“Detective,” says the Rudashevsky to the right, maybe Yossele’s brother, maybe his cousin. Maybe both at once. “We heard you were in the neighborhood.”
“This is Detective Landsman, my partner. Could you please tell Rabbi Shpilman that we’d like to have a moment of his time? Please believe, we wouldn’t disturb him at this hour if it wasn’t so important.”
Black hats, even Verbovers, don’t usually challenge the right or authority of policemen to conduct police business in the Harkavy or on Verbov Island. They don’t cooperate, but they usually don’t interfere. On the other hand, to enter the home of exile’s strongest rabbi, at the very brink of the holiest moment of the week, for that you need a good reason. You need to be coming to tell him, for example, that his only son is dead.
“A moment of the rebbe’s time?” says a Rudashevsky.
“If you had a million dollars, please don’t mind my saying so, with all due respect, Detective Shemets;” says the other, broader of shoulder and hairier of knuckle than Yossele, laying a hand over his heart, “it wouldn’t be worth so much as that.”
Landsman turns to Berko. “Have you got that kind of money on you?”
Berko jabs Landsman in the side with an elbow. Landsman never walked a black-hat beat in his latke days, groping his way along a murky sea bottom of blank looks and silences that could crush a submarine. Landsman doesn’t know how to show the proper repect.
“Come, Yossele. Shmerl, sweetness,” Berko croons. “I need to get home to my table. Let us in.”
Yossele tugs on his brisket-colored chin muffler. Then the other begins to speak in a low, steady undertone. The bik is wearing, hidden by one of his looping auburn sidelocks, a headset-style microphone and ear- piece.
“I am to inquire respectfully,” the bik says after a moment, the force of the order flowing across his features, softening them as it stiffens his diction, “what business brings the distinguished officers of the law to he rebbe’s home so late this Friday afternoon.”
“Idiots!” Zimbalist says, a slug of vodka in him, reering up the steps like a fool of a bear on a unicycle. He grabs the lapels of Yosse1e Rudashevsky’s coat and dances with them, left and right, anger and grief. “They’re here about Mendele! ”
The men standing around in front of the Shpilman house have been muttering and commenting and critiquing the performance, but they shut up. Life wheezes in and out of their lungs, rattles in the snot of their noses. The heat of the lantern vaporizes the snow. The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsman feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist’s crying out the name of the rebbe’s lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering among them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it’s just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hour. Or maybe it’s the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night’s sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.
Yossele turns to Shmerl, the dough of his forehead kneaded, holding on to Zimbalist with the brainless tenderness of a brutal man. Shmerl speaks another few syllables into the heart of the Verbover rebbe’s house. He looks east, west. He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin. Then he eases open the paneled door. Yossele sets old Zimbalist down with a jingling of galoshes clasps and pats him on the check. “If you please, Detectives,” he says.
You come into a wainscoted hall, a door at the far end, on the left a wooden stair leading up to the second floor. The stairs and risers, the wainscot, even the floorboards are all cut from big slabs of some kind of pine, knotty and butter-colored. Along the wall opposite the stairway runs a low bench, also knotty pine, covered in a purple velvet cushion, worn to a shine in patches and bearing six round indentations made by years of Verbover buttocks.
“The esteemed detectives will please wait here,” Shmerl says.
He and Yossele return to their posts, leaving Landsman and Berko under the steady but indifferent scrutiny of a third hulking Rudashevsky who lounges against the baluster at the bottom of the stairs.
“Sit, Professor,” says the indoor Rudashevsky.
“Thank you,” he says. “But I don’t care to sit.”
“You all right, Professor?” Berko says, laying a hand on the maven’s arm.
“A handball court,” Zimbalist says as if in reply to the question. “Who plays handball anymore?”
Something in the pocket of Zimbalist’s coat catches Berko’s eye. Landsman takes a sudden interest in a small wooden rack affixed to the wall by the door, well stocked with two slick, colorful brochures. One is entitled “Who Is the Verbover Rebbe?” and it informs him that they are standing in the formal or ceremonial entrance of the house, and that the family comes and goes and does its living at the other end, just like in the house of the president of America. The other brochure they’re giving away is called “Five Great Truths and Five Big Lies About Verbover Hasidism.”
“I saw the movie,” Berko says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder.
The stair creaks. The Rudashevsky mumbles, as if announcing a change in the dinner menu, “Rabbi Baronshteyn.”
Landsman knows Baronshteyn only by reputation. Another boy wonder, with a law degree in addition to his rabbi’s smikha, he married one of the rebbe’s eight daughters. He is never photographed, and he never leaves Verbov Island, unless you believe the stories of his sneaking into some South Sitka roach motel in the dead of night to exact personal retribution on a policy game skimmer, or on some shlosser who mishandled a hit.
“Detective Shemets, Detective Landsman. I am Aryeh Baronshteyn, the rebbe’s gabay.”
Landsman is surprised by how young he is, thirty at the outside. High, narrow forehead, black eyes hard as a couple of stones left on a grave marker. He has concealed his girlish mouth in the manly bloom of a King Solomon beard, fitted with careful streaks of gray to suggest maturity. The sidelocks hang limp and orderly. He has the air of a self-denier, but his clothes betray the old Verbover love of flash. His calves are plump and muscular in their silk garters and white hose. He keeps his long feet encased in brushed black velveteen slippers. The frock coat looks fresh from the bespoke needle of Moses and Sons on Asch Street. Only the plain knit skullcap has a modest air. Underneath it, his brush-cut hair glints like the business end of a paint-stripping rotor. His face displays no trace of wariness, but Landsman can see where wariness has been carefully erased.
“Reb Baronshteyn,” Berko murmurs, taking off his hat. Landsman does likewise.
Baronshteyn keeps his hands in the pockets of his frock coat, a satin number with velour lapels and pocket flaps, He’s making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don’t know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.
“What do you want here?” he says. He mimes a glance at his watch, poking it from the cuff of his milled cotton shirt just long enough for them to read the name of Patek Philippe on its face. “It’s very late.”
“We’re here to talk to Rebbe Shpilman, Rabbi,” Landsman says. “If your time is so precious, then we surely don’t want to waste it by talking to you.”
“It isn’t my time that I fear to have you waste, Detective Landsman. And I can tell you right now that if you attempt to display, in this house, the disrespectful attitude and disgraceful behavior for which you are notorious, then you will not remain in this house. Is that clear?”