Motherless Brooklyn Read Free Page B

luxury of worrying about it. I pushed away a host of tics and tried not to dwell on things I didn’t understand.
    I glanced at the door. Presumably Coney was still behind it. I wanted to hear
not if my life depended on it
so we could rush the stairs.
    I was startled by a knock on the driver’s window. It was the doorman who’d been watching. He gestured for me to roll down the window. I shook my head, he nodded his. Finally I complied, pulling the headphones off one ear so I could listen.
    “What?” I said, triply distracted—the power window had seduced my magpie mind and now demanded purposeless raising and lowering. I tried to keep it subtle.
    “Your friend, he wants you,” said the doorman, gesturing back toward his building.
    “What?” This was thoroughly confusing. I craned my neck to see past him, but there was nobody visible in the doorway of his building. Meanwhile, Minna was saying something over the wire. But not
bathroom
or
depended on it
.
    “Your friend,” the doorman repeated in his clumsy Eastern European accent, maybe Polish or Czech. “He asks for you.” He grinned, enjoying my bewilderment. I felt myself knitting my brow exaggeratedly,a tic, and wanted to tell him to wipe the grin off his face: Everything he was seeing was not to his credit.
    “What friend?” I said. Minna and Coney were both inside—I would have noticed if the Zendo door had budged
    “He said if you’re waiting, he’s ready,” said the doorman, nodding, gesturing again. “Wants to talk.”
    Now Minna was saying something about
“… make a mess on the marble floor …”
    “I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I said to the doorman.
“Dickweed!”
I winced, waved him off, tried to focus on the voices coming over the headphones.
    “Hey, hey,” the doorman said. He held up his hands. “I’m just bringing you a message, friend.”
    I zipped down the power window again, finally pried my fingers away. “No problem,” I said, and suppressed another
dickweed
into a high, chihuahuaesque barking sound, something like
yipke!
“But I can’t leave the car. Tell my
friend
if he wants to talk to come out and talk to me here. Okay,
friend?”
It seemed to me I had too many friends all of a sudden, and I didn’t know any of their names. I repeated my impulsive flapping motion with my hand, an expedient tic-and-gesture combo, trying to nudge this buffoon back to his doorway.
    “No, no. He said come in.”
    “… break an arm …”
I thought I heard Minna say.
    “Get his name, then,” I said, desperate. “Come back and tell me his name.”
    “He wants to talk to you.”
    “Okay,
eatmedoorman
, tell him I’ll be right there.” I powered up the window in his face. He tapped again, and I ignored him.
    “… first let me use your toilet …”
    I opened the car door and pushed the doorman out of the way, went to the Zendo door and knocked, six times, hard. “Coney,” I hissed. “Get out here.”
    Over the headset I heard Minna shut the bathroom door behindhim, begin running water.
“Hope you heard that, Freakshow,”
he whispered into his microphone, addressing me directly.
“We’re getting in a car. Don’t lose us. Play it cool.”
    Coney popped out of the door.
    “He’s coming out,” I said, pulling the headphones down around my neck.
    “Okay,” said Coney, eyes wide. We were in the thick of the action, for once.
    “You drive,” I said, touching my fingertip to his nose. He flinched me away like a fly. We hustled into the car, and Coney revved the engine. I threw the bag of cooling Castles and paper wreckage into the backseat. The idiot doorman had vanished into his building. I put him out of my mind for the moment.
    We sat facing forward, our car shrouded in its own sam, waiting, vibrating. My brain went
Follow that car! Hollywood star! When you wish upon a cigar!
My jaw worked, chewing the words back down, keeping silent. Gilbert’s hands gripped the wheel, mine drummed quietly in my lap,