The Yiddish Policemen's Union

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 intend 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 Maish 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.”

He started to stalk back and forth across the office.

I don’t see what you are so worried about you have the easy job

“Is that so?”

He has to redeem Isreel, you just have to redeem him

Roboy stopped pacing and turned to face Litvak, who put down his pen and set about returning the pieces to their maple box.

“Three hundred boys are ready to die at his back,” Roboy said, peevish. “Thirty thousand Verbovers will be staking their lives and fortunes on this man. Uprooting their homes, putting their families at risk. If others follow, then we are talking about millions. I’m glad you can make jokes about that. I’m glad it doesn’t make you nervous to look out that window and watch the sky and know that he is finally on his way.”

Litvak stopped putting away the pieces and looked out the window again. Cormorants, gulls, a dozen fanciful variations on the basic duck, having no names in Yiddish. At any moment anyone of them, wings spread against the sunset, might be taken for an approaching Piper Super Cub, coming in low from the southwest. Looking at the sky was making Litvak nervous, too. But theirs was not by definition an endeavor that attracted men with the talent for waiting.

I hope that he is the Tz H-D I really do

“No, you don’t,” Roboy said. “That’s a lie. You’re just in it for the stakes. For the game.”

Following the accident that took Litvak’s wife and his voice, it was Dr. Rudolf Buchbinder, the mad dentist of Ibn Ezra Street, who had rebuilt his jaw, restored its masonry in acrylic and titanium. And when Litvak found himself addicted to painkillers, it was the dentist who had sent him for treatment to an old friend, Dr. Max Roboy. Years later, when Cashdollar asked his man in Sitka for help fulfilling the divinely inspired mission of the president of America, Litvak thought at once of Buchbinder and Roboy.

It had taken a lot longer, not to mention every last ounce of chutzpah Litvak had, to work Heskel Shpilman into the plan. Endless pilpul and haggling through Baronshteyn. Stiff resistance from career men at Justice who viewed Shpilman and Litvak — with justice — as a ganglord and a hatchetman. At last, after months of false alarms and cancellations, a meeting with the big man at the Ringelblum Avenue Baths.

A Tuesday morning, snow twisting down in sloppy helixes, four inches of new snow on the ground. Too new, too early for the snowplow. At the corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn, a chestnut vendor, snow on his red umbrella, hiss and shimmer of the roasting box, parallel grooves of his cart wheels framing the slurry of his footprints in the snow. So quiet you could hear the clockwork thunking in the traffic signal box and the vibration of the pager on the hip of the gunman by the door. A pair of gunmen, those great red bears they kept to guard the body of the Verbover rebbe.

As the Rudashevsky biks handed Litvak along from the door, up the cement stairs with the vinyl treads, down the mine shaft of a hallway to the front door of the baths, the fists of their faces all cupped a minor light. Mischief, pity, the glint of a prankster, a torturer, a priest preparing to uncover the cannibal god. As for the ancient Russian cashier in his steel cage, the burly attendant in his bunker of folded white towels, these yids had no eyes at all, as far as Litvak ever knew. They kept their heads down, blinded by fear and discretion. They were elsewhere, drinking coffee at the Polar Shtern, still at home in their beds with their wives. The baths were not even open for business at this hour. There was nobody here, nobody at all, and the attendant who slid a pair of threadbare towels across the counter to Litvak was a ghost serving up a winding sheet to a dead man.

Litvak stripped and hung up his clothes on two led hooks. He could smell the tidal flux of the baths, chlorine and armpit and a ripe salt vapor that might on second thought have been the pickle factory on the ground floor. There was nothing to weaken him, if that was part of the intent, in obliging him to take off his clothes. His scars were numerous, in certain instances horrible, and they had their effect. He heard a low whistle from one of the two Rudashevskys working the locker room. Litvak’s body was a parchment scribed by pain and violence on which they could only hope to make the barest exegesis. He slipped his pad from the hip pocket of his jacket on its hook.

Like what you see?

The Rudashevskys could not agree on a fitting reply.

One nodded; the other shook his head. They exchanged responses, to the satisfaction of neither. Then they gave him up and sent him through the misty glass door to the steam room, to confront the body they guarded.

