Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

“Where do we go from here?” she said.

“We go home, Julia,” I said. “I’m sorry about Frank and Tony, but the story’s over. You and me, we made it through alive.”

It was only a slight exaggeration. The story would be over at some secret moment in the next few hours or days when something found Gerard Minna, a bullet or blade that had been searching for him for almost twenty years.

Meanwhile, I flicked the safety back and forth, impelled, counting. At five I stopped, temporarily satisfied. That left the safety off, the gun ready to shoot. My fingers were unbearably curious about the trigger’s action, its resistance and weight.

“Where’s your home, Lionel? Upstairs from L and L?”

“Saint Vengeance Home for Bailey,” I ticced.

“Is that what you call it?” said Julia.

Before my finger could pulse on the trigger the way it craved to I flung the gun out toward the ocean with all the force of my overwound-watchspring body. It sailed out past the rocks, but the tiny splash of its disappearance into the sea was lost in the wind and the ambient crash of the surf.

One , I counted.

Before Julia could calculate the meaning of my action I darted as if for an elusive shoulder and grabbed the muzzle of her gun, then twisted it out of her hand and hurled with all the strength in my legs, like a center fielder deep at the wall straining for a distant cutoff man. Julia’s gun went farther than Tony’s, out to where the waves that would reach the rocks were just taking shape, the sea curling, discovering its form.

That made two .

“Don’t hurt me, Lionel.” She backed away, her shocked eyes framed by the bristly halo of her crew cut, her mouth crooked with fear and fury.

“It’s over, Julia. Nobody’s going to hurt you.” I couldn’t concentrate on her fully, needing something more to throw into the sea. I pulled Minna’s beeper out of my pocket. It was a tool of The Clients, evidence of their hold on Frank, and it deserved to be interred with the guns. I threw it as far as I could, but it didn’t have enough heft to keep from being knocked down by the wind, and so trickled down between two wet, mossy boulders.

Three .

Nxt I found the cell phone. The instant it came into my hand, Kimmery’s number begged for dialing. I pushed the impulse aside, substituted the gratification of flinging it off the lighthouse deck, picturing the doormen in the rental car who I’d taken it from. It flew truer than the beeper, made it out to the water.

Four .

“Give me something to throw,” I told Julia.

“What?”

“I need something, one more thing.”

“You’re crazy.”

I considered Frank’s watch. I was sentimental about the watch. It had no taint of doormen or Clients.

“Give me something,” I said again. “Look in your purse.”

“Go to hell, Lionel.”

Julia had always been the hardest-boiled of us all, it struck me now. We who were from Brooklyn, we jerks from nowhere-or from somewhere, in the case of Frank and Gerard. We couldn’t hold a candle to the girl from Nantucket and I thought I might finally understand why. She was the hardest-boiled because she was the unhappiest. She was maybe the unhappiest person I’d ever met.

I suppose losing Frank Minna, hard as it was, was easier for those of us who’d actually had him, actually felt his love. The thing Julia lost she’d never possessed in the first place.

But her pain was no longer my concern.

You choose your battles , Frank Minna used to say, though the term was hardly original to him.

You also distance yourself from cruelty, if you have any brains. I was developing a few.

I took off my right shoe, felt the polished leather that had served me well, the fine stitching and the fraying lace, kissed it good-bye on the top of the tongue, then threw it high and far and watched it splash silently into the waves.

Five , I thought.

But who’s counting?

“Good-bye, Julia,” I said.

“Screw you, you maniac.” She knelt and picked up her lighter, and this time she got her cigarette lit on the first flick. “Barnabaileyscrewjuliaminna.”

It was my final word on the subject.

So I drove with my gas-pedal-and-brake foot clad only in a dress sock, back to Brooklyn.

Then somewhere, sometime, a circuit closed. It was a secret from me, but I knew the secret existed. A man-two men?-found another man. Lifted an instrument, gun, knife? Say gun. Did a job. Took care of a job. Collected a debf life. This was the finishing of something between two brothers, a transaction of brotherly love-hate, something playing out, a dark, wobbly melody. The notes of the melody had been other people, boys-turned-Minna Men, mobsters, monks, doormen. And women, one woman especially. We’d all been notes in the melody, but the point of the song was the brothers, and the payoff, the last note struck-a scream? a bloody beat? a bare interrupted moan?-or not even a moan, perhaps. In my guilt I’d like to think so. Let it finish in silence. Let it be, then, that Rama-lama-ding-dong died in his sleep.

We sat together in the L &L storefront at two in the morning, playing poker on the counter, listening to Boyz 2 Men, courtesy of Danny. Now that Frank and Tony were gone, Danny could play the sort of music he liked. It was one of a number of changes.

“One card,” said Gilbert. I was the dealer, so I slid his discard toward me and offered him a fresh selection from the top of the deck.

“Jesus, Gil,” said the ex-Garbage Cop. He was a driver now, a part of the new L &L. “You’re always one card or no cards -why can’t I get dealt anything but crap?”

“That’s ’cause you’re still in charge of garbage, Loomis,” said Gilbert happily. “Even though you quit the force, doesn’t matter. Someone’s gotta handle it.”

“Handle with garbagecrap!” I declared as I dealt myself three new cards.

Gilbert had been released two weeks before, after five nights in the lockup, for want of evidence in Ullman’s killing. Detective Seminole had called us to apologize, excessively sheepish, I thought, as though he were still a little afraid. Gilbert’s size and manner had carried him through the ordeal pretty well, though he came out short a wrist-watch and had involuntarily given up smoking during his stay, having been connived out of every cigarette on his person. He was making up for it now in cigarettes, and in beer and coffee and Sno Balls and White Castles and Zeod’s pastrami heroes, but no flow of indulgences could be constant enough to stem his complaints at how we’d abandoned him. Fortunately he was winning hands tonight.

Danny sat apart from the three of us, silent, eyebrows raised slightly between his poker hand and his new fedora. He sat a little farther apart and dressed a little sharper each passing night, or so it seemed to me. Leadership of L &L had fallen to him like an easy rebound, one he didn’t even have to jump for, while the other players boxed and elbowed and sweated on the wrong part of the floor. What Danny knew or didn’t know about Gerard and Fujisaki was never said. He took my account of the events in Maine and nodded once, and we were done speaking of it. It turned out it was that simple. Want to be the new Frank Minna? Dress the part, and shut up, and wait. Court Street will know you when it sees you. Zeod will put the tab in your name. Gilbert and Loomis and I couldn’t have argued. We were Dapper and the Stooges, it was plain to the eye.

L &L was a detective agency, a clean one for the first time. So clean we didn’t have any clients. So we were also a car service, a real one now, one thatdidn’t turn away calls unless we truly were out of cars. Danny was even having flyers printed up, and new business cards, boasting of our economy and efficiency to points all over the boroughs. The Lincoln Minna had bled to death inside was clean now too, part of a small fleet of cars making regular runs between the Cobble Hill Nursing Home on Henry Street and the Promenade Diner at the end of Montague, between the Boerum Hill Inn and stylish apartment buildings along Prospect Park West and Joralemon Street.