Motherless Brooklyn

ONE MIND

There were only and always two things Frank Minna would not discuss in the years following his return from exile and founding of the Minna Agency. The first was the nature of that exile, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance that day in May when his brother Gerard hustled him out of town. We didn’t know why he left, where he went or what he did while he was gone, or why he came back when he did. We didn’t know how he met and married Julia. We didn’t know what happened to Gerard. There was never again any sign or mention of Gerard. The sojourn “upstate” was covered in a haze so complete it was sometimes hard to believe it had lasted three years.

The other was The Clients, though they lurked like a pulse felt here or there in the body of the Agency.

L &L wasn’t a moving company anymore, and we never again saw the inside of that hollowed-out brownstone on Degraw. But we were as much errand boys as detectives, and it wasn’t hard, in the early days, to sense Matricardi and Rockaforte’s shadow in some percentage of our errands. Their assignments were discernible for the deep unease they provoked in Minna. Without explanation he’d alter his patterns, stop dropping in at the barbershop or the arcade for a week or so, close the L &L storefront and tell us to get lost for a few days. Even his walk changed, his whole manner of being. He’d refuse to be seated anywhere but in the corners of restaurants, his back to the wall. He’d turn his head on the street for no reason, which I of course cobbled into a lifelong tic. For cover he’d joke harder but also more discontinuously, his stream of commentary and insult turned balky and riddled with grim silences, his punch lines become non sequiturs. And the jobs we did for The Clients were discontinuous too. They were fractured stories, middles lacking a clear beginning or end. When we Minna Men tracked a wife for a husband or watched an employee suspected of pilferage or cooking the books we mastered their pathetic dramas, encompassed their small lives with our worldliness. What we gathered with our bugs and cameras and etched into our reports was true and complete. Under Minna we were secret masters, writing a sort of social history of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens into our duplicate files. B when the hand of Matricardi and Rockaforte moved the Minna Men we were only tools, glancing off the sides of stories bigger than we understood, discarded and left wondering at the end.

Once in the early days of the Agency we were dispatched to stand guard in broad daylight around a car, a Volvo, and we picked up a scent of The Clients in Minna’s stilted, fragmentary instructions. The car was empty as far as we could tell. It was parked on Remsen Street near the Promenade, at a placid dead-end traffic circle overlooking Manhattan. Gilbert and I sat on a park bench, trying to look casual with our backs to the skyline, while Tony and Danny idled at the mouth of Remsen and Hicks, glaring at anyone who turned onto the block. We knew only that we were supposed to give way at five o’clock, when a tow truck would come for the car.

Five o’clock stretched into six, then seven, with no truck. We took pee breaks in the children’s park at Montague Street, ran through cigarettes, and paced. Evening strollers appeared on the Promenade, couples, teenagers with paper-bagged bottles of beer, gays mistaking us for cruisers. We shrugged them away from our end of the walk, muttered, glanced at our watches. The Volvo couldn’t have been less conspicuous if it were invisible, but for us it glowed, screamed, ticked like a bomb. Every kid on a bike or stumbling wino seemed an assassin, a disguised ninja with aims on the car.

When the sun began to set Tony and Danny started arguing.

“This is stupid,” said Danny. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t,” said Tony.

“You know there’s a body in the trunk,” said Danny.

“How am I supposed to know that?” said Tony.

“Because what else would it be?” said Danny. “Those old guys had someone killed.”

“That’s stupid,” said Tony.

“A body?” said Gilbert, plainly unnerved. “I thought the car was full of money.”

Danny shrugged. “I don’t care, but it’s a body. I’ll tell you what else: We’re being set up for it.”

“That’s stupid,” said Tony.

“What does Frank know? He just does what they tell him.” Even in rebellion Danny obeyed Minna’s stricture against speaking The Clients’ names.

“You really think it’s a body?” said Gilbert to Danny.

“Sure.”

“I don’t want to stay if it’s a body, Tony.”

“Gilbert, you fat fuck. What if it is? What do you think we’re doing here? You think you’re never gonna see a body working for Minna? Go join the garbage cops, for chrissakes.”

“I’m cutting out,” said Danny. “I’m hungry anyway. This is stupid.”

“What should I tell Minna?” said Tony, daring Danny to go.

“Tell him what you want.”

It was a startling defection. Tony and Gilbert and I were all problems in our various ways, while Danny in his silence and grace was Minna’s pillar, his paragon.

Tony couldn’t face this mutiny directly. He was accustomed to bullying Gilbert and me, not Danny. So he reverted to form. “What about you, Freakshow?”

I shrugged, then kissed my own hand. It was an impossible question. Devotion to Minna had boiled down to this trial of hours watching over the Volvo. Now we had to envision disaster, betrayal, rotting flesh.

But what would it mean to turn from Minna?

I hated The Clients then.

The tow truck came grinding down Remsen before I could speak. It was manned by a couple of fat lugs who laughed at our jumpiness and told us nothing about the car’s importance, just shooed us off and began chaining the Volvo’s bumper to their rig. Less Men than Boys in suits, we felt as though this had been designed as a test of our fresh-grown nerves. And we’d failed, even if Minna and The Clients didn’t know about it.

We grew tougher, though, and Minna became unflappable, and we came to take the role of The Clients in the life of the Agency more in stride. Who had to make sense of everything? It wasn’t always certain when we were acting for them anyway. Seize a given piece of equipment from a given office: Was that on The Clients’ behalf or not? Collect this amount from such and such a person: When we passed the take to Minna did he pass it along to The Clients? Unseal this envelope, tap this phone: Clients? Minna kept us in the dark and turned us into professionals. Matricardi and Rockaforte’s presence became mostly subliminal.

The last job I felt certain was for The Clients was more than a year before Minna’s murder. It bore their trademark of total inexplicability. A supermarket on Smith Street had burned and been razed earlier that summer, and the empty lot was filled with crushed brick and turned into an informal peddlers’ market, where sellers of one fruit-oranges, say, or mangoes-would set up a few crates and do a summer afternoon’s business, alongside the hot-dog and shaved-ice carts that began to gather there. After a month or so a Hispanic carnival took over the site, setting up a Tilt-a-Whirl and a miniature Ferris wheel, each a dollar a ride, along with a grilled-sausage stand and a couple of lame arcades: a water-gun balloon game and a grappling hook over a glass case full of pink and purple stuffed animals. The litter and smells of grease were a blight if you got too close, but the Ferris wheel was lined with white tubes of neon, and it was a glorious thing to see at night down Smith Street, a bright unexpected pinwheel almost three stories high.

We’d been so bored that summer that we’d fallen into working regularly as a car service, taking calls when they came, ferrying dates home from nightclubs, old ladies to and from hospitals, vacationers to La Guardia for the weekend flight to Miami Beach. Between rides we’d play poker in the air-conditioned storefront. It was after one-thirty on a Friday night when Minna came in. Loomis was sitting in on the game, losing hands and eating all the chips, and Minna told him to get lost, go home already.

“What’s the matter, Frank?” said Tony.

“Nothing’s the matter. Got something for us to do, that’s all.”

“Something what? For who?”

“Just a job. What do we have in here that’s like a crowbar or something?” Minna smoked furiously to mask his unease.

“A crowbar?”

“Just something you can swing. Like a crowbar. I’ve got a bat and a lug wrench in my trunk. Stuff like that.”

“Sounds like you want a gun,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “If I wanted a gun I’d get a gun, you diphthong. This doesn’t take a gun.”

“You want chains?” said Gilbert, meaning to be helpful. “There’s a whole bunch of chains in the Pontiac.”

“Crowbar, crowbar, crowbar. Why do I even bother with you mystic seers anymore? If I wanted my mind read I’d call Gladys Knight for chrissakes.”

“Dionne Warwick,” said Gilbert.

“What?”

“Psychic Hotline’s Dionne Warwick, not Gladys Knight.”

“Psychicwarlock!”

“Got some pipe downstairs,” mused Danny, only now laying down the hand he’d been holding since Minna barged into the office. It was a full house, jacks and eights.

“It’s gotta be swingable,” said Minna. “Let’s see.”

The phone rang and I grabbed for it and said, “L &L.”

“Tell them we don’t have any cars,” said Minna.

“This needs all four of us?” I said. I was courting fond notions of missing the crowbar-and-lug-wrench project, whatever it was, and driving someone out to Sheepshead Bay instead.

“Yes, Freakboy. We’re all going.”

I got rid of the call. Twenty minutes later we were loaded up with pipes, lug wrench, car jack and a souvenir Yankee bat from Bat Day in Minna’s old Impala, the least distinguished of L &L’s many cars, and another bad sign if I was trying to read signs. Minna drove us down Wyckoff, past the projects, then circled around, south on Fourth Avenue down to President Street, and back toward Court. He was stalling, checking his watch.

We turned on Smith, and Minna parked us a block below the empty supermarket lot. The carnival had shut down for the night, plywood boards up over the concessions, rides stilled, the evening’s discarded beer cups and sausage wrappers glowing against the moonlit rubblescape. We crept onto the lot with our implements, following Minna wordlessly now, no longer chafing at his leadership, instead lulled into our deep obedient rhythm as his Men. He pointed at the Ferris wheel.

“Take it out.”

“Eh?”

“Destroy the wheel, you candied yams.”

Gilbert understood soonest, perhaps because the task suited his skills and temperament so well. He took a swing at the nearest line of neon with his chunk of pipe, smashing it easily, bringing a rain of silver dust. Tony and Danny and I followed his lead. We attacked the body of the wheel, our first swings tentative, measuring our strength, then lashing out, unloading. It was easy to damage the neon, not easy at all to impress the frame of the wheel, but we set at it, attacked any joint or vulnerable weld, prying up the electrical cable and chopping at it with the sharpest edge of the wrench until insulation and wire were bare and mangled, then frayed. Minna himself wielded the Yankee bat, splintering its wood against the gates that held riders into their seats, not breaking them but changing their shape. Gilbert and I got inside the frame of the wheel and with all our weight dragged at one of the chairs until we ruptured the hinge. Then we found the brake and released the wheel to turn so that we could apply our malicious affection to the whole of it. A couple of Dominican teenagers stood watching us from across the street. We ignored them, bore down on the Ferris wheel, hurrying but not frantic, absolutely Minna’s to direct but not even needing direction. We acted as one body to destroy the amusement. This was the Agency at its mature peak: unquestioning and thorough in carrying out an action even when it bordered on sheer Dada.

“Frank loved you, Lionel,” said Rockaforte.

“I, uh, I know.”

“For that reason we care for you, for that reason we are concerned.”

“Though we have not seen you since you were a boy,” said Matricardi.

“A boy who barked,” said Rockaforte. “We remember. Frank brought and you stood before us in this very room and you barked.”

“And Frank spoke of your sickness many times.”

“He loved you though he considered you a freak.”

“He used that very word.”

“You helped him build, you were one of his boys, and now you are a man and you stand before us in this hour of pain and misunderstanding.”

Matricardi and Rockaforte had looked sepulchral to me as a teenager and they looked no worse now, their skin mummified, their thin hair in a kind of spider- sheen over their reflective pates, Matricardi’s ears and scarred nose dwarfing his other features, Rockaforte’s face puffier and more potatolike. They were dressed as twins in black suits, whether consciously in mourning or not I couldn’t know. They sat together on the tightly upholstered couch and when I stepped through the door I thought I saw their hands first joined on the cushions in the space between them, then jerking to their laps. I stood far enough back that I wasn’t tempted to reach out and play pattycake, to slap at their folded hands or the place their hands had been resting.

