The idea had never occurred to Zimbalist. “I didn’t say anything to them,” he said. “I don’t know them.”
“There was more than enough blessing to go around,” Mendel informed him. “Tell them. Give it to them tonight.”
But that night, when Zimbalist went to visit his lady friend, she had been moved to another ward, one where nobody was in danger of death, and somehow or other, Zimbalist forgot the boy’s reminder. Two weeks later, the woman’s doctors sent her home, shaking their heads in puzzlement. Two weeks after that, an X ray showed no trace of the cancer in her body.
By then she and Zimbalist had broken off their affair by mutual agreement, and he slept every night in the marital bed. The daily meetings with Mendel in the back of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue continued for a while, but Zimbalist found that he had lost his pleasure in them. The apparent miracle of the cancer cure forever altered his relations with Mendel Shpilman. Zimbalist could not shake a sense of vertigo that came over him every time Mendel looked at him with his close-set eyes, flecked with pity and gold. The boundary maven’s faith in faithlessness had been shaken by a simple question- How is she? — by a dozen words of blessing, by a simple bishop move that seemed to imply a chess beyond the chess that Zimbalist knew.
It was as repayment for the miracle that Zimbalist had arranged the secret match between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik, king of the Cafe Einstein and future champion of the world. Three games in the back room of a shop on Ringelblum Avenue, with the boy winning two out of three. When this act of subterfuge was uncovered-and not the other; no one else ever learned of the affair-the visits between Zimbalist and Mendel Shpilman were broken off. After that, he and Mendel never shared another hour at the board.
“That’s what comes from giving out blessings,” says Zimbalist the boundary maven. “But it took Mendel Shpilman a long time to figure that out.”
15
You met this ganef,” Landsman half asks Berko as they hump along behind the boundary maven through the Sabbath snow to the rebbe’s door. For the journey across the platz, Zimbalist washed his face and armpits in a sink at the back of the shop. He wet a comb and raked all seventeen of his hairs into a moire across the top of his head. Then he put on a brown corduroy sport coat, an orange down vest, black galoshes, and over everything, a belted bearskin coat trailing a smell of mothballs like a muffler twenty feet long. From a moose antler by the door, the maven took a football or miniature ottoman made of wolverine fur and set it on top of his head. Now he waddles along ahead of the detectives, reeking of naphthalene, looking like a small bear urged by cruel masters to perform demeaning feats. Under an hour before dark, and the snow falling is like pieces of broken daylight. The Sitka sky is dull silver plate and tarnishing fast.
“Yeah, I met him,” Berko says. “They brought me in to see him right after I started working the Fifth Precinct. They had a ceremony in his office, over the study hall on South Ansky Street. He pinned something to the crown of my latke, a gold leaf. After that he used to send me a nice basket of fruit at Purim. Delivered right to my house, even though I never gave out my home address. Every year pears and oranges until we moved out to the Shvartser-Yam.”
“I hear he’s kind of on the large side.”
“He’s cute. Cute as a fucking button.”
“That stuff the maven was just telling us about Mendel. The wonders and miracles. Berko, you believe any of that?”
“You know it’s not about believing for me, Meyer. It never has been.”
“But do you-I’m curious-do you really feel like you’re waiting for Messiah?”
Berko shrugs, uninterested in the question, keeping his eyes on the track of the black galoshes in the snow. “It’s Messiah,” he says. “What else can you do but wait?”
“And then when he comes, what? Peace on earth?”
“Peace, prosperity. Plenty to eat. Nobody sick or lonely. Nobody selling anything. I don’t know.”
“And Palestine? When Messiah comes, all the Jews move back there? To the promised land? Fur hats and all?”
“I heard Messiah cut a deal with the beavers,” Berko says. “No more fur.”
