Landsman clears his throat. He is the primary, and this is his job to do. He steals another glance at the Verboover Clock. There are seven minutes remaining in his sorry excuse for a week.
“Before you begin, Detectives,” says Aryeh Baronshteyn, “let me state for the record that I am here in my capacity as attorney to Rabbi Shpilman, Rebbe, if you have any doubt about whether you ought to answer question put to you by the detectives, please refrain from answering, and allow me to ask them to clarify or rephrase it.”
“This isn’t an interrogation, Rabbi Baronshteyn,” Berko says.
“You are welcome here, more than welcome, Aryeh,” the rebbe says. “Indeed, I insist that you be present. But as my gabay and my son-in-law. Not as my lawyer. For this I don’t need a lawyer.”
“If I may, dear Rebbe. These men are homicide detectives. You are the Verbover rebbe. If you don’t need a lawyer, then nobody needs a lawyer. And believe me, everybody needs a lawyer.” Baronshteyn slides a pad of yellow paper from the interior or the lectern, where he no doubt keeps his vials of curare and his necklaces of severed human ears. He unscrews the cap of a fountain pen. “I will at least take notes. On,” he deadpans, “a legal pad.”
The Verbover rebbe contemplates Landsman from deep inside the redoubt of his flesh. He has light eyes, somewhere between green and gold. They’re nothing like the pebbles abandoned by mourners on Baronshteynx tombstone puss. Fatherly eyes that suffer and forgive and find amusement. They know what Landsman has lost, what he has squandered and let slip from his grasp through doubt, faithlessness, and the pursuit of being tough. They understand the furious wobble that throws off the trajectory of Landsman’s good intentions. They comprehend the love affair that Landsman has with violence, his wild willingness to put his body out there on the street to break and to be broken. Until this minute Landsman didn’t grasp what he and every noz in the District, and the Russian shtarkers and small-time wiseguys, and the FBI and the IRS and the ATF, were up against. He never understood how the other sects could tolerate and even defer to the presence of these pious gangsters in their black-hat midst. You could lead men with a pair of eyes like that. You could send them to the very lip of whatever abyss you chose.
“Tell me why you are here, Detective Landsman,” the rebbe says.
Through the door of the outer office comes the muffled jangle of a telephone. There is no phone on desk and none in sight. The rebbe works some feat of semaphore with half an eyebrow and a minor muscle of the eye. Baronshteyn puts down his pen. The ringing swells and dwindles as Baronshteyn slips the black missive of his body through the slot of the office door. A moment later, Landsman hears him answer. The words are unclear, the tone curt, maybe even harsh.
The rebbe catches Landsman trying to eavesdrop and puts his eyebrow muscles to more strenuous use. “Right,” says Landsman. “It’s like this. It so happens, Rabbi Shpilman, that I live in the Zamenhof. It’s a hotel, not a good one, down on Max Nordau Street. Last night the manager knocked on my door nd asked me would I mind coming down to have a look at another guest in the hotel. The manager had been worried about this guest. He was afraid the Jew might have overdosed. And so he had let himself into the room. It turned out that the man was dead. He was registered under an assumed name. He had no ‘dentification.’ But there were a few hints of this and that in his room. And today my partner and I followed up on one of those hints, and it led us here. To you. We believe — we are all but certain — that the dead man was your son.”
Baronshteyn sidles back into the room as Landsman is giving the news. His face has been wiped, as if with a soft cloth, of all prints or smudges of emotion.
“All but certain,” the rebbe says dully, nothing moving in his face but the lights in his eyes. “I see. All but certain. Hints of this and that.”
“We have a picture,” Landsman says. Once again he produces like a grim magician Shpringer’s photograph of the dead Jew in 208. He starts to pass it to the rebbe but consideration, a sudden flutter of sympathy, stops his hand.
“Perhaps it would be best,” says Baronshteyn, “if I—”
“No,” the rebbe says.
Shpilman takes the photograph from Landsman and, with both hands, brings it very close to his face, straight up into the precinct of his right eyeball. He’s only nearsighted, but there is something vampiric in the gesture, as if he’s trying to drain a vital liquor from the photograph with the lamprey mouth of his eye. He measures it from top to bottom and end to end. His expression never alters. Then he lowers the photograph to the clutter of his desk and clucks his tongue once.
Baronshteyn steps forward to take a look at the picture, but the rebbe waves him off and says, “It’s him.”
Landsman, his instruments dialed up to full gain, widest aperture, is tuned to catch some faint radiation of regret or satisfaction that might escape the singularities at the heart of Baronshteyn’s eyes. And it’s there; a brief tracer arc of particles lights them up. But what Landsman detects in that instant, to his surprise, is disappointment. For an instant Aryeh Baronshteyn looks like a, man who just drew an ace of spades and is contemplating the fan of useless diamonds in his hand. He exhales a short breath, half a sigh, and walks slowly back to his lectern.
“Shot,” the rebbe says.
“Once,” says Landsman.
“By whom, please?”
“Well, we don’t know that.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Not so far.”
“Motive? ”
Landsman says no, then turns to Berko for confirmation, and Berko gives his head a somber shake.
“Shot.” The Rebbe shakes his head as if marveling: How do you like that? With no discernible change in his voice or manner, he says, “You are well, Detective Shemets?”
“I can’t complain, Rabbi Shpilman.”
“Your wife and children? Healthy and strong?”
“They could be worse.”
“Two sons, I believe, one an infant.”
“Right, as usual.”
The massive cheeks tremble in assent or satisfaction. The rebbe murmurs a conventional blessing on the heads of Berko’s little boys. Then his gaze rolls in Landsman’s direction, and when it locks on him, Landsman feels a stab of panic. The rebbe knows everything. He knows about the mosaic chromosome and the boy Landsman sacrificed to preserve hard-earned illusions about the tendency of life to get things wrong. And now he’s going to offer a blessing for Django, too. But the rebbe says nothing, and the gears in the Verbover Clock grind away. Berko glances at his wrist watch; time to get home to the candles and the wine. To his blessed boys, who could be worse. To Ester Malke, with the braided loaf of another child tucked somewhere in her belly. He and Landsman have no dispensation to be here past sundown, investigating a case that officially no longer exists. No one’s life is at stake. There is nothing to be done to save any of them, not the yids in this room, not the yid, poor thing, who brought them here.
“Rabbi Shpilman?”
“Yes, Detective Landsman?”
“Are you all right?”
“Do I seem ‘all right’ to you, Detective Landsman?”
“I’ve only just had the honor of meeting you,” Landsman says carefully, more in deference to Berko’s sensibilities than to the rabbi or his office. “But to be honest, you seem all right.”
“In a way that appears suspicious? That seems to inculpate me, perhaps?”
“Rebbe, please, no jokes,” Baronshteyn says.
“As to that,” Landsman says, ignoring the mouth-piece, “I wouldn’t venture an opinion.”
“My son has been dead to me for many years, Detective. Many years. I tore my clothes and said kadish and lit a candle for his loss long ago.” The words themselves trade in anger and bitterness, but his tone breathtakingly void of emotion. “What you found in the Zamenhof Hotel — was it the Zamenhof? — what you found there, if it is him, that was only a husk. The kernel was long since cut out and spoiled.”