FORMERLY KNOWN

There once was a girl from Nantucket.

No, really, that’s where she was from.

Her mother and father were hippies and so she was a little hippie child. Her father wasn’t always there on Nantucket with the family. When he was there he didn’t stay long, and over time the visits grew both briefer and less frequent.

The girl used to listen to tapes her father would leave behind, the Alan Watts Lecture Series, an introduction to Eastern thought for Americans in the form of a series of rambling, humorous monologues. After the girl’s father stopped coming at all, the girl would confuse her memories of her father with the charming man whose voice she heard on the tapes.

When the girl got older she sorted this out, but she’d listened to Alan Watts hundreds of times by then.

When the girl turned eighteen she went to college in Boston, to an art school that was part of a museum. She hated the school and the other students there, hated pretending she was an artist, and after two years she dropped out.

First she went back to Nantucket for a little while, but the girl’s mother had moved in with a man the girl didn’t like, and Nantucket is, after all, an island. So she went back to Boston. There she found a lousy job as a waitress in a student dive, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from customers and co-workers. At night she’d take yoga classes and attend Zen meetings in the basement of a local YWCA, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from instructors and other students. The girl decided she didn’t hate only school, she hated Boston.

A year or so later she visited a Zen retreat center on the coast of Maine. It was a place of striking beauty and, apart from the frantic summer months when the town became a resort for wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers, splendid isolation. It reminded her of Nantucket, the things she missed there. She quickly arranged to study at the center full-time, and to support herself she took a job waitressing at the seafood restaurant next door, which at that time was a traditional Maine lobster pound.

It was there the girl met the two brothers.

The older brother first, during a series of short visits to the retreat with his friend. The friend had some experience with Buddhism, the older brother none, but they were both a disconcerting presence there in placid Maine—vibrant with impatience and a hostile sort of urban humor, yet humble and sincere in their fledgling approach to Zen practice. The older brother was solicitous and flattering to the girl when they were introduced. He was a talker like none she’d never met, except perhaps on the Alan Watts lecture tapes, which still shaped her yearnings so powerfully—but the older brother was no Watts. His stories were of ethnic Brooklyn, of petty mobsters and comic scams, and some of them had a violent finish. With his talk he made this world seem as near and real to her as it was actually distant. In some way Brooklyn, where she’d never been, became a romantic ideal, something truer and finer than the city life she’d glimpsed in Boston.

The girl and the older brother were lovers after a while.

The older brother’s visits grew both briefer and less frequent.

Then one day the older brother returned, in an Impala filled with paper shopping bags stuffed full of his clothes and with his younger brother in tow. After a sizable donation to the Zen center’s petty-cash fund the two men moved into rooms in the retreat center, rooms that were out of sight of the coastal highway. The next day the older brother drove the Impala off and returned with a pickup truck, with Maine plates.

Now whenever the girl tried to visit the older brother in his room, he turned her away. This persisted for a few weeks before she began to accept the change. The lovemaking and talk of Brooklyn were over between them. It was only then that the younger brother came into focus for the girl.

The younger brother wasn’t a student of Zen. He’d also never been out of New York City until his arrival in Maine, and it was a destination as mysterious and absurd to him as he was mysterious and absurd to her. To the girl the younger brother seemed an embodiment of the stories of Brooklyn the older brother had entranced her with. He was a talker, too, but rootless, chaotic in the stories he told. His talk entirely lacked the posture of distance and bemusement, the gloss of Zen perspective that characterized the older brother’s tales. Instead, though they sat together on the Maine beaches, huddling together in the wind, he seemed still to inhabit the streets he described.

The older brother read Krishnamurti and Watts and Trungpa, while the younger read Spillane and Chandler and Ross MacDonald, often aloud to the girl, and it was in the MacDonald especially that the girl heard something that taught her about a part of herself not covered by Nantucket or Zen or the bit she’d learned in college.

The younger brother and the girl became lovers after a while.

And the younger brother did what the older would never have done: He explained to the girl the situation that had driven the two brothers out of Brooklyn, to come and seek refuge in the Zen center. The brothers had been acting as liaisons between two aging Brooklyn mobsters and a group of suburban Westchester and New Jersey bandits who hijacked trucks on small highways into ork City. The aging mobsters were in the business of redistributing the goods seized by the truck pirates, and it was a business that was profitable for everyone associated with it. The brothers had made it more profitable for themselves than they should have, though. They found a place to warehouse a percentage of the goods, and a fence to take the goods off their hands. When the two mobsters discovered the betrayal, they decided to kill the brothers.

