Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  I washed down the tangy nubbin of the first dog while the phone rang. Papaya Czar’s product did emulate an expensive steak’s melting-in-your-mouthiness, frankfurters apparently skinless and neither bun nor dog crisped in the cooking, so they slid together into hot-dog cream on the tongue. These virtues could be taken in excess and leave one craving the greater surface tension of a Nathan’s dog, but I was in the mood for the Czar’s today. I had four more laid out in a neat row on the counter where I sat, each with a trim line of yellow mustard for an exclamation—five was still my angel.

  As for papaya itself, I might as well be drinking truffula seed nectar or gryphon milk, for all I knew—I’d never encountered the fruit in any form except the Czar’s chalky beverage.

  “Sanitation Inspector Loomis,” answered the Garbage Cop.

  “Listen, Loomis. I’m working on this Gilbert thing.” I knew I needed to tie it in to his friend’s plight to keep him focused. In fact, Gilbert was now the furthest thing from my mind. “I need you to pull up some information for me.”

  “That you, Lionel?”

  “Yeah. Listen. Ten-three-oh Park Avenue. Write that down. I need some records on the building, management company, head of the board, whatever you can find out. See if any names you recognize pop up.”

  “Recognize from where?”

  “From, uh, around the neighborhood.” I was thinking Frank Minna, but I didn’t want to say it. “Oh, one in particular. Fujisaki. It’s Japanese.”

  “I don’t know any Fujisaki from around the neighborhood.”

  “Just look up the records, Loomis. Call me back when you get something.”

  “Call you back where?”

  I’d gotten the beeper and the cell phone mixed up. I was collecting other people’s electronics. In fact, I didn’t know the number of the phone I’d borrowed from the doorman in sunglasses. I wondered for the first time who I’d find myself talking to if I answered the incoming calls.

  “Forget it,” I said. “You’ve still got Minna’s beeper number?”

  “Sure.”

  “Use that. I’ll call you.”

  “When do we bail out Gilbert?”

  “I’m working on it. Listen, Loomis, I’d better go. Get back to me, all right?”

  “Sure thing, Lionel. And, buddy?”

  “What?”

  “Good stature, man,” said Loomis. “You’re holding up great.” “Uh, thanks Loomis.” I ended the call, put the cell phone back into my jacket pocket.

  “Kee-rist,” said a man sitting on my right. He was a guy in his forties. He wore a suit. As Minna said more than once, in New York any chucklehead can wear a suit. Satisfied he wasn’t a doorman, I ignored him, worked on dog number three.

  “I was in this restaurant in L.A.,” he started. “Great place, million-dollar place. All the food is tall, you know what I mean? Tall food? There’s this couple at a table, both of them talking on fucking cell phones, just like you got there. Two different conversations through the whole meal, yakking all over each other, what Cindy said, get away for the weekend, gotta work on my game, the whole nine yards. You couldn’t hear yourself think over the racket.”

  I finished dog three in five evenly spaced bites, licked the mustard off my thumb tip, and picked up number four.

  “I thought L.A., fair enough. Chalk it up. You can’t expect any different. So couple months ago I’m trying to impress a client, take him to Balthazar, you know, downtown? Million-dollar place, take it from me. Tall food, gangly food. So what do I see but a couple of bozos at the bar talking on cell phones. My water’s getting hot, but I figure, bar, fair enough, that’s showing decent respect. Adjust my standards, whatever. So we get a table after waiting fifteen fucking minutes, sit down and my client’s phone rings, he takes it out at the table! Guy I was with! Sits there yakking! Ten, fifteen minutes!”

  I enjoyed dog four in Zen-like calm and silence, practicing for my coming zazen.

  “Never thought I’d see it in here, though. Fucking California, Balthazar, whatever, all these guys with crap in their hair and million-dollar wristwatches like Dick Tracy I guess I gotta adjust my standards to the modern universe but I thought at the very least I could sit here eat a fucking hot dog without listeing to yak yak yak.”

