In the outer room of the penthouse, the young believers hug one another and jump up and down in their suits. Their yarmulkes tumble from their heads. Their faces shine with tears.
On the big television screen, Landsman gets his first look at an image that will soon be splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the world. All over town, pious hands will clip it and tape it to their front doors and windows. They will frame it and hang it behind the counters of their shops. Some hustler, inevitably, will work the thing up as a full-size poster, two feet by three. The hilltop in Jerusalem, crowded with alleys and houses. The broad empty mesa of paving stone. The jagged jawbone of burnt teeth. The magnificent plume of black smoke. And at the bottom the legend, in blue letters, AT LAST! These posters will sell at the stationers’ for between ten dollars and $12.95.
“Sweet God. What are they doing? What did they do?”
There is a lot that shocks Landsman about the image on the television screen, but the most shocking thing of all is simply that an object eight thousand miles away has been acted upon by Jews from Sitka. It seems to violate some fundamental law of the emotional physics that Landsman understands. Sitka space-time is a curved phenomenon; a yid could reach out in any direction as far as he was able and end up only tapping himself on the back.
“What about Mendel?” he says.
“I guess they were too far along to stop,” Bina says. “I guess they just went ahead without him.”
It’s perverse, but for some reason, the thought makes Landsman feel sad on Mendel’s behalf. Everything and everyone, from now on, will be going ahead without him.
For a couple of minutes Bina stands there watching the boys carry on, her arms folded, her face without expression except at the corners of her eyes.
The way she looks reminds Landsman of an engagement party they went to years ago, for a friend of Bina’s. The bride-to-be was marrying a mexican, and as a kind of joke, the party had a Cinco de Mayo theme. They hung a papier-mâché penguin from a tree in the yard. Children were blindfolded and sent forth, armed with a stick, to deal the penguin blows until it broke open. The children beat the penguin with savagery, and then the candy came showering down. It was just a bunch of wrapped toffees, peppermint, butterscotch, the kind your great-aunt could be relied upon to supply from a dusty crevice of her handbag. But as it rained from the sky, the children swarmed with a bestial joy. And Bina stood there watching them with her arms folded and a pleat at the corners of her eyes.
She passes Berko back his sholem and unholsters her own.
“Shut up,” Bina says, and then in American, “Shut the fuck up!”
Some of the young men have taken out their Shoyfers and are trying to call people, but everyone in Sitka must be trying to call people. They show one another the error messages they are getting on their telephones’ screens. The network is busy. Bina goes over to the television and kicks its cord. The plug snaps out of the wall. The television sighs.
Some dark fuel seems to drain from the young men’s tanks when the television goes off.
“You are under arrest,” Bina says gently, now that she has their attention. “Go over and put your hands on the wall. Meyer.”
Landsman pats them down one by one, crouching like a tailor measuring an inseam. From the six along the wall, he collects eight handguns and two expensive hunting knives. As he finishes with each one, he tells him to sit down. His third search recovers the Beretta that Berko lent to him before he left for Yakovy. Landsman holds it up for Berko to enjoy.
“Little cutie,” Berko says, keeping his big sholem level.
When Landsman is through, the young believers take their seats, three on the couch, two in a pair of armchairs, one in a dining chair pulled from an alcove. All at once, sitting in their chairs, they look young and lost. They are the runts. The ones that have been left behind. They turn as one, faces flushed, to the door of Litvak’s bedroom, looking for guidance. The door to the bedroom is closed. Bina opens the door, then pushes it wide with a toe. She stands, looking in, for a full five seconds.
“Meyer. Berko.”
The blind rattles in the wind. The bathroom door stands open, the bathroom dark. Alter Litvak is gone.
They look in the closet. They look in the shower. Bina goes over to the rattling blind and jerks it high. A sliding glass door stands open, wide enough to admit an intruder or an escapee. They go out onto the roof and look around. They search behind the air-conditioner unit, and all around a water tank, and under a tarp that conceals a pile of folding chairs. They peer over the cornices. There is no shattered portrait of Litvak drawn in oils on the surface of the parking lot. They go back down to the penthouse of the Blackpool.
