Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

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 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.