Motherless Brooklyn

Which meant I wasn’t going inside to talk with either one of them until they were apart. If then-the image of Tony pulling his wobbly gun on me was fresh enough to give pause.

Anyway, something happened before I’d decided what to do-why was I not surprised? But it was a relatively banal something, reassuring, even. A tick of the clock of everyday life on Bergen Street, an everyday life that already felt nostalgic.

A block east, on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt, was an elegantly renovated tavern called the Boerum Hill Inn, with a gleaming antique inlaid-mirror bar, a CD jukebox weighted toward Blue Note and Stax, and a Manhattanized clientele of professional singles too good for bars with televisions, for subway rides home, or for the likes of the Men. Only Minna ever visited the Boerum Hill Inn, and he cracked that anyone who drank there was someone else’s assistant: a district attorney’s, an editor’s, or a video artist’s. The dressed-up crowd at the inn gabbled and flirted every night of the week until two in the morning, oblivious to the neighborhood’s past or present reality, then slept it off in their overpriced apartments or on their desks the next day in Midtown. Typically a few parties would stagger down the block after last call and try to engage an L &L car for a ride home-sometimes it was a woman alone or a newly rmed couple too drunk to throw to the fates, and we’d take the job. Mostly we claimed not to have any cars.

But the inn’s bartenders were a couple of young women we adored, Siobhain and Welcome. Siobhain was properly named, while Welcome bore the stigma of her parents’ hippie ideals, but both were from Brooklyn and Irish to their ancient souls-or so had declared Minna. They were roommates in Park Slope, possibly lovers (again according to Minna), and bartending their way through graduate school. Each night one or the other was stuck with closing-the owner of the inn was stingy and didn’t let them double up after midnight. If we weren’t actually busy on some surveillance job we’d always drive the closer home.

It was Welcome, at the door of L &L, now going inside. I saw Tony nod at Danny, then Danny stood and stubbed out a butt, checked in his pocket for the keys and nodded too. He and Welcome moved to the door and out. I lowered my head. Danny led her to the Caddy, which sat at the front of the row of parked cars, on the corner of Smith. She went around to the front passenger seat, not like the usual ride who’d sit in the back. Danny slammed his door and the interior light shut off, then he started the engine. I glanced back to see that Tony was now going through the drawers behind the L &L counter, searching for something, his desperado’s energy suddenly lashed to a purpose. He used both hands, his cigarette stuck in his mouth, and unpacked papers onto the countertop hurriedly. I’d gathered a piece of vague information, I supposed: Tony didn’t trust Danny with everything.

Then I saw a hulking shadow stir, in a parked car on L &L’s side of the street, just a few yards from the storefront.

Unmistakable.

The Kumquat Sasquatch.

The car was an economy model, bright red, and he filled it like it had been cast around his body. I saw him lean sideways to watch the Cadillac with Danny and Welcome inside round the corner of Smith and disappear with a pulse of brakelights. Then he turned his attention back to the storefront; I read the movement in the disappearance of a nose from the silhouette, its replacement by an elephantine ear. The giant was doing what I was doing, staking out L &L.

He watched Tony, and I watched them both. Tony was a lot more interesting at the moment. I hadn’t often seen him reading, and never this intently. He was searching for something in the sheaf of papers he’d pulled from Minna’s drawers, his brow furrowed, cigarette in his lips, looking like Edward R. Murrow’s punk brother. Now, unsatisfied, he dug in another drawer, and worked over a notebook I recognized even from across the street as the one containing my own stakeout jottings from the day before. I tried not to take it personally when he thrust this aside even more hastily and went back to tearing up the drawers.

The large shadow took it all in, complacent. His hand moved from somewhere below the line of the car window and briefly covered his mouth; he chewed, then leaned forward to dribble out some discarded seeds or pits. A bag of cherries or olives this time, something a giant would gobble in a handful. Or Cracker Jack, and he didn’t like peanuts. He watched Tony like an operagoer who knew the libretto, was curious only to gaidew details of how the familiar plot would play out this time.

Tony exhausted the drawers, started in on the file cabinets.