hint of the monstrous father. Or maybe a little, around the eyes. Shpilman turned to the pilot, affecting to be surprised, even hurt, by the implication that he was so far gone as to need a wheelchair. But Litvak saw that he was putting it on to cover his real surprise and hurt at the implication.
“You said I looked all right, Miss Landsman,” Shpilman said, teasing her, appealing to her, pleading with her.
“You look terrific, kid,” the Landsman told him. She was dressed in blue jeans tucked into high black boots, a man’s white oxford shirt, an old Sitka Central firing-range jacket that said LANDSMAN over the pocket. “You look fabulous.”
“Ah, you’re lying, you liar.”
“You look like thirty-five hundred dollars to me, Shpilman,” the Landsman said, not unkindly. “How about we leave it at that?”
“I won’t be needing the wheelchair, doctor,” Shpilman said without reproach. “But thank you for thinking of me.”
“Are you ready, Mendel?” Dr. Roboy asked him in his gentle and sententious way.
“Do I need to be ready?” Mendel said. “If I need to be ready, we may have to push this back a few weeks.”
The words emerged from Litvak’s throat like a kind of verbal dust devil, a tangle of grit and gusts, unbidden. An awful sound, like a glob of burning rubber plunged into a bucket of ice.
“You don’t need to be ready,” Litvak said. “You only need to be here. ”
They all looked shocked, horrified, even Gold, who happily could have read a comic book by the light of a burning man. Shpilman turned slowly, a smile tucked into one corner of his mouth like a baby carried on the hip.
“Alter Litvak, I presume,” he said, holding out his hand, scowling at Litvak, affecting to be tough and masculine in a way that mocked toughness and masculinity and his own relative lack of both qualities. “What a grip, oy, it’s like a rock.”
His own grip was soft, warm, not quite dry, eternally a schoolboy’s. Something in Litvak resisted it, the warmth and softness of it. He was himself horrified by the pterosaur echo of his own voice, by the fact that he had spoken at all. He was horrified to see that there was something about Mendel Shpilman, about his puffy face and his bad suit, his kid-prodigy smile and his brave attempt to hide the fact that he was afraid, that had prompted Litvak, for the first time in years, to speak. Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength. He felt, shaking Shpilman’s hot hand, how sound his tactics were. If Roboy could get Shpilman up and running again, then Shpilman could inspire and lead not merely a few hundred armed believers or thirty thousand black-hatted hustlers looking for new turf, but an entire lost and wandering nation. Litvak’s plan was going to work because there was something about Mendel Shpilman that could make a man with a broken voice box want to speak. It was against the something in Shpilman that something in Litvak pushed back, revulsed. He felt an urge to crush that schoolboy hand in his own, to break the bones of it.
“What’s up, yid?” the Landsman said to Litvak. “Long time.”
Litvak nodded, and he shook the Landsman’s hand. He was torn, as he had always been, between his natural impulse to admire a competent practitioner of a difficult trade and his suspicion that the woman was a lesbian, a human category that he failed almost on principle to understand.
“All right, then,” she said. She was still holding on to Shpilman, and as the wind picked up, she moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulder, drawing him to her, giving him a squeeze. She scanned the greenish faces of the men who waited for her to hand over the cargo. “You going to be all right, then?”
Litvak wrote in his pad and passed it to Roboy.
“It’s late,” Roboy said. “And dark. Let us put you up for the night.”
She appeared to consider rejecting the offer for a long moment. Then she nodded. “Good idea,” she said.
At the bottom of the long, winding stair, Shpilman stopped to take in the particulars of the climb and the platform of the inclined elevator, and he seemed to suffer a qualm-a foreshock, a sudden access of understanding of everything that would from now on be expected of him. With a certain drama, he collapsed into Roboy’s wheelchair.
“I left my cape at home,” he said.
