“I never asked you to observe the religion,” the old man says, not looking up. “I don’t think I ever put any kind of—”

“It has nothing to do with religion,” Berko says. “It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers.”

It comes through the mother, of course, one’s being or not being a Jew. But Berko knows that. He’s known it since the day he moved to Sitka. He sees it every time he looks into a mirror.

“It’s all nonsense,” the old man goes on, a little mumbly, half to himself “A slave religion. Tying yourself up. Bondage gear! I’ve never worn that nonsense in my life.”

“No?” Berko says.

It catches Landsman off guard, how quick and how massive is the transfer of Berko Shemets from the doorway of the cabin to the dining table. Before Landsman can quite understand what is happening, Berko has jerked the ritual undergarment down over the old man’s head. He cradles the head in one arm while, with the other, he winds the knotted fringes around and around, defining in fine strands of wool the contours of the old man’s face. It’s as if he’s packing a statue for shipment. The old man kicks, rakes at the air with his fingernails.

“You never wore one, eh?” Berko says. “You never fucking wore one! Try mine! Try mine, you prick!”

“Stop.” Landsman goes to the rescue of the man whose addiction to tactics of sacrifice led, maybe not predictably but directly, to the death of Laurie Jo Bear. “Berko, come on. Stop now.” He takes hold of Berko’s elbow and drags him aside, and when he’s got himself between the two, he starts shoving the big man toward the door.

“Okay.” Berko throws up his hands and lets Landsman push him a couple of feet in that direction. “Okay, I’m done. Get off me, Meyer.”

Landsman eases up, letting go of his partner. Berko tucks his tee into his trousers and starts to button his shirt, but all the buttons have flown away. He leaves it, smooths down the black badger of his hair with a wide palm, stoops to retrieve his hat and coat from the floor, and walks out. Night comes curling with the fog into the house on its stilts above the water.

Landsman turns back to the old man, who is sitting there with his head shrouded in the four-corners, like a hostage who cannot be permitted to see the faces of his captors.

“You want some help, Uncle Hertz?” Landsman says.

“I’m fine,” the old man says, his voice faint, muffled by the cloth. “Thank you.”

“You just want to sit there like that?”

The old man doesn’t reply. Landsman puts on his hat and walks out.

They are just getting into the car when they hear the gunshot, a boom that in the darkness maps the mountains, lights them up with reflected echoes, then fades away.

“Fuck,” Berko says. He is back inside the house before Landsman has even reached the stairs. By the time Landsman runs in, Berko has crouched down beside his father, who has assumed a strange attitude on the floor beside his bed, a hurdler’s stride, one leg drawn to his chest and the other flung out behind him. In his right hand, he keeps a loose grip on a black snub-nosed revolver; in his left hand, the ritual fringe. Berko straightens his father out, rolls him over onto his back, and feels for a pulse at the throat. There is a slick red patch on the right side of the old man’s forehead, just above the corner of his eye. Scorched hair matted with blood. A poor shot, from the look of it.

“Oh, shit,” Berko says. “Oh, shit, old man. You fucked it up.”

“He fucked it up,” Landsman agrees.

“Old man!” Berko shouts, and then he lowers his voice to a guttural rasp and croons something, a word or two, in the language that he left behind.

They stop the bleeding and pack the wound. Landsman looks around for the bullet and finds the worm hole that it chewed through the plywood wall.

“Where’d he get this?” Landsman says, picking up the gun. It’s a homely thing, worn at the edges, an old machine. “The .38 Detective Special?”

“I don’t know. He has a lot of guns. He likes guns.

That’s the one thing we had in common.”

“I think it might be the gun that Melekh Gaystik used in the Cafe Einstein.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Berko says. He shoulders the burden of his father, and they carry him down to the car and lay him in the backseat on a pile of towels. Landsman switches on the undercover siren that he has used maybe twice in five years. Then they drive back up over the mountain.

There is an urgent-care center at Nayeshtat, but many have died there so they decide to take him all the way in to Sitka General. Along the way, Berko calls his wife. He explains to her, not very coherently, that his father and a man named Alter Litvak were indirectly responsible for his mother’s death during the worst Indian-Jew violence in the sixty-year history of the District, and that his father has shot himself in the head. He tells her that they are going to dump the old man at the Sitka General ER, because he is a policeman, God damn it, and he has a job to do, and because the old man can go and die for all he cares. Ester-Malke appears to accept this project as stated, and Berko hangs up the phone. They disappear into a zone without cellular telephone coverage for ten or fifteen minutes, and when they emerge from it, having said nothing, they are nearly to the city limits and the Shoyfer is ringing.

“No,” Berko says, and then, more angrily, “No.”

He listens to his wife’s reasoning for a little under a minute. Landsman has no idea what she’s saying’ to him, whether she’s preaching from the text of profesional conduct, or of common decency, or of forgiveness, or of the duty of a son to a father that transcends or precedes them all. In the end Berko shakes his head. He looks over the backseat at the old Jew stretched out there. “All right.” He closes the telephone.

“You can drop me off at the hospital,” he says, sounding defeated. “Just call me when you find that fucking Litvak.”

37

“I need to speak to Katherine Sweeney,” Bina says into the telephone. Sweeney, the assistant United States Attorney, is earnest and competent and may very well listen to what Bina has called her to say. Landsman reaches over, darts his hand across her desk, and cuts the connection with a fingertip. Bina stares at him with great slow wingbeats of her eyelids. He has taken her by surprise. A rare feat.

“They are behind this,” Landsman says, his finger on the button.

“Kathy Sweeney is behind this,” she says, keeping the receiver to her ear.

“Well, no. I doubt that.”

“The Sitka U.S. Attorney’s office is behind it?”

“Maybe. No, probably not.”

“But you’re saying the Justice Department.”

“Yes. I don’t know. Bina, I’m sorry. I just don’t know how high up it goes.”

The surprise has faded; her gaze is steady and unblinking. “Okay. Now, you listen to me. First of all, take your hairy damned finger off of my telephone.”

Landsman withdraws the offending digit before the laser beams from her eyes can sever it cleanly at the knuckle.

“Don’t you touch my telephone, Meyer.”

“Never again.”

“If the story you have been telling me is true,” Bina says, a teacher addressing a roomful of imbecile five year-olds, “then I need to tell Kathy Sweeney. I probably need to tell the State Department. I may even need to get hold of the Department of Defense.”

“But—”

“Because I don’t know if you are aware of this, but the Holy Land is not part of this precinct.”

“Granted, of course. But listen. Someone with weight, serious weight, got into the FAA database and vanished that file. The same kind of weight promised the Tlingit Council they could have the District back if they let Litvak run his program out of Peril Strait for a little while.”

“Dick told you that?”