Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  “What’s the matter, Frank?” said Tony.

  “Nothing’s the matter. Got something for us to do, that’s all.”

  “Something what? For who?”

  “Just a job. What do we have in here that’s like a crowbar or something?” Minna smoked furiously to mask his unease.

  “A crowbar?”

  “Just something you can swing. Like a crowbar. I’ve got a bat and a lug wrench in my trunk. Stuff like that.”

  “Sounds like you want a gun,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “If I wanted a gun I’d get a gun, you diphthong. This doesn’t take a gun.”

  “You want chains?” said Gilbert, meaning to be helpful. “There’s a whole bunch of chains in the Pontiac.”

  “Crowbar, crowbar, crowbar. Why do I even bother with you mystic seers anymore? If I wanted my mind read I’d call Gladys Knight for chrissakes.”

  “Dionne Warwick,” said Gilbert.

  “What?”

  “Psychic Hotline’s Dionne Warwick, not Gladys Knight.”

  “Psychicwarlock!”

  “Got some pipe downstairs,” mused Danny, only now laying down the hand he’d been holding since Minna barged into the office. It was a full house, jacks and eights.

  “It’s gotta be swingable,” said Minna. “Let’s see.”

  The phone rang and I grabbed for it and said, “L&L.”

  “Tell them we don’t have any cars,” said Minna.

  “This needs all four of us?” I said. I was courting fond notions of missing the crowbar-and-lug-wrench project, whatever it was, and driving someone out to Sheepshead Bay instead.

  “Yes, Freakboy. We’re all going.”

  I got rid of the call. Twenty minutes later we were loaded up with pipes, lug wrench, car jack and a souvenir Yankee bat from Bat Day in Minna’s old Impala, the least distinguished of L&L’s many cars, and another bad sign if I was trying to read signs. Minna drove us down Wyckoff, past the projects, then circled around, south on Fourth Avenue down to President Street, and back toward Court. He was stalling, checking his watch.

  We turned on Smith, and Minna parked us a block below the empty supermarket lot. The carnival had shut down for the night, plywood boards up over the concessions, rides stilled, the evening’s discarded beer cups and sausage wrappers glowing against the moonlit rubblescape. We crept onto the lot with our implements, following Minna wordlessly now, no longer chafing at his leadership, instead lulled into our deep obedient rhythm as his Men. He pointed at the Ferris wheel.

  “Take it out.”

  “Eh?”

  “Destroy the wheel, you candied yams.”

  Gilbert understood soonest, perhaps because the task suited his skills and temperament so well. He took a swing at the nearest line of neon with his chunk of pipe, smashing it easily, bringing a rain of silver dust. Tony and Danny and I followed his lead. We attacked the body of the wheel, our first swings tentative, measuring our strength, then lashing out, unloading. It was easy to damage the neon, not easy at all to impress the frame of the wheel, but we set at it, attacked any joint or vulnerable weld, prying up the electrical cable and chopping at it with the sharpest edge of the wrench until insulation and wire were bare and mangled, then frayed. Minna himself wielded the Yankee bat, splintering its wood against the gates that held riders into their seats, not breaking them but changing their shape. Gilbert and I got inside the frame of the wheel and with all our weight dragged at one of the chairs until we ruptured the hinge. Then we found the brake and released the wheel to turn so that we could apply our malicious affection to the whole of it. A couple of Dominican teenagers stood watching us from across the street. We ignored them, bore down on the Ferris wheel, hurrying but not frantic, absolutely Minna’s to direct but not even needing direction. We acted as one body to destroy the amusement. This was the Agency at its mature peak: unquestioning and thorough in carrying out an action even when it bordered on sheer Dada.

  “Frank loved you, Lionel,” said Rockaforte.

  “I, uh, I know.”

  “For that reason we care for you, for that reason we are concerned.”

  “Though we have not seen you since you were a boy,” said Matricardi.

  “A boy who barked,” said Rockaforte. “We remember. Frank brought and you stood before us in this very room and you barked.”

  “And Frank spoke of your sickness many times.”

  “He loved you though he considered you a freak.”