In the middle of his cot lie Litvak’s pen and pad and an ill-used gunmetal Zippo. Landsman picks up the pad to read the last words that Litvak wrote before he laid it down.
I didnt kill her she was a good man
“They smuggled him out,” Bina says. “Those bastards. Those bastard U.S. Army Ranger friends of his.”
Bina calls to the men down around the hotel’s doors. None of them saw anyone leave nor anything unusual, for example, a squad of coal-faced warriors on rappelling cables being lowered from a Black Hawk.
“Bastards,” she says again, in American this time, and with greater heat. “Fucking Bible-thumping Yankee motherfuckers.”
“Language, lady, jeez!”
“Yeah, whoa, take it easy, there, ma’am.”
Some Americans in suits, a number of them, too many and too bunched up for Landsman to count accurately, call it six, have arranged their shoulders in the doorway to the outer room. Big men, well fed, loving their jobs. One wears a snappy olive-drab duster and an apologetic smile under his white-gold hair. Landsman almost doesn’t recognize him without the penguin sweater.
“Okay, now,” says the man who must be Cashdollar. “Let’s everybody try to calm down.”
“FBI,” says Berko.
“Close enough,” says Cashdollar.
41
Landsman pisses away the next twenty-four hours in the hum of a chalk-white room with a milk-white carpet on the seventh floor of the Harold Ickes Federal Building on Seward Street.
In teams of two, six men with the variegated surnames of doomed crewmen in a submarine movie rotate in and out of the room in four-hour shifts. One is a black man and one a Latino, and the others are fluid pink giants with haircuts that occupy the neat interval between astronaut and pedophile scoutmaster. Gum chewers, overgrown boys with good manners and Bible-school smiles. In each of them at moments Landsman sniffs out the diesel heart of a policeman, but he is baffled by the fairings of their southern and gentile glamor. Despite the smoke screen of back talk that Landsman puts up, they make him feel rattletrap, a two-stroke old beater.
No one threatens him or tries to intimidate him. Everyone addresses him by rank, taking care to pronounce Landsman’s name the way he prefers. When Landsman turns surly, flippant, or evasive, the Americans display forbearance and schoolteacher poise. But when Landsman dares to give out with a question of his own, an extinguishing silence rains down like a thousand gallons of water dropped from a plane. The Americans will say nothing about the whereabouts or situation of Detective Shemets or Inspector Gelbfish. They have nothing to say, either, about Alter Litvak’s vanishing act, and they appear never to have heard of Mendel Shpilman or Naomi Landsman. They want to know what Landsman knows, or thinks he knows, about U.S. involvement in the attack on the Qubbat As-Sakhrah, and about the perpetrators, principals, ancillaries, and victims of that attack. And they do not want him to know what they know, if anything, about any of that. They have been so well trained in their art that they are deep into the second shift before Landsman realizes that the Americans are asking him the same roughly two dozen questions over and over, inverting and rephrasing and coming at them from odd angles. Their questions are like the fundamental moves of the six different chess pieces, endlessly recombined until they number
with the neurons in the brain.
At regular intervals Landsman is provided with terrible coffee and a series of increasingly rigid apricot and cherry Danish. At one point he is shown into a break room and invited to inhabit a sofa. The coffee and Danish rotate in and out of the chalk-white room of Landsman’s brain while he jams his eyes shut and pretends to nap. Then it is time to go back to the steady white noise of the walls, the laminate tabletop, the squeak of vinyl under his ass.
“Detective Landsman.”
He opens his eyes and sees woozy black moire on brown. Landsman’s cheekbone is numb from the pressure of the tabletop against it. He hoists his head, leaving behind a puddle of spit. A sticky filament connects his lip to the table, then snaps.
