Motherless Brooklyn Read online

  “What if they come meet you?” said Coney.

  “Worry about that if it happens,” said Minna curtly.

  “Okay, but what if—”

  Minna waved him off before he could finish. Really Coney was groping for comprehension of his role, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Lionel—” started Minna.

  Lionel, my name. Frank and the Minna Men pronounced it to rhyme with vinyl. Lionel Essrog. Line-all.

  Liable Guesscog.

  Final Escrow.

  Ironic Pissclam.

  And so on.

  My own name was the original verbal taffy, by now stretched to filament-thin threads that lay all over the floor of my echo-chamber skull. Slack, the flavor all chewed out of it.

  “Here.” Minna dropped a radio monitor and headphones in my lap, then patted his rib pocket. “I’m wired. I’ll be coming over that thing live. Listen close. If I say, uh, ‘Not if my life depended on it,’ you get out of the car and knock on the door here, Gilbert lets you in, two of you rush upstairs and find me quick, okay?”

  Eat me, dickweed was almost dislodged from my mouth in the excitement, but I breathed in sharply and swallowed the words, said nothing instead.

  “We’re not carrying,” said Coney.

  “What?” said Minna.

  “A piece, I don’t have a piece.”

  “What’s with piece? Say gun, Gilbert.”

  “No gun, Frank.”

  “That’s what I count on. That’s how I sleep at night, you have to know. You with no gun. I wouldn’t want you chuckleheads coming up a stairway behind me with a hairpin, with a harmonica, let alone a gun. I’ve got a gun. You just show up.”

  “Sorry, Frank.”

  “With an unlit cigar, with a fucking Buffalo chicken wing.”

  “Sorry, Frank.”

  “Just listen. If you hear me say, uh, ‘First I gotta use the bathroom,’ that means we’re coming out. You get Gilbert, get back in the car, get ready to follow. You got it?”

  Get, get, get, GOT! said my brain. Duck, duck, duck, GOOSE!

  “Life depended, rush the Zendo,” was what I said aloud. “Use the bathroom, start the car.”

  “Genius, Freakshow,” said Minna. He pinched my cheek, then tossed his cigarette behind him into the street, where it tumbled, sparks scattering. His eyes were far away.

  Coney got out of the car, and I scooted over to the driver’s seat. Minna thumped the hood once, as if patting a dog on its head after saying stay, then slipped past the front bumper, put his finger up to slow Coney, crossed the pavement to the door of One-oh-nine, and hit the doorbell under the Zendo sign. Coney leaned against the car, waiting. I put on the headphones, got a clear sound of Minna’s shoe scraping pavement over the wire so I knew it was working. When I looked up I saw the doorman from the big place to the right watching us, but he wasn’t doing anything apart from watching.

  I heard the buzzer sound, live and over the wire both. Minna went in, sweeping the door wide. Coney skipped over, grabbed the door, and disappeared inside, too.

  Footsteps upstairs, no voices yet. Now suddenly I dwelled in two worlds, eyes and quivering body in the driver’s seat of the Lincoln, watching from my parking spot the orderly street life of the Upper East Side, dog-walkers, deliverymen, girls and boys dressed as grownups in business suits shivering their way into gimmicky bars as the nightlife got under way, while my ears built a soundscape from the indoor echoes of Minna’s movement up the stair, still nobody meeting him but he seemed to know where he was, shoe leather chafing on wood, stairs squeaking, then a hesitation, a rustle of clothing perhaps, then two wooden clunks, and the footsteps resumed more quietly. Minna had taken off his shoes.

  Ringing the doorbell, then sneaking in? It didn’t follow. But what in this sequence did follow? I palmed another Castle out of the paper sack—six burgers to restore order in a senseless world.

  “Frank,” came a voice over the wire.

  “I came,” said Minna wearily. “But I shouldn’t have to. You should clear up crap on your end.”

  “I appreciate that,” went the other voice. “But things have gotten complicated.”

  “They know about the contract for the building,” said Minna.

  “No, I don’t think so.” The voice was weirdly calm, placating. Did I recognize it? Perhaps not that so much as the rhythm of Minna’s replies—this was someone he knew well, but who?

  “Come inside, let’s talk,” said the voice.

  “What about?” said Minna. “What do we have to talk about?”

