Motherless Brooklyn (46 page)

Five
, I thought.

But who’s counting?

“Good-bye, Julia,” I said.

“Screw you, you maniac.” She knelt and picked up her lighter, and this time she got her cigarette lit on the first flick. “Barnabaileyscrewjuliaminna.”

It was my final word on the subject.

So I drove with my gas-pedal-and-brake foot clad only in a dress sock, back to Brooklyn.

Then somewhere, sometime, a circuit closed. It was a secret from me, but I knew the secret existed. A man—two men?—found another man. Lifted an instrument, gun, knife? Say gun. Did a job. Took care
of a job. Collected a debf life. This was the finishing of something between two brothers, a transaction of brotherly love-hate, something playing out, a dark, wobbly melody. The notes of the melody had been other people, boys–turned–Minna Men, mobsters, monks, doormen. And women, one woman especially. We’d all been notes in the melody, but the point of the song was the brothers, and the payoff, the last note struck—a scream? a bloody beat? a bare interrupted moan?—or not even a moan, perhaps. In my guilt I’d like to think so. Let it finish in silence. Let it be, then, that Rama-lama-ding-dong died in his sleep.

We sat together in the L&L storefront at two in the morning, playing poker on the counter, listening to Boyz 2 Men, courtesy of Danny.
Now that Frank and Tony were gone, Danny could play the sort of music he liked. It was one of a number of changes.

“One card,” said Gilbert. I was the dealer, so I slid his discard toward me and offered him a fresh selection from the top of the deck.

“Jesus, Gil,” said the ex–Garbage Cop. He was a driver now, a part of the new L&L. “You’re always
one card
or
no cards
—why can’t I get dealt anything but crap?”

“That’s ’cause you’re still in charge of garbage, Loomis,” said Gilbert happily. “Even though you quit the force, doesn’t matter. Someone’s gotta handle it.”

“Handle with garbagecrap!”
I declared as I dealt myself three new cards.

Gilbert had been released two weeks before, after five nights in the lockup, for want of evidence in Ullman’s killing. Detective Seminole had called us to apologize, excessively sheepish, I thought, as though he were still a little afraid. Gilbert’s size and manner had carried him through the ordeal pretty well, though he came out short a wrist-watch and had involuntarily given up smoking during his stay, having been connived out of every cigarette on his person. He was making up for it now in cigarettes, and in beer and coffee and Sno Balls and White Castles and Zeod’s pastrami heroes, but no flow of indulgences could be constant enough to stem his complaints at how we’d abandoned him. Fortunately he was winning hands tonight.

Danny sat apart from the three of us, silent, eyebrows raised slightly between his poker hand and his new fedora. He sat a little farther apart and dressed a little sharper each passing night, or so it seemed to me. Leadership of L&L had fallen to him like an easy rebound, one he didn’t even have to jump for, while the other players boxed and elbowed and sweated on the wrong part of the floor. What Danny knew or didn’t know about Gerard and Fujisaki was never said. He took my account of the events in Maine and nodded once, and we were done speaking of it. It turned out it was that simple. Want to be the new Frank Minna? Dress the part,
and shut up, and wait. Court Street will know you when it sees you. Zeod will put the tab in your name. Gilbert and Loomis and I couldn’t have argued. We were Dapper and the Stooges, it was plain to the eye.

L&L was a detective agency, a clean one for the first time. So clean we didn’t have any clients. So we were also a car service, a real one now, one thatdidn’t turn away calls unless we truly were out of cars. Danny was even having flyers printed up, and new business cards, boasting of our economy and efficiency to points all over the boroughs. The Lincoln Minna had bled to death inside was clean now too, part of a small fleet of cars making regular runs between the Cobble Hill Nursing Home on Henry Street and the Promenade Diner at the end of Montague, between the Boerum Hill Inn and stylish apartment buildings along Prospect Park West and Joralemon Street.

As a matter of fact, the Boerum Hill Inn had just closed for the night, and Siobhain was at the door, her eyes dark-circled and her posture rather crushed from the effort of tossing out the tenacious flirting crowd. Gilbert put up a finger to say he’d take the job of driving her home, but first wished to lay his poker hand on the table—it appeared to be one he was particularly proud of. Seeing his recent enthusiasm for chaperoning Siobhain I suspected Gilbert had developed a little crush on her, or maybe it was an old crush he had just allowed to let show, now that Frank wasn’t around to needle him constantly that she was playing for the other team.

