Motherless Brooklyn

“Jacks and twos?” Gilbert inspected my cards. “That won’t do it, Freakshow.” He tossed down aces and eights. “Read ’em and scream, like the maniac you are.”

Assertions are common to me, and they’re also common to detectives. (“About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door”-Marlowe, The Big Sleep.) And in detective stories things are always always, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary. Oh sure. Seen it before, will see it again. Trust me on this one.

Assertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.

Here’s one more. As a great man once said, the more things change, the harder they are to change back.

Within a few days of Gerard’s disappearance most of the Yorkville Zendo’s students had trickled away. There was a real Zendo on the Upper East Side, twenty blocks south, and its ranks were swelled by defectors from Yorkville seeking truer essences (though, as Kimmery had pointed out, anyone who teaches Zen is a Zen teacher). Those bewildered doormen had all originally been authentic students of Gerard’s, it turned out, rudderless seekers, human clay. It was their absolute susceptibility to Gerard’s charismatic teachings that made them available to be exploited, first in the Park Avenue building, then as a gang of inept drivers and strong-arms when Gerard needed bodies to fill ranks alongside the Polish giant. Frank Minna had Minna Men while Gerard had only followers, Zen stooges, and that difference might have determined how the case worked out. That might have been my little edge. It pleased me to think so anyway.

The Yorkville Zendo didn’t fold, though. Wallace, that stoic sitter, took over stewardship of what flock remained, though he declined to claim the title of Roshi for himself. Instead he asked to be called sensei, a lesser term denoting a sort of apprentice-instructor. So it was that each of the Minna organizations, Frank’s and Gerard’s, were gently and elegantly steered past the shoals of corruption by their quietest disciples. Of course Fujisaki and The Clients, those vast shadows, crept away unharmed, barely even ruffled. It would take more than the Minna brothers or Lionel Essrog to make a lasting impression.

I learned the fate of the Yorkville Zendo from Kimmery the only time I saw her, two weeks after my return from Maine. I’d been leaving messages on her machine, but she hadn’t returned my calls until then. We arranged a rendezvous at a coffee shop on Seventy-second Street, our telephone conversation clipped and awkward. Before I left for the date I took the thoroughest shower I knew how to take, then dressed and re-dressed a dozen times, playing mirror games with myself, trying to see something that wasn’t there, trying not to see the big twitchy Essrog that was. I suppose I still had a faint notion we could be together.

We talked about the Zendo for a while before she said anything to suggest she even recalled our night together. And when she did, it was “Do you have my keys?”

I met her eyes and saw she was afraid of me. I tried not to loom or jerk, though there was a Papaya Czar franchise across the street. I was pining for their hot dogs, and it was hard to keep from turning my head.

“Oh, sure,” I said. I dropped the keys on the table, glad I hadn’t chosen to hurl them into the Atlantic. Instead I’d been burnishing them in my pocket, as I had The Clients’ fork once upon a time, each talisman of a world I wouldn’t get to visit again. I said good-bye to the keys now.

“I have to tell you something, Lionel.” She delivered it with that same hectic half smile that I’d been trying to conjure in my mind’s eye for most of two weeks.

“Tellmebailey,” I whispered.

“I’m moving back in with Stephen,” she said. “So that thing that happened with us, it was just, you know- a thing.”

So Oreo Man was a cowboy after all, now striding back in from his sunset backdrop.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

“You understand, Lionel?”

“Ah.” Understand me, Bailey.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. She didn’t need to know it was just a tic, just echolalia that made me say it. I reached across the table and smoothed the two ends of her collar toward her small, bony shoulders. “Okayokayokayokayokay,” I said under my breath.

I had a dream about Minna. We were in a car. He was driving.

“Was I in the Butt Trust?” I asked him.

He smiled at me, liking to be quoted, but didn’t reply.

“I guess everybody needs stooges,” I said, not meaning to make him feel bad.

“I don’t know if I’d put you exactly in the Butt Trust category,” he said.

“You’re a little too strange for that.”

“So what am I, then?” I asked. “I don’t know, kid. I guess I’d call you King Tugboat.”

I must have laughed or at least smiled.

“That’s nothing to be proud of, you radish rosette.”

What about vengeance?

I gave it five or ten minutes of my time once. That’s a lot, a lifetime, when it comes to vengeance. I had wanted to think vengeance wasn’t me, wasn’t Tourettic or Essroggian at all. Like the subway, say.

Then I took the V train. I did it with a cell phone and a number in Jersey, I did it standing by a lighthouse in Maine. I did it with a handful of names and other words, strung together into something more effective than a tic. That was me, Lionel, hurtling through those subterranean tunnels, visiting the labyrinth that runs under the world, which everyone pretends is not there.

You can go back to pretending if you like. I know I will, though the Minna brothers are a part of me, deep in my grain, deeper than mere behavior, deeper even than regret, Frank because he gave me my life and Gerard because, though I hardly knew him, I took his away.

I’ll pretend I never rode that train, but I did.

The next call that came in that night was a pickup on Hoyt Street for a trip out to Kennedy Airport. It was Loomis who took the call, and he grimaced exaggeratedly when he offered it to the three of us, knowing that according to L &L lore JFK was an exasperating destination. I put up my hand and said I’d take it, just to deny him the point.

For another reason, too. There was a snack I had a hankering for. At the International Terminal at Kennedy, upstairs by the El Al gates, is a single kosher-food stand called Mushy’s, run by a family of Israelis, with sauce- spattered metal tins full of stewig kasha and gravy and handmade knishes, a place utterly unlike the chain restaurants elsewhere in the terminal. Anytime I took a passenger out to the airport, night or day, I’d park the car and slip up to Mushy’s for a bite. Their chicken shwarma, carved fresh off the roasting pin, stuffed into a pita and slathered in grilled peppers, onions and tahini is one of the great secret sandwiches of New York, redemption for a whole soulless airport. Permit me to recommend it if you’re ever out that way.

Kimmery and lemongrass broth hadn’t ruined my taste for the finer things.

The ghosts I felt sorriest for weren’t the dead ones. I’d imagined Frank and Tony were mine to protect, but I’d been wrong. I knew it now.

It was Julia I couldn’t shrug off, though she was hardly more mine than the others, though she’d barely