Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  Heck, make me one with anything.

  I was pretty hungry, too, if I thought about it. A stakeout was customarily a gastronomic occasion, and I was beginning to get that itch for something between two slices of bread. Why shouldn’t I be hungry? I’d missed dinner, had Kimmery instead.

  With thoughts of food and sex my attention slipped, so that I was startled now to see Tony pop out of the storefront, his expression still as fierce as it had been when he was poring over the paperwork. For a moment I thought I’d been spotted. But he turned toward Smith Street, crossed Bergen, and disappeared around the corner.

  The giant watched, unimpressed, unworried.

  We waited.

  Tony returned with a large plastic shopping bag, probably from Zeod’s. The only thing I could discern was a carton of Marlboros sticking out of the top, but the bag was heavy with something. Tony opened the passenger door of the Pontiac and put the bag on the seat, glanced quickly up the street without spotting either me or the giant, then relocked the car and went back to L&L.

  Figuring it was status quo for the time being, I made my way back down Bergen, up Hoyt Street, and around the block the long way, and checked into Zeod’s myself.

  Zeod liked to work the late hours, do the overnight, check in the newspaper deliveries at six and then sleep through the bright hours of the morning and early afternoon. He was like the Sheriff of Smith Street, eyes open while we all slept, seeing the drunks stagger home, keeping his eye on the crucial supplies, the Ding Dongs and Entenmann’s cookies, the forty-ounce malt liquor and the cups of coffee “regular” with a picture of the Parthenon on the cup. Except now he had company down the street at L&L, Tony and Danny and the giant and myself enacting our strange vigil, our roundelay of surveillance. I wondered if Zeod knew about Minna yet. As I slipped up to the counter the groggy counter boy was punishing the slicer with a steaming white towel, replenishing the towel in a basin of hot suds, while Zeod stood exhorting him, telling him how he could be doing it better, squeezing some value out of him before he quit like all the others.

  “Crazyman!”

  “Shhh.” I imagined that Tony or the giant could hear Zeod bellow through the shop window and around the corner of the block.

  “You’re working so late for Frank tonight? Something important, eh? Tony just came.”

  “Important Freaks! Important Franks!”

  “Ho ho ho.”

  “Listen, Zeod. Can you tell me what Tony bought?” Zeod screwed up his face, finding this question sensational. “You can’t ask him yourself?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He shrugged. “Six-pack of beer, four sandwiches, carton of cigarettes, Coca-Cola—whole picnic.”

  “Funny picnic.”

  “Wasn’t funny to him,” said Zeod. “Couldn’t make him smile. Like you, Crazyman. On a very serious case, eh?”

  “What—becausewhich, besideswhich—what sandwiches did he buy?” It was my suddenly ravenous appetite that steered this inquiry.

  “Ah!” Zeod rubbed his hands together. He was always ready to savor his own product on someone else’s behalf. “Turkey with Thousand, very nice on a kaiser roll, pepperoni-and-provolone hero with peppers inside, two roast beef with horseradish on rye bread.”

  I had to clutch the counter to keep from falling over, this storm of enticements was so heady.

  “You like what you hear, I can see that,” said Zeod.

  I nodded, turned my head sideways, took in the fresh-gleaming slicer, the elegant curve of the fender that sheathed the bla.

  Zeod said, “You want something, Crazyman, don’t you?”

  I saw the counter boy’s eyes roll in weary anticipation. The slicer rarely saw this much action at two or three in the morning. They’d have to sluice it down with suds again before the night was done.

  “Please—ghostradish, pepperpony, kaiserphone—please, uh, the same as Tony.”

  “You want the same? All four the same?”

  “Yes,” I gasped. I couldn’t think past Tony’s list of sandwiches. My hunger for them was absolute. I had to match Tony sandwich for sandwich, a gastronomic mirroring-tic—I’d understand him by the time I was through the fourth, I figured. We would achieve a Zeod’s mind-meld, with Thousand Island dressing.

