Motherless Brooklyn

Seminole’s attention. “I looked into that rumor,” he said. “None of you carry investigators’ credentials, according to the computer. Just limousine operators’ licenses.”

“We work for Frank Minna,” I said, and heard my own unconcealed nostalgia, my pining. “We assist a detective. We’re, uh, operatives.”

“You do stooge work for a penny-ante hood, according to what I can see. A dead penny-ante hood. You were in the pocket of a guy in the pocket of Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte, two relatively deep old dudes. Only it appears the pocket got turned inside out.”

Tony winced: These cliches hurt. “We work for the clients that come in,” he said, oddly sincere. For a moment Minna again came alive in Tony’s voice. “We don’t ask questions we shouldn’t, or we wouldn’t have any clients at all. The cops do the same, don’t try to tell me any different.”

“Cops don’t have clients,” said the homicide detective stiffly. I would have liked to see the real Frank Minna handle Seminole.

“What are you, Abraham Jefferson Jackson?” said Tony. “You running for office with that speech? Give me a break.”

I snorted. Despite everything, Tony was cracking me up. I threw in a flourish of my own:

“Abracadabra Jackson!”

The gun, and Seminole’s status as a law-enforcement officer, didn’t matter-he was losing control of this interview. What happened was this: Tony and I, so deeply estranged, had been drawn together by the point of the detective’s gun. In this post-Minna era we Men were a little panicked and raw at facing one another head on. But triangulated by Seminole we’d rediscovered the kinship that lurked in our old routines. If we couldn’t trust each other, Tony and I were at least reminded we were two of a kind, especially in the eyes of a cop. And Tony, seeing chinks in the detective’s confidence, was turning on him with his old orphan’s savagery. A bully knows the parameters and half-life of a brandished threat-the only thing weaker than a gun so long ignored was no gun at all. The cop had had to arrest us or hurt us or turn us against each other by now, and he hadn’t. Tony would cut him apart with his tongue for the mistake.

In the meantime I considered what Seminole had been saying, and tried to sift the information from his dingbat theories. If Julia didn’t get a call from the hospital how did she know about Minna’s death?

Again I wondered: Was it Julia who missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong? Did she keep it in Boston?

“Listen, you scumbags,” said Seminole. He was compensating desperately for his plummeting authority. “I’d rather tangle with homies doing drive-bys all day than wade into this Italianate mobster shit. Don’t get big-headed, now-I can see you’re just a couple of fools. It’s the wiseguys pulling your strings I’m worried about.”

“Great,” said Tony. “A paranoid cop. Wiseguys pulling strings-you read too many comic books, Cleopatra Jones.”

“Clapperdapper Bailey Johnson!”

“You think I’m stupid,” continued Seminole, on a real tear now. “You think a dumb black cop is going to stumble into your little nest and take it on face value. Car service, detective agency, give me a break. I’m going to push this murder bag just far enough to turn it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then I’m going to get my ass out of here for good. Might even take a vacation, sit on the beach and read about you losers in the Metro section.”

Stumble, wade: Seminole’s choice of words betrayed him. He really and truly feared he’d already gotten in further than was good for him. I wanted to find a way to allay his fears, I really did. I sort of liked the homicide detective. But everything out of my mouth sounded vaguely like a racial slur.

“Federal Bureau of what?” said Tony. “I never met those guys.”

“Let’s go upstairs and see if Uncle Alphonso and Uncle Leonardo can explain it to you,” said Seminole. “Something tells me they’ve got a working familiarity with the FBI.”

“I don’t think the old guy are home anymore,” said Tony.

“Oh yeah? Where’d they go?”

“They went through a tunnel in the basement,” said Tony. “They had to get back to their hideout, since they’ve got James Bond-or Batman, I can’t remember which-roasting over a slow fire.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t worry, though. Batman always gets away. These supervillains never learn.”

“Uncle Batman!” I shouted. They couldn’t know how much work it was for me to keep my hands on that dashboard, my neck straight. “Unclebailey Blackman! Barnamum Bat-a-potamus!”

“That’s enough, Alibi,” said Seminole. “Get out of the car.”

“What?”

“Get lost, go home. You annoy me, man. Tony and me are going to have a little talk.”

“C’mon, Blacula,” complained Tony. “We’ve been talking for hours. I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“Every name you call me I think up a couple more questions,” said Seminole. He waved at me with his gun. “Get lost.”

I gaped at Seminole, incredulous.

“I mean it. Get.”

I opened the door. Then I thought to find the Pontiac’s keys and hand them to Tony.

Tony glared at me. “Go back to the office and wait for me.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and stepped out onto the curb.

“Close the door,” said Seminole, training gun and gaze on Tony.

“Thanks, Count Chocula,” I said, and skipped away, literally.

Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette’s? Yup, you guessed it, it’s a tic. Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic plus ultra. I’ve got meta- Tourette’s. Thinking about ticcing, my mind racing, thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette’s. It’s sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes. Or like a tugboater whose favorite anecdote concerns actual tugboats.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

Though at each step I felt the gaze of an army of invisible doormen on my neck, I was nevertheless exultant to be back on the Upper East Side. I hurried down Lexington from the Eighty-sixth Street station, with only ten minutes to spare before five o’clock: zazen. I didn’t want to be late for my first. While I was still on the street, though, I took out the cell phone and called Loomis.

“Yeah, I was just about to call you.” I could hear him chewing a sandwich or a chicken leg, and pictured his open mouth, smacking lips. Hadn’t he been at lunch two hours before? “I got the goods on that building.”

“Let’s have it-quick.”

“This guy in Records, he was going on and on about it. That’s a sweet little building, Lionel. Way outta my class.”

“It’s Park Avenue, Loomis.”

“Well, there’s Park Avenue and then there’s this. You gotta have a hundred million to get on the waiting list for this place, Lionel. This kind of people, their other house is an island.”

I heard Loomis quoting someone smarter than himself. “Right, but what about Fujisaki?”

“Hold your horses, I’m getting there. This sort of place, there’s a whole staff-it’s like a bunch of mansions stacked together. They got secret passages, wine cellars, a laundry service, swimming pool, servants’ quarters, private chef. Whole secret economy. There’s only five or six buildings like this in the city-the place where Bob Dylan