home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that’s too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan. Landsman puts his shoulder to them and mutters, “Pardon me.”
He makes for one great beast of a limousine, a custom twenty-foot stretch four-by-four. The journey from the top of the hill, down the hillside, across the boulevard, through the umbrellas and beards and Jewish ululations to the side of the big-ass limousine has a kind of jumpy, handheld quality in his imagination as he lives it. Amateur footage of an assassination attempt in progress. But Landsman hasn’t come to shoot anybody. He just wants to talk to the lady, get her attention, catch her eye. He just wants to ask her one question. Which question, nu, that he doesn’t know.
In the end somebody beats him to it: in fact, a dozen men. The reporters have tunneled their way through the black hats like Landsman, digging with their scapulae and elbows. When the diminutive woman in the black veil totters through the gates on the arm of her son-in-law, they haul out the questions they have brought. They unpocket them like stones and throw them all at once. They vandalize the woman with questions. She pays no attention; her head never turns, the veil never trembles or parts. Baronshteyn guides the dead man’s mother to the hulk of the limo. The chauffeur climbs down from the stretch four-by-four’s passenger seat. He’s a jockey-shaped Filipino with a scar on his chin like a second smile. He runs to open the door for his employer. Landsman is still a couple of hundred feet away. He isn’t going to make it in time to ask her a question, or to do anything at all.
A growl, a feral rolling in the throat, low and half human, a rumble of warning or dark admonition: one of the black hats standing by the cars has taken a reporter’s question amiss. Or maybe he’s taken them all amiss, along with the style in which they were tendered. Landsman sees the angry black hat, wide, blond, tieless, his shirttails untucked, and recognizes him as Dovid Sussman, the yid whom Berko Shemets teased out on Verbov Island. A bruiser with a bulge at the hinge of his jaw and another under his left arm. Sussman throws an arm around the neck of Dennis Brennan, poor thing, gets him in a choke hold. Lecturing Brennan with his teeth at his ear, Sussman drags the reporter back, out of the path of the family as they come through the gates.
That’s when one of the latkes steps in to intervene, which, after all, is what he’s there for. But because he’s scared-the kid looks scared-maybe he’s too free with his truncheon when it comes to the bones of Dovid Sussman’s head. There’s a sick snap, and then Sussman turns to liquid and pours himself onto the ground at the latke’s feet.
For an instant the crowd, the afternoon, the whole wide world of Jews breathes in and forgets to breathe out again. After that it’s madness, a Jewish riot, at once violent and verbal, fat with intemperate accusations and implacable curses. Skin diseases are called down, damnations and hemorrhages. Yelling, surging black hats, sticks and fists, shouting and screaming, beards fluttering like crusader flags, swearing, the smell of churning mud, of blood and ironed trousers. Two men carry a banner stretched between poles, bidding farewell to their lost prince Menachem; somebody grabs one pole and somebody else grabs another. The banner tears loose and gets sucked into the gears of the crowd. The poles are put to work on the jaws and craniums of policemen. The word FAREWELL painstakingly painted on the banner gets torn free and spat out. It sails into the air over the heads of the mourners and the policemen, the gangsters and the pious, the living and the dead.
Landsman loses track of the rebbe, but he sees a bunch of Rudashevskys pile the mother, Batsheva, into the back of the four-by-four. The chauffeur grabs the driver’s-side door and kicks up into his seat like a gymnast. The Rudashevskys pound on the side of the car, saying, “ go go go. ” Landsman, still groping in his pockets for the shining coin of one good question, watches, and watching, he notices a suite of small things. The Filipino chauffeur is rattled. He doesn’t fasten his shoulder strap. He doesn’t give a good solid cattle-clearing blast on his horn. And the stem of the lock at the top of the door panel never drops. The chauffeur simply throws the long black four-by- four into gear and rolls forward, gaining too much speed for such a crowded area.
