Motherless Brooklyn

“Is there anyone else-Zonebone!-anyone else at the Zendo who’s involved in this thing? Anyone-Kissmefaster! Killmesooner! Cookiemonster!-anyone the killer might target? That old hippie, Wallace? Or the girl-Kissingme!-Kimmery?” I tried not to divulge the special freight of tenderness and hope behind this query. Whether the string of shrieks I issued in the course of its delivery made me appear more or less blasé, I couldn’t say.

“No.” Gerard spoke benevolently. “I compromised myself personally, but not my students or my practice as a teacher. Wallace and Kimmery should be safe. It’s kind of you to be concerned.”

I’m concerned about Pinched and Indistinct, too, I wanted to say. I doubted students could get any more compromised than that.

And then there was that nod of complicity I saw pass between Gerard and the giant.

The three of them-Pinched, Indistinct, and the nod-were three sour notes in a very pretty song. But I kept my tongue, feeling I’d learned what I could here, that it was time to go. I wanted to find Tony before the giant did. And I needed to step outside the candle glow of Gerard’s persuasiveness to sort out the false and the real, the Zen and the chaff in our long discussion.

“I’m going now,” I said awkwardly.

“Good night, Lionel.” He was still watching me as I closed the door.

On second thought, there is a vaguely Tourettic aspect to the New York City subway, especially late at night-that dance of attention, of stray gazes, in which every rider must engage. And there’s a lot of stuff you shouldn’t touch in the subway, particularly in a certain order: this pole and then your lips, for instance. And the tunnel walls are layered, like those of my brain, with expulsive and incoherent language-

But I was in a terrible hurry, or rather two terrible hurries: to get back to Brooklyn, and to sort out my thinking about Gerard before I got there. I couldn’t spare a minute to dwell in myself as a body riding the Lexington train to Nevins Street-I might as well have been tele-ported, or floated to Brooklyn on a magic carpet, for all that I was allured or distracted by the 4 train’s sticky, graffitied immediacy.

The lights were burning in the L &L storefront. I approached from the opposite sidewalk, confident I was invisible on the darkened street to those in the office-I’d been on the other side of that plate of glass only two or three thousand nights in preparation for the act of spying on my fellow Men from the street. I didn’t want to go waltzing into a trap. Detective Seminole might be there or, who knew, maybe Tony and a passel of doormen. If there was something to learn at a distance, I’d learn it.

It was almot two-thirty now, and Bergen Street was shut up tight, the night cold enough to chase the stoop-sitting drinkers indoors. Smith Street showed a bit more life, Zeod’s Market lit up like a beacon, catering to the all-night cigarette cravings, to the squad-car cops in need of a bagel or LifeSaver or some other torus. Four L &L cars were scattered in parking spots near the storefront: the Minna death car, which hadn’t moved since Gilbert and I returned from the hospital and parked it, the Pontiac in which Tony had shanghaied me in front of The Clients’ brownstone, a Caddy that Minna had liked to drive himself, and a Tracer, an ugly modernistic bubble of a car that usually fell to me or Gilbert to pilot. I slowed my walk as I drew up even with the storefront, then turned my neck. It was pleasing to have a good solid reason behind turning my neck for once, retroactive validation for a billion tics. As I passed, I made out the shapes of two Men inside: Tony and Danny, both in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Danny seated behind the counter with a folded newspaper, radiating cool, Tony pacing, radiating cool’s opposite. The television was on.

I walked past, to the corner of Smith, then swiveled and went back. This time I set up shop on the brief stoop of the big apartment building directly across from L &L. It was a safe outpost. I could duck my head and watch them through a parked car’s windows if I thought they were in any danger of spotting me. Otherwise I’d sit back in the wings and study them in the limelight of the storefront until something happened or I’d decided what to do.

Danny-I gave Danny Fantl a moment of my time. He was sliding through this crisis as he’d slid through life to this point, so poised he was practically an ambient presence. Gilbert was in jail and I was hunted high and low and Danny sat in the storefront all day, refusing car calls and smoking cigarettes and reading sports. He wasn’t exactly my candidate for any plot’s criminal mastermind, but if Tony conspired with or even confided in anyone inside L &L’s circle, it would be Danny. In the present atmosphere, I decided, there was no way I could take Danny for granted, trust him with my back.