Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  But here, here was the beauty part. By Minna’s own admission, he’d buried the lead: L&L Car Service—it wasn’t really a car service. That was just a front. L&L was a detective agency.

  The joke Minna wanted to hear in the emergency room, the joke about Irving, went like this:

  A Jewish mother—Mrs. Gushman, we’ll call her—walks into a travel agency. “I vant to go to Tibet,” she says. “Listen lady, take my word for it, you don’t want to go to Tibet. I’ve got a nice package tour for the Florida Keys, or maybe Hawaii—” “No,” says Mrs. Gushman, “I vant to go to Tibet.” “Lady, are you traveling alone? Tibet is no place—” “Sell me a ticket for Tibet!” shouts Mrs. Gushman. “Okay, okay.” So she goes to Tibet. Gets off the plane, says to the first person she sees, “Who’s the greatest holy man in Tibet?” “Why, that would be the High Lama,” comes the reply. “That’s who I vant to see,” says Mrs. Gushman. “Take me to the High Lama.” “Oh, no, you don’t understand, American Lady, the High Lama lives on top of our highest mountain in total seclusion. No one can see the High Lama.” “I’m Mrs. Gushman, I’ve come all the vay to Tibet, and I must see the High Lama!” “Oh, but you could never—” “Which mountain? How do I get there?” So Mrs. Gushman checks into a hotel at the base of the mountain and hires sherpas to take her to the monastery at the top. All the way up they’re trying to explain to her, nobody sees the High Lama—his own monks have to fast and meditate for years before they’re allowed to ask the High Lama a single question. She just keeps pointing her finger and saying “I’m Mrs. Gushman, take me up the mountain!” When they get to the monastery the sherpas explain to the monks—crazy American lady, wants to see the High Lama. She says, “Tell the High Lama Mrs. Gushman is here to see him.” “You don’t understand, we could never—” “Just tell him!” The monks go and come back and they’re shaking their heads in confusion. “We don’t understand, but the High Lama says he will grant you an audience. Do you understand what an honor—” “Yes, yes,” she says. “Just take me!” So they lead her in to see the High Lama. The monks are whispering and they open the door and the High Lama nods—they can leave him alone with Mrs. Gushman. And the High Lama looks at Mrs. Gushman and Mrs. Gushman says, “Irving, when are you coming home? Your father’s worried!”

  INTERROGATION EYES

  Minna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men collect money. Minna Men don’t ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean-shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.

  Gilbert and I left the hospital so quickly, and drove back in such a perfect fog of numbness, that when we walked into L&L and Tony said, “Don’t say it. We already heard,” it was as though I were learning myself for the first time.

  “Heard from who?” said Gilbert.

  “Black cop, through here a few minutes ago, looking for you,” said Tony. “You just missed him.”

  Tony and Danny stood furiously smoking cigarettes behind L&L’s counter, their foreheads pasty with sweat, eyes fogged and distant, teeth grinding behind their drawn lips. They looked like somebody had worked them over and they wanted to take it out on us.

  The Bergen Street office was as we’d renovated it fifteen years before: divided in two by the Formica counter, thirty-inch color television playing constantly in the “waiting area” on this side of the counter, telephones, file cabinets and computer on the rear wall, underneath a massive laminated map of Brooklyn, Minna’s heavy Magic Marker numerals scrawled across each neighborhood, showing the price of an L&L ride—five bucks to the Heights, seven to Park Slope or Fort Greene, twelve to Williamsburg or Borough Park, seventeen to Bushwick. Airports or Manhattan were twenty and up.

  The ashtray on the counter was full of cigarette butts that had been in Minna’s fingers, the telephone log full of his handwriting from earlier in the day. The sandwich on top of the fridge wore his bite marks. We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centerpiece, as incoherent as a verbless sentence.

  “How did they find us?” I said. “We’ve got Frank’s wallet.” I opened it up and took out the bundle of Frank’s business cards and slipped them into my pocket. Then I dropped it on the counter and slapped the Formica five times to finish a six-count.

  Nobody minded me except myself. This was my oldest, most jaded audience. Tony shrugged and said, “Him croaking out L and L as his dying words? A business card in his coat? Gilbert giving out names like a fucking idiot? You tell me how they found us.”

  “What did this cop want?” said Gilbert stoically. He would deal with one problem at a time, the plodder, even if they stacked up from here to the moon.

  “He said you weren’t supposed to leave the hospital, that’s what he said. You gave some nurse your name, Gilbert.”

