“Okay, then,” says Landsman.
If he lets her go, he will never lie in the hollow of her breast, asleep. He will never sleep again without the help of a handful of Nembutal or the good offices of his chopped M-39.
Bina pushes back from the table and pulls on her parka. She returns the plastic box to the leather case, then shoulders it with a groan. “Good night, Meyer.”
“Where are you staying?”
“With my parents,” she says in the tone you might use to pronounce a death sentence on the planet.
“Oy vey.”
“Tell me about it. Just until I find a place. Anyway, it can’t be worse than the Hotel Zamenhof.”
She zips up her coat and then stands there for a long few seconds, submitting him to her shammes inspection. Her gaze is not as comprehensive as his-she misses the details sometimes-but the things that she does see, she can link up quickly in her mind to the things that she knows about women and men, victims and murderers. She can shape them with confidence into narratives that hold together and make sense. She does not solve cases so much as tell the stories of them.
“Look at you. You are like a house falling down.”
“I know,” Landsman says, feeling his chest tighten.
“I heard you were bad, but I thought they were just trying to cheer me up.”
He laughs and wipes his cheek with the sleeve of his jacket.
“What’s this?” she says. With the nails of her thumb and forefinger, she tweezes a crumpled, coffee-stained wad of paper from the mass of napkins that Landsman dumped onto the neighboring table. Landsman makes a grab at it, but Bina’s too fast for him, and she always was. She pulls apart the wad and stretches it flat.
“‘Five Great Truths and Five Big Lies About Verbover Hasidism,’” she says. Her eyebrows reach for each other across the bridge of her nose. “You thinking of turning black hat on me?”
He doesn’t answer quickly enough, and she gathers what there is to be gathered from his face and his silence and what she knows about him, which is basically everything.
“What are you up to, Meyer?” she says. All at once she looks as weary and spent as he feels. “No. Never mind. I’m too fucking tired.” She crumples the Verbover brochure back up, and throws it at his head.
“We said we weren’t going to talk about it,” Landsman says.
“Yeah, well, we said a lot of things,” she says. “You and I.”
She half turns, getting a purchase on the shoulder strap of the bag in which she lives her life. “I want to see you tomorrow in my office.”
“Hmm. Right. Only the thing is,” Landsman says, “I’m just coming off a twelve-day shift.”
This statement, while correct, makes no apparent impression on Bina. She might not have heard him, or he might not be speaking an Indo-European language.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Unless I blow my brains out tonight.”
“I said no love poetry,” Bina says. She gathers up a tumbling coil of her dark-pumpkin hair and shoves it into a toothed clip above and behind her right ear. “Brains or no brains. Be in my office at nine.”
Landsman watches her walk across the dining area to the doors of the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria. He bets himself a dollar that she won’t look back at him before she puts up her hood and steps out into the snow. But he’s a charitable man, and it was a sucker bet, and so he never bothers to collect.
19
When the telephone wakes him at six the next morning, Landsman is sitting in the wing chair, in his white underpants, with a tender hold on the grip of his M-39.
Tenenboym is just going off duty. “You asked,” he says, and then he hangs up.
Landsman doesn’t remember putting in for a wake-up call. He doesn’t remember polishing off the bottle of slivovitz that stands empty on the scratched urethane surface of the oak-veneer tabletop, next to the wing chair. He doesn’t remember eating the noodle pudding whose remaining third now huddles in a corner of a plastic clamshell container beside the bottle of slivovitz. From the position of the shards of painted glass on the floor, he can reconstruct having hurled his 1977 Sitka World’s Fair shot glass against the radiator. Maybe he was feeling frustrated over being unable to make any progress with the pocket chess set that lies facedown under the bed, its minute chessmen sprinkled liberally around the room. But he has no memory of the throw itself, or of shattering glass. He might have been drinking a toast to something or someone, with the radiator standing in for a fireplace. He doesn’t remember. But nothing about the squalid scenery of room 505 can be said to surprise him, least of all the loaded sholem in his hand.
He checks the firing pin safety and returns the gun to its holster, slung across the back of the wing chair. Then he goes over to the wall and drags the pull-down bed from its notch. He peels back the covers and climbs in. The linens are clean, and they smell of the steam press and of the dust in the hole in the wall. Dimly, Landsman recalls conceiving a romantic project, sometime around midnight the night before, to show up for work early, see what forensics and ballistics have made of the Shpilman case, maybe even go out to the islands, the Russian neighborhoods, and try to nudge the patzer ex-con Vassily Shitnovitzer. Do what he can, give it his best shot, before Bina takes a pair of pliers to his teeth and claws at nine. He smiles ruefully at the headstrong young bravo he was last midnight. A six A.M. wake up call.
He pulls the covers up over his head and closes his eyes. Unbidden, the configuration of pawns and pieces lays itself out on a chessboard in his mind, the Black king hemmed in but unchecked at the center of the board, the White pawn on the b file about to become something better. There is no longer any need for the pocket set; to his horror, he has the thing by heart. He tries to drive it from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.
He is still lying there, all the white squares of his mind blotted out, in his underpants and socks, when there’s a knock at the door. He sits up, facing the wall, his heart a drum banging in his temples, the sheets pulled down tight over him like he’s a kid hoping to spook somebody. He’s been lying on his stomach, maybe for a while. He remembers hearing, from the bottom of a tomb of black mud, in a lightless cave a mile beneath the surface of the earth, the distant vibrations of his Shoyfer, and sometime after that, the soft chirping of the phone on the oak- veneer table. But he was buried so deep under the mud that even if the telephones had been mere telephones in a dream, he would not have had the strength or the inclination to answer them. His pillow is drenched in a foul brew of drunk-sweat, panic, and saliva. He looks at his watch. It’s ten-twenty.
“Meyer?”
Landsman falls back onto the bed, upside down and tangled in the sheets. “I quit,” he says. “Bina, I resign.”
Bina doesn’t say anything right away. Landsman hopes she has accepted his resignation-which is superfluous anyway-and returned to the modular, and the man from the Burial Society, and her transition from Jewish policewoman to an officer of the law of the great state of Alaska. Once he is sure she has gone, Landsman will arrange for the maid who changes the bedding and towels once a week to come in and shoot him. Then all she has to do to bury him is return the pull-down bed to its notch in the wall. His claustrophobia, his fear of the dark, will no longer trouble him.
A moment later, he hears the teeth of a key in a lock, and the door of room 505 swings open. Bina creeps in the way you creep into a sickroom, a cardiac ward, expecting a shock, reminders of mortality, grim truths about the body.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see.
She wades through pieces of Landsman’s gray suit and a bath towel and stands at the foot of the bed. Her eyes take in the pink wallpaper patterned with garlands in burgundy flock, the green plush carpet with its random motif of burn spots and mystery stains, the broken glass, the empty bottle, the peeling and chipped veneer of the pressboard furniture. Watching her with his head at the foot of the pull-down bed, Landsman enjoys the look of horror on her face, mostly because if he doesn’t, then he will have to feel ashamed.
