Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Yes,” said Julia.

  She’d been talking in a kind of trance, not needing me to prompt her more than once in a while. As the narrative got nearer the present day her eyes grew clearer, her gaze less transfixed on the distant island, and her voice grew heavier with resentment. I felt I was losing her to bitterness, and I wanted to draw her back. Protect her from herself if there was no other threat.

  “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, disappoin
ted lovers of Frank Minna, abandoned children.

  “We’re almost the same age, Julia,” I said lamely. “I mean, you and me, we were teenagers at pretty much the same time.” She looked at me blankly.

  “I met a woman, Julia. Because of this case. She’s like you in certain ways. She studies Zen, just like you did when you met Frank.”

  “No woman will ever want you, Lionel.”

  “WantmeBailey!”

  It was a classic tic, honest and clean. Nothing about Maine or Julia Minna or my profound exhaustion could get in the way of a good, clean, throat-wrenching tic. My maker in his infinite wisdom had provided me with that.

  I tried not to listen to what Julia was saying, to focus on the far-off squalling of gulls and splash of surf instead.

  “That’s not really true,” she went on. “They might want you. I’ve wanted you a little bit myself. But they’ll never be fair to you, Lionel. Because you’re such a freak.”

  “This person is different,” I said. “She’s different from anyone I’ve ever met.” But now I was losing my point. If I made the distinction between Julia and Kimmery plain to Julia, to myself—she’s not as mean as you, could never be so mean—I would only be sorry I’d spoken at all.

  “Well, I bet you’re different for her, too. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.” In her mouth the words happy together came out twisted and harsh.

  Crappy however.

  Slappy forget her.

  I wanted to call Kimmery now, wanted to so badly my fingers located the cell phone in my jacket pocket and began to fondle it.

  “Why was Tony coming to Maine?” I asked, running for cover back to the plot we’d begun spinning together, which suddenly seemed to have little or nothing to do with our miserable fates, our miserable lives exposed out here in the wind. “Why didn’t you just get away from here? You knew Gerard might kill you.”

  “I heard Fujisaki was flying up here today.” Again she struck with the lighter against her cigarette, as if it were going to ignite like a flint against a rock. It wasn’t just the wind she was fighting now. Her hands trembled, and the cigarette trembled where she held it in her lips. “Tony and I were going to tell them about Gerard. He was going to bring some proof. Then you got in the way.”

  “It wasn’t me that stopped Tony from keeping the date.” I was distracted by the phone in my pocket, the prospect of Kimmery’s soothing voice, even if it were only the outgoing message on her machine. “Gerard sent his giant after Tony,” I went on. “He followed Tony up here, maybe figuring to take out two birds with one flick of his big finger.”

  “Gerard didn’t want me killed,” she said quietly. Her hands had fallen to her sides. “He wanted me back.” She was trying to make it so by saying it, but the words themselves were nearly lost in the wind. Julia threatened to recede into the distance again, and this time I knew I wouldn’t bother trying to bring her back.

  “Is that why he had his brother killed? Jealousy?”

  “Does it have to be one thing? He probably figured it was him or Frank.” The cigarette still dangled in her mouth. “Fujisaki required a sacrifice. They’re great believers in that.”

  “Did you talk to Fujisaki just now?”

  “Men like that don’t cut deals with waitresses, Lionel.”

  “It’s rotten for Tony the killer found him before he found Fujisaki,” I said. “But it won’t save Gerard. I made sure of that.” I didn’t want to elaborate.

  “So you say.” She paced away from the railing, gripping the lighter so tightly I expected her to crush it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that I’m not acquainted with this giant killer you keep talking about. Are you sure you’re not imagining things?” She turned and handed me the lighter, plucked the cigarette from her lips and held it out. “Would you light this for me, Lionel?” I heard a weird vibration in her voice, as though she were about to cry again, but without the anger this time, maybe begin to mourn Minna at last. I took them away from her, put the cigarette in my own lips, and turned my back to the wind.

  By the time I had it lit she’d taken her gun from her purse.

  I put up my hands instinctively, dropping the lighter, to make a pose of surrender but also of self-protection, as though I might deflect a bullet with Frank’s watch like Wonder Woman with her magic wristbands. Julia held the gun easily, its muzzle directed at my navel, and now her eyes were as gray and hard to read as the farthest reaches of the Maine horizon.

  I felt jets of acid fire in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if I would ever get used to facing gunpoint, and then I wondered if that was really anything to aspire to. I wanted to tic just for the hell of it, but at the moment I couldn’tlignk of anything.

  “I just remembered something Frank once said about you, Lionel.”

  “What’s that?” I slowly lowered one hand and offered her the lit cigarette, but she shook her head. I dropped it on the lighthouse deck and ground it under my shoe instead.

  “He said the reason you were useful to him was because you were crazy everyone thought you were stupid.”

  “I’m familiar with the theory.”

  “I think I made the same mistake,” she said. “And so did Tony, and Frank before that. Everywhere you go, somebody who Gerard wants dead is made dead. I don’t want to be next.”

  “You think I killed Frank?”

  “You said we’re the same age, Lionel. You ever watch Sesame Street?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “You remember the Snuffleupagus?”

  “Big Bird’s friend.”

  “Right, only nobody could see him except Big Bird. I think the giant’s your Snuffleupagus, Lionel.”

  “Shockadopalus! Fuckalotofus! The giant is real, Julia. Put the gun away.”

  “I don’t think so. Step back, Lionel.”

  I stepped back, but I pulled out Tony’s gun as I did it. I saw Julia’s fingers tighten as I raised it to her, but she didn’t fire, and neither did I.

  We faced one another on the lighthouse rail, the vast sky dimming everywhere and perfectly useless to us, the ocean’s depths useless, too. The two guns drew us close together and rendered the rest irrelevant—we might as well have been in a dingy motel room, with an image of Maine playing on the television set. My moment had come at last. I had a gun in my hands. That it was trained not on Gerard or the giant or Tony or a doorman but on the girl from Nantucket who’d grown into Frank Minna’s bruise-eyed widow, who’d chopped off her hair and tried to retreat to her waitress past and instead been cornered by that same past, by Gerard and the giant and Tony—I tried not to let it bother me. I’d been wrong, Julia and I had nothing in common. We were just any two people who happened to be pointing guns at one another now. And Tony’s gun had object properties all its own, not a fork nor a toothbrush but something much weightier and more seductive. I slipped off the safety with my thumb.

  “I understand your mistake, Julia, but I’m not the killer.”

  She had both hands on the gun, and it didn’t waver. “Why should I trust you?”

  “TRUST ME BAILEY!” I had to scream it into the sky. I turned my head, bargaining with my Tourette’s that I could let the one phrase fly and then be done. I tasted salt air as I screamed.

  “Don’t scare me, Lionel. I might shoot you.”

  “We’ve both got that same problem, Julia.” In fact my syndrome had just discovered the prospect of the gun, and I began to obsess on pulling the trigger. I suspected that if I fired a shot out into the sky in the manner of my verbal exclamation, I might not survive the experience. But I didn’t want to shoot Julia. I flicked on the safety, hoped she didn’t notice.

  “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.