  “Listen to yourself, Frank.”

  “I came here to listen to myself? I can do that at home.”

  “But do you, in fact?” I could hear a smile in the voice. “Not as often, or as deeply as you might, I suspect.”

  “Where’s Ullman?” said Minna. “You got him here?” “Ullman’s downtown. You’ll go to him.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Patience.”

  “You say patience, I say fuck.”

  “Characteristic, I suppose.”

  “Yeah. So let’s call the whole thing off.”

  More muffled footsteps, a door closing. A clunk, possibly a bottle and glass, a poured drink. Wine. I wouldn’t have minded a beverage myself. I chewed on a Castle instead and gazed out the windshield, brain going Characteristic autistic mystic my tic dipstick dickweek and then I thought to take another note, flipped open the notebook and under WOMAN, HAIR, GLASSES wrote ULLMAN DOWNTOWN, thought Dull Man Out of Town. When I swallowed the burger, my jaw and throat tightened, and I braced for an unavoidable copralalic tic—out loud, though no one was there to hear it. “Eat shit, Bailey!”

  Bailey was a name embedded in my Tourette’s brain, though I couldn’t say why. I’d never known a Bailey. Maybe Bailey was everyman, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. My imaginary listener, he had to bear the brunt of a majority of my solitary swearing—some part of me required a target, apparently. If a Touretter curses in the woods and there’s nobody to hear does he make a sound? Bailey seemed to be my solution to that conundrum.

  “Your face betrays you, Frank. You’d like to murder someone.”

  “You’d do fine for a start.”

  “You shouldn’t blame me, Frank, if you’ve lost control of her.”

  “It’s your fault if she misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong.

  You’re the one who filled her head with that crap.”

  “Here, try this.” (Offering a drink?)

  “Not on an empty stomach.”

  “Alas. I forget how you suffer, Frank.”

  “Aw, go fuck yourself.”

  “Eat shit, Bailey!” The tics were always worst when I was nervous, stress kindling my Tourette’s. And something in this scenario was making me nervous. The conversation I overheard was too knowing, the references all polished and opaque, as though years of dealings lay underneath every word.

  Also, where was the short-dark-haired girl? In the room with Minna and his supercilious conversational partner, silent? Or somewhere else entirely? My inability to visualize the interior space of One-oh-nine was agitating. Was the girl the “she” they were discussing? It seemed unlikely.

  And what was her Rama-lama-ding-dong? I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about it. I pushed away a host of tics and tried not to dwell on things I didn’t understand.

  I glanced at the door. Presumably Coney was still behind it. I wanted to hear not if my life depended on it so we could rush the stairs.

  I was startled by a knock on the driver’s window. It was the doorman who’d been watching. He gestured for me to roll down the window. I shook my head, he nodded his. Finally I complied, pulling the headphones off one ear so I could listen.

  “What?” I said, triply distracted—the power window had seduced my magpie mind and now demanded purposeless raising and lowering. I tried to keep it subtle.

  “Your friend, he wants you,” said the doorman, gesturing back toward his building.
>
  “What?” This was thoroughly confusing. I craned my neck to see past him, but there was nobody visible in the doorway of his building. Meanwhile, Minna was saying something over the wire. But not bathroom or depended on it.

  “Your friend,” the doorman repeated in his clumsy Eastern European accent, maybe Polish or Czech. “He asks for you.” He grinned, enjoying my bewilderment. I felt myself knitting my brow exaggeratedly, a tic, and wanted to tell him to wipe the grin off his face: Everything he was seeing was not to his credit.

  “What friend?” I said. Minna and Coney were both inside—I would have noticed if the Zendo door had budged

  “He said if you’re waiting, he’s ready,” said the doorman, nodding, gesturing again. “Wants to talk.”

  Now Minna was saying something about “… make a mess on the marble floor …”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I said to the doorman. “Dickweed!” I winced, waved him off, tried to focus on the voices coming over the headphones.

  “Hey, hey,” the doorman said. He held up his hands. “I’m just bringing you a message, friend.”

