Motherless Brooklyn

“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.