Motherless Brooklyn

AUTO BODY

See me now, at one in the morning, stepping out of another cab in front of the Zendo, checking the street for cars that might have followed, for giveaway cigarette-tip glows through the windows of the cars parked on the deadened street, moving with my hands in my jacket pockets clutching might-be-guns-for-all-they-know, collar up against the cold like Minna, unshaven like Minna now, too, shoes clacking on sidewalk: think of a coloring-book image of the Green Hornet, say. That’s who I was supposed to be, that black outline of a man in a coat, ready suspicious eyes above his collar, shoulders hunched, moving toward conflict.

Here’s who I was instead: that same coloring-book outline of a man, but crayoned by the hand of a mad or carefree or retarded child, wild slashes of idiot color, a blizzard of marks violating the boundaries that made man distinct from street, from world. Some of those colors were my fresh images of Kimmery, flashing me back to the West Side an hour before, crayon stripes and arrows like flares over Central Park in the night sky. Others weren’t so pretty, roaring scrawls of mania, find-a-man-kill-a-phone-fuck-a-plan in sloppy ten-foot-high letters drawn like lightning bolts or Hot Wheels race-car flames through the space of my head. And the blackened steel-wool scribble of my guilt-deranged investigation: I pictured the voices of the two Minna brothers and Tony Vermonte and The Clients as gnarled above and around me, in a web of betrayal I had to penetrate and dissolve, an ostensible world I’d just discovered was really only a private cloud I carried everywhere, had never seen the outside of. So, crossing the street to the door of the Zendo, I might have appeared less a single Green Hornet than a whole inflamed nest of them.

My first act was to drop in next door. I found the original doorman, Dirk, asleep on his stool.

I lifted his head up with my hand and he jerked awake and away from my grasp. “Hello!” he shouted.

“You remember me, Dirk?” I said. “I was sitting in a car. You told me I had a message from my ‘friend.’ ”

“Oh? Sure, I remember. Sorry, I was just doing what I was told.”

“Sure you were. And I suppose you never saw the guy before, did you-dirtyworker, dirketyname?”

“I never saw the guy before.” He breathed out, wide-eyed.

“He was ery big man, yes?”

“Yes!” He rolled his eyes upward to show it. Then he held his hands out, begging my patience. I backed off a little and he stood and neatened his coat. I helped him with it, especially around the collar. He was too sleepy or confused by my questions to object.

“He pay you or just scare you into giving me the bum steer?” I asked more gently. My anger was wasted on Dirk. Anyway, I felt vaguely grateful to him for confirming the giant’s existence. My only other sure witness was Gilbert, in jail. Kimmery had begun to make me doubt my eyes.

“A man that big doesn’t have to pay,” said Dirk honestly.

One of the stolen keys got me inside. This time I held on to my shoes as I passed the sitting room and headed upstairs, past the floor where Kimmery and I had sat at tea, up to the Roshi’s private quarters-a.k.a. Gerard Minna’s hideout. The halls were darker the higher I climbed, until at the top I could only grope my way toward a thin margin of light squeezed out underneath a sealed door. I turned the handle and pushed the door open, impatient with my own fear.

His bedroom had the integrity of his self-reinvention. It was bare of furnishings except for a long low shelf against the wall, a board, really, propped on bricks and bearing a few candles and books, a glass of water and a small bowl of ashes, decorated with Japanese script, presumably some kind of tiny shrine. The spareness reminded me of Kimmery’s empty studio apartment but I resented the echo, not wishing to see Kimmery as influenced by Gerard’s Zen pretensions, not wishing to imagine her visiting his private floor, his lair, at all. Gerard sat propped on pillows on a flat mattress on the floor, his legs crossed, the book at his knees shut, his posture calm, as though he’d been waiting for me. I faced him head on for what might have been the first time-I don’t know that I’d ever addressed him directly, stolen more than a glance as a teenager. In the candlelight I first made out his silhouette: He’d thickened around the jaw and neck, so that his bald head seemed to rise from his round shoulders like the line of a cobra’s hood. I might have been overly influenced by that bald head but as my eyes adjusted I couldn’t keep from understanding the difference between his features and Frank Minna’s as the same as that between Brando’s in Apocalypse Now! and On the Waterfront.

“Thehorrorthehorror,” I ticced. “Icouldabeenacontender!” It was like a couplet.

“You’re Lionel Essrog, aren’t you?”

“Unreliable Chessgrub,” I corrected. My throat pulsed with ticcishness. I was overly conscious of the open door behind me, so my neck twitched, too, with the urge to look over my shoulder. Doormen could come through open doors, anyone knew that. “Is there anyone else in the building?” I said.

“We’re alone.”

“Mind if I close this?”

“Go ahead.” He didn’t budgfrom his position on the mattress, just gazed at me evenly. I closed the door and moved just far enough into the room not to be tempted to grope behind me for the door’s surface. We faced each other across the candlelit gloom, each a figure out of the other’s past, each signifying to the other the lost man, the man killed the day before.

“You broke your vow of silence just now,” I said.

“I’m finished with my sesshin,” he said. “Anyway, you brought silence to a rather conclusive finish during today’s sitting.”

“I think your hired killer had something to do with that.”

“You’re speaking without thinking,” he said. “I recall your difficulties in that area.”

I took a deep breath. Gerard’s serenity called out of me a storm of compensatory voices, a myriad possible shrieks and insults to stanch. A part of me wanted to cajole him out from behind his Zen front, expose the Lord of Court Street lurking, make him Frank’s older brother again. What came out of my mouth was the beginning of a joke, one from the deepest part of the made-Frank-Minnalaugh-once archive:

“So there’s this order of nuns, right?”

“An order of nuns,” Gerard repeated.

“Ordinary nunphone!-an order of nuns. Like the Cloisters. You know, a monastery.”

“A monastery is for monks.”

“Okay, a nunastery. A plannery, a nunnetarium!-a nunnery. And they’ve all, these nuns, they’ve all taken a vow of silence, a lifetime vow of silence, right?” I was driven, tears at the edges of my eyes, wishing for Frank to be alive to rescue me, tell me he’d heard this one already. Instead I had to go on. “Except one day a year one of the nuns gets to say something. They take turns, one nun a year. Understand?”

“I think I understand.”

“So the big day comes-Barnamum-big-nun! Domesticated ghost-phone!-the big day is here and the nuns are all sitting at the dinner table and the one who gets to talk this year opens her mouth and says ‘The soup is terrible.’ And the other nuns all look at each other but nobody says anything because of the vow of silence, and that’s it, back to normal. Another year of silence.”

“A very disciplined group,” said Gerard, not without admiration.

“Right. So a year later the day comes and it’s this other nun’s turn. So they’re sitting and the second nun turns to the first and says ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think the soup’s that bad’-and that’s it, silence. Another year.”

“Hmmm. Imagine the states of contemplation one could achieve in such a year.”

Flip-a-thon! Fuck-a-door! Flipweed! Fujisaki! Flitcraft!-the special day comes around again. This third nun, it’s her turn-Nun-fuck-a-phone!-so this third nun, she looks at the first nun and the second nun and she says ‘Bicker, bicker, bicker.’ ”

There was silence, then Gerard nodded and said, “That would be the punch line.”

“I know about the building,” I said, working to catch my breath. “And the Fujisaki Corporation.” Unfuckafish whispered under my palate.

“Ah. Then you know much.”

“Yeah, I know a thing. And I’ve met your killing machine. But you saw that, when he dragged me out, downstairs. The kumquat-eater.”

I was desperate to see him flinch, to impress him with the edge I had, the things I’d learned, but Gerard wasn’t ruffled. He raised his eyebrows, which got a lot of play across the empty canvas of his forehead. “You and your friends, what are their names?”

“Who? The Minna Men?”

“Yes-Minna Men. That’s a very good description. My brother was very important to the four of you, wasn’t he?” I nodded, or not, but anyway he went on.

“He really taught you everything, I suppose. You sound just like him when you speak. What an odd life, really. You realize that, don’t you? That Frank was a very odd man, living in a strange and anachronistic way?”

“What’s cartoonistic about it?”

“Anachronistic,” said Gerard patiently. “From another time.”

“I know what it means,” I said. “I mean what’s so akakonistic about it?” I was too wound up to go back and repair the tic-pocked surface of my speech. “Anyway, enactoplasmic as opposed to what? A million-year-old mystical Japanese cult?”

“You wear your ignorance as aggressively as Frank,” said Gerard. “I suppose you’re making my point for me.”

“Point being what?”

“My brother taught you only what he knew, and not even all of that. He kept you charmed and flattered but also in the dark, so your sense of even his small world was diminished, two-dimensional. Cartoonistic, if you like. What’s astonishing to me is that you didn’t know about the Park Avenue building until just now. It really must come as a shock.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Surely you’ve got my brother’s money in your pocket even as we speak, Lionel. Do you really believe that it came from detective work, from those scuffling little assignments he contrived to keep you children busy? Or perhaps you imagine he speech.pped money. That’s just as likely.”

