Mizmor Boulevard is a parking lot, mourners and spectators in a haze of diesel fumes. Landsman threads a course among the bumpers and fenders and then plunges into the mass of people jammed onto the parkway strip. Boys and young men, hoping for a better view, have climbed up into the branches of a row of luckless European larches that never quite took root along the median. The yids around Landsman get out of his way, and when they don’t get out of his way, Landsman gives them a hint with the bones of his shoulder.
They smell of lamentation, these yids, long underwear, tobacco smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They’re praying like they’re going to faint, fainting like it’s a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren’t mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can’t be. It’s something else they feel has gone out of the world, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. This half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that’s too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan. Landsman puts his shoulder to them and mutters, “Pardon me.”
He makes for one great beast of a limousine, a custom twenty-foot stretch four-by-four. The journey from the top of the hill, down the hillside, across the boulevard, through the umbrellas and beards and Jewish ululations to the side of the big-ass limousine has a kind of jumpy, handheld quality in his imagination as he lives it. Amateur footage of an assassination attempt in progress. But Landsman hasn’t come to shoot anybody. He just wants to talk to the lady, get her attention, catch her eye. He just wants to ask her one question. Which question, nu, that he doesn’t know.
In the end somebody beats him to it: in fact, a dozen men. The reporters have tunneled their way through the black hats like Landsman, digging with their scapulae and elbows. When the diminutive woman in the black veil totters through the gates on the arm of her son-in-law, they haul out the questions they have brought. They unpocket them like stones and throw them all at once. They vandalize the woman with questions. She pays no attention; her head never turns, the veil never trembles or parts. Baronshteyn guides the dead man’s mother to the hulk of the limo. The chauffeur climbs down from the stretch four-by-four’s passenger seat. He’s a jockey-shaped Filipino with a scar on his chin like a second smile. He runs to open the door for his employer. Landsman is still a couple of hundred feet away. He isn’t going to make it in time to ask her a question, or to do anything at all.
A growl, a feral rolling in the throat, low and half human, a rumble of warning or dark admonition: one of the black hats standing by the cars has taken a reporter’s question amiss. Or maybe he’s taken them all amiss, along with the style in which they were tendered. Landsman sees the angry black hat, wide, blond, tieless, his shirttails untucked, and recognizes him as Dovid Sussman, the yid whom Berko Shemets teased out on Verbov Island. A bruiser with a bulge at the hinge of his jaw and another under his left arm. Sussman throws an arm around the neck of Dennis Brennan, poor thing, gets him in a choke hold. Lecturing Brennan with his teeth at his ear, Sussman drags the reporter back, out of the path of the family as they come through the gates.
That’s when one of the latkes steps in to intervene, which, after all, is what he’s there for. But because he’s scared—the kid looks scared—maybe he’s too free with his truncheon when it comes to the bones of Dovid Sussman’s head. There’s a sick snap, and then Sussman turns to liquid and pours himself onto the ground at the latke’s feet.
For an instant the crowd, the afternoon, the whole wide world of Jews breathes in and forgets to breathe out again. After that it’s madness, a Jewish riot, at once violent and verbal, fat with intemperate accusations and implacable curses. Skin diseases are called down, damnations and hemorrhages. Yelling, surging black hats, sticks and fists, shouting and screaming, beards fluttering like crusader flags, swearing, the smell of churning mud, of blood and ironed trousers. Two men carry a banner stretched between poles, bidding farewell to their lost prince Menachem; somebody grabs one pole and somebody else grabs another. The banner tears loose and gets sucked into the gears of the crowd. The poles are put to work on the jaws and craniums of policemen. The word FAREWELL painstakingly painted on the banner gets torn free and spat out. It sails into the air over the heads of the mourners and the policemen, the gangsters and the pious, the living and the dead.
