On my way up the hill I felt a buzz, like a bee or hornet trapped inside my pants. It was Minna's beeper. I'd set it to "vibrate" at the Zendo. I drew it out. It showed a New Jersey number. The Clients were home from Brooklyn.

In the parking lot I got into my car and found the cell phone on the seat with the sandwich wrappings, which were beginning to mature in the sun. I rang the number.

I was very tired.

"Yes?"

"It's Lionel, Mr. Matricardi. You beeped me."

"Yes. > "I'm working on it."

"Working is wonderful, honorable, admirable. Results-now those we truly cherish."

"I'll have something for you soon."

The interior was all inlaid burnished wood to match the exterior's toasted-marshmallow color; the carpet supplied the seashell pink. The girl who met me just inside the door wore an elaborate Japanese robe and a dazed expression. I smoothed both sides of her collar with my hand and she seemed to take it well, perhaps as admiration for the silk. I nodded at the big windows overlooking the water and she led me to a small table there, then bowed and left me alone. I was the only customer for lunch, or the first anyway. I was starving. A sushi chef waved his broad knife at me and grinned from across the big, elegant dining room. The beveled-glass partition he worked behind made me think of the holdup-proof Plexiglas habitats for clerks in Smith Street liquor stores. I waved back, and he nodded, a sudden and ticcish bob, and I reciprocated happily. We had quite a thing going until he broke it off, to begin slicing with theatrical flair the whole skin off a slab of reddish fish.

The doors to the kitchen swung open, and Julia came out. She too wore a robe, and she wore it splendidly. It was her haircut that was a little jarring. She'd shaved her long blond hair down to military fuzz, exposing the black roots. Her face underneath the fuzz looked exposed and raw, her eyes a little wild to be without their veil. She picked up a menu and brought it to my table and halfway across the floor I saw her notice who she was bringing it to. She lost only a little something from her stride.

"Lionel."

"Pisspaw," I completed. I completed.

"I'm not going to ask you what you're doing here," she said. "I don't even want to know." She passed me the menu, the cover of which was thatched, a weave of bamboo.

"I followed Tony," I said, putting the menu gingerly aside, wary of splinters. "And the giant, the killer. We're all coming up here for a Frank Minna convention."

"That's not funny." She examined me, her mouth drawn. "You look like shit, Lionel."

"It was a long drive. I guess I should have flown into Boston and-what's your trick, rental car? Or catch a bus? This is a regular vacation spot for you, I know that much."

"Very nice, Lionel, you're very smart. Now get lost."

"Muscongaphone! Minnabunkport!" I gritted back a whole series of Maine-geography tics that wished to follow these two through the gate of my teeth. "We really ought to talk, Julia." I gritted back a whole series of Maine-geography tics that wished to follow these two through the gate of my teeth. "We really ought to talk, Julia."

"Why don't you just talk to yourself?"

"Where's Tony?"

"He's-Tugboat! Tunaphone!-he's on a boat ride." It sounded so pleasant, I didn't want to say who with. From the vantage of Yoshii's high window I could see Muscongus Island at last, wreathed in mist on the horizon.

"He should have come here," said Julia, without a trace of sentiment. She spoke as someone whose thinking had taken a very practical turn in the past day or so. "He told me to wait here for him, but I can't wait much longer. He should have come."

"Maybe he tried. I think he wants to get to Fujisaki before someone gets to him." I watched her as I dangled the theory, alert for any flinch or fire that might cross her expression.

It was flinch. She lowered her voice. "Don't say that name here, Lionel. Don't be an idiot." She looked around, but there was only the hostess and sushi chef. Don't say that name Don't say that name-the widow had inherited the dead man's superstitions.

"Who are you afraid of, Julia? Is it Fujisaki, really? Or Matricardi and Rockaforte?"

She looked at me and I saw her throat tighten and her nostrils flare.

"I'm not the one hiding from the Italians," she said. "I'm not the one who should be afraid."

"Who's hiding?"

It was one question too many. Her fury's crosshairs centered on me now, only because I was there and the person she wanted to kill was so very far away, working her by remote control. "Screw you, Lionel. You fucking freak."

The ducks were on the pond, the monkeys were in a tree, the birds wired, the fish barreled, the pigs blanketed: However the players in this tragic fever dream ought to be typed zoologically, I had them placed together now. The problem wasn't one of tracing connections. I'd climbed into my Tracer and accomplished that. Now, though, I had to draw a single coherent line through the monkeys, ducks, fish, pigs, through monks and mooks-a line that accurately distinguished two opposed teams. I might be close.

"Will you take my order, Julia?"

"Why don't you go away, Lionel? Please." It was pitying and bitter and desperate at once. She wanted to spare us both. I had to know from what.

"I want to try some uni. Some-orphan ocean ice cream!-some urchin eggs. See what all the fuss is about."

"You wouldn't like it."

"Can it be done up as a sandwich of some kind? Like an uni-salad sandwich?"

"It's not a sandwich spread."

"Okay, well, then just bring me out a big bowl and a spoon. I'm really hungry, Julia."

She wasn't paying attention. The door had opened, pale sunlight flaring into the orange and pink cavern of the room. The hostess bowed, then led the Fujisaki Corporation to a long table in the middle of the room.