Hence, Maine.

The younger brother did another thing his older brother might never have done: He fell in love with the strange angry girl from Nantucket. And one day in the flush of this love he explained to her his great dream: He was going to open a detective agency.

The older brother in the meantime had grown distant from them both, and more deeply and sincerely involved in Zen practice. In the manner of so many spiritual practitioners past and present he seemed to draw away from the world of material concerns, to grow tolerant and wry but also a little chilly in his regard for the people and things he’d left behind.

When the younger brother and the girl were away from the retreat center they’d refer to the older brother as “Rama-lama-ding-dong.” Before too long they even began to call him that to his face.

One day the younger brother tried to telephone his mother and found that she’d been taken to the hospital. He conferred with his older brother; the girl overheard some of their bitter, fearful conversations. The older brother was persuaded that their mother’s hospitalization had been arranged as a trap to lure them back to Brooklyn for their punishment. The younger disagreed. The next day he bought a car and loaded it with his belongings, and announced he was going back to the city. He invited the girl to join him, though he warned her of the possible danger.

She considered her life at the retreat, which had grown as close and predictable around her as an island, and she considered the younger brother and the prospect of Brooklyn, his Brooklyn, of living there by his side. She agreed to leave Maine.

On the way they were married in Albany, by a justice of the peace at the state capital. The younger brother wanted to surprise and please his mother, and perhaps also wished to offer some excuse for his long disappearance. He took the girl shopping for clothes in Manhattan before they crossed the famous bridge into Brooklyn, and then, as an afterthought, he brought her to a salon on Montague Street, where they bleached her dark hair to platinum blond. It was as though she were the one who should be in disguise here.

The mother’s sickness wasn’t a trap. She was dead of a stroke by the time the younger brother and his new wife reached the hospital. But it was also true that the mobsters were aware of everything that happened in the neighborhood and were watching the hospital closely. When the younger brother was spotted there, it wasn’t long before he was brought in to answer for his and his brother’s misdeeds.

He begged for his life. He explained that he’d just gotten married.

He also blamed his brother for the crimes they’d both committed. He claimed to have lost touch with his brother completely.

He ende by promising to spend his life in service as the gangsters’ errand boy.

On that condition his apology was accepted by the gangsters. They permitted him to live, though they swore again a vow of death against the older brother, and made the younger promise that he’d turn his brother in if and when he reappeared.

The younger brother moved his new wife into his mother’s old apartment and the woman from Nantucket began her adjustment to life in Brooklyn. What she encountered was first intoxicating and frightening, then disenchanting. Her husband was a small-time operator, his “agents,” as he called them, a motley gang of high-school-dropout orphans. For a while he installed her as a secretary in a friend’s law office, where she worked as a notary public, humiliatingly on view in a shop window out on Court Street. When she protested, he allowed her to recede into privacy in the apartment. The old gangsters paid the couple’s rent anyway, and most of the younger brother’s detective work was on their behalf. The woman from Nantucket didn’t like what passed for detective work in Brooklyn. She wished he genuinely ran a car service. Their married life was chilly and glancing, full of unexplained absences and omissions, no walk on the beach. In time she began to understand that there were other women, too, old high-school girlfriends and distant cousins who’d never left the neighborhood and never really been very far from the younger brother’s bed either.

The woman from Nantucket survived, found occasional lovers herself, and spent most of her days in the movie theaters on Court and Henry streets, shopping in Brooklyn Heights, drinking in the hotel lobbies there and then taking slow walks on the Promenade, where she fended off an endless series of advances from college boys and lunch-hour husbands, spent her days any way except musing on the serene rural life she’d left behind in Maine, the faint uncontroversial satisfactions she’d known before she’d met the two brothers and been taken to Brooklyn.

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.”

“I wasn’t hiding.”

“Did Frank know that you and Gerard were in touch?”

“He didn’t care.”

“Were you and Gerard still lovers?”

“Only when his … spiritual path allowed it.” She spat the words. The tears had dried on her face.

“When did you figure out the truth?”

“I called Tony. We compared notes. Gerard underestimated what Tony knew.”

