“So either — Let me get this straight. Either she made the two-hour hop from Peril Strait to Yakovy in less than forty-five minutes,” Landsman says, “or else . . . Or else she changed her flight plan to come to Yakovy, when she was already en route and heading someplace else.”

The steaks come; the waitress takes away their number on its pole and leaves their thick slabs of Canadian beef. They smell good and they look good. Spiro ignores them. He has forgotten his drink. He sifts through the pile of pages.

“Okay, here’s the day before. She flew from Sitka to Peril Strait with three passengers. She took off at four and closed out her flight plan at six-thirty. Okay, so then it’s dark when they get there. She’s planning to stay overnight. Then the next morning . . .” Spiro stops. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Here’s — I’m guessing this was her original flight plan. Looks like she was planning to go back to Sitka the next morning. Originally. Not to come here to Yakovy.”

“With how many passengers?”

“None.”

“After she’s been flying a while, supposedly headed for Sitka, and alone but actually with a mystery passenger on board, she suddely switches her destination to Yakovy.”

“That’s how it looks.”

“Peril Strait,” Landsman says. “What’s in Peril Strait?”

“What’s anywhere? Moose, bears. Deer. Fish. Anything a Jew wants to kill.”

“I don’t think so,” Landsman says. “I don’t think this was a fishing trip.”

Spiro frowns, then gets up and goes over to the bar.

He sidles up to the American pilot, and they converse. The pilot looks wary, perhaps constitutionally so. But he nods and follows Spiro back to the booth.

“Rocky Kitka,” Spiro says. “Detective Landsman.”

Then he sits down and takes care of his steak.

Kitka has on black leather jeans and a matching vest worn over his bare skin, which is covered from wrists to throat to the waistband of his pants in Native-themed tattooing. Big-toothed whales and beavers and, down his left biceps, a snake or an eel with a sly expression in its eye.

“You’re a pilot?” Landsman says.

“No, I’m a policeman.” He laughs with a touching sincerity at his own display of wit.

“Peril Strait,” Landsman says. “You’ve been there?”

Kitka shakes his head, but Landsman disbelieves him at once.

“Know anything about the place?”

“Just the way it looks from the sky.”

“Kitka,” Landsman says. “That’s a Native name.”

“My father’s Tlingit. My mother’s Scotch-Irish and German and Swedish. Pretty much everything in there but Jew.”

“Lot of Natives at Peril Strait?”

“Nothing but.” Kitka says it with simple authority, then recalls his claim not to know anything about Peril Strait, and his eyes slide away from Landsman’s, lighting on the steak. He looks extremely hungry.

“No white people?”

“One or two, maybe, tucked away back in the coves.”

“And Jews?” Landsman says.

Kitka gets a hard look in his eye, a protective look.

“Like I said. I just know it to fly past.”

“I’m making a little investigation,” Landsman says. “It turns out there might be something over there to interest a Jew from Sitka.”

“That’s Alaska over there,” Kitka says. “A Jewish cop, with all due respect, he can ask questions all day long in that neighborhood, isn’t nobody has to answer them.”

Landsman slides over in the booth. “Come on, sweetness,” he says in Yiddish. “Stop looking at it. It’s yours. I didn’t touch it.”

“You aren’t going to eat it?”

“I have no appetite, I don’t know why.”

“It’s the New York, isn’t it? I love the New York.” Kitka sits down, and Landsman slides the plate toward him. He drinks his cup of coffee and watches the two men destroy their dinners. Kitka looks much happier when he’s done, less wary, less fearful of being set up.

“Shit, that is good meat,” he says. He takes a long swallow of ice water from a red plastic schooner. He looks at Spiro, then away, then back at Landsman, then away again. He stares into the water glass. “Price of a meal,” he says bitterly. Then: “They got some kind of honor ranch. I hear. For religious Jews that get hooked on drugs and whatnot. I guess even those beards of yours, they get into the drugs and the drinking and the petty crime.”

“That makes sense, they’d want to put it someplace out of the way,” Spiro says. “There’s a lot of shame involved.”

“I don’t know,” Landsman says. “It’s not easy to get permission to start a Jewish business of any kind on the other side of the Line. Not even a do-good business like that.”

“Like I said,” Kitka says. “I just heard a few things. Probably it’s bullshit.”

“Weird,” says Spiro. He’s in the world of the dossier again, flipping back and forth among the pages.

Landsman says, “Tell me what’s weird.”

“Well, I’m looking through all this, and you know what I don’t see? I don’t see her flight plan for — for the fatal one. Yakovy back to Sitka.” He takes out his Shoyfer and hits two keys and waits. “I know she filed one. I remember seeing it. Bella? Spiro. Are you busy? Uh-huh. Okay. Listen. Can you check something for me? I need you to pull a flight plan from the system.” He gives the on-duty manager Naomi’s name and the date and time of her final flight. “Can you run that? Yeah.”

“Did you know my sister, Mr. Kitka?” Landsman says.

“You might say that,” Kitka says. “She kicked my ass one time.”

“Join the club,” Landsman says.

“That can’t be,” Spiro says, his voice tight. “Could you check again?”

Now no one says anything. They just watch Spiro listening to Bella at the other end of the line.

“Something’s not right, Bella,” Spiro says finally. “I’m coming back over there.”

He hangs up, looking as if his fine steak has begun to disagree with him.

“What is it?” Landsman says. “What’s the matter?”

“She can’t find the flight plan in the system.” He stands up and gathers together the scattered pages of Naomi’s file. “But I know that can’t be right, because it’s referenced by number right here in the crash report.” He stops. “Or not.”

Again he bats back and forth the pages of the thick clipped sheaf of close-typed pages that comprise the results ofthe FAA investigation into Naomi’s fatal encounter with the northwest slope of Mount Dunkelblum.

“Somebody’s been in this file,” he says at last, unwillingly at first, his mouth a slit. As the conclusion spreads through his mind, he relaxes into it. Goes slack. “Somebody with weight.”

“Weight,” Landsman says. “The kind of weight it takes, for example, to get permission to build a Jewish rehab center on BIA land?”

“Too much weight for me,” Spiro says. He slams the cover of the file shut, stuffs it under his arm. “I can’t be here with you anymore, Landsman. I’m sorry. Thanks for the steak dinner.”

After he goes, Landsman takes out his cell phone and dials a number in the Alaskan area code. When the woman on the other end answers, he says, “Wilfred Dick.”

“Holy Jesus,” Kitka says. “Look out.” But Landsman gets only a desk sergeant.

“The inspector ain’t here,” the sergeant says. “What’s this about?”

“Maybe you heard something, I don’t know, about some honor ranch out at Peril Strait?” Landsman says. “Doctors with beards?”

“Beth Tikkun?” says the sergeant, as if it’s an American girl whose last name rhymes with “chicken", “I know it.”

This knowledge, his tone implies, has not brought him happiness and is not likely to do so anytime soon. “I might want to pay a little visit there,” Landsman says. “Say tomorrow. Think that would be okay?”

The sergeant cannot seem to find an adequate reply to this apparently simple question. “Tomorrow,” he says at last.

“Yes, I thought I would fly out there. Have a look around the grounds.”

“Huh.”

“What’s the matter, Sergeant? This Beth Tikkun place, is it on the up-and-up?”