Motherless Brooklyn (41 page)
Read Motherless Brooklyn Online
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Back on the dry land of the parking lot, I straightened my jacket and peered around to see if anyone had overheard my outburst. The nearest activity was at the base of the fishing docks below, where a small boat had come in and tiny figures in Devo-style yellow jumpsuits stood handing blue plastic crates over the prow and onto a pallet on the dock. I locked the car and strolled across to the other end of the empty lot, then scooted down the scrubby hill toward the men and boats, half sliding on my pavement-walker’s leather soles, wind biting at my nose and chin. The restaurant and retreat center were eclipsed by the swell of the hill as I reached the dock.
“Hey!”
I got the attention of one of the men on the dock. He turned with his crate and plopped it on the pile, then stood hands on hips waiting for me to reach him. As I got closer, I examined the boat. The blue cartons were sealed, but the boatmen hefted them as though they were heavy with something, and with enough care to make me know the something was valuable. The deck of the boat held racks covered with diving equipment—rubber suits, flippers, and masks, and a pile of tanks for breathing underwater.
“Boy, it’s cold,” I said, scuffing my hands together like a sports fan. “Tough day to go boating, huh?”
The boatman’s eyebrows and two-day beard were bright red, but not brighter than his sun-scrubbed flesh, everywhere it showed: cheeks, nose, ears and the corroded knuckles he rubbed under his chin now as he tried to work out a response.
I heard and felt the boat’s body clunking as it bobbed against the pier. My thoughts wandered to the underwaterropellers, whirring silently in the water. If I were closer to the water I’d want to reach in and touch the propeller, it was so stimulating to my kinesthetic obsessions.
“Tugboat! Forgettaboat!”
I ticced, and jerked my neck, to hurl the syllables sideways into the wind.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” he said carefully. I’d expected his voice to come out like Yosemite Sam’s or Popeye’s, scabrous and sputtering. Instead he was so stolid and patrimonial with his New England accent—
Ya nawt from around heah, ah you?
—that I was left with no doubt which of us resembled the cartoon character.
“No, actually.” I affected a bright look—
Illuminate me, sir, for I am a stranger in these exotic parts!
It seemed as likely he’d shove me off the dock into the water or simply turn away as continue the conversation. I straightened my suit again, fingered my own collar so I wouldn’t be tempted to finger his fluorescent hood, to crimp its Velcro edge like the rim of a piecrust.
He examined me carefully. “Urchin season runs October through March. It’s cold work. Day like today is a walk in the park.”
“Urchin?” I said, feeling as I said it that I’d ticced, that the word was itself a tic by definition, it was so innately twitchy. It would have made a good pronunciation for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince’s glyph.
“These are urchin waters out around the island. That’s the market, so that’s what’s fished.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, that’s terrific. Keep it up. You know anything about the place up the hill—Yoshii’s?”
“Probably you want to talk to Mr. Foible.” He nodded his head at the fishing dock’s small shack, from the smokestack of which piped a tiny plume of smoke. “He’s the one does dealings with them Japanese. I’m just a bayman.”
“Eatmebayman!
—thanks for your help.” I smiled and tipped an
imaginary cap to him, and headed for the shack. He shrugged at me and received another carton off the boat.
“How can I help you, sir?”
Foible was red too, but in a different way. His cheeks and nose and even his brow were spiderwebbed with blossoming red veins, painful to look at. His eyes too showed veins through their yellow. As Minna used to say about the St. Mary’s parish priest, Foible had
a thirsty face
. Right on the wooden counter where he sat in the shack was evidence of what the face was thirsty for: a cluster of empty long-neck beer bottles and a couple of gin quarts, one still with an inch or so to cover the bottom. A coil heater glowed under the countertop, and when I stepped inside, he nodded at the heater and the door to indicate I should shut the door behind me. Besides Foible and his heater and bottles the shack held a scarred wooden file cabinet and a few boxes of what I guessed might be hardware and fishing tackle beneath their layers of grease. In my two-day suit and stubble I was the freshest thing in the place by far.
“What about ’em?” His milky eyes made intimate contact with the twenty, worked their way back up to meet mine.