It all happened at once. There were six of them, a vision to break your heart. I was almost glad Minna was gone so he'd never have to face it, how perfectly the six middle-aged Japanese men of Fujisaki filled the image the Minna Men had always strained toward but had never reached and never would reach, in their impeccably fitted black suits and narrow ties and Wayfarer shades and upright postures, their keen, clicking shoes and shiny rings and bracelets and stoic, lipless smiles. They were all we could never be no matter how Minna pushed us: absolutely a team, a unit, their presence collective like a floating island of charisma and force. Like a floating island they nodded at the sushi chef and at Julia and even at me, then moved to their seats and folded their shades into their breast pockets and removed their beautifully creased felt hats and hooked them on the coatrack and I saw the shine of their bald heads in the orange light and I spotted the one who'd spoken of marshmallows and ghosts and bowel movements and picnics and vengeance and I knew, I knew it all, I understood everything at that moment except perhaps who Bailey was, and so of course I ticced loudly.

"I scream for ur-chin!"

Julia turned, startled. She'd been staring, like me, transfixed by Fujisaki's splendor. If I was right she'd never seen them before, not even in their guises as monks.

"I'll bring your order, sir," she said, recovering gracefully. I didn't bother to point out that I hadn't exactly placed an order. Her panicked eyes said she couldn't handle any banter right then. She collected the bamboo-covered menu, and I saw her hand trembling and had to restrain myself from reaching for it to comfort her and my syndrome both. She turned again and headed for the kitchen, and when she passed Fujisaki's table, she managed a brave little bow of her own.

A few members of the corporation turned and glanced at me again, ever so lightly and indifferently. I smiled and waved to embarrass them out of giving me the once-over. They went back to their conversation in Japanese, the sound of which, trickling over the carpet and polished wood in my direction, was a choral murmur, a purr.

I sat still as I could and watched as Julia reemerged to take their drink order and pass out menus. One of the suits ignored her, leaned back in his seat, and transacted directly with the sushi chef, who grunted to show comprehension. Others unfolded the spiny menu and began to grunt as well, to jabber and laugh and stab their manicured fingers at the laminated photographs of fish inside. I recalled the monks in the Zendo, the pale, saggy flesh, the scanty tufts of underarm hair that now hid behind the million-dollar tailoring. The Zendo seemed a distant and unlikely place from where I sat now. Julia went back through the kitchen doors and came out carrying a large steaming bowl and a small trivet with daubs of bright color on it. With thesehe threaded past Fujisaki, to my table.

"Uni," she said, nodding at the tiny block of wood. It held a thick smudge of green paste, a cluster of pink-hued shavings from a pickled beet or turnip, and a gobbet of glistening orange beads-the urchin eggs, I supposed. It wasn't three bites of food altogether. The bowl she set down was a touch more promising. The broth was milky white, its surface rippled from underneath by a thick tangle of vegetables and chunks of chicken, and decorated on top by sprigs of some sort of exotic parsley.

"I also brought you something you might actually like," she said quietly as she drew a small ceramic ladle and a pair of inlaid chopsticks out of a pouch in her robe and set them at my place. "It's Thai chicken soup. Eat it and go, Lionel. Please."

Tie-chicken-to-what? went my brain. went my brain. Tinker to Evers to Chicken Tinker to Evers to Chicken.

Julia returned to Fujisaki's table with her order pad, to contend with the corporation's contradictory barked commands, their staccato pidgin English. I sampled the uni, scraping it up in the ladle-chopsticks were not my game. The gelatinous orange beads ruptured in my mouth like capers, brackish and sharp but not impossible to like. I tried mixing the three bright colors on the wood, blobbing the tacky green paste and the shreds of pickled radish together with the eggs. The combination was something else entirely: An acrid claw of vapor sped up the back of my throat and filled my nasal cavity. Those elements were apparently not meant to be mixed. My ears popped, my eyes watered, and I made a sound like a cat with a hairball.

I'd garnered Fujisaki's attention once again, and the sushi chef's as well. I waved, face flushed bright red, and they nodded and waved back, bobbed their heads, returned to talking. I ladled up some of the soup, thinking at least to flush the poisons off the sensitive surface of my tongue. Another reverse: The broth was superb, a reply and rebuke to the toxic explosion that had preceded it. It transmitted warmth in the other direction, down into my gullet and through my chest and shoulders as it passed. Levels of flavor unfolded, onion, coconut, chicken, a piquancy I couldn't place. I scooped up another ladleful, with a strip of chicken this time, and let the nourishing fire flow through me again. Until placed in this soup's care I hadn't realized how chilled I was, how starved for comfort. It felt as if the soup were literally embracing my heart.

The trouble came with the third spoonful. I'd dredged low, come up with a tangle of unidentifiable vegetables. I drank down more of the broth, then gnawed on the mouthful of pungent roughage that was left in my mouth-only some of it was rougher than I might have liked. There was some resilient, bladelike leaf that wasn't losing the contest with my teeth, was instead beginning to triumph in an unexpected skirmish with my gums and the roof of my mouth. I chewed, waiting for it to disintegrate. It wouldn't. Julia appeared just as I'd reached in with my pinkie to clear it from my mouth.

"I think part of the menu got into the soup," I said as I ejected the bulrushes onto the table.

"That's lemongrass," said Julia. "You're not supposed to eat eat it." 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. 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. 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 utterance problem, I think." 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. 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 Gottagettagun gottagettagun.

Gun Gun Gun Shoot! 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! 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. 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.

I shifted into first, swerved forward and left, then reversed into the giant's car again, crumpling the metal along the driver's-side door, deforming the contour of the Contour, wrinkling it like foil, hearing it creak and groan at being reshaped.

I might have stopped then. I believed the giant was unconscious under the air bag. He was at least silent and still, not firing his gun, not struggling to free himself.

But I felt the wild call of symmetry: His car ought to be crumpled on both sides. I needed to maul both of the Contour's shoulders. I rolled forward and into position, then backed and crashed against his car once more, wrecking it on the passenger side as I had on the driver's.

It's a Tourette's thing-you wouldn't understand.