Motherless Brooklyn

The door at the top of the stair was acned with a thousand tiny dents, from my ritual rapping of my keys before opening the door. I added six more quick key-impressions-my counting nerve was stuck on six today, ever sine the fatal bag of White Castles-and then let myself in. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I left my lights off, not wanting to signal to the detective, if he was still outside watching, the connection between upstairs and down. Then I crept to my front window and peered out. The corner was empty of cop. Still, why take a chance? Enough light leaked in from the streetlamps for me to make my way around. So I left the lamps dimmed, though I had to run my hands under the shades and fondle the switches, ritual contact just to make myself feel at home.

Understand: The possibility that I might at any time have to make the rounds and touch every visible item in my apartment dictated a sort of faux-Japanese simplicity in my surroundings. Beneath my reading lamp were five unread paperbacks, which I would return to the Salvation Army on Smith Street as soon as I’d finished them. The covers of the books were already scored with dozens of minute creases, made by sliding my fingernails sideways over their surfaces. I owned a black plastic boom box with detachable speakers, and a short row of Prince/Artist Formerly Known As CDs-I wasn’t lying to the homicide cop about being a fan. Beside the CDs lay a single fork, the one I’d stolen from Matricardi and Rockaforte’s table full of silverware fourteen years before. I placed the Vibe magazine and the bag with the sandwich on my table, which was otherwise clean. I wasn’t so terribly hungry anymore. A drink was more urgent. Not that I really liked alcohol, but the ritual was essential.

The phone downstairs went on ringing. L &L didn’t have a machine to pick it up-callers usually gave up after nine or ten rings and tried another car service. I tuned it out. I emptied my jacket pockets and rediscovered Minna’s watch and beeper. I put them on the table, then poured myself a tumblerful of Walker Red and dropped in a couple of ice cubes and sat down there in the dark to try to let the day settle over me, to try to make some sense of it. The way my ice shimmered made me need to bat at it like a cat fishing in a goldfish bowl, but otherwise the scene was pretty calm. If only the phone downstairs would stop ringing. Where was Danny? For that matter, shouldn’t Tony be back from the East Side by now? I didn’t want to think he’d go into the Zendo without some backup, without letting us other Minna Men in on the score. I pushed the thought away, tried to forget about Tony and Danny and Gilbert for the moment, to pretend it was my case alone and weight the variables and put them into some kind of shape that made sense, that produced answers or at least a clear question. I thought of the giant Polish killer we’d watched drive our boss away to a Dumpster-he already seemed like something I’d imagined, an impossible figure, a silhouette from a dream. The phone downstairs went on ringing. I thought about Julia, how she’d toyed with the homicide detective and then flown, how she’d almost seemed too ready for the news from the hospital, and I considered the bitterness laced into her sorrow. I tried not to think of how she’d toyed with me, and how little I knew it meant. I thought about Minna himself, the mystery of his connection in the Zendo, his caustic familiarity with his betrayer, his disastrous preference for keeping his Men in the dark and how he’d paid for it. As I gazed past the streetlight to the flickering blue-lit curtains of the bedrooms in the apartments across Bergen Street, I lingered over my paltry clues: Ullman downtown, the girl with glasses and short hair, “the building” that the sardonic voice in the Yorkville Zendo had mentioned, and Irving-if Irving really was a clue.

While I thought about hese things, another track in my brain intoned brainyoctomy brainyalimony bunnymonopoly baileyoctopus brainyanimal broccopotamus. And the phone downstairs kept on ringing. Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, went back downstairs and picked up the phone.

“No cars!” I said forcefully.

“That you, Lionel?” said Gilbert’s friend Loomis, the sanitation inspector-the garbage cop.

“What is it, Loomis?” I disliked the garbage cop intensely.

“Gotta problem over here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Sixth Precinct house, in Manhattan.”

“Dickweed! What are you doing at the precinct house, Loomis?”

“Well, they’re saying it’s too late, no way they’re gonna arraign him tonight, he’s gonna have to spend the night in the bullpen.”

“Who?”

“Who’d you think? Gilbert! They got him up on killing some guy name Ullman.”