Read The Land of Laughs for Free Online Page B

name was always Marshall France.” He shook his head. “And he didn’t have any brothers. Sorry.”
    “Yes, but —”
    He raised his hand to cut me off. “Really. I’m telling you this so that you won’t waste your time on it. You can spend the rest of your life in the library, but you won’t find what you’re looking for, I promise you. Marshall France was always Marshall France, and he was an only child. I’m sorry to say that it’s as simple as that.”
    We talked a little longer, but his obvious disbelief of what I’d said cast a pall over further conversation. A few minutes later we were standing in the door. He asked me if I thought I’d try writing the book anyway. I nodded but didn’t say anything. He halfheartedly wished me luck and told me to stay in touch. A few seconds later I was going down in the elevator, staring off into space, and wondering about everything. France/Frank, David Louis, Anna … Saxony. Where the hell had she gotten that stuff on Martin Frank and a dead brother who never lived in the first place?

5
    “Do you think I’m lying?”
    “Of course not, Saxony. It’s just that Louis was so damned adamant about there not being any brother and France’s name not being Frank.”
    I was at a booth on Sixty-fourth Street that had no door and smelled suspiciously like bananas. I’d called Saxony long distance after getting four thousand quarters in a drugstore. She listened quietly to my adventures with Louis. She never got angry when I hinted at the possibility that her information was all bullshit. In fact it seemed that she was almost relaxed. She was talking in a new low, sexy voice.
    I was a little wary of her calmness. There was a long silence while I watched a cabdriver throw a newspaper out the window of his cab.
    When she spoke again her voice was even quieter. “There’s one way that you can check on this Martin Frank part, Thomas.”
    “How’s that?”
    “The undertaker he worked for — Lucente. He’s still in business downtown. I checked a Manhattan telephone directory a few days ago. Why don’t you go and ask him about Martin Frank? See what he has to say about it.”
    Her voice was so smooth and sure of itself that I obediently asked her for the Lucente address like a good little boy and hung up.
    Things like The Godfather and The American Way of Death make the job of undertaker sound profitable, if not pleasant, but one look at “Lucente and Son Funeral Home” and you’d have second thoughts.
    It was down in a corner pocket of the city near Little Italy. It was next to a store that sold fluorescent madonnas and stone saints that you put in your garden to give it a taste of Italy. When I first walked by Lucente’s I missed it completely because the doorway was small and there was only a tiny sign in the lower corner of the front window announcing the family business.
    When I opened the door I heard a dog yapping way off in the back somewhere, and the place was lit by a yellow light from the street that cut in through the half-drawn venetian blinds. A green metal chair and desk — the kind you see in an Army recruiting offlee — a chair facing the desk, a year-old calendar announcing August from the Arthur Siegel Oil Company of New York — that was all. No soft music for the bereaved, no muted Oriental carpets to hush the sound of feet, no professional ghouls gliding around, trying to make you more “comfortable.” It all came back to me from the days of my father’s funeral.
    “Ah! Zito!”
    The only other door in the room flashed open and an old man came out in a hurry. He flung both arms up in the air, and looking back over his shoulder into the room he’d just come from, kicked the door shut.
    “What can I do for you? ”
    For a moment I asked myself how I’d feel if my mother had just died and I was coming to this place to make the arrangements for her. A crazy old man comes flying out, cursing … Some funeral home. But later when I thought about