  “He used that very word.”

  “You helped him build, you were one of his boys, and now you are a man and you stand before us in this hour of pain and misunderstanding.”

  Matricardi and Rockaforte had looked sepulchral to me as a teenager and they looked no worse now, their skin mummified, their thin hair in a kind of spider- sheen over their reflective pates, Matricardi’s ears and scarred nose dwarfing his other features, Rockaforte’s face puffier and more potatolike. They were dressed as twins in black suits, whether consciously in mourning or not I couldn’t know. They sat together on the tightly upholstered couch and when I stepped through the door I thought I saw their hands first joined on the cushions in the space between them, then jerking to their laps. I stood far enough back that I wasn’t tempted to reach out and play pattycake, to slap at their folded hands or the place their hands had been resting.

  The Degraw Street brownstone was unchanged, outside and in, apart from a dense, even layer of dust on the furniture and carpet and picture frames in the parlor. The air in the room swam with stirred dust, as though Matricardi and Rockaforte had arrived just a few moments before. They visited their Brooklyn shrine less often than in the past, I supposed. I wondered who drove them in from Jersey and whether they took any pains not to be seen coming here or whether they cared. Perhaps no one alive in Carroll Gardens knew them by sight anymore.

  A neighborhood’s secret lords could also be Invisible Men.

  “What is between you and Tony?” said Matricardi.

  “I want to find Frank’s killer.” I’d already heard myself say this too many times, and meaning was leaking out of the phrase. It threatened to become a sort of moral tic: findfrank’skiller.

  “Why don’t you follow Tony in this? Shouldn’t you act as one, as brothers?”

  “I was there. When they took Frank. Tony—Hospitabailey!—Tony wasn’t there.”

  “You’re saying then that he should follow you.”

  “He shouldn’t get in my way. Essway! Wrongway!” I winced, hating to tic now, in front of them.

  “You’re upset, Lionel.”

  “Sure I’m upset.” Why should I confess my distrust to those I distrusted? The more Matricardi and Rockaforte spoke Tony’s name, the more certain I was they were tangled together in this somehow, and that Tony was far more familiar with The Clients than I’d been in the years since our first visit to this crypt, this mausoleum. I’d come away with a fork, he with something more. Why should I accuse one half of a conspiracy to the other? Instead I squinted and turned my head and pursed my lips, trying to avoid the obvious, finally acceded to The Clients’ power of suggestion and barked once, loudly.

  “You are afflicted and we feel for you. A man shouldn’t run, and he shouldn’t woof like a dog. He should find peace.”

  “Why doesn’t Tony want me looking into Frank’s murder?”

  “Tony wishes this thing to be done correctly and with care. Work with him, Lionel.”

  “Why do you speak for Tony?” I gritted my teeth as I spoke the words. It wasn’t actly ticcing, but I’d begun to echo The Clients’ verbal rhythms, the cloistered Ping-Pong of their diction.

  Matricardi sighed and looked at Rockaforte. Rockaforte raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you like this house?” said Matricardi.

  I considered the dust-covered parlor, the load of ancient furnishing between the carpet and the ceiling’s scrollwork, how it all hung suspended inside the shell of the warehouse-brownstone. I felt the presence of the past, of moth
ers and sons, deals and understandings, one dead hand gripping another—dead hands were nested here on Degraw Street like a series of Chinese boxes. Including Frank Minna’s. There were so many ways I didn’t like it I didn’t know where to begin, except that I knew I shouldn’t allow myself to begin at all.

  “It’s not a house,” I said, offering the very least of my objections. “It’s a room.”

  “He says it’s a room,” said Matricardi. “Lionel, this is my mother’s house where we sit. Where you stand so full of fury it makes you like a cornered dog.”

  “Somebody killed Frank.”

  “Are you accusing Tony?”

  “Accusatony! Excusebaloney! Funnymonopoly!” I squeezed my eyes shut to interrupt the seizure of language.

  “We wish you to understand, Lionel. We regret Frank’s passing. We miss him sorely. It is a soreness in our hearts. Nothing could please us more than to see his killer torn by birds or picked apart by insects with claws. Tony should have your help in bringing that day closer. You should stand behind him.”