When they reached the top, he stayed in the chair and allowed the Landsman to wheel him into the main building. The strain of travel or the step he had finally taken or the plummeting level of heroin in his bloodstream was beginning to tell. But when they reached the room on the ground floor that had been prepared for him-a bed, a desk, a chair, and a fine English chess set-he rallied. He reached into the pocket of his creased suit and took out a black and bright-yellow cardboard package.
“Nu, I understand a mazel tov is in order?” he said, passing out half a dozen fine-looking Cohiba cigars. The smell of them, even unlit and three feet from his nostrils, was enough to whisper promises to Litvak of well-earned respite, clean sheets, hot water, brown women, the quiet aftermath of brutal battles. “They tell me it’s a girl.”
For a moment nobody knew what he was talking about, and then they all laughed nervously, except for Litvak and Turteltoyb, whose cheeks turned the color of borscht. Turteltoyb knew, as each of them knew, that Shpilman was not to be provided with any details of the plan, including the newborn heifer, until Litvak gave the order.
Litvak knocked the cigar from Shpilman’s soft hand. He scowled at Turteltoyb, hardly able to see him through the blood-red broth of his own anger. The certainty he had felt down on the dock that Shpilman would serve their needs was turned abruptly on its head. A man like Shpilman, a talent like Shpilman’s, could never serve anyone; it could only be served, above all by the one who wielded it. No wonder the poor bastard had been hiding from it for so long.
Out
They read his message and filed one by one out of the room, last of all the Landsman, who made a point of asking where she would be sleeping and then of telling Mendel pointedly that she would see him in the morning. At the time Litvak had a vague idea she might be arranging a tryst, but his notion of her as a lesbian canceled it out before he had time to give it any consideration. It didn’t occur to Litvak that the Jewess, in her readiness for any adventure, was already laying the groundwork for the daring escape that Mendel had not yet decided to attempt. The Landsman struck a match, puffed at her cigar to get it lit. Then she sauntered out.
“Don’t hold it against the boy, Reb Litvak,” Shpilman said when they were alone. “People have a way of telling me things. But I guess you noticed that. Please, have a cigar. Go on. It’s a very good one.”
Shpilman picked up the corona that Litvak had knocked from his grasp, and when Litvak neither accepted nor refused it, the yid lifted it to Litvak’s mouth and fitted it gently between his lips. It hung there, exuding its smells of gravy and cork and mesquite, cuntish smells that stirred old longings. There was a click, and a scrape, and then Litvak leaned wonderingly forward and poked the end of the cigar into the flame of his own Zippo lighter. He felt the momentary shock of a miracle. Then he grinned and nodded his thanks, feeling a kind of giddy relief at the belated arrival of a logical explanation: He must have left the lighter back in Sitka, where Gold or Turteltoyb had found it and brought it along on the flight to Peril Strait. Shpilman had borrowed it and, with his junkie instincts, pocketed it after lighting a papiros. Yes, good.
The cigar caught with a crackle and flared. When Litvak looked back up from the glowing coal, Shpilman was staring at him with those strange mosaic eyes, flecks of gold and green. Good, Litvak told himself again. A very good cigar.
“Go ahead,” Shpilman said. He pressed the Zippo into Litvak’s hand. “Go, Reb Litvak. Light the candle. There’s no prayer you say. There’s nothing you have to do or feel. You just light it. Go on.”
As logic drained away from the world, never entirely to return, Shpilman reached into Litvak’s jacket pocket and took out the glass and the wax and the wick. For this trick, Litvak could make himself no explanation. He took the candle from Shpilman and set it on a table. He struck the flint with a scratch of his thumb. He felt the intense warmth of Shpilman’s hand on his shoulder. The fist of his heart begin to slacken its grip, the way it might when the day came that he finally set foot in the home where he was meant to dwell. It was a terrifying sensation. He opened his mouth.
“No,” he said in a voice that had in it, to his wonder, a note of the human.
He snapped the lighter shut and knocked Shpilman’s hand aside with such violence that Shpilman lost his
