Dick walks over to the Caudillo, and knocks on the closed door like he wants to come in. The door opens, and Dick stands behind it and converses in a low voice with whoever is sitting inside, keeping warm. After a moment Dick comes back and tells Gold, “Man in charge wants to speak to you.”
Gold goes around the open door to talk to the man in charge. When he comes back, he looks like his sinuses have been pulled out through his ears and he blames Landsman for it. He nods once to Dick.
“Detective Landsman,” Dick says. “I’m very much fucking afraid that you are under arrest.”
32
In the emergency room at the Indian hospital in St. Cyril, the Indian doctor looks Landsman over and pronounces him fit to be jailed. The doctor’s name is Rau, and he’s from Madras, and he’s heard all of the jokes before. He’s handsome in the Sal Mineo style, big obsidian eyes and a mouth like a cake-icing rose. Mild frostbite, he tells Landsman, nothing serious, though one hour and forty-seven minutes after his rescue, Landsman still can’t seem to suppress the temblors that rise from inner faults to shake his body. Cold to the honeycomb of his bones.
“Where’s the big dog with the little thing of brandy around his neck?” Landsman says after the doctor tells him he can take off the blanket and put on the jailhouse clothes that lie in a neat stack beside the sink. “When does he show up?”
“Do you enjoy brandy?” Dr. Rau says, as if he’s reading from a phrase book, as if he has not the slightest interest either in his question or in any answer that Landsman might ever produce. Landsman tags it at once as a classic interrogator’s tone, so cold that it leaves a burn. Dr. Rau’s gaze remains resolutely fixed on an empty corner of the room. “Is that something you feel you need?”
“Who said anything about needing?” Landsman says, fumbling with the button fly of some worn twill trousers. Cotton work shirt, laceless canvas sneaks. They want to dress him like a wino, or a beach bum, or some other kind of loser who turns up naked at your intake desk, homeless, no visible means of support. The shoes are too big, but otherwise, everything’s a perfect fit.
“No craving?” There’s a fleck of ash in the A of the doctor’s name tag. He picks at it with a fingernail. “You’re not feeling the need of a drink right now?”
“Maybe I just want one,” Landsman says. “Did you ever think of that?”
“Maybe,” the doctor says. “Or maybe you are fond of large, salivating dogs.”
“Okay, knock it off, Doc,” Landsman says. “Let’s not play games.”
“All right.” Dr. Rau turns his plump face to Landsman. The irises of his eyes are like cast iron. “Based on my examination, I would guess that you are going through alcoholic withdrawal, Detective Landsman. In addition to exposure, you’re also suffering from dehydration, tremors, palpitations, and your pupils are enlarged. Your blood sugar is low, which tells me you probably haven’t been eating. Loss of appetite is another symptom of withdrawal. Your blood pressure is elevated, and your recent behavior appears to have been, from what I gather, quite erratic. Even violent.”
Landsman tugs on the wrinkled lapels of the collar of his chambray work shirt, trying to smooth them out. Like cheap window blinds, they keep rolling themselves up.
“Doctor,” he says, “from one man with X-ray eyeballs to another, I respect your keenness, but tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don’t you think you might take up drinking?”
“That or ranting to strange doctors.”
“The dog with the brandy never gets wise with the frozen guy,” Landsman says wistfully.
“Detective Landsman.”
“Yes, Doc.”
“I have been examining you for the last eleven minutes, and in that time you have produced three prolonged speeches. Rants, I would call them.”
“Yes,” Landsman says, and now his blood begins to flow for the first time: into his cheeks. “It happens sometimes.”
“You like to make speeches?”
“They come and go.”
“Verbal jags.”
“I’ve heard them called that.”
For the first time Landsman notices that Dr. Rau is secretly chewing something, working it with his back teeth. The faint smell of anise leaks from his frosting-pink lips.
The doctor makes a note on Landsman’s chart. “Are you currently under the care of a psychiatrist or taking any medication for depression?”
“Depression? I seem depressed to you?”
“It’s really just a word,” the doctor says. “I’m looking at possible symptoms. From what Inspector Dick has told me, and from my examination of you, it seems at least possible that you might possibly have some kind of mood disorder.”
“You aren’t the first person to say that,” Landsman says. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you.”
“Are you taking medication?
“No, not really.”
“Not really?”
“No. I don’t want to.”
“You don’t want to.”
“I’m, you know. Afraid I might lose my edge.”
“That explains the drinking, then,” the doctor says. His words seem tinged with a sardonic whiff of licorice. “I hear it does wonders for one’s edge.” He goes to the door, opens it, and an Indian noz comes in to take Landsman away. “In my experience, Detective Landsman, if I may,” the doctor concludes his own jag, “the people who worry about losing their edge, often they fail to see they already lost the blade a long time ago.”
“The swami speaks,” says the Indian noz.
“Lock him up,” the doctor says, tossing Landsman’s file into the tray mounted to the wall.
The Indian noz has a head like a redwood burl and the worst haircut Landsman has ever seen, some kind of ungodly hybrid of a high-and-tight and a pompadour. He leads Landsman through a series of blank hallways, up a flight of steel stairs, to a room at the back of the St. Cyril jail. It has an ordinary steel door, no bars. It’s reasonably clean and reasonably well lit. The bunk has a mattress, a pillow, and a blanket, folded trim. The toilet has a seat. There’s a metal mirror bolted to the wall.
“The VIP suite,” says the Indian noz.
“You should see where I live,” Landsman says. “It’s almost as nice as this.”
“Nothing personal,” the noz says. “The inspector wanted to make sure you knew that.”
“Where is the inspector?”
“Dealing with this. We get a complaint from those people, he has nine flavors of shit to deal with.” A humorless grin contorts his face. “You fucked up that gimpy little Jew pretty bad.”
“Who are they?” Landsman says. “Sergeant, what the fuck are those Jews up to over there?”
“It’s a retreat center,” the sergeant says with the same burning lack of emotion that Dr. Rau put into his questions about Landsman’s alcoholism. “For wayward Jew youth trapped by the scourge of crime and drugs. Anyways, that’s what I heard. Have yourself a nice nap, Detective.”
After the Indian noz leaves, Landsman crawls into the bunk and pulls the blanket over his head, and before he can prevent himself, before he has time even to feel something and know that he is feeling it, a sob gets wrenched loose from some deep niche and fills his windpipe. The tears that burn his eyes are like his alcoholic tremors: They have no use, and he can’t seem to get on top of them. He clamps his pillow down over his face and feels for the first time how utterly alone Naomi left him.
To calm himself, he goes back to Mendel Shpilman on the bed in room 208. He imagines himself lying on the