  “What if my search brings me to Tony?” I’d let The Clients lead me to this pass in the conversation, and now there wasn’t any reason to pretend.

  “The dead live in our hearts, Lionel. From there Frank will never be dislodged. But now Tony has replaced Frank in the world of the living.”

  “What does that mean? You’ve replaced Frank with Tony?”

  “It means you shouldn’t act against Tony. Because our wishes go with him.”

  I understood now. It was Tony’s Italian apotheosis at last. I was thrilled for him.

  Unless it had been this way for years without my knowing. Maybe Tony Vermonte and The Clients ran deeper than Frank Minna and The Clients ever had.

  I considered the word replaced. I decided it was time to go.

  “I need your permission—” I began, then stopped. Who were The Clients, and what did their permission consist of? What was I thinking?

  “Speak, Lionel.”

  “I’m goi to keep looking,” I said. “With or without Tony’s help.”

  “Yes. We can see. And so we have an assignment for you. A suggestion.”

  “A place for you to apply your passion for justice.”

  “And your talent for detection. The training instilled.”

  “What?” Just a measure of the day’s angled brightness penetrated the heavy curtains of the parlor. I glared back at a row of thuggish midcentury faces staring out from picture frames, wondering which was Matricardi’s mom. The hot dogs I’d eaten were rumbling in my stomach. I longed to be outside, on the Brooklyn streets, anywhere but here.

  “You spoke with Julia,” said Matricardi. “You should find her. Bring her in as we brought you. Let us speak with her.”

  “She’s afraid,” I said. A frayed knot.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “She’s like me. She doesn’t trust Tony.”

  “Something is wrong between them.”

  This was exhausting. “Of course something’s wrong. They slept together.”

  “Making love brings people closer, Lionel.”

  “Maybe they feel guilty about Frank.”

  “Guilty, yes. Julia knows something. We called her to see us. Instead she runs. Tony says he doesn’t know where.”

  “You think Julia has something to do with Frank’s murder?” I let my hand trace a vague line in the dust on the marble mantelpiece. A mistake. I tried to forget I’d done it.

  “There’s something on her mind, something weighing. You want to help us, Lionel, find her.”

  “Learn her secrets and share them with us. Do this without telling Tony.”

  Losing control somewhat, I inserted my finger into the grooved edge of the mantel and pushed, gathering a shaggy clot of dust.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Now you want me to go behind Tony’s back?”

  “We listen, Lionel. We hear. We consider. Questions occur. If your suspicions are grounded the answers may lie with Julia. Tony has been less than clear in this one area. However strange and damaged, you’ll be our hands and feet, our eyes and ears, you’ll learn and return to us and share.”

  “Founded,” I said. I reached the end of the mantel and thrust the accumulated dustball past the edge, following through like a one-fingered shot-putter.

  “If they are,” said Matricardi/em> I 201C;You don’t know. That’s what you’ll find out.”

  “No, I mean founded, not grounded. Suspicions founded.”

  “He’s correcting,” said Rockaforte to Matricardi, gritting his teeth.

  “Find her, Essrog! Founder! Grounder! Confessrub!” I tried to wipe my finger clean on my jacket and made a gray stripe of clingy dust.

  Then I belched, really, and tasted hot dogs.

  “There’s a little part of Frank in you,” said Matricardi. “We speak to that part and it understands. The rest of you may be inhuman, a beast, a freak. Frank was right to use that word. You’re a freak of nature. But the part of you that Frank Minna cared for and that cares so much for his memory is the part that will help us find Julia and bring her home.”

  “Go now, because you sicken us to see you playing with the dust that gathers in the home of his beloved mother, bless her sweet dishonored and tormented soul.”

  Conspiracies are a version of Tourette’s syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close. Like Tourette’s, all conspiracies are ultimately solipsistic, sufferer or conspirator or theorist overrating his centrality and forever rehearsing a traumatic delight in reaction, attachment and causality, in roads out from the Rome of self.