  I’d apportioned a fifth of my papaya juice for rinsing down the last dog. Suddenly impatient to leave, I stuffed a wad of napkins in my jacket pocket and took the dog and the drink in hand and headed back out into the bright cold day.

  “Fucking people talking to themselves in a public place like they got some kind of illness!”

  The beeper went off just as I got to the car. I drew it out for a look: another unfamiliar number in 718. I got into the car and called from the cell phone, ready to be irritated with Loomis.

  “DickTracyphone,” I said into the mouthpiece.

  “This is Matricardi and Rockaforte,” went a gravelly voice. Rockaforte. Though I’d heard them speak just two or three times in fifteen years, I would have known his voice anywhere.

  Through the windshield I viewed Eighty-third Street, midday, November. A couple of women in expensive coats mimed a Manhattan conversation for my benefit, trying to persuade me of their reality. On the line, though, I heard an old man’s breathing, and what I saw through the windshield wasn’t real at all.

  I considered that I was answering Minna’s beeper. Did they know he was dead? Would I have to deliver the news to The Clients? I felt my throat constrict, instantly throbbing with fear and language.

  “Speak to me,” rasped Rockaforte.

  “Larval Pushbug,” I said softly, trying to offer my name. Did The Clients even know it? “Papaya Pissbag.” I was tic-gripped, helpless. “NotMinna,” I said at last. “NotFrank. Frank’sdead.”

  “We know, Lionel,” said Rockaforte.

  “Who told you?” I whispered, controlling a bark.

  “Things don’t escape,” he said. He paused, breathed, went on. “We’re very sorry for you in this time.”

  “You found out from Tony?”

  “We found out. We find out what we need. We learn.”

  But do you kill? I wanted to ask. Do you command a Polish giant?

  “We’re concerned for you,” he said. “The information is that you are running, going here and there, unable to sit still. We hear this, and it concerns.”

  “What information?”

  “And that Julia has left her home in this time of mourning. That nobody knows where she has gone unless it is you.”

  “Nojulia, nobody, nobodyknows.”

  “You stll suffer. We see this and we suffer as well.”

  This was somewhat obscure to me, but I wasn’t going to ask.

  “We wish to speak with you, Lionel. Will you come and talk to us?”

  “We’re talking now,” I breathed.

  “We wish to see you standing before us. It’s important in this time of pain. Come see us, Lionel.”

  “Where? New Jersey?” Heart racing, I allowed soothing permutations to course through my brain: Garden state bricko and stuckface garbage face grippo and suckfast garter snake ticc-o and circus. My lips rustled at the phone, nearly giving the words breath.

  “We’re in the Brooklyn house,” he said. “Come.”

  “Scarface! Cigarfish!”

  “What’s got you running, Lionel?”

  “Tony. You’ve been talking to Tony. He said I’m running. I’m not running.”

  “You sound running.”

  “I’m looking for the killer. Tony’s trying to stop me, I think.”

  “You have a problem with Tony?”

  “I don’t trust him. He’s acting—Stuccotash!—he’s acting strangely.”

  “Let me speak,” came a voice in the background of the call. Rockaforte’s voice was replaced with Matricardi’s: higher, more mellifluous, a single-malt whiskey instead of Dewar’s.

  “What’s wrong with Tony?” said Matricardi. “You don’t trust him in this matter?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t trust him,” I repeated dumbly. I thought about ending the call. Again I consulted my other senses: I was in the sunshine in Manhattan in an L&L vehicle talking on a doorman’s cell phone. I could discard Minna’s beeper, forget about the call, go anywhere. The Clients were like players in a dream. They shouldn’t have been able to touch me with their ancient, ethereal voices. But I couldn’t bring myself to hang up on them.

  “Come to us,” said Matricardi. “We’ll talk. Tony doesn’t have to be there.”

  “Forgettaphone.”

  “You remember our place? Degraw Street. You know where?”

  “Of course.”

