“The man has no voice, he has to write everything down. I asked him where I could find him if I needed to talk to him, and he wrote that he was going to Madagascar.”

“That’s a new one.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did he know our Frank?”

“Not well, he said.”

“Nobody knew our Frank,” Berko says. “But everybody is very sad that he died.” He buttons his coat over his belly, turns up his collar, settles his hat more firmly on his head. “Even you.”

“Fuck you,” Landsman says. “The yid was nothing to me.”

“Maybe he was a Russian? That might explain the chess. And your pal Vassily’s behavior. Maybe Lebed or Moskowits is behind the hit.”

“If he’s Russian, it doesn’t explain what the two black hats were so afraid of,” Landsman says. “Those two don’t know from Moskowits. Russian shtarkers, a gangland hit, it just doesn’t mean that much to your average Bobover.” He gives his chin another few pulls and then makes up his mind. He looks up at the strip of radiant gray sky that stretches along the top of the narrow alley behind the Hotel Einstein. “I wonder what time sunset is tonight.”

“Why? We’re going to poke a stick into the Harkavy, Meyer? I don’t think Bina will care much for that, we start stirring up the black hats down there.”

“You don’t, eh?” Landsman smiles. He takes the valet ticket from his pocket. “Then we’d better steer clear of the Harkavy.”

“Uh-oh. You have that smile.”

“You don’t like this smile?”

“Only I’ve noticed what comes after is usually a question that you plan to answer yourself".

“How about this one. What kind of a yid, Berko, tell me this, what kind of a yid can make a prison-hard Russian sociopath want to crap in his pants, and bring tears to the eyes of the most pious black hat in Sitka?”

“I know you want me to say a Verbover,” Berko says. After Berko passed out of the academy, his first billet was the Fifth Precinct, the Harkavy, where the Verbovers landed, along with most of their fellow black hats, after the 1948 arrival of the ninth Verbover rebbe, father-in-law of the present model, with the pitiful remnant of his court. It was a classic ghetto assignment, trying to help and protect people who disdain and despise you and the authority you represent. It ended when the young half-Indian latke took a bullet in the shoulder, two inches from his heart, in the Shavuos Massacre at Goldblatt’s Dairy Restaurant. “I know that’s who you want me to say.”

This is how Berko once explained to Landsman the sacred gang known as the Chasids of Verbov: They started out, back in the Ukraine, black hats like all the other black hats, scorning and keeping their distance from the trash and hoo-hah of the secular world, inside their imaginary ghetto wall of ritual and faith. Then the entire sect was burned in the fires of the Destruction, down to a hard, dense core of something blacker than any hat. What was left of the ninth Verbover rebbe emerged from those fires with eleven disciples and, among his family, only the sixth of his eight daughters. He rose into the air like a charred scrap of paper and blew to this narrow strip between the Baranof Mountains and the end of the world. And here he found a way to remake the old-style black-hat detachment. He carried its logic to its logical end, the way evil geniuses do in cheap novels. He built a criminal empire that profited on the meaningless tohubohu beyond the theoretical walls, on beings so flawed, corrupted, and hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all.

“I had the same thought, of course,” Berko confesses. “Which I immediately suppressed.” He claps his big hands over his face and leaves them there for a moment before dragging them slowly down, pulling at his cheeks until they stretch past his chin like the jowl flaps of a bulldog. “Woe is me, Meyer, you want us to go out to Verbov Island?”

“Fuck, no,” Landsman says in American. “Truth, Berko. I hate that place. If we have to go to an island, I’d much rather go to Madagascar.”

They stand there in the alley behind the Einstein, thinking through the numerous arguments against and the few that can be made in favor of pissing off the most powerful underworld characters north of the 55th parallel. They attempt to generate alternate explanations for the squirrelly behavior of the patzers in the Einstein.

“We’d better see Itzik Zimbalist,” Berko says finally. “Anybody else out there, it’s going to be as useful as talking to a dog. And a dog already broke my heart once today.”

12

The street grid here on the island is still Sitka’s, ruled and numbered, but apart from that, you are gone, sweetness: star-shot, teleported, spun clear through the wormhole to the planet of the Jews. Friday afternoon on Verbov Island, and Landsman’s Chevelle Super Sport surfs the wave of black hats along Avenue 225. The hats in question are felt numbers, with high, dented crowns and mile-wide brims, the kind favored by overseers in plantation melodramas. The women sport head scarves and glossy wigs spun from the hair of the poor Jewesses of Morocco and Mesopotamia. Their coats and long dresses are the finest rags of Paris and New York, their shoes the flower of Italy. Boys careen down the sidewalks on in-line roller skates in a slipstream of scarves and sidelocks, flashing the orange linings of their unzipped parkas. Girls hobbled by long skirts go along braided arm in arm, raucous chains of Verbover girls vehement and clannish as schools of philosophy. The sky has turned steely, the wind has died, and the air crackles with the alchemy of children and the promise of snow.

“Look at this place,” Landsman says. “It’s hopping.”

“Not one empty storefront.”

“And more of these no-good yids than ever.” Landsman stops for a red at NW Twenty-eight Street. Outside a corner store, by a study hall, Torah bachelors loiter, Scripture grifters, unmatchable luft-mensches and garden-variety hoodlums. When they notice Landsman’s car, with its reek of plaincloth man hubris and its inflammatory double-S on grille, they leave off yelling at one another and give Landsman the Bessarabian fish-eye. He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing.

“Look at those assholes looking,” Landsman say “I don’t like it.”

“Meyer.”

The truth is, black-hat Jews make Landsman angry, and they always have. He finds that it is a pleasurable anger, rich with layers of envy, condescension, resentment, and pity. He puts the car in gear and shoves open his door.

“Meyer. No.”

Landsman steps around the open door of the Super Sport. He feels the women watching. He smells the sudden fear on the breath of the men around him, like caries of the teeth. He hears the laughter of the chickens that have not yet met their fates, the hum of the air compressors keeping the carp alive in their tanks. He’s glowing like a needle that you heat to kill a tick.

“So, nu,” he says to the yids on the corner. “Which one of you buffaloes wants a ride in my sweet nozmobile?”

A yid steps forward, a fair-skinned slab, low and wide, with a lumpy forehead and a forked yellow beard. “I suggest you return to your vehicle, Officer,” he says softly, reasonably. “And go on where you’re going.”

Landsman grins. “Is that what you suggest?” he says.

The other street-corner men step forward now, filling in the space all around the bruiser with the lightning beard. There must be twenty of them, more than Landsman believed at first. Landsman’s glow gutters, flickers like a lightbulb going bad.

“I’ll put it another way,” suys the blond bruiser, a bulge at his hip drawing the attention of his ringers. “Get back in the car.”