the steady maven flicker of intelligence is snuffed out. For a second Landsman is looking at a Polaroid of a dead boundary maven. Then the lights come back on in the old fart’s face. Berko and Landsman wait a little, and then a little more, and Landsman understands that the boundary maven is fighting as hard as he can to maintain that control, to hold on to the chance of making his next words Detectives, I have never seen that man before in my life, and having it sound plausible, inevitable, true.
“Who was he, Professor Zimbalist?” Berko says at last.
Zimbalist sets the photograph down on the desk and looks at it some more, not bothering about what his eyes or his lips might be doing.
“Oy, that boy,” he says. “That sweet, sweet boy.”
He takes a handkerchief from the pocket of his zippered cardigan and blots the tears from his cheeks and barks once. It’s a horrible sound. Landsman picks up the maven’s glass of tea and pours it into his own. From his hip pocket, he takes the bottle of vodka he impounded in the men’s room of the Vorsht that morning. He pours two fingers into the glass of tea and then holds the cup out to the old fart.
Zimbalist takes the vodka without a word and knocks it down in one shot. Then he returns the handkerchief to its pocket and gives Landsman his photograph.
“I taught that boy to play chess,” he says. “When that man was a boy, I mean. Before he grew up. I’m sorry, I’m not making sense.” He goes for another Broadway, but he has already smoked them all. It takes him a while to figure this out. He sits there, poking around in the foil with a hooked finger, as if he’s going for the peanut in a package of Cracker Jack. Landsman fixes him up with a smoke. “Thanks, Landsman. Thank you.”
But then he doesn’t say anything, he just sits there watching the papiros burn down. He peers out from his cavernous eyeholes at Berko, then steals a cardplayer peek at Landsman. He’s recovering from the shock now. Trying to map the situation, the lines he cannot cross, the doorways that he mustn’t step through on peril of his soul. The hairy, mottled crab of his hand flicks one of its legs toward the telephone on his desk. In another minute, the truth and darkness of life will once again have been remanded to the custody of lawyers.
The garage door creaks and rumbles, and with a moan of gratitude, Zimbalist starts to pop up again, but this time Berko beats him to his feet. He drops a heavy hand on the old man’s shoulder.
“Sit down, Professor,” he says. “I beg you. Take it slow if you have to, but please, sit your ass down on that donut.” He leaves the hand where it is, giving Zimbalist a gentle squeeze, and nods toward the garage. “Meyer.”
Landsman crosses the workshop to the garage and hauls out his shield. He walks directly into the path of the van as if the shield really is a badge that can stop a two-ton Chevy. The driver hits the brakes, and the howl of tires echoes against the cold stone walls of the garage. The driver rolls down his window. He has the full Zimbalist crew equipage: beard in a net, yellow coverall, well developed scowl.
“What gives, Detective?” he wants to know.
“Go take a drive,” Landsman says. “We’re talking.” He reaches over to the dispatch panel and grabs hold of the skulking bachelor by the collar of his long coat. Dangles the kid like a puppy around to the passenger side of the van and drags open the side door, then tenderly shoves the bachelor into the van. “And take this little pisher with you.”
“Boss?” the driver calls over to the boundary maven. After a moment Zimbalist nods and waves the driver away.
“But where should I go?” the driver says to Landsman.
“I don’t know,” Landsman says. He drags the van’s door shut and shoves it home. “Go buy me a nice present.”
Landsman pounds on the hood of the van, and it rolls back out into the storm of white lines being knit like strings of the boundary maven across the replica housefronts and the blazing gray sky. Landsman pulls the garage door into place and throws the latch.
“Nu, how about you start over?” he says to Zimbalist when he sits down again in the ladder back chair. He crosses his legs and lights another papiros for each of them. “We have plenty of time.”
“Come on, Professor,” Berko says. “You know the victim since he’s a boy, right? All those memories have got to be going around and around in your head right now. As bad as you feel, it’s going to feel better if you just start talking.”
“It isn’t that,” the boundary maven says. “It’s-It isn’t that.” He takes the lit papiros from Landsman, and this time he smokes most of it before he starts to talk. He is a learned yid, and he likes to have his thoughts in order.
“His name is Menachem,” he begins. “Mendel. He is, or was, thirty-eight, a year older than you, Detective Shemets, but he had the same birthday, August fifteenth, isn’t that right? Eh? I thought so. You see? This is the map cabinet.” He taps his hairless dome. “Maps of Jericho, Detective Shemets, Jericho and Tyre.”
Tapping the map cabinet gets a little out of control, and he knocks the yarmulke off his head. When he grabs at it, ash cascades all down his sweater.
“Mendele’s IQ was measured at one-seventy,” he continues. “By the time he was eight or nine, he could read Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Spanish, Latin, Greek. The most difficult texts, the thorniest tangles of logic and argument. By then Mendele was already a much better chess player than I could ever hope to be. He had a remarkable memory for recorded games; he had only to read a transcript once, and after that, he could reproduce it on a board or in his head, move by move, without a mistake. When he was older and they didn’t let him play so much anymore, he would work through famous games in his head. He must have known three, four hundred games by heart.”
“That’s what they used to say about Melekh Gaystik,” Landsman says. “He had that kind of mind for the game.”
“Melekh Gaystik,” Zimbalist says. “Gaystik was a freak. It was not human, the way Gaystik played. He had a mind like some kind of bug, the only thing he knew to do was eat you. He was rude. Filthy. Mean. Mendele wasn’t like that at all. He made toys for his sisters, dolls out of clothespins and felt, a house from a box of oatmeal. Always glue on his fingers, a clothespin in his pocket with a face on it. I would give him twine for the hair. Eight little sisters hanging off him all the time. A pet duck that used to follow him around like a dog.” Zimbalist’s thin brown lips hitch themselves up at the corners. “Believe it or not, I once arranged for a match to be played between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik. You could do such things-Gaystik was always broke and in debt, and he would have played against a half-drunk bear if the money was right. The boy was twelve at the time, Gaystik twenty-six. It was the year before he won the championship at Petersburg. They played three games in the back of my shop, which at that time-you remember, Detective-was on Ringelblum Avenue. I offered Gaystik five thousand dollars to play against Mendele. The boy won the first and the third. The second game he had Black and played Gaystik to a draw. Yes, Gaystik was only too happy to keep the match a secret.”
“Why?” Landsman wants to know. “Why did the games have to be kept secret?”
“Because this boy,” the boundary maven says. “The one who died in a hotel room on Max Nordau Street. Not a nice hotel, I imagine.”
“A fleabag,” Landsman says.
“He was shooting heroin into his arm?”
Landsman nods, and after a hard second or two, Zimbalist nods, too.
“Yes. Of course. Nu. The reason why I was obliged to arrange the games in secret was that this boy had been forbidden to play chess with outsiders. Somehow or other, I never learned how, Mendele’s father got wind of the match against Gaystik. It was a near thing for me. In spite of the fact that my wife was a relative of the father, I almost lost his haskama, which at that time was the foundation of my business. I built this whole operation on that endorsement.”
“The father. You’re not saying-it was Heskel Shpilman,” Berko says. “The man there in the picture is the son of the Verbover rebbe.”
Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.
“That’s right,” Zimbalist says at last. “Mendel Shpilman. The only son. He had a twin brother who was born dead. Later, that was interpreted as a sign.”
Landsman says, “A sign of what? That he would be a prodigy? That he would turn out to be a junkie living in a cheap Untershtot flop?”
“Not that,” says Zimbalist. “That nobody imagined.”