  “Come. Honor us in this time of disappointment and regret. We’ll talk without Tony. What’s wrong we’ll straighten.”

  While I considered what to do I used the doormen’s phone again, called information and got the number of the Daily News’ obituary page and bought a notice for Minna. I put in on a credit card of Minna’s to which he’d added my name. He had to pay for his own notice, but I knew he’d have wanted it, considered it fifty bucks well spent. He was always an avid reader of the obituaries, studying them each morning in the L&L office like a tip sheet, a chance for him to pick up or work an angle. The woman on the line did it all by rote, and so did I: billing information, name of deceased, dates, survivors, until we got to the part where I gave out a line or two about who Minna was supposed to have been.

  “Beloved something,” said the woman, not unkindly. “It’s usually Beloved something.”

  Beloved Father Figure?

  “Or something about his contributions to the community,” she suggested.

  “Just say detective,” I told her.

  ONE MIND

  There were only and always two things Frank Minna would not discuss in the years following his return from exile and founding of the Minna Agency. The first was the nature of that exile, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance that day in May when his brother Gerard hustled him out of town. We didn’t know why he left, where he went or what he did while he was gone, or why he came back when he did. We didn’t know how he met and married Julia. We didn’t know what happened to Gerard. There was never again any sign or mention of Gerard. The sojourn “upstate” was covered in a haze so complete it was sometimes hard to believe it had lasted three years.

  The other was The Clients, though they lurked like a pulse felt here or there in the body of the Agency.

  L&L wasn’t a moving company anymore, and we never again saw the inside of that hollowed-out brownstone on Degraw. But we were as much errand boys as detectives, and it wasn’t hard, in the early days, to sense Matricardi and Rockaforte’s shadow in some percentage of our errands. Their assignments were discernible for the deep unease they provoked in Minna. Without explanation he’d alter his patterns, stop dropping in at the barbershop or the arcade for a week or so, close the L&L storefront and tell us to get lost for a few days. Even his walk changed, his whole manner of being. He’d refuse to be seated anywhere but in the corners of restaurants, his back to the wall. He’d turn his head on the street for no reason, which I of course cobbled into a lifelong tic. For cover he’d joke harder but also more discontinuously, his stream of commentary and insult turned balky and riddled with grim silences, his punch lines become non sequiturs. And the jobs we did for The Clients were discontinuous too. They were fractured stories, middles lacking a clear beginning or end. When we Minna Men tracked a wife for a husband or watched an employee suspected of pilferage or cooking the books we mastered their pathetic dramas, encompassed their small lives with our worldliness. What we gathered with our bugs and cameras and etched into our reports was true and complete. Under Minna we were secret masters, writing a sort of social history of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens into our duplicate files. B when the hand of Matricardi and Rockaforte moved the Minna Men we were only tools, glancing off the sides of stories bigger than we understood, discarded and left wondering at the end.

  Once in the early days of the Agency we were dispatched to stand guard in broad daylight around a car, a Volvo, and we picked up a scent of The Clients in Minna’s stilted, fragmentary instructions. The car was empty as far as we could tell. It was parked on Remsen Street near the Promenade, at a placid dead-end traffic circle overlooking Manhattan. Gilbert and I sat on a park bench, trying to look casual with our backs to the skyline, while Tony and Danny idled at the mouth of Remsen and Hicks, glaring at anyone who turned onto the block. We knew only that we were supposed to give way at five o’clock, when a tow truck would come for the car.

  Five o’clock stretched into six, then seven, with no truck. We took pee breaks in the children’s park at Montague Street, ran through cigarettes, and paced. Evening strollers appeared on the Promenade, couples, teenagers with paper-bagged bottles of beer, gays mistaking us for cruisers. We shrugged them away from our end of the walk, muttered, glanced at our watches. The Volvo couldn’t have been less conspicuous if it were invisible, but for us it glowed, screamed, ticked like a bomb. Every kid on a bike or stumbling wino seemed an assassin, a disguised ninja with aims on the car.