  The second gunman on the grassy knoll wasn’t part of a conspiracy—we Touretters know this to be true. He was ticcing, imitating the action that had startled and allured him, the shots fired. It was just his way of saying, Me too! I’m alive! Look here! Replay the film!

  The second gunman was tugging the boat.

  I’d parked in the shade of an elderly, crippled elm, trunk knotted and gnarled from surviving disease, with roots that had slowly nudged the slate sidewalk upward and apart. I didn’t see Tony waiting in the Pontiac until I nearly had my key in the door. He was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “Get in.” He leaned over and opened the passenger door. The sidewalk was empty in both directions. I considered strolling away, ran into the usual problem of where to go.

  “Get in, Freakshow.”

  I went to the passenger side and slid into the seat beside him, then reached out disconsolately and caressed his shoulder, leaving a smudge of dust. He raised his hand and slapped me on the side of the head.

  “They lied to me,” I said, flinching away.

  “I’m shocked. Of course they lied. What are you, a newborn baby?”

  “Barnamum baby,” I mumble

  “Which particular lie are you worrying about, Marlowe?”

  “They warned you I was coming here, didn’t they? They set me up. It was a trap.”

  “Fuck did you think was going to happen?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You think you’re smart,” said Tony, his voice twangy with contempt. “You think you’re Mike fucking Hammer. You’re like the Hardy Boys’ retarded kid brother, Lionel.” He slapped my head again. “You’re Hardly Boy.”

  My home borough had never felt so like a nightmare to me as it did on this bright sunlit day on Matricardi and Rockaforte’s block of Degraw: a nightmare of repetition and enclosure. Ordinarily I savored Brooklyn’s unchangeability, the bullying, Minna-like embrace of its long memory. At the moment I yearned to see this neighborhood razed, replaced by skyscrapers or multiplexes. I longed to disappear into Manhattan’s amnesiac dance of renewal. Let Frank be dead, let the Men disperse. I only wanted Tony to leave me alone.

  “You knew I had Frank’s beeper,” I said sheepishly, putting it together.

  “No, the old guys hav
e X-ray vision, like Superman. They don’t know shit if I don’t tell them, Lionel. You need to find a new line of work, McGruff. Shitlock Holmes.”

  I was familiar enough with Tony’s belligerence to know it had to run awhile, play itself out. Me, I slid my hands along the top of the dashboard at the base of the windshield, smoothing away the crumbs and dust accumulated there, riffling my fingers over the plastic vents. Then I began buffing the corner of the windshield with my thumb tip. Visiting Matricardi’s mother’s parlor had triggered a dusting compulsion.

  “You idiot freak.”

  “Beepmetwice.”

  “I’ll beep you twice, all right.”

  He lifted his hand, and I flinched again, ducking underneath like a boxer. While I was near I licked the shoulder of his suit, trying to clean off the smudge of dust I’d left. He pushed me away disgustedly, an ancient echo of St. Vincent’s hallway.

  “Okay, Lionel. You’re still half a fag. You got me convinced.”

  I didn’t speak, no small achievement. Tony sighed and put both hands on the wheel. He appeared to be through buffeting me for the moment. I watched my saliva-stripe evaporate into the weave of his jacket.

  “So what did they tell you?”

  “The Clients?”

  “Sure, The Clients,” said Tony. “Matricardi and Rockaforte. Frank’s dead, Lionel. I don’t think he’s gonna, like, spin in his grave if you say their names.”

  “Fork-it-hardly,” I whispered, then glanced over my shoulder at their stoop. “Rocket-fuck-me.”

  “Good enough. So what did they tell you?”

  “The same thing the—Duckman! Dogboy! Confessdog!—same thing the doormen told me: Stay off the case.” I was mad with verbal tics now, making up for lost time, feeling at home. Tony was still a comfort to me in that way.

  “What doorman?”

  “Doormen. A whole bunch of them.”

  “Where?”

  But Tony’s eyes said he knew perfectly well where, only needed to measure what I knew. He looked a little panicked, too.

  “Ten-thirty Park Avenue,” I said. Energy pocket angle. Rectangle sauce!