“I saw the movie,” Berko says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder.
The stair creaks. The Rudashevsky mumbles, as if announcing a change in the dinner menu, “Rabbi Baronshteyn.”
Landsman knows Baronshteyn only by reputation. Another boy wonder, with a law degree in addition to his rabbi’s smikha, he married one of the rebbe’s eight daughters. He is never photographed, and he never leaves Verbov Island, unless you believe the stories of his sneaking into some South Sitka roach motel in the dead of night to exact personal retribution on a policy game skimmer, or on some shlosser who mishandled a hit.
“Detective Shemets, Detective Landsman. I am Aryeh Baronshteyn, the rebbe’s gabay.”
Landsman is surprised by how young he is, thirty at the outside. High, narrow forehead, black eyes hard as a couple of stones left on a grave marker. He has concealed his girlish mouth in the manly bloom of a King Solomon beard, fitted with careful streaks of gray to suggest maturity. The sidelocks hang limp and orderly. He has the air of a self-denier, but his clothes betray the old Verbover love of flash. His calves are plump and muscular in their silk garters and white hose. He keeps his long feet encased in brushed black velveteen slippers. The frock coat looks fresh from the bespoke needle of Moses and Sons on Asch Street. Only the plain knit skullcap has a modest air. Underneath it, his brush-cut hair glints like the business end of a paint-stripping rotor. His face displays no trace of wariness, but Landsman can see where wariness has been carefully erased.
“Reb Baronshteyn,” Berko murmurs, taking off his hat. Landsman does likewise.
Baronshteyn keeps his hands in the pockets of his frock coat, a satin number with velour lapels and pocket flaps, He’s making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don’t know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.
“What do you want here?” he says. He mimes a glance at his watch, poking it from the cuff of his milled cotton shirt just long enough for them to read the name of Patek Philippe on its face. “It’s very late.”
“We’re here to talk to Rebbe Shpilman, Rabbi,” Landsman says. “If your time is so precious, then we surely don’t want to waste it by talking to you.”
“It isn’t my time that I fear to have you waste, Detective Landsman. And I can tell you right now that if you attempt to display, in this house, the disrespectful attitude and disgraceful behavior for which you are notorious, then you will not remain in this house. Is that clear?”
“I think you have me mixed up with the other Detective Meyer Landsman,” Landsman says. “I’m the one who’s just doing his job.”
“Then you are here as part of a murder investiga tion? May I ask in what way it concerns the rebbe?”
“We really do need to talk to the rebbe,” Berko says.
“If he tells us he’d like to have you present, you’re welcome to stay. But with all due respect, Rabbi, we’re not here to answer your questions. And we aren’t here to waste anybody’s time.”
“In addition to being his adviser, Detective, I am the rebbe’s attorney. You know that.”
“We’re aware of that, sir.”
“My office is across the platz,” Baronshteyn says, going to the front door and holding it open like a gracious doorman. Snow pours down past the open doorway, glowing in the gaslight like an endless jackpot of coins. “I’m sure I will be able to answer whatever questions you have.”
“Baronshteyn, you puppy. Get out of their way.”
Zimbalist is on his feet now, hat collapsing over one ear, in his vast mangy coat and his miasma of mothballs and grief.
“Professor Zimbalist.” Baronshteyn’s tone is one of warning, but his eye grows keen as he takes in the ruin of the boundary maven. He may never have seen Zimbalist in proximity to an emotion. The spectacle clearly interests him. “Have a care.”
“You tried to take his place. Well, now you have it. How does it feel?” Zimbalist totters a step closer to the gabay. There must be all kinds of cords and tripwires crisscrossing the space between them. But for once the boundary maven seems to have mislaid his string map. “He’s more alive even now than you will ever be, you smelt, you waxworks.”
He crashes past Berko and Landsman, reaching for the banister or the gabay’s throat. Baronshteyn doesn’t flinch. Berko grabs hold of the belt at the waist of the bearskin coat and drags Zimbalist back.
“Who is?” says Baronshteyn. “Who are you talking about?” He looks at Landsman. “Detective, did some thing happen to Mendel Shpilman?”
Landsman will review the performance later with Berko, but his first impression is that Baronshteyn sounds surprised by the possibility.
“Professor,” Berko says. “We appreciate the help Thank you.” He zips up Zimbalist’s sweater and buttons his jacket. He tucks one side of the bearskin coat over the other and knots the belt tightly at the waist “Now, please, go home. Yossele, Shmerl, somebody walk the professor home before his wife gets worried and calls the police.”
Yossele takes Zimbalist by the arm, and they start down the steps.
Berko shuts the door against the cold. “Take us tu the rebbe, counselor,” he says. “Now.”
16
Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see.
“I suggest we dispense with the pleasantries,” the rebbe says.
His voice comes pitched high, droll, the voice of the well-proportioned, scholarly man he must have been once. Landsman has heard that it’s a glandular disorder. He has heard that the Verbover rebbe, for all his bulk, maintains the diet of a martyr, broth and roots and a daily crust of bread. But Landsman prefers to see the man as distended with the gas of violence and corruption. His belly filled with bones and shoes and the hearts of men, half digested in the acid of his Law.
“Sit down and tell me what you came here to say.”
“We can do that, rebbe,” Berko says.
They each take a chair in front of the rebbe’s desk.
The office is pure Austro-Hungarian empire. Behemoths of mahogany, ebony and bird’s-eye maple crowd the walls, ornate as cathedrals. In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover Clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed. It runs counterclock wise, reverse-numbered with the first twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its recovery was a turning point in the fortunes of the Verbover court and marked the start of Heskel Shpilman’s ascent. Baronshteyn takes up a position behind and to the right of the rebbe, at a lectern where he can keep one eye on the street, one eye on whatever volume is being combed for precedents and justifications, and one eye, a lidless inner eye, on the man who is the center of his existence.