Bina has boiled up two cups of instant coffee. She hands one to Landsman. “Black and sweet,” she says. “Right?”

“Bina.”

“You’re on your own. The black flag stays put. You get caught, you get in a jam, you get your knees broken by Rudashevskys, I don’t know anything about it.” She goes over to her bag and takes out an accordion file thick with folders. She puts it on the veneer table. “The forensic is only a partial. Shpringer sort of left it hanging. Blood and hair. Latents. It isn’t much. The ballistics are still out.”

“Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn’t Lasker. This guy—”

She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

“I don’t know anything about it,” she says. She removes her hand. She takes a sip of instant coffee and makes a face. “Feh.”

She puts down the cup, picks up her bag, and goes to the door. She stops and looks back at Landsman, standing there in the bathrobe that she bought for him on his birthday when he turned thirty-five.

“You have some nerve,” she says. “I can’t believe you and Berko went out there.”

“We had to tell him his son was dead.”

“His son.”

“Mendel Shpilman. The rebbe’s only son.”

Bina opens her mouth, then closes it. Not astonished so much as engaged, sinking her terrier teeth into the information, gnawing on the bloody joint of it. Landsman can see that she likes the way it gives against the sharp grip of her jaw. But her eyes take on a weariness that Landsman recognizes. Bina will never lose her detective’s appetite for people’s stories, Landsman thinks, of puzzling her way back through them from the final burst of violence to the first mistake. But sometimes a shammes gets a little tired of that hunger.

“And what did the rebbe say?” She lets go of the doorknob with an air of genuine regret.

“He seemed a little bitter.”

“Did he seem surprised?”

“Not especially, but I don’t know what you can make of that. I take it the kid had been heading down the chute for a long time. Do I think Shpilman would have fed his own son a bullet? In theory, sure. That goes double for Baronshteyn.”

Her bag hits the floor like a body. She stands and works her shoulder in a small aching circle. He could offer to massage it for her, bur wisely, he refrains.

“I suppose I can expect a phone call,” she says. “From Baronshteyn. As soon as there are three stars in the sky.”

“Well, I wouldn’t listen too carefully when he tries to tell you how broken up he is that Mendel Shpilman is out of the picture. Everybody loves it when the prodigal returns, except for the guy that’s been sleeping in his pajamas.” Landsman takes a sip of the coffee, dreadfully bitter and sweet.

“The prodigal.”

“He was some kind of a miracle kid. At chess, at Torah, at languages. I heard a story today about him healing a woman’s cancer, not that I really believe that, but I guess there were a lot of stories going around about him inside the black-hat world. That he might be the Tzaddik Ha-Dor — you know what that is?”

“Sort of. Yes. Anyway, I know what the words mean,” Bina says. Her father, Guryeh Gelbfish, is a learned man in the traditional sense, and he squandered a certain portion of his learning on his only child, a girl. “The righteous man of this generation.”

“So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing up for work, one per generation, for the past couple of thousand years, right? Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.”

“He is despised and rejected of men,” Bina says, or rather, recites. “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” says Landsman. “Anyone. A bum. A scholar. A junkie. Even a shammes.”

“I guess it could be,” Bina says. She works it out in her mind, the road from wonder-working prodigy of the Verbovers to murdered junkie in a flophouse on Max Nordau Street. The story adds up in a way that appears to sadden her. “Anyway, I’m glad it isn’t me.”

“You don’t want to redeem the world anymore?”

“Did I used to want to redeem the world?”

“I think that you did, yes.”

She considers it, rubbing the side of her nose with a finger, trying to remember. “I guess I got over it,” she says, but Landsman doesn’t buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman. “It’s all talking chickens to me now.”

She should probably exit on that line, but she stands around for another fifteen seconds of unredeemed time, leaning against the door, watching Landsman fiddle with the frayed ends of his bathrobe sash.

“What are you going to tell Baronshteyn when he calls?” Landsman says.

“That you were totally out of line, and I’ll see that you come up for a board. I may have to lift your shield. I’ll try to fight it, but with this shomer from the Burial Society coming — Spade, a curse on him — I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver. And neither do you.”

“Okay, you warned me,” Landsman says. “I have been warned.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Now? Now I want to put a touch on the mother. Shpilman said nobody ever heard from Mendel or spoke to him. But for some reason, I’m not inclined to take his word for it.”

“Batsheva Shpilman. That is going to be a tough touch,” Bina says. “Especially for a man.”

“True,” Landsman says with a display of wistfulness.

“No,” Bina says. “No, Meyer. Forget it. You are on your own.”

“She’ll be at the funeral. All you need to do is—”

“All I need to do,” Bina says, “is stay out of the way of shomers, watch my ass, and get through the next two months without setting fire to it.”

“I’d be happy to watch your ass for you,” Landsman says, just for old times’ sake.

“Get dressed,” Bina says. “And do yourself a favor? Clean this shit up. Look at this dump. I can’t believe you’re living like this. Sweet God, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed, from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself.

“Only every time I see your face,” Landsman says.