pulldown bed in that wallpapered cell, running through the moves of Alekhine’s second game against Capablanca at Buenos Aires in 1927, while the smack turned his blood into a flood of sugar and his brain into a lapping tongue. So. Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket. All right. Then a lot of wasted years. Hustling chess for drug money. Cheap hotels. Hiding himself from the incompatible destinies chosen for him by his genes and by his God. Then one day some men dig him up and dust him off and take him away to Peril Strait. A place with a doctor, a facility built through the generosity of the Barrys and the Marvins and the Susies of Jewish America, where they can clean him up, patch him together. Why? Because they need him. Because they intend to restore him to practical use. And he wants to go with them, these men. He agrees to do so. Naomi never would have flown Shpilman and his escorts if she sniffed any kind of coercion in the job. So there is something in it-money, the promise of healing or recaptured glory, reconciliation with the family, an eventual payoff in drugs-for Shpilman. But when he arrives at Peril Strait to start his new life, something changes Shpilman’s mind. Something that he learns, or realizes, or sees. Or maybe he just gets cold feet. And turns for help to the woman who served any number of people, generally the most lost, as the only friend they had in the world. Naomi flies him out again, changing her flight plan en route, and finds him a ride to a cheap motel with the pie man’s daughter. In payment for her hubris, these mystery Jews crash Naomi’s airplane for her. Then they go out hunting for Mendel Shpilman, gone to ground again. Hiding from his possible selves. Lying there in his room at the Zamenhof, facedown on the bed, too far gone to think about Alekhine and Capablanca and the Queen’s Indian Defense. Too far gone to hear the knock on the door.
“You don’t have to knock, Berko,” Landsman says. “This is a jail.”
There’s a rattle of keys, and then the Indian noz throws open the door. Berko Shemets stands behind him. He has dressed himself as for a safari deep into the bush. Jeans, flannel shirt, lace-up leather hiking boots, a grayish- brown fisherman’s vest equipped with seventy-two pockets, sub-pockets, and sub-sub-pockets. At first glance, he looks almost like a typical if rather large Alaskan bush runner. You can hardly make out the polo-player insignia that ornaments his shirt. Berko’s usual discreet skullcap has been laid aside in favor of an outsize embroidered number, cylindrical, a dwarf fez. Berko always lays on the Jew a little thick when he is obliged to travel to the Indianer- Lands. Landsman can’t tell from here, but his partner is probably wearing his Star of David cuff links, too.
“I’m sorry,” Landsman tells him. “I know I’m always sorry, but this time, believe me, I could not be sorrier.”
“We’ll see about that,” Berko says. “Come on, he wants to see us.”
“Who does?”
“The emperor of the French.”
Landsman gets up from the bed, goes to the sink, throws some water on his face.
“Am I free to go?” he asks the Indian noz as he walks out the door of the cell. “You’re telling me I’m free to go?”
“You’re a free man,” says the noz.
“Don’t you believe it,” says Landsman.
33
From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow-capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, staring out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot-no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick’s face. It’s the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.
“I hope you’re dressed,” Dick says without turning from the window. The wistful flicker in his eyes has been snuffed. There is no longer anything happening in his face at all. “Because the things I witnessed in those woods- Christ, I almost had to fucking burn my motherfucking bearskin.” He affects to shudder. “The Tlingit Nation doesn’t pay me anywhere near enough to make up for having to look at you standing around in your underpants.”
“The Tlingit Nation,” says Berko Shemets, pronouncing it like the name of a notorious scam or a claim about the location of Atlantis. He intrudes his bulk on the furnishings of Dick’s office. “So, what, they still pay the salaries around here? Because Meyer was just telling me it might be otherwise.”
Dick turns, slow and lazy, and hikes up a corner of his upper lip to bare a few incisors and cuspids. “Johnny the Jew,” he says. “Well, well. Beanie and all. And clearly you haven’t had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut.”
“Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget.”
“Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer.”
In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the snow.
“Go shit in the ocean,” Dick says in flawless Yiddish.
They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. They pound at each other’s backs, searching for the tubercular spots in their slowly dying friendship, sounding the depths of their ancient enmity like a drum. In the year of misery that preceded his defection to the Jewish side of his nature, before his mother was crushed by a runaway truckload of rioting Jews, young John Bear discovered basketball and Wilfred Dick, then a four-foot-two point guard. It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.
“Johnny Bear,” Dick says. “What the fuck, you great big Jew?”
Berko shrugs, rubbing at the back of his neck in a sheepish way that makes him look like a thirteen-year-old center who has just watched something small and nasty squirt past him on a drive to the basket. “Yeah, hey, Willie D.,” he says.
“Sit down, you fat motherfucker,” Dick says. “You, too, Landsman, and all those ugly freckles on your ass crack.”
Berko grins, and they all sit down, Dick on his side of his desk, the Jewish policemen on theirs. The two chairs for visitors are standard scale, along with the bookshelves and everything else in the office apart from Dick’s desk and chair. The effect is fun house, nauseating. Or maybe that’s another symptom of alcoholic withdrawal. Dick takes out his black cigarettes and pushes an ashtray across the desk toward Landsman. He leans back in his chair and puts his boots up on the desk. He wears the sleeves of his Woolrich shirt rolled back. His forearms are ropy and brown. Curling gray hairs peep over his open collar, and his chic eyeglasses are folded in the pocket of his shirt.
“There are so many people I would rather be looking at right now,” he says. “Literally millions.”
“Then close your fucking eyes,” Berko suggests.
Dick complies. His eyelids are dark and glossy, bruised-looking. “Landsman,” he says, as if enjoying the blindness, “how was your room?”
“The sheets had a touch more lavender water than I care for,” Landsman says. “Other than that, I really have no complaints.”
Dick opens his eyes. “It has been my good fortune as an agent of law enforcement on this reservation to have relatively few dealings with Jews over the years,” he begins. “Oh, and before either of you starts cinching up his sphincter on me over my supposed anti-Semitism, let me just stipulate right now that I don’t give a flying fuck whether I offend your pork-shunning asses or not, and on balance, I would say that I hope I do. The fat man there knows perfectly well, or he should, that I hate everyone equally and without favor, regardless of creed or DNA.”