  “Fuck it,” said Coney. “Fuck some fucking black cop.”

  “Yeah, well, you can express that sentiment in person, since he’s coming back. And you might want to say, ‘Fuck some fucking black homicide detective,’ since that’s actually what you’re dealing with here. Smart cop, too. You could see it in his eyes.”

  “Fuckicide,” I thought to add.

  “Who’s going to tell Julia?” said Danny quietly. His mouth, his whole face, was veiled in smoke. Nobody answered.

  “Well, I won’t be here when he comes back,” said Gilbert. “I’ll be out doing his work for him, catching the motherfucker who did this. Gimme a coffin nail.”

  “Slow down, Sherlock,” said Tony, handing him a cigarette. “I wanna know how’d it even happen in the first place? How’d the two of you even get involved? I thought you were supposed to be on a stakeout.”

  “Frank showed up,” said Gilbert, trying to flick his depleted lighter again and again, failing to make it catch. “He went inside. Fuck. Fuck.” His voice was clenched like a fist. I saw the whole stupid sequence playing behind his eyes: parked car, wire, traffic light, Brainum, the chain of banalities that somehow led to the bloody Dumpster and the hospital. The chain of banalities now immortalized by our guilt.

  “Inside where?” said Tony, handing Gilbert a book of matches. The phone rang.

  “Some kinda kung-fu place,” said Gilbert. “Ask Lionel, he knows all about it—”

  “Not kung fu,” I started. “Meditation—”

  “You’re trying to say they killed him with meditation?” said Tony. The phone rang a second time.

  “No, no, we saw who killed him—Viable Guessfrog!—a big Polish guy—Barnamum Pierogi!—I mean really big. We only saw him from behind.”

  “Which one of us is going to tell Julia?” said Danny again. The phone rang a third time.

  I picked it up and said, “L and L.”

  “Need a car at One-eighty-eight Warren, corner of—” droned a female voice.

  “No cars,” I said by rote.

  “You don’t have any cars?”

  “No cars.” I gulped, ticking like a time bomb.

  “How soon can you get a car?”

  “Lionel Deathclam!” I shouted into the phone. That got the caller’s attention, enough that she hung up. My fellow Minna Men glanced at me, jarred only slightly from their hard-boiled despair.

  A real car service, even a small one, has a fleet of no fewer than thirty cars working in rotation, and at the very least ten on the street at any given time. Elite, our nearest rival, on Court Street, has sixty cars, three dispatchers, probably twenty-five drivers on a shift. Rusty’s, on Atlantic Avenue, has eighty cars. New Relámpago, a Dominican-run service out of Williamsburg, has one hundred and sixty cars, a magisterial secret economy of private transportation hidden deep in the borough. Car services are completely dependent on phone dispatches—the drivers are forbidden by law to pick up customers on the street, lest they compete with medallioned taxicabs. So the drivers and dispatchers litter the wor
ld with business cards, slip them into apartment foyers like Chinese take-out menus, leave them stacked beside potted plants in hospital waiting rooms, palm them out with the change at the end of every ride. They sticker pay phones with their phone number, writ in phosphorescent font.

  L&L had five cars, one for each of us, and we were barely ever available to drive them. We never handed out cards, were never friendly to callers, and had, five years before, removed our phone number from both the Yellow Pages and the sign over the Bergen Street storefront.

  Nevertheless, our number circulated, so that one of our main activities was picking up the phone to say “no cars.”

  As I replaced the receiver Gilbert was explaining what he knew about the stakeout, doggedly. English might have been his fourth or fifth language from the sound of it, but you couldn’t question his commitment. As Bionic Dreadlog was my likely contribution—my mourning brain had decided renaming itself was the evening’s assignment—I was in no position to criticize. I stepped outside, away from the chainsmoking confusion, into the cold, light-washed night. Smith Street was alive, F train murmuring underneath, pizzeria, Korean grocer, and the Casino all streaming with customers. It could have been any night—nothing in the Smith Street scene required that Minna have died that day. I went to the car and retrieved the notebook from the glove compartment, doing my best not to glance at the bloodstained backseat. Then I thought of Minna’s final ride. There was something I’d forgotten. When I steeled myself to look in the back I saw what it was: his watch and beeper. I fished them out from under the passenger seat where they’d slid and put them in my pocket.

