Motherless Brooklyn

L &L wasn’t a moving company anymore, and we never again saw the inside of that hollowed-out brownstone on Degraw. But we were as much errand boys as detectives, and it wasn’t hard, in the early days, to sense Matricardi and Rockaforte’s shadow in some percentage of our errands. Their assignments were discernible for the deep unease they provoked in Minna. Without explanation he’d alter his patterns, stop dropping in at the barbershop or the arcade for a week or so, close the L &L storefront and tell us to get lost for a few days. Even his walk changed, his whole manner of being. He’d refuse to be seated anywhere but in the corners of restaurants, his back to the wall. He’d turn his head on the street for no reason, which I of course cobbled into a lifelong tic. For cover he’d joke harder but also more discontinuously, his stream of commentary and insult turned balky and riddled with grim silences, his punch lines become non sequiturs. And the jobs we did for The Clients were discontinuous too. They were fractured stories, middles lacking a clear beginning or end. When we Minna Men tracked a wife for a husband or watched an employee suspected of pilferage or cooking the books we mastered their pathetic dramas, encompassed their small lives with our worldliness. What we gathered with our bugs and cameras and etched into our reports was true and complete. Under Minna we were secret masters, writing a sort of social history of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens into our duplicate files. B when the hand of Matricardi and Rockaforte moved the Minna Men we were only tools, glancing off the sides of stories bigger than we understood, discarded and left wondering at the end.

Once in the early days of the Agency we were dispatched to stand guard in broad daylight around a car, a Volvo, and we picked up a scent of The Clients in Minna’s stilted, fragmentary instructions. The car was empty as far as we could tell. It was parked on Remsen Street near the Promenade, at a placid dead-end traffic circle overlooking Manhattan. Gilbert and I sat on a park bench, trying to look casual with our backs to the skyline, while Tony and Danny idled at the mouth of Remsen and Hicks, glaring at anyone who turned onto the block. We knew only that we were supposed to give way at five o’clock, when a tow truck would come for the car.

Five o’clock stretched into six, then seven, with no truck. We took pee breaks in the children’s park at Montague Street, ran through cigarettes, and paced. Evening strollers appeared on the Promenade, couples, teenagers with paper-bagged bottles of beer, gays mistaking us for cruisers. We shrugged them away from our end of the walk, muttered, glanced at our watches. The Volvo couldn’t have been less conspicuous if it were invisible, but for us it glowed, screamed, ticked like a bomb. Every kid on a bike or stumbling wino seemed an assassin, a disguised ninja with aims on the car.

When the sun began to set Tony and Danny started arguing.

“This is stupid,” said Danny. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t,” said Tony.

“You know there’s a body in the trunk,” said Danny.

“How am I supposed to know that?” said Tony.

“Because what else would it be?” said Danny. “Those old guys had someone killed.”

“That’s stupid,” said Tony.

“A body?” said Gilbert, plainly unnerved. “I thought the car was full of money.”

Danny shrugged. “I don’t care, but it’s a body. I’ll tell you what else: We’re being set up for it.”

“That’s stupid,” said Tony.

“What does Frank know? He just does what they tell him.” Even in rebellion Danny obeyed Minna’s stricture against speaking The Clients’ names.

“You really think it’s a body?” said Gilbert to Danny.

“Sure.”

“I don’t want to stay if it’s a body, Tony.”

“Gilbert, you fat fuck. What if it is? What do you think we’re doing here? You think you’re never gonna see a body working for Minna? Go join the garbage cops, for chrissakes.”

“I’m cutting out,” said Danny. “I’m hungry anyway. This is stupid.”

“What should I tell Minna?” said Tony, daring Danny to go.

“Tell him what you want.”

It was a startling defection. Tony and Gilbert and I were all problems in our various ways, while Danny in his silence and grace was Minna’s pillar, his paragon.

Tony couldn’t face this mutiny directly. He was accustomed to bullying Gilbert and me, not Danny. So he reverted to form. “What about you, Freakshow?”

I shrugged, then kissed my own hand. It was an impossible question. Devotion to Minna had boiled down to this trial of hours watching over the Volvo. Now we had to envision disaster, betrayal, rotting flesh.

But what would it mean to turn from Minna?

I hated The Clients then.