  I zipped down the power window again, finally pried my fingers away. “No problem,” I said, and suppressed another dickweed into a high, chihuahuaesque barking sound, something like yipke! “But I can’t leave the car. Tell my friend if he wants to talk to come out and talk to me here. Okay, friend?” It seemed to me I had too many friends all of a sudden, and I didn’t know any of their names. I repeated my impulsive flapping motion with my hand, an expedient tic-and-gesture combo, trying to nudge this buffoon back to his doorway.

  “No, no. He said come in.”

  “… break an arm …” I thought I heard Minna say.

  “Get his name, then,” I said, desperate. “Come back and tell me his name.”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay, eatmedoorman, tell him I’ll be right there.” I powered up the window in his face. He tapped again, and I ignored him.

  “… first let me use your toilet …”

  I opened the car door and pushed the doorman out of the way, went to the Zendo door and knocked, six times, hard. “Coney,” I hissed. “Get out here.”

  Over the headset I heard Minna shut the bathroom door behind him, begin running water. “Hope you heard that, Freakshow,” he whispered into his microphone, addressing me directly. “We’re getting in a car. Don’t lose us. Play it cool.”

  Coney popped out of the door.

  “He’s coming out,” I said, pulling the headphones down around my neck.

  “Okay,” said Coney, eyes wide. We were in the thick of the action, for once.

  “You drive,” I said, touching my fingertip to his nose. He flinched me away like a fly. We hustled into the car, and Coney revved the engine. I threw the bag of cooling Castles and paper wreckage into the backseat. The idiot doorman had vanished into his building. I put him out of my mind for the moment.

  We sat facing forward, our car shrouded in its own sam, waiting, vibrating. My brain went Follow that car! Hollywood star! When you wish upon a cigar! My jaw worked, chewing the words back down, keeping silent. Gilbert’s hands gripped the wheel, mine drummed quietly in my lap, tiny hummingbird motions.

  This was what passed for playing it cool around here.

  “I don’t see him,” said Coney.

  “Just wait. He’ll come out, with some other guys probably.” Probably, gobbledy. I lifted one of the headphones to my right ear. No voices, nothing but clunking sounds, maybe the stairs.

  “What if they get into a car behind us?” said Coney.

  “It’s a one-way street,” I said, annoyed, but glancing backward at this cue to survey the parked cars behind us. “Just let them pass.”

  “Hey,” said Coney.

  They’d appeared, slipping out the door and rushing ahead of us on the sidewalk while I’d turned: Minna and another man, a giant in a black coat. The other man was seven feet tall if he was an inch, with shoulders that looked as though football pads or angel wings were hidden under his coat. Or perhaps the petite short-haired girl was curled under there, clutching the tall man’s shoulders like a human backpack. Was this giant the man who’d spoken so insinuatingly? Minna hurried ahead of the giant, as if he were motivated to give us the slip instead of dragging his heels to keep us in the game. Why? A gun in his back? The giant’s hands were hidden in his pockets. For some reason I envisioned them gripping loaves of bread or large chunks of salami, snacks hidden in the coat to feed a giant in winter, comfort food.

  Or maybe this fantasy was merely my own self-comfort: a loaf of bread couldn’t be a gun, which allotted Minna the only firearm in the scenario.

  We watched stupidly as they crossed between two parked cars and slid into the backseat of a black K-car that had rolled up from behind us in the street, then immediately took off. Overanxious as we were, Coney and I had at some level timed our reactions to allow for their starting a parked car, and now they were getting away. “Go!” I said.

  Coney swerved to pull the Lincoln out of our spot, batted bumpers, hard enough to dent. Of course we were locked in. He backed, more gently thumped the rear end, then found an arc sufficient to free us from the space, but not before a cab had rocketed past us to block the way. The K-car tucked around the corner up ahead, onto Second Avenue. “Go!”

  “Look,” said Coney, pointing at the cab. “I’m going. Keep your eyes up.”

  “Eyes up?” I said. “Eyes out. Chin up.” Correcting him was an involuntary response to stress.

  “Yeah, that too.”

  “Eyes open, eyes on the road, ears glued to the radio—” I suddenly had to list every workable possibility. That was how irritating eyes up had been.

  “Yeah, and trap buttoned,” said Coney. He got us right on the tail of the cab, better than nothing since it was moving fast. “What about gluing your ears to Frank while you’re at it?”

