Motherless Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn Read Free

Book: Motherless Brooklyn Read Free
Author: Jonathan Lethem
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pick him up somewhere. Something complicated was going on, and—surprise!—we stooges were out of the loop again.
    I whispered inaudibly through narrowed lips,
Stakeout, snakeout, ambush Zendo
.
    The Lords of Snakebush
.
    “Gimme a smoke,” said Minna. Coney leaned over me with a pack of Malls, one tapped out an inch or so for the boss to pluck. Minnaput it in his mouth and lit it himself, pursing his brow in concentration, sheltering the lighter in the frame of his collar. He drew in, then gusted smoke into our airspace. “Okay, listen,” he said, as though we weren’t already hanging on his words. Minna Men to the bone.
    “I’m going in,” he said, narrowing his eyes at the Zendo. “They’ll buzz me. I’ll swing the door wide. I want you”—he nodded at Coney—“to grab the door, get inside, just inside, and wait there, at the bottom of the stairs.”
    “What if they come meet you?” said Coney.
    “Worry about that if it happens,” said Minna curtly.
    “Okay, but what if—”
    Minna waved him off before he could finish. Really Coney was groping for comprehension of his role, but it wasn’t forthcoming.
    “Lionel—” started Minna.

     
    Lionel, my name. Frank and the Minna Men pronounced it to rhyme with
vinyl.
Lionel Essrog.
Line-all
.
    Liable Guesscog.
    Final Escrow.
    Ironic Pissclam.
    And so on.
    My own name was the original verbal taffy, by now stretched to filament-thin threads that lay all over the floor of my echo-chamber skull. Slack, the flavor all chewed out of it.

     
    “Here.” Minna dropped a radio monitor and headphones in my lap, then patted his rib pocket. “I’m wired. I’ll be coming over that thinglive. Listen close. If I say, uh, ‘Not if my life depended on it,’ you get out of the car and knock on the door here, Gilbert lets you in, two of you rush upstairs and find me quick, okay?”
    Eat me, dickweed
was almost dislodged from my mouth in the excitement, but I breathed in sharply and swallowed the words, said nothing instead.
    “We’re not carrying,” said Coney.
    “What?” said Minna.
    “A piece, I don’t have a piece.”
    “What’s with
piece?
Say
gun
, Gilbert.”
    “No gun, Frank.”
    “That’s what I count on. That’s how I sleep at night, you have to know. You with no gun. I wouldn’t want you chuckleheads coming up a stairway behind me with a hairpin, with a harmonica, let alone a gun. I’ve got a gun. You just show up.”
    “Sorry, Frank.”
    “With an unlit cigar, with a fucking Buffalo chicken wing.”
    “Sorry, Frank.”
    “Just listen. If you hear me say, uh, ‘First I gotta use the bathroom,’ that means we’re coming out. You get Gilbert, get back in the car, get ready to follow. You got it?”
    Get, get, get, GOT!
said my brain.
Duck, duck, duck, GOOSE!
    “Life depended, rush the Zendo,” was what I said aloud. “Use the bathroom, start the car.”
    “Genius, Freakshow,” said Minna. He pinched my cheek, then tossed his cigarette behind him into the street, where it tumbled, sparks scattering. His eyes were far away.
    Coney got out of the car, and I scooted over to the driver’s seat. Minna thumped the hood once, as if patting a dog on its head after saying
stay
, then slipped past the front bumper, put his finger up to slow Coney, crossed the pavement to the door of One-oh-nine, and hit the doorbell under the Zendo sign. Coney leaned against the car, waiting. I put on the headphones, got a clear sound of Minna’s shoescraping pavement over the wire so I knew it was working. When I looked up I saw the doorman from the big place to the right watching us, but he wasn’t doing anything apart from watching.
    I heard the buzzer sound, live and over the wire both. Minna went in, sweeping the door wide. Coney skipped over, grabbed the door, and disappeared inside, too.
    Footsteps upstairs, no voices yet. Now suddenly I dwelled in two worlds, eyes and quivering body in the driver’s seat of the Lincoln, watching from my parking

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