“Come on, you suckers, I’m calling you,” said Gilbert.

“Nothing,” said Loomis, bugging his eyes at his hand, trying to embarrass the cards. “Load of crap.”

Danny just frowned and shook his head, put his cards on the table. He didn’t need poker triumphs just now, he had better things. For all we knew he was folding winning hands just to throw some glory Gilbert’s way.

“Forks and spoons,”
I said, slapping my hand down to show the card faces.

“Jacks and twos?” Gilbert inspected my cards. “That won’t do it, Freakshow.” He tossed down aces and eights. “Read ’em and scream, like the maniac you are.”

Assertions are common to me, and they’re also common to detectives. (“About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door”—Marlowe,
The Big Sleep.)
And in detective stories things are always
always
, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary. Oh sure. Seen it before, will see it again. Trust me on this one.

Assertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.

Here’s one more. As a great man once said, the more things change, the harder they are to change back.

Within a few days of Gerard’s disappearance most of the Yorkville Zendo’s students had trickled away. There was a real Zendo on the Upper East Side, twenty blocks south, and its ranks were swelled by defectors from Yorkville seeking truer essences (though, as Kimmery had pointed out, anyone who teaches Zen is a Zen teacher). Those bewildered doormen had all originally been authentic students of Gerard’s, it turned out, rudderless seekers, human clay. It was their absolute susceptibility to Gerard’s charismatic teachings that made them available to be exploited, first in the Park Avenue building, then as a gang of inept drivers and strong-arms when Gerard needed bodies to fill ranks alongside the Polish giant. Frank Minna had Minna
Men while Gerard had only followers, Zen stooges, and that difference might have determined how the case worked out. That might have been my little edge. It pleased me to think so anyway.

The Yorkville Zendo didn’t fold, though. Wallace, that stoic sitter, took over stewardship of what flock remained, though he declined to claim the title of Roshi for himself. Instead he asked to be called
sensei
, a lesser term denoting a sort of apprentice-instructor. So it was that each of the Minna organizations, Frank’s and Gerard’s, were gently and elegantly steered past the shoals of corruption by their quietest disciples. Of course Fujisaki and The Clients, those vast shadows, crept away unharmed, barely even ruffled. It would take more than the Minna brothers or Lionel Essrog to make a lasting impression.

I learned the fate of the Yorkville Zendo from Kimmery the only time I saw her, two weeks after my return from Maine. I’d been leaving messages on her machine, but she hadn’t returned my calls until then. We arranged a rendezvous at a coffee shop on Seventy-second Street, our telephone conversation clipped and awkward. Before I left for the date I took the thoroughest shower I knew how to take, then dressed and re-dressed a dozen times, playing mirror games with myself, trying to see something that wasn’t there, trying not to see the big twitchy Essrog that was. I suppose I still had a faint notion we could be together.

We talked about the Zendo for a while before she said anything to suggest she even recalled our night together. And when she did, it was “Do you have my keys?”

I met her eyes and saw she was afraid of me. I tried not to loom or jerk, though there was a Papaya Czar franchise across the street. I was pining for their hot dogs, and it was hard to keep from turning my head.

“Oh, sure,” I said. I dropped the keys on the table, glad I hadn’t chosen to hurl them into the Atlantic. Instead I’d been burnishing them in my pocket, as I had The Clients’ fork once upon a time, each talisman of a world I wouldn’t get to visit again. I said good-bye to the keys now.

“I have to tell you something, Lionel.” She delivered it with that same hectic half smile that I’d been trying to conjure in my mind’s eye for most of two weeks.

“Tellmebailey,” I whispered.

“I’m moving back in with Stephen,” she said. “So that thing that happened with us, it was just, you know—
a thing.”

So Oreo Man was a cowboy after all, now striding back in from his sunset backdrop.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

“You understand, Lionel?”

“Ah.”
Understand me, Bailey
.

“Okay?”

“Okay,”
I said. She didn’t need to know it was just a tic, just echolalia that made me say it. I reached across the table and smoothed the two ends of her collar toward her small, bony shoulders. “Okayokayokayokayokay,” I said under my breath.

I had a dream about Minna. We were in a car. He was driving.

“Was I in the Butt Trust?” I asked him.

He smiled at me, liking to be quoted, but didn’t reply.

“I guess everybody needs stooges,” I said, not meaning to make him feel bad.

“I don’t know if I’d put you exactly in the Butt Trust category,” he said.