Was crapped a chink in Gerard’s Zen façade, a bit of Brooklyn showing through? I recalled the elder monk proclaiming the worthlessness of “Bowel Movement Zen.”

“Frank consorted with dangerous people,” Gerard went on. “And he stole from them. The remuneration and the risk were high. The odds that he would flourish in such a life forever, low.”

“Talk to me about fool-me-softly-Fujisaki.”

“They own the building. Minna had a hand in managing it. The money involved would dazzle your senses, Lionel.” He gave me an expectant look, as though this assertion ought to dazzle me in the money’s stead, ought to astonish me right out of my investigation, and his bedroom.

“These people, their other home is an island,” I said, quoting the Garbage Cop-not that the phrase was likely to have originated with him.

Gerard smiled at me oddly. “For every Buddhist, Japan is his other home. And yes, it is an island.”

“Who’s a Buddhist?” I said. “I was talking about the money.”

He sighed, without losing the smile. “You are so like Frank.”

“What’s your role, Gerard?” I wanted to sicken him the way I was sickened. “I mean, besides sending your brother out into the Polack’s arms to die.”

Now he beamed munificently. The worse I attacked him, the deeper his forgiveness and grace would be-that’s what the smile said. “Frank was very careful never to expose me to any danger if he could help it. I was never introduced to anyone from Fujisaki. I believe I have yet to make their acquaintance, apart from the large hit man you led here yesterday.”

“Who’s Ullman?”

“A bookkeeper, another New Yorker. He was Frank’s partner in fleecing the Japanese.”

“But you never met the guy.”

I meant him to hear the sarcasm, or rather Frank Minna’s sarcasm in quotation. But he went on obliviously. “No. I only supplied the labor, in return for consideration equal to my mortgage here on the Zendo. Buddhism is spread by what means it finds.”

“Labor for what?” My brain tangled on spread by means it finds, fed in springs by mimes, bled by mingy spies, but I shook it off.

“My students performed the maintenance and service work for the building, as part of their training. Cleaning, cooking, the very sort of labor they’d perform in a monastery, only in a slightly different setting. The contract for those services in such a building is worth millions. My brother and Ullman tithed the difference mostly into their own pockets.”

“Yes. Doormen, too.”

“So Fujisaki sicced the giant on Frank and the bookkeeper.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

“And he just happened to use the Zendo as his trap yesterday?” I aired out another Minna-ism: “Don’t try to hand me no two-ton feather.” I was dredging up Minna’s usages on any excuse now, as though I could build a golem of his language, then bring it to life, a figure of vengeance to search out the killer or killers.

I was aware of myself standing in Gerard’s room, planted on his floor, arms at my sides, never moving nearer to him where he sat beaming Zen pleasantness in my direction, ignoring my accusations and my tics. I was big but I was no golem or giant. I hadn’t startled Gerard in deep sleep nor upended his calm with my griefy hostility. I wasn’t holding a gun on him. He didn’t have to answer my questions.

“I don’t really believe in sophisticated killers,” said Gerard. “Do you?”

“Go-fisticate-a-killphone,” I ticced.

“The Fujisaki Corporation is ruthless and remorseless-in the manner of corporations. And yet in the manner of corporations their violence is also performed at a remove, by a force just nominally under their control. In the giant you speak of they seem to have located a sort of primal entity-one whose true nature is killing. And sicced him, as you say, on the men who they feel betrayed them. I’m not sure the killer’s behavior is explicable in any real sense, Lionel. Any human sense.”

Gerard’s persuasiveness was a variant of the Minna style, I saw now. I felt the force of it, moving me authentically. Yet his foray against the notion of a sophisticated killer also made me think of Tony mocking Detective Seminole with jokes about Batman and James Bond supervillains. Was it a giveaway, a clue that Gerard and Tony were in league? And what about Julia? I wanted to quote Frank’s conversation with Gerard the night he died: She misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong, find out what he meant. I wanted to ask about Boston, and I wanted to ask about Frank and Julia’s marriage-had Gerard been at the ceremony? I wanted to ask him about whether he missed Brooklyn, and how he got his head so shiny. I searched for a single question that could stand for my thousands and what popped out was this:

“What’s human sense?”

“In Buddhism, Lionel, we come to understand that everything on this earth is a vessel for Buddha-nature. Frank had Buddha-nature. You have Buddha-nature. I feel it.”

Gerard allowed a long minute to pass while we contemplated his words. Buddha nostril, I nearly blurted. When he spoke again, it was with a confidence that sympathy flowed between us untrammeled by doubt or fear.

“There’s another of your Minna Men, Lionel. He’s pushing his way into this, and I fear he may have aroused the killer’s ire. Tony, is that his name?”

“Tony Vermonte,” I said, marveling-it was as if Gerard had read my mind.

“Yes. He’d like to walk in my brother’s footsteps. But Fujisaki will be keeping a keener eye on their money from this point, I’d think. There’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost. Perhaps you’ll have a word with him.”

“Tony and I aren’t exactly… communicating well, since yesterday.”

“Ah.”

I felt a surge of care in me, for Tony. He was only a heedless adventurer, with a poignant urge to imitate Frank Minna in all things. He was a member of my family-L &L, the Men. Now he was in above his head, threatened on all sides by the giant, by Detective Seminole, by The Clients. Only Gerard and I understood his danger.

I must have been silent for a minute or so-a veritable sesshin by my standards.

“You and Tony are together in your pain at the loss of my brother,” said Gerard softly. “But you haven’t come together in actuality. Be patient.”

“There’s another factor,” I said, tentative now, lulled by his compassionate tones. “Someone else may be involved in this somehow. Two of them, actually-Monstercookie and Antifriendly!-uh, Matricardi and Rockaforte.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do.”

“You can’t know how sorry I am to hear those names.” Never say those names! warned Minna in the echo chamber of my memory. Gerard went on, “Those two are the prototype, aren’t they, for my brother’s tendency to dangerous associations-and his tendency to exploit those associations in dangerous ways.”

“He stole from them?”

“Do you recall that he once had to leave New York for a while?”

Did I recall! Suddenly Gerard threatened to solve the deepest puzzles of my existence. I practically wanted to ask him, So who’s Bailey?

“I’d hoped they were no longer in the picture,” said Gerard reflectively. It was the nearest to thrown I’d seen him, the closest I’d come to pushing his buttons. Only now I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “Avoid them, Lionel, if you can,” he continued. “They’re dangerous men.”

He returned his gaze to my face, batted his lashes, moved his expressive eyebrows. If I’d been in striking distance I’d have tried to span his head with my hands and stroke his eyebrows with my thumb tips, just to soothe this one small worry I’d raised.

“Can I ask one more thing?” I nearly called him Roshi, so complete was my conversion. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

Gerard nodded. The High Lama will grant you an audience, Mrs. Gushman.

“Is there anyone else-Zonebone!-anyone else at the Zendo who’s involved in this thing? Anyone-Kissmefaster! Killmesooner! Cookiemonster!-anyone the killer might target? That old hippie, Wallace? Or the girl-Kissingme!-Kimmery?” I tried not to divulge the special freight of tenderness and hope behind this query. Whether the string of shrieks I issued in the course of its delivery made me appear more or less blasé, I couldn’t say.

“No.” Gerard spoke benevolently. “I compromised myself personally, but not my students or my practice as a teacher. Wallace and Kimmery should be safe. It’s kind of you to be concerned.”

I’m concerned about Pinched and Indistinct, too, I wanted to say. I doubted students could get any more compromised than that.

And then there was that nod of complicity I saw pass between Gerard and the giant.

The three of them-Pinched, Indistinct, and the nod-were three sour notes in a very pretty song. But I kept my tongue, feeling I’d learned what I could here, that it was time to go. I wanted to find Tony before the giant did. And I needed to step outside the candle glow of Gerard’s persuasiveness to sort out the false and the real, the Zen and the chaff in our long discussion.

“I’m going now,” I said awkwardly.

“Good night, Lionel.” He was still watching me as I closed the door.

On second thought, there is a vaguely Tourettic aspect to the New York City subway, especially late at night-that dance of attention, of stray gazes, in which every rider must engage. And there’s a lot of stuff you shouldn’t touch in the subway, particularly in a certain order: this pole and then your lips, for instance. And the tunnel walls are layered, like those of my brain, with expulsive and incoherent language-

But I was in a terrible hurry, or rather two terrible hurries: to get back to Brooklyn, and to sort out my thinking about Gerard before I got there. I couldn’t spare a minute to dwell in myself as a body riding the Lexington train to Nevins Street-I might as well have been tele-ported, or floated to Brooklyn on a magic carpet, for all that I was allured or distracted by the 4 train’s sticky, graffitied immediacy.

