“The other end being Palestine.”
“I don’t know much about Palestine,” Spade says. “I’m from Lubbock. My wife is from Nacogdoches, though, and that’s only about forty miles from Palestine.”
Bina looks blank for a moment, and then understanding seems to redden her cheeks like anger. “Don’t you stand there and make jokes,” she says. “Don’t you dare.”
“No, ma’am,” Spade says, and it’s his turn to go a little red.
“I take this job very seriously, Mr. Spade. And you had better, let me tell you, you had better fucking take me seriously.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bina gets up from behind the desk and takes her orange parka from its hook. “I am going to bring in Alter Litvak. Question him. Possibly arrest him. You want to stop me, try to stop me.” Parka whuffing, she brushes past Spade, who’s caught off guard by the move. “But if you try to stop me, things will not be smooth on your end. I promise you that.”
And she’s gone for a second. Then she sticks her head back into the doorway, pulling on her dazzling orange coat.
“Hey, yid,” she tells Landsman. “I could use a little backup.”
Landsman puts on his hat and goes after her, nodding to Spade on his way out.
“Praise the Lord,” Landsman says.
38
The Moriah Institute is the sole occupant of the seventh and uppermost story of the Hotel Blackpool. There is fresh paint on the walls of the corridor and a spotless mauve carpet on the floor. At the far end, beside the door to 707, small black characters on a discreet brass plate spell out the name of the Institute in American and Yiddish, and beneath that, in roman characters: SOL AND DOROTHY ZIEGLER CENTER. Bina pushes a buzzer. She looks up into the lens of the security camera that looks down at them.
“You remember the deal,” Bina tells him. It’s not a question.
“I am to shut up.”
“That’s such a small part of it.”
“I am not even here. I don’t even exist.”
She buzzes again, and just as she raises her knuckles to knock, Buchbinder opens the door. He is wearing a different enormous sweater-jacket, this one in cornflower blue with flecks of pale green and salmon, over baggy chinos and a Bronfman U. sweatshirt. His face and hands are smudged with ink or grease.
“Inspector Gelbfish,” Bina says, showing him her badge. “Sitka Central. I’m looking for Alter Litvak. I have reason to believe he may be here.”
A dentist is not a man of guile, as a rule. Buchbinder’s face reads plainly and without concealment: He was expecting them.
“It is very late,” he tries. “Unless you—”
“Alter Litvak, Dr. Buchbinder. Is he here?”
Landsman can see Buchbinder wrestling with the mechanics and trajectories, the wind shear of telling a lie.
“No. No, he is not.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No. No, Inspector, I do not.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. Any chance you might be lying to me, Dr. Buchbinder?”
There is a brief, dense pause. Then he closes the door in their faces. Bina raps, her fist the relentless head and bill of a woodpecker. A moment later, Buchbinder opens the door, tucking his Shoyfer away into a pocket of his sweater. He nods, his cheeks, jowls, and the twinkle in his eye arranged to genial effect. Someone has decanted a small hopper of molten iron into his spine.
“Please come in,” he says. “Mr. Litvak will see you. He is upstairs.”
“Isn’t this the top floor?” Bina says.
“There is a penthouse.”
“Fleabags don’t have penthouses,” Landsman says. Bina shoots him a look. He’s supposed to be invisible, inaudible, a ghost.
Buchbinder lowers his voice. “It used to be for the maintenance man, I gather. But they have fixed it up. This way, please, there is a back stair.”
The internal walls have been knocked out, and Buchbinder leads them through the gallery of the Ziegler Center. It’s a cool, dim space, painted white, nothing like the grimy old ex-stationery shop on Ibn Ezra Street. The light emerges from a gridwork of glass or Lucite cubes set atop carpeted pedestals. Each cube displays its object, a silver shovel, a copper bowl, an inexplicable garment like something worn by the Zorvoldian ambassador in a space opera. There must be more than a hundred objects on display, many of them worked in gold and gemstones. Each of them advertises the names of the American Jews whose generosity made their construction possible.
“You’ve come up in the world,” Landsman says.
“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Buchbinder says. “A miracle.”
A dozen large packing crates have been lined up at the far end of the room, spilling exuberant coils of shaved pine. A delicate silver handle protrudes from the excelsior, chased with gold. At the center of the room, on a low, broad table, a scale model of a stone-furrowed bare hill soaks up the glow of a dozen halogen spots. The hilltop, where Isaac waited for his father to pry the muscle of life from his body, is as flat as a place mat on a table. On its flanks, stone houses, stone alleys, tiny olive and cypress trees with fuzzy foliage. Tiny Jews wrapped in tiny prayer shawls contemplate the void at the top of the hill, as if to illustrate or model the principle, thinks Landsman, that every Jew has a personal Messiah who never comes.
