Motherless Brooklyn (42 page)

“That’s lemongrass,” said Julia. “You’re not supposed to
eat
it.”

“What’s it doing in the soup, then?”

“Flavor. It flavors the soup.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “What’s the name again?”

“Lemongrass,” she hissed. She dropped a slip of paper onto the table by my hand. “Here’s your check, Lionel.”

I reached for her hand where it covered the slip but she pulled it away, like some version of a children’s game, and all I got was the paper.

“Lasagna ass,”
I said under my breath.

“What?”

“Laughing Gassrog.”
This was more audible, but I hadn’t disturbed Fujisaki, not yet. I looked up at her helplessly.

“Good-bye, Lionel.” She hurried away from my table.

The check wasn’t really a check. Julia’s scrawl covered the underside:

THE FOOD IS ON THE HOUSE
.

MEET ME AT FRIENDSHIP HEAD LIGHTHOUSE TWO-THIRTY
.

GET OUT OF HERE!!!

I finished the soup, carefully putting the mysterious inedible lemongrass to one side. Then I rose from the table and went past Fujisaki toward the doors, hoping for Julia’s sake to be invisible. One of them turned as I passed, though, and grabbed my elbow.

“You like the food?”

“Terrific,” I said.

It was the one who as a monk had applied the paddle to my back. They’d been guzzling sake and his face was red, his eyes moist and merry.

“You Jerry-Roshi’s unruly student,” he said.

“I guess that’s right.”

“Retreat center a good idea,” he said. “You need long sesshin. You got an
utterance
problem, I think.”

“I know I do.”

He clapped me on the shoulder, and I clapped his shoulder in
return, feeling the shoulder pad in his suit, the tight seam at the sleeve. Then I tugged loose of his embrace, meaning to go, but it was too late. I had to make the rounds and touch the others. I started around the table, clapping each perfectly tailored shoulder. The men of Fujisaki seemed to take it as an encouragement to tap and poke me back while they joked with one another in Japanese. “Duck, duck, goose,” I said, quietly at first. “Otter, otter, utterance.”

“Monk, monk, stooge!” I said, circling the table faster, cavorting. “Weapongrass duckweed!”

“You go now,” said the scowling paddle-wielder.

“Eat me Fujisaki!”
I screamed, and whirled out the door.

The second boat had returned to the dock. I went back through Yoshii’s parking lot and down the hill to have a closer look. Smoke still plumed from Foible’s shack; otherwise the scene on the fishing pier was completely still. Perhaps the captain of the boat had joined Foible inside the shack for a drink from a new bottle of gin, on my twenty. Or maybe he’d just gone home to bed after a day’s labor that had started at three in the morning, Urchin Daylight Savings time. I envied him if he had. I crept past the shack, to the other side of the pier. From what I could see the ferry landing was empty too, the boat itself out at the island, the ticket office closed until the late-afternoon landing. The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.

It was farther on, in the tree-shrouded parking lot, that I saw something move, a sign of life. I went silently past the ferry landing to a
place out of the harsh angled brightness so I could peer into the shadow and distinguish what the something was. The answer was the giant. He stood between his car and Tony’s squinting in the wind and dappled sunlight and reading or at least staring at a bunch of papers in a manila folder, something out of the L&L files perhaps. In the minute that I watched he grew bored or dissatisfied with the papers and closed the file and ripped it in two, then two again, and walked across the lot to the edge where the pavement was divided from the sea by a wide margin of barnacled and beer-canned boulders. He hurled the torn quadrants of the folder in the direction of the rocks and water and the wind whipped them instantly back to flutter madly past him and disperse across the lot’s gravel and into the trees. But he wasn’t finished yet. There was something else in his hand, something black and small and shiny, and for a moment I thought he was making a call. Then I saw that it was a wallet. He rifled through it and moved some folding money into his own pants pocket and then he hurled the wallet, too, with more success than he’d had with the papers, so that it arced over the rocks and possibly reached the water—I couldn’t tell from my perspective, and neither, I think, could the giant. He didn’t appear particularly worried. Worry wasn’t in his nature.