The lights were burning in the L &L storefront. I approached from the opposite sidewalk, confident I was invisible on the darkened street to those in the office-I’d been on the other side of that plate of glass only two or three thousand nights in preparation for the act of spying on my fellow Men from the street. I didn’t want to go waltzing into a trap. Detective Seminole might be there or, who knew, maybe Tony and a passel of doormen. If there was something to learn at a distance, I’d learn it.

It was almot two-thirty now, and Bergen Street was shut up tight, the night cold enough to chase the stoop-sitting drinkers indoors. Smith Street showed a bit more life, Zeod’s Market lit up like a beacon, catering to the all-night cigarette cravings, to the squad-car cops in need of a bagel or LifeSaver or some other torus. Four L &L cars were scattered in parking spots near the storefront: the Minna death car, which hadn’t moved since Gilbert and I returned from the hospital and parked it, the Pontiac in which Tony had shanghaied me in front of The Clients’ brownstone, a Caddy that Minna had liked to drive himself, and a Tracer, an ugly modernistic bubble of a car that usually fell to me or Gilbert to pilot. I slowed my walk as I drew up even with the storefront, then turned my neck. It was pleasing to have a good solid reason behind turning my neck for once, retroactive validation for a billion tics. As I passed, I made out the shapes of two Men inside: Tony and Danny, both in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Danny seated behind the counter with a folded newspaper, radiating cool, Tony pacing, radiating cool’s opposite. The television was on.

I walked past, to the corner of Smith, then swiveled and went back. This time I set up shop on the brief stoop of the big apartment building directly across from L &L. It was a safe outpost. I could duck my head and watch them through a parked car’s windows if I thought they were in any danger of spotting me. Otherwise I’d sit back in the wings and study them in the limelight of the storefront until something happened or I’d decided what to do.

Danny-I gave Danny Fantl a moment of my time. He was sliding through this crisis as he’d slid through life to this point, so poised he was practically an ambient presence. Gilbert was in jail and I was hunted high and low and Danny sat in the storefront all day, refusing car calls and smoking cigarettes and reading sports. He wasn’t exactly my candidate for any plot’s criminal mastermind, but if Tony conspired with or even confided in anyone inside L &L’s circle, it would be Danny. In the present atmosphere, I decided, there was no way I could take Danny for granted, trust him with my back.

Which meant I wasn’t going inside to talk with either one of them until they were apart. If then-the image of Tony pulling his wobbly gun on me was fresh enough to give pause.

Anyway, something happened before I’d decided what to do-why was I not surprised? But it was a relatively banal something, reassuring, even. A tick of the clock of everyday life on Bergen Street, an everyday life that already felt nostalgic.

A block east, on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt, was an elegantly renovated tavern called the Boerum Hill Inn, with a gleaming antique inlaid-mirror bar, a CD jukebox weighted toward Blue Note and Stax, and a Manhattanized clientele of professional singles too good for bars with televisions, for subway rides home, or for the likes of the Men. Only Minna ever visited the Boerum Hill Inn, and he cracked that anyone who drank there was someone else’s assistant: a district attorney’s, an editor’s, or a video artist’s. The dressed-up crowd at the inn gabbled and flirted every night of the week until two in the morning, oblivious to the neighborhood’s past or present reality, then slept it off in their overpriced apartments or on their desks the next day in Midtown. Typically a few parties would stagger down the block after last call and try to engage an L &L car for a ride home-sometimes it was a woman alone or a newly rmed couple too drunk to throw to the fates, and we’d take the job. Mostly we claimed not to have any cars.

But the inn’s bartenders were a couple of young women we adored, Siobhain and Welcome. Siobhain was properly named, while Welcome bore the stigma of her parents’ hippie ideals, but both were from Brooklyn and Irish to their ancient souls-or so had declared Minna. They were roommates in Park Slope, possibly lovers (again according to Minna), and bartending their way through graduate school. Each night one or the other was stuck with closing-the owner of the inn was stingy and didn’t let them double up after midnight. If we weren’t actually busy on some surveillance job we’d always drive the closer home.

It was Welcome, at the door of L &L, now going inside. I saw Tony nod at Danny, then Danny stood and stubbed out a butt, checked in his pocket for the keys and nodded too. He and Welcome moved to the door and out. I lowered my head. Danny led her to the Caddy, which sat at the front of the row of parked cars, on the corner of Smith. She went around to the front passenger seat, not like the usual ride who’d sit in the back. Danny slammed his door and the interior light shut off, then he started the engine. I glanced back to see that Tony was now going through the drawers behind the L &L counter, searching for something, his desperado’s energy suddenly lashed to a purpose. He used both hands, his cigarette stuck in his mouth, and unpacked papers onto the countertop hurriedly. I’d gathered a piece of vague information, I supposed: Tony didn’t trust Danny with everything.

Then I saw a hulking shadow stir, in a parked car on L &L’s side of the street, just a few yards from the storefront.

Unmistakable.

The Kumquat Sasquatch.

The car was an economy model, bright red, and he filled it like it had been cast around his body. I saw him lean sideways to watch the Cadillac with Danny and Welcome inside round the corner of Smith and disappear with a pulse of brakelights. Then he turned his attention back to the storefront; I read the movement in the disappearance of a nose from the silhouette, its replacement by an elephantine ear. The giant was doing what I was doing, staking out L &L.

He watched Tony, and I watched them both. Tony was a lot more interesting at the moment. I hadn’t often seen him reading, and never this intently. He was searching for something in the sheaf of papers he’d pulled from Minna’s drawers, his brow furrowed, cigarette in his lips, looking like Edward R. Murrow’s punk brother. Now, unsatisfied, he dug in another drawer, and worked over a notebook I recognized even from across the street as the one containing my own stakeout jottings from the day before. I tried not to take it personally when he thrust this aside even more hastily and went back to tearing up the drawers.

The large shadow took it all in, complacent. His hand moved from somewhere below the line of the car window and briefly covered his mouth; he chewed, then leaned forward to dribble out some discarded seeds or pits. A bag of cherries or olives this time, something a giant would gobble in a handful. Or Cracker Jack, and he didn’t like peanuts. He watched Tony like an operagoer who knew the libretto, was curious only to gaidew details of how the familiar plot would play out this time.

Tony exhausted the drawers, started in on the file cabinets.

The giant chewed. I blinked in time with his chewing, and counted chews and blinks, occupying my Tourette’s brain with this nearly invisible agitation, tried to stay otherwise still as a lizard on the stoop. He had only to turn this way to spot me. My whole edge consisted of seeing without being seen; I had nothing more on the giant, had never had. If I wanted to preserve that wafer-thin edge I needed to find a better hiding place-and it wouldn’t hurt to get in out of the stiff, cold wind.

The three remaining L &L cars were my best option. But the Pontiac, which I would have preferred, was up ahead of the giant’s car, easily in his line of sight. I was sure I didn’t want to face whatever ghosts or more tangibly olfactory traces of Minna might be trapped inside the sealed windows of the Death Car. Which left the Tracer. I felt in my pocket for my bunch of keys, found the three longest, one of which was the Tracer’s door and ignition. I was preparing to duckwalk down the pavement and slip into the Tracer when the Cadillac reappeared, hurtling down Bergen, with Danny at the wheel.

He parked in the same spot at the front of the block and walked back toward L &L. I slumped on the stoop, played drunk. Danny didn’t see me. He went inside, surprising Tony in his filework. They exchanged a word or two, then Tony slid the drawer closed and bummed another cigarette from Danny. The shadow in the little car went on watching, sublimely confident and peaceful. Neither Tony nor Danny had ever seen the giant, I suppose, so he had less to worry about in attracting attention than I did. But reason alone couldn’t account for the giant’s composure. If he wasn’t a student of Gerard’s, he should have been: He possessed true Buddha-nature, and would have surpassed his teacher. Three hundred and fifty-odd pounds instill a cosmic measure of gravity, I suppose. What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor? was the joke I remembered now, one of Loomis’s measly riddles. Make me one with everything. I would have been happy to be one with everything at that moment.

Heck, make me one with anything.

I was pretty hungry, too, if I thought about it. A stakeout was customarily a gastronomic occasion, and I was beginning to get that itch for something between two slices of bread. Why shouldn’t I be hungry? I’d missed dinner, had Kimmery instead.

With thoughts of food and sex my attention slipped, so that I was startled now to see Tony pop out of the storefront, his expression still as fierce as it had been when he was poring over the paperwork. For a moment I thought I’d been spotted. But he turned toward Smith Street, crossed Bergen, and disappeared around the corner.

The giant watched, unimpressed, unworried.

We waited.

Tony returned with a large plastic shopping bag, probably from Zeod’s. The only thing I could discern was a carton of Marlboros sticking out of the top, but the bag was heavy with something. Tony opened the passenger door of the Pontiac and put the bag on the seat, glanced quickly up the street without spotting either me or the giant, then relocked the car and went back to L &L.

Figuring it was status quo for the time being, I made my way back down Bergen, up Hoyt Street, and around the block the long way, and checked into Zeod’s myself.

