The garage door creaks and rumbles, and with a moan of gratitude, Zimbalist starts to pop up again, but this time Berko beats him to his feet. He drops a heavy hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Sit down, Professor,” he says. “I beg you. Take it slow if you have to, but please, sit your ass down on that donut.” He leaves the hand where it is, giving Zimbalist a gentle squeeze, and nods toward the garage. “Meyer.”

Landsman crosses the workshop to the garage and hauls out his shield. He walks directly into the path of the van as if the shield really is a badge that can stop a two-ton Chevy. The driver hits the brakes, and the howl of tires echoes against the cold stone walls of the garage. The driver rolls down his window. He has the full Zimbalist crew equipage: beard in a net, yellow coverall, well developed scowl.

“What gives, Detective?” he wants to know.

“Go take a drive,” Landsman says. “We’re talking.”

He reaches over to the dispatch panel and grabs hold of the skulking bachelor by the collar of his long coat. Dangles the kid like a puppy around to the passenger side of the van and drags open the side door, then tenderly shoves the bachelor into the van. “And take this little pisher with you.”

“Boss?” the driver calls over to the boundary maven. After a moment Zimbalist nods and waves the driver away.

“But where should I go?” the driver says to Landsman.

“I don’t know,” Landsman says. He drags the van’s door shut and shoves it home. “Go buy me a nice present.”

Landsman pounds on the hood of the van, and it rolls back out into the storm of white lines being knit like strings of the boundary maven across the replica housefronts and the blazing gray sky. Landsman pulls the garage door into place and throws the latch.

“Nu, how about you start over?” he says to Zimbal ist when he sits down again in the ladder back chair. He crosses his legs and lights another papiros for each of them. “We have plenty of time.”

“Come on, Professor,” Berko says. “You know the victim since he’s a boy, right? All those memories have got to be going around and around in your head right now. As bad as you feel, it’s going to feel better if you just start talking.”

“It isn’t that,” the boundary maven says. “It’s — It isn’t that.” He takes the lit papiros from Landsman, and this time he smokes most of it before he starts to talk. He is a learned yid, and he likes to have his thoughts I order.

“His name is Menachem,” he begins. “Mendel. He is, or was, thirty-eight, a year older than you, Detective Shemets, but he had the same birthday, August fifteenth, isn’t that right? Eh? I thought so. You see? This is the map cabinet.” He taps his hairless dom “Maps of Jericho, Detective Shemets, Jericho and Tyre.”

Tapping the map cabinet gets a little out of control and he knocks the yarmulke off his head. When he grabs at it, ash cascades all down his sweater.

“Mendele’s IQ was measured at one-seventy,” he continues. “By the time he was eight or nine, he could read Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Spanish, Latin, Greek. The most difficult texts, the thorniest tangle of logic and argument. By then Mendele was already a much better chess player than I could ever hop to be. He had a remarkable memory for recorded games; he had only to read a transcript once, and after that, he could reproduce it on a board or in his head, move by move, without a mistake. When he was older and they didn’t let him play so much anymore, he would work through famous games in his head. He must have known three, four hundred games by heart.”

“That’s what they used to say about Melekh Gayik,” Landsman says. “He had that kind of mind for the game.”

“Melekh Gaystik,” Zimbalist says. “Gaystik was a freak. It was not human, the way Gaystik played. He had a mind like some kind of bug, the only thing he new to do was eat you. He was rude. Filthy. Mean. Mendele wasn’t like that at all. He made toys for his sisters, dolls out of clothespins and felt, a house from a box of oatmeal. Always glue on his fingers, a clothespin in his pocket with a face on it. I would give him twine for the hair. Eight little sisters hanging off him all the time. A pet duck that used to follow him around like a dog.” Zimbalist’s thin brown lips hitch themselves up at the corners. “Believe it or not, I once arranged for a match to be played between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik. You could do such things — Gaystik was always broke and in debt, and he would have played against a half-drunk bear if the money was right. The boy was twelve at the time, Gaystik twenty-six. It was the year before he won the championship at Petersburg. They played three games in the back of my shop, which at that time — you remember, Detective — was on Ringel blum Avenue. I offered Gaystik five thousand dollars to play against Mendele. The boy won the first and the third. The second game he had Black and played Gaystik to a draw. Yes, Gaystik was only too happy to keep the match a secret.”

“Why?” Landsman wants to know. “Why did the games have to be kept secret?”

“Because this boy,” the boundary maven says. “The one who died in a hotel room on Max Nordau Street. Not a nice hotel, I imagine.”

“A fleabag,” Landsman says.

“He was shooting heroin into his arm?”

Landsman nods, and after a hard second or two, Zimbalist nods, too.

“Yes. Of course. Nu. The reason why I was obliged to arrange the games in secret was that this boy had been forbidden to play chess with outsiders. Somehow or other, I never learned how, Mendele’s father got wind of the match against Gaystik. It was a near thing for me. In spite of the fact that my wife was a relative of the father, I almost lost his haskama, which at that time was the foundation of my business. I built this whole operation on that endorsement.”

“The father. You’re not saying — it was Heskel Shpilman,” Berko says. “The man there in the picture is the son of the Verbover rebbe.”

Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.

“That’s right,” Zimbalist says at last. “Mendel Shpilman, The only son. He had a twin brother who was born dead. Later, that was interpreted as a sign.”

Landsman says, “A sign of what? That he would be a prodigy? That he would turn out to be a junkie living in a cheap Untershtat flop?”

“Not that,” says Zimbalist. “That nobody imagined.”

“They said … they used to say … ” Berko begins. He screws up his face, as if he knows what he’ll say next is going to irk Landsman or give him cause for scorn. He unscrews his brown eyes, lets it pass. He can’t bring himself to repeat it. “Mendel Shpilman. Dear God. I heard some stories.”

“A lot of stories,” Zimbalist says. “Nothing but stories till he was twenty years old.”

“What kind of stories?” Landsman says, duly irked. “Stories about what? Tell me already, damn you.”