I considered the word replaced. I decided it was time to go.
“I need your permission-” I began, then stopped. Who were The Clients, and what did their permission consist of? What was I thinking?
“Speak, Lionel.”
“I’m goi to keep looking,” I said. “With or without Tony’s help.”
“Yes. We can see. And so we have an assignment for you. A suggestion.”
“A place for you to apply your passion for justice.”
“And your talent for detection. The training instilled.”
“What?” Just a measure of the day’s angled brightness penetrated the heavy curtains of the parlor. I glared back at a row of thuggish midcentury faces staring out from picture frames, wondering which was Matricardi’s mom. The hot dogs I’d eaten were rumbling in my stomach. I longed to be outside, on the Brooklyn streets, anywhere but here.
“You spoke with Julia,” said Matricardi. “You should find her. Bring her in as we brought you. Let us speak with her.”
“She’s afraid,” I said. A frayed knot.
“Afraid of what?”
“She’s like me. She doesn’t trust Tony.”
“Something is wrong between them.”
This was exhausting. “Of course something’s wrong. They slept together.”
“Making love brings people closer, Lionel.”
“Maybe they feel guilty about Frank.”
“Guilty, yes. Julia knows something. We called her to see us. Instead she runs. Tony says he doesn’t know where.”
“You think Julia has something to do with Frank’s murder?” I let my hand trace a vague line in the dust on the marble mantelpiece. A mistake. I tried to forget I’d done it.
“There’s something on her mind, something weighing. You want to help us, Lionel, find her.”
“Learn her secrets and share them with us. Do this without telling Tony.”
Losing control somewhat, I inserted my finger into the grooved edge of the mantel and pushed, gathering a shaggy clot of dust.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Now you want me to go behind Tony’s back?”
“We listen, Lionel. We hear. We consider. Questions occur. If your suspicions are grounded the answers may lie with Julia. Tony has been less than clear in this one area. However strange and damaged, you’ll be our hands and feet, our eyes and ears, you’ll learn and return to us and share.”
“Founded,” I said. I reached the end of the mantel and thrust the accumulated dustball past the edge, following through like a one-fingered shot-putter.
“If they are,” said Matricardi/em› I 201C;You don’t know. That’s what you’ll find out.”
“No, I mean founded, not grounded. Suspicions founded.”
“He’s correcting,” said Rockaforte to Matricardi, gritting his teeth.
“Find her, Essrog! Founder! Grounder! Confessrub!” I tried to wipe my finger clean on my jacket and made a gray stripe of clingy dust.
Then I belched, really, and tasted hot dogs.
“There’s a little part of Frank in you,” said Matricardi. “We speak to that part and it understands. The rest of you may be inhuman, a beast, a freak. Frank was right to use that word. You’re a freak of nature. But the part of you that Frank Minna cared for and that cares so much for his memory is the part that will help us find Julia and bring her home.”
“Go now, because you sicken us to see you playing with the dust that gathers in the home of his beloved mother, bless her sweet dishonored and tormented soul.”
Conspiracies are a version of Tourette’s syndrome, the making and tracing of unexpected connections a kind of touchiness, an expression of the yearning to touch the world, kiss it all over with theories, pull it close. Like Tourette’s, all conspiracies are ultimately solipsistic, sufferer or conspirator or theorist overrating his centrality and forever rehearsing a traumatic delight in reaction, attachment and causality, in roads out from the Rome of self.
The second gunman on the grassy knoll wasn’t part of a conspiracy-we Touretters know this to be true. He was ticcing, imitating the action that had startled and allured him, the shots fired. It was just his way of saying, Me too! I’m alive! Look here! Replay the film!
The second gunman was tugging the boat.
I’d parked in the shade of an elderly, crippled elm, trunk knotted and gnarled from surviving disease, with roots that had slowly nudged the slate sidewalk upward and apart. I didn’t see Tony waiting in the Pontiac until I nearly had my key in the door. He was sitting in the driver’s seat.
“Get in.” He leaned over and opened the passenger door. The sidewalk was empty in both directions. I considered strolling away, ran into the usual problem of where to go.
“Get in, Freakshow.”
I went to the passenger side and slid into the seat beside him, then reached out disconsolately and caressed his shoulder, leaving a smudge of dust. He raised his hand and slapped me on the side of the head.
“They lied to me,” I said, flinching away.
“I’m shocked. Of course they lied. What are you, a newborn baby?”
“Barnamum baby,” I mumble
“Which particular lie are you worrying about, Marlowe?”
“They warned you I was coming here, didn’t they? They set me up. It was a trap.”
“Fuck did you think was going to happen?”
“Never mind.”
“You think you’re smart,” said Tony, his voice twangy with contempt. “You think you’re Mike fucking Hammer. You’re like the Hardy Boys’ retarded kid brother, Lionel.” He slapped my head again. “You’re Hardly Boy.”
My home borough had never felt so like a nightmare to me as it did on this bright sunlit day on Matricardi and Rockaforte’s block of Degraw: a nightmare of repetition and enclosure. Ordinarily I savored Brooklyn’s unchangeability, the bullying, Minna-like embrace of its long memory. At the moment I yearned to see this neighborhood razed, replaced by skyscrapers or multiplexes. I longed to disappear into Manhattan’s amnesiac dance of renewal. Let Frank be dead, let the Men disperse. I only wanted Tony to leave me alone.
“You knew I had Frank’s beeper,” I said sheepishly, putting it together.
“No, the old guys have X-ray vision, like Superman. They don’t know shit if I don’t tell them, Lionel. You need to find a new line of work, McGruff. Shitlock Holmes.”
I was familiar enough with Tony’s belligerence to know it had to run awhile, play itself out. Me, I slid my hands along the top of the dashboard at the base of the windshield, smoothing away the crumbs and dust accumulated there, riffling my fingers over the plastic vents. Then I began buffing the corner of the windshield with my thumb tip. Visiting Matricardi’s mother’s parlor had triggered a dusting compulsion.
“You idiot freak.”
“Beepmetwice.”
“I’ll beep you twice, all right.”
He lifted his hand, and I flinched again, ducking underneath like a boxer. While I was near I licked the shoulder of his suit, trying to clean off the smudge of dust I’d left. He pushed me away disgustedly, an ancient echo of St. Vincent’s hallway.
“Okay, Lionel. You’re still half a fag. You got me convinced.”
I didn’t speak, no small achievement. Tony sighed and put both hands on the wheel. He appeared to be through buffeting me for the moment. I watched my saliva-stripe evaporate into the weave of his jacket.
“So what did they tell you?”
“The Clients?”
“Sure, The Clients,” said Tony. “Matricardi and Rockaforte. Frank’s dead, Lionel. I don’t think he’s gonna, like, spin in his grave if you say their names.”