Motherless Brooklyn

The monk with the paddle approached. He gripped it cross-handed, like Hank Aaron. The giant stood, shoved his baggie of kumquats into the pocket of his Members Only jacket and rubbed his sticky hands together, readying them for use. Gerard turned and stared at me, but if he recognized in me the twitchy teenager he’d left behind at the St. Vincent’s schoolyard fence nineteen years before, he didn’t show any sign. His eyebrows were delicately knit, his mouth pursed, his expression bemused. Kimmery put her hand on my knee and I put my hand on hers, reciprocity-ticcing. Even in a shitstorm such as I was in at this moment, my syndrome knew that God was in the details.

“Keisaku is more than ceremonial implement,” said the monk with the paddle. He applied it to my shoulder blades so gently it was like a caress. “Unruly student can do with a blow.” Now he clouted my back with the same muscular Buddhist glee his colleague had applied to my scalp.

“Ouch!” I fished behind me for the paddle, snagged it, tugged. It came out of the monk’s grasp and he staggered backward. By now the giant was headed in our direction. Those between us rolled or scuttled out of his path, according to their ability to unlock their elaborately folded legs. Kimmery darted away just as he loomed over us, not wanting to be crushed. Pierogi Man hadn’t checked his shoes at the door.

That was when I saw the nod.

Gerard Minna nodded ever so slightly at the giant, and the giant nodded back. That was all it took. The same team that had doomed Frank Minna was back in the saddle. I would be the sequel.

The giant wrapped me in his arms and lifted, and the paddle clattered to the floor.

I weigh nearly two hundred pounds, but the giant didn’t strain at all moving me down the stairs and out onto the street, and when he plumped me onto the sidewalk I was more shaken and winded than he by far. I straightened my suit and confirmed the alignment of my neck with a strig of jerks while he unloaded his bag of kumquats and got back to sucking out their juice and pulp, reducing their bodies to husks that looked like orange raisins in his massive hands.

The narrow street was nearly dark now, and the dog-walkers were far enough away to give us privacy.

“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag. His voice was a dull thing where it began in his throat but it resonated to grandeur in the tremendous instrument of his torso, like a mediocre singer on the stage of a superb concert hall.

“No, thanks,” I said. Here was where I should grow large with anger, facing Minna’s killer right at the spot of the abduction. But I was diminished, ribs aching from his squeezing, confused and worried-conworried-by my discovery of Gerard Minna inside the Zendo, and unhappy to have left Kimmery and my shoes upstairs. The pavement was cold through my socks, and my feet tingled oddly as they flushed with the blood denied them by Zen posture.

“So what’s the matter with you?” he said, discarding another of the withered kumquats.

“I’ve got Tourette’s,” I said.

“Yeah, well, threats don’t work with me.”

“Tourette’s,” I said.

“Eh? My hearing’s not so good. Sorry.” He put the bag of fruit away again, and when his hand reemerged it was holding a gun. “Go in there,” he said. He pointed with his chin at the three steps leading to the narrow channel between the Zendo and the apartment building on the right, a lane filled with garbage cans and darkness. I frowned, and he reached out and with the hand not holding the gun shoved me backward toward the steps. “Go,” he said again.

I considered the giant and myself as a tableau. Here was the man I’d been hunting and wishing to go up against, howling for a chance at vengeance like an insatiable ghost or marshmallow-yet had I planned a way to take advantage of him, a method or apparatus to give me any real edge, let alone narrow the immense gap in force his size presented? No. I’d come up pathetically empty. And now he had a gun to ice the cake. He shoved me again, straight-armed my shoulder, and when I tried, ticcishly, to shove his shoulder in return I found I was held at too great a distance, couldn’t brush his shoulder even with long-stretched fingertips, and it conjured some old memory of Sylvester the Cat in a boxing ring with a kangaroo. My brain whispered, He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse.

“Apocamouse,” I mumbled, language spilling out of me unrestrained. “Unplan-a-canal. Unpluggaphone.”

“I said get in there, Squeaky.” Had he caught my mouse reference, even with his impaired hearing? But then, who wouldn’t be squeaky to him? He was so big he only had to shrug to loom. I took a step backward. I had Tourette’s, he had threats. “Go,” he said again.

It was the last thing I wanted to do and I did it.

The minute I stepped down into the darkness he swung the gun at my head.