happen to Mendel Shpilman?”
Landsman will review the performance later with Berko, but his first impression is that Baronshteyn sounds surprised by the possibility.
“Professor,” Berko says. “We appreciate the help. Thank you.” He zips up Zimbalist’s sweater and buttons his jacket. He tucks one side of the bearskin coat over the other and knots the belt tightly at the waist. “Now, please, go home. Yossele, Shmerl, somebody walk the professor home before his wife gets worried and calls the police.”
Yossele takes Zimbalist by the arm, and they start down the steps.
Berko shuts the door against the cold. “Take us to the rebbe, counselor,” he says. “Now.”
16
Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man- made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see.
“I suggest we dispense with the pleasantries,” the rebbe says.
His voice comes pitched high, droll, the voice of the well-proportioned, scholarly man he must have been once. Landsman has heard that it’s a glandular disorder. He has heard that the Verbover rebbe, for all his bulk, maintains the diet of a martyr, broth and roots and a daily crust of bread. But Landsman prefers to see the man as distended with the gas of violence and corruption. His belly filled with bones and shoes and the hearts of men, half digested in the acid of his Law.
“Sit down and tell me what you came here to say.”
“We can do that, rebbe,” Berko says.
They each take a chair in front of the rebbe’s desk. The office is pure Austro-Hungarian empire. Behemoths of mahogany, ebony and bird’s-eye maple crowd the walls, ornate as cathedrals. In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover Clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed. It runs counterclockwise, reverse-numbered with the first twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its recovery was a turning point in the fortunes of the Verbover court and marked the start of Heskel Shpilman’s ascent. Baronshteyn takes up a position behind and to the right of the rebbe, at a lectern where he can keep one eye on the street, one eye on whatever volume is being combed for precedents and justifications, and one eye, a lidless inner eye, on the man who is the center of his existence.
Landsman clears his throat. He is the primary, and this is his job to do. He steals another glance at the Verbover Clock. There are seven minutes remaining in this sorry excuse for a week.
“Before you begin, Detectives,” says Aryeh Baronshteyn, “let me state for the record that I am here in my capacity as attorney to Rabbi Shpilman. Rebbe, if you have any doubt about whether you ought to answer a question put to you by the detectives, please refrain from answering, and allow me to ask them to clarify or rephrase it.”
“This isn’t an interrogation, Rabbi Baronshteyn,” Berko says.
“You are welcome here, more than welcome, Aryeh,” the rebbe says. “Indeed, I insist that you be present. But as my gabay and my son-in-law. Not as my lawyer. For this I don’t need a lawyer.”
“If I may, dear Rebbe. These men are homicide detectives. You are the Verbover rebbe. If you don’t need a lawyer, then nobody needs a lawyer. And believe me, everybody needs a lawyer.” Baronshteyn slides a pad of yellow paper from the interior of the lectern, where he no doubt keeps his vials of curare and his necklaces of severed human ears. He unscrews the cap of a fountain pen. “I will at least take notes. On,” he deadpans, “a legal pad.”
The Verbover rebbe contemplates Landsman from deep inside the redoubt of his flesh. He has light eyes, somewhere between green and gold. They’re nothing like the pebbles abandoned by mourners on Baronshteyn’s tombstone puss. Fatherly eyes that suffer and forgive and find amusement. They know what Landsman has lost, what he has squandered and let slip from his grasp through doubt, faithlessness, and the pursuit of being tough. They understand the furious wobble that throws off the trajectory of Landsman’s good intentions. They comprehend the love affair that Landsman has with violence, his wild willingness to put his body out there on the street to break and to be broken. Until this minute Landsman didn’t grasp what he and every noz in the District, and the Russian shtarkers and small-time wiseguys, and the FBI and the IRS and the ATF, were up against. He never understood how the other sects could tolerate and even defer to the presence of these pious gangsters in their black-hat midst. You could lead men with a pair of eyes like that. You could send them to the very lip of whatever abyss you chose.
“Tell me why you are here, Detective Landsman,” the rebbe says.
Through the door of the outer office comes the muffled jangle of a telephone. There is no phone on the desk and none in sight. The rebbe works some feat of semaphore with half an eyebrow and a minor muscle of the eye. Baronshteyn puts down his pen. The ringing swells and dwindles as Baronshteyn slips the black missive of his body through the slot of the office door. A moment later, Landsman hears him answer. The words are unclear, the tone curt, maybe even harsh.
The rebbe catches Landsman trying to eavesdrop and puts his eyebrow muscles to more strenuous use.
“Right,” says Landsman. “It’s like this. It so happens, Rabbi Shpilman, that I live in the Zamenhof. It’s a hotel, not a good one, down on Max Nordau Street. Last night the manager knocked on my door and asked me would I mind coming down to have a look at another guest in the hotel. The manager had been worried about this guest. He was afraid the Jew might have overdosed. And so he had let himself into the room. It turned out that the man was dead. He was registered under an assumed name. He had no identification. But there were a few hints of this and that in his room. And today my partner and I followed up on one of those hints, and it led us here. To you. We believe-we are all but certain-that the dead man was your son.”
Baronshteyn sidles back into the room as Landsman is giving the news. His face has been wiped, as if with a soft cloth, of all prints or smudges of emotion.
“All but certain,” the rebbe says dully, nothing moving in his face but the lights in his eyes. “I see. All but certain. Hints of this and that.”
“We have a picture,” Landsman says. Once again he produces like a grim magician Shpringer’s photograph of the dead Jew in 208. He starts to pass it to the rebbe but consideration, a sudden flutter of sympathy, stops his hand.
“Perhaps it would be best,” says Baronshteyn, “if I-”
“No,” the rebbe says.
Shpilman takes the photograph from Landsman and, with both hands, brings it very close to his face, straight up into the precinct of his right eyeball. He’s only nearsighted, but there is something vampiric in the gesture, as if he’s trying to drain a vital liquor from the photograph with the lamprey mouth of his eye. He measures it from top to bottom and end to end. His expression never alters. Then he lowers the photograph to the clutter of his desk and clucks his tongue once. Baronshteyn steps forward to take a look at the picture, but the rebbe waves him off and says, “It’s him.”
Landsman, his instruments dialed up to full gain, widest aperture, is tuned to catch some faint radiation of regret or satisfaction that might escape the singularities at the heart of Baronshteyn’s eyes. And it’s there; a brief tracer arc of particles lights them up. But what Landsman detects in that instant, to his surprise, is disappointment. For an instant Aryeh Baronshteyn looks like a man who just drew an ace of spades and is contemplating the fan of useless diamonds in his hand. He exhales a short breath, half a sigh, and walks slowly back to his lectern.
“Shot,” the rebbe says.