Zeod liked to work the late hours, do the overnight, check in the newspaper deliveries at six and then sleep through the bright hours of the morning and early afternoon. He was like the Sheriff of Smith Street, eyes open while we all slept, seeing the drunks stagger home, keeping his eye on the crucial supplies, the Ding Dongs and Entenmann’s cookies, the forty-ounce malt liquor and the cups of coffee “regular” with a picture of the Parthenon on the cup. Except now he had company down the street at L &L, Tony and Danny and the giant and myself enacting our strange vigil, our roundelay of surveillance. I wondered if Zeod knew about Minna yet. As I slipped up to the counter the groggy counter boy was punishing the slicer with a steaming white towel, replenishing the towel in a basin of hot suds, while Zeod stood exhorting him, telling him how he could be doing it better, squeezing some value out of him before he quit like all the others.

“Crazyman!”

“Shhh.” I imagined that Tony or the giant could hear Zeod bellow through the shop window and around the corner of the block.

“You’re working so late for Frank tonight? Something important, eh? Tony just came.”

“Important Freaks! Important Franks!”

“Ho ho ho.”

“Listen, Zeod. Can you tell me what Tony bought?” Zeod screwed up his face, finding this question sensational. “You can’t ask him yourself?”

“No, I can’t.”

He shrugged. “Six-pack of beer, four sandwiches, carton of cigarettes, Coca-Cola-whole picnic.”

“Funny picnic.”

“Wasn’t funny to him,” said Zeod. “Couldn’t make him smile. Like you, Crazyman. On a very serious case, eh?”

“What-becausewhich, besideswhich-what sandwiches did he buy?” It was my suddenly ravenous appetite that steered this inquiry.

“Ah!” Zeod rubbed his hands together. He was always ready to savor his own product on someone else’s behalf. “Turkey with Thousand, very nice on a kaiser roll, pepperoni-and-provolone hero with peppers inside, two roast beef with horseradish on rye bread.”

I had to clutch the counter to keep from falling over, this storm of enticements was so heady.

“You like what you hear, I can see that,” said Zeod.

I nodded, turned my head sideways, took in the fresh-gleaming slicer, the elegant curve of the fender that sheathed the bla.

Zeod said, “You want something, Crazyman, don’t you?”

I saw the counter boy’s eyes roll in weary anticipation. The slicer rarely saw this much action at two or three in the morning. They’d have to sluice it down with suds again before the night was done.

“Please-ghostradish, pepperpony, kaiserphone-please, uh, the same as Tony.”

“You want the same? All four the same?”

“Yes,” I gasped. I couldn’t think past Tony’s list of sandwiches. My hunger for them was absolute. I had to match Tony sandwich for sandwich, a gastronomic mirroring-tic-I’d understand him by the time I was through the fourth, I figured. We would achieve a Zeod’s mind-meld, with Thousand Island dressing.

While Zeod rode his counter boy to complete the large order I hid in the back near the beverage cases, picked out a liter of Coke and a bag of chips, and reorganized and counted a disorderly shelf of cat-food cans.

“Okay, Lionel.” Zeod was always most gentle with me when handing over his precious cargo-we shared that reverence for his product. “Put it on Frank’s tab, right?” He gathered my soda and chips in a large bag with the paper-wrapped sandwiches.

“No, no-” I rustled in my pockets for a tight-folded twenty.

“What’s the matter? Why not the boss man pick it up?”

“I want to pay you.” I pushed the bill across the counter. Zeod took it and arched his eyebrows.

“Very funny business,” he said, and made a chuck-chuck-chuck sound with his tongue in his cheek.

“What?”

“Same thing as Tony, before you,” he said. “He says he wants to pay. Same thing.”

“Listen, Zeod. If Tony comes back in here tonight”-I fought off a howling sound that wanted to come out of me, the cry of a sandwich predator over fresh kill he has yet to devour-“don’t tell him you saw me, okay?”

Zeod winked. Somehow this made sense to him. I felt a thing that was either a nauseous wave of paranoia-perhaps Zeod was an agent of Tony’s, absolutely in his pocket, and would be on the phone to him the minute I was out of the shop-or else my stomach spasming in anticipation of food. “Okay, Chief,” said Zeod as I went out the door.

I came around the block the long way again, quickly confirmed that the giant and Tony were still in their places, then swerved across the street and slipped up beside the Tracer, key in hand. The giant’s compact was six cars ahead, but I couldn’t see his clifflike silhouette from where I stood as I unlocked the car. I only hoped that meant he couldn’t see me. I plopped Zeod’s bag on the passenger seat, jumped inside, and slammed the door shut as quickly as I could, praying that the brief flash of the interior light hadn’t registered in the giant’s rearview. Then I slumped down in my place so I’d be invisible, on the slight chance he did turn and could make anything out through a thickness of twelve darkened windshields. Meanwhile I got my hands busy unfurling the paper around one of Zeod’s roast beef and horseradish specials. Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.

Now it was a proper stakeout-if only I could figure what it was I was waiting to see happen. Not that I could see much from inside the Tracer. The giant’s car was still in its place but I couldn’t confirm his existence inside it. And at this extreme angle all I could see was a thin slice of bright L &L window. Twice Tony paced to the front of the store, just long enough for me to identify his form in shadow and a flash of an elbow, a left-behind plume of cigarette exhalation across the edge of Minna’s destination map, the Queens airports at the left margin showing Minna’s Magic Marker scrawl: $18. Bergen Street was a void in my rearview, Smith Street only marginally brighter ahead of me. It was a quarter to four. I felt the F train’s rumble underneath Bergen, first as it slowed into the station and paused there, then a second tremor as it departed. A minute later the 67 bus rolled like a great battered appliance down Bergen, empty apart from the driver. Public transportation was the night’s pulse, the beep on the monitor at the patient’s bedside. In a few hours those same trains and buses would be jammed with jawing, caffeinated faces, littered with newspapers and fresh gum. Now they kept the faith. Me, I had the cold to keep me awake, that and the liter of Coca-Cola and my assignment, my will to influence the outcome of the night’s strange stalemate. Those would have to slug it out with the soporific powers of the roast-beef sandwich, the dreamy pull of my fresh memories of Kimmery, the throb of my skull where the giant had clubbed me with his gun.

What was the giant waiting for?

What did Tony want to find in Minna’s files?

Why were his sandwiches in the car?

Why had Julia flown to Boston?

Who was Bailey anyway?

I opened my bag of chips, took a slug of my cola, and put myself to work on those new and old questions and on staying awake.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s-the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance-as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

I’ve spent long nights in that place. This night, though, consisted of summoning up that state I’d so often worked to banish. I was alone now, sunna, no Men, my own boss on this stakeout with who-knew-what riding on its outcome. If I fell asleep the little world of my investigation would crumble. I needed to find my insomniac self, to agitate my problem-solving brain, if not to solve actual problems, then to worry at them for the purpose of keeping my dumb eyeballs propped open.

Avoiding becoming one with everything: that was my big challenge at the moment.

It was four-thirty. My consciousness was distended, the tics like islands in an ocean of fog.

Who needed sleep? I asked myself. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Minna had liked to say.

I guess he had his chance now.

I’ll die when I’m dead, my brain recited in Minna’s voice. Not a minute sooner, you kosher macaroons!

A diet of bread. A guy on a bed.

No, no bed. No car. No phone.

Phone.

The cell phone. I pulled it out, rang the L &L number. It rang three times before a hand picked it up.

“No cars,” said Danny lazily. If I knew him, he’d been sleeping with his head on the counter, weary of pretending to listen to whatever Tony was ranting about.

I’d have given a lot, of course, to know what Tony was ranting about.

“It’s me, Danny. Put Tony on.”

“Yo,” he said, unsurprisable. “Here you go.”

“What?” said Tony.

“It’s me,” I said. “Deskjob.”

“You fucking little freak,” said Tony. “I’ll kill you.”

I outweighed Tony only by about fifty pounds. “You had your chance,” I heard myself say. Tony still brought out the romantic in me. We’d be two Bogarts to the end. “Except if you’d pulled that trigger, you might have blown a hole in your foot, or in some far-off toddler on his bike.”

“Oh, I’d of straightened it out,” Tony said. “I wish I had put a coupla holes in you. Leaving me with that fucking cop.”

“Remember it any way you like. I’m trying to help you at the moment.”

“That’s a good one.”

“Eat me St. Vincent!” I held the phone away from my face until I was sure the tic was complete. “You’re in danger, Tony. Right now.”

“What do you know about it?”

I wanted to say, Going out of town? What1C;I in the files? Since when do you like horseradish? But I couldn’t let him know I was outside and have him rush into the giant’s arms. “Trust me,” I said. “I really wish you would.”

“Oh, I trust you-to be Bozo the Clown,” he said. “The point is, what can you tell me that’s worth the time to listen?” “That hurts, Tony.”

“For chrissake!” Now he held his receiver away from his mouth and swore. “I got problems, Freakshow, and you’re A-number one.”

