into the bright, gentile future of the Hotel Zamenhof.
“I saw it on the television,” Landsman says, though the memory feels secondhand, fogged-over, a construct that his interrogators implanted through persistent questioning.
“At first they said it was a mistake,” Tenenboym says, gold toothpick jiggling in a corner of his mouth. “Some Arabs making bombs in a tunnel under the Temple Mount. Then they said it was deliberate. The ones fighting the other ones.”
“Sunnis and Shiites?”
“Maybe. Somebody got careless with a rocket launcher.”
“Syrians and Egyptians?”
“Whoever. The president was on, saying they might have to go in. Saying it’s a holy city to everybody.”
“That didn’t take long,” Landsman says.
His only other piece of mail is a postcard advertising a deep discount on lifetime membership at a gym where Landsman worked out for a few months after his divorce. The suggestion was made at the time that exercise might help his moods. It was a good suggestion. Landsman can’t remember if it proved correct or not. The card depicts a fat Jew to the left and a thin Jew to the right. The Jew to the left is haggard, sleepless, sclerotic, straggly, with cheeks like two spoonfuls of sour cream, and two bright, mean little eyes. The Jew to the right is lean, tanned, and trim-bearded, relaxed, self-confident. He looks a lot like one of Litvak’s young men. The Jew of the future, Landsman thinks. The unlikely claim is made by the postcard that the left-hand Jew and the Jew on the right are one and the same person.
“Did you see them out in the neighborhoods?” Tenenboym says, the golden pick clicking against a bicuspid. “On the television?”
Landsman shakes his head. “I imagine there was dancing?”
“Such dancing. Fainting. Crying. A mass orgasm.”
“Not on an empty stomach, I beg you, Tenenboym.”
“Blessing the Arabs for fighting with each other. Blessing the memory of Mohammed.”
“That seems cruel.”
“One of these black hats was on there saying how he’s going to move over to the Land of Israel, get himself a good seat for when Messiah shows up.” He removes the toothpick and surveys its tip for a hint of treasure, then returns it, disappointed. “Ask me, I say put all those nut jobs on a great big airplane, send them all the hell over there, a black year on them.”
“That what you say, Tenenboym?”
“I’ll fly that airplane myself.”
Landsman stuffs the letter from the Joyce/Generali Hotel Group back into its envelope and slides it across the counter to Tenenboym. “Toss that for me, would you?”
“You have thirty days, Detective,” Tenenboym says. “You will find something.”
“You bet I will,” Landsman says. “We’ll all find something.”
“Unless something finds us first, am I right?”
“What about you? They going to let you keep your job?”
“My status remains under review.”
“That sounds hopeful.”
“Or hopeless.”
“One or the other.”
Landsman takes the elevatoro to the fifth floor. He walks down the corridor, his overcoat slung on a crooked fingertip from one shoulder, loosening his necktie with the other hand. The door to his room hums its simple lyric: five-oh-five. It means nothing. Lights in the fog. Three Arabic numerals. Invented in India, actually, like the game of chess, but disseminated by Arabs. Sunnis, Shiites. Syrians, Egyptians. Landsman wonders how long it will take the various contending factions in Palestine to figure out that none of them was responsible for the attack. A day or two, maybe a week. Just long enough for terminal confusion to set in, Litvak to get his boys in place, Cashdollar to send in the air support. Next thing you know, Tenenboym’s working as the night manager of the Jerusalem Luxington Parc.
Landsman gets into bed and takes out the pocket chess set. His attention flits along the lines of force, hops from square to square in pursuit of the killer of Mendel Shpilman and Naomi Landsman. Landsman finds, to his surprise and relief, that he already knows who the killer is-it is the Swiss-born physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and mediocre chess player Albert Einstein. Einstein with his fog of hair and his enormous sweater-jacket and his eyes like tunnels reaching deep into the darkness of time itself. Landsman pursues Albert Einstein across the milk- white, chalk-white ice, hopping from square to shadowed square across relativistic chessboards of culpability and atonement, across the imaginary land of penguins and Eskimos that the Jews never quite managed to inherit.
His dream makes a knight move, and with characteristic fervor, his little sister, Naomi, begins to explain to Landsman Einstein’s famous proof of the Eternal Return of the Jew and how it can be measured only in terms of the Eternal Exile of the Jew, a proof that the great man deduced from observing the wobble in the wing of an airplane and the drift of a dark bloom of smoke rising from the slope of an ice mountain. Landsman’s dream calves other slow iceberg dreams, and the ice hums with fluorescence. At some point the humming that has plagued Landsman and his people since the dawn of time, which some in their foolishness have mistaken for the voice of God, gets trapped in the windows of room 505 like sunlight in the heart of an iceberg.
Landsman opens his eyes. In the seams of the venetian blinds, daylight buzzes like a trapped fly. Naomi is dead again, and that fool of an Einstein is innocent of all wrongdoing in the Shpilman case. Landsman knows nothing at all. He feels an ache in his abdomen that he takes at first for sorrow before determining, a moment later, that what he’s feeling is hunger. The desire, in fact, for stuffed cabbage. He checks his Shoyfer for the time, but the battery has died. The day clerk reports, when Landsman calls down to the desk, that it is 9:09 A.M., Thursday. Stuffed cabbage! Every Wednesday night is Rumania night at the Vorsht, and Mrs. Kalushiner always has something left over the next morning. The old bat serves the finest sarmali in Sitka. At once light and dense, favoring hot pepper over sweet-and-sour, drizzled with fresh sour cream, topped with sprigs of fresh dill. Landsman shaves and dresses in the same blown suit and a tie from off the doorknob. He is ready to consume his own weight in sarmali. But when he gets downstairs, he glances at the clock over the mail slots and realizes that he is nine minutes late for his hearing before the review committee.
By the time Landsman comes scrabbling like a dog on slick tile down the corridor of the Administration modular, into room 102, he is twenty-two minutes late. He finds nothing but a long veneer table with five chairs, one for each member of the review board, and his commanding officer, sitting on the edge of the table, legs dangling, crossed at the ankle, her pointy-toed pumps aiming straight for Landsman’s heart. The five big high- backed leather chairs are empty.
Bina looks like hell, only hotter. Her seagull-brown suit is rumpled and misbuttoned. Her hair appears to be tied back with a plastic drinking straw. Her panty hose are long gone, her legs bare and dappled with pale freckles. Landsman recalls with a strange pleasure the way she would trash a laddered pair of stockings, shredding them into a pompon of rage before tossing them into the can.
“Stop looking at my legs,” she says. “Cut it out, Meyer. Look at my face.”
Landsman complies, staring right down the bores of her doublebarreled gaze. “I overslept,” he says. “I’m sorry. They kept me for twenty-four hours, and by the time-”
“They kept me for thirty-one hours,” she says. “I just got out.”
“So fuck me and my whining, for starters.”
“For starters.”
“How was it by you?”
“They were so nice,” Bina says bitterly. “I totally folded. Told them everything.”
“Same here.”
“So,” she says, gesturing to the room around them with upturned hands, like she just made something disappear. Her jocular tone is not a good sign. “Guess what?”
“I’m dead,” Landsman tries. “The board sprinkled me with quicklime and plowed me under.”
“As a matter of fact,” she says, “I got a call on my mobile this morning, in this room, at eight-fifty-nine. After I made a total ass of myself and screamed my head off until they let me out of the Federal Building, so I could get down here and make sure I was in that chair behind you, on time and ready to stand up and support my