That body, the horror and the splendor of it, naked as a giant bloodshot eyeball without a socket. Litvak had seen it only once before, years ago, topped with a fedora, rolled tight as a wad of Pinar del Rio into a stiff black greatcoat that swept the toes of his dainty black boots. Now it emerged ponderous from the steam, a slab of wet limestone webbed with a black lichen of hair. Litvak felt like a fogbound airplane buffeted by updrafts into the surprise of a mountain. The belly pregnant with elephant triplets, the breasts full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple. The thighs great hand-rolled marbled loaves of halvah. Lost in the shadows between them, a thick umbilicus of grayish-brown meat.

Litvak lowered the uninsulated armature of his frame to the hot grid of tiles opposite the rabbi. The time he had passed Shpilman in the street, the man’s eyes lay in the ambit of shadow cast by the sundial of his hat brim. Now they were trained on Litvak an his vandalized body. They were kindly eyes, Litvak thought, or eyes whose employer had schooled them in the uses of kindliness. They read Litvak’s scars, the puckered purple mouth on his right shoulder, th slashes of red velour on his hip, the pit in his left thigh deep enough to hold an ounce of gin. They offered sympathy, regard, even gratitude. The war in Cuba was notorious for its futility, brutality, and waste. Its veterans had been shunned on their return. No one had offered them forgiveness, understanding, a chance at healing. Heskel Shpilman was offering Litvak and his war-torn hide all three.

“The nature of your handicap,” the rebbe said, “has been explained to me, along with the substance of your offer.” His girlish voice, baffled by steam and porcelain tile, seemed to emerge from someplace other than the kettledrum chest. “I see you’ve brought along your pad and a pen, in spite of my clear instructions that you were to carry nothing at all.”

Litvak held up the offending items, beaded with steam. He could feel the warp, the buckle, in the pages of his pad.

“You won’t need them.” The birds of Shpilman’s hands roosted on the rock of his belly, and he closed his eyes, depriving Litvak of their sympathy, real or feigned, and leaving Litvak to stew for a minute or two in the steam. Litvak had always hated a shvitz. But this fixture of the old Harkavy, secular and squalid, was the only place that the Verbover rebbe could contrive to do private business away from his court, his gabay, his world. “I don’t plan to require any further response or inquiry from you.”

Litvak nodded and prepared to stand. His mind told him that Shpilman would not have bothered to summon him to this nude and one-sided interview if he planned to turn Litvak down. But he felt in his gut that the errand was doomed, that Shpilman had called him down to Ringelblum Avenue to deliver the refusal in all the elephantine authority of his person.

“I want you to know, Mr. Litvak, that I have been giving a great deal of consideration to this proposal. I have attempted to follow its logic from every angle.

“Let’s begin with our southern friends. If it were simply a case of their wanting something, some tangible feature or resource … oil, for example. Or if they were prompted by a more purely strategic concern with regard to Russia or Persia. In either case, they clearly don’t need us. However difficult a conquest the Holy Land might be, our physical presence, our willingness to fight, our arms, can’t make a great difference to their battle plan. I have studied their claims of support for the Jewish cause in Palestine, and their theology, and to the extent that I can, based on Rabbi Baronshteyn’s reports, I have tried to form a judgment of the gentiles and their aims. And I can only conclude that when they say they wish to see Jerusalem restored to Jewish sovereignty, they mean it. Their reasoning, the so-called prophecies and apocrypha whose supposed authority underlies this wish, maybe it all strikes me as laughable. Abominable, even. I pity the gentiles for their childlike trust in the imminent return of one who never in the first place departed, let alone arrived. But I am quite sure that they, in turn, pity us our own tardy Messiah. As a foundation for a partnership, mutual pity is not to be despised.

“As for your angle in this matter, that is easy, yes? You are a soldier for hire. You enjoy the challenge and the responsibility of generalship. I understand that. I do. You like to fight, and you like killing, as long as those who die aren’t your men. And, I dare say, after all these years with Shemets — and now, on your own behalf — you are long in the habit of appearing to please the Americans.