“Ick,” says Cashdollar. He takes a little package of Kleenex out of the right pocket of his sweater and slides it across the table to Landsman, past an open box of Danish. Cashdollar has on a new sweater, a dark gold cardigan with front panels of coffee-brown suede, leather buttons, suede patches on the elbows. He’s sitting upright on a metal chair, necktie knotted, cheeks smooth, blue eyes softened by attractive jet-pilot wrinkles. His hair is the precise gold of the foil in a package of Broadways. He smiles without enthusiasm or cruelty. Landsman wipes his face and the mess he made on the table during his nap.
“Are you hungry? Would you like a drink?”
Landsman says he would like a glass of water. Cashdollar reaches into the left pocket of his sweater and takes out a small bottle of mineral water. He tips it on its side and rolls it across the table to Landsman. He is not a young man, but there is something boyishly serious about the way he aims the bottle and launches it and steers it with body English to its destination. Landsman uncaps the bottle and takes a swallow. He doesn’t really care for mineral water.
“I used to work for a man,” Cashdollar says. “The man who had this job before me. He had a lot of cute catchphrases he liked to drop into a conversation. It’s kind of a common trait among people who do what I do. We come out of the military, you know, we come out of the business world. We tend to like our catchphrases. Shibboleths. That’s a Hebrew word, you know. Judges, Chapter 12. Are you sure you aren’t hungry? I can get you a bag of potato chips. Cup of noodles. There’s a microwave.”
“No, thanks,” Landsman says. “So. Shibboleths.”
“This man, my predecessor. He used to say, ‘We are telling a story, Cashdollar. That’s what we do.’” The voice he adopts to quote his former superior is bigger and not as folksy as his own prim tenor twang. More pompous. “‘Tell them a story, Cashdollar. That’s all the poor suckers want.’ Only he didn’t say ‘suckers.’”
“People who do what you do,” Landsman says. “Meaning what? Sponsor terrorist attacks on Muslim holy places? Start in with the Crusades all over again? Kill innocent women who never did anything but fly their small airplanes and try to help somebody out of a jam once in a while? Shoot defenseless junkies in the head? Excuse me, I forget what it is you do, you people with your shibboleths.”
“First of all, Detective, we had nothing to do with Menashe Shpilman’s death.” He pronounces Shpilman’s Hebrew name “Men-ashy.” “I was as shocked and puzzled by that as anybody. I never met the fellow, but I know he was a remarkable individual with remarkable abilities, and we are very much worse off without him. How about a cigarette?” He holds out an unopened package of Winstons. “Come on. I know you like to smoke. There you go.” He produces a package of matches and passes them with the Winstons across the table.
“Now, as for your sister, hey, listen. I am so very sorry about your sister. No, I really am. For what it’s worth, and I suppose that’s not a lot, you have my sincere apology on that. That was a bad call made by the man who preceded me in this job, the fellow I was just talking about. And he paid for it. Not with his life, of course.” Cashdollar bares his big square teeth. “Maybe you wish he had. But he paid. He was wrong. The man was wrong about a lot of things. For one, huh-uh, sorry.” He gives his head a gentle shake. “But we aren’t telling a story.”
“No?”
“Huh-uh. The story, Detective Landsman, is telling us. Just like it has done from the beginning. We’re part of the story. You. Me.”
The book of matches comes from a place in Washington, D.C., called Hogate’s Seafood, at Ninth and Maine Avenue, SW. The very restaurant, if he remembers his history, in front of which Delegate Anthony Dimond, prime opponent of the Alaskan Settlement Act, was run down by a taxicab while chasing an errant rum bun into the street.
Landsman strikes a match.
“Jesus?” he says, looking up cross-eyed over the flame.
“Jesus, too.”
“Jesus is okay with me.”
“I’m glad. He’s okay with me, too. And Jesus wasn’t keen on killing, on hurting people, on destruction. I know that. The Qubbat As-Sakhrah was a fine old piece of architecture, and Islam is a venerable religion, and other than the fact that it’s completely mistaken on a fundamental level, I have no quarrel with it per se. I wish there was some way to do this job that didn’t require taking such actions. But sometimes there isn’t. And Jesus knew that. ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ Right? I mean, those are Jesus’ words. The man could be fairly harsh when he needed to be.”