  I locked the car and rehearsed a few imaginary options. I could go back to the Yorkville Zendo by myself and have a look around. I could also seek out the homicide detective, earn his trust, pool my knowledge with him instead of the Men. I could walk down Atlantic Avenue, sit in an Arabic storefront where they knew me and wouldn’t gape, and drink a tiny cup of mudlike black coffee and eat a baklava or Crow’s Nest—acid, steam and sugar to poison my grief.

  Or I could go back into the office. I went back into the office. Gilbert was still fumbling with the end of his account, our race up the ambulance ramp, the confusion at the hospital. He wanted Tony and Danny to know we’d done all we could do. I laid the notebook flat on the counter and with a red ballpoint circled WOMAN, GLASSES and ULLMAN, DOWNTOWN, those crucial new players on our stage. Paper-thin and unrevealing as they might be, they had more life than Minna now.

  I had other questions: The building they’d spoken of. The doorman’s interference. The unnamed woman Frank lost control of, the one who missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong. The wiretap itself: What did Minna hope I’d hear? Why couldn’t he just tell me what to listen for?

  “We asked him, in the back of the car,” said Gilbert. “We asked him and he wouldn’t tell us. I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell.”

  “Asked him what?” said Tony.

  “Asked him who killed him,” said Gilbert. “I mean, before he was dead.”

  I remembered the name Irving, but didn’t say anything.

  “Somebody’s definitely going to have to tell Julia,” said Danny.

  Gilbert grasped the significance of the notebook. He stepped over and read what I’d circled. “Who’s Ullman?” said Gilbert, looking at me. “You wrote this?”

  “In the car,” I said. “It’s the note I took in the car. ‘Ullman, downtown’ was where Frank was supposed to go when he got into the car. The guy in the Zendo, who sent him out—that’s where he was sending him.”

  “Sent him where?” said Tony.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He didn’t go. The giant took him and killed him instead. What matters is who sent him—Failey! Bakum! Flakely!—the guy inside the place.”

  “I’m not telling Julia,” said Danny. “I don’t care what anyone says.”

  “Well, it ai tellin;t gonna be me,” said Gilbert, noticing Danny at last.

  “We ought to go back to the East Side—TrickyZendo!—and have a look around.” I was panting to get to the point, and Julia didn’t seem to me to be it.

  “All right, all right,” said Tony. “We’re gonna put our fucking heads together here.”

  At the word heads I was blessed with a sudden vision: Lacking Minna, ours, put together, were as empty and tenuous as balloons. Untethered by his death, the only question was how quickly they would drift apart, how far—and whether they’d burst or just wither.

  “Okay,” said Tony. “Gilbert, we gotta get you out of here. You’re the name they’ve got. So we’ll get you out doing some hoofwork. You look for this Ullman guy.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Gilbert wasn’t exactly a specialist in digging up leads.

  “Why don’t you let me help him?” I said.

  “I need you for something else,” said Tony. “Gilbert can find Ullman.”

  “Yeah,” said Gilbert. “But how?”

  “Maybe his name’s in the book,” said Tony. “It’s not so common, Ullman. Or maybe in Frank’s book—you got that? Frank’s address book?”

  Gilbert looked at me.

  “Must still be in his coat,” I said. “Back at the hospital.” But this triggered a compulsive self-frisking anyway. I patted each of my pockets six times. Under my breath I said, “Franksbook, forkspook, finksblood—”

  “Great,” said Tony. “That’s just great. Well, show some initiative for once and find the guy. That’s your job, Gilbert, for chrissakes. Call your pal, the garbage cop—he’s got access to police records, right? Find Ullman and size him up. Maybe he’s your giant. He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.”

  “The guy upstairs set Frank up,” I said. I was frustrated that Gilbert and his jerk friend from the Sanitation Police were getting the assignment to track Ullman. “They were in it together, the guy upstairs and the giant. He knew the giant was waiting downstairs.”

  “Okay, but the giant could still be this guy Ullman,” said Tony irritably. “And that’s what Gilbert’s going to find out, okay?”

  I raised my hands in surrender, then snatched an imaginary fly out of the air.

  “I’ll go up to the East Side myself,” said Tony. “Take a look around. See if I can get into this building. Danny, you mind the store.”

  “Check,” said Danny, stubbing out his cirette.

  “That cop’s gonna come back around,” said Tony. “You talk to him. Cooperate, just don’t give him anything. We don’t want to look like we’re panicking.” Implicit in this assignment was the notion of Danny’s superior rapport with the fucking black cop.

  “You make it sound like we’re the suspects,” I said.

  “That’s how this cop made it sound,” said Tony. “It isn’t me.”