Beloved Father Figure?

"Or something about his contributions to the community," she suggested.

"Just say detective," I told her.

ONE MIND.

There were only and always two things Frank Minna would not discuss in the years following his return from exile and founding of the Minna Agency. The first was the nature of that exile, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance that day in May when his brother Gerard hustled him out of town. We didn't know why he left, where he went or what he did while he was gone, or why he came back when he did. We didn't know how he met and married Julia. We didn't know what happened to Gerard. There was never again any sign or mention of Gerard. The sojourn "upstate" was covered in a haze so complete it was sometimes hard to believe it had lasted three years.

The other was The Clients, though they lurked like a pulse felt here or there in the body of the Agency.

L&L wasn't a moving company anymore, and we never again saw the inside of that hollowed-out brownstone on Degraw. But we were as much errand boys as detectives, and it wasn't hard, in the early days, to sense Matricardi and Rockaforte's shadow in some percentage of our errands. Their assignments were discernible for the deep unease they provoked in Minna. Without explanation he'd alter his patterns, stop dropping in at the barbershop or the arcade for a week or so, close the L&L storefront and tell us to get lost for a few days. Even his walk changed, his whole manner of being. He'd refuse to be seated anywhere but in the corners of restaurants, his back to the wall. He'd turn his head on the street for no reason, which I of course cobbled into a lifelong tic. For cover he'd joke harder but also more discontinuously, his stream of commentary and insult turned balky and riddled with grim silences, his punch lines become non sequiturs. And the jobs we did for The Clients were discontinuous too. They were fractured stories, middles lacking a clear beginning or end. When we Minna Men tracked a wife for a husband or watched an employee suspected of pilferage or cooking the books we mastered their pathetic dramas, encompassed their small lives with our worldliness. What we gathered with our bugs and cameras and etched into our reports was true and complete. Under Minna we were secret masters, writing a sort of social history of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens into our duplicate files. B when the hand of Matricardi and Rockaforte moved the Minna Men we were only tools, glancing off the sides of stories bigger than we understood, discarded and left wondering at the end.

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.

We turned on Smith, and Minna parked us a block below the empty supermarket lot. The carnival had shut down for the night, plywood boards up over the concessions, rides stilled, the evening's discarded beer cups and sausage wrappers glowing against the moonlit rubblescape. We crept onto the lot with our implements, following Minna wordlessly now, no longer chafing at his leadership, instead lulled into our deep obedient rhythm as his Men. He pointed at the Ferris wheel.

"Take it out."

"Eh?"

"Destroy the wheel, you candied yams."

Gilbert understood soonest, perhaps because the task suited his skills and temperament so well. He took a swing at the nearest line of neon with his chunk of pipe, smashing it easily, bringing a rain of silver dust. Tony and Danny and I followed his lead. We attacked the body of the wheel, our first swings tentative, measuring our strength, then lashing out, unloading. It was easy to damage the neon, not easy at all to impress the frame of the wheel, but we set at it, attacked any joint or vulnerable weld, prying up the electrical cable and chopping at it with the sharpest edge of the wrench until insulation and wire were bare and mangled, then frayed. Minna himself wielded the Yankee bat, splintering its wood against the gates that held riders into their seats, not breaking them but changing their shape. Gilbert and I got inside the frame of the wheel and with all our weight dragged at one of the chairs until we ruptured the hinge. Then we found the brake and released the wheel to turn so that we could apply our malicious affection to the whole of it. A couple of Dominican teenagers stood watching us from across the street. We ignored them, bore down on the Ferris wheel, hurrying but not frantic, absolutely Minna's to direct but not even needing direction. We acted as one body to destroy the amusement. This was the Agency at its mature peak: unquestioning and thorough in carrying out an action even when it bordered on sheer Dada.

"Frank loved you, Lionel," said Rockaforte.

"I, uh, I know."

"For that reason we care for you, for that reason we are concerned."

"Though we have not seen you since you were a boy," said Matricardi.

"A boy who barked," said Rockaforte. "We remember. Frank brought and you stood before us in this very room and you barked."

"And Frank spoke of your sickness many times."

"He loved you though he considered you a freak."

"He used that very word."

"You helped him build, you were one of his boys, and now you are a man and you stand before us in this hour of pain and misunderstanding."

