"It means you shouldn't act against Tony. Because our wishes go with him."

I understood now. It was Tony's Italian apotheosis at last. I was thrilled for him.

Unless it had been this way for years without my knowing. Maybe Tony Vermonte and The Clients ran deeper than Frank Minna and The Clients ever had.

I considered the word replaced 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 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. 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." 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 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 think was going to happen?" 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?"

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! 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? 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. 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 want The Clients to know. Julia, Julia, Julia, I needed to figure out the Julia angle, even if Matricardi and Rockaforte wanted me to. 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 that would've freaked me out. 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."