Landsman steps back as the four-by-four shoulders its way toward him. A strand of mourners detaches itself from the greater black braid and drags along behind Batsheva Shpilman’s four-by-four. A slipstream of sorrow. For an instant the mourners hanging on to the car serve to block the Rudashevskys’ view of the four-by-four, and of anyone fool enough to try to climb inside it. Landsman nods, catching the rhythm of the crowd’s madness and his own. He watches for his moment and wiggles his fingers. When the car rumbles by, he yanks open the rear door.
Instantly, the power of the engine is translated into a sense of panic in his legs. It’s like a proof of the physics of his foolishness, the inescapable momentum of his own bad luck. As he gets dragged along beside the car for fifteen feet or so, he finds time to wonder if this was how the end came for his sister, a quick demonstration of gravity and mass. His wrists strain their cables. Then he gets a knee up into the limousine’s interior and tumbles in.
24
A dark cavern lit with blue diodes. Cool, dry, fragrant with some kind of lemon deodorizer. Landsman senses in himself a trace of that smell, a lemony hint of boundless hope and energy. This may have been the stupidest thing he’s ever done, but it needed to be done, and the feeling of having done it, for this instant, is the answer to the only question he knows how to ask.
“There’s ginger ale,” says the queen of Verbov Island. She’s folded like a throw rug, coiled in a shadowy back corner of the interior. Her dress is drab but cut of fine stuff, and the lining of her raincoat betrays a fashionable logo. “Drink it, I don’t care to.”
But Landsman gives his attention to the rear-facing seat, up by the chauffeur, and the likeliest source of trouble. Sitting there is six feet, maybe two hundred pounds, of female in a black sharkskin suit with a white-on- white collarless shirt. This formidable person’s eyes are gray and hard. They remind Landsman of the backs of two dull spoons. She wears a white earpiece wormed around the flange of her left ear, and her tomato-gravy hair is cut short as a man’s.
“I didn’t know they made lady Rudashevskys,” Landsman says, crouched on his toes in the wide space between the front- and rear-facing benches.
“That is Shprintzl,” says his hostess in the back of the car. Then Batsheva Shpilman lifts her veil. The body is frail, perhaps even gaunt, but it can’t be with age, because the fine-featured face, though hollow, is smooth, a pleasure to look at. She has wide-set eyes of a blue that wavers between heartbreaking and fatal. Her mouth is unpainted but full and red. The nostrils in her long, straight nose arch like a pair of wings. Her face is so strong and lovely, and her frame so wasted, that it’s disturbing to look at her. Her head sits atop her veined throat like an alien parasite, preying on her body. “I want you to be sure to notice that she hasn’t killed you yet.”
“Thank you, Shprintzl,” Landsman says.
“No problem,” Shprintzl Rudashevsky says in American, in a voice like an onion rolling in a bucket.
Batsheva Shpilman points to the opposite end of the backseat. Her hand is gloved in black velvet, buttoned at the cuff with three black seed pearls. Landsman takes the suggestion and gets up off the floor. The seat is very comfortable. He can feel the cold sweat of an imaginary highball against his fingertips.
“Also, she hasn’t contacted any of her brothers or cousins in the other cars, even though, as you see, she’s wired right to them.”
“Tight-knit bunch, the Rudashevskys,” Landsman says, but he understands what she wants him to understand: “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Did I?” she says, and her lips contemplate but decide against lifting at one corner. “You’re the one who barged into my car.”
“Oh, is this a car? My mistake, I thought it was the Sixty-one bus.”
Shprintzl Rudashevsky’s wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth. “They’re asking about you, darling,” she says to the older woman with a nurselike tenderness. “They want to know if you’re all right.”
“Tell them I’m fine, Shprintzeleh. Tell them we’re on our way home.” She turns her soft eyes toward Landsman. “We’ll drop you at your hotel. I want to see it.” They’re a color he’s never seen, her eyes, a blue you would find in bird plumage or a stained-glass window. “Will that suit you, Detective Landsman?”