The Degraw Street brownstone was unchanged, outside and in, apart from a dense, even layer of dust on the furniture and carpet and picture frames in the parlor. The air in the room swam with stirred dust, as though Matricardi and Rockaforte had arrived just a few moments before. They visited their Brooklyn shrine less often than in the past, I supposed. I wondered who drove them in from Jersey and whether they took any pains not to be seen coming here or whether they cared. Perhaps no one alive in Carroll Gardens knew them by sight anymore.

A neighborhood’s secret lords could also be Invisible Men.

“What is between you and Tony?” said Matricardi.

“I want to find Frank’s killer.” I’d already heard myself say this too many times, and meaning was leaking out of the phrase. It threatened to become a sort of moral tic: findfrank’skiller.

“Why don’t you follow Tony in this? Shouldn’t you act as one, as brothers?”

“I was there. When they took Frank. Tony-Hospitabailey!-Tony wasn’t there.”

“You’re saying then that he should follow you.”

“He shouldn’t get in my way. Essway! Wrongway!” I winced, hating to tic now, in front of them.

“You’re upset, Lionel.”

“Sure I’m upset.” Why should I confess my distrust to those I distrusted? The more Matricardi and Rockaforte spoke Tony’s name, the more certain I was they were tangled together in this somehow, and that Tony was far more familiar with The Clients than I’d been in the years since our first visit to this crypt, this mausoleum. I’d come away with a fork, he with something more. Why should I accuse one half of a conspiracy to the other? Instead I squinted and turned my head and pursed my lips, trying to avoid the obvious, finally acceded to The Clients’ power of suggestion and barked once, loudly.

“You are afflicted and we feel for you. A man shouldn’t run, and he shouldn’t woof like a dog. He should find peace.”

“Why doesn’t Tony want me looking into Frank’s murder?”

“Tony wishes this thing to be done correctly and with care. Work with him, Lionel.”

“Why do you speak for Tony?” I gritted my teeth as I spoke the words. It wasn’t actly ticcing, but I’d begun to echo The Clients’ verbal rhythms, the cloistered Ping-Pong of their diction.

Matricardi sighed and looked at Rockaforte. Rockaforte raised his eyebrows.

“Do you like this house?” said Matricardi.

I considered the dust-covered parlor, the load of ancient furnishing between the carpet and the ceiling’s scrollwork, how it all hung suspended inside the shell of the warehouse-brownstone. I felt the presence of the past, of mothers and sons, deals and understandings, one dead hand gripping another-dead hands were nested here on Degraw Street like a series of Chinese boxes. Including Frank Minna’s. There were so many ways I didn’t like it I didn’t know where to begin, except that I knew I shouldn’t allow myself to begin at all.

“It’s not a house,” I said, offering the very least of my objections. “It’s a room.”

“He says it’s a room,” said Matricardi. “Lionel, this is my mother’s house where we sit. Where you stand so full of fury it makes you like a cornered dog.”

“Somebody killed Frank.”

“Are you accusing Tony?”

“Accusatony! Excusebaloney! Funnymonopoly!” I squeezed my eyes shut to interrupt the seizure of language.

“We wish you to understand, Lionel. We regret Frank’s passing. We miss him sorely. It is a soreness in our hearts. Nothing could please us more than to see his killer torn by birds or picked apart by insects with claws. Tony should have your help in bringing that day closer. You should stand behind him.”

“What if my search brings me to Tony?” I’d let The Clients lead me to this pass in the conversation, and now there wasn’t any reason to pretend.

“The dead live in our hearts, Lionel. From there Frank will never be dislodged. But now Tony has replaced Frank in the world of the living.”

“What does that mean? You’ve replaced Frank with Tony?”

“It means you shouldn’t act against Tony. Because our wishes go with him.”

I understood now. It was Tony’s Italian apotheosis at last. I was thrilled for him.

Unless it had been this way for years without my knowing. Maybe Tony Vermonte and The Clients ran deeper than Frank Minna and The Clients ever had.

I considered the word replaced. I decided it was time to go.

“I need your permission-” I began, then stopped. Who were The Clients, and what did their permission consist of? What was I thinking?

“Speak, Lionel.”

“I’m goi to keep looking,” I said. “With or without Tony’s help.”

“Yes. We can see. And so we have an assignment for you. A suggestion.”

“A place for you to apply your passion for justice.”

“And your talent for detection. The training instilled.”

“What?” Just a measure of the day’s angled brightness penetrated the heavy curtains of the parlor. I glared back at a row of thuggish midcentury faces staring out from picture frames, wondering which was Matricardi’s mom. The hot dogs I’d eaten were rumbling in my stomach. I longed to be outside, on the Brooklyn streets, anywhere but here.

“You spoke with Julia,” said Matricardi. “You should find her. Bring her in as we brought you. Let us speak with her.”

“She’s afraid,” I said. A frayed knot.

“Afraid of what?”

“She’s like me. She doesn’t trust Tony.”

“Something is wrong between them.”

This was exhausting. “Of course something’s wrong. They slept together.”

“Making love brings people closer, Lionel.”

“Maybe they feel guilty about Frank.”

“Guilty, yes. Julia knows something. We called her to see us. Instead she runs. Tony says he doesn’t know where.”

“You think Julia has something to do with Frank’s murder?” I let my hand trace a vague line in the dust on the marble mantelpiece. A mistake. I tried to forget I’d done it.

“There’s something on her mind, something weighing. You want to help us, Lionel, find her.”

“Learn her secrets and share them with us. Do this without telling Tony.”

Losing control somewhat, I inserted my finger into the grooved edge of the mantel and pushed, gathering a shaggy clot of dust.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Now you want me to go behind Tony’s back?”

“We listen, Lionel. We hear. We consider. Questions occur. If your suspicions are grounded the answers may lie with Julia. Tony has been less than clear in this one area. However strange and damaged, you’ll be our hands and feet, our eyes and ears, you’ll learn and return to us and share.”

“Founded,” I said. I reached the end of the mantel and thrust the accumulated dustball past the edge, following through like a one-fingered shot-putter.

“If they are,” said Matricardi/em› I 201C;You don’t know. That’s what you’ll find out.”

“No, I mean founded, not grounded. Suspicions founded.”

“He’s correcting,” said Rockaforte to Matricardi, gritting his teeth.

“Find her, Essrog! Founder! Grounder! Confessrub!” I tried to wipe my finger clean on my jacket and made a gray stripe of clingy dust.

Then I belched, really, and tasted hot dogs.

“There’s a little part of Frank in you,” said Matricardi. “We speak to that part and it understands. The rest of you may be inhuman, a beast, a freak. Frank was right to use that word. You’re a freak of nature. But the part of you that Frank Minna cared for and that cares so much for his memory is the part that will help us find Julia and bring her home.”

“Go now, because you sicken us to see you playing with the dust that gathers in the home of his beloved mother, bless her sweet dishonored and tormented soul.”

Conspiracies are a version of Tourette’s syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close. Like Tourette’s, all conspiracies are ultimately solipsistic, sufferer or conspirator or theorist overrating his centrality and forever rehearsing a traumatic delight in reaction, attachment and causality, in roads out from the Rome of self.

The second gunman on the grassy knoll wasn’t part of a conspiracy-we Touretters know this to be true. He was ticcing, imitating the action that had startled and allured him, the shots fired. It was just his way of saying, Me too! I’m alive! Look here! Replay the film!

The second gunman was tugging the boat.

I’d parked in the shade of an elderly, crippled elm, trunk knotted and gnarled from surviving disease, with roots that had slowly nudged the slate sidewalk upward and apart. I didn’t see Tony waiting in the Pontiac until I nearly had my key in the door. He was sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Get in.” He leaned over and opened the passenger door. The sidewalk was empty in both directions. I considered strolling away, ran into the usual problem of where to go.

“Get in, Freakshow.”

I went to the passenger side and slid into the seat beside him, then reached out disconsolately and caressed his shoulder, leaving a smudge of dust. He raised his hand and slapped me on the side of the head.

“They lied to me,” I said, flinching away.

“I’m shocked. Of course they lied. What are you, a newborn baby?”

“Barnamum baby,” I mumble

“Which particular lie are you worrying about, Marlowe?”

“They warned you I was coming here, didn’t they? They set me up. It was a trap.”

“Fuck did you think was going to happen?”

“Never mind.”

“You think you’re smart,” said Tony, his voice twangy with contempt. “You think you’re Mike fucking Hammer. You’re like the Hardy Boys’ retarded kid brother, Lionel.” He slapped my head again. “You’re Hardly Boy.”

My home borough had never felt so like a nightmare to me as it did on this bright sunlit day on Matricardi and Rockaforte’s block of Degraw: a nightmare of repetition and enclosure. Ordinarily I savored Brooklyn’s unchangeability, the bullying, Minna-like embrace of its long memory. At the moment I yearned to see this neighborhood razed, replaced by skyscrapers or multiplexes. I longed to disappear into Manhattan’s amnesiac dance of renewal. Let Frank be dead, let the Men disperse. I only wanted Tony to leave me alone.

“You knew I had Frank’s beeper,” I said sheepishly, putting it together.

“No, the old guys have X-ray vision, like Superman. They don’t know shit if I don’t tell them, Lionel. You need to find a new line of work, McGruff. Shitlock Holmes.”

I was familiar enough with Tony’s belligerence to know it had to run awhile, play itself out. Me, I slid my hands along the top of the dashboard at the base of the windshield, smoothing away the crumbs and dust accumulated there, riffling my fingers over the plastic vents. Then I began buffing the corner of the windshield with my thumb tip. Visiting Matricardi’s mother’s parlor had triggered a dusting compulsion.

“You idiot freak.”

“Beepmetwice.”

“I’ll beep you twice, all right.”

He lifted his hand, and I flinched again, ducking underneath like a boxer. While I was near I licked the shoulder of his suit, trying to clean off the smudge of dust I’d left. He pushed me away disgustedly, an ancient echo of St. Vincent’s hallway.

“Okay, Lionel. You’re still half a fag. You got me convinced.”

I didn’t speak, no small achievement. Tony sighed and put both hands on the wheel. He appeared to be through buffeting me for the moment. I watched my saliva-stripe evaporate into the weave of his jacket.

“So what did they tell you?”

“The Clients?”

“Sure, The Clients,” said Tony. “Matricardi and Rockaforte. Frank’s dead, Lionel. I don’t think he’s gonna, like, spin in his grave if you say their names.”

“Fork-it-hardly,” I whispered, then glanced over my shoulder at their stoop. “Rocket-fuck-me.”

“Good enough. So what did they tell you?”

“The same thing the-Duckman! Dogboy! Confessdog!-same thing the doormen told me: Stay off the case.” I was mad with verbal tics now, making up for lost time, feeling at home. Tony was still a comfort to me in that way.

“What doorman?”

“Doormen. A whole bunch of them.”

“Where?”

But Tony’s eyes said he knew perfectly well where, only needed to measure what I knew. He looked a little panicked, too.

“Ten-thirty Park Avenue,” I said. Energy pocket angle. Rectangle sauce!

His hands tightened on the wheel. Instead of looking at me, he squinted into the distance. “You were there?”

“I was following a lead.”

“Answer my question. You were there?”

“Sure.”

“Who’d you see?”

“Just a lot of doormen.”

