“Coming through, please,” the maven says, headin for the front steps with their pretty railings of curlicued wrought iron. “Friend Belsky, move aside.”
The men make way as if Zimbalist is running toward a water bucket holding something on fire. Before they can quite close up the gap, they see Landsman and Berko coming their way and throw down a silence so heavy that Landsman can feel it pressing on the sides of his head. He can hear the snow fizzing and the sizzle each snowflake makes as it hits the top of the gas lamp. The men put on an exhibition of hard looks and innocent looks and looks so blank they threaten to vacuum all the air from Landsman’s lungs. Somebody says, “I don’t see any hammer.”
Detectives Landsman and Shemets wish them the joy of the Sabbath. Then they turn their attention to the biks by the door, a couple of thickset, red-haired, pop-eyed boys with pug noses and dense woolly beards the rusty gold of brisket gravy. Two red Rudashcvskys, biks from a long line of biks, bred for simplicity, density, power, and lightness of foot.
“Professor Zimbalist,” says the Rudashevsky to the left of the door. “A good Sabbath to you.”
“And to you, Friend Rudashevsky. I regret to disturb your watch on this peaceful afternoon.” The boundary maven settles the furry ottoman more snugly on his head. Off to a flowery start, but when goes to open the drawer of his face, no more coin falls out. Landsman reaches into his hip pocket. Zimbalist is just standing there, his arms hanging slack, maybe thinking it’s all his fault, that it was chess that bent the boy from the God-directed angle of his glory, and now Zimbalist has to go in there and tell the father the sorry ending of the tale. So Landsman brushes up against Zimbalist’s shoulder, with his fingers around the cold smooth neck of the pint of Canadian vodka in his pocket. He taps the bottle against Zimbalist’s bony claw until the old fart catches on and palms it.
“Nu, Yossele, it’s Detective Shemets,” Berko says, taking over the operation, squinting up into the scatering gaslight with a hand over his eyes. The gang of men behind them begins to murmur, sensing now the quick unfolding of something bad and marvelous. The wind jerks the snowflakes back and forth on its hundred hooks. “What’s up, yid?”
“Detective,” says the Rudashevsky to the right, maybe Yossele’s brother, maybe his cousin. Maybe both at once. “We heard you were in the neighborhood.”
“This is Detective Landsman, my partner. Could you please tell Rabbi Shpilman that we’d like to have a moment of his time? Please believe, we wouldn’t disturb him at this hour if it wasn’t so important.”
Black hats, even Verbovers, don’t usually challenge the right or authority of policemen to conduct police business in the Harkavy or on Verbov Island. They don’t cooperate, but they usually don’t interfere. On the other hand, to enter the home of exile’s strongest rabbi, at the very brink of the holiest moment of the week, for that you need a good reason. You need to be coming to tell him, for example, that his only son is dead.
“A moment of the rebbe’s time?” says a Rudashevsky.
“If you had a million dollars, please don’t mind my saying so, with all due respect, Detective Shemets;” says the other, broader of shoulder and hairier of knuckle than Yossele, laying a hand over his heart, “it wouldn’t be worth so much as that.”
Landsman turns to Berko. “Have you got that kind of money on you?”
Berko jabs Landsman in the side with an elbow. Landsman never walked a black-hat beat in his latke days, groping his way along a murky sea bottom of blank looks and silences that could crush a submarine. Landsman doesn’t know how to show the proper repect.
“Come, Yossele. Shmerl, sweetness,” Berko croons. “I need to get home to my table. Let us in.”
Yossele tugs on his brisket-colored chin muffler. Then the other begins to speak in a low, steady undertone. The bik is wearing, hidden by one of his looping auburn sidelocks, a headset-style microphone and ear- piece.
“I am to inquire respectfully,” the bik says after a moment, the force of the order flowing across his features, softening them as it stiffens his diction, “what business brings the distinguished officers of the law to he rebbe’s home so late this Friday afternoon.”
“Idiots!” Zimbalist says, a slug of vodka in him, reering up the steps like a fool of a bear on a unicycle. He grabs the lapels of Yosse1e Rudashevsky’s coat and dances with them, left and right, anger and grief. “They’re here about Mendele! ”
The men standing around in front of the Shpilman house have been muttering and commenting and critiquing the performance, but they shut up. Life wheezes in and out of their lungs, rattles in the snot of their noses. The heat of the lantern vaporizes the snow. The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsman feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist’s crying out the name of the rebbe’s lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering among them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it’s just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hour. Or maybe it’s the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night’s sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.
Yossele turns to Shmerl, the dough of his forehead kneaded, holding on to Zimbalist with the brainless tenderness of a brutal man. Shmerl speaks another few syllables into the heart of the Verbover rebbe’s house. He looks east, west. He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin. Then he eases open the paneled door. Yossele sets old Zimbalist down with a jingling of galoshes clasps and pats him on the check. “If you please, Detectives,” he says.
You come into a wainscoted hall, a door at the far end, on the left a wooden stair leading up to the second floor. The stairs and risers, the wainscot, even the floorboards are all cut from big slabs of some kind of pine, knotty and butter-colored. Along the wall opposite the stairway runs a low bench, also knotty pine, covered in a purple velvet cushion, worn to a shine in patches and bearing six round indentations made by years of Verbover buttocks.
“The esteemed detectives will please wait here,” Shmerl says.
He and Yossele return to their posts, leaving Landsman and Berko under the steady but indifferent scrutiny of a third hulking Rudashevsky who lounges against the baluster at the bottom of the stairs.
“Sit, Professor,” says the indoor Rudashevsky.
“Thank you,” he says. “But I don’t care to sit.”
“You all right, Professor?” Berko says, laying a hand on the maven’s arm.
“A handball court,” Zimbalist says as if in reply to the question. “Who plays handball anymore?”
Something in the pocket of Zimbalist’s coat catches Berko’s eye. Landsman takes a sudden interest in a small wooden rack affixed to the wall by the door, well stocked with two slick, colorful brochures. One is entitled “Who Is the Verbover Rebbe?” and it informs him that they are standing in the formal or ceremonial entrance of the house, and that the family comes and goes and does its living at the other end, just like in the house of the president of America. The other brochure they’re giving away is called “Five Great Truths and Five Big Lies About Verbover Hasidism.”