Motherless Brooklyn

I heard and felt the boat’s body clunking as it bobbed against the pier. My thoughts wandered to the underwaterropellers, whirring silently in the water. If I were closer to the water I’d want to reach in and touch the propeller, it was so stimulating to my kinesthetic obsessions. “Tugboat! Forgettaboat!” I ticced, and jerked my neck, to hurl the syllables sideways into the wind.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” he said carefully. I’d expected his voice to come out like Yosemite Sam’s or Popeye’s, scabrous and sputtering. Instead he was so stolid and patrimonial with his New England accent-Ya nawt from around heah, ah you?-that I was left with no doubt which of us resembled the cartoon character.

“No, actually.” I affected a bright look-Illuminate me, sir, for I am a stranger in these exotic parts! It seemed as likely he’d shove me off the dock into the water or simply turn away as continue the conversation. I straightened my suit again, fingered my own collar so I wouldn’t be tempted to finger his fluorescent hood, to crimp its Velcro edge like the rim of a piecrust.

He examined me carefully. “Urchin season runs October through March. It’s cold work. Day like today is a walk in the park.”

“Urchin?” I said, feeling as I said it that I’d ticced, that the word was itself a tic by definition, it was so innately twitchy. It would have made a good pronunciation for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince’s glyph.

“These are urchin waters out around the island. That’s the market, so that’s what’s fished.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, that’s terrific. Keep it up. You know anything about the place up the hill-Yoshii’s?”

“Probably you want to talk to Mr. Foible.” He nodded his head at the fishing dock’s small shack, from the smokestack of which piped a tiny plume of smoke. “He’s the one does dealings with them Japanese. I’m just a bayman.”

“Eatmebayman!-thanks for your help.” I smiled and tipped an imaginary cap to him, and headed for the shack. He shrugged at me and received another carton off the boat.

“How can I help you, sir?”

Foible was red too, but in a different way. His cheeks and nose and even his brow were spiderwebbed with blossoming red veins, painful to look at. His eyes too showed veins through their yellow. As Minna used to say about the St. Mary’s parish priest, Foible had a thirsty face. Right on the wooden counter where he sat in the shack was evidence of what the face was thirsty for: a cluster of empty long-neck beer bottles and a couple of gin quarts, one still with an inch or so to cover the bottom. A coil heater glowed under the countertop, and when I stepped inside, he nodded at the heater and the door to indicate I should shut the door behind me. Besides Foible and his heater and bottles the shack held a scarred wooden file cabinet and a few boxes of what I guessed might be hardware and fishing tackle beneath their layers of grease. In my two-day suit and stubble I was the freshest thing in the place by far.

ght=”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”›I could see this called for the oldest investigatory technique of them all: I opened my wallet and took out a twenty. “I’d buy a guy a drink if he could tell me a few things about the Japanese,” I said.

“What about ’em?” His milky eyes made intimate contact with the twenty, worked their way back up to meet mine.

“I’m interested in the restaurant up the hill. Who owns it, specifically.”

“Why?”

“What if I said I wanted to buy it?” I winked and gritted through a barking tic, cut it down to a momentary “-charp!”

“Son, you’d never get that thing away from them. You better do your shopping elsewhere.”

“What if I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse?”

Foible squinted at me, suddenly suspicious. I thought of how Detective Seminole had gotten spooked by the Minna Men, our Court Street milieu. I had no idea whether such images would reverberate so far from Gotham City.

“Can I ask you something?” said Foible.

“Shoot.”

“You’re not one of them Scientologists, are you?”

“No,” I said, surprised. It wasn’t the impression I’d imagined I was making.

He winced deeply, as though recalling the trauma that had driven him to the bottle. “Good,” he said. “Dang Scientologists bought the old hotel up the island, turned it into a funhouse for movie stars. Hell, I’ll take the Japanese any day. Least they eat fish.”

“Muscongus Island?” I’d only wanted to feel the word in my mouth at last.

“What other island would I be talking about?” He squinted at me again, then held out his hand for the twenty. “Give me that, son.”