Motherless Brooklyn

“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.”

“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?”