Motherless Brooklyn (4 page)

I was another story.

“Sinister mystery weed,” I said, trying to find words that would ease the compulsion. It was as if my brain were inspired, trying to generate a really original new tic. Tourette’s muse was with me. Rotten timing. Stress generally aggravated tics, but when I was engaged in a task the concentration kept me tic-free. I should have done the driving, I now realized. This chase was all stress and no place for it to go.

“Disturbed visitor week. Sisturbed.”

“Yeah, I’m getting a little
sisturbed
myself,” said Coney absently as he jockeyed for an open spot in the lane to the right.

“Fister—” I sputtered.

“Spare me,” groused Coney as he got us directly behind the K-car
at last. I leaned forward to make out what I could of the interior. Three heads. Minna and the giant in the backseat, and a driver. Minna was facing straight ahead, and so was the giant. I picked up the headphones to check, but I’d guessed right: no talk. Somebody knew what they were doing and where they were going, and that somebody wasn’t even remotely us.

At Fifty-ninth Street we hit the end of the cycle of green lights, as well as the usual unpleasantness around the entrance to the Queensborough bridge. The pack slowed, resigning itself to the wait through another red. Coney sagged back so we wouldn’t too obvious pulling in behind them for the wait, and another cab slipped in ahead of us. Then the K-car shot off through the fresh red, barely missing the surge of traffic coming across Fifty-eighth.

“Shit!”

“Shit!”

Coney and I both almost bounced out of our skins. We were wedged in, unable to follow and brave the stream of crosstown traffic if we’d wanted to try. It felt like a straitjacket. It felt like our fate overtaking us, Minna’s losers, failing him again. Fuckups fucking up because that’s what fuckups do. But the K-car hit another mass of vehicular stuff parked in front of the next red and stayed in sight a block ahead. The traffic was broken into chunks. We’d gotten lucky for a minute, but a minute only.

I watched, frantic. Their red, our red, my eyes flicked back and forth. I heard Coney’s breath, and my own, like horses at the gate—our adrenalinated bodies imagined they could make up the difference of the block. If we weren’t careful, at the sight of the light changing we’d pound our two foreheads through the windshield.

Our red did change, but so did theirs, and, infuriatingly, their vehicular mass surged forward while ours crawled. That mass was our hope—they were at the tail end of theirs, and if it stayed densely enough packed, they wouldn’t get too far away. We were almost at the front of ours. I slapped the glove-compartment door six times. Coney accelerated
impulsively and tapped the cab in front of us, but not hard. We veered to the side and I saw a silver scrape in the yellow paint of the cab’s bumper. “Fuck it, keep going,” I said. The cabbie seemed to have the same idea anyway. We all screeched across Fifty-ninth, a madcap rodeo of cabs and cars, racing to defy the immutable law of timed stoplights. Our bunch splayed and caught up with the rear end of their splaying bunch and the two blended, like video spaceships on some antic screen. The K-car aggressively threaded lanes. We threaded after them, making no attempt to disguise our pursuit now. Blocks flew past.

“Turning!” I shouted. “Get over!” I gripped the door handle as Coney, getting fully into the spirit of things, bent topological probability in moving us across three crowded lanes full of shrieking bald rubber and cringing chrome. Now my tics were quieted—stress was one thing, animal fear another. As when an airplane lands shakily, and all on board concentrate every gram of their will to stabilize the craft, the task of imagining I controlled things I didn’t (in this case wheel, traffic, Coney, gravity, friction, etc.), imagining it with every fiber of my being—that was engagement enough for me at the moment. My Tourette’s was overwhelmed.

“Thirty-sixth,” said Coney as we rattled down the side street.

“What’s that mean?”

“I dunno. Something.”

“Midtown Tunnel. Queens.”

There was something comforting about this. The giant and his driver were moving onto our turf, more or less. The boroughs. Not quite Brooklyn, but it would do. We bumped along with the thickening traffic into the two dense lanes of the tunnel, the K-car safe tied up two cars ahead of us, its windows now black and glossy with reflections from the strips of lighting that laced the stained tile artery. I relaxed a bit, quit holding my breath, and squeaked out a teeth-clenched, Joker-grimacing
eat me
just because I could.

“Toll,” said Coney.

“What?”

“There’s a toll. On the Queens side.”

I started digging in my pockets. “How much?”

“Three-fifty, I think.”

I’d just put it together, miraculously, three bills, a quarter, a dime and three nickels, when the tunnel finished and the two lanes branched out to meet the six or seven toll booths. I balled the fare and held it out to Coney in a fist. “Don’t get stuck behind them,” I said. “Get a fast lane. Cut someone off.”

“Yeah.” Coney squinted through the windshield, trying to work an angle. As he edged to the right the K-car suddenly cut out of the flow, moving to the far left.

We both stared for a moment.

“Whuzzat?” said Coney.

“E-Z Pass,” I said. “They’ve got an E-Z Pass.”

The K-car slid into the empty E-Z Pass lane, and right through the booth. Meanwhile Coney had landed us third in line for
EXACT CHANGE OR TOKEN
.

“Follow them!” I said.

“I’m trying,” said Coney, plainly dazed by this turn of events. “Get over to the left!” I said. “Go through!”

“We don’t got an E-Z Pass.” Coney grinned painfully, displaying his special talent for rapid reversion to a childlike state.

“I don’t care!”

“But we—”

I started to pry at the wheel in Coney’s hands, to try and push us to the left, but it was too late by now. The spot before us opened, and Coney eased the car into place, then rolled down his window. I plopped the fare into his open palm, and he passed it over.