“If I were you, I’d worry more about Fujisaki.”

“What do you know about Fujisaki?” He was hissing. “Where are you?”

“I know-undress-a-phone, impress-a-clown-I know a few things.” “You better hide,” he said. “You better hope I don’t catch you.” “Aw, Tony. We’re in the same situation.”

“That’s a laugh, only I’m not laughing. I’m gonna kill you.”

“We’re a family, Tony. Minna brought us together-” I caught myself wanting to quote the Garbage Cop, suggest another moment of silence.

“There’s too long a tail on that kite, Freakshow. I don’t have the time.”

Before I could speak he hung up the phone.

It was after five, and bakery trucks had begun to roll. Soon a van would come and deliver Zeod’s newspapers, with Minna’s obituary notice in them.

I was in a comalike state when Tony came out of L &L and got into the Pontiac. A sentinel part of my brain had kept a watch on the storefront while the rest of me slept, and so I was startled to find that the sun was up, that traffic now filled Bergen Street. I glanced at Minna’s watch: It was twenty minutes to seven. I was chilled through, my head throbbed, and my tongue felt as if it had been bound in horseradish-and-cola-soaked plaster and left out on the moon overnight. I shook my head and my neck crackled. I tried to keep my eyes on the scene even as I worked my jaw sideways to revive the mechanism of my face. Tony steered the Pontiac into Smith Street’s morning flow. The giant poked his compact into the traffic a moment later, first allowing two cars to creep in behind Tony. I turned the Tracer’s ignition key and the engine scuffed into life, and I followed, keeping my own safe distance behind.

Tony led us up Smith, onto Atlantic heading toward the waterfront, into a stream of commuters and delivery trucks. In that stream I lost sight of Tony pretty quickly, but held on to the giant’s pretty red compact.

Tony took the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at the foot of Atlantic. The giant and I slid onto the ramp behind him in turn. Greenpoint, that was my first guess. I shuddered at recalling the Dumpster behind Harry Brainum’s, off McGuinness Boulevard, where Minna had met his finish. How had the giant contrived to lure Tony out to that spot?

But I was wrong. We passed the Greenpoint exit, heading north. I saw the black Pontiac in the distance ahead as we rounded the expressway’s curve toward the airports and Long Island, but I kept dropped back, at least two cars behind the red compact. I had to trust the giant to track Tony, another exercise in Zen calm. We threaded the various exits and cloverleafs out of Brooklyn, through Queens toward the airport exits. When we turned momentarily toward JFK I generated a new theory: Someone from Fujisaki was disembarking at the Japan Air Lines terminal, some chief of executions, or a courier with a ticking package to deliver. Minna’s death might be the first blow in an international wave of executions. And a flight to meet explained Tony’s long, nervous overnight wait. Even as I settled on this explanation, I watched the red car peel away from the airport option, to the northbound ramp, marked for the Whitestone Bridge. I barely made it across three lanes to stay on their vehicular heels.

Four sandwiches, of course. If I weren’t prone to multiple sandwiches myself I might have made more of this clue. Four sandwiches and a six-pack. We were headed out of town. Fortunately I had rounded up my clone version of Tony’s picnic, so I was outfitted too. I wondered if the giant had anything to eat besides the bag of cherries or olives I’d seen him gobbling. Our little highway formation reminded me of a sandwich, actually, a Minna Man on either side of the giant-we were a goon-on-orphan, with wheels. As we soared over the Whitestone I took another double shot of cola. It would have to stand in for morning coffee. I only had to solve the problem of needing to pee rather badly. Hence I hurried to finish the Coke, figuring I’d go in the bottle.

Half an hour later we’d passed options for the Pelhams, White Plains, Mount Kisco, a few other names I associated with the outer margins of New York City, on into Connecticut, first on the Hutchinson River Parkway, then on something called the Merritt Parkway. I kept the little red car in my sights. The cars were thick enough to keep me easily camouflaged. Every now and again the giant would creep near enough to Tony’s Pontiac that I could see we were still three, bound like secret lovers through the indifferent miles of traffic.

Highway driving was maximally soothing. The steady flow of attention and effort, the nudging of gas pedal and checking of mirrors and blind spots with a twist of the neck subsumed my ticcishness completely. I was still bleary, needing sleep, but the novelty of this odd chase and of being farther out of New York City than I’d ever been worked to keep me awake. I’d seen trees before-so far Connecticut offered nothing I didn’t know from suburban Long Island, or even Staten Island. But the idea of Connecticut was sort of interesting.

The traffic tightened as we skirted a small city called Hartford, and for a moment we were bricked into a five-lane traffic jam. It was just before nine, and we’d caught Hartford’s endearing little version of a rush hour. Tony and the giant were both in view ahead of me, the giant in the lane to my right, and as I cinched forward a wheel-turn at a time, I nearly drew even with him. The red car was a Contour, I saw now. I was a Tracer following a Contour. As though I’d taken a pencil and followed the giant’s route on a road map. Mlane crept forward while his stood still, and soon I’d nearly pulled up even with him. He was chewing something, his jaw and neck pulsing, his hand now moving again to his mouth. I suppose to maintain that size he had to keep it coming. The car was probably brimful with snacks-perhaps Fujisaki paid him for his hits directly in food, so he wouldn’t have to bother converting cash. They should have gotten him a bigger car, though.

I braked to keep him in front of me. Tony’s lane began to slide ahead of the others and the giant merged into it without signaling, as though the Contour conveyed the authority of his brutish body. I was content to let some distance open between us, and before long Hartford’s miniature jam eased. Heartfood handfoot hoofdog horseradish went the tinny song in my brain. I took a cue from the giant’s chewing and rustled in the bag of sandwiches on the passenger seat. I groped for the hero, wanting to taste the wet crush of the Zeod’s marinated peppers mixed with the spicy, leathery pepperoni.

I had the hero half devoured when I spotted Tony’s black Pontiac slowing into a rest area, while the giant’s Contour soared blithely past.

It could mean only one thing. Having reached this point behind Tony, the giant didn’t need to trail him anymore. He knew where Tony was going and in fact preferred to arrive sooner, to be waiting when Tony arrived.

It wasn’t Boston. Boston might be on the way, but it wasn’t the destination. I’d finally put men of peace and place of peace together. I’m not so slow.

And appropriate to the manner of the evening’s stakeout and the morning’s chase, I still stood in relation to the giant as the giant stood to Tony. I knew where the giant was going-a freakshow chasing a context-I knew where they were both going. And I had reasons to want to get there soonest. I was still seeking my edge over the giant. Maybe I could poison his sushi.

I pulled into the next rest stop and gassed up the car, peed, and bought some ginger ale, a cup of coffee and a map of New England. Sure enough, the diagonal across Connecticut pointed through Massachusetts and a nubbin of coastal New Hampshire to the entrance of the Maine Turnpike. I fished the “Place of Peace” brochure out of my jacket and found the place where the Turnpike left off and the brochure’s rudimentary map took over, a coastal village called Musconguspoint Station. The name had a chewy, unfamiliar flavor that tantalized my syndrome. I spotted others like it on the map. Whether or not Maine’s wilderness impressed me more than suburban Connecticut, the road signs would provide some nourishment.

Now I had only to take the lead in this secret interstate race. I was relying on the giant’s overconfidence-he was so certain he was the pursuer he’d never stopped to wonder whether he might be pursued. Of course, I hadn’t spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder either. I twitched the notion off with a few neck-jerks and got back in my car.

She answered on the second ring, her voiancittle groggy. “Kimmery.”

“Lionel?”

“Yessrog.”

“Where did you go?”

“I’m in-I’m almost in Massachusetts.”

“What do you mean, almost? Is that like a state of mind or something, Massachusetts?”

“No, I mean almost there, literally. I’m on the highway, Kimmery. I’ve never been this far from New York.”

She was quiet for a minute. “When you run you really run,” she said.

“No, no, don’t misunderstand. I had to go. This is my investigation. I’m-invest-in-a-gun, connect-a-cop, inventachusetts-” I mashed my tongue against the cage of my gritted teeth, trying to bottle up the flow.

Ticcing with Kimmery was especially abhorrent to me, now that I’d declared her my cure.

“You’re what?”

“I’m on the giant’s tail,” I said, squeezing out the words. “Well, not actually on his tail, but I know where he’s going.”

“You’re still looking for your giant,” she said thoughtfully. “Because you feel bad about that guy Frank who got killed, is that right?”

“No. Yes.”

“You make me sad, Lionel.”

“Why?”

“You seem so, I don’t know, guilty.”

“Listen, Kimmery. I called because-Missmebailey!-because I missed you. I mean, I miss you.”

“That’s a funny thing to say. Um, Lionel?”

“Yes?”

“Did you take my keys?”

“It was part of my investigation. Forgive me.”

“Okay, whatever, but I thought it was pretty creepy.”

“I didn’t mean anything creepy by it.”

