Zeod said, “You want something, Crazyman, don’t you?”
I saw the counter boy’s eyes roll in weary anticipation. The slicer rarely saw this much action at two or three in the morning. They’d have to sluice it down with suds again before the night was done.
“Please-ghostradish, pepperpony, kaiserphone-please, uh, the same as Tony.”
“You want the same? All four the same?”
“Yes,” I gasped. I couldn’t think past Tony’s list of sandwiches. My hunger for them was absolute. I had to match Tony sandwich for sandwich, a gastronomic mirroring-tic-I’d understand him by the time I was through the fourth, I figured. We would achieve a Zeod’s mind-meld, with Thousand Island dressing.
While Zeod rode his counter boy to complete the large order I hid in the back near the beverage cases, picked out a liter of Coke and a bag of chips, and reorganized and counted a disorderly shelf of cat-food cans.
“Okay, Lionel.” Zeod was always most gentle with me when handing over his precious cargo-we shared that reverence for his product. “Put it on Frank’s tab, right?” He gathered my soda and chips in a large bag with the paper-wrapped sandwiches.
“No, no-” I rustled in my pockets for a tight-folded twenty.
“What’s the matter? Why not the boss man pick it up?”
“I want to pay you.” I pushed the bill across the counter. Zeod took it and arched his eyebrows.
“Very funny business,” he said, and made a chuck-chuck-chuck sound with his tongue in his cheek.
“What?”
“Same thing as Tony, before you,” he said. “He says he wants to pay. Same thing.”
“Listen, Zeod. If Tony comes back in here tonight”-I fought off a howling sound that wanted to come out of me, the cry of a sandwich predator over fresh kill he has yet to devour-“don’t tell him you saw me, okay?”
Zeod winked. Somehow this made sense to him. I felt a thing that was either a nauseous wave of paranoia-perhaps Zeod was an agent of Tony’s, absolutely in his pocket, and would be on the phone to him the minute I was out of the shop-or else my stomach spasming in anticipation of food. “Okay, Chief,” said Zeod as I went out the door.
I came around the block the long way again, quickly confirmed that the giant and Tony were still in their places, then swerved across the street and slipped up beside the Tracer, key in hand. The giant’s compact was six cars ahead, but I couldn’t see his clifflike silhouette from where I stood as I unlocked the car. I only hoped that meant he couldn’t see me. I plopped Zeod’s bag on the passenger seat, jumped inside, and slammed the door shut as quickly as I could, praying that the brief flash of the interior light hadn’t registered in the giant’s rearview. Then I slumped down in my place so I’d be invisible, on the slight chance he did turn and could make anything out through a thickness of twelve darkened windshields. Meanwhile I got my hands busy unfurling the paper around one of Zeod’s roast beef and horseradish specials. Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.
Now it was a proper stakeout-if only I could figure what it was I was waiting to see happen. Not that I could see much from inside the Tracer. The giant’s car was still in its place but I couldn’t confirm his existence inside it. And at this extreme angle all I could see was a thin slice of bright L &L window. Twice Tony paced to the front of the store, just long enough for me to identify his form in shadow and a flash of an elbow, a left-behind plume of cigarette exhalation across the edge of Minna’s destination map, the Queens airports at the left margin showing Minna’s Magic Marker scrawclass="underline" $18. Bergen Street was a void in my rearview, Smith Street only marginally brighter ahead of me. It was a quarter to four. I felt the F train’s rumble underneath Bergen, first as it slowed into the station and paused there, then a second tremor as it departed. A minute later the 67 bus rolled like a great battered appliance down Bergen, empty apart from the driver. Public transportation was the night’s pulse, the beep on the monitor at the patient’s bedside. In a few hours those same trains and buses would be jammed with jawing, caffeinated faces, littered with newspapers and fresh gum. Now they kept the faith. Me, I had the cold to keep me awake, that and the liter of Coca-Cola and my assignment, my will to influence the outcome of the night’s strange stalemate. Those would have to slug it out with the soporific powers of the roast-beef sandwich, the dreamy pull of my fresh memories of Kimmery, the throb of my skull where the giant had clubbed me with his gun.
What was the giant waiting for?
What did Tony want to find in Minna’s files?
Why were his sandwiches in the car?
Why had Julia flown to Boston?
Who was Bailey anyway?
I opened my bag of chips, took a slug of my cola, and put myself to work on those new and old questions and on staying awake.
Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s-the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance-as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
I’ve spent long nights in that place. This night, though, consisted of summoning up that state I’d so often worked to banish. I was alone now, sunna, no Men, my own boss on this stakeout with who-knew-what riding on its outcome. If I fell asleep the little world of my investigation would crumble. I needed to find my insomniac self, to agitate my problem-solving brain, if not to solve actual problems, then to worry at them for the purpose of keeping my dumb eyeballs propped open.
Avoiding becoming one with everything: that was my big challenge at the moment.
It was four-thirty. My consciousness was distended, the tics like islands in an ocean of fog.
Who needed sleep? I asked myself. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Minna had liked to say.
I guess he had his chance now.
I’ll die when I’m dead, my brain recited in Minna’s voice. Not a minute sooner, you kosher macaroons!
A diet of bread. A guy on a bed.
No, no bed. No car. No phone.
Phone.
The cell phone. I pulled it out, rang the L &L number. It rang three times before a hand picked it up.
“No cars,” said Danny lazily. If I knew him, he’d been sleeping with his head on the counter, weary of pretending to listen to whatever Tony was ranting about.
I’d have given a lot, of course, to know what Tony was ranting about.
“It’s me, Danny. Put Tony on.”
“Yo,” he said, unsurprisable. “Here you go.”
“What?” said Tony.
“It’s me,” I said. “Deskjob.”
“You fucking little freak,” said Tony. “I’ll kill you.”
I outweighed Tony only by about fifty pounds. “You had your chance,” I heard myself say. Tony still brought out the romantic in me. We’d be two Bogarts to the end. “Except if you’d pulled that trigger, you might have blown a hole in your foot, or in some far-off toddler on his bike.”
“Oh, I’d of straightened it out,” Tony said. “I wish I had put a coupla holes in you. Leaving me with that fucking cop.”
“Remember it any way you like. I’m trying to help you at the moment.”