The accompanying text whips up a tissue of miracles, evasions, and outright lies about the life and death of Menachem-Mendel Shpilman, late Thursday night, at the Hotel Zamenhof on Max Nordau Street. According to the medical examiner’s office — the examining doctor himself having moved to Canada — the preliminary finding on cause of death is something known in fairy tales as “drug-related misadventure.” “Though little known to the world outside,” the Tog’s man writes,

in the closed world of the pious, Mr. Shpilman was viewed, for the better part of his early life, as a prodigy, a wonder, and a holy teacher, indeed, as possibly the long promised Redeemer. The old Shpilman home on S. Ansky Street in the Harkavy was often thronged with visitors and supplicants during Mr. Shpilman’s childhood, with the devout and the curious traveling from as far as Buenos Aires and Beirut to meet the talented boy who was born on the fateful ninth day of the month of Av. Many hoped and even arranged to be present on one of a number of occasions when rumors flew that he was about to “declare his kingdom.” But Mr. Shpilman never made any declarations. Twenty-three years ago, on the day projected for his marriage to a daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe, he all but disappeared, and during the long ignominy of Mr. Shpilman’s recent life, the early promise had largely been forgotten.

The chaff from the ME’s office is the only item in the story resembling an explanation of the death. Hotel management and the Central Division are said to have declined comment. At the end of the article, Landsman learns that there will be no synagogue service, just the burial itself, at the old Montefiore cemetery, to be presided over by the father of the deceased.

“Berko said he disowned him,” Ester-Malke says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder. “He said the old man wanted nothing to do with the kid. I guess he changed his mind.”

Reading the article, Landsman suffers a cramp of envy toward Mendel Shpilman, tempered by pity. Landsman struggled for many years under the weight of fatherly expectations, but he has no idea how it might feel to fulfill or exceed them. Isidor Landsman, he knows, would have loved to father a son as gifted as Mendel. Landsman can’t help thinking that if he had been able to play chess like Mendel Shpilman, maybe his father would have felt he had something to live for, a small messiah to redeem him. Landsman thinks of the letter that he sent his father, hoping to gain his freedom from the burden of that life and those expectations. He considers the years he spent believing that he caused Isidor Landsman a fatal grief. How much guilt did Mendel Shpilman feel? Had he believed what was said of him, in his gift or wild calling? In the attempt to free himself from that burden, did Mendel feel that he must turn his back not only on his father but on all the Jews in the world?

“I don’t think Rabbi Shpilman ever changes his mind,” Landsman says. “I think somebody would have to change it for him.”

“Who would that be?”

“If I had to guess? I’m thinking that maybe it was the mother.”

“Good for her. Trust a mother not to let them toss her son out like an empty bottle.”

“Trust a mother,” Landsman says. He studies the photograph in the Tog of Mendel Shpilman at fifteen, beard patchy, sidelocks flying, coolly presiding over a conference of young Talmudists who seethed and sulked around him. “The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, in Better Days,” reads the caption.

“What are you thinking about, Meyer?” Ester Malke says, striking a note of doubt.

“The future,” Landsman says.

A mob of black-hat Jews chugs its way, a freight train of grief, from the gates of the cemetery — the house of life, they call it — up a hillside toward a hole cut into the mud. A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of school girls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid — the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground.

Around the grave site, black clumps of fir trees sway like grieving Chasids. Beyond the cemetery walls, hats and black umbrellas shelter thousands of the unworthiest of the unworthy against the rain. Deep structures of obligation and credit have determined which are permitted to enter the gates of the house of life and which must stand outside kibitzing, with rain soaking into their hose. These deep structures, in turn, have drawn the attention of detectives from Burglary, Contraband, and Fraud. Landsman picks out Skolsky, Burwitz, Feld, and Globus, always with his shirttail hanging out, perched on the roof of a gray Ford Victoria. It’s not every day that the entire Verbover hierarchy comes out and stands around on a hillside, posed in relation to one another like circles on a prosecutor’s flow chart. On the roof of a Wal-Mart a quarter mile away, three Americans in blue windbreakers point their telephoto lenses and the trembling pistil of a condenser microphone. A stout blue cord of latkes and motorcycle units has been stitched through the crowd to keep it from coming undone. The press is here, too, cameramen and reporters from Channel I, from the local papers, crews from the NBC affiliate over in Juneau and a cable news channel. Dennis Brennan, without the sense or maybe enough felt in the world to cover that big head of his against the rain. Then you have the half-believing, and the half-observant, and the modern Orthodox, and the merely credulous, and the skeptical, and the curious, and a healthy delegation from the Einstein Chess Club.

Landsman can see them all from the vantage of his powerlessness and his exile, reunited witla his Super Sport on a barren hilltop across Mizmor Boulevard from the house of life. He’s parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavors of irony. The hoped for houses were never built. Wooden stakes tied with orange flags and nylon cord map out a miniature Zion in the mud around the cul-de-sac, a ghostly eruv of failure. Landsman is flying solo, sober as a carp in a bathtub, clutching a pair of binoculars in his clammy grip. The need for a drink is like a missing tooth. He can’t keep his mind off it, and yet there’s something pleasurable in probing the gap. Or maybe the ache of something missing is just the hole left behind when Bina lifted his badge.

Landsman waits out the funeral in his car, studying it through the good Zeiss lenses and running down the car battery with a CBC radio documentary about the blues singer Robert Johnson, whose singing voice sounds as broken and reedy as a Jew saying kaddish in the rain. Landsman has a carton of Broadways, and he burns them wildly, trying to drive from the Super Sport’s interior a lingering odor of Willy Zilberblat. It’s a foul smell, like a pot of water in which two days ago somebody boiled noodles. Berko tried to persuade Landsman that he was imagining this residue of the little Zilberblat’s brief tenure inside Landsman’s life. But Landsman is happy for the excuse to fumigate with cigarettes, which don’t kill the urge for a drink but somehow dull its bite.