“Now,” Landsman says, taking a step toward the bachelor, “why would we want to do that?”
One thing about a Yeshiva bachelor, he knows his way around a question.
“How should I know?” he says. “If I was a fancy-pants lawyer, tell me, please, would I be standing out here slopping around with a rag on the end of a stick?”
Inside the shop, they have gathered around the big map table, Itzik Zimbalist and his crew, a dozen strapping Jews in yellow coveralls, their chins upholstered with the netted rolls of their beards. The presence of a woman in the shop flits among them like a bothersome moth. Zimbalist is the last to look up from the problem spread out on the table before him. When he sees who has come with the latest thorny question for the boundary maven, he nods and grunts with a suggestion of huffiness, as if Landsman and Bina are late for their appointment.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Bina says, her voice weirdly fluting and unpersuasive in this big male barn. “I’m Inspector Gelbfish.”
“Good morning,” says the boundary maven.
His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull. He rolls up the plan or chart with practiced hands, ties it in a length of cord, and turns to sheath it in the rack, where it disappears among a thousand of its fellows. His movements are those of an old man to whom haste is a forgotten vice. His step is herky-jerk, but his hands mannered and accurate.
“Lunch is over,” he tells the crew, though there is not a trace of food to be seen.
The men hesitate, forming an irregular eruv around the boundary maven, ready to shield him from the secular trouble that stands hung with a couple of badges in their midst.
“Maybe they’d better stick around,” Landsman says. “We might need to talk to them, too.”
“Go wait in the vans,” Zimbalist tells them. “You’re in the way.”
They start across the supply area to the garage. One of the crew turns back, pressing doubtfully at the roll of his beard.
“Seeing as how lunch is over, Reb Itzik,” he says, “is it all right with you if we have our supper now?”
“Eat your breakfast, too,” Zimbalist says. “You’re going to be up all night.”
“Lot of work to do?” Bina says.
“Are you kidding? It’s going to take them years to pack up this mess. I’m going to need a cargo container.”
He goes to the electric tea kettle and begins to set up three glasses. “Nu, Landsman, I heard maybe you lost the use of that badge of yours for a little while,” he says.
“You hear a lot, don’t you?” Landsman says.
“I hear what I hear.”
“Have you ever heard that people dug tunnels all under the Untershtot, just in case the Americans turned on us and decided to stage an aktion?”
“I’d say it rings a bell,” Zimbalist says. “Now that you mention it.”
“So you wouldn’t happen to possess, by any chance, a plan of those tunnels? Showing how they run, where they connect, et cetera?”
The old man still has his back to them, tearing open the paper envelopes that hold the tea bags. “If I didn’t,” he says, “what kind of a boundary maven would I be?”
“So if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get somebody, say, into or out of the basement of the Hotel Blackpool on Max Nordau Street without being seen. Could you do that?”
“Why would I want to do that?” Zimbalist says. “I wouldn’t board my mother-in-law’s Chihuahua in that fleabag.”
He unplugs the kettle before the water has boiled and soaks the tea bags one-two-three. He puts the glasses on a tray with a pot of jam and three small spoons, and they sit down at his desk in the corner. The tea bags surrender their color unwillingly to the tepid water. Landsman hands around papiroses and lights them. From the vans come the sounds of men shouting, or laughing, Landsman isn’t quite sure.
Bina walks around the workshop, admiring the mass and variety of string, stepping carefully to avoid a tumbleweed of knotted wire, gray rubber with a blood-red copper stump.
“Ever make a mistake?” Bina asks the boundary maven. “Tell someone he can carry where he’s not allowed to carry? Draw a line where no line needs to be drawn?”
“I don’t dare to make mistakes,” Zimbalist says. “Carrying on the Sabbath, it’s a serious violation. People start thinking they can’t rely on my maps, I’m through.”
“We still don’t have a ballistic fingerprint on the gun that killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says with care. “But you saw the wound, Meyer.”
“I did.”
“Did it look like it was made by, say, a Glock, or a TEC-9, or any kind of an automatic?”
“In my humble opinion,” Landsman says, “no.”
“You spent a lot of quality time with Litvak’s crew and their firearms.”
“And loved every minute.”
“Did you see anything in their toybox that was not an automatic?”
“No,” Landsman says. “No, Inspector, I did not.”
“What does that prove?” Zimbalist says, easing his tender bottom down onto the inflatable-donut cushion of his desk chair. “More importantly, why should I care?”
“Aside from your general, personal interest in seeing justice done in this matter, of course,” says Bina.
“Aside from that,” Zimbalist says.
“Detective Landsman, do you think Alter Litvak killed Shpilman or ordered him killed?”
Landsman looks right into the boundary maven’s face and says, “He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t just need Mendel. The yid had started to believe in Mendel.”
Zimbalist blinks and fingers the blade of his nose, thinking this over, as if it is the rumor of a newborn creek that will force him to redraw one of his maps.
“I do not buy it,” he concludes. “Anybody else. Everybody else. Not that yid.”
Landsman doesn’t bother to argue. Zimbalist reaches for his tea. A vein of rust twists in the water like the ribbon in a glass marble.
“What would you do if something you had been telling everybody was one of the lines on your map,” Bina says, “turned out to be, say, a crease? A hair. A stray pen mark. Something like that. Would you tell anyone? Would you go to the rebbe? Would you admit that you made a mistake?”
“It would never happen.”
“But if it did. Would you be able to live with yourself?”
“If you knew you had sent an innocent man to prison for many years, Inspector Gelbfish, for the rest of his life, would you be able to live with yourself?”
“It happens all the time,” Bina says. “But here I am.”
“Well, then,” the maven says. “I guess you know how I feel. By the way, I use the term ‘innocent’ very loosely.”
“As do I,” says Bina. “No doubt about it.”
“My whole life, I knew only one man I would use that word to describe.”
“You’re ahead of me, then,” Bina says.
“Me, too,” says Landsman, missing Mendel Shpilman as if they had been, for many years, the best of friends. “I am very sorry to say.”
“You know what people are saying?” Zimbalist says. “These geniuses I dwell among? They’re saying Mendel’s coming back. That it’s all happening just the way it was written. That when they get to Jerusalem, Mendel is going to be there, waiting for them. Ready to rule over Israel.”
Tears start to run down the boundary maven’s sallow cheeks. After a moment Bina removes a handkerchief from her bag, clean and pressed. Zimbalist takes it and looks at it for a moment. Then he blows a great tekiah on his shofar of a nose.
“I would like to see him again,” he says. “I will admit it.”
Bina hoists her bag to her shoulder, and it resumes its steady mission to drag her down. “Get your things together, Mr. Zimbalist.”
The old man appears startled. He puffs his lips as if trying to light an invisible cigar. He picks up a loop of