“For the Verbovers, there is great risk. Our entire community could be lost in this adventure. Wiped out in a matter of days, if your troops are ill prepared or simply, as seems not unlikely, outmanned. But if we stay here, well, then we are finished, too. Scattered to the winds. Our friends in the south have made that clear. That is the ‘stick.’ Reversion as the fire in the seat of the pants, yes? A restored Jerusalem as the bucket of ice water. Some of our younger men argue for making a stand here, daring them to dislodge us. But that is madness.

“On the other hand, if we agree, and you are successful, then we have regained a treasure of such incalculable value — I mean Zion, of course — that the mere thought of it opens a long-shuttered window in my soul. I have to shield my eyes from the brilliance.”

He raised the back of his left hand to his eyes. His thin wedding band was engulfed in his fingers like an ax head lost in the flesh of a tree. Litvak felt the pulse in his throat, a thumb plucking over and over at the lowest string of a harp. Dizziness. A sensation of ballooning in his feet and arms. It must be the heat, he thought. He took shallow timid breaths of rich burning air.

“I am dazzled by that vision,” the rebbe said. “Maybe as blinded by it, in my own way, as the evangelicals. So precious is the treasure. So incalculably sweet.”

No. It was not, or not only, the heat and ripeness of the shvitz that were making Litvak’s pulse thrum and his head spin. He felt certain of the wisdom of his gut: Shpilman was about to reject his proposal. But as that likelihood drew nearer, a new possibility began to dizzy him, to course through him. It was the thrill of a dazzling move.

“Still, it’s not enough,” the rebbe was saying. “I long for Messiah as I long for nothing else in this world.” He stood up, and his belly poured over his hips and groin like scalded milk foaming down the sides of a pot. “But I am afraid. I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of the potential for great loss of life among my yids and the utter destruction of everything we’ve worked for these last sixty years. There were eleven Verbovers left at the end of the war, Litvak. Eleven. I promised my wife’s father on his deathbed that I would never let such destruction befall us again.

“And, finally, truthfully, I fear this all may be a fool’s errand. There are numerous and persuasive teachings against acting in any way to hasten the coming of Messiah. Jeremiah condemns it. So do the Oaths of Solomon. Yes, of course, I want to see my yids settled in a new home with financial assurances from the U.S., offers of assistance and of access to all the unimaginably vast new markets your success in this operation would create. And I want Messiah like I want to sink, after this heat, into the cold dark waters of the mikvah in the next room. But, God should forgive me these words, I am afraid. So afraid that even the taste on my lips of Messiah is not enough. And you can tell them that down in Washington. Tell them the Verbover rebbe was afraid.” The idea of his fear seemed almost to entrance him with its novelty, like a teenager thinking of death or a whore of the chance of an immaculate love. “What?”

Litvak held up his right index finger. He had something, one more thing to offer the rebbe. One more clause for the contract. He had no idea how he would deliver it or if indeed it could be delivered. But as the rebbe prepared to turn his massive back on Jerusalem and on the complicated hugeness of the deal that Litvak had been putting together for months, he felt it well up in him like a chess brilliancy, notated with double exclamation marks. He scrambled to open his pad. He scrawled two words on the first clean leaf, but in his haste and panic, he pressed too hard and his pen ripped through the wet paper.

“What is it?” Shpilman said, “You have somethin more to offer?”

Litvak nodded, once, twice.

“Something more than Zion? Messiah? A home, fortune?”

Litvak got up and padded across the tile floor until he stood just beside the rebbe. Naked men, bearing the tales of their ruined bodies. Each of them, in his way, bereft, alone. Litvak reached out and, with the force and inspiration of that loneliness, and with the tip of his finger, inscribed two words in the vapor condensed on a white square of tile.

The rebbe read them and looked up, and they beaded over once more and were gone.

“My son,” the rebbe said.

It’s more than a game, Litvak wrote now, in the office at Peril Strait, as he and Roboy awaited the arrival of that wayward and unredeemed son. I would rather fight to take a prize however doubtful than wait to see what scraps I may be fed

“I suppose there’s a credo in there someplace,” Roboy said. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millennia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game — the survival of the Jews.

