sky.”
“Well, I wouldn’t listen too carefully when he tries to tell you how broken up he is that Mendel Shpilman is out of the picture. Everybody loves it when the prodigal returns, except for the guy that’s been sleeping in his pajamas.” Landsman takes a sip of the coffee, dreadfully bitter and sweet.
“The prodigal.”
“He was some kind of a miracle kid. At chess, at Torah, at languages. I heard a story today about him healing a woman’s cancer, not that I really believe that, but. I guess there were a lot of stories going around about him inside the black-hat world. That he might be the Tzaddik Ha-Dor-you know what that is?”
“Sort of. Yes. Anyway, I know what the words mean,” Bina says. Her father, Guryeh Gelbfish, is a learned man in the traditional sense, and he squandered a certain portion of his learning on his only child, a girl. “The righteous man of this generation.”
“So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing up for work, one per generation, for the past couple of thousand years, right? Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.”
“He is despised and rejected of men,” Bina says, or rather, recites. “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” says Landsman. “Anyone. A bum. A scholar. A junkie. Even a shammes.”
“I guess it could be,” Bina says. She works it out in her mind, the road from wonder-working prodigy of the Verbovers to murdered junkie in a flophouse on Max Nordau Street. The story adds up in a way that appears to sadden her. “Anyway, I’m glad it isn’t me.”
“You don’t want to redeem the world anymore?”
“Did I used to want to redeem the world?”
“I think that you did, yes.”
She considers it, rubbing the side of her nose with a finger, trying to remember. “I guess I got over it,” she says, but Landsman doesn’t buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman. “It’s all talking chickens to me now.”
She should probably exit on that line, but she stands around for another fifteen seconds of unredeemed time, leaning against the door, watching Landsman fiddle with the frayed ends of his bathrobe sash.
“What are you going to tell Baronshteyn when he calls?” Landsman says.
“That you were totally out of line, and I’ll see that you come up for a board. I may have to lift your shield. I’ll try to fight it, but with this shoymer from the Burial Society coming-Spade, a curse on him-I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver. And neither do you.”
“Okay, you warned me,” Landsman says. “I have been warned.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Now? Now I want to put a touch on the mother. Shpilman said nobody ever heard from Mendel or spoke to him. But for some reason, I’m not inclined to take his word for it.”
“Batsheva Shpilman. That is going to be a tough touch,” Bina says. “Especially for a man.”
“True,” Landsman says with a display of wistfulness.
“No,” Bina says. “No, Meyer. Forget it. You are on your own.”
“She’ll be at the funeral. All you need to do is-”
“All I need to do,” Bina says, “is stay out of the way of shoymers, watch my ass, and get through the next two months without setting fire to it.”
“I’d be happy to watch your ass for you,” Landsman says, just for old times’ sake.
“Get dressed,” Bina says. “And do yourself a favor? Clean this shit up. Look at this dump. I can’t believe you’re living like this. Sweet God, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed, from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself.
“Only every time I see your face,” Landsman says.
20
Landsman cadges half a dozen papiroses from the weekend manager, Krankheit, then kills an hour setting fire to three of them while the reports on the dead man in 208 render up their pitiful account of proteins and grease marks and dust. As Bina said, there’s nothing new in any of it. The killer seems to have been a professional, a shlosser of skill who left no trace of his passage. The dead man’s fingerprints match those on record for a Menachem-Mendel Shpilman, arrested seven times on drug charges over the past ten years, under a variety of aliases, including Wilhelm Steinitz, Aron Nimzovitch, and Richard Reti. So much, and no more, is clear.
Landsman contemplates sending down for a pint, but he takes a hot shower instead. Alcohol has failed him, the thought of food turns his stomach, and let’s face it, if he was ever really going to kill himself, he would have done so long before now. So, all right, work is a joke; it remains work. And that is the true content of the accordion file that Bina brought him, her message to him across the divide of departmental policy and marital estrangement and careers rolling in opposite directions: Just keep at it.
Landsman frees his last clean suit from its plastic sack, shaves his chin, works up a lustrous nap in his porkpie hat with his hat brush. He is off duty today, but duty means nothing, today means nothing, nothing means anything but a clean suit, three fresh Broadways, the wobble of the hangover just behind his eyes, the murmur of the brush against the whiskey-brown felt of his hat. And, all right, maybe a trace in his hotel room of the smell of Bina, of the sour collar of her shirt, her verbena soap, the marjoram smell of her armpit. He rides down in the elevator feeling as if he has stepped out from under the onrushing shadow of a plummeting piano, some kind of jazzy clangor in his ear. The knot of his gold-and-green rep necktie presses its thumb against his larynx like a scruple pressing against a guilty conscience, a reminder that he is alive. His hat is as glossy as a seal.
Max Nordau Street has not been plowed; the road crews of Sitka, slashed to skeletons, concentrate on the arterials and the highway. Landsman leaves the Super Sport with the garageman after retrieving his rubber overshoes from the trunk. Then he stomps his way carefully through the foot-deep drifts to Mabuhay Donuts on Monastir Street.
The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trencherman would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither God nor the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires. A panatela of fried dough not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp-skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets. You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things.
The hidden master of the Filipino-style Chinese donut is Benito Taganes, proprietor and king of the bubbling vats at Mabuhay. Mabuhay, dark, cramped, invisible from the street, stays open all night long. It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers and shlemiels, whores and night owls. With the fat applauding in the fryers, the exhaust fans roaring, and the boom box blasting the heartsick kundimans of Benito’s Manila childhood, the clientele makes free with their secrets. A golden mist of kosher oil hangs in the air and baffles the senses. Who could overhear with ears full of KosherFry and the wailing of Diomedes Maturan? But Benito Taganes overhears, and he remembers. Benito could draw you a family tree for Alexei Lebed, the chieftain of the Russian mob, only on it you would find not grandparents and nieces but bagmen, bump-offs, and offshore bank accounts. He could sing you a kundiman of wives who remain loyal to their imprisoned husbands and husbands doing time because their
