sweeping plazas. Here and there a carved Sumerian monster lends a touch of the barbaric. This is the paper that God left the Jews holding, Landsman thinks, the promise that we have been banging Him a kettle about ever since. The rook that attends the king at the endgame of the world.
“Now turn on the choo-choo,” Landsman says.
At the back of the space there’s a narrow stair, open on one side and flush against the wall on the other. It leads up to an enameled black steel door. Buchbinder gives a soft knock.
The young man who opens the door is one of the grandnephews from the Einstein, the driver of the Caudillo, the plump, broad-shouldered American kid with the pink nape.
“I believe Mr. Litvak is expecting me,” Bina says brightly. “I’m Inspector Gelbfish.”
“You can have five minutes,” says the young man in serviceable Yiddish. He can’t be older then twenty. He has a turned-in left eye and more acne than beard on his baby cheeks. “Mr. Litvak is a busy man.”
“And who are you?”
“You can call me Micky.”
She steps right up to him and jams her chin toward the meat of his throat. “Micky, I know this makes me a bad person in your eyes, but I don’t really care how busy Mr. Litvak is. I need to talk to him for as long as it takes me to do that. Now take me to him, sweetness, or you’re not going to be busy at all for a very long time.”
Micky shoots a look at Landsman as if to say, What a ballbreaker. Landsman pretends not to understand.
“If you will excuse me, please,” Buchbinder says with a bow to each of them. “I have very much work to do.”
“Are you going somewhere, Doctor?” Landsman says.
“I already told you this,” the dentist says. “Maybe you ought to try writing things down.”
The penthouse of the Blackpool Hotel is nothing special. A two-room suite. The outer room holds a sleeper couch, a wet bar and mini-fridge, an armchair, and seven young men in dark suits and bad haircuts. The bed is all folded away, but you can smell that the room has been slept in by young men, maybe as many as seven. The piped corner of a bedsheet pokes from the crack of the seat cushion like a shirttail caught in a fly.
The young men are watching a very large television tuned to a satellite news channel. On the screen, the prime minister of Manchuria is shaking hands with five Manchurian astronauts. The box that the television came in is sitting on the floor beside its former contents. Bottled sports drinks and bags of sunflower seeds on the coffee table, scattered among drifts of sunflower hulls. Landsman marks three guns, automatics, two jammed into waistbands, one into a sock. Maybe the butt of a fourth under somebody’s thigh. Nobody is happy to see the detectives. In fact, the young men seem sullen, keyed up. Anxious to be anywhere else but here.
“Show us the warrant.” It’s Gold, the sharpened little prison shank of a mexican from Peril Strait. He peels himself from the couch and comes toward them. When he recognizes Landsman, his single eyebrow gets tangled at its apex. “Lady, that one has no right to be here. Get him out.”
“Take it easy,” Bina says. “What’s your name?”
“He’s Gold,” says Landsman.
“Ah, yes. Gold, look at the situation. There are one, two, three, seven of you. There are two of us.”
“I’m not even here,” Landsman says. “You’re just imagining me.”
“I am here to talk to Alter Litvak, and I don’t need a piece of paper to do that, sweetness. Even if I wanted to arrest him, I could always get the warrant later.” She gives him her winning smile, slightly shopworn. “Honest.”
Gold hesitates. He starts to check with his six comrades to see what they think he should do, but some aspect of that process, or of life in general, strikes him as pointless. He goes to the door of the bedroom and knocks. On the other side of the door, a set of punctured bagpipes gives out a dying wheeze.
The room is as spartan and neat as Hertz Shemets’s cabin, complete with chessboard. No television. No radio. Just a chair and a bookshelf and a folding cot in the corner. A steel blind that reaches to the floor rattles in the wind off the Gulf. Litvak sits on the cot, knees together, a book open on his lap, sipping some kind of canned nutritional shake through a flexible green drinking straw. When Bina and Landsman walk in, Litvak sets the can down on the bookshelf beside the marbled pad. He marks his place with a length of ribbon and closes his book. Landsman can see that it is an old hardback edition of Tarrasch, possibly Three Hundred Chess Games. Then Litvak looks up. His eyes are two dull pennies. His face is nothing but hollows and angles, an annotation in the yellow leather of his skull. He waits as if they have come to show him a card trick, a complicated grandfatherly expression on his face, prepared both to be disappointed and to pretend to be amused.
“I’m Bina Gelbfish. You know Meyer Landsman.”
I know you, too, say the old man’s eyes.
“Reb Litvak doesn’t speak,” Gold says. “He’s crippled in the voice box.”
“I understand,” says Bina. She takes measure of the devastation wrought by time, injury, and physics on the man with whom, seventeen, eighteen years ago, she danced the rumba at the wedding of Landsman’s cousin Shifra Sheynfeld. Her brash ladyshammes manner has been put away, though not abandoned. Never abandoned. Holstered, say, with the safety off, and one hand poised, fingers flexing, at her hip. “Mr. Litvak, I have been hearing some pretty wild stories about you from my detective here.”
Litvak reaches for the pad, crossed with the sleek ebony cigar of his Waterman. He opens the pad with the fingers of one hand, spreads it on his knee, studying Bina the way he studied the chessboard at the Einstein Club, looking for his opening, seeing twenty possibilities, eliminating nineteen. He unscrews his pen. He’s on the very last page. He marks it.
You don’t care for wild stories
“No, sir, I don’t. That’s right. I have been a police detective for a lot of years, and I can count on one hand the number of times that somebody’s wild story of what happened in a case turns out to be useful or true.”
Tough break-to favor simple explanations in a world full of Jews
“Agreed.”
A hard lot to be a Jewish policeman then
“I like it,” Bina says simply, with feeling. “I’m going to miss it when it’s done.”
Litvak shrugs as if to suggest that he would like to sympathize, if only he could. His hard, bright red-rimmed eyes slide to the doorway and, with one arched eyebrow, form a question for Gold. Gold shakes his head. Then he goes back to the watching the TV.
“I realize it’s not easy,” Bina says. “But suppose you tell us what you know about Mendel Shpilman, Mr. Litvak.”
“And Naomi Landsman,” Landsman puts in.
You think I killed Mendel you’re as clueless as he is
“I don’t think anything at all,” Bina says.
Lucky you
“It’s a gift I have.”
Litvak checks his watch and makes a broken sound that Landsman takes for a patient sigh. He snaps his fingers, and when Gold turns, Litvak waves the filled-in notepad. Gold goes into the outer room and comes back holding a fresh pad. He crosses the room and passes it to Litvak, along with a look that offers to dispense with or dispose of the annoying visitors by any one of a number of interesting methods. Litvak waves the kid away, sends him back to the doorway with one hand. Then he slides over and pats the vacated space beside him. Bina unzips her parka and sits down. Landsman drags over the bentwood chair. Litvak opens the notepad to its first fresh page.
Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself
39
They had a pilot of their own, a good one, a Cuba veteran named Frum who flew the bus run from Sitka. Frum had served under Litvak at Matanzas and in the bloody debacle of Santiago. He was both faithful and without a shred of faith, a combination of traits prized by Litvak, who found himself obliged to contend on every side with the