“I’m interested in the restaurant up the hill. Who owns it, specifically.”
“Why?”
“What if I said I wanted to buy it?” I winked and gritted through a barking tic, cut it down to a momentary “—
charp!”
“Son, you’d never get that thing away from them. You better do your shopping elsewhere.”
“What if I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse?”
Foible squinted at me, suddenly suspicious. I thought of how Detective Seminole had gotten spooked by the Minna Men, our Court Street milieu. I had no idea whether such images would reverberate so far from Gotham City.
“Can I ask you something?” said Foible.
“Shoot.”
“You’re not one of them
Scientologists
, are you?”
“No,” I said, surprised. It wasn’t the impression I’d imagined I was making.
He winced deeply, as though recalling the trauma that had driven him to the bottle. “Good,” he said. “Dang Scientologists bought the old hotel up the island, turned it into a funhouse for movie stars. Hell, I’ll take the Japanese any day. Least they eat fish.”
“Muscongus
Island?” I’d only wanted to feel the word in my mouth at last.
“What other island would I be talking about?” He squinted at me again, then held out his hand for the twenty. “Give me that, son.”
I turned it over. He laid it out on the counter and cleared his rheumy throat. “That money there says you’re out of your depth here, son. Japanese yank out a roll, the smallest thing they got’s a hundred. Hell, before they shut down the urchin market, this dock used to be littered with thousand-dollar bank bands from them Japanese paying off my baymen for a haul.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Humph.”
“Eat me.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“I said tell me about it. Explain about the Japanese to a guy who doesn’t know.”
“You know what
uni
is?”
“Forgive my ignorance.”
“That’s the national food of Japan, son. That’s the whole story around Musconguspoint anymore, unless you count the Scientologists
camped out in that damn hotel. Japanese family’s got to eat uni least once a week just to maintain their self-respect. Like you’d want a steak, they want a plate of urchin eggs. Golden Week—that’s like Christmas in Japan—uni’s the only thing they eat. Except Japanese waters got fished out. You follow?”
“Maybe.”
“The Japanese law says you can’t dive for urchin anymore. All you can do is hand-rake. Means standing out on a rock at low tide with a rake in your hand. Try it sometime. Rake all day, won’t get an urchin worth a damn.”
If ever there was a guy who needed to
tell his story walking
, it was Foible. I stifled the urge to tell him so.
“Maine coast’s got the choicest urchin on the globe, son. Clustered under the island thick as grapes. Mainers never had a taste for the stuff, lobstermen thought urchins was a pain in the ass. That Japanese law made a lot of boatmen rich up here, if they knew how to rig for a diving crew. Whole economy down Rockport way. Japanese set up processing plants, they got women down there shucking urchins day and night, fly it out the next morning. Japanese dealers come in limousines, wait for the boats to come in, bid on loads, pay in cash with wads like I said before—the money would scare you silly.”
“What happened?” I gulped back tics. Foible’s story was beginning to interest me.
“In Rockport? Nothing happened. Still like that. If you mean up here, we just got a couple of boats. The folks up the hill bought me out and that’s that, no more cars with dark windows, no more Yakuza making deals on the dock—I don’t miss it for a minute. I’m an exclusive supplier, son, and a happier man you’ll never meet.”
In the little shack I was surrounded by Foible’s happiness, and I wasn’t enthralled. I didn’t mention it. “The folks up the hill,” I said. “You mean Fujisaki.” I figured he was deep enough in his story not to balk at my feeding him the name.
“That’s correct, sir. They’re a classy outfit. Got a bunch of homes
on the island, redid themselves a whole restaurant, brought in a sushi cook so they could eat the way they like. Sure wish they’d outbid the Scientologists for that old hotel, though.”
“Don’t we all. So does Fujisaki—
Superduperist! Clientologist! Fujiopolis!
—does Fujisaki live here in Musconguspoint year-round?”
“What’s that?”
“Fly-on-top-of-us!”
“You got a touch of Tourette’s syndrome there, son.”
“Yes,” I gasped. “You want a drink?”
“No, no. The classy outfit, do they all live up here?”