“You discuss this with Matricardi and Rockaforte? Tell me you didn’t, you goddamn motormouth.”

“They talked, I listened.”

“Oh yeah, that’s likely. Fuck.”

Oddly, I found myself wanting to reassure Tony. He and The Clients had drawn me back to Brooklyn and ambushed me in my car, but some old orphans’ solidarity worked against my claustrophobia. Tony scared me, but The Clients scared me more. And now I knew they still scared Tony, too. Whatever deal he’d struck was incomplete.

It was cold in the car, but Tony was sweating.

“Be serious with me now, Lionel. Do they know about the building?”

“I’m always serious. That’s the tragedy of my life.”

“Talk to me, Freakshow.”

“Anybuilding! Nobuilding! Nobody said anything about a building.” I reached for his collar, wanting to straighten it, but he batted my hands away.

“You were in there awhile,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me, Lionel. What was said?”

“They want me to find Julia,” I said, wondering if it was a good idea to mention her name. th think she knows something.” Tony took a gun out from under his arm and pointed it at me.

I’d returned to Brooklyn suspecting Tony of colluding with The Clients, and now-sweet irony!-Tony suspected me of the same thing. It wasn’t that much of a leap. Matricardi and Rockaforte didn’t have any motive for humoring me. If they trusted Tony, they wouldn’t have required him to wait and bag me outside in the car afterward. He would have been hidden inside, behind the proverbial curtain, soaking up the whole conversation.

I had to give The Clients credit. They’d played us like a Farfisa organ.

On the other hand, Tony had a secret from The Clients: the building on Park Avenue. And despite his fears his secret seemed intact. No point of this particular quadrangle had a monopoly on information. Tony knew something they didn’t. I knew something Tony didn’t, didn’t I? I hoped so. And Julia knew something neither Tony nor The Clients knew, or else she knew something Tony didn’t want The Clients to know. Julia, Julia, Julia, I needed to figure out the Julia angle, even if Matricardi and Rockaforte wanted me to.

Or was I outsmarting myself? I knew what Minna would have said.

Wheels within wheels.

I’d never faced Tony at gunpoint before, but at some level I’d been preparing for this moment all my life. It didn’t feel at all unnatural. Rather it was a sort of culmination, the rarefied end point of our long association. Now, if I’d had a gun on him, that would’ve freaked me out.

The gun also served splendidly to concentrate my attention. I felt my ticcishness ease, and a flood of excess language instantly evaporate, like cartoon blemishes in a television commercial. Gunplay: another perfectly useless cure.

Tony didn’t seem all that impressed by the situation. His eyes and mouth were tired. It was only four in the afternoon and we’d been sitting in the parked car too long already. He had questions, urgent, particular, and the gun would help move things along.

“You talk to anyone else about the building?” he asked.

“Who would I talk to?”

“Danny, say. Or Gilbert.”

“I was just up there. I haven’t seen Danny. And Gilbert’s in jail.” I left out the part about the Garbage Cop, and prayed Minna’s beeper didn’t go off anytime soon.

Meanwhile, with his questions Tony was telling me more than I was telling him: Danny and Gilbert weren’t with him in the Park Avenue caper. Yes, this Hardly Boy was still on the case.

“So it’s just you,” Tony said. “You’re the jerk I’ve gotta deal with. You’re Sam Spade.”

“Minna wasn’t your partner. He was your sponsor, Freakshow. He was Jerry Lewis, and you were the thing in the wheelchair.”

“Then why’d he call for me instead of you when he was in trouble yesterday?”

“He was an idiot bringing you up there.”

A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I’d overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.

“Tell me about Julia, Tony-Tulip Attorney!” The magic curative of being at gunpoint was beginning to fade.

“Shut up a little. I’m thinking.”

“What about Ullman?” I said. As long as he was allowing my questions I might as well ask. “Who was Ullman?-Doofus Allplan!” I wanted to ask about the Fujisaki Corporation, but I figured the extent of what I knew was one of the only things I knew and he didn’t. I needed to preserve that advantage, however minuscule. Besides, I didn’t want to hear what hay my syndrome would make of the word Fujisaki.

Tony made a particularly sour face. “Ullman’s a guy who didn’t figure numbers right. He’s one of a little group of somebodies who tried to make themselves rich. Frank was another one.”

“So you and the Polish killer took him out, huh?”

“That’s so wrong it’s funny.”

“Tell me, Tony.”

“Where would I start?” he said. I heard a note of bitterness, and wondered if I could play on it. Tony likely missed Minna in his way, and missed the Agency, no matter how he’d been corrupted or what poisonous information he knew that I didn’t.

“Be sentimental for a change,” I said. “Make me know you didn’t kill him.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“That was persuasive,” I said. Then I made a sour face like an uptight British butler: “Per-shwoosh-atively!”

“The problem with you, Lionel, is you don’t know anything about how the world really works. Everything you know comes from Frank Minna or a book. I don’t know which is worse.”

“Gangster movies.” I fought to keep the butler-face from reappearing.

“What?”

“I watched a lot of gangster movies, like you. Everything we both know comes from Frank Minna or gangster movies.”

“Frank Minna was two guys,” said Tony. “The one I learned from and the chucklehead who thought you were funny and got himself killed. You only knew the chucklehead.”

Tony held the gun floppily between us, using it to gesture, to signal punctuation. I only hoped he understood how literally it could punctuate. None of us had ever carried guns so far as I knew, apart from Minna. He’d rarely allowed us even to see his. Now I wondered what private teaching had gone on when I wasn’t around, wondered how seriously I should take Tony’s notion of the two Minnas.

“I suppose it was the smart Frank Minna who taught you to wave guns around,” I said. It came out a bit more sarcastic than I’d intended, then I yelled, “Frankensmart!” which pretty much undercut my delivery. Tony really was waving the gun, though. The only thing it never pointed at was himself.

“I’m carrying this for protection. Like I’m protecting you with it right now, by convincing you to shut up and quit asking questions. And stay in Brooklyn.”

“I hope you don’t have to protect me-Protectmebailey! Detectorbaby!-by pulling the trigger.”

“Let’s both hope. Too bad you weren’t clever like Gilbert, to get himself put under police protection for a week or so.”

“Is that the current sentence for murder? A week?”

“Don’t make me laugh. Gilbert didn’t kill anybody.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I’m long over my disappointment that Frank liked to surround himself with a cavalcade of clowns. It was a way of life. I won’t be making the same mistake.”

“No, you’ll think up a whole bunch of new ones.”

“Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut? Get out of the car.”

At that moment there came a tap on the window, driver’s side. It was a gun muzzle that tapped. The arm holding the gun extended from behind the trunk of the elm tree. A head poked out too: the homicide detective.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “Do step out of the car-slowly.”

Ambushes within ambushes.

He still had that threadbare, jaded, coffee-isn’t-working-anymore air about him, even in daylight. It didn’t look like he’d gotten out of his suit since the night before. I believed him with a gun better than I did Tony, though. He waved us over to the front of the car and had us spread our legs, to the wonderment of a couple of old ladies, then took away Tony’s gun. He had Tony open his jacket and show the open holster and lift his pant legs to prove there was nothing strapped to his ankles. Then he tried to pat me down and I began to pat him back.

“Goddamn it, Alibi, cut that out.” He was still fond of that nickname he’d invented for me. It made me fond of him.

“I can’t help it,” I said.

“What’s that? A phone? Take it out.”

“It’s a phone.” I showed him.

Tony looked at me strangely, and I just shrugged.

“Get back in the car. Give me the keys first.” Tony handed over the keys and we got back into the front seat. The homicide detective opened the back doors and eased into the seat behind us, training his gun on the backs of our heads.

“Hands on the wheel and the dash, that’s good. Face forward, gentlemen. Don’t look at me. Smile like they’re taking your picture. They will be soon enough.”

“What did we do?” said Tony. “A guy can’t show another guy a gun anymore?”

“Shut up and listen. This is a murder investigation. I’m the investigating officer. I don’t care about your goddamn gun.”

“So give it back.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Vermonte. You people make me nervous. I found out a few things about this neighborhood in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Mister Gobbledy Gun.”

“Shut up, Alibi.”

Shut up shut up shut up! I kneaded the petrified foam of the Pontiac’s dashboard like a nursing kitten, just trying to keep still and shut up. Someday I’d change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

“I got this case because you jokers brought Frank Minna into Brooklyn Hospital. That’s where he died and that’s in my jurisdiction. I don’t get to work this side of Flatbush Avenue that often, you get me? I don’t know all that much about your neighborhood, but I’m learning, I’m learning.”

“Not so many murders over here, eh, Chief?” said Tony.

“Not so many niggers on this side of Flatbush, that what you’re trying to say?”

“Whoa, slow down,” said Tony. “You’re leading the witness. Isn’t that against the rules?” Tony kept his hands on the steering wheel and grinned into the windshield. I don’t think the homicide cop had really meant to inspire such a smile.

“Okay, Tony,” said the cop, his voice a little husky. I heard him breathing heavily through his nose. I suppose unsheathing his gun had gotten him a bit worked up. I imagined I could feel its muzzle centering first on my ear, then rs

“All I meant was not so many murders-am I right?”

“Yeah, you got the lid clamped down pretty tight around here. No murders and no niggers. Nice clean streets, nothing but old guys carrying around racing forms and tiny pencils. Makes me nervous.”

It was honest of him to admit it. I wondered what Mafia horror stories he’d gathered in his day-old investigation.

“Around here people watch out for each other,” said Tony.

“Yeah, right up until you off each other. What’s the connection between Minna and Ullman, Tony?”

“Who’s Ullman?” said Tony. “I never met the guy.”

That was a Minna-ism: never met the guy.

“Ullman kept the books for a property-management firm in Manhattan,” said the homicide detective. “Until your friend Coney shot him through the skull. Looks like tit for tat to me. I’m impressed with how quick you guys get to work.”

“What’s your name, Officer?” said Tony. “I get to ask that, don’t I?”

“I’m not an officer, Tony. I’m a detective. My name is Lucius Seminole.”

“Luscious? You gotta be kidding me.”

“Lucius. Call me Detective Seminole.”

“What is that, like an Indian name?”

“It’s a Southern name,” said Seminole. “Slave name. Keep laughing, Tony.”

“Detectahole!”

“Alibi, you are not making me happy.”

“Inspectaholic!”

“Don’t kill him, Superfly,” said Tony, grinning broadly. “I know it’s pitiful, but he can’t help himself. Think of it as a free human freak show.”

“Licorice Smellahole!” Not turning my head was driving me crazy: I had to rename what I couldn’t see.

“You a car service or a comedy team?” said Seminole.

“Lionel’s just jealous because you’re asking me all the questions,” said Tony. “He likes to talk.”

“I already heard from Alibi last night. He near about drove me crazy with his talk. Now I’m looking for answers from you, straight man.”

“We’re not a car service,x201D; I said. “We’re a detective agency.” The assertion fought its way out of me, a tic disguised as a common statement.

“Turn around, Alibi. Let’s talk about the lady who ran to Boston-

Mrs. Deadguy.”

“Boston?” said Tony. “We’readetectiveagency,” I ticced again.

“She booked the flight under her own name,” said Seminole. “It’s not the first time either. What’s in Boston?”

“Beats me. She goes up there a lot?”

“Don’t play stupid.”

“It’s news to me,” said Tony. He scowled at me, and I made a dopey face back, stumped. Julia in Boston? I wondered if Seminole had his information straight.

