to the property lines. The houses jostle and shoulder one another the way black hats do in synagogue.
“Not a single for-sale sign,” Landsman observes. “Laundry on every line. All the other sects have been packing up the Torahs and the hatboxes. The Harkavy’s half a ghost town. But not the Verbovers. Either they’re totally oblivious to Reversion, or they know something we don’t.”
“They’re Verbovers,” Berko says. “Which way would you bet?”
“You’re saying the rebbe put the fix in. Green cards for everyone.” Landsman considers this possibility. He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagmen and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government. The Verbovers, with their Talmudic grasp of systems, their deep pockets, and the impenetrable face they present to the outer world have broken or rigged many mechanisms of control. But to have figured a way to gaff the entire INS like a Coke machine with a dollar on a string?
“Nobody has that much weight,” Landsman says. “Not even the Verbover rebbe.”
Berko ducks his head and gives his shoulders a half-shrug, as if he doesn’t want to say anything more lest terrible forces be unleashed, scourges and plagues and holy tornadoes.
“Just because you don’t believe in miracles,” he says.
13
Zimbalist, the boundary maven, that learned old fart, he’s ready when a rumor of Indians in a blue hunk of Michigan muscle comes rumbling up to his front door. Zimbalist’s shop is a stone building with a zinc roof and big doors on rollers, at the wide end of a cobbled platz. The platz starts narrow at one end and broadens out like the nose of a cartoon Jew. Half a dozen crooked lanes tumble into it, following paths first laid down by long-vanished Ukrainian goats or aurochs, past housefronts that are faithful copies of lost Ukrainian originals. A Disney shtetl, bright and clean as a freshly forged birth certificate. An artful jumble of mud-brown and mustard-yellow houses, wood and plaster with thatched roofs. Across from Zimbalist’s shop, at the narrow end of the platz, stands the house of Heskel Shpilman, tenth in the dynastic line from the original rebbe of Verbov, himself a famous worker of miracles. Three neat white cubes of spotless stucco, with mansard roofs of blue slate tile and tall windows, shuttered and narrow. An exact copy of the original home, back in Verbov, of the present rebbe’s wife’s grandfather, the eighth Verbover rebbe, right down to the nickel-plated bathtub in the upstairs washroom. Even before they turned to money laundering, smuggling, and graft, Verbover rebbes distinguished themselves from the competition by the splendor of their waistcoats, the French silver on their Sabbath table, the soft Italian boots on their feet.
The boundary maven is small, frail, slope-shouldered, call him seventy-five but looking ten years older. Patchy cinder-gray hair worn too long, sunken dark eyes, and pale skin tinged yellow like a celery heart. He wears a zip cardigan with collar flaps and a pair of old plastic sandals, navy blue, over white socks with a hole for the left big toe and its horn. His herringbone trousers are stained with egg yolk, acid, tar, epoxy fixative, sealing wax, green paint, mastodon blood. The maven’s face is bony, mostly nose and chin, evolved for noticing, probing, cutting straight to gaps, breaches, and lapses. His full ashy beard flutters in the wind like bird fluff caught on a barbed-wire fence. In a hundred years of helplessness, this would be the last face that Landsman would ever turn to hoping for aid or information, but Berko knows more about black-hat life than Landsman ever will.
Standing next to Zimbalist, in front of the arched stone door of the shop, a beardless young bachelor holds an umbrella to keep the snow off the old fart’s head. The black cake of the kid’s hat is already dusted with a quarter inch of frosting. Zimbalist gives him the attention you give a tree in a pot.
“You’re fatter than ever,” he says by way of greeting as Berko swaggers toward him, some ghost of the weight of the war hammer lingering in his gait. “Big as a sofa.”
“Professor Zimbalist,” Berko says, swinging that invisible mallet. “You look like something that fell out of a used vacuum-cleaner bag.”
“Eight years you don’t bother me.”
“Yeah, I thought I’d give you a break.”
