Motherless Brooklyn

Zeod nodded at his second, an indolent Dominican kid, who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he’d taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressibility I craved. I let myself be hypnotized by the whine of the slicer, the rhythm of the kid’s arm as he received the slices and dripped them onto the kaiser roll. Zeod watched me. He knew I obsessed on his sandwiches, and it pleased him. “You and your friend?” he said magnanimously.

The detective shook his head. “Pack of Marlboro Lights,” he said.

“Okay. You want a soda, Crazyman? Get yourself.” I went and got a Coke out of the cooler while Zeod put my sandwich and the cop’s cigarettes into a brown paper bag with a plastic fork and a sheaf of napkins.

“Charge it to Frank, yes, my friend?”

I couldn’t speak. I took the bag and we stepped back out onto Smith Street.

“Sleeping with the dead man’s wife,” said the detective. “Now you’re eating on his tab. That takes some gall.”

“You misunderstand,” I said.

“Then maybe you better set me straight,” he said. “Gimme those cigarettes.”

“I work for Frank-”

“Worked. He’s dead. Why didn’t you tell your friend the A-rab?”

“Arab-eye!-I don’t know. No reason.” I handed the cop his Marlboros. “Eatmebailey, repeatmebailey, repeatmobile-could we continue this maybe another time? Because-retreatmobile!-because now I really urgently have to go home and-eatbail! beatmail!-eat this sandwich.”

“You work for him where? At the car service?”

Detective agency, I silently corrected. “Uh, yeah.”

“So you and his wife were, what? Driving around? Where’s the car?”

“She wanted to go shopping.” This lie came out so blessedly smooth and un-tic-laden it felt like the truth. For that reason or some other, the detective didn’t challenge it.

“So you’d describe yourself as, what? A friend of the deceased?”

“Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!-sure, that’s right.”

He was learning to ignore my outbursts. “So where are we going now? Your house?” He lit a cigarette without breaking stride. “Looks like you’re headed back to work.”

I didn’t want to tell him how little difference there was between the two.

“Let’s go in here,” I said, jerking my neck sideways as we crossed Bergen Street, letting my physical tic lead me-navigation by TouretteWherx2014;into the Casino.

The Casino was Minna’s name for Smith Street’s hole-in-the-wall newspaper shop, which had a single wall of magazines and a case of Pepsi and Snapple crammed into a space the size of a large closet. The Casino was named for the lines that stretched each morning to buy Lotto and Scratchers and Jumble 6 and Pickball, for the fortune being made on games of chance by the newsstand’s immigrant Korean owners, for the hearts being quietly broken there round the clock. There was something tragic in the way they stood obediently waiting, many of them elderly, others new immigrants, illiterate except in the small language of their chosen game, deferring to anyone with real business, like the purchase of a magazine, a pack of double-A batteries, or a tube of lip gloss. That docility was heartbreaking. The games were over almost before they started, the foil scraped off tickets with a key or a dime, the contrived near-misses underneath bared. (New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom.) The sidewalk just outside the Casino was strewn with discarded tickets, the chaff of wasted hope.

But I was hardly in a position to criticize lost causes. I had no reason for visiting the Casino except that I associated it with Minna, with Minna alive. If I visited enough of his haunts before news of his death spread along Court and Smith Street, I might persuade myself against the evidence of my own eyes-and against the fact of the homicide cop on my heels-that nothing had happened.

“What’re we doing?” said the detective.

“I, uh, need something to read with my sandwich.”

The desultory magazines were shelved two deep in the rack-there weren’t more than one or two customers for GQ or Wired or Brooklyn Bridge per month around here. Me, I was bluffing, didn’t read magazines at all. Then I spotted a familiar face, on a magazine called Vibe: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Before a blurred cream background he posed resting his head against the neck of a pink guitar, his eyes demure. The unpronounceable typographical glyph with which he had replaced his name was shaved into the hair at his temple.

“Skrubble,” I said.

“What?”

“Plavshk,” I said. My brain had decided to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph, a linguistic foray into the lands On Beyond Zebra. I lifted up the magazine.

“You’re telling me you’re gonna read Vibe?”

“Sure.”