“She was ready to fly,” said Seminole. “Somebody tipped her.”

“She got a call from the hospital,” I said.

“Nope,” said Seminole. “I checked that. Try another one. Maybe your boy Gilbert gave her a call. Maybe Gilbert took out Frank Minna before he took out Ullman. Maybe he and the lady are in this together.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Gilbert didn’t kill anybody. We’re detectives.” I finally got Seminole’s attention. “I looked into that rumor,” he said. “None of you carry investigators’ credentials, according to the computer. Just limousine operators’ licenses.”

“We work for Frank Minna,” I said, and heard my own unconcealed nostalgia, my pining. “We assist a detective. We’re, uh, operatives.”

“You do stooge work for a penny-ante hood, according to what I can see. A dead penny-ante hood. You were in the pocket of a guy in the pocket of Alphonso Matricardi and Leonardo Rockaforte, two relatively deep old dudes. Only it appears the pocket got turned inside out.”

Tony winced: These clichés hurt. “We work for the clients that come in,” he said, oddly sincere. For a moment Minna again came alive in Tony’s voice. “We don’t ask questions we shouldn’t, or we wouldn’t have any clients at all. The cops do the same, don’t try to tell me any different.”

“Cops don’t have clients,” said the homicide detective stiffly. I would have liked to see the real Frank Minna handle Seminole.

“What are you, Abraham Jefferson Jackson?” said Tony. “You running for office with that speech? Give me a break.”

I snorted. Despite everything, Tony was cracking me up. I threw in a flourish of my own:

“Abracadabra Jackson!”

The gun, and Seminole’s status as a law-enforcement officer, didn’t matter-he was losing control of this interview. What happened was this: Tony and I, so deeply estranged, had been drawn together by the point of the detective’s gun. In this post-Minna era we Men were a little panicked and raw at facing one another head on. But triangulated by Seminole we’d rediscovered the kinship that lurked in our old routines. If we couldn’t trust each other, Tony and I were at least reminded we were two of a kind, especially in the eyes of a cop. And Tony, seeing chinks in the detective’s confidence, was turning on him with his old orphan’s savagery. A bully knows the parameters and half-life of a brandished threat-the only thing weaker than a gun so long ignored was no gun at all. The cop had had to arrest us or hurt us or turn us against each other by now, and he hadn’t. Tony would cut him apart with his tongue for the mistake.

In the meantime I considered what Seminole had been saying, and tried to sift the information from his dingbat theories. If Julia didn’t get a call from the hospital how did she know about Minna’s death?

Again I wondered: Was it Julia who missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong? Did she keep it in Boston?

“Listen, you scumbags,” said Seminole. He was compensating desperately for his plummeting authority. “I’d rather tangle with homies doing drive-bys all day than wade into this Italianate mobster shit. Don’t get big-headed, now-I can see you’re just a couple of fools. It’s the wiseguys pulling your strings I’m worried about.”

“Great,” said Tony. “A paranoid cop. Wiseguys pulling strings-you read too many comic books, Cleopatra Jones.”

“Clapperdapper Bailey Johnson!”

“You think I’m stupid,” continued Seminole, on a real tear now. “You think a dumb black cop is going to stumble into your little nest and take it on face value. Car service, detective agency, give me a break. I’m going to push this murder bag just far enough to turn it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then I’m going to get my ass out of here for good. Might even take a vacation, sit on the beach and read about you losers in the Metro section.”

Stumble, wade: Seminole’s choice of words betrayed him. He really and truly feared he’d already gotten in further than was good for him. I wanted to find a way to allay his fears, I really did. I sort of liked the homicide detective. But everything out of my mouth sounded vaguely like a racial slur.

“Federal Bureau of what?” said Tony. “I never met those guys.”

“Let’s go upstairs and see if Uncle Alphonso and Uncle Leonardo can explain it to you,” said Seminole. “Something tells me they’ve got a working familiarity with the FBI.”

“I don’t think the old guy are home anymore,” said Tony.

“Oh yeah? Where’d they go?”

“They went through a tunnel in the basement,” said Tony. “They had to get back to their hideout, since they’ve got James Bond-or Batman, I can’t remember which-roasting over a slow fire.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t worry, though. Batman always gets away. These supervillains never learn.”

“Uncle Batman!” I shouted. They couldn’t know how much work it was for me to keep my hands on that dashboard, my neck straight. “Unclebailey Blackman! Barnamum Bat-a-potamus!”

“That’s enough, Alibi,” said Seminole. “Get out of the car.”

“What?”

“Get lost, go home. You annoy me, man. Tony and me are going to have a little talk.”

“C’mon, Blacula,” complained Tony. “We’ve been talking for hours. I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“Every name you call me I think up a couple more questions,” said Seminole. He waved at me with his gun. “Get lost.”

I gaped at Seminole, incredulous.

“I mean it. Get.”

I opened the door. Then I thought to find the Pontiac’s keys and hand them to Tony.

Tony glared at me. “Go back to the office and wait for me.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and stepped out onto the curb.

“Close the door,” said Seminole, training gun and gaze on Tony.

“Thanks, Count Chocula,” I said, and skipped away, literally.

Have you noticed yet that I relate everything to my Tourette’s? Yup, you guessed it, it’s a tic. Counting is a symptom, but counting symptoms is also a symptom, a tic plus ultra. I’ve got meta-Tourette’s. Thinking about ticcing, my mind racing, thoughts reaching to touch every possible symptom. Touching touching. Counting counting. Thinking thinking. Mentioning mentioning Tourette’s. It’s sort of like talking about telephones over the telephone, or mailing letters describing the location of various mailboxes. Or like a tugboater whose favorite anecdote concerns actual tugboats.

There is nothing Tourettic about the New York City subways.

Though at each step I felt the gaze of an army of invisible doormen on my neck, I was nevertheless exultant to be back on the Upper East Side. I hurried down Lexington from the Eighty-sixth Street station, with only ten minutes to spare before five o’clock: zazen. I didn’t want to be late for my first. While I was still on the street, though, I took out the cell phone and called Loomis.

“Yeah, I was just about to call you.” I could hear him chewing a sandwich or a chicken leg, and pictured his open mouth, smacking lips. Hadn’t he been at lunch two hours before? “I got the goods on that building.”

“Let’s have it-quick.”

“This guy in Records, he was going on and on about it. That’s a sweet little building, Lionel. Way outta my class.”

“It’s Park Avenue, Loomis.”

“Well, there’s Park Avenue and then there’s this. You gotta have a hundred million to get on the waiting list for this place, Lionel. This kind of people, their other house is an island.”

I heard Loomis quoting someone smarter than himself. “Right, but what about Fujisaki?”

“Hold your horses, I’m getting there. This sort of place, there’s a whole staff-it’s like a bunch of mansions stacked together. They got secret passages, wine cellars, a laundry service, swimming pool, servants’ quarters, private chef. Whole secret economy. There’s only five or six buildings like this in the city-the place where Bob Dylan got killed, what’s it, the Nova Scotia? That’s a doghouse in comparison. This place is for the old-money people, they’ll turn down Seinfeld, Nixon, doesn’t matter. They don’t even give a shit.”

“Include me in that category,” I said, unable to discern any useful information in the Garbage Cop’s jabber. “I’m looking for names, Loomis.”

“Your Fujisaki’s the management corporation. Whole bunch of other Jap names in there-guess they own half of New York if you started digging. This is a serious money operation, Lionel. Ullman, far as I can tell, he was just Fujisaki’s accountant. So clue me in: Why would Gilbert go after an accountant?”

“Ullman was the last guy Frank was supposed to see,” I said. “He never got to him.”

“Minna was supposed to kill Ullman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or vice versa?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or did the same guy kill them both?”

“I don’t know, Loomis.”

“So you aren’t learning much besides what I’m digging up for you, huh?”

“Eat me, Loomis.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said Kimmery when she opened the door to me. “You’re just in time. Mostly everybody’s sitting already.” She kissed me on the cheek again. “There’s a lot of excitement about the monks.”

“I’m feeling a lot of excitement myself.” In fact, I felt an instant euphoria at Kimmery’s alleviating presence. If this was the prospect of Zen I was ready to begin my training.

“You’ll have to take a cushion right away. Just sit anywhere but up at the front of the line. We’ll work on your posture some other time-for now you can sit and concentrate on your breathing.”

“I’ll do that.” I followed her up the stairs.

“That’s really everything anyway, breathing. You could work on just that for the rest of your life.”

“I’ll probably have to.”

“Take off your shoes.”

Kimmery pointed, and I added my shoes to a neat row in the hallway. It was a bit disconcerting to surrender them and with them my street-readiness, but in fact my aching dogs were grateful for the chance to breathe and stretch.

The second-floor sitting room was gloomy now, overhead track lighting still dark, the fading November daylight insufficient. I spotted the source of the heavy smell this time, a pot of smoldering incense on a high shelf beside a jade Buddha. The walls of the room were covered with undecorated paper screens, the glossy parquet floor with thin cushions. Kimmery led me to a spot near the back of the room and sat beside me, folded her legs and straightened her back, then nodded wide-eyed to suggest I imitate her moves. If only she knew. I sat and worked my big legs into position, grabbing my shins with both hands, only once jostling the sitter ahead of me, who turned and quickly glared, then resumed his posture of grace. The rows of cushions around us were mostly full with Zen practitioners, twenty-two when I counted, some in black robes, others in beatniky street clothes, corduroy or sweatpants and turtlenecks, not one in a suit like me. In the dimness I couldn’t make out any faces.

So I sat and waited and wondered exactly what I was there for, though it was tough to keep my back straight as those I saw around me. I glanced at Kimmery. Her eyes were already peacefully shut. In twenty-four hours-it was only slightly more than that since Gilbert and I had parked at the curb outside the day before-my confusion at the Zendo’s significance had doubled and redoubled, become veiled in successive layers. The conversation I’d heard on the wire, those sneering insinuations, now seemed impossible to fix to this place. Kimmery’s voice, ingenuous, unconspiring, was all I heard now. That, of course, against a background of my own interior babble. As I sat beside Kimmery, sheltered inside her tic-canceling field, I felt all the more keenly the uneasy, half-stoppered force of my own language-generator, my Multi-Mind, that tangle of responses and mimickings, of interruptions of interruptions.

I gazed at her again. She was sitting sincerely, not wondering about me. So I shut my eyes and, taking my own little crack at enlightenment, tried to unify my mind and get a fix on my Buddha nature.

The first thing I heard was Minna’s voice: I dare you to shut up for a whole twenty minutes sometime, you free human freakshow.

I pushed it away, thought One Mind instead.

One Mind.

Tell me one, Freakshow. One I don’t already know.

I vant to go to Tibet.

One Mind. I focused on my breathing.

Come home, Irving.

One Mind. Sick Mind. Dirty Mind. Bailey Mind.

One Mind.

Oreo Man.

When I opened my eyes again, I’d adjusted to the gloom. At the front of the room was a large bronze gong, and the cushions nearest the gong were empty as if readied for celebrity sitters, perhaps the important monks. The rows of heads had developed features, though mostly I was looking at ears and napes, the neckline of haircuts. The crowd was a mix of sexes, the women mostly skinny, with earrings and hairstyles that cost something, the men on average more lardish and scruffy, their haircuts overdue. I spotted Wallace’s ponytail and bald spot and furniture-stiff posture up near the front. And a row ahead of me, closer to the entrance, sat Pinched and Indistinct, my would-be abductors. At last I understood: They were men of peace. Was there a severe shortage of human beings on the Upper East Side, so the same small cast of doormen was required to pose in costume, here as goons, there as seekers after serenity? At least they’d shed their blue suits, made a greater commitment to this new identity. Garbed in black robes, their postures were admirably erect, presumably earned by extensive training, years of sacrifice. They hadn’t been working all that time on their strong-arm patter, that was for sure.

