“Home,” I said, before I recalled that he’d been to the place I called home once already this evening, and that it wasn’t in my best interests to lead him there again. “Except actually Iȁd like to get a sandwich first. I’m starving. You want to get a sandwich with me? There’s a place on Smith, called Zeod’s, if that’s okay, we’ll get a sandwich and then maybe part ways there, since I’m kind of shy about bringing people back to my place-” As I turned to deliver my speech my shoulder-lust was activated, and I began reaching for him again.
He knocked my hand away. “Slow down, Alibi. What’s the matter with you?”
“Tourette’s syndrome,” I said, with a grim sense of inevitability. Tourette’s was my other name, and, like my name, my brain could never leave the words unmolested. Sure enough, I produced my own echo: “Tourette is the shitman!” Nodding, gulping, flinching, I tried to silence myself, walk quickly toward the sandwich shop, and keep my eyes down, so that the detective would be out of range of my shoulder-scope. No good, I was juggling too much, and when I reticced, it came out a bellow: “Tourette Is the Shitman!”
“He’s the shitman, huh?” The detective apparently thought we were exchanging up-to-the-minute street jargon. “Can you take me to him?”
“No, no, there’s no Tourette,” I said, catching my breath. I felt mad for food, desperate to shake the detective, and choked with imminent tics.
“Don’t worry,” said the detective, talking down to me. “I won’t tell him who gave out his name.”
He thought he was grooming a stool pigeon. I could only try not to laugh or shout. Let Tourette be the suspect and maybe I’d get off the hook.
On Smith Street we veered into Zeod’s Twenty-Four-Hour Market, where the odors of baloney and bad coffee mingled with those of pistachio, dates, and St. John’s bread. If the cop wanted an Arab, I’d give him an Arab. Zeod himself stood on the elevated ramp behind the Plexiglas-and-plywood counter. He saw me and said, “Crazyman! How are you my friend?”
“Not so good,” I admitted. The detective hovered behind me, tempting me to turn my head again. I resisted.
“Where’s Frank?” said Zeod. “How I never see Frank anymore?”
Here was my chance to deliver the news at last, and my heart wasn’t up to it. “He’s in the hospital,” I said, unable now to keep from glancing nervously at the homicide detective. “Doctorbyebye!” recalled my Tourette’s.
“Some crazyman you are,” said Zeod, smiling and arching his hedge of eyebrows knowingly at my official shadow. “You tell Frank Zeod asks, okay, partner?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that. How about a sandwich for now? Turkey on a kaiser, plenty of mustard.”
Zeod nodded at his second, an indolent Dominican kid, who moved to the slicer. Zeod never made sandwiches himself. But he’d taught his countermen well, to slice extraordinarily thin and drape the meat as it slid off the blade so it fell in bunches, rather than stacking airlessly, to make a sandwich with that fluffy compressibility I craved. I let myself be hypnotized by the whine of the slicer, the rhythm of the kid’s arm as he received the slices and dripped them onto the kaiser roll. Zeod watched me. He knew I obsessed on his sandwiches, and it pleased him. “You and your friend?” he said magnanimously.
The detective shook his head. “Pack of Marlboro Lights,” he said.
“Okay. You want a soda, Crazyman? Get yourself.” I went and got a Coke out of the cooler while Zeod put my sandwich and the cop’s cigarettes into a brown paper bag with a plastic fork and a sheaf of napkins.
“Charge it to Frank, yes, my friend?”
I couldn’t speak. I took the bag and we stepped back out onto Smith Street.
“Sleeping with the dead man’s wife,” said the detective. “Now you’re eating on his tab. That takes some gall.”
“You misunderstand,” I said.
“Then maybe you better set me straight,” he said. “Gimme those cigarettes.”
“I work for Frank-”
“Worked. He’s dead. Why didn’t you tell your friend the A-rab?”
“Arab-eye!-I don’t know. No reason.” I handed the cop his Marlboros. “Eatmebailey, repeatmebailey, repeatmobile-could we continue this maybe another time? Because-retreatmobile!-because now I really urgently have to go home and-eatbail! beatmail!-eat this sandwich.”
“You work for him where? At the car service?”
Detective agency, I silently corrected. “Uh, yeah.”
“So you and his wife were, what? Driving around? Where’s the car?”
“She wanted to go shopping.” This lie came out so blessedly smooth and un-tic-laden it felt like the truth. For that reason or some other, the detective didn’t challenge it.
“So you’d describe yourself as, what? A friend of the deceased?”
“Trend the decreased! Mend the retreats!-sure, that’s right.”
He was learning to ignore my outbursts. “So where are we going now? Your house?” He lit a cigarette without breaking stride. “Looks like you’re headed back to work.”
I didn’t want to tell him how little difference there was between the two.
“Let’s go in here,” I said, jerking my neck sideways as we crossed Bergen Street, letting my physical tic lead me-navigation by TouretteWherx2014;into the Casino.
The Casino was Minna’s name for Smith Street’s hole-in-the-wall newspaper shop, which had a single wall of magazines and a case of Pepsi and Snapple crammed into a space the size of a large closet. The Casino was named for the lines that stretched each morning to buy Lotto and Scratchers and Jumble 6 and Pickball, for the fortune being made on games of chance by the newsstand’s immigrant Korean owners, for the hearts being quietly broken there round the clock. There was something tragic in the way they stood obediently waiting, many of them elderly, others new immigrants, illiterate except in the small language of their chosen game, deferring to anyone with real business, like the purchase of a magazine, a pack of double-A batteries, or a tube of lip gloss. That docility was heartbreaking. The games were over almost before they started, the foil scraped off tickets with a key or a dime, the contrived near-misses underneath bared. (New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom.) The sidewalk just outside the Casino was strewn with discarded tickets, the chaff of wasted hope.
But I was hardly in a position to criticize lost causes. I had no reason for visiting the Casino except that I associated it with Minna, with Minna alive. If I visited enough of his haunts before news of his death spread along Court and Smith Street, I might persuade myself against the evidence of my own eyes-and against the fact of the homicide cop on my heels-that nothing had happened.
“What’re we doing?” said the detective.
“I, uh, need something to read with my sandwich.”
The desultory magazines were shelved two deep in the rack-there weren’t more than one or two customers for GQ or Wired or Brooklyn Bridge per month around here. Me, I was bluffing, didn’t read magazines at all. Then I spotted a familiar face, on a magazine called Vibe: The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Before a blurred cream background he posed resting his head against the neck of a pink guitar, his eyes demure. The unpronounceable typographical glyph with which he had replaced his name was shaved into the hair at his temple.
“Skrubble,” I said.
“What?”
“Plavshk,” I said. My brain had decided to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph, a linguistic foray into the lands On Beyond Zebra. I lifted up the magazine.