Oh I wouldn’t go that far

There was a knock at the door, and Micky Vayner put in his head.

“I came to remind you, sir,” he said in his good American Hebrew.

Litvak stared blankly at the pink face with its peeling eyelids and baby-fat chin.

“Five minutes before twilight. You said to remind you.”

Litvak went to the window. The sky was striped in the pink, green, and luminous gray of a salmon’s hide. Sure enough, he saw a star or planet overhead. He nodded his thanks to Micky Vayner. Then he closed the box of chessmen and hooked the clasp.

“What’s at twilight?” Roboy said. He turned to Micky Vayner. “What’s today?”

Micky Vayner shrugged; as far as he knew, it was, by the lunar calendar, an ordinary day in the month of Nisan. Though, like his young comrades, he had been trained to believe in the foreordained reestablishment of the biblical kingdom of Judaea and in the destiny of Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jews, he was no more strict or nice in his observance than any of the others. The young American Jews at Peril Strait observed the principal holidays, and for the most part, they kept the dietary laws. They wore the skullcap and the four-corners but kept their beards in military trim. They avoided work and training on the Sabbath, though not without exception. After forty years as a secular warrior, Litvak could stomach that much. Even in the wake of the accident, with his Sora gone, with the wind whistling through the hole she had left in Litvak’s life, with a thirst for meaning and a hunger for sense and an empty cup and a barren dish, Alter Litvak could not have taken a place among truly religious men. He never could have fallen happily, for example, among the black hats. In fact, he could not abide black hats, and since the meeting at the baths, he had kept to a minimum his contacts with the Verbovers, as they prepared in secret to be airlifted en masse to Palestine.

Today is nothing, he wrote before he pocketed the notepad and walked out of the room. Call me when they arrive

In his room Litvak took out his dental plates and dropped them with a chime of dice into a drinking glass. He unlaced his boots and sat down heavily on a folding cot. Whenever he came out to Peril Strait, he slept in this tiny room — on the blueprints, it had been shown as a utility closet — down the hall from Roboy’s office. His clothes he hung on a hook behind the door, his kit he stashed under the cot.

He leaned back against the cold wall of painted cinder block and looked at the wall, over the steel shelf that held the glass with his teeth. There was no window, so Litvak imagined an early star. A wheeling duck. The photograph moon. The sky slowly turning to the color of a gun. And an airplane, coming in low from the southeast, bearing the man who was, in Litvak’s plan, both prisoner and dynamite, tower and trapdoor, bull’s-eye and dart.

Litvak stood up slowly, with a grunt of pain. There were screws in his hips, which ached; his knees thudded and gonged like the pedals of an old piano. There was a constant thrum of wire in the hinges of his jaw.

He ran his tongue across the empty zones of his mouth with their feel of slick putty. He was accustomed to pain and breakage, but since the accident, his body no longer seemed to belong to him. It was something sawed and nailed together out of borrowed parts. A birdhouse built of scrap wood and propped on a pole, in which his soul flapped like a fugitive bat. He had been born, like every Jew, into the wrong world, the wrong country, at the wrong time, and now he was living in the wrong body, too. In the end maybe it was that sense of wrongness, that fist in the Jewish belly, binding Alter Litvak to the cause of the yids who had made him their general.

He went over to the steel shelf that was bolted to the wall under his notional window. Alongside the drinking glass that held the proof of Buchbinder’s genius, there stood a second glass. That one contained a few ounces of paraffin hardened around a piece of white string. Litvak had bought this candle in a grocery store not quite a year after his wife died, with the intention of burning it on the anniversary of her death. Now a number of such anniversaries had come and gone, and Litvak had evolved his own quaint tradition. Every year he brought the yahrzeit candle out, and looked at it, and thought about lighting it. He imagined the shy flutter of a flame. He envisioned himself lying in the darkness with the memorial candle’s light dancing over his head, scattering an alefbeys of shadows across the ciling of the tiny room. He pictured the glass empty at the close of twenty-four hours, the wick consumed the paraffin combusted, the metal tab drowned at the bottom in waxy dregs. And after that — but here his imagination tended to fail him.

