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 wheelchair 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 long 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 bloodstream was beginning to tell. But when they reached 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.
40
Just as Litvak lays down his pen, you can hear a tumult outside: half a curse, glass breaking, the wind huffing out of somebody’s lungs. Then Berko Shemets comes promenading into the bedroom. He has Gold’s head nestled under one arm like a nice roast and the rest of Gold draggling along behind. The ganef’s heels plow deep furrows in the carpet. Berko slams the door behind them. He has his sholem out, and it hungers like a compass needle for the magnetic north of Alter Litvak. Hertz’s blood is mapped across Berko’s hunting shirt and jeans. Berko’s hat is pushed back in a way that makes his face look all brow and eye whites. The head of Gold glares oracular from the crook of Berko’s arm.
“You should shit blood and pus,” Gold intones. “You should get scabies like Job.”
Berko’s gun swings around to get a look at the young yid’s brain in its breakable container. Gold stops struggling, and the gun resumes its one-eyed inspection of Alter Litvak’s chest.
“Berko,” Landsman says. “What’s this craziness?”
Berko heaves his gaze toward Landsman like a great burden. He opens his lips, closes them, draws a breath. He seems to have something important that he wants to express, a name, a spell, an equation that can bend time or unknit the strings of the world. Or maybe he’s trying to keep from coming unknit himself.
“That yid,” he says, and then softer, his voice a little husky, “My mother.”
Landsman has maybe seen a photograph of Laurie Jo Bear. He manages to scare up a vague memory of teased black bangs, pinkish glasses, a wiseass smile. But the woman is not even a ghost to him. Berko used to tell stories about life in the Indianer-Lands. Basketball, seal hunts, drunks and uncles, Willie Dick stories, the story of the human ear on the table. Landsman doesn’t remember any stories about the mother. He supposes that he always knew there had to be some kind of cost to Berko in turning himself inside out the way he did, some kind of heroic feat of forgetting. He just never bothered to think of it as a loss. A failure of imagination, a worse sin in a shammes than going into a hot place with no backup. Or maybe it was the same sin in a different form.
“No doubt,” Landsman says, taking a step toward his partner. “Bad guy. Worth a bullet.”
“You have two little boys, Berko,” Bina says in her flattest tone. “You have Ester-Malke. You have a future not to throw away.”
“He does not,” Gold says, or tries to say. Berko puts a deeper squeeze on him, and Gold gags, trying to turn over, to gain purchase with his feet.
Litvak scrawls something in the back of the pad without taking his
eyes off of Berko.
“What is it?” Berko says. “What did he say?”
No future here for any Jew
“Yeah, yeah,” says Landsman. “We get it already.”
He grabs the pen and the pad away from Litvak. He flips over the last page and writes, in American, DON’T BE AN IDIOT! YOUR ACTING LIKE ME! He tears out the sheet of paper, then tosses the pad and pen back to Litvak. He holds the sheet up in front of Berko’s face so that his partner can read it. It’s a fairly persuasive argument. Berko lets go of Gold right as the yid is turning a bruised color all over. Gold drops to the floor, gasping for breath. The gun in Berko’s fist wavers.
“He killed your sister, Meyer.”
“I don’t know if he did or not,” Landsman says. He turns to Litvak. “Did you?”
Litvak shakes his head and starts to write something out on the pad, but before he finishes, a cheer goes up in the outer room. The heartfelt but self-conscious whoop of young men watching something great on television. A goal has been scored. A girl playing beach volleyball has fallen out of her bikini top. A moment later, Landsman hears the cheer echoing, the sound of it carried through the open window of the penthouse as if on a wind from far away, the Harkavy, the Nachtasyl. Litvak smiles and puts down the pad and pen with a strange finality, as if he has nothing left to say. As if his whole confession was leading to—was made possible by—only this moment. Gold crawls to the door, drags it open, and then staggers to his feet and into the outer room. Bina goes over to Berko and holds out her hand, and after a moment Berko lays the gun across her palm.
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.