Matricardi and Rockaforte had looked sepulchral to me as a teenager and they looked no worse now, their skin mummified, their thin hair in a kind of spider- sheen over their reflective pates, Matricardi's ears and scarred nose dwarfing his other features, Rockaforte's face puffier and more potatolike. They were dressed as twins in black suits, whether consciously in mourning or not I couldn't know. They sat together on the tightly upholstered couch and when I stepped through the door I thought I saw their hands first joined on the cushions in the space between them, then jerking to their laps. I stood far enough back that I wasn't tempted to reach out and play pattycake, to slap at their folded hands or the place their hands had been resting.

The Degraw Street brownstone was unchanged, outside and in, apart from a dense, even layer of dust on the furniture and carpet and picture frames in the parlor. The air in the room swam with stirred dust, as though Matricardi and Rockaforte had arrived just a few moments before. They visited their Brooklyn shrine less often than in the past, I supposed. I wondered who drove them in from Jersey and whether they took any pains not to be seen coming here or whether they cared. Perhaps no one alive in Carroll Gardens knew them by sight anymore.

A neighborhood's secret lords could also be Invisible Men.

"What is between you and Tony?" said Matricardi.

"I want to find Frank's killer." I'd already heard myself say this too many times, and meaning was leaking out of the phrase. It threatened to become a sort of moral tic: findfrank'skiller findfrank'skiller.

"Why don't you follow Tony in this? Shouldn't you act as one, as brothers?"

"I was there. When they took Frank. Tony-Hospitabailey!-Tony wasn't there."

"You're saying then that he should follow you."

"He shouldn't get in my way. Essway! Wrongway! Essway! Wrongway!" I winced, hating to tic now, in front of them.

"You're upset, Lionel."

"Sure I'm upset." Why should I confess my distrust to those I distrusted? The more Matricardi and Rockaforte spoke Tony's name, the more certain I was they were tangled together in this somehow, and that Tony was far more familiar with The Clients than I'd been in the years since our first visit to this crypt, this mausoleum. I'd come away with a fork, he with something more. Why should I accuse one half of a conspiracy to the other? Instead I squinted and turned my head and pursed my lips, trying to avoid the obvious, finally acceded to The Clients' power of suggestion and barked once, loudly.

"You are afflicted and we feel for you. A man shouldn't run, and he shouldn't woof like a dog. He should find peace."

"Why doesn't Tony want me looking into Frank's murder?"

"Tony wishes this thing to be done correctly and with care. Work with him, Lionel."

"Why do you speak for Tony?" I gritted my teeth as I spoke the words. It wasn't actly ticcing, but I'd begun to echo The Clients' verbal rhythms, the cloistered Ping-Pong of their diction.

Matricardi sighed and looked at Rockaforte. Rockaforte raised his eyebrows.

"Do you like this house?" said Matricardi.

I considered the dust-covered parlor, the load of ancient furnishing between the carpet and the ceiling's scrollwork, how it all hung suspended inside the shell of the warehouse-brownstone. I felt the presence of the past, of mothers and sons, deals and understandings, one dead hand gripping another-dead hands were nested here on Degraw Street like a series of Chinese boxes. Including Frank Minna's. There were so many ways I didn't like it I didn't know where to begin, except that I knew I shouldn't allow myself to begin at all.

"It's not a house," I said, offering the very least of my objections. "It's a room."

"He says it's a room," said Matricardi. "Lionel, this is my mother's house where we sit. Where you stand so full of fury it makes you like a cornered dog."

"Somebody killed Frank."

"Are you accusing Tony?"

"Accusatony! Excusebaloney! Funnymonopoly!" I squeezed my eyes shut to interrupt the seizure of language. I squeezed my eyes shut to interrupt the seizure of language.

"We wish you to understand, Lionel. We regret Frank's passing. We miss him sorely. It is a soreness in our hearts. Nothing could please us more than to see his killer torn by birds or picked apart by insects with claws. Tony should have your help in bringing that day closer. You should stand behind him."

"What if my search brings me to Tony?" I'd let The Clients lead me to this pass in the conversation, and now there wasn't any reason to pretend.

"The dead live in our hearts, Lionel. From there Frank will never be dislodged. But now Tony has replaced Frank in the world of the living."

"What does that mean? You've replaced Frank with Tony?"