Litvak rummaged in the pockets of his suit pants for his lighter, just to give himself the option, the chance of finding out, if he could bring himself to do it, What it might mean to set fire to the memory of his wife. The lighter was a steel Zippo etched with the Rangers insignia in worn black lines on one side, and on the other dented deeply where it had deflected some oncoming bit of the car, or the road, or the chokecherry tree, from piercing Litvak’s heart. For the sake of his throat, Litvak no longer smoked; the lighter was only a habit, a token of his survivorship, an ironical charm that never left his bedside or his pants. But now it was in neither place. He patted himself down with the sheepish method of old man. He stepped backward through his day, working his way to that morning, when, as every morning, he had slid the lighter into his hip pocket. Hadn’t he? All at once he could not remember having pocketed his Zippo that morning, or laying it on the steel shelf last night when he went to sleep. Perhaps he had been forgetting it for days. It might be in Sitka, in the back room at the Blackpool Hotel. It might be anywhere. Litvak lowered himself to the ground, dragged his kit from under the cot, and ransacked it, his heart pounding. No lighter. No matches, either. Only a candle in a juice glass, and a man who did not know how to light it even when he had a source of fire. Litvak turned to the door just as he heard someone approach. A soft knock. He slipped the yahrzeit candle into the hip pocket of his jacket.

“Reb Litvak,” said Micky Vayner. “They’re here, sir.”

Litvak put in his teeth and tucked in his shirt.

I want everyone in quarters I don’t want anybody to see him now

“He isn’t ready,” Micky Vayner said, a little doubtfully, wanting to be reassured. He didn’t know, had never seen Mendel Shpilman. He had only heard stories of long-ago boyish miracles and perhaps caught an acrid whiff of spoiled goods that sometimes curled in the air over the mention of Shpilman’s name.

He is unwell but we will heal him

It was neither part of their doctrine nor necessary to the success of Litvak’s plan for Micky Vayner or any of the Peril Strait Jews to believe that Mendel Shpilman was the Tzaddik Ha-Dor. A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

“We know he’s just a man,” said Micky Vayner dutifully. “We all know that, Reb Litvak. Only a man and nothing more, and this is bigger than any man, what we’re doing.”

It isn’t the man I’m worried about, Litvak wrote. Everyone in quarters

As he stood on the floatplane dock and watched Naomi Landsman help Mendel Shpilman down from the cockpit of her Super Cub, Litvak considered that if he did not know better, he would have taken them for old lovers. There was a brusque familiarity in the way she gripped his upper arm, fished his shirt collar from the lapels of his rumpled pin-striped jacket, picked a string of cellophane from his hair. She watched his face, only his face, as Shpilman eyed Roboy and Litvak; she was tender as an engineer looking for cracks, fatigue in the material. It seemed inconceivable that they had known each other, as far as Litvak was aware, for slightly under three hours. Three hours. That was all it had taken for her to seal up her fate with his.

“Welcome,” Dr. Roboy said, posed beside a wheel chair with his necktie flapping in the breeze. Gold and Turteltoyb, a Sitka boy, jumped down from the plane to the dock, Turteltoyb heavy enough to make it ring like a slammed telephone. The water smacked the pilings. The air smelled of rotten netting and brackish puddles in the bottoms of old boats. It was almost dark, and they all looked vaguely green in the light of the floods on the standards, except for Shpilman, who looked white as a feather and as hollow. “You are genuinely welcome.”

“You didn’t need to send an airplane,” Shpilman said. He had a wry, actorish voice, his diction studied, excellent, with a low, soft underthrob of the sorrowful Ukraine. “I’m perfectly capable of flying on my own.”

“Yes, well—”

“X-ray vision. Bulletproof. The whole bit. Who is the wheelchair for, me?”

He outspread his arms, laid his feet primly side by side, and gave himself a slow once-over, looking prepared to be shocked at what he found. Ill-fitting pin striped suit, hatless, tie loosely knotted, one shirttail hanging out, something teenage in his unruly ginger curls. Impossible to see in that slender fragile frame, that sleepy face, any hint of the monstrous father. Or maybe a little, around the eyes. Shpilman turned to the pilot, affecting to be surprised, even hurt, by the implication that he was so far gone as to need a wheelchair. But Litvak saw that he was putting it on to cover his real surprise and hurt at the implication.

