“My partner was disappointed by the welcome we received,” Berko says.
“It lacked that Sabbath glow,” Landsman says, lighting a papiros of his own. “In my opinion.”
Zimbalist slides a three-cornered copper ashtray across the desk. On the side of the ashtray, it says krasny’s tobacco and stationery, which is where Isidor Landsman used to go for his monthly copy of Chess Review. Krasny’s, with its lending library and encyclopedic humidor and annual poetry prize, was crushed by American chain stores years ago, and at the sight of this homely ashtray, the squeeze box of Landsman’s heart gives a nostalgic wheeze.
“Two years of my life I gave those people,” Berko says. “You’d think some of them could remember me. Am I that easy to forget?”
“Let me tell you something, Detective.” With an other squeak of the rubber donut, Zimbalist is up again and pouring tea into three filthy glasses. “The way they breed around here, those people you saw in the street today aren’t the ones you knew eight years ago, those are their grandchildren. Nowadays they’re born pregnant.”
He hands them each a steaming glass, too hot to hold. It scalds the tips of Landsman’s fingers. It smells like grass, rose hips, maybe a hint of string.
“They keep on making new Jews,” Berko says, stirring a spoonful of jam into his glass. “Nobody is making places to put them.”
“That is the truth,” Zimbalist says as his bony ass hits the donut. He grimaces. “Strange times to be a Jew.”
“Not around here, apparently,” says Landsman.
“Strictly life as usual on Verbov Island. A stolen BMW in every driveway and a talking chicken in every pot.”
“These people don’t worry until the rebbe tells them to worry,” Zimbalist says.
“Maybe they don’t have anything to worry about,” Berko says. “Maybe the rebbe already took care of the problem.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
“So don’t believe it.”
One of the garage doors goes sliding back on its wheels, and a white van pulls in, a bright mask of snow on its windshield. Four men in yellow coveralls pile out of the van, their noses red, their beards tied up in black nets. They start blowing their noses and stamping their feet, and Zimbalist has to go over and yell at them for a while. It turns out there was a problem near the reservoir in Sholem-Aleykhem Park, some idiot at Municipal put up a handball wall, right smack in the middle of a make-believe doorway between two light poles.
They all tramp over to the map table in the middle of the office. While Zimbalist gets down the appropriate chart and unrolls it, the crew members take turns nodding and flexing their scowling muscles at Landsman and Berko. After that the crew just ignores them.
“They say the maven has a string map for every city where ten Jewish men ever bumped noses,” Berko says to Landsman. “Clear on back to Jericho.”
“I started that rumor myself,” Zimbalist says, keeping his eyes on the chart. He tracks down the site, and one of the boys sketches in the handball wall with the stub of a pencil. Zimbalist quickly plots out a work around that will hold through sundown tomorrow, a salient in the great imaginary wall of the eruv. He sends his boys back down to the Harkavy to run some plastic pipe up the sides of a couple of nearby phone poles, so that the Satmars who live on the east side of Sholem-Aleykhem Park can take their dogs out for a walk without endangering their souls.
“I’m sorry,” he says, coming back around the desk. He winces. “I don’t enjoy the act of sitting any more. Now, what can I do for you? I doubt very much that you came here with a question about reshus harabim?
“We’re working a homicide, Professor Zimbalist,” Landsman says. “And we have reason to believe the deceased may have been a Verbover, or had ties to the Verbovers, at least at one time.”
“Ties,” the maven says, giving them a glimpse of those pipe-organ stalactites of his. “I suppose I know something about those.”
“He was living in a hotel on Max Nordau Street under the name of Emanuel Lasker.”
“Lasker? Like the chess player?” There’s a crease in the parchment of Zimbalist’s yellow forehead, and deep in the eye sockets, a scrape of f1int and steel: surprise, puzzlement, a memory kindling. “I used to follow the game,” he explains. “A long time ago.”
“So did I,” Landsman says. “So did our dead guy, right up to the end. Next to the body, there was a game all set up. He was reading Siegbert Tarrasch. And he was familiar to the regulars at the Einstein Chess Club. They knew him as Frank.”
“Frank,” the boundary maven says, giving it a Yankee twang. “Frank, Frank, Frank. That was his first name? It’s a common Jewish last name, but a first name, no. You know for a fact he was a Jew, this Frank?”
Berko and Landsman exchange a quick look. They don’t know anything for sure. The phylacteries in the nightstand could have been a plant or a memento, something left behind by a prior occupant of room 208. Nobody at the Einstein Club claimed to have seen Frank the dead junkie in shul, rocking in the grip of the Standing Prayer.
“We have reason to believe,” Berko repeats calmly, “that he may at one time have been a Verbover Jew.”
“What kind of reason?”
“There were a couple of likely telephone poles,” Landsman says. “We tied a string between them.”
He reaches into his pocket and takes out an envelope.
He passes one of Shpringer’s death Polaroids across the desk to Zimbalist, who holds it at arm’s length, long enough to form the idea that it’s a picture of a corpse. He takes a deep breath and purses his lips, getting ready to lay on them a solid professorial consideration of the evidence at hand. A picture of a dead man, it’s a break, to be honest, in the routine of a boundary maven’s life. Then he looks at the picture, and in the instant before he regains absolute control of his features Landsman sees Zimbalist take a swift punch in the belly. The wind departs his lungs, and the blood drains from his face. In his eyes, the steady maven flicker of intelligence is snuffed out. For a second Landsman is looking at a Polaroid of a dead boundary maven. Then the lights come back on in the old fart’s face. Berko and Landsman wait a little, and then a little more, and Landsman understands that the boundary maven is fighting as hard as he can to maintain that control, to hold on to the chance of making his next words Detectives, I have never seen that man before in my life, and having it sound plausible, inevitable, true.
“Who was he, Professor Zimbalist?” Berko says at last.
Zimbalist sets the photograph down on the desk and looks at it some more, not bothering about what his eyes or his lips might be doing.
“Oy, that boy,” he says. “That sweet, sweet boy.” He takes a handkerchief from the pocket of his zippered cardigan and blots the tears from his cheeks and barks once. It’s a horrible sound. Landsman picks up the maven’s glass of tea and pours it into his own. From his hip pocket, he takes the bottle of vodka he impounded in the men’s room of the Vorsht that morning. He pours two fingers into the glass of tea and then holds the cup out to the old fart.
Zimbalist takes the vodka without a word and knocks it down in one shot. Then he returns the handkerchief to its pocket and gives Landsman his photograph.
“I taught that boy to play chess,” he says. “When that man was a boy, I mean. Before he grew up. I’m sorry, I’m not making sense.” He goes for another Broadway, but he has already smoked them all. It takes him a while to figure this out. He sits there, poking around in the foil with a hooked finger, as if he’s going for the peanut in a package of Cracker Jack. Landsman fixes him up with a smoke. “Thanks, Landsman. Thank you.”
But then he doesn’t say anything, he just sits there watching the papiros burn down. He peers out from his cavernous eyeholes at Berko, then steals a cardplayer peek at Landsman. He’s recovering from the shock now. Trying to map the situation, the lines he cannot cross, the doorways that he mustn’t step through on peril of his soul. The hairy, mottled crab of his hand flicks one of its legs toward the telephone on his desk. In another minute, the truth and darkness of life will once again have been remanded to the custody of lawyers.