Motherless Brooklyn

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.