What Tony knew was the least of it, I thought. Tony meant to take over Frank Minna’s share of the Fujisaki scam, not knowing that nothing remained to take over. He wanted that and much more. As I ached always to be a virtuous detective, Tony ached to be a corrupt one, or even to be an out-and-out wiseguy. He’d been fitting himself for the darkest shoes in Frank Minna’s wardrobe from the moment he learned they existed, perhaps on that day when we unloaded the guitars and amplifiers and were introduced to Matricardi and Rockaforte, perhaps even sooner, on some uglier errand only he and Frank knew about. Certainly he understood by the time Frank’s van windows had been smashed. His special glee that day was at having his Mafioso fantasies confirmed, as well as at seeing Frank Minna’s vulnerability for the first time. If Frank’s fortunes could rise and fall, that episode said, then power was fluid, and so Tony might someday have a share of it himself. The moment Frank was dead Tony envisioned himself playing Frank on both stages, for The Clients in Brooklyn and for Gerard and the Fujisaki Corporation up in Yorkville, only playing the part with greater efficiency and brutality, without Frank Minna’s goofy edges, those soft places that caused him to collect freaks like me or that finally led him astray.

Gerard’s picture of Tony was another part of that convoluted after-hours story that hadn’t been entirely a lie. I suppose Gerard couldn’t be the many things he was without knowing how to x-ray a mind like Tony’s at a single glance.

“You and Tony compared more than notes, Julia.” I regretted it the minute I said it.

She looked at me with pity now.

“So I fucked him.” She took out a cigarette and lighter from her purse. “I fucked a lot of guys, Lionel. I fucked Tony and Danny, even Gilbert once. Everyone except you. It’s no big deal.” She put the cigarette in her lips and cupped her hands against the wind.

“Maybe it was to Tony,” I said, and regretted it even worse.

She only shrugged, worked the lighter uselessly again and again. Cars whirred past on the highway below, but nobody stopped at the lighthouse. We were alone in our torment and shame, and useless to each other.

It might not have been a big deal to Julia that she fucked the Minna Men, the Minna Boys, really, and maybe it was no big deal to Tony either—but I doubted it. You were the original woman, I wanted to tell her. When Minna brought you home to us we tried to learn what it meant for Frank to marry, we studied you to understand what a Minna Woman might be, and saw only rage—rage I now understood had concealed disappointment and fear, oceans of fear. We had watched women and letters soar past before, but you were the first that was addressed to us, and we tried to understand you. And we loved you.

I needed to rescue Julia now, retrieve her from this lighthouse and the bareness of her story against the Maine sky. I needed her to see that we were the same, disappointed lovers of Frank Minna, abandoned children.

“We’re almost the same age, Julia,” I said lamely. “I mean, you and me, we were teenagers at pretty much the same time.” She looked at me blankly.

“I met a woman, Julia. Because of this case. She’s like you in certain ways. She studies Zen, just like you did when you met Frank.”

“No woman will ever want you, Lionel.”

“WantmeBailey!”

It was a classic tic, honest and clean. Nothing about Maine or Julia Minna or my profound exhaustion could get in the way of a good, clean, throat-wrenching tic. My maker in his infinite wisdom had provided me with that.

I tried not to listen to what Julia was saying, to focus on the far-off squalling of gulls and splash of surf instead.

“That’s not really true,” she went on. “They might want you. I’ve wanted you a little bit myself. But they’ll never be fair to you, Lionel. Because you’re such a freak.”

“This person is different,” I said. “She’s different from anyone I’ve ever met.” But now I was losing my point. If I made the distinction between Julia and Kimmery plain to Julia, to myself—she’s not as mean as you, could never be so mean—I would only be sorry I’d spoken at all.

“Well, I bet you’re different for her, too. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.” In her mouth the words happy together came out twisted and harsh.

Crappy however.

Slappy forget her.

I wanted to call Kimmery now, wanted to so badly my fingers located the cell phone in my jacket pocket and began to fondle it.

“Why was Tony coming to Maine?” I asked, running for cover back to the plot we’d begun spinning together, which suddenly seemed to have little or nothing to do with our miserable fates, our miserable lives exposed out here in the wind. “Why didn’t you just get away from here? You knew Gerard might kill you.”