Landsman loses track of the rebbe, but he sees a bunch of Rudashevskys pile the mother, Batsheva, into the back of the four-by-four. The chauffeur grabs the driver’s-side door and kicks up into his seat like a gymnast. The Rudashevskys pound on the side of the car, saying, “go go go.” Landsman, still groping in his pockets for the shining coin of one good question, watches, and watching, he notices a suite of small things. The Filipino chauffeur is rattled. He doesn’t fasten his shoulder strap. He doesn’t give a good solid cattle-clearing blast on his horn. And the stem of the lock at the top of the door panel never drops. The chauffeur simply throws the long black four-by-four into gear and rolls forward, gaining too much speed for such a crowded area.
Landsman steps back as the four-by-four shoulders its way toward him. A strand of mourners detaches itself from the greater black braid and drags along behind Batsheva Shpilman’s four-by-four. A slipstream of sorrow. For an instant the mourners hanging on to the car serve to block the Rudashevskys’ view of the four-by-four, and of anyone fool enough to try to climb inside it. Landsman nods, catching the rhythm of the crowd’s madness and his own. He watches for his moment and wiggles his fingers. When the car rumbles by, he yanks open the rear door.
Instantly, the power of the engine is translated into a sense of panic in his legs. It’s like a proof of the physics of his foolishness, the inescapable momentum of his own bad luck. As he gets dragged along beside the car for fifteen feet or so, he finds time to wonder if this was how the end came for his sister, a quick demonstration of gravity and mass. His wrists strain their cables. Then he gets a knee up into the limousine’s interior and tumbles in.
24
A dark cavern lit with blue diodes. Cool, dry, fragrant with some kind of lemon deodorizer. Landsman senses in himself a trace of that smell, a lemony hint of boundless hope and energy. This may have been the stupidest thing he’s ever done, but it needed to be done, and the feeling of having done it, for this instant, is the answer to the only question he knows how to ask.
“There’s ginger ale,” says the queen of Verbov Island. She’s folded like a throw rug, coiled in a shadowy back corner of the interior. Her dress is drab but cut of fine stuff, and the lining of her raincoat betrays a fashionable logo. “Drink it, I don’t care to.”
But Landsman gives his attention to the rear-facing seat, up by the chauffeur, and the likeliest source of trouble. Sitting there is six feet, maybe two hundred pounds, of female in a black sharkskin suit with a white-on-white collarless shirt. This formidable person’s eyes are gray and hard. They remind Landsman of the backs of two dull spoons. She wears a white earpiece wormed around the flange of her left ear, and her tomato-gravy hair is cut short as a man’s.
“I didn’t know they made lady Rudashevskys,” Landsman says, crouched on his toes in the wide space between the front- and rear-facing benches.
“That is Shprintzl,” says his hostess in the back of the car. Then Batsheva Shpilman lifts her veil. The body is frail, perhaps even gaunt, but it can’t be with age, because the fine-featured face, though hollow, is smooth, a pleasure to look at. She has wide-set eyes of a blue that wavers between heartbreaking and fatal. Her mouth is unpainted but full and red. The nostrils in her long, straight nose arch like a pair of wings. Her face is so strong and lovely, and her frame so wasted, that it’s disturbing to look at her. Her head sits atop her veined throat like an alien parasite, preying on her body. “I want you to
be sure to notice that she hasn’t killed you yet.”
“Thank you, Shprintzl,” Landsman says.
“No problem,” Shprintzl Rudashevsky says in American, in a voice like an onion rolling in a bucket.
Batsheva Shpilman points to the opposite end of the backseat. Her hand is gloved in black velvet, buttoned at the cuff with three black seed pearls. Landsman takes the suggestion and gets up off the floor. The seat is very comfortable. He can feel the cold sweat of an imaginary highball against his fingertips.
“Also, she hasn’t contacted any of her brothers or cousins in the other cars, even though, as you see, she’s wired right to them.”
“Tight-knit bunch, the Rudashevskys,” Landsman says, but he understands what she wants him to understand: “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Did I?” she says, and her lips contemplate but decide against lifting at one corner. “You’re the one who barged into my car.”