So much for my breathing. I managed to check my voice, though. Pinched and Indistinct both had their eyes shut, and I’d arrived last, so I had the drop on them. They weren’t exactly my idea of big trouble anyway. But I was reminded that the stolen cell phone and borrowed beeper in my jacket might shatter this ancient Eastern silence at any moment. Moving quietly as possible, I drew them out and turned off the cell phone’s ringer, set Minna’s beeper to “vibrate.” As I slipped them back into my jacket’s inner pocket an open hand slapped the back of my head and neck, hard.

Stung, I whipped around. But my attacker was already past me, marching solemnly between the mats to the front of the room, the first in a file of six bald Japanese men, all draped in robes revealing glimpses of sagging brown skin and threads of white underarm hair. Important monks. The lead monk had swerved out of his way to deliver the blow. I’d been reprimanded or perhaps offered a jolt of enlightenment-did I now know the sound of one hand clapping? Eitheray, I felt the heat of blood rushing to my ears and scalp.

Kimmery hadn’t noticed, just placidly Zenned right through the whole sequence. Maybe she was further along on her spiritual path than she realized.

The six moved to the front and took the unoccupied mats near the gong. And a seventh entered the room, a little behind the others, also robed, also with a polished bald skull. But he wasn’t small and Japanese and his body hair wasn’t white and it wasn’t limited to his underarms. He had silky black plumes of back and shoulder hair, rising from all sides to circle his neck with a fringe. It wasn’t a look the designer of the robe had likely had in mind. He moved to the front of the room and took the last of the VIP spots before I could see his face, but I thought of Kimmery’s description and decided this must be the American teacher, founder of the Zendo, the Roshi.

Irving. When are you coming home, Irving? Your family misses you.

The joke nagged at me, but I couldn’t put it to work. Was that Roshi’s original name, his American name: Irving? Was Roshi-Irving the voice on the wire?

If so, why? What linked Minna to this place?

They settled into quietude up front. I stared at the row of bald heads, the six monks and Roshi, but discerned nothing. Even Pinched and Indistinct were meditating serenely. Minutes crept past and I was the only set of open eyes. Someone coughed and I faked a cough in imitation. If I kept one eye on Kimmery I was mostly calm, though. It was like having a bag of White Castles beside me on the car seat. I wondered how deep her influence over my syndrome could run if given the chance, how much of that influence I could hope to import. How close I could get. I shut my eyes, trusting Pinched and Indistinct to stay planted obliviously on their cushions, and drifted into some pleasant thoughts about bodies, about Kimmery’s body, her nervous elegant limbs. Perhaps this was the key to Zen, then. We don’t exactly have God, she’d said. We just sit and try to stay awake. Well, I wasn’t having any trouble staying awake. And as my penis stiffened it occurred to me I’d found my One Mind.

I was jostled from my reverie by a sound at the door. I opened my eyes and turned to see the Polish giant standing in the entrance to the sitting room, filling the doorway with his square shoulders, holding in his fist a plastic produce bag full of kumquats and gazing at the roomful of Zen practitioners with an expression of absolute and utter serenity. He wasn’t in a robe, but he might have been Buddha himself for the benignity of his gaze.

Before I could figure a plan or response there came a commotion at the front of the room. A commotion by the local standards anyway: One of the Japanese monks stood and bowed to Roshi, then to the other monks in his party, then to the room at large. You still would have heard a pin drop, but the rustling of his robe was signal enough, and eyes opened everywhere. The giant stepped into the room, still clutching his kumquats like a bag of live goldfish, and took a mat-a couple actually-on the other side of Kimmery, between us and the door. I reminded myself that the giant hadn’t seen me, at least not yesterday. He certainly wasn’t giving me any special notice-or anyonese for that matter. Instead he settled into his spot, looking ready for the monk’s lecture. Quite a gathering we made now, the various mugs and lugs attending to the wise little men from the East. Pinched and Indistinct might be real Zen students playing at thuggishness, but Pierogi Monster was undoubtedly the opposite. The kumquats, I was pretty sure, were a giveaway-weren’t they a Chinese fruit, not Japanese at all? I wanted to hug Kimmery toward me, away from the killer’s reach, but then I wanted to do a lot of things-I always do.

The monk bowed to us again, searched our faces briefly, then began speaking, so abruptly and casually it was as if he were resuming a talk he’d been having with himself.

“Daily life, I fly on an airplane, I take a taxicab to visit Yorkville Zendo”-this came out Yolkville-ah-“I feel excitement, thoughts, anticipations, what will my friend Jerry-Roshi show me? Will I go to a very good Manhattan restaurant, sleep on a very good bed in New York City hotel?” He stomped his sandaled foot as though testing out a mattress.

I vant to go to Tibet! The joke insisted itself upon me again. My calm was under pressure from all sides, the goons everywhere, my echolalia provoked by the monk’s speech. But I couldn’t turn and gaze and refresh my dose of Kimmery without also taking in Minna’s titanic killer-he was so big that his outline framed her on all sides despite his being farther away, an optical trick I couldn’t afford to find fascinating.

“All these moods, impulses, this daily life, nothing wrong with them. But daily life, island, dinner, airplane, cocktail, daily life is not Zen. In zazen practice all that matters is the sitting, the practice. American, Japan, doesn’t matter. Only sitting.”

I vant to speak to the Lama! The American monk, Roshi, had half turned in his spot to better contemplate the master from across the ocean. The profile below Roshi’s gleaming dome stirred me unexpectedly. I recognized some terrible force of authority and charisma in his features.

Jerry-Roshi?

Meanwhile the giant sat disrespectfully pinching the skin of a kumquat, pressing it to his monstrous lips, sucking its juice.

“It is easy practice zazen in its external form, sit on the cushion and waste time on the cushion. So many forms of nothing-Zen, meaningless Zen, only one form of true Zen: actual making contact with own Buddha-self.”

The High Lama will grant you an audience.

“There is chikusho Zen, Zen of domesticated animals who curl up on pillows like cats in homes, waiting to be fed. They sit to kill time between meals. Domesticated animal Zen useless! Those who practice chikusho should be beaten and thrown out of the zendo.”

I obsessed on Jerry-Roshi’s face while the monk sputtered on.

“There is ningen Zen, Zen practiced for self-improvement. Ego-Zen. Make skin better, make bowel movement better, think positive thoughts and influence people. Shit! Ningen Zen is shit Zen!”

Irving, come home, went my brain. No soap, Zendo. Tibettapocamus. Chickenshack Zen. High Oscillama Talkalot. The monk’s wonky syllables, the recursions of the Tibet joke, my own fear of the giant-all were conspiring to bring me to a boil. I wanted to trace Roshi’s enthralling profile with my fingertip-perhaps I’d recognize its significance by touch. Instead I practiced Essrog Zen, and stifled myself.

“Consider also gaki Zen: the Zen of insatiable ghosts. Those who study gaki Zen chase after enlightenment like spirits who crave food or vengeance with a hunger can never be satisfied. These ghosts never even enter the house of Zen they are so busy howling at the windows!”

Roshi looked like Minna.

Your brother misses you, Irving.

Irving equals Lama, Roshi equals Gerard.

Roshi was Gerard Minna.

Gerard Minna was the voice on the wire.

I couldn’t say which got me there first, his profile in front of me or the joke’s subliminal nagging. It felt like a dead heat. Of course, the joke had been designed to get me there sooner, spare me figuring it out while in the belly of the whale. Too bad.

I tried to quit staring, failed. Up front, the monk continued to enumerate false Zens, the various ways we could go wrong. I personally could think of a few he probably hadn’t come across yet.

But why had Minna buried the information in a joke to begin with? I thought of a couple of reasons. One: He didn’t want us to know about Gerard unless he died. If he survived the attack he wanted his secret to survive as well. Two: He didn’t know who among his Men to trust, even down to Gilbert Coney. He could be certain I’d puzzle over the Irving clue while Gilbert would write it off as our mutual inanity.

And he felt, rightly, that no conspiracy around him could possibly include his pet Freakshow. The other Boys would never let me play. I could be flattered at the implied trust, or insulted by the dis. It didn’t really matter now.

I stared at Gerard. Now I understood the charismatic force of his profile, but it inspired only bitterness. It was as though the world imagined it could take Minna away and offer this clumsy genetic substitution. A resemblance.

“California Roll Zen. This is the Zen of sushi so full of avocado and cream cheese might as well be a marshmallow for all you know. The pungent fish of zazen smothered in easy pleasures, picnics, get-togethers, Zendo becomes a dating service!”

“Zengeance!” I shouted.

Not every head turned. Gerard Minna’s did, though. So did Pinched’s, and Indistinct’s. And so did the giant’s. Kimmery was among those who practiced their calm by ignoring me.

“Ziggedy zendoodah,” I said aloud. My erection dimmed, energy venting elsewhere. “Pierogi Monster Zen master zealous neighbor. Zen zaftig Zsa Zsa go-bare.” I rapped the scalp of the sitter in front of me. “Zippity go figure.”

The roomful of gurus and acolytes came to agitated life but not one of them spoke a word, so my burst of verbiage sang in the silence. The lecturing monk glared at me and shook his head. Another of his posse rose from his cushion and lifted a wooden paddle I hadn’t previously noticed from a hook on the wall, then started through the rows of students in my direction. Only Wallace sat immobile, eyes shut, still meditating. I began to appreciate his reputation for imperturbability.

“Pierogi kumquat sushiphone! Domestic marshmallow ghost! Insatiable Mallomar! Smothered pierogiphone!” The flood came with such force, I twisted my neck and nearly barked the words.

“Silence!” commanded the lecturing monk. “Very bad to make disturbance in the Zendo! Time and place for everything!” Anger wasn’t good for his English. “Shouting is for outside, New York City full of shouting! Not in Zendo.”

“Knock knock Zendo!” I shouted. “Monk monk goose!”

The monk with the paddle approached. He gripped it cross-handed, like Hank Aaron. The giant stood, shoved his baggie of kumquats into the pocket of his Members Only jacket and rubbed his sticky hands together, readying them for use. Gerard turned and stared at me, but if he recognized in me the twitchy teenager he’d left behind at the St. Vincent’s schoolyard fence nineteen years before, he didn’t show any sign. His eyebrows were delicately knit, his mouth pursed, his expression bemused. Kimmery put her hand on my knee and I put my hand on hers, reciprocity-ticcing. Even in a shitstorm such as I was in at this moment, my syndrome knew that God was in the details.

“Keisaku is more than ceremonial implement,” said the monk with the paddle. He applied it to my shoulder blades so gently it was like a caress. “Unruly student can do with a blow.” Now he clouted my back with the same muscular Buddhist glee his colleague had applied to my scalp.

“Ouch!” I fished behind me for the paddle, snagged it, tugged. It came out of the monk’s grasp and he staggered backward. By now the giant was headed in our direction. Those between us rolled or scuttled out of his path, according to their ability to unlock their elaborately folded legs. Kimmery darted away just as he loomed over us, not wanting to be crushed. Pierogi Man hadn’t checked his shoes at the door.

