“You wrote all this down, did you?”
“Yes, and sent it to my lawyer, to be opened in the case that I should suddenly, for example, vanish from the face of the earth.”
“Your lawyer.”
“That’s right.”
“And what lawyer would that be?”
“Sender Slonim.”
“Sender Slonim, I see,” Baronshteyn says, nodding as if fully persuaded by Landsman’s claim. “A good Jew but a bad lawyer.” He slides down from the stool, and the thud of his boots puts a period to his examination of the prisoner. “I’m satisfied. Friend Fligler.”
There is a snik and the scrape of a sole against linoleum, and the next thing Landsman knows, a shadow looms at his right eye. The space between the steel tip and Landsman’s cornea can be measured in the flicker of an eyelash. Landsman jerks his head away, but at the other end of the knife, Fligler grabs hold of Landsman’s ear and yanks. Landsman curls up into a ball and tries to roll down from the counter. Fligler smacks Landsman’s bandaged wound with the head of his cane, and a jagged star bursts across the back of Landsman’s eyes. While he’s busy ringing like a bell of pain, Fligler turns Landsman onto his belly. He climbs on top of him and jerks his head back and lays the knife against his throat.
“I may not have a badge,” Landsman says with dif ficulty. He addresses himself to Dr. Roboy, whom he senses to be the least resolute yid in the room. “But I’m still a noz. You people kill me, it’s a world of trouble for whatever you have going here.”
“Probably not,” Fligler says.
“Not in all likelihood,” Baronshteyn agrees. “None of you yids is even going to be a policeman two months from now.”
The thin string of carbon and iron atoms that is the consequential feature of the knife blade burns one degree hotter against Landsman’s windpipe.
“Fligler . . .” Roboy says, wiping his mouth with one giant hand.
“Please, Fligler,” Landsman says. “Cut my throat. I’ll thank you for it. Go on, you pussy.”
From the other side of the kitchen door comes a churn of agitated male voices. A pair of feet scrapes the floor, about to knock, and hesitates. Nothing happens.
“What is it?” Roboy says bitterly.
“A word, Doctor,” says a voice, young, American, speaking American.
“Don’t do anything,” Roboy says. “Just wait.”
Just before the door swings shut behind Roboy, Landsman hears a voice begin to speak, a rush of an anular syllables that do not register on his brain as anything but throaty noise.
Fligler settles his weight more securely into the small of Landsman’s back. There follows the small awkwardness of strangers in an elevator. Baronshteyn consults his fine Swiss watch.
“How much of it did I have right?” Landsman says. “Just so I know.”
“Ha,” Fligler says. “I could laugh.”
“Roboy is a trained rehabilitation therapist,” Baronshteyn says with a show of tolerant patience, sounding remarkably like Bina when speaking to one of the five billion people, Landsman among them, whom she considers to be on balance an idiot. “They were genuinely trying to help the rebbe’s son. Mendel’s presence here was entirely voluntary. When he made the decision to leave, there was nothing they could do to stop him.”
“I’m sure the news broke your heart,” Landsman says.
“And what do you mean by that?”
“I suppose a cleaned-up Mendel Shpilman was no threat to you? To your status as heir apparent?”
“Oy,” Baronshteyn says. “What you don’t know.”
The kitchen door opens and Roboy slips back inside, eyebrows arched. Before the door bangs shut, Landsman catches a glimpse of two young men, bearded and dressed in ill-fitting dark suits. Big boys, one with the black snail of an earphone curled in the shell of his ear. On the outside of the door a small plaque reads KITCHEN EQUIPPED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF MR. AND MRS. LANCE PEARLSTEIN PIKESVILLE MD.
“Eight minutes,” Roboy says. “Ten at the most.”
“Someone coming?” Landsman says. “Who is it? Heskel Shpilman? Or does he even know you’re here, Baronshteyn? Did you come to cut a deal with these people? Are they moving in on Verbover action? What did they want with Mendel? Were you going to use him to force the rebbe’s hand?”
“Sounds to me as though you need to read that letter of yours again,” Baronshteyn observes. “Or get Sender Slonim to tell you what it says.”
Landsman can hear people moving around, chair legs screeching against a wooden floor. In the distance, the whirr and click of an electric motor, a golf cart zip ping away.
“We cannot do this now,” Roboy says, coming close to Landsman, looming over him. His dense beard flocks his entire face from the cheekbones down, flourishing in his nostrils, winding in fine tendrils from the flaps of his ears. “The last thing he wants is any hint of mess. Okay, Detective.” His slow voice turns syrupy, abruptly warmer. A perfunctory affection suffuses it, and Landsman stiffens, awaiting the bad thing that this surely betokens, which proves to be only a stick in the arm, quick and expert.
In the dreamy seconds that precede his loss of consciousness, the guttural language that Landsman heard Roboy speaking plays like a recording in his ear, and he makes a dazzling leap into impossible understand ing, like the sudden consciousness in a dream of one’s having invented a great theory or written a fine poem that in the morning turns out to be gobbledygook. They are talking, those Jews on the other side of the door, about roses and frankincense. They are standing in a desert wind under the date palms, and Landsman is there, in flowing robes that keep out the biblical sun, speaking Hebrew, and they are all friends and brothers together, and the mountains skip like rams, and the hills like little lambs.
31
Landsman wakes from a dream of feeding his right ear to the propeller blades of a Cessna 206. He stirs under a clammy blanket, electric but unplugged, in a room not much larger than the cot he’s stretched across. He touches a cautious finger to the side of his head. Where Fligler originally sapped him, the flesh is swollen and moist. Landsman’s left shoulder is killing him, too.
In a narrow window opposite the cot, metal-slat blinds leak the disappointed gray of a November afternoon in southeastern Alaska. It’s not light oozing through so much as a residue of light, a day haunted by the memory of the sun.
Landsman tries to sit up and discovers that his shoulder hurts so much because somebody has been kind enough to handcuff his left wrist to a steel leg of the cot frame. With his arm jerked up over his head, Landsman practiced some kind of brutal chiropractic on his shoulder in the thrashing and tossing of sleep. The same kind soul who chained him was thoughtful enough to remove his trousers, shirt, and jacket, reduc ing him once again to a man in his underpants.
He sits up on his haunches at the head of the cot. Then he eases himself backward off the mattress so that he can squat with his left arm hanging at a more natural angle, his shackled hand resting against the floor. The floor is yellow linoleum, the color of the inside of a used cigarette filter, and as cold as an ME’s stethoscope. It features an extensive collection of dust lemmings and dust wigs and a winged smear of black fly grease. The walls are cinder block painted a thick, glossy shade of dentifrice blue. On the wall beside Landsman’s head, a familiar hand has penned a tiny message for Landsman in the mortar line between two cinder blocks: THIS DETAINMENT CELL COURTESY OF THE GENEROSITY OF NEAL AND RISA NUDELMAN SHORT HILLS NEW JERSEY. He wants to laugh, but the sight of his sister’s droll alphabet in this place raises the hair on the back of his neck.
Apart from the bed, the only other furnishing, in the corner by the door, is a metal wastebasket. The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.