Motherless Brooklyn (44 page)

Hence, Maine.

The younger brother did another thing his older brother might never have done: He fell in love with the strange angry girl from Nantucket. And one day in the flush of this love he explained to her his great dream: He was going to open a detective agency.

The older brother in the meantime had grown distant from them both, and more deeply and sincerely involved in Zen practice. In the manner of so many spiritual practitioners past and present he seemed to draw away from the world of material concerns, to grow tolerant and wry but also a little chilly in his regard for the people and things he’d left behind.

When the younger brother and the girl were away from the retreat center they’d refer to the older brother as “Rama-lama-ding-dong.” Before too long they even began to call him that to his face.

One day the younger brother tried to telephone his mother and found that she’d been taken to the hospital. He conferred with his older brother; the girl overheard some of their bitter, fearful conversations. The older brother was persuaded that their mother’s hospitalization had been arranged as a trap to lure them back to Brooklyn for
their punishment. The younger disagreed. The next day he bought a car and loaded it with his belongings, and announced he was going back to the city. He invited the girl to join him, though he warned her of the possible danger.

She considered her life at the retreat, which had grown as close and predictable around her as an island, and she considered the younger brother and the prospect of Brooklyn, his Brooklyn, of living there by his side. She agreed to leave Maine.

On the way they were married in Albany, by a justice of the peace at the state capital. The younger brother wanted to surprise and please his mother, and perhaps also wished to offer some excuse for his long disappearance. He took the girl shopping for clothes in Manhattan before they crossed the famous bridge into Brooklyn, and then, as an afterthought, he brought her to a salon on Montague Street, where they bleached her dark hair to platinum blond. It was as though she were the one who should be in disguise here.

The mother’s sickness wasn’t a trap. She was dead of a stroke by the time the younger brother and his new wife reached the hospital. But it was also true that the mobsters were aware of everything that happened in the neighborhood and were watching the hospital closely. When the younger brother was spotted there, it wasn’t long before he was brought in to answer for his and his brother’s misdeeds.

He begged for his life. He explained that he’d just gotten married.

He also blamed his brother for the crimes they’d both committed. He claimed to have lost touch with his brother completely.

He ende by promising to spend his life in service as the gangsters’ errand boy.

On that condition his apology was accepted by the gangsters. They permitted him to live, though they swore again a vow of death against the older brother, and made the younger promise that he’d turn his brother in if and when he reappeared.

The younger brother moved his new wife into his mother’s old
apartment and the woman from Nantucket began her adjustment to life in Brooklyn. What she encountered was first intoxicating and frightening, then disenchanting. Her husband was a small-time operator, his “agents,” as he called them, a motley gang of high-school-dropout orphans. For a while he installed her as a secretary in a friend’s law office, where she worked as a notary public, humiliatingly on view in a shop window out on Court Street. When she protested, he allowed her to recede into privacy in the apartment. The old gangsters paid the couple’s rent anyway, and most of the younger brother’s detective work was on their behalf. The woman from Nantucket didn’t like what passed for detective work in Brooklyn. She wished he genuinely ran a car service. Their married life was chilly and glancing, full of unexplained absences and omissions, no walk on the beach. In time she began to understand that there were other women, too, old high-school girlfriends and distant cousins who’d never left the neighborhood and never really been very far from the younger brother’s bed either.

The woman from Nantucket survived, found occasional lovers herself, and spent most of her days in the movie theaters on Court and Henry streets, shopping in Brooklyn Heights, drinking in the hotel lobbies there and then taking slow walks on the Promenade, where she fended off an endless series of advances from college boys and lunch-hour husbands, spent her days any way except musing on the serene rural life she’d left behind in Maine, the faint uncontroversial satisfactions she’d known before she’d met the two brothers and been taken to Brooklyn.

One day the younger brother told his wife a dire secret, which she had to be sure to keep from leaking to anyone in Brooklyn, lest it reach the ears of the gangsters: The older brother had returned to New York City. He’d declared himself a roshi, an elder teacher of Zen, and started a Zendo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in Yorkville. This Yorkville Zendo was subsidized by a powerful group
of Japanese businessmen he’d met in Maine, where they’d taken over and renovated top to bottom the homely Zen center and the lobster pound next door: the Fujisaki Corporation.

The men of Fujisaki were highly spiritual, but had found themselves in disrepute in their native country, where monkhood is reserved only for those born into certain esteemed bloodlines, and where capitalistic rapaciousness and spiritual devotion are viewed as mutually exclusive. Money and power, it seemed, couldn’t buy Fujisaki the precise sort of respect its members craved at home. Here, first in Maine, now in New York City, they would make themselves credible as penitents and teachers, men of wisdom and peace. In the process, as the older brother explained to the younger, the younger then to his wife, the men of Fujisaki and the older brother hoped to do a little “business.” New York City: land of opportunity for monks and crooks and mooks alike.

We stood at the rail at the sea edge of the lighthouse tfaint unclooking out. The wind was still strong, but I was used to it now. I had my collar up, the way Frank Minna would. The sky out past the island was gray and uninspiring, but there was a nice line of light where it met the water, an edge I could work with my eyes like a seam of stitching between my fingers. The birds harassed the foam below, looking for urchin, perhaps, or discarded hot-dog ends among the rocks.

I had Tony’s gun in my jacket, and from this vantage we could see for miles down Route 1 in both directions should anyone approach. I had a strong urge to protect Julia, to hold her or cover her with my presence, so as to feel that I’d helped someone safely through besides myself. But I doubted that the Fujisaki Corporation cared about me or Julia directly. She and I each had been part of Gerard Minna’s problem, not Fujisaki’s. And Julia showed no interest in my protective urges.

“I know what happened next,” I told her. “Eventually the brothers dipped into the till again. Frank got involved in a scam to siphon money away from Fujisaki’s management company.” That part of what Gerard told me wasn’t a lie, I understood now, just an artfully mangled version of the truth. Gerard had been leaving himself out of it, playing the Zen innocent, when in fact he was the wheel’s hub. “With a bookkeeper named—
Dullbody, Allmoney, Alimony
—ah, a guy named Ullman.”

“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.