“Oh, is this a car? My mistake, I thought it was the Sixty-one bus.”
Shprintzl Rudashevsky’s wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth. “They’re asking about you, darling,” she says to the older woman with a nurselike tenderness. “They want to know if you’re all right.”
“Tell them I’m fine, Shprintzeleh. Tell them we’re on our way home.” She turns her soft eyes toward Landsman. “We’ll drop you at your hotel. I want to see it.” They’re a color he’s never seen, her eyes, a blue you would find in bird plumage or a stained-glass window. “Will that suit you, Detective Landsman?”
Landsman says that will suit him fine. While Shprintzl Rudashevsky murmurs into a concealed microphone, her employer lowers the partition and gives instructions to the chauffeur that will take them to the corner of Max Nordau and Berlevi.
“You look thirsty, Detective,” she says, raising the partition again. “You’re sure you won’t have a ginger ale? Shprintzeleh, get the gentleman a glass ginger ale.”
“Thank you, ma’am, I’m not thirsty.”
Batsheva Shpilman’s eyes widen, narrow, widen again. She’s taking inventory of him, checking it against what she knows or has heard. Her gaze is quick and unsparing. She would probably make a fine detective. “Not for ginger ale,” she says.
They turn onto Lincoln and roll along the shoreline, past Oysshtelung Island and the broken promise of the Safety Pin, headed toward the Untershtot. In nine minutes they will arrive at the Hotel Zamenhof. Those eyes of hers drown him in a jar of ether. They stick him with pins to a corkboard.
“Sure, all right, why not?” Landsman says.
Shprintzl Rudashevsky fixes him a cold bottle of ginger ale. Landsman holds it to his temples, then takes a swallow, fighting it down with a sensation of medicinal virtue.
“I haven’t sat this close to a strange man in forty-five years, Detective,” Batsheva Shpilman says. “It’s very wrong. I should be ashamed.”
“Particularly given your choice of male companions,” Landsman says.
“Do you mind?” She lowers the black moire, and her face is gone from the conversation. “I’ll feel more comfortable.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Nu,” she says. The veil puffs out with her breath. “All right. Yes, I wanted to talk to you.”
“I wanted to talk to you, too.”
“Why? Do you think that I killed my son?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t. But I was hoping you might know who did.”
“So!” she declares, a low thrill in her voice, as if she has caught Landsman out. “He was murdered.”
“Uh, well, yes, he was, ma’am. Didn’t—What did your husband tell you?”
“What my husband tells me,” she says, making it sound rhetorical, like the title of a very slim tract. “You’re married, Detective?”
“I was.”
“The marriage failed?”
“I guess that’s the best way to put it.” He reflects for a moment. “I guess that’s really the only way.”
“My marriage is a complete success,” she says without a trace of boastfulness or pride. “Do you understand what that means?”
“No, ma’am,” Landsman says. “I’m not sure that I do.”
“In every marriage, there are things,” she begins. She shakes her head once, and the veil trembles. “One of my grandsons was at my house today, before the funeral. Nine years old. I put the television for him in the sewing room, you’re not supposed to, but what does it matter, the little shkotz was bored. I sat with him ten minutes, watching. It was that cartoon program, the wolf that chases the blue rooster.”
Landsman says that he knows it.
“Then you know,” she says, “how that wolf can run in the middle of the air. He knows how to fly, but only so long as he still thinks he’s touching the ground. As soon as he looks down, and sees where he is, and understands what’s going on, then he falls and smashes into the ground.”
“I’ve seen that bit,” Landsman says.
“That’s how it is in a successful marriage,” says the rabbi’s wife. “I have spent the last fifty years running in the middle of the air. Not looking down. Outside of what God requires, I never talk to my husband. Or vice versa.”
“My parents had it worked out the same way,” Landsman says. He wonders if he and Bina might have lasted longer if they had given this traditional route a try. “Only they didn’t much trouble themselves over God’s requirements.”