“Nope. They come and go in a bunch, always together, Tokyo, New York, London. Got a heliport on the island, go back and forth. They just rode in on the ferry this morning.”
“Ah.” I blinked madly in the wake of the outburst. “You run the ferry, too?”
“Nope, wouldn’t want any part of that bathtub. Just a couple of boats, couple of crews. Keep my feet up, concentrate on my hobbies.”
“Your other boat’s out fishing?”
“Nope. Urchin-diving’s an early-morning affair, son. Go out three, four in the morning, day’s over by ten o’clock.”
“Right, right. So where’s the boat?”
“Funny you ask. Let a couple of guys take it out an hour ago, said they had to get to the island, couldn’t wait for the ferry. Rented my boat and captain. They were a lot like you, thought I’d be real impressed with twenty-dollar bills.”
“One of them big?”
“Biggest I ever saw.”
My detour through the middle of Boston had cost me the lead in the race to Musconguspoint. Now it seemed silly that I’d imagined anything
else. I found the red Contour and the black Pontiac in a small parking area just past the ferry landing, a tree-hidden cul-de-sac lot for day-trippers to the island, with an automated coin-fed gate and one-way exit with flexible spikes pointed at an angle and signs that warned,
DON’T BACK UP! SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE!
There was something I found poignant in Tony and the giant each paying to park here, fishing in their pockets for coins before enacting whatever queer struggle had led them to hire the urchin boat. I took a closer look and saw that the Contour was locked up tight, while the Pontiac’s keys were in the ignition, the doors unlocked. Tony’s gun, the one he’d pointed at me the day before, lay on the floor near the gas pedal. I pushed it under the seat. Maybe Tony would need it. I hoped so. I thought of how the giant had strong-armed Minna wherever he wanted him to go and felt sorry for Tony.
On my way up the hill I felt a buzz, like a bee or hornet trapped inside my pants. It was Minna’s beeper. I’d set it to “vibrate” at the Zendo. I drew it out. It showed a New Jersey number. The Clients were home from Brooklyn.
In the parking lot I got into my car and found the cell phone on the seat with the sandwich wrappings, which were beginning to mature in the sun. I rang the number.
I was very tired.
“Yes?”
“It’s Lionel, Mr. Matricardi. You beeped me.”
“Yes. >
“I’m working on it.”
“Working is wonderful, honorable, admirable. Results—now those we truly cherish.”
“I’ll have something for you soon.”
The interior was all inlaid burnished wood to match the exterior’s toasted-marshmallow color; the carpet supplied the seashell pink.
The girl who met me just inside the door wore an elaborate Japanese robe and a dazed expression. I smoothed both sides of her collar with my hand and she seemed to take it well, perhaps as admiration for the silk. I nodded at the big windows overlooking the water and she led me to a small table there, then bowed and left me alone. I was the only customer for lunch, or the first anyway. I was starving. A sushi chef waved his broad knife at me and grinned from across the big, elegant dining room. The beveled-glass partition he worked behind made me think of the holdup-proof Plexiglas habitats for clerks in Smith Street liquor stores. I waved back, and he nodded, a sudden and ticcish bob, and I reciprocated happily. We had quite a thing going until he broke it off, to begin slicing with theatrical flair the whole skin off a slab of reddish fish.
The doors to the kitchen swung open, and Julia came out. She too wore a robe, and she wore it splendidly. It was her haircut that was a little jarring. She’d shaved her long blond hair down to military fuzz, exposing the black roots. Her face underneath the fuzz looked exposed and raw, her eyes a little wild to be without their veil. She picked up a menu and brought it to my table and halfway across the floor I saw her notice who she was bringing it to. She lost only a little something from her stride.
“Lionel.”
“Pisspaw,”
I completed.
“I’m not going to ask you what you’re doing here,” she said. “I don’t even want to know.” She passed me the menu, the cover of which was thatched, a weave of bamboo.
“I followed Tony,” I said, putting the menu gingerly aside, wary of splinters. “And the giant, the killer. We’re all coming up here for a Frank Minna convention.”
“That’s not funny.” She examined me, her mouth drawn. “You look like shit, Lionel.”
