Once in the early days of the Agency we were dispatched to stand guard in broad daylight around a car, a Volvo, and we picked up a scent of The Clients in Minna’s stilted, fragmentary instructions. The car was empty as far as we could tell. It was parked on Remsen Street near the Promenade, at a placid dead-end traffic circle overlooking Manhattan. Gilbert and I sat on a park bench, trying to look casual with our backs to the skyline, while Tony and Danny idled at the mouth of Remsen and Hicks, glaring at anyone who turned onto the block. We knew only that we were supposed to give way at five o’clock, when a tow truck would come for the car.
Five o’clock stretched into six, then seven, with no truck. We took pee breaks in the children’s park at Montague Street, ran through cigarettes, and paced. Evening strollers appeared on the Promenade, couples, teenagers with paper-bagged bottles of beer, gays mistaking us for cruisers. We shrugged them away from our end of the walk, muttered, glanced at our watches. The Volvo couldn’t have been less conspicuous if it were invisible, but for us it glowed, screamed, ticked like a bomb. Every kid on a bike or stumbling wino seemed an assassin, a disguised ninja with aims on the car.
When the sun began to set Tony and Danny started arguing.
“This is stupid,” said Danny. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t,” said Tony.
“You know there’s a body in the trunk,” said Danny.
“How am I supposed to know that?” said Tony.
“Because what else would it be?” said Danny. “Those old guys had someone killed.”
“That’s stupid,” said Tony.
“A body?” said Gilbert, plainly unnerved. “I thought the car was full of money.”
Danny shrugged. “I don’t care, but it’s a body. I’ll tell you what else: We’re being set up for it.”
“That’s stupid,” said Tony.
“What does Frank know? He just does what they tell him.” Even in rebellion Danny obeyed Minna’s stricture against speaking The Clients’ names.
“You really think it’s a body?” said Gilbert to Danny.
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to stay if it’s a body, Tony.”
“Gilbert, you fat fuck. What if it is? What do you think we’re doing here? You think you’re never gonna see a body working for Minna? Go join the garbage cops, for chrissakes.”
“I’m cutting out,” said Danny. “I’m hungry anyway. This is stupid.”
“What should I tell Minna?” said Tony, daring Danny to go.
“Tell him what you want.”
It was a startling defection. Tony and Gilbert and I were all problems in our various ways, while Danny in his silence and grace was Minna’s pillar, his paragon.
Tony couldn’t face this mutiny directly. He was accustomed to bullying Gilbert and me, not Danny. So he reverted to form. “What about you, Freakshow?”
I shrugged, then kissed my own hand. It was an impossible question. Devotion to Minna had boiled down to this trial of hours watching over the Volvo. Now we had to envision disaster, betrayal, rotting flesh.
But what would it mean to turn from Minna?
I hated The Clients then.
The tow truck came grinding down Remsen before I could speak. It was manned by a couple of fat lugs who laughed at our jumpiness and told us nothing about the car’s importance, just shooed us off and began chaining the Volvo’s bumper to their rig. Less Men than Boys in suits, we felt as though this had been designed as a test of our fresh-grown nerves. And we’d failed, even if Minna and The Clients didn’t know about it.
We grew tougher, though, and Minna became unflappable, and we came to take the role of The Clients in the life of the Agency more in stride. Who had to make sense of everything? It wasn’t always certain when we were acting for them anyway. Seize a given piece of equipment from a given office: Was that on The Clients’ behalf or not? Collect this amount from such and such a person: When we passed the take to Minna did he pass it along to The Clients? Unseal this envelope, tap this phone: Clients? Minna kept us in the dark and turned us into professionals. Matricardi and Rockaforte’s presence became mostly subliminal.
The last job I felt certain was for The Clients was more than a year before Minna’s murder. It bore their trademark of total inexplicability. A supermarket on Smith Street had burned and been razed earlier that summer, and the empty lot was filled with crushed brick and turned into an informal peddlers’ market, where sellers of one fruit-oranges, say, or mangoes-would set up a few crates and do a summer afternoon’s business, alongside the hot-dog and shaved-ice carts that began to gather there. After a month or so a Hispanic carnival took over the site, setting up a Tilt-a-Whirl and a miniature Ferris wheel, each a dollar a ride, along with a grilled-sausage stand and a couple of lame arcades: a water-gun balloon game and a grappling hook over a glass case full of pink and purple stuffed animals. The litter and smells of grease were a blight if you got too close, but the Ferris wheel was lined with white tubes of neon, and it was a glorious thing to see at night down Smith Street, a bright unexpected pinwheel almost three stories high.
We’d been so bored that summer that we’d fallen into working regularly as a car service, taking calls when they came, ferrying dates home from nightclubs, old ladies to and from hospitals, vacationers to La Guardia for the weekend flight to Miami Beach. Between rides we’d play poker in the air-conditioned storefront. It was after one-thirty on a Friday night when Minna came in. Loomis was sitting in on the game, losing hands and eating all the chips, and Minna told him to get lost, go home already.
“What’s the matter, Frank?” said Tony.
“Nothing’s the matter. Got something for us to do, that’s all.”
“Something what? For who?”
“Just a job. What do we have in here that’s like a crowbar or something?” Minna smoked furiously to mask his unease.
“A crowbar?”
“Just something you can swing. Like a crowbar. I’ve got a bat and a lug wrench in my trunk. Stuff like that.”
“Sounds like you want a gun,” said Tony, raising his eyebrows. “If I wanted a gun I’d get a gun, you diphthong. This doesn’t take a gun.”
“You want chains?” said Gilbert, meaning to be helpful. “There’s a whole bunch of chains in the Pontiac.”
“Crowbar, crowbar, crowbar. Why do I even bother with you mystic seers anymore? If I wanted my mind read I’d call Gladys Knight for chrissakes.”
“Dionne Warwick,” said Gilbert.
“What?”
“Psychic Hotline’s Dionne Warwick, not Gladys Knight.”
“Psychicwarlock!”
“Got some pipe downstairs,” mused Danny, only now laying down the hand he’d been holding since Minna barged into the office. It was a full house, jacks and eights.
“It’s gotta be swingable,” said Minna. “Let’s see.”
The phone rang and I grabbed for it and said, “L &L.”
“Tell them we don’t have any cars,” said Minna.
“This needs all four of us?” I said. I was courting fond notions of missing the crowbar-and-lug-wrench project, whatever it was, and driving someone out to Sheepshead Bay instead.
“Yes, Freakboy. We’re all going.”
I got rid of the call. Twenty minutes later we were loaded up with pipes, lug wrench, car jack and a souvenir Yankee bat from Bat Day in Minna’s old Impala, the least distinguished of L &L’s many cars, and another bad sign if I was trying to read signs. Minna drove us down Wyckoff, past the projects, then circled around, south on Fourth Avenue down to President Street, and back toward Court. He was stalling, checking his watch.