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? Shprintze1eh, 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 Untershtat. 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.”