“It was a long drive. I guess I should have flown into Boston and—what’s
your trick, rental car? Or catch a bus? This is a regular vacation spot for you, I know that much.”
“Very nice, Lionel, you’re very smart. Now get lost.”
“Muscongaphone! Minnabunkport!”
I gritted back a whole series of Maine-geography tics that wished to follow these two through the gate of my teeth. “We really ought to talk, Julia.”
“Why don’t you just talk to yourself?”
“Where’s Tony?”
“He’s—
Tugboat! Tunaphone!
—he’s on a boat ride.” It sounded so pleasant, I didn’t want to say who with. From the vantage of Yoshii’s high window I could see Muscongus Island at last, wreathed in mist on the horizon.
“He should have come here,” said Julia, without a trace of sentiment. She spoke as someone whose thinking had taken a very practical turn in the past day or so. “He told me to wait here for him, but I can’t wait much longer. He should have come.”
“Maybe he tried. I think he wants to get to Fujisaki before someone gets to him.” I watched her as I dangled the theory, alert for any flinch or fire that might cross her expression.
It was flinch. She lowered her voice. “Don’t say that name here, Lionel. Don’t be an idiot.” She looked around, but there was only the hostess and sushi chef.
Don’t say that name
—the widow had inherited the dead man’s superstitions.
“Who are you afraid of, Julia? Is it Fujisaki, really? Or Matricardi and Rockaforte?”
She looked at me and I saw her throat tighten and her nostrils flare.
“I’m not the one hiding from the Italians,” she said. “I’m not the one who should be afraid.”
“Who’s hiding?”
It was one question too many. Her fury’s crosshairs centered on me
now, only because I was there and the person she wanted to kill was so very far away, working her by remote control. “Screw you, Lionel. You fucking freak.”
The ducks were on the pond, the monkeys were in a tree, the birds wired, the fish barreled, the pigs blanketed: However the players in this tragic fever dream ought to be typed zoologically, I had them placed together now. The problem wasn’t one of tracing connections. I’d climbed into my Tracer and accomplished that. Now, though, I had to draw a single coherent line through the monkeys, ducks, fish, pigs, through monks and mooks—a line that accurately distinguished two opposed teams. I might be close.
“Will you take my order, Julia?”
“Why don’t you go away, Lionel? Please.” It was pitying and bitter and desperate at once. She wanted to spare us both. I had to know from what.
“I want to try some uni. Some—
orphan ocean ice cream!
—some urchin eggs. See what all the fuss is about.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Can it be done up as a sandwich of some kind? Like an uni-salad sandwich?”
“It’s not a sandwich spread.”
“Okay, well, then just bring me out a big bowl and a spoon. I’m really hungry, Julia.”
She wasn’t paying attention. The door had opened, pale sunlight flaring into the orange and pink cavern of the room. The hostess bowed, then led the Fujisaki Corporation to a long table in the middle of the room.
It all happened at once. There were six of them, a vision to break your heart. I was almost glad Minna was gone so he’d never have to face it, how perfectly the six middle-aged Japanese men of Fujisaki filled the
image the Minna Men had always strained toward but had never reached and never would reach, in their impeccably fitted black suits and narrow ties and Wayfarer shades and upright postures, their keen, clicking shoes and shiny rings and bracelets and stoic, lipless smiles. They were all we could never be no matter how Minna pushed us: absolutely a team, a unit, their presence collective like a floating island of charisma and force. Like a floating island they nodded at the sushi chef and at Julia and even at me, then moved to their seats and folded their shades into their breast pockets and removed their beautifully creased felt hats and hooked them on the coatrack and I saw the shine of their bald heads in the orange light and I spotted the one who’d spoken of marshmallows and ghosts and bowel movements and picnics and vengeance and I knew, I knew it all, I understood everything at that moment except perhaps who Bailey was, and so of course I ticced loudly.
“I scream for ur-chin!”
Julia turned, startled. She’d been staring, like me, transfixed by Fujisaki’s splendor. If I was right she’d never seen them before, not even in their guises as monks.
