Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

“So Frank was hiding the secret of his brother’s existence from The Clients,” I said. “Meanwhile the two of them are running a number on Gerard’s Japanese partners. And then the deal goes- lemongrass, sour-ball, fuckitall!” I was unable to continue until I made a farting, fricative sound into the wind-“blew a raspberry,” in the parlance-to satisfy the expulsive tic. Bits of saliva spattered back into my face. “Then Fujisaki figured out someone was taking their money,” I said finally, wiping at myself with my sleeve.

She looked at me with disgust. I’d drawn her back, in a way. “Yes,” she said.

“And Gerard fingered- Mr. Fingerphone! Uncle Sourgrass! -Gerard fingered Frank and Ullman to save himself.”

“That’s what Tony thought,” she said, distant again.

“Fujisaki must have told Gerard to take care of it, as a show of good faith. So Gerard hired the killer.”

Which was where I, innocent stooge, had walked into the story. Frank Minna had installed me and Gilbert there outside the Zendo two days before because he smelled a rat, didn’t trust Gerard, and wanted some backup on the street. Warm bodies. If something went wrong he’d bring me and Gilbert up to speed, let us in on the scam, or so he must have thought. And if things went smooly, it was better to keep us where we’d always been, were born to be-in the dark.

“You know more about it than me,” said Julia. She grew agitated now, her storyteller’s reverie dissipated, the talk turning to a killer’s hiring and all that went with it unsaid. I had to turn away myself now, imitate her pensive searching of the horizon, though my fingers danced idiotically on the lighthouse tower rail, counting one-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five. I’d grown more accustomed to her short new haircut, but those eyes of hers had blazed so long from behind a curtain of hair that without that curtain they blazed too hard. I was drawn and repelled at once, antic with ambivalence. Now I understood that when Frank showed her to us at the end of high school, she was only five or six years older than we were, though it seemed he’d plucked a woman off a fading movie poster. How Nantucket and Buddhism could have made her so old and fierce, I couldn’t fathom. I suppose Frank himself had made her old in a hurry, in ways he’d intended, with panty hose and peroxide and sarcasm-and ways he hadn’t.

“Let me work out the next part,” I said. I felt as if I were trying to get through a joke without ticcing, but there wasn’t a punch line in sight. “After Frank and Ullman were gone, Gerard had to make sure he eliminated any link between himself and Frank Minna. That meant you and Tony.”

Gerard, I surmised, had been in a panic, afraid of Fujisaki and The Clients both. By having his brother killed he’d damaged a delicate system of controls, one that had kept him safe from Matricardi and Rockaforte for more than a decade. And Fujisaki had announced a visit to New York to inspect their holdings, to enact a little hands-on management (albeit disguised as monks), right as Gerard was frantically trying to mop up the mess. Perhaps they’d also wanted to see Gerard mop up the mess, wanted to feel him squirm a little.

Gerard had reasoned rightly that if Frank confided in anyone it would be his wife and his right-hand man, his groomed successor. Which was to say, Tony. This last part still came a little hard for me. That Tony had paid with his life for being Frank’s intimate was a lousy excuse for consolation.

“It was Gerard who called to say that Frank was dead,” I suggested. “Not the hospital.”

She turned and looked at me with her teeth gritted, tears making glossy tracks on her face. “Very good, Lionel,” she whispered. I reached for her cheeks to blot her tears with my sleeve, but she darted back, uninterested in my care.

“But you didn’t trust him, so you ran.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Lionel,” she said, her voice vibrant with hate. “Why would I come here if I were hiding from Gerard ?”

“Idiot Dressfork! Alphabet Tuningfreak!” I cleared the tic with a jerk of my stiff neck. “I don’t understand,” I told her.

“He arranged for me to use this as a safe house. He said the people who killed Frank were looking for the rest of us. I trusted him.”

I began to see. Lucius Sinole had said that Julia’s records showed a series of visits to Boston. “This was your hideaway when you got angry at Frank,” I suggested. “Your retreat into the past.”

“I wasn’t hiding.”

“Did Frank know that you and Gerard were in touch?”

“He didn’t care.”

“Were you and Gerard still lovers?”

“Only when his … spiritual path allowed it.” She spat the words. The tears had dried on her face.

“When did you figure out the truth?”

“I called Tony. We compared notes. Gerard underestimated what Tony knew.”

What Tony knew was the least of it, I thought. Tony meant to take over Frank Minna’s share of the Fujisaki scam, not knowing that nothing remained to take over. He wanted that and much more. As I ached always to be a virtuous detective, Tony ached to be a corrupt one, or even to be an out-and-out wiseguy. He’d been fitting himself for the darkest shoes in Frank Minna’s wardrobe from the moment he learned they existed, perhaps on that day when we unloaded the guitars and amplifiers and were introduced to Matricardi and Rockaforte, perhaps even sooner, on some uglier errand only he and Frank knew about. Certainly he understood by the time Frank’s van windows had been smashed. His special glee that day was at having his Mafioso fantasies confirmed, as well as at seeing Frank Minna’s vulnerability for the first time. If Frank’s fortunes could rise and fall, that episode said, then power was fluid, and so Tony might someday have a share of it himself. The moment Frank was dead Tony envisioned himself playing Frank on both stages, for The Clients in Brooklyn and for Gerard and the Fujisaki Corporation up in Yorkville, only playing the part with greater efficiency and brutality, without Frank Minna’s goofy edges, those soft places that caused him to collect freaks like me or that finally led him astray.

Gerard’s picture of Tony was another part of that convoluted after-hours story that hadn’t been entirely a lie. I suppose Gerard couldn’t be the many things he was without knowing how to x-ray a mind like Tony’s at a single glance.

“You and Tony compared more than notes, Julia.” I regretted it the minute I said it.

She looked at me with pity now.

“So I fucked him.” She took out a cigarette and lighter from her purse. “I fucked a lot of guys, Lionel. I fucked Tony and Danny, even Gilbert once. Everyone except you. It’s no big deal.” She put the cigarette in her lips and cupped her hands against the wind.

“Maybe it was to Tony,” I said, and regretted it even worse.

She only shrugged, worked the lighter uselessly again and again. Cars whirred past on the highway below, but nobody stopped at the lighthouse. We were alone in our torment and shame, and useless to each other.

It might not have been a big deal to Julia that she fucked the Minna Men, the Minna Boys, really, and maybe it was no big deal to Tony either-but I doubted it. You were the original woman , I wanted to tell her. When Minna brought you home to us we tried to learn what it meant for Frank to marry, we studied you to understand what a Minna Woman might be, and saw only rage-rage I now understood had concealed disappointment and fear, oceans of fear. We had watched women and letters soar past before, but you were the first that was addressed to us, and we tried to understand you. And we loved you.

I needed to rescue Julia now, retrieve her from this lighthouse and the bareness of her story against the Maine sky. I needed her to see that we were the same, disappointed lovers of Frank Minna, abandoned children.