“Nu, what should we talk about, then? Not your day, either.”

“Definitely not.”

“What does that leave us?”

“In my case,” Landsman says, “not very much.”

“Some things never change.” She pushes away the empty plate and calls forward the noodle pudding to meet its fate. It makes him happier than he has been in years just to see her giving that kugel the eye.

“I still like to talk about my car,” he says.

“You know I don’t care for love poetry.”

“Definitely let’s not talk about Reversion.”

“Agreed. And I do not want to hear about the talking chicken, or the kreplach shaped like the head of Maimonides, or any of that other miraculous shit.”

He wonders what Bina would make of the story that Zimbalist told them today about the man lying in a drawer in the basement of Sitka General.

“Nothing about Jews at all, let’s stipulate,” Landsman says.

“Stipulated, Meyer, I am heartily sick of Jews.”

“And not Alaska.”

“God, no.”

“No politics. Nothing about Russia, or Manchuria, or Germany, or the Arabs.”

“I am heartily sick of the Arabs, too,”

“How about the noodle pudding, then?” Landsman says.

“Good,” she says. “Only, please, Meyer, eat a little, it makes my heart ache to look at you, my God, you’re so thin. Here, you have to have a bite of this. I don’t know what they do to it, somebody told me they put a little ginger. Let me tell you, up in Yakovy, a good kugel is something you dream about.”

She cuts him a piece of noodle pudding and starts to poke it right into his mouth with her fork. Some thing like a cold hand grabs hold of his guts at the sight of the kugel coming his way. He averts his face. The fork stops in mid-trajectory. Bina dumps the wedge of egg custard and noodle, jeweled with sultanas, onto his plate beside the unmolested blintzes.

“Anyway, you should try it,” she says. She takes a couple of bites herself, then lays down her fork. “I guess that’s all there is to say about noodle pudding.”

Landsman sips his coffee, and Bina swallows her remaining pills with a glass of water.

“Nu,” she says.

“Okay, then,” says Landsman.

If he lets her go, he will never lie in the hollow of her breast, asleep. He will never sleep again without the help of a handful of Nembutal or the good offices of his chopped M-39.

Bina pushes back from the table and pulls on her parka. She returns the plastic box to the leather case, then shoulders it with a groan. “Good night, Meyer.”

“Where are you staying?”

“With my parents,” she says in the tone you might use to pronounce a death sentence on the planet.

“Oy vey.”

“Tell me about it. Just until I find a place. Anyway, it can’t be worse than the Hotel Zamenhof.”

She zips up her coat and then stands there for a long few seconds, submitting him to her shammes inspection. Her gaze is not as comprehensive as his — she misses the details sometimes — but the things that she does see, she can link up quickly in her mind to the things that she knows about women and men, victims and murderers. She can shape them with confidence into narratives that hold together and make sense. She does not solve cases so much as tell the stories of them.

“Look at you. You are like a house falling down.”

“I know,” Landsman says, feeling his chest tighten.

“I heard you were bad, but I thought they were just trying to cheer me up.”

He laughs and wipes his cheek with the sleeve of his jacket.

“What’s this?” she says. With the nails of her thumb and forefinger, she tweezes a crumpled, coffee-stained wad of paper from the mass of napkins that Landsman dumped onto the neighboring table. Landsman makes a grab at it, but Bina’s too fast for him, and she always was. She pulls apart the wad and stretches it flat.

“’Five Great Truths and Five Big Lies About Verbover Hasidism,’” she says. Her eyebrows reach for each other across the bridge of her nose. “You thinking of turning black hat on me?”

He doesn’t answer quickly enough, and she gathers what there is to be gathered from his face and his silence and what she knows about him, which is basically everything.

“What are you up to, Meyer?” she says. All at once she looks as weary and spent as he feels. “No. Never mind. I’m too fucking tired.” She crumples the Verbover brochure back up, and throws it at his head.

“We said we weren’t going to talk about it,” Landsman says.

“Yeah, well, we said a lot of things,” she says. “You and I.”

She half turns, getting a purchase on the shoulder strap of the bag in which she lives her life. “I want to see you tomorrow in my office.”

“Hmm. Right. Only the thing is,” Landsman says, “I’m just coming off a twelve-day shift.”

This statement, while correct, makes no apparent impression on Bina. She might not have heard him, or he might not be speaking an Indo-European language.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Unless I blow my brains out tonight.”

“I said no love poetry,” Bina says. She gathers up a tumbling coil of her dark-pumpkin hair and shoves it into a toothed clip above and behind her right ear. “Brains or no brains. Be in my office at nine.”

Landsman watches her walk across the dining area to the doors of the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria. He bets himself a dollar that she won’t look back at him before she puts up her hood and steps out into the snow. But he’s a charitable man, and it was a sucker bet, and so he never bothers to collect.

19

When the telephone wakes him at six the next morning, Landsman is sitting in the wing chair, in his white underpants, with a tender hold on the grip of his M-39.

Tenenboym is just going off duty. “You asked,” he says, and then he hangs up.

Landsman doesn’t remember putting in for a wake up call. He doesn’t remember polishing off the bottle of slivovitz that stands empty on the scratched urethane surface of the oak-veneer tabletop, next to the wing chair. He doesn’t remember eating the noodle pudding whose remaining third now huddles in a corner of a plastic clamshell container beside the bottle of slivovitz. From the position of the shards of painted glass on the floor, he can reconstruct having hurled his 1977 Sitka World’s Fair shot glass against the radiator. Maybe he was feeling frustrated over being unable to make any progress with the pocket chess set that lies facedown under the bed, its minute chessmen sprinkled liberally around the room. But he has no memory of the throw itself, or of shattering glass. He might have been drinking a toast to something or someone, with the radiator standing in for a fireplace. He doesn’t remember. But nothing about the squalid scenery of room 505 can be said to surprise him, least of all the loaded sholem in his hand.

He checks the firing pin safety and returns the gun to its holster, slung across the back of the wing chair. Then he goes over to the wall and drags the pull-down bed from its notch. He peels back the covers and climbs in. The linens are clean, and they smell of the steam press and of the dust in the hole in the wall. Dimly, Landsman recalls conceiving a romantic project, sometime around midnight the night before, to show up for work early, see what forensics and ballistics have made of the Shpilman case, maybe even go out to the islands, the Russian neighborhoods, and try to nudge the patzer ex-con Vassily Shitnovitzer. Do what he can, give it his best shot, before Bina takes a pair of pliers to his teeth and claws at nine. He smiles ruefully at the headstrong young bravo he was last midnight. A six A.M. wake up call.

He pulls the covers up over his head and closes his eyes. Unbidden, the configuration of pawns and pieces lays itself out on a chessboard in his mind, the Black king hemmed in but unchecked at the center of the board, the White pawn on the b file about to become something better. There is no longer any need for the pocket set; to his horror, he has the thing by heart. He tries to drive it from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.