“I don’t see the Temple,” Bina says, seemingly in spite of herself.
Buchbinder emits an odd grunt, animal and contented. Then he presses a button in the floor with the toe of one loafer. There follows a soft click and the hum of a tiny fan. And then, built to scale, the Temple, erected by Solomon, destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt, restored by the same king of Judaea who condemned Christ to die, destroyed by the Romans, sealed and built over by the Abbasids, resumes its rightful place at the navel of the world. The technology generating the image imparts a miraculous radiance to the model. It shimmers like a fata morgana. In design, the proposed Third Temple is a restrained display of stonemason might, cubes and pillars and 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 ha
s 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 sometimes voluntary treachery of believers. The pilot Frum believed only what his instrument panel said. He was sober, meticulous, competent, quiet, tough. When he landed a load of recruits at Peril Strait, the boys left Frum’s airplane with a sense of what kind of soldier they wanted to become.
Send Frum, Litvak wrote when they received the news from the case handler, Mr. Cashdollar, of a miraculous birth in Oregon. Frum left on a Tuesday. On Wednesday—how, the believers would say, could this be mere chance?—Mendel Shpilman stumbled into Buchbinder’s cabinet of wonders on the seventh floor of the Blackpool Hotel, saying he was down to his last blessing and ready to spend it on himself. By now the pilot Frum was a thousand miles away, on a ranch outside of Corvallis, where Fligler and Cashdollar, who flew out from Washington, were having trouble coming to terms with the breeder of the magical red animal.
There were, of course, other pilots available to fly Shpilman out to Peril Strait, but they were outsiders, or young believers. An outsider could never be trusted, and Litvak worried that Shpilman might disappoint a young believer and start the evil tongues wagging. Shpilman was in a very fragile condition, according to Dr. Buchbinder. He was agitated and crotchety, or sleepy and listless, and he weighed only fifty-five kilos. Really, he was not much in the way of a Tzaddik Ha-Dor at all.
On such short notice, there was one other pilot whom Litvak considered, another one utterly without faith, but discreet and reliable, and with an ancient tie to Litvak on which he dared to pin his hopes. At first he tried to dismiss the name from his thoughts, but it kept returning. He was worried that if they hesitated, they would lose Shpilman again; twice already the yid had backed out of a promise to seek treatment with Roboy at Peril Strait. So Litvak ordered this faithless, reliable pilot tracked down and offered the job. She took it, for a thousand dollars more than Litvak had intended to pay.
“A woman,” said the doctor, shifting his queenside rook, a move that gave him no advantage that Litvak could see. Dr. Roboy, in Litvak’s measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone
to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence. “Here. In this place.”
They were sitting in the office on the second floor of the main building, with a view of the strait, the ragtag Indian village with its nets and crazed boardwalk, the jutting arm of the brand-new floatplane dock. The office was Roboy’s, with a desk in the corner for Moish Fligler when he was around and could be kept behind a desk. Alter Litvak preferred to do without the luxury of a desk, an office, a home. He slept in guest rooms, garages, on somebody’s couch. His desk was a kitchen table, his office the training ground, the Einstein Chess Club, the back room of the Moriah Institute.
We have men in this place who are less manly, Litvak wrote in his notepad, I should have hired her before
He forced an exchange of bishops, opening a sudden breach in White’s center. He saw that he had mate, in one of two ways, within four moves. The prospect of victory was tedious. He wondered if he had ever cared at all for the game of chess. He took up his pen and wrote out an insult, even though, in almost five years, it had proved impossible to get a rise out of Roboy.
If we had a hundred like her I would be cleaning your clock by now on a terrace overlooking the Mount of Olives
“Humph,” said Dr. Roboy, fingering a pawn, watching Litvak’s face as Litvak watched the sky.
Dr. Roboy sat with his back to the window, a dark parenthesis bracketing the chessboard, his long, jutting face slack with the effort of guessing at the bleakness of his immediate chess future. Behind him the western sky was all marmalade and smoke. The crumpled mountains, folds of green that looked black, and purple that looked black, and luminous blue fissures of white snow. To the southwest a full moon was setting early, sharp-edged and gray, looking like a high-resolution black-and-white photograph of itself pasted to the sky.
“Every time you look out the window,” Roboy said, “I think it’s because they’re here. I wish you would stop. You’re making me nervous.” He tipped over his king, pushed back from the board, and unfurled his great mantis body one joint at a time. “I can’t play, I’m sorry. You win. I’m too keyed up.”
Michael Chabon Page 32