“You said I looked all right, Miss Landsman,” Shpilman said, teasing her, appealing to her, pleading with her.

“You look terrific, kid,” the Landsman told him. She was dressed in blue jeans tucked into high black boots, a man’s white oxford shirt, an old Sitka Central firing range jacket that said LANDSMAN over the pocket. “You look fabulous.”

“Ah, you’re lying, you liar.”

“You look like thirty-five hundred dollars to me, Shpilman,” the Landsman said, not unkindly. “How about we leave it at that?”

“I won’t be needing the wheelchair, doctor,” Shpilman said without reproach. “But thank you for thinking of me.”

“Are you ready, Mendel?” Dr. Roboy asked him in his gentle and sententious way.

“Do I need to be ready?” Mendel said. “If I need to be ready, we may have to push this back a few weeks.”

The words emerged from Litvak’s throat like a kind of verbal dust devil, a tangle of grit and gusts, unbidden. An awful sound, like a glob of burning rubber plunged into a bucket of ice.

“You don’t need to be ready,” Litvak said. “You only need to be here.”

They all looked shocked, horrified, even Gold, who happily could have read a comic book by the light of a burning man. Shpilman turned slowly, a smile tucked into one corner of his mouth like a baby carried on the hip.

“Alter Litvak, I presume,” he said, holding out his hand, scowling at Litvak, affecting to be tough and masculine in a way that mocked toughness and masculinity and his own relative lack of both qualities. “What a grip, oy, it’s like a rock.”

His own grip was soft, warm, not quite dry, eternally a schoolboy’s. Something in Litvak resisted it, the warmth and softness of it. He was himself horrified by the pterosaur echo of his own voice, by the fact that he had spoken at all. He was horrified to see that there was something about Mendel Shpilman, about his puffy face and his bad suit, his kid-prodigy smile and his brave attempt to hide the fact that he was afraid, that had prompted Litvak, for the first time in years, to speak. Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength. He felt, shaking Shpilman’s hot hand, how sound his tactics were. If Roboy could get Shpilman up and running again, then Shpilman could inspire and lead not merely a few hundred armed believers or thirty thousand black-hatted hustlers looking for new turf, but an entire lost and wandering nation. Litvak’s plan was going to work because there was something about Mendel Shpilman that could make a man with a broken voice box want to speak. It was against the something in Shpilman that something in Litvak pushed back, revulsed. He felt an urge to crush that schoolboy hand in his own, to break the bones of it.

“What’s up, yid?” the Landsman said to Litvak. “Long time.”

Litvak nodded, and he shook the Landsman’s hand.

He was torn, as he had always been, between his natural impulse to admire a competent practitioner of a difficult trade and his suspicion that the woman was a lesbian, a human category that he failed almost on principle to understand.

“All right, then,” she said. She was still holding on to Shpilman, and as the wind picked up, she moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulder, drawing him to her, giving him a squeeze. She scanned the greenish faces of the men who waited for her to hand over the cargo. “You going to be all right, then?”

Litvak wrote in his pad and passed it to Roboy.

“It’s late,” Roboy said. “And dark. Let us put you up for the night.”

She appeared to consider rejecting the offer for a I moment. Then she nodded. “Good idea,” she said.

At the bottom of the long, winding stair, Shpilman stopped to take in the particulars of the climb and the platform of the inclined elevator, and he seemed to suffer a qualm — a foreshock, a sudden access of understanding of everything that would from now on be expected of him. With a certain drama, he collapsed into Roboy’s wheelchair.

“I left my cape at home,” he said.

When they reached the top, he stayed in the chair and allowed the Landsman to wheel him into the main building. The strain of travel or the step he had finally taken or the plummeting level of heroin in his blood stream was beginning to tell. But when they reach the room on the ground floor that had been prepared for him — a bed, a desk, a chair, and a fine English chess set — he rallied. He reached into the pocket of his creased suit and took out a black and bright-yellow cardboard package.

