high and secretive. As Landsman whirrs along, he catches sight between the trees of a high chain-link fence topped by gay glinting curls of razor wire. The steel mesh fence is woven with slats of green plastic. In places a gap appears in the green weave of the fence. Through these gaps, Landsman glimpses another steel shed, a clearing, posts, crossbeams, interlaced cables. A huge frame stretched with a web of cargo net, distended coils of barbed wire, rope swings. It might be an athletic facility, some kind of therapeutic playground for patients in recovery. Sure, and the people in the Caudillo might just be bringing him his pants.
The black car is under two hundred yards from him now. The passenger in its front seat rolls down his window and climbs out to sit on the top of his door, steadying himself with one hand on the roof rack. The other hand, Landsman observes, is busy getting ready to fire a handgun. It’s a fair, bearded young man in a black suit, cropped hair, a sober tie like Roboy’s. He takes his time with the shot, reckoning the ever-dwindling distance. A flash blooms around his hand, and the back of the Zumzum explodes with a crack and a spray of fiberglass slivers. Landsman lets out a cry and takes his foot off the accelerator pedal. So much for not making a mess.
He bumps along on momentum for another five or ten feet and then comes to a stop. The young man hanging out of the Caudillo’s window raises his firing arm and judges the effect of his shot. The jagged hole in the fiberglass body of the Zumzum is probably disappointing to the poor kid. But he has to be happy about the fact that his moving target has just become stationary. His next shot is going to be a lot easier. The kid lowers his arm again with a patient slowness that is almost ostentatious, almost cruel. In his care and his parsimonious attitude toward bullets, Landsman senses the hallmark of rigorous training and an athlete’s grasp of eternity.
Surrender unfurls across Landsman’s heart like the shadow of a flag. There is no way he can outrace the Caudillo, not in a shot-up Zumzum that on a good day tops out around fifteen miles per hour. A warm blanket, maybe a hot cup of tea: These strike him as adequate recompense for failure. The Caudillo comes charging toward him and then sloshes to a halt in a spray of fallen needles. Three of its doors swing open and three men climb out, lumbering young yids in ill-fitting suits and meteor-black shoes, steering their automatic pistols toward Landsman. The guns seem to thrum in their hands as if they contain wild life or gyroscopes. The gunmen can barely restrain them. Hard boys, neckties flying, their beards trimmed neat along the jawline, their skullcaps small crocheted saucers.
The rear door on the near side remains firmly shut, but behind it Landsman makes out the outline of a fourth man. The hard boys close on Landsman in their matching suits, with their earnest haircuts.
Landsman stands up and turns around with his hands in the air. “You’re clones, right?” he says as the three hard boys surround him. “At the end of the picture, it always turns out to be clones.”
“Shut up,” says the nearest hard boy, speaking American, and Landsman is about to assent when he hears a sound like something both fibrous and doughy being slowly torn in two. In the time it takes him to observe in the eyes of the hard boys that they hear it, too, the sound sharpens and rises to a steady chopping, a sheet of paper caught in the blades of a fan. The sound grows louder and more layered. The hacking cough of an old man. A heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp. Through the trees a light appears, stitching and staggering like a bumblebee, and suddenly, Landsman knows it for what it is.
“Dick,” he says simply and not without wonder, and a shudder shakes him deep down to his bones. The light is an old six-volt lamp, no more powerful than a large flashlight, flickering and wan in the gloom of the spruce forest. The engine that drives the light toward the party of Jews is a V-Twin, custom-manufactured. You can hear the springs of the front forks as they register every jolt in the road.
“Fuck him,” mutters one of the hard boys. “And his fucking Matchbox motorcycle.”
Landsman has heard different stories about Inspector Willie Dick and his motorcycle. Some say that it was made for a full-grown Bombay millionaire of smaller than average stature, others that it was originally presented as a thirteenth birthday gift to the Prince of Wales, and still others that it once belonged to a daredevil freak in a circus down in Texas or Alabama or some exotic place like that. At first glance, it is a stock 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader, gunmetal gray in the sunlight, its stunning chromium trim carefully restored. You have to get up next to it, or see it alongside a normal-sized motorcycle, to realize that it is built to two-thirds scale. Willie Dick, though full-grown and thirty-seven years old, is only four feet seven inches tall.