“He was kick-ass,” Landsman suggests.
“Yes, he was. Now, you might not credit the fact, but the end times are coming. And I for one very much look forward to seeing them come. But for that to happen, Jerusalem and the Holy Land have to belong to the Jews again. That’s what it says in the Book. Sadly, there is no way to do that without some bloodshed, unfortunately. Without a certain amount of destruction. That’s just what is written, you know? But I am trying very hard, unlike my immediate predecessor, to hold all that down to the absolute minimum. For Jesus’ sake and for the sake of my own soul and all our sakes. To keep things running clean. Hold this operation together until we have it sorted out over there. Lay us down some facts on the ground.”
“You don’t want anybody to know you’re behind it. You people who do what you do.”
“Well, but, that’s kind of our MO, if you know what I mean.”
“And you want me to keep my mouth shut.”
“I know it’s asking a lot.”
“Just until you lay these facts down on Jerusalem. Move some Arabs out and some Verbovers in. Rename a few streets.”
“Just until we get some of that good old critical mass going. Straighten out some of the noses this has put out of joint. And then get busy, you know. Fulfilling what is written.”
Landsman takes a swallow of mineral water. It’s warm and tastes of the inside of the pocket of a cardigan. “I want my gun and my badge,” he says. “And that’s what I want.”
“I love policemen,” Cashdollar says without much enthusiasm. “I really do.” He covers his mouth with one hand and takes a contemplative breath through his nostrils. His hand sports a manicure, but one thumbnail has been gnawed. “It’s going to get awfully Indian around here, mister. Just between you and me. You get your gun and badge back, you don’t stand to hold on to them for very long. Tribal P won’t be hiring too many Jewboys to serve and protect.”
“Maybe not. But they’ll take Berko.”
“They aren’t taking anyone who doesn’t have the paper.”
“Oh, yeah,” Landsman says. “That’s the other thing I want.”
“You’re talking about a lot of paper, Detective Landsman.”
“You need a lot of quiet.”
“Indeed I do,” Cashdollar says.
Cashdollar studies Landsman for a long second or two, and Landsman understands from a certain alertness in the man’s eyes, a look of anticipation, that there is a gun concealed somewhere on Cashdollar’s person and an itch in his finger to go with it. There are more direct ways of keeping Landsman’s mouth shu
t than buying him off with a gun and some documentation. Cashdollar gets up from the chair and returns it carefully to its place under the table. He starts to work his thumb into his teeth but thinks better of it.
“If I could just get my Kleenex back?”
Landsman tosses the package, but it goes awry, and Cashdollar fumbles the catch. The package of Kleenex splats down into the box of stale Danish, landing in a shiny patch of red jelly. Anger opens a seam in Cashdollar’s placid gaze, through which you can see the banished shades of monsters and aversions. The last thing he wants, Landsman remembers, is any hint of a mess. Cashdollar tweezes a Kleenex from the package and uses it to wipe the package off, then tucks the rest back into the safety of his right pocket. He fidgets the bottom button of his sweater back through its buttonhole, and in the brief tug of woolen waistband over hip, Landsman spots the bulge of the sholem.
“Your partner,” he tells Landsman, “has a great deal to lose. A very great deal. So does your ex-wife. A fact that they both recognize all too well. Maybe it’s time you came to the same conclusion about yourself.”
Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid picture of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless as arguments among Jews. Ghosts of Imperial Russia traced in the onion dome of St. Michael’s Cathedral, and of Warsaw in the rocking and sawing of a café violinist. Canals, fishing boats, islands, stray dogs, canneries, dairy restaurants. The neon marquee of the Baranof Theatre reflected on wet asphalt, colors running like watercolor as you come out of a showing of Welles’s Heart of Darkness, which you have just seen for the third time, with the girl of your dreams on your arm.
Michael Chabon Page 35