“Nu, I understand a mazel tov is in order?” he said passing out half a dozen fine-looking Cohiba cigars. The smell of them, even unlit and three feet from his nostrils was enough to whisper promises to Litvak of well-earned respite, clean sheets, hot water, brown women, the quiet aftermath of brutal battles. “They tell me it’s a girl.”

For a moment nobody knew what he was talking about, and then they all laughed nervously, except for Litvak and Turteltoyb, whose cheeks turned the color of borscht. Turteltoyb knew, as each of them knew, that Shpilman was not to be provided with any details of the plan, including the newborn heifer, until Litvak gave the order.

Litvak knocked the cigar from Shpilman’s soft hand. He scowled at Turteltoyb, hardly able to see him through the blood-red broth of his own anger. The certainty he had felt down on the dock that Shpilman would serve their needs was turned abruptly on its head. A man like Shpilman, a talent like Shpilman’s, could never serve anyone; it could only be served, above all by the one who wielded it. No wonder the poor bastard had been hiding from it for so long.

Out

They read his message and filed one by one out of the room, last of all the Landsman, who made a point of asking where she would be sleeping and then of telling Mendel pointedly that she would see him in the morning. At the time Litvak had a vague idea she might be arranging a tryst, but his notion of her as a lesbian canceled it out before he had time to give it any consideration. It didn’t occur to Litvak that the Jewess, in her readiness for any adventure, was already laying the groundwork for the daring escape that Mendel had not yet decided to attempt. The Landsman struck a match, puffed at her cigar to get it lit. Then she sauntered out.

“Don’t hold it against the boy, Reb Litvak,” Shpilman said when they were alone. “People have a way of telling me things. But I guess you noticed that. Please, have a cigar. Go on. It’s a very good one.”

Shpilman picked up the corona that Litvak had knocked from his grasp, and when Litvak neither accepted nor refused it, the yid lifted it to Litvak’s mouth and fitted it gently between his lips. It hung there, exuding its smells of gravy and cork and mesquite, cuntish smells that stirred old longings. There was a click, and a scrape, and then Litvak leaned wonderingly forward and poked the end of the cigar into the flame of his own Zippo lighter. He felt the momentary shock of a miracle. Then he grinned and nodded his thanks, feeling a kind of giddy relief at the belated arrival of a logical explanation: He must have left the lighter back in Sitka, where Gold or Turteltoyb had found it and brought it along on the flight to Peril Strait. Shpilman had borrowed it and, with his junkie instincts, pocketed it after lighting a papiros. Yes, good.

The cigar caught with a crackle and flared. When Litvak looked back up from the glowing coal, Shpilman was staring at him with those strange mosaic eyes, flecks of gold and green. Good, Litvak told himself again. A very good cigar.

“Go ahead,” Shpilman said. He pressed the Zippo into Litvak’s hand. “Go, Reb Litvak. Light the candle. There’s no prayer you say. There’s nothing you have to do or feel. You just light it. Go on.”

As logic drained away from the world, never entirely to return, Shpilman reached into Litvak’s jacket pocket and took out the glass and the wax and the wick. For this trick, Litvak could make himself no explanation. He took the candle from Shpilman and set it on a table. He struck the flint with a scratch of his thumb. He felt the intense warmth of Shpilman’s hand on his shoulder. The fist of his heart begin to slacken its grip, the way it might when the day came that he finally set foot in the home where he was meant to dwell. It was a terrifying sensation. He opened his mouth.

“No,” he said in a voice that had in it, to his wonder, a note of the human.

He snapped the lighter shut and knocked Shpilman’s hand aside with such violence that Shpilman lost his balance, stumbled, and hit his head on the metal shelf. The force of the blow jarred loose the candle and sent it crashing to the tile floor. The glass cracked into three large pieces. The cylinder of wax split in two.

“I don’t want it,” Litvak croaked. “I’m not ready.” But when he looked down at Shpilman, sprawled on the floor, dazed, bleeding from a cut on his right temple, he knew that it was already too late.