detective.”
“Um.”
“Your hearing was canceled.”
Bina reaches into her bag, rummages around, and comes out with a gun. She adds it to the battery comprising her rifled gaze and the toes of her pointed shoes. A chopped M-39. A manila tag dangles on a string from its barrel. She arcs it toward Landsman’s head. He manages to catch the gun but fumbles the badge holder that comes flying after it. Then comes a little bag with Landsman’s clip. Another brief search of her bag produces a murderous-looking form and its triplicate henchmen. “After you go ahead and break your head on this DPD-2255, Detective Landsman, you will have been reinstated, with full pay and benefits, as an active member of the District Police, Sitka Central Division.”
“I’m back on the job.”
“For, what is it, five more weeks? Enjoy.”
Landsman weighs the sholem like a Shakespearean hero contemplating a skull. “I should have asked for a million dollars,” he says. “I’ll bet he would have coughed it up.”
“God damn him,” Bina says. “God damn them all. I always knew they were there. Down there in Washington. Up there over our heads. Holding the strings. Setting the agenda. Of course I knew that. We all knew that. We all grew up knowing that, right? We are here on sufferance. Houseguests. But they ignored us for so long. Left us to our own devices. It was easy to kid yourself. Make you think you had a little autonomy, in a small way, nothing fancy. I thought I was working for everyone. You know. Serving the public. Upholding the law. But really I was just working for Cashdollar.”
“You think I should have been discharged, don’t you?”
“No, Meyer.”
“I know I go a little too far. Play the hunches. The loose-cannon routine.”
“You think I’m angry because they gave you back your badge and your gun?”
“Well, not so much that, no. But the hearing being canceled. I know how much you like things done by the book.”
“I do like things done by the book,” she says, her voice tight. “I believe in the book.”
“I know you do.”
“If you and I had played it by the book a little more,” she says, and something dangerous seems to well up between them. “You and your hunches, a black year on them.”
He wants to tell it to her then: the story that has been telling him for the past three years. How, after Django was husked from her body, Landsman stopped the doctor in the hall outside the operating room. Bina had instructed Landsman to ask this good doctor whether there was some use, some aim or study, to which the half-grown bones and organs might be put.
“My wife was wondering,” Landsman began, then faltered.
“Whether there was any visible defect?” the doctor said. “No. Nothing at all. The baby appeared to be normal.” He remarked, too late, the look of horror blooming on Landsman’s face. “Of course, that doesn’t mean there was nothing wrong.”
“Of course,” Landsman said.
He never saw this doctor again. The ultimate fate of the little body, of the boy Landsman sacrificed to the god of his own dark hunches, was something he had neither the heart nor the stomach to investigate.
“I made the same fucking deal, Meyer,” Bina says before he can confess to her. “For my silence.”
“That you get to keep being a cop?”
“No. That you do.”
“Thanks,” Landsman says. “Bina, thanks a lot. I’m grateful.”
She presses her face into her hands and massages her temples. “I’m grateful to you, too,” she says. “I’m grateful for the reminder of just how messed up all of this is.”
“My pleasure,” he says. “Glad I could help.”
“Fucking Mr. Cashdollar. The man’s hair doesn’t move. It’s like it’s welded to his head.”
“He said he had nothing to do with Naomi,” Landsman says. He pauses and nibbles on his lip. “He said it was the man who had the job before him.”
He tries to keep his head up while he says it, but after a moment he finds himself looking at the stitches of his shoes. Bina reaches, hesitates, then gives his shoulder a squeeze. She leaves her hand on him for all of two seconds, just long enough to rip a seam or two in Landsman.
“Also he denied any involvement in Shpilman. I forgot to ask him about Litvak, though.” Landsman looks up, and she takes her hand away. “Did Cashdollar tell you where they took him? Is he on his way to Jerusalem?”
“He tried to look mysterious about it, but I think he was just without a clue. I overheard him on his cell phone, telling somebody they were bringing in a forensic team from Seattle to go over the room at the Blackpool. Maybe that was something he wanted me to hear. But I have to say they all seemed nonplussed about our friend Alter Litvak. They seem to have no idea where he is. Maybe he took the money and ran. He could be halfway to Madagascar by now.”
“Maybe,” Landsman says, then, more slowly, “maybe.”
“God help me, I sense another hunch coming on.”
“You said you’re grateful to me.”
“In a backhanded, ironical way. Yeah.”
“Look, I could use a little backup. I want to have another look at Litvak’s room.”
“We can’t get into the Blackpool. The whole joint is under some kind of secret federal lockdown.”
“Only I don’t want to get into the Blackpool. I want to get under it.”
“Under it?”
“I heard there might be some, well, some tunnels down there.”
“Tunnels.”
“Warsaw tunnels, I heard they’re called.”
“You need me to hold your hand,” she says. “In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.”
“Only in the metaphorical sense,” he says.
43
At the top of the stairs, Bina takes a key-ring flashlight from her cowhide bag and passes it to Landsman. It promotes or possibly allegorizes the services of a Yakovy funeral home. Then she moves aside some dossiers, a sheaf of court documents, a wooden hairbrush, a mummified boomerang that may once have been a banana in a Ziploc, a copy of People, and comes up with a slack black harness suggestive of sadomasochistic sex play, equipped with a kind of round canister. She plunges her head into the midst of it and involves her hair with the black webbing. When she sits up and turns her head, a silver lens flares and wanes, raking Landsman’s face. Landsman can feel the imminent darkness, can feel the very word “tunnel” burrowing through his rib cage.
They go down the steps, through the lost-articles room. The taxidermy marten leers at them as they pass. The loop of rope on the door of the crawl space dangles. Landsman tries to recall if he returned it to its hook before his inglorious retreat last Thursday night. He stands there, racking his memory, and then he gives up.
“I’ll go first,” Bina says.
She gets down on her bare knees and works herself into the crawl space. Landsman hangs back. His throbbing pulse, his dry tongue, his autonomic systems are caught up in the tiresome history of his phobia, but the crystal set that is handed out to every Jew, tuned to receive transmissions from Messiah, resonates at the sight of Bina’s ass, the long indented arc of it like some kind of magic alphabet letter, a rune with the power to roll away the stone slab behind which he has entombed his desire for her. He is pierced by the knowledge that no matter how potent a spell it still casts over him, he will never again find himself permitted, wonder of wonders, to bite it. Then it vanishes into the darkness, along with the rest of her, and Landsman is left stranded. He mutters to himself, reasons with himself, dares himself to go in after her, and then Bina says, “Get in here,” and Landsman obeys.
She spans an arc of the plywood disk with her fingertips, lifts it, and passes it to Landsman, her face
