Motherless Brooklyn (16 page)

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 world 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.”

“What about me?” I said. “You want me—
Criminal Fishrug!
—to go with you? I know the place.”

“No,” said Tony. “You go explain to Julia.”

Julia Minna had come back with Frank from wherever he’d gone between the dissolution of the moving company and the founding of the detective agency. She might have been the last and greatest of the Minna girls, for all we knew—she sure looked the part: tall, plush, blond by nurture, defiant around the jaw. It was easy to imagine Minna joshing with her, untucking her shirt, taking an elbow in the stomach. But by the time we got to meet her the two had initiated their long, dry stalemate. All that remained of their original passion was a faint crackle of electricity animating their insults, their drab swipes at one another. That was all that showed anyway. Julia terrified us at first, not for anything she did, but because of her cool grip on Minna, and also how tense he was around her, how ready to punish us with his words.

If Julia and Frank had still been animated, quickened with love, we might have remained in infantile awe of her, our fascination and lust still adolescent. But the chill between them was an opening. In our imaginations we became Frank and loved her, unchilled her, grew to manhood in her arms. If we were angry or disappointed with Frank
Minna we felt connected to his beautiful, angry, disappointed wife, and were thrilled. She became an idol of disillusionment. Frank had shown us what girls were, and now he’d shown us a woman. And by failing to love her, he’d left a margin for our love to grow.

In our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna—that wasn’t news. But now we shot a little higher: If we had Julia we would do better than Frank, and make her happy.

Or so went dreams. I suppose over the years the other Minna Men conquered their fear and awe and desire of Julia, or anyway modulated it, by finding women of their own to make happy and unhappy, to enchant and disenchant and discard.

All except me, of course.

In the beginning Minna had Julia installed in the office of a Court Street lawyer, in a storefront as small as L&L’s. We Men used to drop in on her there with little deliveries, messages or gifts from Frank, and watch her answering phones, reading
People
, making bad coffee. Minna seemed eager to show us off to her, more eager than he was to drop in himself. Similarly, he seemed pleased to have Julia on showcase there, under glass on Court Street. We all intuitively gasped Minna’s instinct for human symbols, for moving us around to mark territory, so in this one sense Julia Minna had joined the Men, was on the team. Something went wrong, however, something soured between Julia and the lawyer, and Minna dragged her back to Carlotta Minna’s old second-story apartment on Baltic Street, where she’d stayed for most of fifteen years, a sulking housewife. I could never visit without thinking of Carlotta’s plates of food being carried down the stairwell by Court Street’s assorted mugs. The old stove itself was gone, though. Julia and Frank mostly ate out.

I went to that apartment now, and knocked on the door, rolling my knuckles to get the right sound.

“Hello, Lionel,” Julia said after peering at me through the peephole. She left the door unlatched and turned her back. I ducked inside. She wore a slip, her ripe arms bared, but below it she was already in stockings and heels. The apartment was dark, except for the bedroom. I shut the door behind me and followed her in, to where a dusty suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by heaps of clothing. It wasn’t going to be my privilege to be first with the news anywhere, apparently. In a mass of lingerie already inside the suitcase I spotted something dark and shiny, half smothered there. A pistol.