“You can’t do that kind of thing. It freaks people out, you know?”

“I’m really sorry. I’ll bring them back.”

She was quiet again. I coursed in the fast lane with a band of other speeders, every so often slipping to the right to let an especially frantic one go by. The highway driving had begun to inspire a Touretic fantasy, that the hoods and fenders of the cars were shoulders and collars I couldn’t touch. I had to keep adequate distance so I wouldn’t be tempted to try to brush up against those gleaming proxy bodies.

I hadn’t seen any sign of either Tony or the giant, but I had reason to hope that Tony at least was already behind me. The giant would have to stop for gas if he hadn’t, and that was when I would pass him.

“I’m going to a place you might know about,” I said. “Yoshii’s. A retreat.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said grudgingly, curiosity winning over her anger. “I always wanted to go there. Roshi said it was really great.”

“Maybe-”

“What?”

“Maybe sometime we’ll go together.”

“I should get off the phone, Lionel.”

The call had made me anxious. I ate the second of the roast-beef sandwiches. Massachusetts looked the same as Connecticut.

I called her back.

“What did you mean by guilty?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, Lionel. It’s just, I’m not really sure about this investigation. It seems like you’re just running around a lot trying to keep from feeling sad or guilty or whatever about this guy Frank.”

“I want to catch the killer.”

“Can’t you hear yourself? That’s like something O. J. Simpson would say. Regular people, when someone they know gets killed or something they don’t go around trying to catch the killer. They go to a funeral.”

“I’m a detective, Kimmery.” I almost said, I’m a telephone. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know. I just can’t really accept it.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I thought detectives were more, uh, subtle.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of detectives in movies or on television.” I was a fine one to be explaining this distinction. “On TV they’re all the same. Real detectives are as unalike as fingerprints, or snowflakes.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m trying to make you laugh,” I said. “I’m glad you noticed. Do you like jokes?”

“You know what koans are? They’re like Zen jokes, except they don’t really have punch lines.”

“What are you waiting for? I’ve got all day here.” In truth the highway had grown fat with extra lanes, and complicated by options and merges. But I wasn’t going to interrupt Kimmery while things were going so well, ticless on my end, bubbly with digressions on hers.

“Oh, I can never remember them, they’re too vague. Lots of monks hitting each other on the head and stuff.”

“That sounds hilarious. The best jokes usually have animals in them, I think.”

“There’s plenty of animals. Here-” I heard a rustle as she braced the phone between her shoulder and chin and paged through a book. I’d had her in the middle of the big empty room-now I adjusted the picture, envisioned her with the phone stretched to reach the bed, perhaps with Shelf on her lap. “So these two monks are arguing over a cat and this other monk cuts the cat in half-Oh, that’s not very nice.”

“You’re killing me. I’m busting a gut over here.”

“Shut up. Oh, here, this is one I like. It’s about death. So this young monk comes to visit this old monk to ask about this other, older monk who’s just died. Tendo, that’s the dead monk. So the young monk is asking about Tendo and the old monk says stuff like ‘Look at that dog over there’ and ‘Do you want a bath?’-all this irrelevant stuff. It goes on like that until finally the young monk is enlightened.”

“Enlightened by what?”

“I guess the point is you can’t really say anything about death.”

“Okay, I get it. It’s just like in Only Angels Have Wings, when Cary Grant’s best friend Joe crashes his plane and dies and then Rosalind Russell asks him ‘What about Joe?’ and “Aren’t you going to do anything about Joe?’ and Cary Grant just says, ‘Who’s Joe?’ ”

“Speaking of watching too much movies and television.”

“Exactly.” I liked the way the miles were flying past for me now, ticless, aloft on Kimmery’s voice, the freeway traffic thinning.

The moment I observed the way our talk and my journey were racing along, though, we lapsed into silence.

“Roshi says this thing about guilt,” she said after a minute. “That it’s selfish, just a way to avoid taking care of yourself. Or thinking about yourself. I guess that’s sort of two different things. I can’t remember.”

“Please don’t quote Gerard Minna to me on the subject of guilt,” I said. “That’s a little hard to swallow under the present circumstances.”

“You really think Roshi’s guilty of something?”

“There’s more I need to find out,” I admitted. “That’s what I’m doing. That’s why I had to take your keys.”

“And why you’re going to Yoshii’s?”

“Yes.”

In the pause that followed I detected the sound of Kimmery believing me, believing in my case, for the first time. “Be careful, Lionel.”

“Sure. I’m always careful. Just keep your promise to me, okay?”

“What promise?”

“Don’t go to the Zendo.”

“Okay. I think I’m getting off the phone now, Lionel.”

“You promise?”

“Sure, yeah, okay.”

Suddenly I was surrounded by office buildings, carports, stacked overhead freeways clogged with cars. I realized too late I probably should have navigated around Boston instead of through it. I suffered through the slowdown, munched on chips and tried not to hold my breath, and before too long the city’s grip loosened, gave way to suburban sprawl, to the undecorated endless interstate. I only hoped I hadn’t let Tony and the giant get ahead of me, lost my lead, my edge. Gotta have an edge. I was beginning to obsess on edge too much: edge of car, edge of road, edge of vision and what hovered there, nagging and insubstantial. How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

Don’t hover in my blind spot, Fonebone!

I felt as though I would begin ticcing with the body of the car, would need to flirt with the textured shoulder of the highway or the darting, soaring bodies all around me unless I heard her voice again.

“Kimmery.”

“Lionel.”

“I called you again.”

“Aren’t these car-phone calls kind of expensive?”

“I’m not the one paying,” I burbled. I was exhilarated by the recurrent technomagic, the cell phone reaching out across space and time to connect us again.

“Who is?”

“Some Zen doormat I met yesterday in a car.”

“Doormat?”

“Doorman.”

“Mmmm.” She was eating something. “You call too much.”

“I like talking to you. Driving is… boring.” I undersold my angst, let the one word stan for so many others.

“Yeah, mmmm-but I don’t want anything, you know, crazy in my life right now.”

“What do you mean by crazy?” Her tonal swerves had caught me by surprise again. I suppose it was this strange lurching dance, though, that kept my double brain enchanted.

“It’s just-A lot of guys, you know, they tell you they understand about giving you space and stuff, they know how to talk about it and that you need to hear it. But they don’t really have any idea what it means. I’ve been through a lot recently, Lionel.”

“When did I say anything about giving you space?”

“I just mean this is a lot of calls in a pretty short period is all.”

“Kimmery, listen. I’m not like other, ah, people you meet. My life is organized around certain compulsions. But it’s different with you, I feel different.”

“That’s good, that’s nice-”

“You have no idea.”

“-but I’m just coming out of something pretty intense. I mean, you swept me off my feet, Lionel. You’re kind of overwhelming, actually, if you don’t already know. I mean, I like talking to you, too, but it isn’t a good idea to call three times right after, you know, spending the night.”

I was silent, unsure how to decode this remarkable speech. “What I mean is, this is exactly the kind of craziness I just got through with, Lionel.”

“Which kind?”

“Like this,” she said in a meek voice. “Like with you.”

“Are you saying Oreo Man had Tourette’s syndrome?” I felt a weird thrill of jealousy. She collected us freaks, I understood now. No wonder she took us in stride, no wonder she damped our symptoms. I was nothing special after all. Or rather my fistlike penis was my only claim.

“Who’s Oreo Man?”

“Your old boyfriend.”

“Oh. But what’s the other thing you said?”

“Never mind.”

We were silent for a while. My brain went, Tourette’s slipdrip stinkjet’s blessdroop mutual-of-overwhelm’s wild kissdoom-

“All I mean is I’m not ready for anything too intense right now,” said Kimmery. “I need space to figure out what I want. I can’t be all overwhelmed and obsessed like the last time.”

“I think I’ve heard enough about that for now.”

“Okay.”

“But-” I gathered myself, made a plunge into territory far stranger to me than Connecticut or Massachusetts. “I think I understand what you mean about space. About leaving it between things so you don’t get too obsessed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or is that the kind of talk you don’t want to hear? I guess I’m confused.”

“No, it’s okay. But we can talk about this later.”

“Well, okay.”

“Bye, Lionel.”

Dial and redial were sitting on a fence. Dial fell off. Who was left?

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

Click. “You’ve reached two-one-two, three-oh-four-”

“HellokimmeryIknowIshouldn’tbecallingbutIjust-”

Clunk. “Lionel?”

“Yes.”

“Stop now.”

“Uh-”

“Just stop calling now. It’s way too much like some really bad things that have happened to me, can you understand? It’s not romantic.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, bye, Lionel, for real now, okay?”

“Yes.”

Redial.

“You’ve reached-”

“Kimmery? Kimmery? Kimmery? Are you there? Kimmery?”

I was my syndrome’s dupe once again. Here I’d imagined I was enjoying a Touretteless morning, yet when the new manifestation appeared, it was hidden in plain sight, the Purloined Tic. Punching that redial I was exhibiting a calling-Kimmery-tic as compulsive as any rude syllable or swipe.