“I heard about Mendel’s death from my son-in-law, Aryeh. And that man never tells me anything but lies.”
Landsman hears someone jumping up and down on a leather valise. It turns out to be the sound of Shprintzl Rudashevsky’s laughter.
“Go on,” Mrs. Shpilman says. “Please. Tell me.”
“Go on. Nu. Your son was shot. In a way that—Well, to be frank, ma’am, he was executed.” Landsman is glad for the veil when he pronounces that word. “Who by, that we can’t say. We’ve learned that some men, two or three men, were looking for Mendel, asking around. These men might not have been very nice. That was a few months back. We know he was using heroin when he died. So, at the end, he felt nothing. No pain, I mean.”
“Nothing, you mean,” she corrects him. Two blots, blacker than black silk, spread across the veil. “Go on.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. About your son. I should have said that right off.”
“I was relieved that you didn’t.”
“We think that whoever did this to him was better than amateur. But look, I admit it, since Friday morning we’re getting more or less nowhere with our investigation of your son’s death.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’” she says. “Meaning, naturally, Sitka Central.”
Now he wishes he could see her eyes. Because he gets the distinct idea that she is toying with him. That she knows he has no right or authority at his back.
“Not exactly,” Landsman says.
“The Homicide division.”
“No.”
“You and your partner.”
“Again, no.”
“Well, then, maybe I’m confused,” she says. “Who is this ‘we’ getting nowhere investigating my son’s death?”
“At this point? I, hmm, it’s sort of a theoretical inquiry.”
“I see.”
“By an independent entity.”
“My son-in-law,” she says, “claims that you have been suspended because you came by the island. Came by my house. You insulted my husband. You blamed him for being a bad father to Mendel. Aryeh told me that your badge has been taken away.”
Landsman rolls the cool shaft of the ginger ale glass along his forehead. “Yes, well. This entity I’m talking about,” he says. “So maybe they don’t give out with badges.”
“Only with theories.”
“That’s right.”
“Such as?”
“Such as. All right, here’s one: You were in occasional, maybe even regular, communicatio
n with Mendel. You heard from him. You knew where he was. He called you up every once in a while. He sent you postcards. Maybe you even saw him from time to time, on the sly. This secret ride home that you and Friend Rudashevsky are so kindly providing me, for example, it sort of gives me ideas in that direction.”
“I have not seen my son, my Mendel, in over twenty years,” she says. “Now I never will again.”
“But why, Mrs. Shpilman? What happened? Why did he leave the Verbovers? What did he do? Was there a break? An argument?”
She doesn’t answer for a minute, like she’s fighting the long habit of saying nothing to anyone, let alone to a secular policeman, about Mendel. Or maybe she’s fighting the mounting sense of pleasure she will take, in spite of herself, in remembering her son aloud.
“Such a match I made for him,” she says.
25
A thousand guests, some from as far away as Miami Beach and Buenos Aires. Seven catering trailers and a Volvo truck stuffed with food and wine. Gifts, swag, and tributes in heaps to rival the Baranof Range. Three days of fasting and prayer. The entire Muzikant family of klezmorim, enough for half a symphony orchestra. Every last Rudashevsky, even the great-grandfather, half drunk and shooting off an ancient Nagant revolver into the air. For a week leading up to the day, a line of people in the hall, out the door, around the corner, and two blocks down Ringelblum Avenue, hoping for a blessing from the bridegroom king. All day and night a noise around the house like a mob in search of a revolution.
An hour before the wedding they were still there, waiting for him, hats and slick umbrellas in the street. He was not likely, this late, to see them or hear their pleas and sob stories. But you never knew. It was always Mendel’s nature to make the unpredictable move.
She was at the window, peering through the curtains at the petitioners, when the girl came to say that Mendel was gone and that two ladies were here to see her. Mrs. Shpilman’s bedroom overlooked the side yard, but she could see between the neighboring houses through to the corner: hats and umbrellas, slick with rain. Jews shouldered together, soaked in longing for a glimpse of Mendel.