  I raised the headphones. Nothing but an overlay of traffic sounds to substitute for the ones I’d blotted out. Coney followed the cab onto Second Avenue, where the K-car obligingly waited in a thicket of cabs and other traffic for the light to change. We were back in the game, a notion exhilarating and yet pathetic by definition, since we’d lost them in the space of a block.

  We merged left to pull around the first cab and into position behind another in the same lane as the car containing Minna and the giant. I watch the timed stoplights a half mile ahead turn red. Now there, I thought, was a job for someone with obsessive-compulsive symptoms—traffic management. Then our light turned green and we lurched all together, a floating quilt of black- and dun-colored private cars and the bright-orange cabs, through the intersection.

  “Get closer,” I said, pulling the phones from my ears again. Then an awesome tic wrenched its way out of my chest: “Eat me Mister Dicky-weed!”

  This got even Gilbert’s attention. “Mister Dicky-weed?” As the lights turned green in sequence for us the cabs threaded audaciously back and forth, seeking advantage, but the truth was the lights were timed for twenty-five-mile-an-hour traffic, and there wasn’t any advantage to be gained. The still-unseen driver of the K-car was as impatient as a cabbie, and moved up to the front of the pack, but the timed lights kept us all honest, at least until they turned a corner. We remained stuck a car back. This was a chase Coney could handle, so far.

  I was another story.

  “Sinister mystery weed,” I said, trying to find words that would ease the compulsion. It was as if my brain were inspired, trying to generate a really original new tic. Tourette’s muse was with me. Rotten timing. Stress generally aggravated tics, but when I was engaged in a task the concentration kept me tic-free. I should have done the driving, I now realized. This chase was all stress and no place for it to go.

  “Disturbed visitor week. Sisturbed.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting a little sisturbed myself,” said Coney absently as he jockeyed for an open spot in the lane to the right.

>   “Fister—” I sputtered.

  “Spare me,” groused Coney as he got us directly behind the K-car at last. I leaned forward to make out what I could of the interior. Three heads. Minna and the giant in the backseat, and a driver. Minna was facing straight ahead, and so was the giant. I picked up the headphones to check, but I’d guessed right: no talk. Somebody knew what they were doing and where they were going, and that somebody wasn’t even remotely us.

  At Fifty-ninth Street we hit the end of the cycle of green lights, as well as the usual unpleasantness around the entrance to the Queensborough bridge. The pack slowed, resigning itself to the wait through another red. Coney sagged back so we wouldn’t too obvious pulling in behind them for the wait, and another cab slipped in ahead of us. Then the K-car shot off through the fresh red, barely missing the surge of traffic coming across Fifty-eighth.

  “Shit!”

  “Shit!”

  Coney and I both almost bounced out of our skins. We were wedged in, unable to follow and brave the stream of crosstown traffic if we’d wanted to try. It felt like a straitjacket. It felt like our fate overtaking us, Minna’s losers, failing him again. Fuckups fucking up because that’s what fuckups do. But the K-car hit another mass of vehicular stuff parked in front of the next red and stayed in sight a block ahead. The traffic was broken into chunks. We’d gotten lucky for a minute, but a minute only.

  I watched, frantic. Their red, our red, my eyes flicked back and forth. I heard Coney’s breath, and my own, like horses at the gate—our adrenalinated bodies imagined they could make up the difference of the block. If we weren’t careful, at the sight of the light changing we’d pound our two foreheads through the windshield.

  Our red did change, but so did theirs, and, infuriatingly, their vehicular mass surged forward while ours crawled. That mass was our hope—they were at the tail end of theirs, and if it stayed densely enough packed, they wouldn’t get too far away. We were almost at the front of ours. I slapped the glove-compartment door six times. Coney accelerated impulsively and tapped the cab in front of us, but not hard. We veered to the side and I saw a silver scrape in the yellow paint of the cab’s bumper. “Fuck it, keep going,” I said. The cabbie seemed to have the same idea anyway. We all screeched across Fifty-ninth, a madcap rodeo of cabs and cars, racing to defy the immutable law of timed stoplights. Our bunch splayed and caught up with the rear end of their splaying bunch and the two blended, like video spaceships on some antic screen. The K-car aggressively threaded lanes. We threaded after them, making no attempt to disguise our pursuit now. Blocks flew past.