tired of hearing about pogroms secondhand and are hoping to throw one for themselves. Landsman says that as far as he knows, he is not going anywhere. Most of the places that will take Jews require that you have a near relative living there. All of Landsman’s nearest relatives are dead or facing Reversion themselves.
“Then let me say goodbye to you now, forever,” Shpringer says. “Tomorrow night at this time I will be basking in the warm Saskatchewan sun.”
“Saskatoon?” Landsman guesses.
“Thirty below they had today,” Shpringer says. “That was the high.”
“Look at it this way,” Landsman says. “You could be living in this dump.”
“The Zamenhof.” In his memory, Shpringer pulls Landsman’s file, and frowns at its contents. “That’s right. Home sweet home, eh?”
“It suits me in my current style of life.”
Shpringer smiles a thin smile from which almost every trace of pity has been erased.
“Which way to the dead man?” he says.
4
First thing Shpringer screws in all the lightbulbs that Lasker loosened. Then he lowers his safety glasses and goes to work. He gives Lasker a manicure and pedicure and looks inside his mouth for a severed finger or a bronze doubloon. He lifts prints with his dust and brush. He takes 317 Polaroids. He takes pictures of the corpse, the room, the perforated pillow, the fingerprints he has raised. He takes a picture of the chessboard.
“One for me,” Landsman says.
Shpringer snaps a second shot of the board that the murder obliged Lasker to abandon. Then he hands it to Landsman, an eyebrow raised.
“Valuable clue,” Landsman says.
One piece at a time, Shpringer undoes the dead man’s Nimzo-Croatian Defense or whatever it is he had going, zipping each chessman into its own baggie.
“How’d you get so dirty?” he says without looking at Landsman.
Landsman notices the bright brown dust clinging to his shoe tops, his cuffs, the knees of his pants. “I was looking in the basement. There’s a huge, I don’t know, service pipe down there.” He feels the blood flow into his cheeks. “I had to check it out.”
“A Warsaw tunnel,” Shpringer says. “They go all through this part of the Untershtot.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“When the greeners got here after the war. The ones who had been in the ghetto at Warsaw. At Bialystok. The ex-partisans. I guess some of them didn’t trust the Americans very much. So they dug tunnels. Just in case they had to fight again. That’s the real reason it’s called the Untershtot.”
“A rumor, Shpringer. An urban myth. It’s just a utility pipe.”
Shpringer grunts. He bags the bath towel, the hand towel, and a worn tile of soap. He counts the ginger pubic hairs pasted to the toilet seat and then bags each one. “Speaking of rumors,” he says, “what do you hear from Felsenfeld?”
Felsenfeld is Inspector Felsenfeld, the squad commander. “What do you mean, what do I hear from him? I just saw him this afternoon,” Landsman says. “I didn’t hear anything from him, the man hasn’t uttered three words together in ten years. What kind of question is that? What rumors?”
“Just wondering.”
Shpringer is running his fingers in their latex glove across the freckled skin of Lasker’s left arm. It bears needle tracks and faint marks where the deceased tied himself off.
“Felsenfeld’s hand was on his belly all day,” Landsman says, reflecting. “Maybe I heard him say ‘reflux.’” Then: “What do you see?”
Shpringer frowns at the flesh above Lasker’s elbow, where the tourniquet marks are bunched. “Looks like he used a belt,” he says. “Only his belt is too wide to have made these marks.” He has already put Lasker’s belt, along with two pairs of gray trousers and two blue blazers, into a brown paper bag.
“His works are in the drawer, in a black zip,” Landsman says. “I didn’t look too close.”
Shpringer opens the drawer in Lasker’s bedside table and takes out the black toilet kit. He unzips it and then makes a funny sound in his throat. The cover of the kit opens toward Landsman. At first Landsman can’t see what has caught Shpringer’s interest.
“What do you know about this Lasker?” Shpringer says.
“I’m willing to venture that on occasion he played chess,” Landsman says. One of the three books in the room is a creased and broken-backed paperback edition of Three Hundred Chess Games by Siegbert Tarrasch. It has a manila pocket pasted to its inside back cover, with a return card that shows it was last borrowed from the central branch of the Sitka Public Library in July 1986. Landsman can’t help thinking that he first made love to his future ex-wife in July 1986. Bina was twenty at the time, and Landsman was twenty-three, and it was the height of the northern summer. July 1986 is the date stamped onto the card in the pocket of Landsman’s illusions. The other two books are cheap Yiddish thrillers. “Beyond that I know goat shit.”
As Shpringer has inferred from the marks on Lasker’s arm, the deceased’s apparent tourniquet of choice was a leather strap, black, about half an inch wide. Shpringer pulls it out of the zip and holds it up between two fingers as if it might bite. Halfway along the strap hangs a small leather box designed to hold a slip of paper on which a scribe, with ink and a feather, has written four passages from the Torah. Each morning the pious Jew twines one of these doodads along his left arm, ties another to his forehead, and prays for understanding of the kind of God Who obliges somebody to do something like that every damn day of his life. But there is nothing inside the box on Emanuel Lasker’s prayer strap. It’s just the thing he chose to use to dilate the vein in his arm.
“That’s a new one,” Shpringer says. “Tying off with tefillin.”
“Now that I think about it,” Landsman says, “he had the look. Like maybe he used to be black hat. They take on a kind of a-I don’t know. They look shorn.”
Landsman pulls on a glove and, gripping Lasker’s chin, tilts from side to side the dead man’s head with its swollen mask of blood vessels. “If he used to wear a beard, then it was a while ago,” he says. “Skin tone on his face is even.”
He lets go of Lasker’s face and steps away from the body. It would not be quite accurate to say that he pegged Lasker for a former black hat. But with the chin of a fat boy, and the air of ruination, Landsman figured Lasker for having once been something more than a sockless junkie in a cheap hotel. He sighs. “What I wouldn’t give to be lying on the sunny beaches of Saskatoon.”
There are noises in the hallway, and the rattle of metal and straps, and the next moment two workers from the morgue come in with a collapsible gurney. Shpringer tells them to bring the evidence bin and the bags he has filled, and then lumbers out, one wheel of his trolley squeaking as he goes.
“Piece of shit,” Landsman informs the morgue boys, meaning the case, not the victim. This judgment does not appear to surprise or come to them as news. Landsman goes back up to his room to rejoin his bottle of slivovitz and the World’s Fair shot glass that has captured his affections. He sits down in the chair by the pressboard desk, with a dirty shirt for a seat cushion. He takes the Polaroid out of his pocket and studies the game that Lasker left behind, trying to decide whether the next move was to be White’s or Black’s, and what would be the next move after that. But there are too many pieces, and it is too difficult to hold the moves in his head, and Landsman doesn’t own anything like a chess set on which to lay it all out. After a few minutes he feels himself drifting off to sleep. But no, he isn’t going to do that, not when he knows that what awaits him are trite Escher dreams, woozy checkerboards, giant rooks casting phallic shadows.
He takes off his clothes, and steps under the shower, and lies down for half an hour with his eyes wide open, taking memories-of his little sister in her Super Cub, of Bina in the summer of 1986-out of their plastic bags. He studies them as if they are transcriptions, in a dusty book stolen from the library, of bygone checkmates and brilliancies. After half an hour of that useful pursuit, he gets up and puts on a clean shirt and tie, and goes down to Sitka Central to file his report.