Dick rumbles past the Zumzum, squeaks to a stop, kills the elderly British engine. He climbs off the bike and comes swaggering over to Landsman.
“What the fuck?” he says, pulling off his gloves, black leather gauntlets of the sort that might be worn by Max von Sydow playing Erwin Rommel. His voice is always surprisingly rich and deep, given the boyishness of his frame. He describes a slow circuit of appraisal around the flower of Jewish law enforcement. “Detective Meyer Landsman!” He turns to the hard boys and makes a study of their hardness. “Gentlemen.”
“Inspector Dick,” says the one who told Landsman to shut up. The boy has a jailhouse air, honed and stealthy, a toothbrush sharpened to a shiv. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
“With all due respect, Mr. Gold-it is Gold, right? yeah-this is my motherfucking neck of the woods.” Dick steps out from the group centered around Landsman. He stares in to get a look at the shadow watching from behind the closed door of the Caudillo. Landsman can’t be certain, but whoever’s there doesn’t look big enough to be Roboy or the golden man in the penguin sweater. A hunched little shadow, furtive and watchful. “I was here before you, and I’ll be here a long time after you yids are gone.”
Detective Inspector Wilfred Dick is a full-blood Tlingit, descended from the Chief Dick who inflicted the last recorded fatality in the history of Russian-Tlingit relations, shooting and killing a marooned, half-starved Russian submariner he caught raiding his crab traps at Stag Bay in 1948. Willie Dick is married, with nine children by his first and only wife, whom Landsman has never seen. Naturally, she is reputed to be a giantess. In 1993 or ’94 Dick successfully completed the Iditarod dog-sled race, coming in ninth among forty-seven finishers. He has a Ph. D. in criminology from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Dick’s first act as an adult male of his tribe was to travel, in an old Boston whaler, from the Dick village at Stag Bay to Tribal Police central headquarters in Angoon, in order to persuade the superintendent to set aside, in his case, the minimum height requirements for Tribal Police officers. The stories of how this was accomplished are slanderous, salacious, hard to believe, or some combination of the three. Willie Dick has all the usual bad qualities of very small, very intelligent men: vanity, arrogance, overcompetitiveness, a long memory for injuries and slights. He is also honest, dogged, and fearless, and he owes Landsman a favor; Dick has a long memory for favors, too.
“I’m trying to imagine what you mad Hebrews are up to, and every one of my theories is more fucked up than the last one,” he says.
“This man is a patient here,” says Gold. “He was trying to check out a little early, is all.”
“So you were going to shoot him,” Dick says. “That’s some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh?”
He turns back to Landsman and looks him up and down. Dick’s dark face is handsome, in a way, the avid eyes operating from the cover of a sage forehead, the chin dimpled, the nose straight and regular. The last time Landsman saw him, Dick kept having to take a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Now he has given in to senescence and adopted a slick black-and-brushed-steel pair of Italian spectacles, the kind worn in thoughtful interviews by aging British rock guitarists. He is dressed in stiff black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a red-and-black-plaid shirt with an open collar. Over his shoulders he wears, as usual, a short cloak, held in place with a braided rawhide thong, made from the skin of a bear he hunted and killed himself. He is an affected creature, Willie Dick-he smokes black cigarettes-but he is a fine homicide detective.
“Jesus Christ, Landsman. You look like a fucking fetal pig I saw one time pickled in a jar.”
He unties the braided thong with the fingers of one hand and shrugs out of the cloak. Then he tosses it to Landsman. For an instant it’s as cold as steel against Landsman’s body, then wonderfully warm. Dick keeps the grin of mockery in place but, for Landsman’s benefit-only Landsman can see it-extinguishes every last trace of humor from his eyes.
“I spoke to that ex-wife of yours,” he says in a near-whisper, the voice he uses to threaten suspects and intimidate witnesses. “After I got your message. You have less fucking right to be here than a fucking eyeless African molerat.” He raises his voice nearly to the point of staginess. “Detective Landsman, what did I tell you I was going to do to your Jewish ass the next time I caught you running around Indian country without benefit of clothing?”
“I d-don’t remember,” Landsman says, seized by a violent tremor of gratitude and exposure. “You s-said so many things.”
