Meanwhile, another segment of his brain is busy trying to gauge the air temperature — call it 37, 38 degrees F — and from there to calculate or recall some table he might have seen once that gave the time it takes hypothermia to kill a Jewish policeman in his underpants. But the ruling cells of that great ruined organ, addled and drugged, are telling him only to run and keep on running.
The woods give out abruptly, and he’s standing in front of a machine shed, molded gray panels of steel, no windows, with a rippled plastic roof. A scrotal pair of propane tanks huddles against the side of the building. The wind is sharper here, and Landsman feels it like a flow of boiling water over his flesh. He runs around to the other side of the shed. It stands at the edge of a barren expanse of straw-covered ground. Way in the distance, a band of green grass dissolves into the rolling fog. A gravel track leads away from the shed, along the bare field of straw. Fifty yards farther along, the track forks, One fork runs to the east, toward that band of green. The other runs on straight and disappears into a dark stand of trees. Landsman turns back to the shed. A big door on rollers. Landsman drags it thundering to one side. Disassembled refrigeration equipment, cryptic pieces of machines, one wall covered in an Arabic written in lengths of black rubber hose. And, right by the door, one of those three-wheeled electric carts called Zumzums (the District’s number two export, after Shofar-brand cellular telephones). This one is tricked out with a flatbed, the bed lined with a sheet of mud-streaked black rubber. Landsman climbs up behind the wheel. As cold as his ass already is, as cold as the wind is blowing down from the Yukon, the vinyl seat of that Zumzum is even colder. Landsman thumbs its starter switch. He steps on the pedal, and with a thunk and a whirr of differential gears, he’s off. He rumbles up to the fork in the road and hesitates between the woods and that tranquil band of green grass, vanishing like a promise of peacefulness into the fog. Then he smashes down the pedal.
Just before he plunges into the stand of trees, Lands man looks back over his shoulder, and sees the yids of Peril Strait coming after him in a big black Ford Caudillo, splashing gravel as it rounds the corner of the supply shed. Landsman has no idea where it came from or, for that matter, how it got here; he didn’t see any cars at all from the air. It’s five hundred meters behind the Zumzum and gaining easily.
In the woods, gravel gives way to a rough track of packed earth that slips among handsome Sitka spruces, high and secretive. As Landsman whirrs along, he catches sight between the trees of a high chain-link fence topped by gay glinting curls of razor wire. The steel mesh fence is woven with slats of green plastic. In places a gap appears in the green weave of the fence. Through these gaps, Landsman glimpses another steel shed, a clearing, posts, crossbeams, interlaced cables. A huge frame stretched with a web of cargo net, distended coils of barbed wire, rope swings. It might be an athletic facility, some kind of therapeutic playground for patients in recovery. Sure, and the people in the Caudillo might just be bringing him his pants.
The black car is under two hundred yards from him now. The passenger in its front seat rolls down his window and climbs out to sit on the top of his door, steadying himself with one hand on the roof rack. The other hand, Landsman observes, is busy getting ready to fire a handgun. It’s a fair, bearded young man in a black suit, cropped hair, a sober tie like Roboy’s. He takes his time with the shot, reckoning the ever-dwindling distance. A flash blooms around hand, and the back of the Zumzum explodes with a crack and a spray of fiberglass slivers. Landsman lets out a cry and takes his foot off the accelerator pedal. So much for not making a mess.
He bumps along on momentum for another five or ten feet and then comes to a stop. The young man hanging out of the Caudillo’s window raises his firing arm and judges the effect of his shot. The jagged hole in the fiberglass body of the Zumzum is probably disappointing to the poor kid. But he has to be happy about the fact that his moving target has just become stationary. His next shot is going to be a lot easier. The kid lowers his arm again with a patient slowness that is almost ostentatious, almost cruel. In his care and his parsimonious attitude toward bullets, Landsman senses the hallmark of rigorous training and an athlete’s grasp of eternity.
Surrender unfurls across Landsman’s heart like the shadow of a flag. There is no way he can outrace the Caudillo, not in a shot-up Zumzum that on a good day tops out around fifteen miles per hour. A warm blanket, maybe a hot cup of tea: These strike him as adequate recompense for failure. The Caudillo comes charging toward him and then sloshes to a halt in a spray of fallen needles. Three of its doors swing open and three men climb out, lumbering young yids in ill-fitting suits and meteor-black shoes, steering their automatic pistols toward Landsman. The guns seem to thrum in their hands as if they contain wild life or gyroscopes. The gunmen can barely restrain them. Hard boys, neckties flying, their beards trimmed neat along the jawline, their skullcaps small crocheted saucers.
The rear door on the near side remains firmly shut, but behind it Landsman makes out the outline of al fourth man. The hard boys close on Landsman in their matching suits, with their earnest haircuts.
Landsman stands up and turns around with his hands in the air. “You’re clones, right?” he says as the three hard boys surround him. “At the end of the picture, it always turns out to be clones.”
“Shut up,” says the nearest hard boy, speaking American, and Landsman is about to assent when he hears a sound like something both fibrous and doughy being slowly torn in two. In the time it takes him to observe in the eyes of the hard boys that they hear it, too, the sound sharpens and rises to a steady chopping, a sheet of paper caught in the blades of a fan. The sound grows louder and more layered. The hacking cough of an old man. A heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over u lamp. Through the trees a light appears, stitching and staggering like a bumblebee, and suddenly, Landsman knows it for what it is.
“Dick,” he says simply and not without wonder, and a shudder shakes him deep down to his bones. The light is an old six-volt lamp, no more powerful than a large flashlight, flickering and wan in the gloom of the spruce forest. The engine that drives the light toward the party of Jews is a V-Twin, custom-manufactured. You can hear the springs of the front forks as they register every jolt in the road.
“Fuck him,” mutters one of the hard boys. “And his fucking Matchbox motorcycle.”
Landsman has heard different stories about Inspector Willie Dick and his motorcycle. Some say that it was made for a full-grown Bombay millionaire of smaller than average stature, others that it was originally presented as a thirteenth birthday gift to the Prince of’ Wales, and still others that it once belonged to a dare devil freak in a circus down in Texas or Alabama or some exotic place like that. At first glance, it is a stock 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader, gunmetal gray in the sunlight, its stunning chromium trim carefully restored. You have to get up next to it, or see it alongside a normal sized motorcycle, to realize that it is built to two-thirds scale. Willie Dick, though full-grown and thirty-seven years old, is only four feet seven inches tall.
Dick rumbles past the Zumzum, squeaks to a stop, kills the elderly British engine. He climbs off the bike and comes swaggering over to Landsman.
“What the fuck?” he says, pulling off his gloves, black leather gauntlets of the sort that might be worn by Max von Sydow playing Erwin Rommel. His voice is always surprisingly rich and deep, given the boyishness of his frame. He describes a slow circuit of appraisal around the flower of Jewish law enforcement. “Detective Meyer Landsman!” He turns to the hard boys and makes a study of their hardness. “Gentlemen.”