That was when I saw the nod.

Gerard Minna nodded ever so slightly at the giant, and the giant nodded back. That was all it took. The same team that had doomed Frank Minna was back in the saddle. I would be the sequel.

The giant wrapped me in his arms and lifted, and the paddle clattered to the floor.

I weigh nearly two hundred pounds, but the giant didn’t strain at all moving me down the stairs and out onto the street, and when he plumped me onto the sidewalk I was more shaken and winded than he by far. I straightened my suit and confirmed the alignment of my neck with a strig of jerks while he unloaded his bag of kumquats and got back to sucking out their juice and pulp, reducing their bodies to husks that looked like orange raisins in his massive hands.

The narrow street was nearly dark now, and the dog-walkers were far enough away to give us privacy.

“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag. His voice was a dull thing where it began in his throat but it resonated to grandeur in the tremendous instrument of his torso, like a mediocre singer on the stage of a superb concert hall.

“No, thanks,” I said. Here was where I should grow large with anger, facing Minna’s killer right at the spot of the abduction. But I was diminished, ribs aching from his squeezing, confused and worried-conworried-by my discovery of Gerard Minna inside the Zendo, and unhappy to have left Kimmery and my shoes upstairs. The pavement was cold through my socks, and my feet tingled oddly as they flushed with the blood denied them by Zen posture.

“So what’s the matter with you?” he said, discarding another of the withered kumquats.

“I’ve got Tourette’s,” I said.

“Yeah, well, threats don’t work with me.”

“Tourette’s,” I said.

“Eh? My hearing’s not so good. Sorry.” He put the bag of fruit away again, and when his hand reemerged it was holding a gun. “Go in there,” he said. He pointed with his chin at the three steps leading to the narrow channel between the Zendo and the apartment building on the right, a lane filled with garbage cans and darkness. I frowned, and he reached out and with the hand not holding the gun shoved me backward toward the steps. “Go,” he said again.

I considered the giant and myself as a tableau. Here was the man I’d been hunting and wishing to go up against, howling for a chance at vengeance like an insatiable ghost or marshmallow-yet had I planned a way to take advantage of him, a method or apparatus to give me any real edge, let alone narrow the immense gap in force his size presented? No. I’d come up pathetically empty. And now he had a gun to ice the cake. He shoved me again, straight-armed my shoulder, and when I tried, ticcishly, to shove his shoulder in return I found I was held at too great a distance, couldn’t brush his shoulder even with long-stretched fingertips, and it conjured some old memory of Sylvester the Cat in a boxing ring with a kangaroo. My brain whispered, He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse.

“Apocamouse,” I mumbled, language spilling out of me unrestrained. “Unplan-a-canal. Unpluggaphone.”

“I said get in there, Squeaky.” Had he caught my mouse reference, even with his impaired hearing? But then, who wouldn’t be squeaky to him? He was so big he only had to shrug to loom. I took a step backward. I had Tourette’s, he had threats. “Go,” he said again.

It was the last thing I wanted to do and I did it.

The minute I stepped down into the darkness he swung the gun at my head.

So many detectives have been knocked out and fallen into such strange swirling darknesses, such manifold surrealist voids (“something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope”-Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep), and yet I have nothing to contribute to this painful tradition. Instead my falling and rising through obscurity was distinguished only by nothingness, by blankness, by lack and my resentment of it. Except for grains. It was a grainy nothing. A desert of grains. How fond can you be of flavorless grains in a desert? How much better than nothing at all? I’m from Brooklyn and I don’t like wide-open spaces, I guess. And I don’t want to die. So sue me.

Then I remembered a joke, a riddle like one the Garbage Cop would tell, and it was my lifeline, it sang like a chorus of ethereal voices beckoning me from the brink of darkness:

Why don’t you starve in the desert?

Because of the sand which is there.

Why didn’t I want to die or leave New York?

The sandwiches. I concentrated on the sandwiches. For a while that’s all there was, and I was happy. The sandwiches were so much better than the desert of grains.

“Lionel?”

It was Kimmery’s voice.

“Mhrrggh.”

“I brought your shoes.”

“Oooh.”

“I think we should go. Can you stand?”

“Rrrrssp.”

“Lean against the wall. Careful. I’ll get a cab.”

“Cabbabbab.”

I flickered awake again and we were slicing through the park, East Side to West, in that taxicab channel of tree-topped stone, my head on Kimmery’s bony shoulder. She was putting my shoes back on, lifting my leaden feet one after the other, then tying the laces. Her small hands and my large shoes made this an operation rather like saddling a comatose horse. I could see the cabbie’s license-his name was Omar Dahl, which invited tics I couldn’t muster in my state-and a view upward through the side window. For a moment I thought it was snowing and everything seemed precious and distant-Central Park in a snow globe. Then I realized it was snowing inside the cab, too. The grains again. I closed my eyes.

Kimmery’s apartment was on Seventy-eighth Street, in an old-lady apartment building, gloriously shabby and real after the gloss of the East Side, the chilling dystopian lobby of 1030 Park Avenue especially. I got upright and inhe elevator on my own steam, with only Kimmery to hold the doors for me, which was how I liked it-no doormen. We rode to the twenty-eighth floor in an empty car, and Kimmery leaned against me as if we were still in the cab. I didn’t need the support to stand anymore, but I didn’t stop it from happening. My head throbbed-where Pierogi Man had clubbed me, it felt as though I were trying to grow a single horn, and failing-and the contact with Kimmery was a kind of compensation. At her floor she parted from my side with that nervous quick walk I already considered her trademark, her confession of some kernel of jerkiness I could cultivate and adore, and unlocked the door to her place so frantically I wondered if she thought we’d been followed.

“Did the giant see you?” I said when we were inside.

“What?”

“The giant. Are you afraid of the giant?” I felt a body-memory, and shuddered. I was still a little unsteady on my pins, as Minna would have said.

She looked at me strangely. “No, I just-I’m an illegal sublet here. There are people in this building who can’t mind their own business. You should sit down. Do you want some water?”

“Sure.” I looked around. “Sit where?”

Her apartment consisted of a brief foyer, a minuscule kitchen-really more an astronaut’s cockpit full of cooking equipment-and a large central room whose polyurethaned floor mirrored the vast moonlit city nightscape featured in its long, uncurtained window. The reflected image was uninterrupted by carpet or furniture, just a few modest boxes tucked into the corners, a tiny boom box and a stack of tapes, and a large cat that stood in the center of the floor, regarding our entrance skeptically. The walls were bare. Kimmery’s bedding was a flattened mattress on the floor of the foyer where we stood now, just inside the apartment’s door. We were almost on top of it.

“Go ahead and sit on the bed,” she said, with a nervous half smile.

Beside the bed was a candle, a box of tissues, and a small stack of paperbacks. It was a private space, a headquarters. I wondered if she hosted much-I felt I might be the first to see past her door.

“Why don’t you sleep in there?” I said, pointing at the big empty room. My words came out thickened and stupid, like those of a defeated boxer in his dressing room, or a Method actor’s, while playing a defeated boxer. My Tourette’s brain preferred precision, sharper edges. I felt it waking.

“People look in,” said Kimmery. “I’m not comfortable.”

“You could have curtains.” I gestured at the big window.

“It’s too big. I don’t really like that room. I don’t know why.” Now she looked like she regretted bringing me here. “Sit. I’ll bring you some water.”

The room she didn’t like was the whole of the apartment. She lived instead in the foyer. But I decided not to say anything more about it. There was something anyway that suited me in her use of the space, as though she’d planned to bring me here to hide, knew I’d have something to fear from the skyline, the big world of conspiracies and doormen that was Manhattan.

I took a seat on her bed, back against the wall, legs straightened to cross the mattress, so my shoes reached the floor. I felt my tailbone meet the floor through the pancake-thin mattress. Now I saw that Kimmery had double-knotted my laces. I lingered awkwardly over this detail, used it to measure my returning consciousness, allowing my obsessiveness to play over the intricacy of the knots and my stroboscopic memories of Kimmery tugging at my feet in the cab. I imagined I could feel the dented place in my skull and the damaged language flowing in a new direction through this altered inner topography and the words went sandwiches sandwiches I scream for ice cream dust to dust and so on.

I decided to distract myself with the books stacked near the bed. The first was called The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts. Tucked into it as an oversize bookmark was a pamphlet, a glossy sheet folded in thirds. I pulled out the pamphlet. It was for Yoshii’s, a Zen Buddhist retreat center and roadside Thai and Japanese restaurant on the southern coast of Maine. The phone number beneath the schematic road map on the back was circled with blue ballpoint. The heading on the front of the pamphlet said A PLACE OF PEACE.

Pleasure police.

Pressure peas.

The cat walked in from the main room and stood on my outstretched thighs and began kneading them with its front paws, half-retracted claws engaging the material to make a pocka-pocka-pocka sound. The cat was black and white with a Hitler mustache, and when it finally noticed I had a face it squeezed its eyes at me. I folded the pamphlet into my jacket pocket, then took off my jacket and put it on the corner of Kimmery’s bed. The cat went back to working my thighs.

“You probably don’t like cats,” said Kimmery, returning with two glasses of water.

“Chickencat,” I said, ticcing stupidly. “Cream of soup salad sandwich.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No, no,” I said, though maybe I was. “And I like cats fine.” But I kept my hands away, not wanting to begin obsessing on its body-kneading back or mimicking its uneven, cackling purr.

I can’t own a cat, because my behaviors drive them insane. I know because I tried. I had a cat, gray and slim, half the size of Kimmery’s, named Hen for the chirping and cooing sounds she made, for the barnyard pecking motions her initial sniffing inspections of my apartment reminded me of. She enjoyed my attentions at first, my somewhat excessive fondling. She’d purr and push against my hand as I tapped her, taking her pleasure. I’d refine my impulses toward her as well as I could, stroking her neck smoothly, rubbing her cheeks sideways to stimulate her kittenish memories of being licked, or whatever it is that makes cats crave that sensation. But from the very first Hen was disconcerted by my head-jerks and utterances and especially by my barking. She’d turn her head to see what I’d jumped at, to see what I was fishing for in the air with my hand. Hen recognized those behaviors-they were supposed to be hers. She never felt free to relax. She’d cautiously advance to my lap, a long game of half measures and imaginary distractions before she’d settle. Then I’d issue a string of bitten-off shrieks and bat at the curtain.

Worse, her bouts of joy at my petting hands became a focal point for Tourettic games of disruption. Hen would purr and nudge at my hand, and I’d begin stroking her smooth, sharklike face. She’d lean into the pressure, and I’d push back, until she was arched into my hand and ready to topple. Then the tic-I’d withdraw my hand. Other times I’d be compelled to follow her around the apartment, reaching for her when she’d meant to be sly or invisible; I’d stalk her, though it was obvious that like any cat her preference was to come to me. Or I’d fixate on the limits of her pleasure at being touched-would she keep purring if I rubbed her fur backward? If I tickled her cheeks would I be allowed to simultaneously grasp her sacrosanct tail? Would she permit me to clean the sleep from her eyes? The answer was often yes, but there was a cost. As with a voodoo doll, I’d begun investing my own ticcishness in my smaller counterpart: Tourette’s Cat. She’d been reduced to a distrustful, skittish bundle of reactions, anticipatory flinchings and lashings-out. After six months I had to find her a new home with a Dominican family in the next building. They were able to straighten her out, after some cooling-off time spent hidden behind their stove.