“That’s nice. Too bad every other Jew in this accursed potato paring of a District kept right on banging me a kettle all day long.” He turns to the bachelor with the umbrella. “Tea. Glasses. Jam.”
The bachelor murmurs an Aramaic allusion to abject obedience quoted from the Tractate on the Hierarchy of Dogs, Cats, and Mice, opens the door for the boundary maven, and they go in. It’s one vast, echoing room, divided by theory into a garage, a workshop, and an office that’s lined with steel map cabinets, framed testimonials, and all the black-spined volumes of the endless, bottomless Law. The big rolling doors are there to let the vans go in and out. Three vans, judging from the trey of oil stains on the smooth cement floor.
Landsman gets paid-and lives-to notice what normal people miss, but it seems to him that until he walked into Zimbalist the boundary maven’s shop, he hasn’t given enough attention to string. String, twine, rope, cord, tape, filament, lanyard, hawser, and cable; polypropylene, hemp, rubber, rubberized copper, Kevlar, steel, silk, flax, braided velvet. The boundary maven has vast stretches of the Talmud by heart. Topography, geography, geodesy, geometry, trigonometry, they’re a reflex, like sighting along the barrel of a gun. But the boundary maven lives and dies by the quality of his string. Most of it-you can measure it in miles, or in vershts, or in hands, like a boundary maven-is coiled neatly on spools hung from the wall or stacked neatly, by size, on metal spindles. But a lot of it is heaped here and there in crazes and tangles. Brambles, hair combings, huge thorny elf knots of string and wire, blowing around the shop like tumbleweeds.
“This is my partner, Professor, Detective Landsman,” Berko says. “You want somebody to bang you a kettle, let me tell you.”
“A pain in the ass like you?”
“Don’t get me started.”
Landsman and the professor shake hands.
“I know this one,” the boundary maven says, coming in close to get a better look at Landsman, giving him the squint-eye as if he’s one of the maven’s ten thousand boundary maps. “That caught the maniac Podolsky. That sent Hyman Tsharny to prison.”
Landsman stiffens and shakes out the foil sheet of his blast shield, ready for an earful. Hyman Tsharny, a Verbover dollar washer with a string of video stores, hired two Filipino shlossers- contract killers-to help him cement a tricky business deal. But Landsman’s best informer is Benito Taganes, the Filipino-style Chinese donut king. Benito’s information led Landsman to the roadhouse by the airfield where the hapless shlossers were waiting for a plane, and their testimony put Tsharny away, despite the best efforts of the thickest courtroom kevlar that Verbover money could buy. Hyman Tsharny is still the only Verbover ever to be convicted and sentenced on criminal charges in the District.
“Look at him.” Zimbalist’s face breaks open at the bottom. His teeth are like the pipes of an organ made of bones. His laugh sounds like a handful of rusty forks and nail heads clattering on the ground. “He thinks I give a shit about these people, may their loins be as withered as their souls.” The maven stops laughing. “What, you thought I was one of them?”
It feels like the deadliest question Landsman has ever been asked. “No, Professor,” he says. Landsman also had some doubt that Zimbalist was really a professor, but there in the office, above the head of the bachelor struggling with the electric kettle, are the framed credentials and certificates from the Yeshiva of Warsaw (1939), the Polish Free State (1950), and Bronfman Manual and Technical (1955). Also those testimonials, haskamos, and affidavits, each in its sober black frame, one from what looks to be every rabbi in the District, two-bit and big-time, from Yakovy to Sitka. Landsman makes a show of giving Zimbalist another once-over, but it’s obvious just from the big yarmulke covering the eczema at the back of his skull, with its fancy embroidery of silver thread, that the boundary maven isn’t a Verbover. “I wouldn’t make that mistake.”
“No? What about marrying one of them, like I did? Would you make that mistake?”
“When it comes to marriage I like to let other people make the mistakes,” Landsman says. “My ex-wife, for example.”
Zimbalist waves them over, past the stout oak map table, to a couple of broken ladder-back chairs beside a massive rolltop desk. The bachelor can’t get out of his way fast enough, and the boundary maven grabs him by the