  While Zeod rode his counter boy to complete the large order I hid in the back near the beverage cases, picked out a liter of Coke and a bag of chips, and reorganized and counted a disorderly shelf of cat-food cans.

  “Okay, Lionel.” Zeod was always most gentle with me when handing over his precious cargo—we shared that reverence for his product. “Put it on Frank’s tab, right?” He gathered my soda and chips in a large bag with the paper-wrapped sandwiches.

  “No, no—” I rustled in my pockets for a tight-folded twenty.

  “What’s the matter? Why not the boss man pick it up?”

  “I want to pay you.” I pushed the bill across the counter. Zeod took it and arched his eyebrows.

  “Very funny business,” he said, and made a chuck-chuck-chuck sound with his tongue in his cheek.

  “What?”

  “Same thing as Tony, before you,” he said. “He says he wants to pay. Same thing.”

  “Listen, Zeod. If Tony comes back in here tonight”—I fought off a howling sound that wanted to come out of me, the cry of a sandwich predator over fresh kill he has yet to devour—“don’t tell him you saw me, okay?”

  Zeod winked. Somehow this made sense to him. I felt a thing that was either a nauseous wave of paranoia—perhaps Zeod was an agent of Tony’s, absolutely in his pocket, and would be on the phone to him the minute I was out of the shop—or else my stomach spasming in anticipation of food. “Okay, Chief,” said Zeod as I went out the door.

  I came around the block the long way again, quickly confirmed that the giant and Tony were still in their places, then swerved across the street and slipped up beside the Tracer, key in hand. The giant’s compact was six cars ahead, but I couldn’t see his clifflike silhouette from where I stood as I unlocked the car. I only hoped that meant he couldn’t see me. I plopped Zeod’s bag on the passenger seat, jumped inside, and slammed the door shut as quickly as I could, praying that the brief flash of the interior light hadn’t registered in the giant’s rearview. Then I slumped down in my place so I’d be invisible, on the slight chance he did turn and could make anything out through a thickness of twelve darkened windshields. Meanwhile I got my hands busy unfurling the paper around one of Zeod’s roast beef and horseradish specials. Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.

  Now it was a proper stakeout—if only I could figure what it was I was waiting to see happen. Not that I could see much from inside the Tracer. The giant’s car was still in its place but I couldn’t confirm his existence inside it. And at this extreme angle all I could see was a thin slice of bright L&L window. Twice Tony paced to the front of the store, just long enough for me to identify his form in shadow and a flash of an elbow, a left-behind plume of cigarette exhalation across the edge of Minna’s destination map, the Queens airports at the left margin showing Minna’s Magic Marker scrawl: $18. Bergen Street was a void in my rearview, Smith Street only marginally brighter ahead of me. It was a quarter to four. I felt the F train’s rumble underneath Bergen, first as it slowed into the station and paused there, then a second tremor as it departed. A minute later the 67 bus rolled like a great battered appliance down Bergen, empty apart from the driver. Public transportation was the night’s pulse, the beep on the monitor at the patient’s bedside. In a few hours those same trains and buses would be jammed with jawing, caffeinated faces, littered with newspapers and fresh gum. Now they kept the faith. Me, I had the cold to keep me awake, that and the liter of Coca-Cola and my assignment, my will to influence the outcome of the night’s strange stalemate. T
hose would have to slug it out with the soporific powers of the roast-beef sandwich, the dreamy pull of my fresh memories of Kimmery, the throb of my skull where the giant had clubbed me with his gun.

  What was the giant waiting for?

  What did Tony want to find in Minna’s files?

  Why were his sandwiches in the car?

  Why had Julia flown to Boston?

  Who was Bailey anyway?

  I opened my bag of chips, took a slug of my cola, and put myself to work on those new and old questions and on staying awake.

  Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s—the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance—as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

  I’ve spent long nights in that place. This night, though, consisted of summoning up that state I’d so often worked to banish. I was alone now, sunna, no Men, my own boss on this stakeout with who-knew-what riding on its outcome. If I fell asleep the little world of my investigation would crumble. I needed to find my insomniac self, to agitate my problem-solving brain, if not to solve actual problems, then to worry at them for the purpose of keeping my dumb eyeballs propped open.

  Avoiding becoming one with everything: that was my big challenge at the moment.

  It was four-thirty. My consciousness was distended, the tics like islands in an ocean of fog.

  Who needed sleep? I asked myself. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Minna had liked to say.

  I guess he had his chance now.

  I’ll die when I’m dead, my brain recited in Minna’s voice. Not a minute sooner, you kosher macaroons!

  A diet of bread. A guy on a bed.

  No, no bed. No car. No phone.

  Phone.

  The cell phone. I pulled it out, rang the L&L number. It rang three times before a hand picked it up.

  “No cars,” said Danny lazily. If I knew him, he’d been sleeping with his head on the counter, weary of pretending to listen to whatever Tony was ranting about.

  I’d have given a lot, of course, to know what Tony was ranting about.

  “It’s me, Danny. Put Tony on.”

  “Yo,” he said, unsurprisable. “Here you go.”

  “What?” said Tony.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Deskjob.”

  “You fucking little freak,” said Tony. “I’ll kill you.”

  I outweighed Tony only by about fifty pounds. “You had your chance,” I heard myself say. Tony still brought out the romantic in me. We’d be two Bogarts to the end. “Except if you’d pulled that trigger, you might have blown a hole in your foot, or in some far-off toddler on his bike.”

  “Oh, I’d of straightened it out,” Tony said. “I wish I had put a coupla holes in you. Leaving me with that fucking cop.”

  “Remember it any way you like. I’m trying to help you at the moment.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “Eat me St. Vincent!” I held the phone away from my face until I was sure the tic was complete. “You’re in danger, Tony. Right now.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  I wanted to say, Going out of town? What1C;I in the files? Since when do you like horseradish? But I couldn’t let him know I was outside and have him rush into the giant’s arms. “Trust me,” I said. “I really wish you would.”

  “Oh, I trust you—to be Bozo the Clown,” he said. “The point is, what can you tell me that’s worth the time to listen?” “That hurts, Tony.”

  “For chrissake!” Now he held his receiver away from his mouth and swore. “I got problems, Freakshow, and you’re A-number one.”

  “If I were you, I’d worry more about Fujisaki.”

  “What do you know about Fujisaki?” He was hissing. “Where are you?”

  “I know—undress-a-phone, impress-a-clown—I know a few things.” “You better hide,” he said. “You better hope I don’t catch you.” “Aw, Tony. We’re in the same situation.”

  “That’s a laugh, only I’m not laughing. I’m gonna kill you.”

  “We’re a family, Tony. Minna brought us together—” I caught myself wanting to quote the Garbage Cop, suggest another moment of silence.

  “There’s too long a tail on that kite, Freakshow. I don’t have the time.”

  Before I could speak he hung up the phone.

  It was after five, and bakery trucks had begun to roll. Soon a van would come and deliver Zeod’s newspapers, with Minna’s obituary notice in them.

  I was in a comalike state when Tony came out of L&L and got into the Pontiac. A sentinel part of my brain had kept a watch on the storefront while the rest of me slept, and so I was startled to find that the sun was up, that traffic now filled Bergen Street. I glanced at Minna’s watch: It was twenty minutes to seven. I was chilled through, my head throbbed, and my tongue felt as if it had been bound in horseradish-and-cola-soaked plaster and left out on the moon overnight. I shook my head and my neck crackled. I tried to keep my eyes on the scene even as I worked my jaw sideways to revive the mechanism of my face. Tony steered the Pontiac into Smith Street’s morning flow. The giant poked his compact into the traffic a moment later, first allowing two cars to creep in behind Tony. I turned the Tracer’s ignition key and the engine scuffed into life, and I followed, keeping my own safe distance behind.