“I heard Fujisaki was flying up here today.” Again she struck with the lighter against her cigarette, as if it were going to ignite like a flint against a rock. It wasn’t just the wind she was fighting now. Her hands trembled, and the cigarette trembled where she held it in her lips. “Tony and I were going to tell them about Gerard. He was going to bring some proof. Then you got in the way.”

“It wasn’t me that stopped Tony from keeping the date.” I was distracted by the phone in my pocket, the prospect of Kimmery’s soothing voice, even if it were only the outgoing message on her machine. “Gerard sent his giant after Tony,” I went on. “He followed Tony up here, maybe figuring to take out two birds with one flick of his big finger.”

“Gerard didn’t want me killed,” she said quietly. Her hands had fallen to her sides. “He wanted me back.” She was trying to make it so by saying it, but the words themselves were nearly lost in the wind. Julia threatened to recede into the distance again, and this time I knew I wouldn’t bother trying to bring her back.

“Is that why he had his brother killed? Jealousy?”

“Does it have to be one thing? He probably figured it was him or Frank.” The cigarette still dangled in her mouth. “Fujisaki required a sacrifice. They’re great believers in that.”

“Did you talk to Fujisaki just now?”

“Men like that don’t cut deals with waitresses, Lionel.”

“It’s rotten for Tony the killer found him before he found Fujisaki,” I said. “But it won’t save Gerard. I made sure of that.” I didn’t want to elaborate.

“So you say.” She paced away from the railing, gripping the lighter so tightly I expected her to crush it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I’m not acquainted with this giant killer you keep talking about. Are you sure you’re not imagining things?” She turned and handed me the lighter, plucked the cigarette from her lips and held it out. “Would you light this for me, Lionel?” I heard a weird vibration in her voice, as though she were about to cry again, but without the anger this time, maybe begin to mourn Minna at last. I took them away from her, put the cigarette in my own lips, and turned my back to the wind.

By the time I had it lit she’d taken her gun from her purse.

I put up my hands instinctively, dropping the lighter, to make a pose of surrender but also of self-protection, as though I might deflect a bullet with Frank’s watch like Wonder Woman with her magic wristbands. Julia held the gun easily, its muzzle directed at my navel, and now her eyes were as gray and hard to read as the farthest reaches of the Maine horizon.

I felt jets of acid fire in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if I would ever get used to facing gunpoint, and then I wondered if that was really anything to aspire to. I wanted to tic just for the hell of it, but at the moment I couldn’tlignk of anything.

“I just remembered something Frank once said about you, Lionel.”

“What’s that?” I slowly lowered one hand and offered her the lit cigarette, but she shook her head. I dropped it on the lighthouse deck and ground it under my shoe instead.

“He said the reason you were useful to him was because you were crazy everyone thought you were stupid.”

“I’m familiar with the theory.”

“I think I made the same mistake,” she said. “And so did Tony, and Frank before that. Everywhere you go, somebody who Gerard wants dead is made dead. I don’t want to be next.”

“You think I killed Frank?”

“You said we’re the same age, Lionel. You ever watch Sesame Street?” she said.

“Sure.”

“You remember the Snuffleupagus?”

“Big Bird’s friend.”

“Right, only nobody could see him except Big Bird. I think the giant’s your Snuffleupagus, Lionel.”

“Shockadopalus! Fuckalotofus! The giant is real, Julia. Put the gun away.”

“I don’t think so. Step back, Lionel.”

I stepped back, but I pulled out Tony’s gun as I did it. I saw Julia’s fingers tighten as I raised it to her, but she didn’t fire, and neither did I.

We faced one another on the lighthouse rail, the vast sky dimming everywhere and perfectly useless to us, the ocean’s depths useless, too. The two guns drew us close together and rendered the rest irrelevant—we might as well have been in a dingy motel room, with an image of Maine playing on the television set. My moment had come at last. I had a gun in my hands. That it was trained not on Gerard or the giant or Tony or a doorman but on the girl from Nantucket who’d grown into Frank Minna’s bruise-eyed widow, who’d chopped off her hair and tried to retreat to her waitress past and instead been cornered by that same past, by Gerard and the giant and Tony—I tried not to let it bother me. I’d been wrong, Julia and I had nothing in common. We were just any two people who happened to be pointing guns at one another now. And Tony’s gun had object properties all its own, not a fork nor a toothbrush but something much weightier and more seductive. I slipped off the safety with my thumb.

“I understand your mistake, Julia, but I’m not the killer.”