  When the sun began to set Tony and Danny started arguing.

  “This is stupid,” said Danny. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We can’t,” said Tony.

  “You know there’s a body in the trunk,” said Danny.

  “How am I supposed to know that?” said Tony.

  “Because what else would it be?” said Danny. “Those old guys had someone killed.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Tony.

  “A body?” said Gilbert, plainly unnerved. “I thought the car was full of money.”

  Danny shrugged. “I don’t care, but it’s a body. I’ll tell you what else: We’re being set up for it.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Tony.

  “What does Frank know? He just does what they tell him.” Even in rebellion Danny obeyed Minna’s stricture against speaking The Clients’ names.

  “You really think it’s a body?” said Gilbert to Danny.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t want to stay if it’s a body, Tony.”

  “Gilbert, you fat fuck. What if it is? What do you think we’re doing here? You think you’re never gonna see a body working for Minna? Go join the garbage cops, for chrissakes.”

  “I’m cutting out,” said Danny. “I’m hungry anyway. This is stupid.”

  “What should I tell Minna?” said Tony, daring Danny to go.

  “Tell him what you want.”

  It was a startling defection. Tony and Gilbert and I were all problems in our various ways, while Danny in his silence and grace was Minna’s pillar, his paragon.

  Tony couldn’t face this mutiny directly. He was accustomed to bullying Gilbert and me, not Danny. So he reverted to form. “What about you, Freakshow?”

  I shrugged, then kissed my own hand. It was an impossible question. Devotion to Minna had boiled down to this trial of hours watching over the Volvo. Now we had to envision disaster, betrayal, rotting flesh.

  But what would it mean to turn from Minna?

  I hated The Clients then.

  The tow truck came grinding down Remsen before I could speak. It was manned by a couple of fat lugs who laughed at our jumpiness and told us nothing about the car’s importance, just shooed us off and began chaining the Volvo’s bumper to their rig. Less Men than Boys in suits, we felt as though this had been designed as a test of our fresh-grown nerves. And we’d failed, even if Minna and The Clients didn’t know about it.

  We grew tougher, though, and Minna became unflappable, and we came to take the role of The Clients in the life of the Agency more in stride. Who had to make sense of everything? It wasn’t always certain when we were acting for them anyway. Seize a given piece of equipment from a given office: Was that on The Clients’ behalf or not? Collect this amount from such and such a person: When we passed the take to Minna did he pass it along to The Clients? Unseal this envelope, tap this
phone: Clients? Minna kept us in the dark and turned us into professionals. Matricardi and Rockaforte’s presence became mostly subliminal.

  The last job I felt certain was for The Clients was more than a year before Minna’s murder. It bore their trademark of total inexplicability. A supermarket on Smith Street had burned and been razed earlier that summer, and the empty lot was filled with crushed brick and turned into an informal peddlers’ market, where sellers of one fruit—oranges, say, or mangoes—would set up a few crates and do a summer afternoon’s business, alongside the hot-dog and shaved-ice carts that began to gather there. After a month or so a Hispanic carnival took over the site, setting up a Tilt-a-Whirl and a miniature Ferris wheel, each a dollar a ride, along with a grilled-sausage stand and a couple of lame arcades: a water-gun balloon game and a grappling hook over a glass case full of pink and purple stuffed animals. The litter and smells of grease were a blight if you got too close, but the Ferris wheel was lined with white tubes of neon, and it was a glorious thing to see at night down Smith Street, a bright unexpected pinwheel almost three stories high.

  We’d been so bored that summer that we’d fallen into working regularly as a car service, taking calls when they came, ferrying dates home from nightclubs, old ladies to and from hospitals, vacationers to La Guardia for the weekend flight to Miami Beach. Between rides we’d play poker in the air-conditioned storefront. It was after one-thirty on a Friday night when Minna came in. Loomis was sitting in on the game, losing hands and eating all the chips, and Minna told him to get lost, go home already.