  Tony led us up Smith, onto Atlantic heading toward the waterfront, into a stream of commuters and delivery trucks. In that stream I lost sight of Tony pretty quickly, but held on to the giant’s pretty red compact.

  Tony took the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at the foot of Atlantic. The giant and I slid onto the ramp behind him in turn. Greenpoint, that was my first guess. I shuddered at recalling the Dumpster behind Harry Brainum’s, off McGuinness Boulevard, where Minna had met his finish. How had the giant contrived to lure Tony out to that spot?

  But I was wrong. We passed the Greenpoint exit, heading north. I saw the black Pontiac in the distance ahead as we rounded the expressway’s curve toward the airports and Long Island, but I kept dropped back, at least two cars behind the red compact. I had to trust the giant to track Tony, another exercise in Zen calm. We threaded the various exits and cloverleafs out of Brooklyn, through Queens toward the airport exits. When we turned momentarily toward JFK I generated a new theory: Someone from Fujisaki was disembarking at the Japan Air Lines terminal, some chief of executions, or a courier with a ticking package to deliver. Minna’s death might be the first blow in an international wave of executions. And a flight to meet explained Tony’s long, nervous overnight wait. Even as I settled on this explanation, I watched the red car peel away from the airport option, to the northbound ramp, marked for the Whitestone Bridge. I barely made it across three lanes to stay on their vehicular heels.

  Four sandwiches, of course. If I weren’t prone to multiple sandwiches myself I might have made more of this clue. Four sandwiches and a six-pack. We were headed out of town. Fortunately I had rounded up my clone version of Tony’s picnic, so I was outfitted too. I wondered if the giant had anything to eat besides the bag of cherries or olives I’d seen him gobbling. Our little highway formation reminded me of a sandwich, actually, a Minna Man on either side of the giant—we were a goon-on-orphan, with wheels. As we soared over the Whitestone I took another double shot of cola. It would have to stand in for morning coffee. I only had to solve the problem of needing to pee rather badly. Hence I hurried to finish the Coke, figuring I’d go in the bottle.

  Half an hour later we’d passed options for the Pelhams, White Plains, Mount Kisco, a few other names I associated with the outer margins of New York City, on into Connecticut, first on the Hutchinson River Parkway, then on something called the Merritt Parkway. I kept the little red car in my sights. The cars were thick enough to kee
p me easily camouflaged. Every now and again the giant would creep near enough to Tony’s Pontiac that I could see we were still three, bound like secret lovers through the indifferent miles of traffic.

  Highway driving was maximally soothing. The steady flow of attention and effort, the nudging of gas pedal and checking of mirrors and blind spots with a twist of the neck subsumed my ticcishness completely. I was still bleary, needing sleep, but the novelty of this odd chase and of being farther out of New York City than I’d ever been worked to keep me awake. I’d seen trees before—so far Connecticut offered nothing I didn’t know from suburban Long Island, or even Staten Island. But the idea of Connecticut was sort of interesting.

  The traffic tightened as we skirted a small city called Hartford, and for a moment we were bricked into a five-lane traffic jam. It was just before nine, and we’d caught Hartford’s endearing little version of a rush hour. Tony and the giant were both in view ahead of me, the giant in the lane to my right, and as I cinched forward a wheel-turn at a time, I nearly drew even with him. The red car was a Contour, I saw now. I was a Tracer following a Contour. As though I’d taken a pencil and followed the giant’s route on a road map. Mlane crept forward while his stood still, and soon I’d nearly pulled up even with him. He was chewing something, his jaw and neck pulsing, his hand now moving again to his mouth. I suppose to maintain that size he had to keep it coming. The car was probably brimful with snacks—perhaps Fujisaki paid him for his hits directly in food, so he wouldn’t have to bother converting cash. They should have gotten him a bigger car, though.