“Fork-it-hardly,” I whispered, then glanced over my shoulder at their stoop. “Rocket-fuck-me.”
“Good enough. So what did they tell you?”
“The same thing the-Duckman! Dogboy! Confessdog!-same thing the doormen told me: Stay off the case.” I was mad with verbal tics now, making up for lost time, feeling at home. Tony was still a comfort to me in that way.
“What doorman?”
“Doormen. A whole bunch of them.”
“Where?”
But Tony’s eyes said he knew perfectly well where, only needed to measure what I knew. He looked a little panicked, too.
“Ten-thirty Park Avenue,” I said. Energy pocket angle. Rectangle sauce!
His hands tightened on the wheel. Instead of looking at me, he squinted into the distance. “You were there?”
“I was following a lead.”
“Answer my question. You were there?”
“Sure.”
“Who’d you see?”
“Just a lot of doormen.”
“You discuss this with Matricardi and Rockaforte? Tell me you didn’t, you goddamn motormouth.”
“They talked, I listened.”
“Oh yeah, that’s likely. Fuck.”
Oddly, I found myself wanting to reassure Tony. He and The Clients had drawn me back to Brooklyn and ambushed me in my car, but some old orphans’ solidarity worked against my claustrophobia. Tony scared me, but The Clients scared me more. And now I knew they still scared Tony, too. Whatever deal he’d struck was incomplete.
It was cold in the car, but Tony was sweating.
“Be serious with me now, Lionel. Do they know about the building?”
“I’m always serious. That’s the tragedy of my life.”
“Talk to me, Freakshow.”
“Anybuilding! Nobuilding! Nobody said anything about a building.” I reached for his collar, wanting to straighten it, but he batted my hands away.
“You were in there awhile,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me, Lionel. What was said?”
“They want me to find Julia,” I said, wondering if it was a good idea to mention her name. th think she knows something.” Tony took a gun out from under his arm and pointed it at me.
I’d returned to Brooklyn suspecting Tony of colluding with The Clients, and now-sweet irony!-Tony suspected me of the same thing. It wasn’t that much of a leap. Matricardi and Rockaforte didn’t have any motive for humoring me. If they trusted Tony, they wouldn’t have required him to wait and bag me outside in the car afterward. He would have been hidden inside, behind the proverbial curtain, soaking up the whole conversation.
I had to give The Clients credit. They’d played us like a Farfisa organ.
On the other hand, Tony had a secret from The Clients: the building on Park Avenue. And despite his fears his secret seemed intact. No point of this particular quadrangle had a monopoly on information. Tony knew something they didn’t. I knew something Tony didn’t, didn’t I? I hoped so. And Julia knew something neither Tony nor The Clients knew, or else she knew something Tony didn’t want The Clients to know. Julia, Julia, Julia, I needed to figure out the Julia angle, even if Matricardi and Rockaforte wanted me to.
Or was I outsmarting myself? I knew what Minna would have said.
Wheels within wheels.
I’d never faced Tony at gunpoint before, but at some level I’d been preparing for this moment all my life. It didn’t feel at all unnatural. Rather it was a sort of culmination, the rarefied end point of our long association. Now, if I’d had a gun on him, that would’ve freaked me out.
The gun also served splendidly to concentrate my attention. I felt my ticcishness ease, and a flood of excess language instantly evaporate, like cartoon blemishes in a television commercial. Gunplay: another perfectly useless cure.
Tony didn’t seem all that impressed by the situation. His eyes and mouth were tired. It was only four in the afternoon and we’d been sitting in the parked car too long already. He had questions, urgent, particular, and the gun would help move things along.
“You talk to anyone else about the building?” he asked.
“Who would I talk to?”
“Danny, say. Or Gilbert.”
“I was just up there. I haven’t seen Danny. And Gilbert’s in jail.” I left out the part about the Garbage Cop, and prayed Minna’s beeper didn’t go off anytime soon.
Meanwhile, with his questions Tony was telling me more than I was telling him: Danny and Gilbert weren’t with him in the Park Avenue caper. Yes, this Hardly Boy was still on the case.
“So it’s just you,” Tony said. “You’re the jerk I’ve gotta deal with. You’re Sam Spade.”
“Minna wasn’t your partner. He was your sponsor, Freakshow. He was Jerry Lewis, and you were the thing in the wheelchair.”
“Then why’d he call for me instead of you when he was in trouble yesterday?”
“He was an idiot bringing you up there.”
A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I’d overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.
“Tell me about Julia, Tony-Tulip Attorney!” The magic curative of being at gunpoint was beginning to fade.
“Shut up a little. I’m thinking.”
“What about Ullman?” I said. As long as he was allowing my questions I might as well ask. “Who was Ullman?-Doofus Allplan!” I wanted to ask about the Fujisaki Corporation, but I figured the extent of what I knew was one of the only things I knew and he didn’t. I needed to preserve that advantage, however minuscule. Besides, I didn’t want to hear what hay my syndrome would make of the word Fujisaki.
Tony made a particularly sour face. “Ullman’s a guy who didn’t figure numbers right. He’s one of a little group of somebodies who tried to make themselves rich. Frank was another one.”
“So you and the Polish killer took him out, huh?”
“That’s so wrong it’s funny.”
“Tell me, Tony.”
“Where would I start?” he said. I heard a note of bitterness, and wondered if I could play on it. Tony likely missed Minna in his way, and missed the Agency, no matter how he’d been corrupted or what poisonous information he knew that I didn’t.
“Be sentimental for a change,” I said. “Make me know you didn’t kill him.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“That was persuasive,” I said. Then I made a sour face like an uptight British butler: “Per-shwoosh-atively!”
“The problem with you, Lionel, is you don’t know anything about how the world really works. Everything you know comes from Frank Minna or a book. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Gangster movies.” I fought to keep the butler-face from reappearing.
“What?”
“I watched a lot of gangster movies, like you. Everything we both know comes from Frank Minna or gangster movies.”
“Frank Minna was two guys,” said Tony. “The one I learned from and the chucklehead who thought you were funny and got himself killed. You only knew the chucklehead.”
Tony held the gun floppily between us, using it to gesture, to signal punctuation. I only hoped he understood how literally it could punctuate. None of us had ever carried guns so far as I knew, apart from Minna. He’d rarely allowed us even to see his. Now I wondered what private teaching had gone on when I wasn’t around, wondered how seriously I should take Tony’s notion of the two Minnas.