I wanted to hurl the doorman’s cell phone out onto the grassy divider. Instead, in a haze of self-loathing, I dialed another number, one etched in memory though I hadn’t called it in a while.

“Yes?” The voice was weary, encrusted with years, as I remembered it.

“Essrog?” I said.

ut onto tht=”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”›“Yes.” A pause. “This is the Essrog residence. This is Murray Essrog. Who’s calling, please?”

I was a little while coming to my reply. “Eat me Bailey.”

“Oh, Christ.” The voice moved away from the phone. “Mother. Mother, come here. I want you to listen to this.”

“Essrog Bailey,” I said, almost whispering, but intent on being heard.

There was a shuffling in the background.

“It’s him again, Mother,” said Murray Essrog. “It’s that goddamned Bailey kid. He’s still out there. All these years.”

I was still a kid to him, just as to me he’d been an old man since the first time I called him.

“I don’t know why you care,” came an older woman’s voice, every word a sigh.

“Baileybailey,” I said softly.

“Speak up, kid, do your thing,” said the old man.

I heard the phone change hands, the old woman’s breathing come onto the line.

“Essrog, Essrog, Essrog,” I chanted, like a cricket trapped in a wall.

I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon. Both-I’m a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose. My whole life exists in the space between those words, tight, loose, and there isn’t any space there-they should be one word, tightloose. I’m an air bag in a dashboard, packed up layer upon layer in readiness for that moment when I get to explode, expand all over you, fill every available space. Unlike an airbag, though, I’m repacked the moment I’ve exploded, am tensed and ready again to explode-like some safety-film footage cut into a loop, all I do is compress and release, over and over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself. Yet the tape plays on pointlessly, obsessive air bag exploding again and again while life itself goes on elsewhere, outside the range of these antic expenditures.

The night before, in Kimmery’s alcove, suddenly seemed very long ago, very far away.

How could phone calls-cell-phone calls, staticky, unlikely, free of charge-how could they alter what real bodies felt? How could ghosts touch the living?

I tried not to think about it.

I tossed the cell phone onto the seat beside me, into the wreckage of Zeod’s sandwiches, the unfurled paper wrapping, the torn chip bag, the strewn chips and crumpled napkins gone translucent with grease stains in the midmorning sun. I wasn’t eating neatly, wasn’t getting anything exactly right, and now I knew it didnșt matter, not today, not anymore. Having broken the disastrous flow of dialing tics, my mood had gotten hard, my attention narrow. I crossed the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine and focused everything I had left on the drive, on casting off unnecessary behaviors, thrusting exhaustion and bitterness aside and making myself into a vehicular arrow pointed at Musconguspoint Station, at the answers that lay waiting for me there. I heard Minna’s voice now in place of my incessant Tourettic tongue, saying, Floor it, Freakshow. You got something to do, do it already. Tell your story driving.

Route 1 along the Maine coast was a series of touristy villages, some with boats, some with beaches, all with antiques and lobster. A large percentage of the hotels and restaurants were closed, with signs that read SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER! and HAVE A GREAT YEAR! I had trouble believing any of it was real-the turnpike had felt like a schematic, a road map, and I in my car a dot or a penpoint tracing a route. Now I felt as if I were driving through the pages of a calendar, or a collection of pictorial stamps. None of it struck me as particular or persuasive in any way. Maybe once I got out of the car.

Musconguspoint Station was one with boats. It wasn’t the least of these towns, but it was close to it, a swelling on the coast distinguished more than anything by the big ferry landing, with signs for the Muscongus Island Ferry, which made the circuit twice a day. The “place of peace” wasn’t hard to find. Yoshii’s-MAINE’S ONLY THAI AND SUSHI OCEANFOOD EMPORIUM, according to the sign-was the largest of a neat triad of buildings on a hill just past the ferry landing and the fishing docks, all painted a queasy combination of toasted-marshmallow brown and seashell pink, smugly humble earth tones that directly violated Maine’s barn-red and house-white scheme. This was one shot that wasn’t making the calendar. The restaurant extended on stilts over a short cliff on the water, surf thundering below; the other two buildings, presumably the retreat center, were caged in a fussy, evenly spaced row of pine trees, all the same year and model. The sign was topped with a painted image of Yoshii, a smiling bald man with chopsticks and waves of pleasure or serenity emanating from his head like stink-lines in a Don Martin cartoon.

I put the Tracer in the restaurant lot, up on the hill overlooking the water, the fishing dock, and the ferry landing below. It was alone there except for two pickup trucks in staff spots. Yoshii’s hours were painted on the door: seating for lunch began at twelve-thirty, which was twenty minutes from now. I didn’t see any sign of Tony or the giant or anyone else, but I didn’t want to sit in the lot and wait like a fool with a target painted on his back. An edge, that’s what I was after.

Edgerog, 33, seeks Edge.

I got out of the car. First surprise: the cold. A wind that hurt my ears instantly. The air smelled like a thunderstorm but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I went over the barrier of logs at the corner of the parking lot and clambered down the grade toward the water, under the shade of the jutting deck of the restaurant. Once I’d dipped out of sight of the road and buildings, I undid my fly and peed on the rocks, amusing my compulsiveness by staining one whole boulder a deeper gray, albeit only temporarily. It was as I zipped onlurned to see the ocean that the vertigo hit me. I’d found an edge, all right. Waves, sky, trees, Essrog-I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud. Those walls of language had always been in place, I understood now, audible to me until the sky in Maine deafened them with a shout of silence. I staggered, put one hand on the rocks to steady myself. I needed to reply in some new tongue, to find a way to assert a self that had become tenuous, shrunk to a shred of Brooklyn stumbling on the coastal void: Orphan meets ocean. Jerk evaporates in salt mist.

“Freakshow!” I yelled into the swirling foam. It was lost.

“Bailey!” vanished too.

“Eat me! Dickweed!”

Nothing. What did I expect-Frank Minna to come rising from the sea?

“Essrog!” I screamed. I thought of Murray Essrog and his wife. They were Brooklyn Essrogs, like me. Had they ever come to this edge to meet the sky? Or was I the first Essrog to put a footprint on the crust of Maine?

“I claim this big water for Essrog!” I shouted.

I was a freak of nature.

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.

ght=”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”›I could see this called for the oldest investigatory technique of them all: I opened my wallet and took out a twenty. “I’d buy a guy a drink if he could tell me a few things about the Japanese,” I said.

“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.

“That’s lemongrass,” said Julia. “You’re not supposed to eat it.”

“What’s it doing in the soup, then?”

“Flavor. It flavors the soup.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “What’s the name again?”

“Lemongrass,” she hissed. She dropped a slip of paper onto the table by my hand. “Here’s your check, Lionel.”

I reached for her hand where it covered the slip but she pulled it away, like some version of a children’s game, and all I got was the paper.

“Lasagna ass,” I said under my breath.

“What?”

“Laughing Gassrog.” This was more audible, but I hadn’t disturbed Fujisaki, not yet. I looked up at her helplessly.

“Good-bye, Lionel.” She hurried away from my table.

The check wasn’t really a check. Julia’s scrawl covered the underside:

THE FOOD IS ON THE HOUSE.

MEET ME AT FRIENDSHIP HEAD LIGHTHOUSE TWO-THIRTY.

GET OUT OF HERE!!!

I finished the soup, carefully putting the mysterious inedible lemongrass to one side. Then I rose from the table and went past Fujisaki toward the doors, hoping for Julia’s sake to be invisible. One of them turned as I passed, though, and grabbed my elbow.

“You like the food?”

“Terrific,” I said.

It was the one who as a monk had applied the paddle to my back. They’d been guzzling sake and his face was red, his eyes moist and merry.

“You Jerry-Roshi’s unruly student,” he said.

“I guess that’s right.”

“Retreat center a good idea,” he said. “You need long sesshin. You got an utterance problem, I think.”

“I know I do.”

He clapped me on the shoulder, and I clapped his shoulder in return, feeling the shoulder pad in his suit, the tight seam at the sleeve. Then I tugged loose of his embrace, meaning to go, but it was too late. I had to make the rounds and touch the others. I started around the table, clapping each perfectly tailored shoulder. The men of Fujisaki seemed to take it as an encouragement to tap and poke me back while they joked with one another in Japanese. “Duck, duck, goose,” I said, quietly at first. “Otter, otter, utterance.”

“Monk, monk, stooge!” I said, circling the table faster, cavorting. “Weapongrass duckweed!”

“You go now,” said the scowling paddle-wielder.

“Eat me Fujisaki!” I screamed, and whirled out the door.

