39
They had a pilot of their own, a good one, a Cuba veteran named Frum who flew the bus run from Sitka. Frum had served under Litvak at Matanzas and in the bloody debacle of Santiago. He was both faithful and without a shred of faith, a combination of traits prized by Litvak, who found himself obliged to contend on every side with the sometimes voluntary treachery of believers. The pilot Frum believed only what his instrument panel said. He was sober, meticulous, competent, quiet, tough. When he landed a load of recruits at Peril Strait, the boys left Frum’s airplane with a sense of what kind of soldier they wanted to become.
Send Frum, Litvak wrote when they received the news from the case handler, Mr. Cashdollar, of a miraculous birth in Oregon. Frum left on a Tuesday. On Wednesday — how, the believers would say, could this be mere chance? — Mendel Shpilman stumbled into Buchbinder’s cabinet of wonders on the seventh floor of the Blackpool Hotel, saying he was down to his last blessing and ready to spend it on himself. By now the pilot Frum was a thousand miles away, on a ranch outside of Corvallis, where Fligler and Cashdollar, who flew out from Washington, were having trouble coming to terms with the breeder of the magical red animal. There were, of course, other pilots available to fly Shpilman out to Peril Strait, but they were outsiders, or young believers. An outsider could never be trusted, and Litvak worried that Shpilman might disappoint a young believer and start the evil tongues wagging. Shpilman was in a very fragile condition, according to Dr. Buchbinder. He was agitated and crotchety, or sleepy and listless, and he weighed only fifty-five kilos. Really, he was not much in the way of a Tzaddik Ha-Dor at all.
On such short notice, there was one other pilot whom Litvak considered, another one utterly without faith, but discreet and reliable, and with an ancient tie to Litvak on which he dared to pin his hopes. At first he tried to dismiss the name from his thoughts, but it kept returning. He was worried that if they hesitated, they would lose Shpilman again; twice already the yid had backed out of a promise to seek treatment with Roboy at Peril Strait. So Litvak ordered this faithless, reliable pilot tracked down and offered the job. She took it, for a thousand dollars more than Litvak had intend to pay.
“A woman,” said the doctor, shifting his queenside rook, a move that gave him no advantage that Litvak could see. Dr. Roboy, in Litvak’s measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence. “Here. In this place.”
They were sitting in the office on the second floor of the main building, with a view of the strait, the ragtag Indian village with its nets and crazed boardwalk, the jutting arm of the brand-new floatplane dock. The office was Roboy’s, with a desk in the corner for Maish Fligler when he was around and could be kept behind a desk. Alter Litvak preferred to do without the luxury of a desk, an office, a home. He slept in guest rooms, garages, on somebody’s couch. His desk was a kitchen table, his office the training ground, the Einstein Chess Club, the back room of the Moriah Institute.
We have men in this place who are less manly, Litvak wrote in his notepad, I should have hired her before
He forced an exchange of bishops, opening a sudden breach in White’s center. He saw that he had mate, in one of two ways, within four moves. The prospect of victory was tedious. He wondered if he had ever cared at all for the game of chess. He took up his pen and wrote out an insult, even though, in almost five years, it had proved impossible to get a rise out of Roboy.
If we had a hundred like her I would be cleaning your clock by now on a terrace overlooking the Mount of Olives
“Humph,” said Dr. Roboy, fingering a pawn, watching Litvak’s face as Litvak watched the sky.
Dr. Roboy sat with his back to the window, a dark parenthesis bracketing the chessboard, his long, jutting face slack with the effort of guessing at the bleakness of his immediate chess future. Behind him the western sky was all marmalade and smoke. The crumpled mountains, folds of green that looked black, and purple that looked black, and luminous blue fissures of white snow. To the southwest a full moon was setting early, sharp-edged and gray, looking like a high-resolution black-and-white photograph of itself pasted to the sky.
“Every time you look out the window,” Roboy said, “I think it’s because they’re here. I wish you would stop. You’re making me nervous.” He tipped over his king, pushed back from the board, and unfurled his great mantis body one joint at a time. “I can’t play, I’m sorry. You win. I’m too keyed up.”
He started to stalk back and forth across the office.
I don’t see what you are so worried about you have the easy job
“Is that so?”
He has to redeem Isreel, you just have to redeem him
Roboy stopped pacing and turned to face Litvak, who put down his pen and set about returning the pieces to their maple box.
“Three hundred boys are ready to die at his back,” Roboy said, peevish. “Thirty thousand Verbovers will be staking their lives and fortunes on this man. Uprooting their homes, putting their families at risk. If others follow, then we are talking about millions. I’m glad you can make jokes about that. I’m glad it doesn’t make you nervous to look out that window and watch the sky and know that he is finally on his way.”
Litvak stopped putting away the pieces and looked out the window again. Cormorants, gulls, a dozen fanciful variations on the basic duck, having no names in Yiddish. At any moment anyone of them, wings spread against the sunset, might be taken for an approaching Piper Super Cub, coming in low from the southwest. Looking at the sky was making Litvak nervous, too. But theirs was not by definition an endeavor that attracted men with the talent for waiting.
I hope that he is the Tz H-D I really do
“No, you don’t,” Roboy said. “That’s a lie. You’re just in it for the stakes. For the game.”
Following the accident that took Litvak’s wife and his voice, it was Dr. Rudolf Buchbinder, the mad dentist of Ibn Ezra Street, who had rebuilt his jaw, restored its masonry in acrylic and titanium. And when Litvak found himself addicted to painkillers, it was the dentist who had sent him for treatment to an old friend, Dr. Max Roboy. Years later, when Cashdollar asked his man in Sitka for help fulfilling the divinely inspired mission of the president of America, Litvak thought at once of Buchbinder and Roboy.
It had taken a lot longer, not to mention every last ounce of chutzpah Litvak had, to work Heskel Shpilman into the plan. Endless pilpul and haggling through Baronshteyn. Stiff resistance from career men at Justice who viewed Shpilman and Litvak — with justice — as a ganglord and a hatchetman. At last, after months of false alarms and cancellations, a meeting with the big man at the Ringelblum Avenue Baths.
A Tuesday morning, snow twisting down in sloppy helixes, four inches of new snow on the ground. Too new, too early for the snowplow. At the corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn, a chestnut vendor, snow on his red umbrella, hiss and shimmer of the roasting box, parallel grooves of his cart wheels framing the slurry of his footprints in the snow. So quiet you could hear the clockwork thunking in the traffic signal box and the vibration of the pager on the hip of the gunman by the door. A pair of gunmen, those great red bears they kept to guard the body of the Verbover rebbe.
As the Rudashevsky biks handed Litvak along from the door, up the cement stairs with the vinyl treads, down the mine shaft of a hallway to the front door of the baths, the fists of their faces all cupped a minor light. Mischief, pity, the glint of a prankster, a torturer, a priest preparing to uncover the cannibal god. As for the ancient Russian cashier in his steel cage, the burly attendant in his bunker of folded white towels, these yids had no eyes at all, as far as Litvak ever knew. They kept their heads down, blinded by fear and discretion. They were elsewhere, drinking coffee at the Polar Shtern, still at home in their beds with their wives. The baths were not even open for business at this hour. There was nobody here, nobody at all, and the attendant who slid a pair of threadbare towels across the counter to Litvak was a ghost serving up a winding sheet to a dead man.