The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro. Meanwhile Kimmery had placed the two glasses of water on the floor near my feet. Though the room was dim-we were lit as much by the reflected skyline in the big room behind us as by the faint bulb there in the foyer-she’d removed her eyeglasses for the first time, and her eyes looked tender and small and searching. She slid down to seat herself against the wall, so we were arranged like clock hands on the face of the floor, our shoes at the center. According to the clock of us it was four o’clock. I tried not to root for midnight.

“Have you been living here long?” I asked.

“I know, it looks like I’m camping out,” she said. “It’s been about a month. I just broke up with this guy. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“The Oreo Man?” I pictured a weather-beaten cowboy in front of a sunset, holding a cookie to his lips like a cigarette. Then, in frantic compensation, I conjured a tormented nerd in goggle-glasses, peering at cookie crumbs through a microscope, trying to discern their serial numbers.

“Uh-huh,” said Kimmery. “A friend was moving out and she gave me this place. I don’t even like it. I’m hardly ever here.”

“Where instead-the Zendo?”

She nodded. “Or the movies.”

I wasn’t ticcing much, for a couple of reasons. The first was Kimmery herself, still an unprecedented balm to me this late in the day. The second was the day itself, the serial tumult of unsorted clues, the catastrophe of my visit to the Zendo; that extra track in my brain had plenty of work to do threading beads together, smoothing the sequence into order: Kimmery, doormen, Matricardi and Rockaforte, Tony and Seminole, Important Monks, Gerard Minna and the killer. Minna’s killer.

“Did you lock your door?” I said.

“You’re really afraid,” said Kimmery, widening her eyes. “Of the, uh, giant.”

“You didn’t see him?” I said. “The big guy who took me outside?” I didn’t mention what happened next. It was shameful enough that Kimmery had had to mop it up.

“He’s a giant?”

“Well, what do you call it?”

“Isn’t gigantism a genetic condition?”

“I’d say it is. He didn’t earn that height.” I touched the delicate spot on my head with one hand, kept the other calm at my side, ignoring every impulse to return the cat’s pulsing and pawing at my legs. Instead I fingered the homely, hand-stitched coverlet on Kimmery’s mattress, traced its inelegant, lumpy seams.

“I guess I didn’t notice,” she said. “I was, you know-sitting.”

“You’ve never seen him before?”

She shook her head. “But I never met you before today either. I guess I should have told you not to bring anyone like that to the Zendo. And not to make noise. Now I missed practically the whole lecture.”

“You’re not saying the lecture went on?”

“Sure, why not? After you and your friend the giant were gone.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“Because my concentration isn’t that good,” she said, bitterly philosophical now. “If you’re really Zen you sit right through distractions, like Roshi did. And Wallace.” She rolled her eyes.

I was tempted to remind her that she’d moved to avoid being trampled, but it was just one objection among thousands.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t bring him to the Zendo. Nobody knew I was coming there.”

“Well, I guess he followed you.” She shrugged, not wanting to argue. To her it was self-evident that the giant and I were dual phenomena. I’d caused his presence at the Zendo, was likely responsible for his very existence.

“Listen,” id. 01C;I know Roshi’s American name. He’s not who you think he is.”

“I don’t think he’s anyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t say, like, Roshi’s really Johnny Carson or something. I just said I didn’t know.”

“Okay, but he’s not a Zen teacher. He’s involved in a murder.”

“That’s silly.” She made it sound like a virtue, as though I’d meant to entertain her. “Besides, anyone who teaches Zen is a Zen teacher, I think. Probably even if they were a murderer. Just like anyone who sits is a student. Even you.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you, at least according to a Zen outlook. That’s my whole point.”

“Taken.”

“Don’t be so sour, Lionel. I’m only joking. You sure you’re happy with that cat?”

“Doesn’t it have a name?” Feline Hitler had settled ponderously between my thighs, was purring in broken measures, and had begun to feature tiny bubbles of drool at the corners of its mouth.

“Shelf, but I never call him that.”

“Shelf?”

“I know, it’s completely stupid. I didn’t name him. I’m just catsitting.”

“So this isn’t your apartment and this isn’t your cat.”

“It’s sort of a period of crisis for me.” She reached for her glass of water, and I immediately reached for mine, grateful: The mirroring scratched a tiny mental itch. Anyway, I was thirsty. Shelf didn’t budge. “That’s why I got involved with Zen,” Kimmery went on. “For more detachment.”

“You mean like no apartment and no cat? How detached can you get?” My voice was irrationally bitter. Disappointment had crept over me, impossible to justify or perfectly define. I suppose I’d imagined us sheltered in Kimmery’s childlike foyer, her West Side tree house, three cats hiding. But now I understood that she was rootless, alienated in this space. The Oreo Man’s house was her home, or possibly the Zendo, just as L &L was mine, just as Shelf’s was elsewhere, too. None of us could go to those places, so we huddled here together, avoiding the big room and the forest of skyscrapers.

Now, before Kimmery could reply, I ticced loudly, “Detach-me-not!” I tried to block myself, interrupt my own ticcing with the glass of water, which I moved to my lips just in time to shout into the glass, fevering the surface of the water with my breath, “Go-shelf-a-lot!”

“Wow,” said Kimmery.

I didn’t speak. I gulped down water and fondled the stitching of her coverlet again, seeking to lose my Tourette’s self in texture. “You say really weird stuff when you get angry,” she said.

“I’m not-” I turned my neck, put the glass of water down on the floor. This time I jostled Shelf, who looked up at me with jaded eyes. “I’m not angry.”

“What’s wrong with you, then?” The question was delivered evenly, without sarcasm or fear, as though she really wanted an answer. Her eyes no longer looked small to me without the black frames around them. They felt as round and inquisitive as the cat’s.

“Nothing-at least from a Zen outlook. I just shout sometimes. And touch things. And count things. And think about them too much.”

“I’ve heard of that, I think.”

“You’re the exception to the rule if you have.”

She reached into my lap and patted Shelf’s head, distracting the cat from its interrogative gaze. Instead it squeezed its eyes together and craned its neck to press back against her palm. I’d have craned as far.

“Don’t you want to know Roshi’s real name?” I said. “Why should I?”

“What?”

“Unless you’re really going to shock me and say he’s, like, J. D. Salinger, what’s the difference? I mean, it’s just going to be Bob or Ed or something, right?”

“Gerard Minna,” I said. I wanted it to mean as much to her as Salinger, wanted her to understand everything. “He’s Frank Minna’s brother.”

“Okay, but who’s Frank Minna?”

“He’s the guy who got killed.” Strangely, I had a name for him now, a name flat and terrible and true: the guy who got killed. When before I could never have answered that question, or if I started answering it I’d never have finished. Frank Minna is the secret king of Court Street. Frank Minna is a mover and a talker, a word and a gesture, a detective and a fool. Frank Minna c’est moi.

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“Yes.” I wondered if I could ever share with her how terrible it was. “I mean, that’s got to be one of the worst things I’ve ever heard, practically.”

Kimmery leaned closer, comforting the cat, not me. But I felt comforted. She and I were drawn close within her dawning understanding. Perhaps this foyer had only waited for this moment, for me and my story, to become a real space instead of a provisional one. Here Minna would be properly mourned. Here I’d find surcease for my pain and the answer to the puzzle of Tony and The Clients and why Minna and Ullman had to die and where Jua was and who Bailey was, and here Kimmery’s hand would move from Shelf’s head to my thigh and I would never tic again.

“He sent his brother out to die,” I said. “He set him up. I heard it happen. I just don’t know why yet.”

“I don’t understand. How did you hear?”

“Frank Minna was wearing a bug when he went into the Zendo. I heard him and Gerard talking. You were there too, in the building.” I recalled revising my surveillance note, trying to decide whether to declare Kimmery girl or woman, and my writing hand twitched, reenacting my crossing-out across the soft threads of her coverlet.

“When?”

“Yesterday,” I said, though it seemed a long time ago now.

“Well, that’s impossible. It must have been someone else.”

“Tell me why.”

“Roshi is under a vow of silence.” She whispered, as if she were breaking such a vow at this moment. “He hasn’t said a word for the last five days. So you couldn’t have heard him talk.”

I was tongue-tied for once. It was the logic of the Oreo Man, invading my moral puzzle. Or another Zen conundrum: What’s the sound of a silent monk condemning his brother to death?

The quieter the monk, the gaudier the patter I thought, remembering the conversation on the wiretap.

“I can’t believe you go around bugging people,” she said, still whispering. Perhaps she imagined there was a bug in the room now. “Were you trying to frame this Frank person?”

“No, no, no. Frank wanted me to listen.”

“He wanted to be caught?”

“He didn’t do anything,” I said. “Except get bumped off by his brother, the silent monk.”

Though she regarded me skeptically, Kimmery went on rubbing the cat’s neck and head while it nestled in my lap. I had more than the usual panicky reasons to ignore the captivating sensations, the fricative purring and chafing down there. I was suppressing two different kinds of response, two possible ways of poking back. I kept my eyes level on Kimmery’s face.

“I think you’ve got a few things mixed up,” she said gently. “Roshi’s a very gentle man.”

“Well, Gerard Minna’s a punk from Brooklyn,” I said. “And they’re positively the same guy.”

“Hmmm. I don’t know, Lionel. Roshi once told me he’d never been to Brooklyn. He’s from Vermont or Canada or something.”

“Maine?” I asked, thinking of t pamphlet I’d secreted in my jacket, the retreat center by the water.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. You should take my word for it, though, he isn’t from Brooklyn. He’s a very important man.” She made it sound as if the two were mutually exclusive.

“Eat me Brooklyn Roshi!”

I was ticcing out of sheer frustration. In squaring her perceptions to mine I not only had a world of knowledge to build up but a preexisting one to tear down. Anyone faintly Zen was to her beyond reproach. And Gerard Minna, for the cheap act of shaving his likely-already-balding head, was secure in a pantheon of the holy.

And Gerard had a lot of damn gall to renounce the borough.

“Lionel?”

I grabbed for my glass, took another sip of water, averted my eyes from Kimmery’s.

“How does it feel when you do that?” she said. “I mean, what are you thinking?”

She was close enough now, and I succumbed completely and reached for her shoulder, tapped it five times quickly with paired fingertips. Then I moved my water glass to the floor and leaned forward, forcing Shelf to make another bleary, pleasure-addled adjustment to his position in my lap, and straightened Kimmery’s collar with both hands. The material was floppy, and I tried to prop it up as if it were starched, put the collar-tips on point like a ballerina’s toes. And my brain went, How are you feeling and how are you thinking and think how you’re feeling, and that became the chorus, the soundtrack to my adamant necessary collar-play.

“Lionel?” She didn’t push my hands away.

“Liable,” I said softly, my gaze lowered. “Think-a-mum Feely.”

“What do the words mean?”

“They’re just words. They don’t mean anything.” The question depressed me a little, took the wind out of my sails, and this was a good thing: I was able to release her collar, still my wriggling fingers.

Kimmery touched one hand, just briefly, as I withdrew it. I was numb to her now, though. She no longer soothed my tics, and the attention she’d begun to give them was humiliating. I needed to get this interview back on an official basis. Sitting here purring and being purred at wasn’t going to accomplish anything. In the city on the other side of the door a giant killer lurched around unafraid, and it was my job to find him.

