“Have a seat, please,” Dr. Roboy says in his thick black syrup of a voice. “Fligler?”

The man in the tweed suit goes back to the French doors, opens the left panel, and checks the throw bolts at the top and bottom. Then he closes the panel, locks it, and pockets the key. He walks back past Landsman, brushing against him with a padded tweed shoulder.

“Fligler,” Landsman says, taking hold of the smaller man’s arm gently. “You a doctor, too?”

Fligler shakes off Landsman’s hand. He produces a book of matches from his pocket. “You bet,” he says without sincerity or conviction. With the fingers of his right hand, he peels back a match from the matchbook, scrapes it into flame, and touches it to the bowl of his pipe, all in a single continuous motion. While his right hand is busy entertaining Landsman with this minor feat, his left hand plunges into the pocket of Landsman’s jacket and comes away with the. 22.

“There’s your problem right there,” he says, holding the gun up where everyone can see it. “Watch the doctor, now.”

Landsman watches dutifully as Fligler raises the gun, considering it with a keen medical eye. But then the next minute a door slams somewhere inside Lands man’s head, and after that he gets distracted — for half a second — by the drone of a thousand wasps flying in through the porch of his left ear.

30

Landsman comes to on his back, looking up at a row of iron kettles. They dangle with precision on sturdy hooks from a rack three feet above his head. In Landsman’s nostrils, a nostalgic smell of camp kitchen, cooking gas and dish soap, scorched onion, hard water, a faint stink of tackle box. Metal like a chill of foreboding against his nape. He’s stretched on a long stainless-steel counter, hands cuffed behind his back, jammed up against his sacrum. Barefoot, drooling, ready to be plucked and stuffed in the body cavity with lemon and maybe a nice sprig of sage.

“I heard some crazy rumors about you,” Landsman says. “Cannibalism I never heard.”

“I wouldn’t eat you, Landsman,” affirms Baronshteyn. “Not if I was the hungriest man in Alaska and they served you to me with a silver fork. I don’t much care for pickles.” He’s sitting on a high stool to Landsman’s left, arms crossed under the skirts of his lush black beard.

He’s out of uniform in a pair of new blue dungarees, flannel shirt tucked in at the waist and buttoned almost to the top. A fat hide belt with a heavy buckle and black ranger boots. The shirt too big for his frame, the trousers stiff as plate iron. Except for the skullcap, Baronshteyn looks like a skinny kid done up as a lumberjack for a school play, bogus beard and all. With his boot heels hooked on the rail of the stool, the cuffs of his trousers hike to betray a few hose-pale inches of thin shank.

“Who is this yid?” says the gaunt giant, Roboy. Landsman cranes his neck and takes in the doctor, if he is a doctor, perched on a steel stool of his own down by Landsman’s feet. Bags under his eyes like smears of graphite. Beside him stands Nurse Fligler, cane hooked over one arm, watching a papiros die in the custody of his right hand, the left hand tucked ominously into the hip pocket of his tweed jacket. “Why do you know him?”

A panoply of knives, cleavers, choppers, and other tools is ranged along a magnetic rack on the kitchen wall within easy grasp of the industrious chef or shlosser.

“This yid is a shammes named Landsman.”

“This is a policeman?” Roboy says. He looks like he just bit into a bonbon filled with some acrid paste. “He carries no badge. Fligler, the man had a badge?”

“I found no badge or other form of law enforcement labeling,” Fligler says.

“That is because I had his badge taken away from him,” Baron-shteyn says. “Isn’t that right, Detective ?”

“I’ll ask the questions here,” Landsman says, squirming to find a more comfortable way of lying on top of his own cuffed hands. “If you don’t mind.”

“It doesn’t matter if he has a badge or doesn’t,” Fligler opines. “Out here a Jewish badge means goat shit.”

“I don’t care for that kind of language, Friend Fligler,” Baronshteyn says. “As I believe I have men tioned before.”

“You have, but I can never hear it enough,” Fligler says.

Baronshteyn regards Fligler. In the pits of his skull hidden glands secrete their venom. “Friend Fligler here was all for shooting you and dumping your body in the woods,” he says amiably to Landsman, keeping his eyes on the man with the gun in his pocket.

“Way out in the woods,” Fligler says. “See what comes along and gnaws on your carcass.”

“That your treatment plan, Doc?” Landsman says, craning his head around to try to make eye contact with Roboy. “No wonder Mendel Shpilman checked out of here so quick last spring.”

They feed on the meat of this remark, gauging its flavor and vitamin content. Baronshteyn allows a modicum of reproach to flow into his poisonous gaze. You had the yid, says the look that he flicks at Dr. Roboy. And you let him get away.

Baronshteyn leans close, craning in from his stool, and speaks, with that menacing tenderness of his. His breath is stale and acrid. Cheese rinds, bread heels, grounds at the bottom of a cup. “What are you doing, Friend Landsman,” he says, “way out here where you don’t belong?”

Baronshteyn looks genuinely puzzled. The Jew desires to be informed. This may, Landsman thinks, be the only desire the man ever permits himself to feel.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Landsman says, thinking that maybe Baronshteyn has nothing to do with this place, is only a visitor, like Landsman. Maybe he is working the same trail, retracing the recent trajectory of Mendel Shpilman, trying to find the spot where the rebbe’s son crossed the shadow that killed him. “What is this place, a boarding school for wayward Verbovers? Who are these characters? You missed a belt loop, by the way.”

Baronshteyn’s fingers stray toward his waist, then he sits back and makes a face that resembles a smile. “Who knows you’re here?” he says. “Besides the flyer?”

Landsman feels a stab of dread for Rocky Kitka, flying upside down through life for hundreds of miles without knowing it. Landsman doesn’t know very much about these yids of Peril Strait, but it seems fairly clear that they can be awfully tough on a bush pilot.

“What flyer?” he says.

“I think we have to assume the worst,” Dr. Roboy says. “This facility is clearly compromised.”

“You have been spending too much time with those people,” Baronshteyn says. “You are starting to talk like them.” Without taking his eyes off Landsman, he unbuckles his belt and feeds it through the loop that he missed. “You may be right, Roboy.” He cinches the belt tight with a distinct air of self-punishment. “But I would be willing to bet that Landsman told nobody. Not even that fat Indian partner of his. Landsman is out on a limb, and he knows it. He has no support. No jurisdiction, no standing, not even a badge. He wouldn’t tell anyone he was going to the Indianer-Lands, because he would be afraid they would try to talk him out of it. Or worse, forbid him to go. They would tell him that his judgment has been impaired by his desire to avenge his sister’s death.”

Roboy wrings his eyebrows over his nose like a pair of fretful hands. “His sister?” he says. “Who’s his sister?”

“Am I right, Landsman?”

“I wish I could reassure you, Baronshteyn. But I wrote out a complete account of everything I know about you and this operation.”

“Is that right?”

“The phony youth treatment facility.”

“I see,” Baronshteyn says with mock gravity. “The phony youth treatment facility. Quite a shocking tale.”

“A front for your partnership with Roboy and Fligler and their powerful friends.” Landsman’s heart thrashes with the wildness of his guessing. He’s wondering why any Jews would need or want such a large facility out here and how they could manage to persuade the Natives to let them build it. Could they have bought themselves a piece of the Indianer-Lands to build a new McShtet1? Or was this going to be the transfer point for a human smuggling operation, some kind of Verbover airlift out of Alaska made without benefit of visas or passports? “The fact that you killed Mendel Shpilman and my sister to keep them from talking about what you were doing here. Then used your government connections hrough Roboy and Fligler to cover up the crash.”