She had both hands on the gun, and it didn’t waver. “Why should I trust you?”

“TRUST ME BAILEY!” I had to scream it into the sky. I turned my head, bargaining with my Tourette’s that I could let the one phrase fly and then be done. I tasted salt air as I screamed.

“Don’t scare me, Lionel. I might shoot you.”

“We’ve both got that same problem, Julia.” In fact my syndrome had just discovered the prospect of the gun, and I began to obsess on pulling the trigger. I suspected that if I fired a shot out into the sky in the manner of my verbal exclamation, I might not survive the experience. But I didn’t want to shoot Julia. I flicked on the safety, hoped she didn’t notice.

“Where do we go from here?” she said.

“We go home, Julia,” I said. “I’m sorry about Frank and Tony, but the story’s over. You and me, we made it through alive.”

It was only a slight exaggeration. The story would be over at some secret moment in the next few hours or days when something found Gerard Minna, a bullet or blade that had been searching for him for almost twenty years.

Meanwhile, I flicked the safety back and forth, impelled, counting. At five I stopped, temporarily satisfied. That left the safety off, the gun ready to shoot. My fingers were unbearably curious about the trigger’s action, its resistance and weight.

“Where’s your home, Lionel? Upstairs from L and L?”

“Saint Vengeance Home for Bailey,” I ticced.

“Is that what you call it?” said Julia.

Before my finger could pulse on the trigger the way it craved to I flung the gun out toward the ocean with all the force of my overwound-watchspring body. It sailed out past the rocks, but the tiny splash of its disappearance into the sea was lost in the wind and the ambient crash of the surf.

One, I counted.

Before Julia could calculate the meaning of my action I darted as if for an elusive shoulder and grabbed the muzzle of her gun, then twisted it out of her hand and hurled with all the strength in my legs, like a center fielder deep at the wall straining for a distant cutoff man. Julia’s gun went farther than Tony’s, out to where the waves that would reach the rocks were just taking shape, the sea curling, discovering its form.

That made two.

“Don’t hurt me, Lionel.” She backed away, her shocked eyes framed by the bristly halo of her crew cut, her mouth crooked with fear and fury.

“It’s over, Julia. Nobody’s going to hurt you.” I couldn’t concentrate on her fully, needing something more to throw into the sea. I pulled Minna’s beeper out of my pocket. It was a tool of The Clients, evidence of their hold on Frank, and it deserved to be interred with the guns. I threw it as far as I could, but it didn’t have enough heft to keep from being knocked down by the wind, and so trickled down between two wet, mossy boulders.

Three.

Nxt I found the cell phone. The instant it came into my hand, Kimmery’s number begged for dialing. I pushed the impulse aside, substituted the gratification of flinging it off the lighthouse deck, picturing the doormen in the rental car who I’d taken it from. It flew truer than the beeper, made it out to the water.

Four.

“Give me something to throw,” I told Julia.

“What?”

“I need something, one more thing.”

“You’re crazy.”

I considered Frank’s watch. I was sentimental about the watch. It had no taint of doormen or Clients.

“Give me something,” I said again. “Look in your purse.”

“Go to hell, Lionel.”

Julia had always been the hardest-boiled of us all, it struck me now. We who were from Brooklyn, we jerks from nowhere—or from somewhere, in the case of Frank and Gerard. We couldn’t hold a candle to the girl from Nantucket and I thought I might finally understand why. She was the hardest-boiled because she was the unhappiest. She was maybe the unhappiest person I’d ever met.

I suppose losing Frank Minna, hard as it was, was easier for those of us who’d actually had him, actually felt his love. The thing Julia lost she’d never possessed in the first place.

But her pain was no longer my concern.

You choose your battles, Frank Minna used to say, though the term was hardly original to him.

You also distance yourself from cruelty, if you have any brains. I was developing a few.

I took off my right shoe, felt the polished leather that had served me well, the fine stitching and the fraying lace, kissed it good-bye on the top of the tongue, then threw it high and far and watched it splash silently into the waves.

Five, I thought.

But who’s counting?

“Good-bye, Julia,” I said.

“Screw you, you maniac.” She knelt and picked up her lighter, and this time she got her cigarette lit on the first flick. “Barnabaileyscrewjuliaminna.”

It was my final word on the subject.

So I drove with my gas-pedal-and-brake foot clad only in a dress sock, back to Brooklyn.