Pulling out of the tunnel to the right, we were suddenly in Queens, facing a tangle of indifferent streets: Vernon Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, Fifty-second Avenue. Et cetera.

The K-car was gone.

“Pull over,” I said.

Chagrined, Coney parked us on Jackson. It was perfectly dark now,
though it was only seven. The lights of the Empire State and the Chrysler loomed across the river. Cars whirred past us out of the tunnel, toward the entrance to the Long Island Expressway, mocking us in their easy purposefulness. With Minna lose were nobodies, nowhere.
“Eatmepass!”
I said.

“They could of just been losing us,” said Coney. “I’d say they were, yes.”

“No, listen,” he said feebly. “Maybe they turned around and went back to Manhattan. Maybe we could catch them—”

“Shhh.” I listened to the earphones. “If Frank sees we’re off his tail, he might say something.”

But there was nothing to hear. The sounds of driving. Minna and the giant were sitting in perfect silence. Now I couldn’t believe that the man in the Zendo was the same as the giant—that garrulous, pretentious voice I’d heard couldn’t have shut up this long, it seemed to me. It was surprising enough that Minna wasn’t chattering, making fun of something, pointing out landmarks. Was he scared? Afraid to let on he was miked? Did he think we were still with him? Why did he want us with him anyway?

I didn’t know anything.

I made six oinking sounds.

We sat waiting.

More.

“That’s the way of a big Polish lug, I guess,”
said Minna. “
Always gotta stay within sniffing distance of a pierogi.”

Then:
“Urrhhf.”
Like the giant had smashed him in the stomach. “Where’s Polish?” I asked Coney, lifting away one earphone.

“Wha?”

“Where around here’s Polish?
Eat me pierogi lug!
”

“I dunno. It’s all Polish to me.”

“Sunnyside? Woodside? Come on, Gilbert. Work with me. He’s somewhere Polish.”

“Where’d the Pope visit?” mused Coney. It sounded like the start of
a joke, but I knew Coney. He couldn’t remember jokes. “That’s Polish, right? What’s it, uh, Greenpoint?”

“Greenpoint’s Brooklyn, Gilbert,” I said, before thinking. “We’re in Queens.” Then we both turned our heads like cartoon mice spotting a cat. The Pulaski Bridge. We were a few yards from the creek separating Queens and Brooklyn, specifically Greenpoint.

It was something to do anyway. “Go,” I said.

“Keep listening,” said Coney. “We can’t just drive around Greenpoint.”

We soared across the little bridge, into the mouth of Brooklyn.

“Which way, Lionel?” said Coney, as if he thought Minna were feeding me a constant stream of instructions. I shrugged, palms up toward the roof of the Lincoln. The gesture ticcified instantly, and I repeated ieight=”0emrug, palms flapped open, grimace. Coney ignored me, scanning the streets below for a sign of the K-car, driving as slow as he could down the Brooklyn side of the Pulaski’s slope.

Then I heard something. Car doors opening, slamming, the scuff of footsteps. Minna and the giant had reached their destination. I froze in mid-tic, concentrating.

“Harry Brainum Jr.,”
said Minna in his mockingest tone.
“I guess we’re gonna stop in for a quick installation, huh?”

Nothing from the giant. More steps.

Who was Harry Brainum Jr.?

Meanwhile we came off the lit bridge, where the notion of a borough laid out for us, comprehensive, had been briefly indulgeable. Down instead onto McGuinness Boulevard, where at street level the dark industrial buildings were featureless and discouraging. Brooklyn is one big place, and this wasn’t our end of it.

“You know—if you can’t beat ’em, Brainum, right?”
Minna went on in his needling voice. In the background I heard a car horn—they weren’t indoors yet. Just standing on the street somewhere, tantalizingly close.

Then I heard a thud, another exhalation. Minna had taken a second blow.

Then Minna again:
“Hey, hey
—” Some kind of struggle I couldn’t make out.

“Fucking—”
said Minna, and then I heard him get hit again, lose his wind in a long, mournful sigh.

The scary thing about the giant was that he didn’t talk, didn’t even breathe heavy enough for me to hear.

“Harry Brainum Jr.,” I said to Coney. Then, afraid it sounded like a tic to him, I added, “Name mean anything to you, Gilbert?”

“Sorry?” he said slowly.

“Harry Brainum Jr.,” I repeated, furious with impatience. There were times when I felt like a bolt of static electricity communing with figures that moved through a sea of molasses.

“Sure,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of his window. “We just passed it.”

“What? Passed what?”

“It’s like a tool company or something. Big sign.” My breath caught. Minna was talking to us, guiding us. “Turn around.”

“What, back to Queens?”

“No, Brainum, wherever you saw that,” I said, wanting to strangle him. Or at least find his fast-forward button and push it. “They’re out of the car. Make a U-turn.”

“It’s just a block or two.”

“Well, go, then.
Brain me, Junior!
”/p>

Coney made the turn, and right away there it was.
HARRY BRAINUM JR. INC. STEEL SHEETS.
, in giant circus-poster letters on the brick wall of a two-story plant that took up a whole block of McGuinness, just short of the bridge.

Seeing
BRAINUM
on the wall set off a whole clown parade of associations. I remembered mishearing
Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus
as a child. Barnamum Bailey. Like Osmium, Cardamom, Brainium, Barnamum, Where’smymom: the periodic table of elements, the heavy metals. Barnamum Bailey might also be George and Eat Me Bailey’s older brother. Or were they all the same guy? Not now, I begged my Tourette’s self. Think about it later.

“Drive around the block,” I said to Coney. “He’s here somewhere.”

“Quit shouting,” he said. “I can hear you.”