprised? But it was a relatively banal something, reassuring, even. A tick of the clock of everyday life on Bergen Street, an everyday life that already felt nostalgic.
A block east, on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt, was an elegantly
renovated tavern called the Boerum Hill Inn, with a gleaming antique inlaid-mirror bar, a CD jukebox weighted toward Blue Note and Stax, and a Manhattanized clientele of professional singles too good for bars with televisions, for subway rides home, or for the likes of the Men. Only Minna ever visited the Boerum Hill Inn, and he cracked that anyone who drank there was someone else’s assistant: a district attorney’s, an editor’s, or a video artist’s. The dressed-up crowd at the inn gabbled and flirted every night of the week until two in the morning, oblivious to the neighborhood’s past or present reality, then slept it off in their overpriced apartments or on their desks the next day in Midtown. Typically a few parties would stagger down the block after last call and try to engage an L&L car for a ride home—sometimes it was a woman alone or a newly rmed couple too drunk to throw to the fates, and we’d take the job. Mostly we claimed not to have any cars.
But the inn’s bartenders were a couple of young women we adored, Siobhain and Welcome. Siobhain was properly named, while Welcome bore the stigma of her parents’ hippie ideals, but both were from Brooklyn and Irish to their ancient souls—or so had declared Minna. They were roommates in Park Slope, possibly lovers (again according to Minna), and bartending their way through graduate school. Each night one or the other was stuck with closing—the owner of the inn was stingy and didn’t let them double up after midnight. If we weren’t actually busy on some surveillance job we’d always drive the closer home.
It was Welcome, at the door of L&L, now going inside. I saw Tony nod at Danny, then Danny stood and stubbed out a butt, checked in his pocket for the keys and nodded too. He and Welcome moved to the door and out. I lowered my head. Danny led her to the Caddy, which sat at the front of the row of parked cars, on the corner of Smith. She went around to the front passenger seat, not like the usual ride who’d sit in the back. Danny slammed his door and the interior light shut off, then he started the engine. I glanced back to see that Tony was now going through the drawers behind the L&L counter,
searching for something, his desperado’s energy suddenly lashed to a purpose. He used both hands, his cigarette stuck in his mouth, and unpacked papers onto the countertop hurriedly. I’d gathered a piece of vague information, I supposed: Tony didn’t trust Danny with everything.
Then I saw a hulking shadow stir, in a parked car on L&L’s side of the street, just a few yards from the storefront.
Unmistakable.
The Kumquat Sasquatch.
The car was an economy model, bright red, and he filled it like it had been cast around his body. I saw him lean sideways to watch the Cadillac with Danny and Welcome inside round the corner of Smith and disappear with a pulse of brakelights. Then he turned his attention back to the storefront; I read the movement in the disappearance of a nose from the silhouette, its replacement by an elephantine ear. The giant was doing what I was doing, staking out L&L.
He watched Tony, and I watched them both. Tony was a lot more interesting at the moment. I hadn’t often seen him reading, and never this intently. He was searching for something in the sheaf of papers he’d pulled from Minna’s drawers, his brow furrowed, cigarette in his lips, looking like Edward R. Murrow’s punk brother. Now, unsatisfied, he dug in another drawer, and worked over a notebook I recognized even from across the street as the one containing my own stakeout jottings from the day before. I tried not to take it personally when he thrust this aside even more hastily and went back to tearing up the drawers.
The large shadow took it all in, complacent. His hand moved from somewhere below the line of the car window and briefly covered his mouth; he chewed, then leaned forward to dribble out some discarded seeds or pits. A bag of cherries or olives this time, something a
giant would gobble in a handful. Or Cracker Jack, and he didn’t like peanuts. He watched Tony like an operagoer who knew the libretto, was curious only to gaidew details of how the familiar plot would play out this time.
Tony exhausted the drawers, started in on the file cabinets.
The giant chewed. I blinked in time with his chewing, and counted chews and blinks, occupying my Tourette’s brain with this nearly invisible agitation, tried to stay otherwise still as a lizard on the stoop. He had only to turn this way to spot me. My whole edge consisted of seeing without being seen; I had nothing more on the giant, had never had. If I wanted to preserve that wafer-thin edge I needed to find a better hiding place—and it wouldn’t hurt to get in out of the stiff, cold wind.
The three remaining L&L cars were my best option. But the Pontiac, which I would have preferred, was up ahead of the giant’s car, easily in his line of sight. I was sure I didn’t want to face whatever ghosts or more tangibly olfactory traces of Minna might be trapped inside the sealed windows of the Death Car. Which left the Tracer. I felt in my pocket for my bunch of keys, found the three longest, one of which was the Tracer’s door and ignition. I was preparing to duckwalk down the pavement and slip into the Tracer when the Cadillac reappeared, hurtling down Bergen, with Danny at the wheel.
He parked in the same spot at the front of the block and walked back toward L&L. I slumped on the stoop, played drunk. Danny didn’t see me. He went inside, surprising Tony in his filework. They exchanged a word or two, then Tony slid the drawer closed and bummed another cigarette from Danny. The shadow in the little car went on watching, sublimely confident and peaceful. Neither Tony nor Danny had ever seen the giant, I suppose, so he had less to worry about in attracting attention than I did. But reason alone couldn’t account for the giant’s composure. If he wasn’t a student of Gerard’s, he should have been: He possessed true Buddha-nature, and would have surpassed his teacher. Three hundred and fifty-odd pounds
instill a cosmic measure of gravity, I suppose.
What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?
was the joke I remembered now, one of Loomis’s measly riddles.
Make me one with everything
. I would have been happy to be one with everything at that moment.