One day the younger brother told his wife a dire secret, which she had to be sure to keep from leaking to anyone in Brooklyn, lest it reach the ears of the gangsters: The older brother had returned to New York City. He’d declared himself a roshi, an elder teacher of Zen, and started a Zendo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in Yorkville. This Yorkville Zendo was subsidized by a powerful group of Japanese businessmen he’d met in Maine, where they’d taken over and renovated top to bottom the homely Zen center and the lobster pound next door: the Fujisaki Corporation.
The men of Fujisaki were highly spiritual, but had found themselves in disrepute in their native country, where monkhood is reserved only for those born into certain esteemed bloodlines, and where capitalistic rapaciousness and spiritual devotion are viewed as mutually exclusive. Money and power, it seemed, couldn’t buy Fujisaki the precise sort of respect its members craved at home. Here, first in Maine, now in New York City, they would make themselves credible as penitents and teachers, men of wisdom and peace. In the process, as the older brother explained to the younger, the younger then to his wife, the men of Fujisaki and the older brother hoped to do a little “business.” New York City: land of opportunity for monks and crooks and mooks alike.
We stood at the rail at the sea edge of the lighthouse tfaint unclooking out. The wind was still strong, but I was used to it now. I had my collar up, the way Frank Minna would. The sky out past the island was gray and uninspiring, but there was a nice line of light where it met the water, an edge I could work with my eyes like a seam of stitching between my fingers. The birds harassed the foam below, looking for urchin, perhaps, or discarded hot-dog ends among the rocks.
I had Tony’s gun in my jacket, and from this vantage we could see for miles down Route 1 in both directions should anyone approach. I had a strong urge to protect Julia, to hold her or cover her with my presence, so as to feel that I’d helped someone safely through besides myself. But I doubted that the Fujisaki Corporation cared about me or Julia directly. She and I each had been part of Gerard Minna’s problem, not Fujisaki’s. And Julia showed no interest in my protective urges.
“I know what happened next,” I told her. “Eventually the brothers dipped into the till again. Frank got involved in a scam to siphon money away from Fujisaki’s management company.” That part of what Gerard told me wasn’t a lie, I understood now, just an artfully mangled version of the truth. Gerard had been leaving himself out of it, playing the Zen innocent, when in fact he was the wheel’s hub. “With a bookkeeper named-Dullbody, Allmoney, Alimony-ah, a guy named Ullman.”
“Yes,” said Julia.
She’d been talking in a kind of trance, not needing me to prompt her more than once in a while. As the narrative got nearer the present day her eyes grew clearer, her gaze less transfixed on the distant island, and her voice grew heavier with resentment. I felt I was losing her to bitterness, and I wanted to draw her back. Protect her from herself if there was no other threat.
“So Frank was hiding the secret of his brother’s existence from The Clients,” I said. “Meanwhile the two of them are running a number on Gerard’s Japanese partners. And then the deal goes-lemongrass, sour-ball, fuckitall!” I was unable to continue until I made a farting, fricative sound into the wind-“blew a raspberry,” in the parlance-to satisfy the expulsive tic. Bits of saliva spattered back into my face. “Then Fujisaki figured out someone was taking their money,” I said finally, wiping at myself with my sleeve.
She looked at me with disgust. I’d drawn her back, in a way. “Yes,” she said.
“And Gerard fingered-Mr. Fingerphone! Uncle Sourgrass!-Gerard fingered Frank and Ullman to save himself.”
“That’s what Tony thought,” she said, distant again.
“Fujisaki must have told Gerard to take care of it, as a show of good faith. So Gerard hired the killer.”
Which was where I, innocent stooge, had walked into the story. Frank Minna had installed me and Gilbert there outside the Zendo two days before because he smelled a rat, didn’t trust Gerard, and wanted some backup on the street. Warm bodies. If something went wrong he’d bring me and Gilbert up to speed, let us in on the scam, or so he must have thought. And if things went smooly, it was better to keep us where we’d always been, were born to be-in the dark.
“You know more about it than me,” said Julia. She grew agitated now, her storyteller’s reverie dissipated, the talk turning to a killer’s hiring and all that went with it unsaid. I had to turn away myself now, imitate her pensive searching of the horizon, though my fingers danced idiotically on the lighthouse tower rail, counting one-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five. I’d grown more accustomed to her short new haircut, but those eyes of hers had blazed so long from behind a curtain of hair that without that curtain they blazed too hard. I was drawn and repelled at once, antic with ambivalence. Now I understood that when Frank showed her to us at the end of high school, she was only five or six years older than we were, though it seemed he’d plucked a woman off a fading movie poster. How Nantucket and Buddhism could have made her so old and fierce, I couldn’t fathom. I suppose Frank himself had made her old in a hurry, in ways he’d intended, with panty hose and peroxide and sarcasm-and ways he hadn’t.
“Let me work out the next part,” I said. I felt as if I were trying to get through a joke without ticcing, but there wasn’t a punch line in sight. “After Frank and Ullman were gone, Gerard had to make sure he eliminated any link between himself and Frank Minna. That meant you and Tony.”
Gerard, I surmised, had been in a panic, afraid of Fujisaki and The Clients both. By having his brother killed he’d damaged a delicate system of controls, one that had kept him safe from Matricardi and Rockaforte for more than a decade. And Fujisaki had announced a visit to New York to inspect their holdings, to enact a little hands-on management (albeit disguised as monks), right as Gerard was frantically trying to mop up the mess. Perhaps they’d also wanted to see Gerard mop up the mess, wanted to feel him squirm a little.
Gerard had reasoned rightly that if Frank confided in anyone it would be his wife and his right-hand man, his groomed successor. Which was to say, Tony. This last part still came a little hard for me. That Tony had paid with his life for being Frank’s intimate was a lousy excuse for consolation.
“It was Gerard who called to say that Frank was dead,” I suggested. “Not the hospital.”
She turned and looked at me with her teeth gritted, tears making glossy tracks on her face. “Very good, Lionel,” she whispered. I reached for her cheeks to blot her tears with my sleeve, but she darted back, uninterested in my care.
“But you didn’t trust him, so you ran.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Lionel,” she said, her voice vibrant with hate. “Why would I come here if I were hiding from Gerard?”
“Idiot Dressfork! Alphabet Tuningfreak!” I cleared the tic with a jerk of my stiff neck. “I don’t understand,” I told her.
“He arranged for me to use this as a safe house. He said the people who killed Frank were looking for the rest of us. I trusted him.”
I began to see. Lucius Sinole had said that Julia’s records showed a series of visits to Boston. “This was your hideaway when you got angry at Frank,” I suggested. “Your retreat into the past.”