“What do you know about ten-thirty Park Avenue?” I said, resuming my investigation, the legitimate inquiry.

“Is that that big apartment building?” Her hand was back riffling Shelf’s fur, her body ever closer to mine.

“Big building,” I said. “Yes.”

“A lot of Roshi’s students do theork service there,” she said lightly. “Working in the kitchen, cleaning up, that kind of thing. I was telling you about it, remember?”

“Doormen? Any-doormen?” My syndrome wanted to call them dogshirts, doorsnips, diphthongs. I gritted my teeth.

She shrugged. “I think so. I never went there myself. Lionel?”

“Yes?”

“You didn’t really come to the Zendo because you were interested in Buddhism, did you?”

“I guess I thought that was obvious by now.”

“It is obvious.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I was narrowed to a fine point, thinking only of Frank and Gerard and the places I might have to go to finish my investigation. I’d shuttered myself against Kimmery’s tenderness toward me, even shuttered away my own tenderness toward her. She was an incompetent witness, beyond that a distraction. And I was an investigator who supplied plenty of my own distractions, too many.

“You came to make trouble,” she said.

“I came because of trouble, yes.”

Kimmery rubbed the fur of Shelf’s flank in the wrong direction, aggravating my senses. I put my hand on the cat for the first time, nudged Kimmery’s fingers away from the chaos of up-sticking fur she’d caused, and smoothed the fur back into place.

“Well, I’m glad I met you anyway,” she said.

I made a sound, half dog, half cat, something like “Chaarff.”

Our hands collided in Shelf’s fur, Kimmery’s moving to rough up the area I’d just smoothed into sense, mine preemptively slipping underneath to preserve my work. It took a big indifferent loaf of a cat like Shelf to withstand it; Hen would have been across the room reordering herself with her own tongue by now.

“You’re strange to me,” said Kimmery.

“Don’t feel bad about it,” I said.

“No, but I mean strange in a good way, too.”

“Uh.” She was tugging on my fingers, and I tugged systematically back, so our hands were tangling, squirming, the cat a benign mattress underneath, one vibrating like a cheap hotel’s.

“You can say whatever you want,” Kimmery whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“The words.”

“I don’t really need to when you’re touching my hand like that.”

“I like to.”0em”›iv height=”0em”›

“Touch?” Touch shoulders, touch penguins, touch Kimmery-who didn’t like to touch? Why shouldn’t she? But this vaguest of questions was all I could manage. I wasn’t only strange to her, I was strange to myself at that moment: tugging, lulled, resistant. Conworried.

“Yes,” she said. “You. Here-”

She groped at the wall behind her head and switched off the light. We were still outlined in white, Manhattan’s radiation leaking in from the big room. Then she moved closer: It was a minute after twelve. Somewhere as she fit herself in beside me the cat was jostled loose and wandered ungrudgingly away.

“That’s better,” I said lamely, like I was reading from a script. The distance between us had narrowed, but the distance between me and me was enormous. I blinked in the half-light, looking straight ahead. Now her hand was on my thigh where the cat had been. Mirroring, I let my fingers play lightly at the parallel spot on her leg.

“Yes,” she said.

“I can’t seem to interest you fully in my case,” I said.

“Oh, I’m interested,” she said. “It’s just-It’s hard to talk about things that are important to you. With a new person. Everyone is so strange, don’t you think?”

“I think you’re right.”

“So you have to trust them at first. Because everything makes sense after a while.”

“So that’s what you’re doing with me?”

She nodded, then leaned her head against my shoulder. “But you’re not asking me anything about myself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, surprised. “I guess-I guess I don’t know where to start.”

“Well, so you see what I mean, then.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t have to turn her face to mine to kiss her. It was already there when I turned. Her lips were small and soft and a little chapped. I’d never before kissed a woman without having had a few drinks. And I’d never kissed a woman who hadn’t had a few herself. While I tasted her Kimmery drew circles on my leg with her finger, and I did the same back.

“You do everything I do,” she whispered into my mouth.

“I don’t really need to,” I said again. “Not if we’re this close.” It was the truth. I was never less ticcish than this: aroused, pressing toward another’s body, moving out of my own. But just as Kimmery had somehow spared me ticcing aloud in conversation, now I felt free to incorporate an element of Tourette’s into our groping, as though she were negotiating a new understanding between my two disgruntled brains.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You need a shave, though.”

We kissed then, so I couldn’t reply, didn’t want to. I felt her press her thumb very gently against the point of my Adam’s apple, a touch I couldn’t exactly return. I stroked her ear and jaw instead, urging her nearer. Then her hand fell lower, and mine too, and at that moment I felt my hand and mind lose their particularity, their pointiness, their countingness, instead become clouds of general awareness, dreamy and yielding with curiosity. My hand felt less a hand than a catcher’s mitt, or Mickey Mouse’s hand, something vast and blunt and soft. I didn’t count her where I touched her. I conducted a general survey, took a tender sampling.

“You’re excited,” she breathed.

“Yes.”

“It’s okay.”

“I know.”

“I just wanted to mention it.”

“Okay, yes.”

She unbuttoned my pants. I fumbled with hers, with a thin sash knotted at her front for a belt. I couldn’t undo it with one hand. We were breathing into one another’s mouths, lips slipping together and apart, noses mashed. I found a way in around the knotted sash, untucked her shirt. I put my finger in her belly button, then found the crisp margin of her pubic hair, threaded it with a finger. She tremored and slid her knee between mine.

“You can touch me there,” she said.

“I am,” I said, wishing for accuracy.

“You’re so excited,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay. Oh, Lionel, that’s okay. Don’t stop, it’s okay.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.” Okay, okay: Here was Kimmery’s tic, in evidence at last. I couldn’t begrudge it. I turned my whole hand, gathering her up, surrounding her. She spilled as I held her. Meanwhile she’d found the vent in my boxer shorts. I felt two fingertips contact a part of me through that window, the blind men and the elephant. I wanted and didn’t want her to go on, terribly.

“You’re so excited,” she said again, incantatory.

“Uh.” She jostled me, untangled me from my shorts and my self.

“Wow, God, Lionel you’re sort of huge.”

“And bent,” I said, so she wouldn’t have to say it.

“Is that normal?”

“I guess it’s a little unusual-looking.” I panted, hoping be past this moment.

“More than a little, Lionel.”

“Someone-a woman once told me it was like a beer can.”

“I’ve heard of that,” said Kimmery. “But yours is, I don’t know, like a beer can that’s been crushed, like for recycling.”

So it was for me. In my paltry history I’d never been unveiled without hearing something about it-freak shows within freak shows. Whatever Kimmery thought, it didn’t keep her from freeing me from my boxer shorts and palming me, so that I felt myself aching heavily in her cool grasp. We made a circuit: mouths, knees, hands and what they held. The sensation was okay. I tried to match the rhythm of her hand with mine, failed. Kimmery’s tongue lapped my chin, found my mouth again. I made a whining sound, not a part of any word. Language was destroyed. Bailey, he left town.

“It’s okay to talk,” she whispered.

“Uh.”

“I like, um, I like it when you talk. When you make sounds.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me something, Lionel.”

“What?”

“I mean, say something. The way you do.”

I looked at her open-mouthed. Her hand urged me toward an utterance that was anything but verbal. I tried to distract her the same way.

“Speak, Lionel.”

“Ah.” It really was all I could think to say.

She kissed me gaspingly and drew back, her look expectant.

“One Mind!” I said.

“Yes!” said Kimmery.

“Fonebone!” I shouted.

Another key contributor to my Tourette’s lexicon was a cartoonist named Don Martin, first encountered in a pile of tattered Mad magazines in a box in the Ping-Pong room in the basement of St. Vincent’s when I was eleven or twelve. I used to pore over his drawings, trying to find what it was about his characters, drawn with riotously bulging eyes, noses, chins, Adam’s apples and knees, elongated tongues and fingers and feet that flapped like banners, named Professor Bleent, P. Carter Franit, Mrs. Freenbeen and Mr. Fonebone, that stirred such a deep chord in me. His image of life was garish and explosive, heads being stretched and shrunk, surgeons lopping off noses and dropping brains and sewing hands on backward, falling safes and metal presses squashing men flat or into boxlike packages, children swallowing coat hangers and pogo sticks and taking on their shapes. His agonized characters moved through their panels with a geeky physicality, seeming to strain toward ther catastrophic contact with fire hoses, whirring blades, and drawbridges, and his sophomoric punch lines mostly hinged on reversals or literalizations-“The kids are upstairs with their ears glued to the radio”-or else on outright destruction. Mad often held the concluding panel of a Don Martin cartoon to the following page, and part of the pleasure of his work was never knowing whether the payoff would be a visual pun or verbal riff or merely the sight of a man in a full-body cast falling out a window into the path of a steamroller. Mostly, though, I recall the distortion, the torque in the bodies he drew: These characters had met disaster in being born onto the page, and their more extreme fates were only realizations of their essential nature. This made sense to me. And Fonebone made sense, too. He had a name I could get behind. For a while he almost supplanted Bailey, and he was lastingly traceable in my tendency to append phone or bone to the end of a phrase.

When I had sex with another person and my body began to convulse and move faster, my toes to curl, my eyes to roll, I felt like a Don Martin character, a Fonebone, all elbows and bowlegs and boomerang penis and gurgling throat in a halo of flung-off sweat drops and sound effects: Fip, Thwat, Zwip, Sproing, Flabadab. More than Daffy Duck, more than Art Carney, more than any other icon of my discomfort. Don Martin’s drawings throbbed with the suggestion that disruptive feeling was all sexual. Though his venue denied him any overt reference his characters overflowed with lewd energies, which had to be manifested instead in tics and seizures, eruptions and deformations. His poor doomed Fonebones seemed to chart my path from twitch to orgasm, the way sex first smoothed away tics, then supplanted them with a violent double: little death, big tic. So perhaps it was Don Martin’s fault that I always expected a punishment after sex, cringed in anticipation of the steamroller or plummeting anvil to follow.

Possibly Kimmery sensed it in me, this dread of a page about to be turned, revealing some ludicrous doom on the last panel of my cartoon. Another fact about Don Martin: He never used the same character twice-each was an innocent pawn with no carry-over from one episode to the next, no understanding of his role or fate. A Fonebone was a placeholder, a disposable clone or stooge. A member of the Butt Trust.

“Is something the matter?” she said, stopping what she was doing, what I was doing.

“Everything’s fine. I mean, better than fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Just one thing, Kimmery. Promise me you won’t go back to the Zendo. At least for a few days.”

“Why?”

“Just trust me, okay?”

“Okay.”

With that, her magic word, we were done talking.

Once Kimmery was asleep I dressed and tiptoed to her phone, which was on the floor in the big room. Shelf followed me in. I tapped his head five times, instantly reigniting his ragged purring, then pushed him away. The phone showed a number under its plastic window. I fed the number into the speed dial of the doormen’s cell phone, wincing at the beeping tones, which echoed in the silent empty room like musical gunshots. Kimmery didn’t stir on her mattress, though. She lay splayed like a child making a snow angel. I wanted to go and kneel and trace her shape with my fingertips or my breath. Instead I found her key ring and separated the five keys. The key to the apartment was easy to identify, and that was the only one I left behind-she’d have to deal with her suspicious neighbors to get into the lobby downstairs. I took the other four, figuring one would get me into the Zendo. The last two probably unlocked Oreo Man’s place. Those I’d lose.