“Show-off,” Landsman says.

“Always was,” says Dick.

“So,” says Landsman, “what are you saying? The cow is wearing a disguise?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Somebody painted white spots on a red cow.”

“So it appears.”

“This fact has significance to you.”

“In a sense,” Berko says. “In a certain context. I believe that cow may be a red heifer.”

“Get out of here,” Landsman says. “A red heifer.”

“This is a Jew thing, I take it,” Dick says.

“When the Temple in Jerusalem is restored,” Berko says, “and it’s time to make the traditional sin offering, the Bible says you need a particular kind of cow. A red heifer, without blemish. Pure. I guess they’re pretty scarce, pure red heifers. In fact, I believe there have been only nine of them since the beginning of history. It would be pretty cool to find one. It would be like finding a five-leaf clover.”

“When the Temple is restored,” Landsman says, thinking of Buchbinder the dentist and his mad museum. “That’s after Messiah comes?”

“Some people,” Berko says slowly, beginning to understand what Landsman is beginning to understand, “say Messiah will tarry until the Temple is rebuilt. Until altar worship gets restored. Blood sacrifices, a priesthood, the whole song and dance.”

“So if you got hold of a red heifer, say. And you had all the tools ready, right? And the funny hats and stuff. And you, um, you built the Temple … you could basi cally force Messiah to come?”

“Not that I’m a religious man, God knows,” Dick puts in. “But I feel compelled to point out that the Messiah already came, and you bastards fucking killed the motherfucker.”

They hear a human voice in the distance, amplified through a loudspeaker, speaking that strange desert Hebrew. At the sound, Landsman’s heart turns over, and he takes a step toward the truck.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says. “I have spent some time with these men, and my strong impression is that they are not very nice.”

When they get safely back to the truck, Dick starts the engine but keeps it in neutral with the brake on. They sit there, filling up the cab with cigarette smoke. Landsman bums one of Dick’s black ones and is forced to concede that it’s a fine example of the roller’s craft.

“I’m just going to go ahead and say this now, Willie,” Landsman says after he’s smoked the Nat Sherman halfway down. “And I’d like you to try to deny it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“On the way out here, we were talking, and you alluded to a certain amount of, uh, odorousness coming out of this place.”

“I did.”

“A stink of money, you said.”

“There is money behind these buckaroos, no doubt about that.”

“But from the minute I first heard about this place, something’s been bothering me. Now I figure I’ve seen most of the operation. From the sign on the float plane dock to those cows. And it’s bothering me even more.”

“And what’s that?”

“That is, I’m sorry, I don’t care how much money they throw around. I buy that a member of your tribal council might take a bribe from a Jew every now and then. Business is business, a dollar’s a dollar, and so forth. Who knows, I have heard people argue that the flow of illegal funds back and forth over the Line is the closest that Jews and Indians ever come to peace, love, and understanding.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Obviously, these Jews, whatever it is they’re doing, they don’t want to share the news with other Jews. And the District is like a house with too many people and not enough bedrooms. Everybody knows everybody’s business. Nobody has a secret in Sitka, it’s just a big shtetl. You have a secret, it makes sense to try to hide it out here.”

“But.”

“But odor or not, business or not, secret or not, I’m sorry, there is no way in hell the Tlingit are ever going to let a bunch of Jews come in here, in the heart of the Indianer-Lands, and build all this. I don’t care how much Jewish coin gets thrown around.”

“You’re saying not even us Indians are that gutless and debased. To give our worst enemy that kind or toehold.”

“How about, let’s say, us Jews are the world’s most evil schemers, we run the world from our secret headquarters on the dark side of the moon. But even we have our limitations. Do you like that better?”

“I’m not going to argue the point.”

“The Indians would never allow it unless they were expecting some kind of big payoff. Really big. As big as the District, let’s say.”

“Let’s say,” Dick says, his voice sounding tight.

“I figured the American angle in all this was whatever channel somebody used to get Naomi’s crash file pulled. But no Jew could ever guarantee a payoff like that.”

“Penguin Sweater,” Berko says. “He fixes it so the Indians get the District under Native sovereignty once we’re gone. For that, the Indians help the Verbovers and friends set up their secret dairy farm out here.”

“But what does Penguin Sweater get out of it?”

Landsman says. “What’s in it for the U.S.?”

“You have now arrived at a place of great darkness, Brother Landsman,” Dick says, putting the truck into gear. “Which I fear you will have to enter without Wilfred Dick.”

“I hate to say this, cousin,” Landsman says to Berko, putting a hand on his shoulder. “But I think we have to go down to the Massacre Spot.”

“God fucking damn it,” says Berko in American.

35

Forty-two miles south of the Sitka city limits, a house crafted from salvage planks and gray shingles teeters on two dozen pilings over a slough. A nameless backwater, riddled with bears and prone to methane flatulence. A graveyard of rowboats, tackle, pickup trucks, and, somewhere deep down, a dozen Russian fur hunters and their Aleut dog-soldiers. At one end of the slough, back in the bushes, a magnificent Tlingit longhouse is being dismantled by salmonberry and devil’s club. At the other end stretches a rocky beach, littered with a thousand black stones on which an ancient people etched the shapes of animals and stars. It was on this beach, in 1854, that those twelve promyshlennikis and Aleuts under Yevgeny Simonof met a bloody end at the hands of a Tlingit chief named Kohklux. Over a century later, the great-great-granddaughter of Chief Kohklux, Mrs. Pullman, became the second Indian wife taken by a five-foot-six Jewish chess player and spymaster named Hertz Shemets.

At chess, as in secret statecraft, Uncle Hertz was known for his sense of the clock, an excess of prudence, and a tiresome depth of preparation. He read up on his opponents, made a fatal study of them. He sought the pattern of weakness, the unresolved complex, the tic. For twenty-five years he conducted a secret campaign against the people on the far side of the Line, trying to weaken their hold on the Indianer-Lands, and in that time he became a recognized authority on their culture and history. He learned to savor the Tlingit language, with its sucking-candy vowels and its chewy consonants. He undertook profound research into the fra grance and heft of Tlingit women.

When he married Mrs. Pullman (no one ever called the lady, may she rest in peace, Mrs. Shemets), he developed an interest in her great-great-grandfather’s victory over Simonof. He spent hours in the library at Bronfman, poring over Tsarist-era maps. He annotated interviews conducted by Methodist missionaries with ninety-nine-year-old Tlingit crones who were six-year-old girls when those war hammers went to work on all those thick Russian skulls. He discovered that in the USGS survey of 1949, the one that set the proper boundaries of the District of Sitka, the Massacre Spot somehow got drawn as Tlingit land. Even though it lies west of the Baranof range, the Massacre Spot is legally Native, a green badge of Indianness daubed on the Jewish side of Baranof Island. When Hertz discovered this error, he had Berko’s stepmother buy up the land with money — as Dennis Brennan later documented — taken from his cointelpro slush fund. He built his spider-legged house on it. And when Mrs. Pullman died, Hertz Shemets inherited the Simonof Massacre Spot. He declared it the world’s crummiest Indian reservation, and himself the world’s crummiest Indian.