want to talk to. I can arrest whoever I want to arrest.”
“Not if the AUSA tells you to back off.”
The telephone rings.
“That will be the AUSA,” Landsman says.
Bina picks up the phone. “Hello, Kathy,” she says. She listens for a minute, nodding, saying nothing. Then she says, “I understand,” and hangs up the phone. Her voice is calm and devoid of feeling. There’s a tight smile on her face, and she ducks her head in humility, as if she has been beaten fair and square. Landsman can feel that she is deliberately not looking at him, because if she looks at him, she might tear up. And he knows how outraged Bina Gelbfish has to get before there is any danger of tears.
“And I had everything fixed up so nice,” she says.
“And this place, let me tell you,” Landsman says. “Before you got here, it was a shambles.”
“I was just going to hand it all over to you,” she tells Spade. “All wrapped up. Free of crumbs. No loose strings.”
She worked it with such care, accumulated the credits, kissed the asses that needed to be kissed. Swept out the stables. Tied up Sitka Central and attached herself to the top like a decorative bow.
“I even got rid of that wretched love seat,” she says. “What the hell is going on here, Spade?”
“I honestly don’t know, ma’am. And even if I did know, I would say that I didn’t.”
“Your orders are to keep things smooth on this end.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The other end being Palestine.”
“I don’t know much about Palestine,” Spade says. “I’m from Lubbock. My wife is from Nacogdoches, though, and that’s only about forty miles from Palestine.”
Bina looks blank for a moment, and then understanding seems to redden her cheeks like anger. “Don’t you stand there and make jokes,” she says. “Don’t you dare.”
“No, ma’am,” Spade says, and it’s his turn to go a little red.
“I take this job very seriously, Mr. Spade. And you had better, let me tell you, you had better fucking take me seriously.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bina gets up from behind the desk and takes her orange parka from its hook. “I am going to bring in Alter Litvak. Question him. Possibly arrest him. You want to stop me, try to stop me.” Parka whuffing, she brushes past Spade, who’s caught off guard by the move. “But if you try to stop me, things will not be smooth on your end. I promise you that.”
And she’s gone for a second. Then she sticks her head back into the doorway, pulling on her dazzling orange coat.
“Hey, yid,” she tells Landsman. “I could use a little backup.”
Landsman puts on his hat and goes after her, nodding to Spade on his way out.
“Praise the Lord,” Landsman says.
38
The Moriah Institute is the sole occupant of the seventh and uppermost story of the Hotel Blackpool. There is fresh paint on the walls of the corridor and a spotless mauve carpet on the floor. At the far end, beside the door to 707, small black characters on a discreet brass plate spell out the name of the Institute in American and Yiddish, and beneath that, in roman characters: SOL AND DOROTHY ZIEGLER CENTER. Bina pushes a buzzer. She looks up into the lens of the security camera that looks down at them.
“You remember the deal,” Bina tells him. It’s not a question.
“I am to shut up.”
“That’s such a small part of it.”
“I am not even here. I don’t even exist.”
She buzzes again, and just as she raises her knuckles to knock, Buchbinder opens the door. He is wearing a different enormous sweater-jacket, this one in cornflower blue with flecks of pale green and salmon, over baggy chinos and a Bronfman U. sweatshirt. His face and hands are smudged with ink or grease.
“Inspector Gelbfish,” Bina says, showing him her badge. “Sitka Central. I’m looking for Alter Litvak. I have reason to believe he may be here.”
A dentist is not a man of guile, as a rule. Buchbinder’s face reads plainly and without concealment: He was expecting them.
“It is very late,” he tries. “Unless you-”
“Alter Litvak, Dr. Buchbinder. Is he here?”
Landsman can see Buchbinder wrestling with the mechanics and trajectories, the wind shear of telling a lie.
“No. No, he is not.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No. No, Inspector, I do not.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. Any chance you might be lying to me, Dr. Buchbinder?”
There is a brief, dense pause. Then he closes the door in their faces. Bina raps, her fist the relentless head and bill of a woodpecker. A moment later, Buchbinder opens the door, tucking his Shoyfer away into a pocket of his sweater. He nods, his cheeks, jowls, and the twinkle in his eye arranged to genial effect. Someone has decanted a small hopper of molten iron into his spine.
“Please come in,” he says. “Mr. Litvak will see you. He is upstairs.”
“Isn’t this the top floor?” Bina says.
“There is a penthouse.”
“Fleabags don’t have penthouses,” Landsman says. Bina shoots him a look. He’s supposed to be invisible, inaudible, a ghost.
Buchbinder lowers his voice. “It used to be for the maintenance man, I gather. But they have fixed it up. This way, please, there is a back stair.”
The internal walls have been knocked out, and Buchbinder leads them through the gallery of the Ziegler Center. It’s a cool, dim space, painted white, nothing like the grimy old ex-stationery shop on Ibn Ezra Street. The light emerges from a gridwork of glass or Lucite cubes set atop carpeted pedestals. Each cube displays its object, a silver shovel, a copper bowl, an inexplicable garment like something worn by the Zorvoldian ambassador in a space opera. There must be more than a hundred objects on display, many of them worked in gold and gemstones. Each of them advertises the names of the American Jews whose generosity made their construction possible.
“You’ve come up in the world,” Landsman says.
“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Buchbinder says. “A miracle.”
A dozen large packing crates have been lined up at the far end of the room, spilling exuberant coils of shaved pine. A delicate silver handle protrudes from the excelsior, chased with gold. At the center of the room, on a low, broad table, a scale model of a stone-furrowed bare hill soaks up the glow of a dozen halogen spots. The hilltop, where Isaac waited for his father to pry the muscle of life from his body, is as flat as a place mat on a table. On its flanks, stone houses, stone alleys, tiny olive and cypress trees with fuzzy foliage. Tiny Jews wrapped in tiny prayer shawls contemplate the void at the top of the hill, as if to illustrate or model the principle, thinks Landsman, that every Jew has a personal Messiah who never comes.
“I don’t see the Temple,” Bina says, seemingly in spite of herself.
Buchbinder emits an odd grunt, animal and contented. Then he presses a button in the floor with the toe of one loafer. There follows a soft click and the hum of a tiny fan. And then, built to scale, the Temple, erected by Solomon, destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt, restored by the same king of Judaea who condemned Christ to die, destroyed by the Romans, sealed and built over by the Abbasids, resumes its rightful place at the navel of the world. The technology generating the image imparts a miraculous radiance to the model. It shimmers like a fata morgana. In design, the proposed Third Temple is a restrained display of stonemason might, cubes and pillars and