The second boat had returned to the dock. I went back through Yoshii’s parking lot and down the hill to have a closer look. Smoke still plumed from Foible’s shack; otherwise the scene on the fishing pier was completely still. Perhaps the captain of the boat had joined Foible inside the shack for a drink from a new bottle of gin, on my twenty. Or maybe he’d just gone home to bed after a day’s labor that had started at three in the morning, Urchin Daylight Savings time. I envied him if he had. I crept past the shack, to the other side of the pier. From what I could see the ferry landing was empty too, the boat itself out at the island, the ticket office closed until the late-afternoon landing. The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.

It was farther on, in the tree-shrouded parking lot, that I saw something move, a sign of life. I went silently past the ferry landing to a place out of the harsh angled brightness so I could peer into the shadow and distinguish what the something was. The answer was the giant. He stood between his car and Tony’s squinting in the wind and dappled sunlight and reading or at least staring at a bunch of papers in a manila folder, something out of the L &L files perhaps. In the minute that I watched he grew bored or dissatisfied with the papers and closed the file and ripped it in two, then two again, and walked across the lot to the edge where the pavement was divided from the sea by a wide margin of barnacled and beer-canned boulders. He hurled the torn quadrants of the folder in the direction of the rocks and water and the wind whipped them instantly back to flutter madly past him and disperse across the lot’s gravel and into the trees. But he wasn’t finished yet. There was something else in his hand, something black and small and shiny, and for a moment I thought he was making a call. Then I saw that it was a wallet. He rifled through it and moved some folding money into his own pants pocket and then he hurled the wallet, too, with more success than he’d had with the papers, so that it arced over the rocks and possibly reached the water-I couldn’t tell from my perspective, and neither, I think, could the giant. He didn’t appear particularly worried. Worry wasn’t in his nature.

Then he turned and saw me: Laugh-or-cry Edgelost.

I ran the other way, across the ferry landing and the fishing dock, toward the hill, on top of which sat the restaurant, and my car.

The huff of my own exhausted breath, pounding of blood in my ears, squall of a gull and shush of the surf below-all were overtaken by the squeal of the giant’s wheels: His Contour scaped into the restaurant lot just as I got my key into the ignition. His car barreled toward mine. The cliff was near enough that he might push me off. I revved into reverse and jerked my car backward out of his path and he skidded sideways to stop, nearly slamming into the nearest of the parked pickup trucks. I floored it and beat him back out of the lot, down onto Route 1, pointed south. The giant fell in right behind me. In my rearview I saw him bearing down, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a gun.

Minna and Tony-I’d let them both be gently escorted to their quiet murderings. Mine looked to be a little noisier.

I screwed the steering wheel to the left, twitching myself off the highway toward the ferry dock. The giant wasn’t fooled. He hung right on my bumper, as if the red compact were as correspondingly huge as his body and could climb over or engulf my Tracer. I veered right and left, contacting the ragged edges of the paved road to the dock in some half-symbolic finger-wagging or shooing maneuver, trying to dislodge the giant from my tail, but he matched my every vehicular gesture, Contour on Tracer now. Pavement gave way to gravel and I ground braking and sliding to the right to avoid riding straight up onto the dock and into the water. Instead I steered for the ferry’s parking area, where Tony’s Pontiac still sat, where the gun he hadn’t gotten to use on the giant still waited under the driver’s seat.

Gottagettagun, screamed my brain, and my lips moved trying to keep up with the chant: Gottagettagun gottagettagun.

Gun Gun Gun Shoot!

I’d never fired a gun.

I broke through the entrance, snapping the flimsy gate back on its post. The giant’s car chewed on my bumper, the metal squeaking and sighing. Exactly how I would find breathing room enough to get out of my car and into Tony’s to lay hands on the gun remained to be seen. I curled past Tony’s car, to the left, opening a moment’s gap between me and my pursuer, and rode for the rock barrier. Shreds of the torn file still fluttered here and there in the wind. Maybe the giant would do me the favor of plummeting into the sea. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to noticing it-since it was only the Atlantic it might not have been big enough to make an impression.

He caught me again as I turned the other way to avoid a swim myself, and veered with me around the outer perimeter of the lot. DON’T BACK UP! SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE! shouted the signs at the exit, warning of the one-way spikes meant to prevent free use of the lot. Well, I’d gotten around that one. The giant’s car made contact again, rammed me so we both slid off to the left, toward the exit, away from Tony’s car.

Suddenly inspired, I darted for the exit.

I hit the brake as hard as I could as I passed over the flexible spikes, came shrieking and skidding to a halt about a car’s length past the grate. The giant’s car smashed against my rear end so that my car was driven another couple of yards forward and I was slapped back against the seat, hard. I felt something in my neck click and tasted blood in my mouth.

The first blast was the giant’s air bag inflating. In my rearview I saw a white satin blob now filling the interior of the Contour.

The second blast was the giant’s gun firing as he panicked or his fingers clenched around the trigger in traumatic reflex. The glass of his windshield splintered. I don’t know where the shot went, but it found some target other than my body. I shifted into reverse and floored the gas pedal.

And plowed the giant’s car backward toward the spikes.

I heard his rear tires pop, then hiss. The giant’s rear end slumped, his tires lanced on the spikes.

For a moment I heard only the hiss of escaping air, then a gull screamed, and I made a sound to answer it, a scream of pain in the form of a birdcall.

I shook my head, glanced in the mirror. The giant’s air bag was sagging slowly, silently. Perhaps it had been pierced by the bullet. There wasn’t any sign of motion underneath.

I shifted into first, swerved forward and left, then reversed into the giant’s car again, crumpling the metal along the driver’s-side door, deforming the contour of the Contour, wrinkling it like foil, hearing it creak and groan at being reshaped.

I might have stopped then. I believed the giant was unconscious under the air bag. He was at least silent and still, not firing his gun, not struggling to free himself.

But I felt the wild call of symmetry: His car ought to be crumpled on both sides. I needed to maul both of the Contour’s shoulders. I rolled forward and into position, then backed and crashed against his car once more, wrecking it on the passenger side as I had on the driver’s.

It’s a Tourette’s thing-you wouldn’t understand.

I moved the map and cell phone to Tony’s Pontiac. The keys were still in the ignition. I drove it out of the lot through the smashed entrance gate, and steered past the vacant ferry landing, up to Route 1. Apparently no one had heard the collisions or gunshot in the lot by the sea. Foible hadn’t even poked out of his shack.

Friendship Head was an outcropping on the coast twelve miles north of Musconguspoint Station. The lighthouse was painted red and white, no atrocity of Buddhist earth tones like the restaurant. I trusted that the Scientologists hadn’t gotten to it either. I parked the Pontiac as close to the water as I could and sat staring out for a while, feeling the place where I’d bitten my tongue slowly seal and testing out the damage to my neck. Free movement of my neck was crucial to my Tourettic career. I was like an athlete in that regard. But it felt like whiplash, nothing worse. I was chilled and tired, the replenishing effects of the lemongrass broth long since gone, and I could still feel my head throb in the place the giant had clubbed it twenty-four hours and a million years ago. But I was alive, and the water looked pretty good as the angle of the light grew steeper. I was half an hour early for my date with Julia.

I dialed the local police and told them about the sleeping giant they’d find back at the Muscongus Island ferry.

“He might be in bad shape but I think he’s still alive,” I told them. “You’ll probably need the Jaws of Life to pull him out.”

“Can you give us your name, sir?”

“No, I really can’t,” I said. They’d never know how true it was. “My name doesn’t matter. You’ll find the wallet of the man he killed in the water near the ferry. The body’s more likely to wash up on the island.”

Is guilt a species of Tourette’s? Maybe. It has a touchy quality, I think, a hint of sweaty fingers. Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.

Guilt, like Tourette’s, tries again, learns nothing.

And the guilty soul, like the Tourettic, wears a kind of clown face-the Smokey Robinson kind, with tear tracks underneath.

I called the New Jersey number.

“Tony’s dead,” I told them.

“This is a terrible thing-” Matricardi started.

“Yeah, yeah, terrible,” I said, interrupting. I was in no mood. Really no mood at all. The minute I heard Matricardi’s voice, I was something worse or less than human, not simply sorrowful or angry or ticcish or lonely, certainly not moody at all, but raging with purpose. I was an arrow to pierce through years. “Listen carefully to me now,” I said. “Frank and Tony are gone.”

“Yes,” said Matricardi, already seeming to understand.

“I’ve got something you want and then that’s the end of it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the end of it, we’re not bound to you any longer.”

“Who is we? Who is speaking?”

“L and L.”

“There’s a meaning to saying L and L when Frank is departed, and now Tony? What is it to speak of L and L?”

“That’s our business.”

“So what is this thing you have we want?”

“Gerard Minna lives on East Eighty-fourth Street, in a Zendo. Under another name. He’s responsible for Frank’s deat”

“Zendo?”

“A Japanese church.”

There was a long silence.

“This is not what we expected from you, Lionel.”

I didn’t speak.

“But you are correct that it is of interest to us.”

I didn’t speak.

“We will respect your wishes.”

Guilt I knew something about. Vengeance was another story entirely.

I’d have to think about vengeance.