Motherless Brooklyn

Once Kimmery was asleep I dressed and tiptoed to her phone, which was on the floor in the big room. Shelf followed me in. I tapped his head five times, instantly reigniting his ragged purring, then pushed him away. The phone showed a number under its plastic window. I fed the number into the speed dial of the doormen’s cell phone, wincing at the beeping tones, which echoed in the silent empty room like musical gunshots. Kimmery didn’t stir on her mattress, though. She lay splayed like a child making a snow angel. I wanted to go and kneel and trace her shape with my fingertips or my breath. Instead I found her key ring and separated the five keys. The key to the apartment was easy to identify, and that was the only one I left behind-she’d have to deal with her suspicious neighbors to get into the lobby downstairs. I took the other four, figuring one would get me into the Zendo. The last two probably unlocked Oreo Man’s place. Those I’d lose.

AUTO BODY

See me now, at one in the morning, stepping out of another cab in front of the Zendo, checking the street for cars that might have followed, for giveaway cigarette-tip glows through the windows of the cars parked on the deadened street, moving with my hands in my jacket pockets clutching might-be-guns-for-all-they-know, collar up against the cold like Minna, unshaven like Minna now, too, shoes clacking on sidewalk: think of a coloring-book image of the Green Hornet, say. That’s who I was supposed to be, that black outline of a man in a coat, ready suspicious eyes above his collar, shoulders hunched, moving toward conflict.

Here’s who I was instead: that same coloring-book outline of a man, but crayoned by the hand of a mad or carefree or retarded child, wild slashes of idiot color, a blizzard of marks violating the boundaries that made man distinct from street, from world. Some of those colors were my fresh images of Kimmery, flashing me back to the West Side an hour before, crayon stripes and arrows like flares over Central Park in the night sky. Others weren’t so pretty, roaring scrawls of mania, find-a-man-kill-a-phone-fuck-a-plan in sloppy ten-foot-high letters drawn like lightning bolts or Hot Wheels race-car flames through the space of my head. And the blackened steel-wool scribble of my guilt-deranged investigation: I pictured the voices of the two Minna brothers and Tony Vermonte and The Clients as gnarled above and around me, in a web of betrayal I had to penetrate and dissolve, an ostensible world I’d just discovered was really only a private cloud I carried everywhere, had never seen the outside of. So, crossing the street to the door of the Zendo, I might have appeared less a single Green Hornet than a whole inflamed nest of them.

My first act was to drop in next door. I found the original doorman, Dirk, asleep on his stool.

I lifted his head up with my hand and he jerked awake and away from my grasp. “Hello!” he shouted.

“You remember me, Dirk?” I said. “I was sitting in a car. You told me I had a message from my ‘friend.’ ”

“Oh? Sure, I remember. Sorry, I was just doing what I was told.”

“Sure you were. And I suppose you never saw the guy before, did you-dirtyworker, dirketyname?”

“I never saw the guy before.” He breathed out, wide-eyed.

“He was ery big man, yes?”

“Yes!” He rolled his eyes upward to show it. Then he held his hands out, begging my patience. I backed off a little and he stood and neatened his coat. I helped him with it, especially around the collar. He was too sleepy or confused by my questions to object.

“He pay you or just scare you into giving me the bum steer?” I asked more gently. My anger was wasted on Dirk. Anyway, I felt vaguely grateful to him for confirming the giant’s existence. My only other sure witness was Gilbert, in jail. Kimmery had begun to make me doubt my eyes.

“A man that big doesn’t have to pay,” said Dirk honestly.

One of the stolen keys got me inside. This time I held on to my shoes as I passed the sitting room and headed upstairs, past the floor where Kimmery and I had sat at tea, up to the Roshi’s private quarters-a.k.a. Gerard Minna’s hideout. The halls were darker the higher I climbed, until at the top I could only grope my way toward a thin margin of light squeezed out underneath a sealed door. I turned the handle and pushed the door open, impatient with my own fear.