“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?”