Motherless Brooklyn

“No. I only supplied the labor, in return for consideration equal to my mortgage here on the Zendo. Buddhism is spread by what means it finds.”

“Labor for what?” My brain tangled on spread by means it finds, fed in springs by mimes, bled by mingy spies, but I shook it off.

“My students performed the maintenance and service work for the building, as part of their training. Cleaning, cooking, the very sort of labor they’d perform in a monastery, only in a slightly different setting. The contract for those services in such a building is worth millions. My brother and Ullman tithed the difference mostly into their own pockets.”

“Yes. Doormen, too.”

“So Fujisaki sicced the giant on Frank and the bookkeeper.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“And he just happened to use the Zendo as his trap yesterday?” I aired out another Minna-ism: “Don’t try to hand me no two-ton feather.” I was dredging up Minna’s usages on any excuse now, as though I could build a golem of his language, then bring it to life, a figure of vengeance to search out the killer or killers.

I was aware of myself standing in Gerard’s room, planted on his floor, arms at my sides, never moving nearer to him where he sat beaming Zen pleasantness in my direction, ignoring my accusations and my tics. I was big but I was no golem or giant. I hadn’t startled Gerard in deep sleep nor upended his calm with my griefy hostility. I wasn’t holding a gun on him. He didn’t have to answer my questions.

“I don’t really believe in sophisticated killers,” said Gerard. “Do you?”

“Go-fisticate-a-killphone,” I ticced.

“The Fujisaki Corporation is ruthless and remorseless-in the manner of corporations. And yet in the manner of corporations their violence is also performed at a remove, by a force just nominally under their control. In the giant you speak of they seem to have located a sort of primal entity-one whose true nature is killing. And sicced him, as you say, on the men who they feel betrayed them. I’m not sure the killer’s behavior is explicable in any real sense, Lionel. Any human sense.”

Gerard’s persuasiveness was a variant of the Minna style, I saw now. I felt the force of it, moving me authentically. Yet his foray against the notion of a sophisticated killer also made me think of Tony mocking Detective Seminole with jokes about Batman and James Bond supervillains. Was it a giveaway, a clue that Gerard and Tony were in league? And what about Julia? I wanted to quote Frank’s conversation with Gerard the night he died: She misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong, find out what he meant. I wanted to ask about Boston, and I wanted to ask about Frank and Julia’s marriage-had Gerard been at the ceremony? I wanted to ask him about whether he missed Brooklyn, and how he got his head so shiny. I searched for a single question that could stand for my thousands and what popped out was this:

“What’s human sense?”

“In Buddhism, Lionel, we come to understand that everything on this earth is a vessel for Buddha-nature. Frank had Buddha-nature. You have Buddha-nature. I feel it.”

Gerard allowed a long minute to pass while we contemplated his words. Buddha nostril, I nearly blurted. When he spoke again, it was with a confidence that sympathy flowed between us untrammeled by doubt or fear.

“There’s another of your Minna Men, Lionel. He’s pushing his way into this, and I fear he may have aroused the killer’s ire. Tony, is that his name?”

“Tony Vermonte,” I said, marveling-it was as if Gerard had read my mind.

“Yes. He’d like to walk in my brother’s footsteps. But Fujisaki will be keeping a keener eye on their money from this point, I’d think. There’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost. Perhaps you’ll have a word with him.”

“Tony and I aren’t exactly… communicating well, since yesterday.”

“Ah.”

I felt a surge of care in me, for Tony. He was only a heedless adventurer, with a poignant urge to imitate Frank Minna in all things. He was a member of my family-L &L, the Men. Now he was in above his head, threatened on all sides by the giant, by Detective Seminole, by The Clients. Only Gerard and I understood his danger.

I must have been silent for a minute or so-a veritable sesshin by my standards.

“You and Tony are together in your pain at the loss of my brother,” said Gerard softly. “But you haven’t come together in actuality. Be patient.”

“There’s another factor,” I said, tentative now, lulled by his compassionate tones. “Someone else may be involved in this somehow. Two of them, actually-Monstercookie and Antifriendly!-uh, Matricardi and Rockaforte.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do.”

“You can’t know how sorry I am to hear those names.” Never say those names! warned Minna in the echo chamber of my memory. Gerard went on, “Those two are the prototype, aren’t they, for my brother’s tendency to dangerous associations-and his tendency to exploit those associations in dangerous ways.”

“He stole from them?”

“Do you recall that he once had to leave New York for a while?”

Did I recall! Suddenly Gerard threatened to solve the deepest puzzles of my existence. I practically wanted to ask him, So who’s Bailey?

“I’d hoped they were no longer in the picture,” said Gerard reflectively. It was the nearest to thrown I’d seen him, the closest I’d come to pushing his buttons. Only now I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Avoid them, Lionel, if you can,” he continued. “They’re dangerous men.”

He returned his gaze to my face, batted his lashes, moved his expressive eyebrows. If I’d been in striking distance I’d have tried to span his head with my hands and stroke his eyebrows with my thumb tips, just to soothe this one small worry I’d raised.

“Can I ask one more thing?” I nearly called him Roshi, so complete was my conversion. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

Gerard nodded. The High Lama will grant you an audience, Mrs. Gushman.

“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 blase, 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