“How do you say ‘shit heap’ in Esperanto?” Bina says. She goes over to the veneer table and looks down at the last bedraggled curls of noodle pudding lying in the grease-streaked clamshell.
“At least you ate something.”
She turns the wing chair around to face the bed, then lowers her tote to the ground. She studies the seat of the chair. From her face, he can see that she’s wondering if she ought to go after the seat of the chair with something caustic or antibacterial out of her magic bag. At last she lowers herself into the wing chair, a little at a time. She’s dressed in a gray pantsuit, some kind of slick stuff with an iridescent under-sheen of black. Under the jacket she wears a silk shell in celadon green. Her face is bare except for two streaks of brick lip rouge on her mouth. At this hour of the day, her morning effort to control her tangled hair with pins and clips has not yet begun to fail. If she slept well last night, in the narrow bed in her old room, on the top floor of a two-family house on Japonski Island, with old Mr. Oysher and his prosthetic leg bumping around downstairs, it doesn’t show in the hollows and shadows of her face. Her eyebrows are all involved with each other again. Her rouged lips have narrowed to a brick-red seam two millimeters wide.
“So how’s your morning going, Inspector?”
“I don’t like waiting,” she says. “And I especially don’t like waiting for you.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Landsman says. “I quit.”
“It’s funny, but you repeating that particular bit of idiocy does surprisingly little to improve my mood.”
“I can’t work for you, Bina. Come on. That’s just insane. It’s exactly the kind of insanity I would expect from the department right now. If things are that bad, if that’s what it comes to, then forget it. I’m sick of all this play- out-the-string jazz. So, nu, I quit. What do you need me for? Slap black flags on all our cases. Open, closed. Who gives a damn? It’s just a bunch of dead yids anyway.”
“I went through the stack again,” she says. He notes that after all these years, she has retained her thrilling power to ignore him and his bouts of blackness. “I didn’t see anything in any of them that looked like it was going to tie in with the Verbovers.” She reaches into her briefcase and takes out a pack of Broadways, shakes one loose, and fits it to her lips. She says the next eight words in an offhand way that he immediately suspects. “Except for maybe that junkie you found downstairs.”
“You black-flagged that one,” Landsman replies with a policeman’s perfect disingenuousness. “You’re smoking again, too?”
“Tobacco, mercury.” She brushes back a coil of hair and lights her papiros, blows smoke. “Playing out the string.”
“Let me have one.”
She passes him the Broadway and he sits ups, winding himself in a careful toga of bed linens. She looks him over in his splendor as she lights a second papiros. She notes the gray hair around his nipples, the progress of flab at his waist, his bony knees.
“Sleeping in socks and underwear,” she says. “Always a bad sign with you.”
“I guess I have the cafard,” he says. “I guess it kind of hit me last night.”
“Last night?”
“Last year?”
She looks around for something to use as an ashtray. “Did you and Berko go out to Verbov Island yesterday,” she says, “to poke around this Lasker thing?”
There’s really no point in lying to her. But Landsman has been disobeying orders far too long to start telling the truth about it now.
“You didn’t get a call?” he says.
“A call? From Verbov Island? On a Saturday morning? Who there’s going to call me on a Saturday morning?” Her eyes get shrewd, tight at the corners. “And what are they going to tell me when they do?”
“I’m sorry,” Landsman says. “Excuse me. I can’t hold it anymore.”
He gets up, stands right up in his underwear with a sheet hanging off him. He pads around the pull-down bed to the tiny bathroom with its sink and its steel mirror and its shower head. There’s no curtain, just a drain in the middle of the floor. He closes the door and urinates for a long time, with genuine pleasure. Setting the burning papiros on the edge of the toilet tank, he gives his face some brisk business with soap and a washcloth. There’s a wool bathrobe, white with red, green, yellow, and black stripes in an Indian pattern, on a hook behind the bathroom door. He ties it around himself. He puts the papiros back into his mouth and looks at himself in the scratched rectangle of polished steel that’s mounted above the sink. What he sees there affords him no surprises or unknown depths. He flushes the toilet and goes back into the room.
“Bina,” he says, “I did not know this man. He was put in my way. I was given the opportunity to know him, I suppose, but I declined it. If this man and I had gotten to know each other, possibly we would have become pals. Maybe not. He had his thing with heroin, and that was probably enough for him. It usually is. But whether I knew him or not, and whether we could have grown old together holding hands on a sofa down in the lobby, is neither here nor there. Somebody came into this hotel, my hotel, and shot that man in the back of the head while he was off in dreamland. And that bothers me. Set aside whatever general objections I might have worked up over the years to the underlying concept of homicide. Forget about right and wrong, law and order, police procedure, departmental policy, Reversion, Jews and Indians. This dump is my house. For the next two months, or however long it turns out to be, I live here. All these hard-lucks paying rent on a pull-down bed and a sheet of steel bolted to the bathroom wall, for better or worse, they’re my people now. I can’t honestly say I like them very much. Some of them are all right. Most of them are pretty bad. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let somebody walk in here and put a bullet in their heads.”
Bina has boiled up two cups of instant coffee. She hands one to Landsman. “Black and sweet,” she says. “Right?”
“Bina.”
“You’re on your own. The black flag stays put. You get caught, you get in a jam, you get your knees broken by Rudashevskys, I don’t know anything about it.” She goes over to her bag and takes out an accordion file thick with folders. She puts it on the veneer table. “The forensic is only a partial. Shpringer sort of left it hanging. Blood and hair. Latents. It isn’t much. The ballistics are still out.”
“Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn’t Lasker. This guy-”
She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.
“I don’t know anything about it,” she says. She removes her hand. She takes a sip of instant coffee and makes a face. “Feh.”
She puts down the cup, picks up her bag, and goes to the door. She stops and looks back at Landsman, standing there in the bathrobe that she bought for him on his birthday when he turned thirty-five.
“You have some nerve,” she says. “I can’t believe you and Berko went out there.”
“We had to tell him his son was dead.”
“His son. ”
“Mendel Shpilman. The rebbe’s only son.”
Bina opens her mouth, then closes it. Not astonished so much as engaged, sinking her terrier teeth into the information, gnawing on the bloody joint of it. Landsman can see that she likes the way it gives against the sharp grip of her jaw. But her eyes take on a weariness that Landsman recognizes. Bina will never lose her detective’s appetite for people’s stories, Landsman thinks, of puzzling her way back through them from the final burst of violence to the first mistake. But sometimes a shammes gets a little tired of that hunger.
“And what did the rebbe say?” She lets go of the doorknob with an air of genuine regret.
“He seemed a little bitter.”
“Did he seem surprised?”
“Not especially, but I don’t know what you can make of that. I take it the kid had been heading down the chute for a long time. Do I think Shpilman would have fed his own son a bullet? In theory, sure. That goes double for Baronshteyn.”
Her bag hits the floor like a body. She stands and works her shoulder in a small aching circle. He could offer to massage it for her, but wisely, he refrains.
“I suppose I can expect a phone call,” she says. “From Baronshteyn. As soon as there are three stars in the
