After Bina came over from Narcotics, they worked the same shift in Homicide for four solid years. Landsman partnered with Zelly Boybriker, and then Berko, and Bina had poor old Morris Handler, But one day the same sly angel who had brought them together in the first place arranged a conf1uence of leaves taken and injuries to Morris Handler that left Landsman and Bina partners, for the one and only time, on the Grinshteyn case. Together they endured that visitation of failure, failing every day for hours, failing in their bed at night, failing in the streets of Sitka. The murdered girl, Ariela, and the broken Grinshteyns, mother and father, ugly and ruined and hating each other and the hole they were left holding on to: He and Bina had shared that, too. And then there was Django, who took form and impetus from the failure of the Grinshteyn case, from that hole shaped like a plump little girl. Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery f1aw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away.
Landsman looks away.
The footprints in the snow have become shallow as an angel’s. Across the street a small, bent man leans into the wind, dragging a heavy suitcase past the boarded windows of Krasny’s. The wide white brim of his hat f1aps like the wings of a bird. Landsman watches the progress of Elijah the Prophet through the snowstorm and plans his own death. This is a fourth strategy he has evolved to cheer himself when he’s going down the drain. But of course he has to be careful not to overdo it.
Landsman, the son and paternal grandson of suicides’ has seen human beings dispatch themselves in every possible way, from the inept to the efficient. He knows how it should and should not be performed. Bridge leaps and dives from hotel windows: picturesque but iffy. Stairwell leaps: unreliable, an impulse decision, too much like an accidental dean. Slashing wrists, with or without the popular but unnecessary bathtub variation: harder than it seems, tinged with a girlish love of theater. Ritual disembowelment with a samurai sword: hard work, requires a second, and would smack, in a yid, of affectation. Landsman has never seen it done that way, but he knew a noz once who claimed that he had. Landsman’s grandfather threw himself under the wheels of a streetcar in Lodz, which showed a degree of determination that Landsman has always admired. His father employed thirty 100 mg tablets of Nembutal, washed down with a glass of caraway vodka, a method that has much to recommend it. Add a plastic bag over the head, capacious and free of holes, and you have yourself something neat, quiet, and reliable.
But when he envisions taking his own life, Landsman likes to do it with a handgun, like Melekh Gaystik, the champion of the world. His own chopped Model 39 is more than enough sholem for the job. If you know where to put the muzzle (just inside the angle of the mentum) and how to steer your shot (20 degrees off the vertical, toward the lizard core of the brain), it’s fast and reliable. Messy, but Landsman doesn’t have any qualms, for some reason, about leaving behind a mess.
“Since when do you like blintzes?”
He jumps at the sound of her voice. His knee bangs the table leg, and coffee splashes the plate glass in an exit-wound spatter.
“Hey, Skipper,” he says in American. He scrabbles for a napkin, but he took only one from the dispenser by the trays. The coffee is running everywhere. He grabs random scraps of paper from his jacket pocket and blots at the spreading spill.
“Anybody sitting here?” She balances the tray in one hand and fights off her swollen briefcase with the other. She’s wearing a particular expression that he knows well. Eyebrows arched, slight foretaste of a smile. It’s the face she puts on before she walks into a hotel ball room to mingle with a bunch of male law enforcement, or enters a grocery store in the Harkavy wearing a skirt that doesn’t cover her knees. It’s a face that says, I’m not looking for trouble here. I just came in for a pack of gum. She drops the bag and sits before he has a chance to reply.
“Please,” he says, pulling his own plate back to make room. Bina hands him some more napkins, and he takes care of the mess. He dumps the clump of soggy paper on a neighboring table. “I don’t know why I ordered them. You’re right, cheese blintzes, feh.”
Bina lays down a napkin with a knife, fork, and spoon. She takes two plates from the tray and sets them side by side: a scoop of tuna salad on one of Mrs. Nemintziner’s lettuce leaves, and a glinting golden square of noodle pudding. She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drink ingwater, Pepto-Bismol chews, and God knows what else. If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass-Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.
You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cow hide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.
“Tuna salad,” Landsman observes, thinking of how she stopped eating tuna when she found out she was pregnant with Django.
“Yeah, I try to ingest as much mercury as I can,” Bina says, reading the memory on his face. She swallows the enzyme tablet. “Mercury’s kind of my thing nowadays.”
Landsman jerks a thumb toward Mrs. Nemintziner, standing ready with her spoon.
“You ought to order the baked thermometer.”
“I would,” she says, “but they only had rectal.”
“See Penguin?”
“Penguin Simkowitz? Where?” She looks around, turning from the waist, and Landsman seizes the oportunity to peer into her shirt. He can see the freckled top of her left breast, the lace edge of her bra cup, the dark indication of her nipple against the cup. The desire floods him to run his hand inside her shirt, to hold her breast, to climb into the soft hollow there and curl up and fall asleep. When she turns back, she catches him in his dream of cleavage. Landsman feels a burn in his cheeks. “Huh,” she says.
“How was your day?” Landsman says, as if it’s the most natural question he could ask.
“Let’s make a deal,” she says, and her tone ices over.
She buttons the top button of her blouse. “How about we sit here, you and I, and eat our dinners together, and we don’t say one damned word about my day. How does that sound to you, Meyer?”
“I think that sounds all right,” he says. “Good.”
She spoons up a mouthful of tuna salad. He catches the glint of her gold-rimmed bicuspid and thinks of the day she came home with it, looped on nitrous oxide and inviting him to put his tongue into her mouth and see how it felt. After the first bite of tuna salad, Bina gets serious. She shovels in ten or eleven more spoonfuls, chewing and swallowing with abandon. Her breath comes through her nostrils in avid jets. Her eyes arc fixed on the intercourse of her plate and spoon. A girl with a healthy appetite, that was his mother’s first recorded statement on the subject of Bina Gelbfish twenty years ago. Like most of his mother’s compliments, it was convertible to an insult when needed. But Landsman trusts only a woman who eats like a man. When there is nothing left but a mayonnaise slick on the, lettuce leaf, Bina wipes her mouth on her napkin and lets out a deep sigh of satiety.