“I’ll bring your order, sir,” she said, recovering gracefully. I didn’t bother to point out that I hadn’t exactly placed an order. Her panicked eyes said she couldn’t handle any banter right then. She collected the bamboo-covered menu, and I saw her hand trembling and had to restrain myself from reaching for it to comfort her and my syndrome both. She turned again and headed for the kitchen, and when she passed Fujisaki’s table, she managed a brave little bow of her own.
A few members of the corporation turned and glanced at me again, ever so lightly and indifferently. I smiled and waved to embarrass them out of giving me the once-over. They went back to their conversation
in Japanese, the sound of which, trickling over the carpet and polished wood in my direction, was a choral murmur, a purr.
I sat still as I could and watched as Julia reemerged to take their drink order and pass out menus. One of the suits ignored her, leaned back in his seat, and transacted directly with the sushi chef, who grunted to show comprehension. Others unfolded the spiny menu and began to grunt as well, to jabber and laugh and stab their manicured fingers at the laminated photographs of fish inside. I recalled the monks in the Zendo, the pale, saggy flesh, the scanty tufts of underarm hair that now hid behind the million-dollar tailoring. The Zendo seemed a distant and unlikely place from where I sat now. Julia went back through the kitchen doors and came out carrying a large steaming bowl and a small trivet with daubs of bright color on it. With thesehe threaded past Fujisaki, to my table.
“Uni,” she said, nodding at the tiny block of wood. It held a thick smudge of green paste, a cluster of pink-hued shavings from a pickled beet or turnip, and a gobbet of glistening orange beads—the urchin eggs, I supposed. It wasn’t three bites of food altogether. The bowl she set down was a touch more promising. The broth was milky white, its surface rippled from underneath by a thick tangle of vegetables and chunks of chicken, and decorated on top by sprigs of some sort of exotic parsley.
“I also brought you something you might actually like,” she said quietly as she drew a small ceramic ladle and a pair of inlaid chopsticks out of a pouch in her robe and set them at my place. “It’s Thai chicken soup. Eat it and go, Lionel. Please.”
Tie-chicken-to-what?
went my brain.
Tinker to Evers to Chicken
.
Julia returned to Fujisaki’s table with her order pad, to contend with the corporation’s contradictory barked commands, their staccato pidgin English. I sampled the uni, scraping it up in the ladle—chopsticks were not my game. The gelatinous orange beads ruptured in my mouth like capers, brackish and sharp but not impossible to like. I tried mixing the three bright colors on the wood, blobbing the
tacky green paste and the shreds of pickled radish together with the eggs. The combination was something else entirely: An acrid claw of vapor sped up the back of my throat and filled my nasal cavity. Those elements were apparently not meant to be mixed. My ears popped, my eyes watered, and I made a sound like a cat with a hairball.
I’d garnered Fujisaki’s attention once again, and the sushi chef’s as well. I waved, face flushed bright red, and they nodded and waved back, bobbed their heads, returned to talking. I ladled up some of the soup, thinking at least to flush the poisons off the sensitive surface of my tongue. Another reverse: The broth was superb, a reply and rebuke to the toxic explosion that had preceded it. It transmitted warmth in the other direction, down into my gullet and through my chest and shoulders as it passed. Levels of flavor unfolded, onion, coconut, chicken, a piquancy I couldn’t place. I scooped up another ladleful, with a strip of chicken this time, and let the nourishing fire flow through me again. Until placed in this soup’s care I hadn’t realized how chilled I was, how starved for comfort. It felt as if the soup were literally embracing my heart.
The trouble came with the third spoonful. I’d dredged low, come up with a tangle of unidentifiable vegetables. I drank down more of the broth, then gnawed on the mouthful of pungent roughage that was left in my mouth—only some of it was rougher than I might have liked. There was some resilient, bladelike leaf that wasn’t losing the contest with my teeth, was instead beginning to triumph in an unexpected skirmish with my gums and the roof of my mouth. I chewed, waiting for it to disintegrate. It wouldn’t. Julia appeared just as I’d reached in with my pinkie to clear it from my mouth.
“I think part of the menu got into the soup,” I said as I ejected the bulrushes onto the table.