Then he turned and saw me: Laugh-or-cry Edgelost.

I ran the other way, across the ferry landing and the fishing dock, toward the hill, on top of which sat the restaurant, and my car.

The huff of my own exhausted breath, pounding of blood in my ears, squall of a gull and shush of the surf below—all were overtaken by the squeal of the giant’s wheels: His Contour scaped into the restaurant lot just as I got my key into the ignition. His car barreled toward mine. The cliff was near enough that he might push me off. I revved into reverse and jerked my car backward out of his path and he skidded sideways to stop, nearly slamming into the nearest of the parked
pickup trucks. I floored it and beat him back out of the lot, down onto Route 1, pointed south. The giant fell in right behind me. In my rearview I saw him bearing down, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a gun.

Minna and Tony—I’d let them both be gently escorted to their quiet murderings. Mine looked to be a little noisier.

I screwed the steering wheel to the left, twitching myself off the highway toward the ferry dock. The giant wasn’t fooled. He hung right on my bumper, as if the red compact were as correspondingly huge as his body and could climb over or engulf my Tracer. I veered right and left, contacting the ragged edges of the paved road to the dock in some half-symbolic finger-wagging or shooing maneuver, trying to dislodge the giant from my tail, but he matched my every vehicular gesture, Contour on Tracer now. Pavement gave way to gravel and I ground braking and sliding to the right to avoid riding straight up onto the dock and into the water. Instead I steered for the ferry’s parking area, where Tony’s Pontiac still sat, where the gun he hadn’t gotten to use on the giant still waited under the driver’s seat.

Gottagettagun
, screamed my brain, and my lips moved trying to keep up with the chant:
Gottagettagun gottagettagun
.

Gun Gun Gun
Shoot!

I’d never fired a gun.

I broke through the entrance, snapping the flimsy gate back on its post. The giant’s car chewed on my bumper, the metal squeaking and sighing. Exactly how I would find breathing room enough to get out of my car and into Tony’s to lay hands on the gun remained to be seen. I curled past Tony’s car, to the left, opening a moment’s gap
between me and my pursuer, and rode for the rock barrier. Shreds of the torn file still fluttered here and there in the wind. Maybe the giant would do me the favor of plummeting into the sea. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to noticing it—since it was only the Atlantic it might not have been big enough to make an impression.

He caught me again as I turned the other way to avoid a swim myself, and veered with me around the outer perimeter of the lot.
DON’T BACK UP! SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE!
shouted the signs at the exit, warning of the one-way spikes meant to prevent free use of the lot. Well, I’d gotten around that one. The giant’s car made contact again, rammed me so we both slid off to the left, toward the exit, away from Tony’s car.

Suddenly inspired, I darted for the exit.

I hit the brake as hard as I could as I passed over the flexible spikes, came shrieking and skidding to a halt about a car’s length past the grate. The giant’s car smashed against my rear end so that my car was driven another couple of yards forward and I was slapped back against the seat, hard. I felt something in my neck click and tasted blood in my mouth.

The first blast was the giant’s air bag inflating. In my rearview I saw a white satin blob now filling the interior of the Contour.

The second blast was the giant’s gun firing as he panicked or his fingers clenched around the trigger in traumatic reflex. The glass of his windshield splintered. I don’t know where the shot went, but it found some target other than my body. I shifted into reverse and floored the gas pedal.

And plowed the giant’s car backward toward the spikes.

I heard his rear tires pop, then hiss. The giant’s rear end slumped, his tires lanced on the spikes.

For a moment I heard only the hiss of escaping air, then a gull screamed, and I made a sound to answer it, a scream of pain in the form of a birdcall.

I shook my head, glanced in the mirror. The giant’s air bag was
sagging slowly, silently. Perhaps it had been pierced by the bullet. There wasn’t any sign of motion underneath.