Under the glow of a big iron gas lamp mounted, by an iron bracket, to the front of the rebbe’s house, a loose knot of men is killing the last of the week. Hangers-on, the rebbe-struck, an outright simpleton or two. And the usual impromptu mess of would be Swiss Guards who make the job tougher for the biks holding up either side of the front door. Everybody’s telling everybody else to go home and bless the light with their families, leave the rebbe to eat his Sabbath dinner in peace already. Nobody’s quite leaving, nobody’s quite sticking around. They swap authentic lies about recent miracles and portents, new Canadian immigration scams, and forty new versions of the story of the Indian with the hammer, how he recited the Alenu while dancing an Indian patch tanz.
When they hear the crunch and chiming of Zimbalist’s galoshes coming toward them across the platz, they leave off making their noises, one by one, like a calliope running out of steam. Fifty years Zimbalist has been living in their midst and he’s still, by some tangle of choice and necessity, an outsider. He’s a wizard, a juju man, with his fingers on the strings that ring the District, and his palms cupping the brackish water of their souls every Sabbath. Perched at the tops of the boundary maven’s poles, his crews can see into every window, they can listen in on every telephone call. Or at least that is what these men have heard.
“Coming through, please,” the maven says, heading for the front steps with their pretty railings of curlicued wrought iron. “Friend Belsky, move aside.”
The men make way as if Zimbalist is running toward a water bucket holding something on fire. Before they can quite close up the gap, they see Landsman and Berko coming their way and throw down a silence so heavy that Landsman can feel it pressing on the sides of his head. He can hear the snow fizzing and the sizzle each snowflake makes as it hits the top of the gas lamp. The men put on an exhibition of hard looks and innocent looks and looks so blank they threaten to vacuum all the air from Landsman’s lungs. Somebody says, “I don’t see any hammer.”
Detectives Landsman and Shemets wish them the joy of the Sabbath. Then they turn their attention to the biks by the door, a couple of thickset, red-haired, pop-eyed boys with pug noses and dense woolly beards the rusty gold of brisket gravy. Two red Rudashevskys, biks from a long line of biks, bred for simplicity, density, power, and lightness of foot.
“Professor Zimbalist,” says the Rudashevsky to the left of the door. “A good Sabbath to you.”
“And to you, Friend Rudashevsky. I regret to disturb your watch on this peaceful afternoon.” The boundary maven settles the furry ottoman more snugly on his head. Off to a flowery start, but when he goes to open the drawer of his face, no more coin falls out. Landsman reaches into his hip pocket. Zimbalist is just standing there, his arms hanging slack, maybe thinking it’s all his fault, that it was chess that bent the boy from the God-directed angle of his glory, and now Zimbalist has to go in there and tell the father the sorry ending of the tale. So Landsman brushes up against Zimbalist’s shoulder, with his fingers around the cold smooth neck of the pint of Canadian vodka in his pocket. He taps the bottle against Zimbalist’s bony claw until the old fart catches on and palms it.
“Nu, Yossele, it’s Detective Shemets,” Berko says, taking over the operation, squinting up into the scattering gaslight with a hand over his eyes. The gang of men behind them begins to murmur, sensing now the quick unfolding of something bad and marvelous. The wind jerks the snowflakes back and forth on its hundred hooks. “What’s up, yid?”
“Detective,” says the Rudashevsky to the right, maybe Yossele’s brother, maybe his cousin. Maybe both at once. “We heard you were in the neighborhood.”
“This is Detective Landsman, my partner. Could you please tell Rabbi Shpilman that we’d like to have a moment of his time? Please believe, we wouldn’t disturb him at this hour if it wasn’t so important.”
Black hats, even Verbovers, don’t usually challenge the right or authority of policemen to conduct police business in the Harkavy or on Verbov Island. They don’t cooperate, but they usually don’t interfere. On the other hand, to enter the home of exile’s strongest rabbi, at the very brink of the holiest moment of the week, for that you need a good reason. You need to be coming to tell him, for example, that his only son is dead.
“A moment of the rebbe’s time?” says a Rudashevsky.
“If you had a million dollars, please don’t mind my saying so, with all due respect, Detective Shemets,” says
