Litvak rummaged in the pockets of his suit pants for his lighter, just to give himself the option, the chance of finding out, if he could bring himself to do it, What it might mean to set fire to the memory of his wife. The lighter was a steel Zippo etched with the Rangers insignia in worn black lines on one side, and on the other dented deeply where it had deflected some oncoming bit of the car, or the road, or the chokecherry tree, from piercing Litvak’s heart. For the sake of his throat, Litvak no longer smoked; the lighter was only a habit, a token of his survivorship, an ironical charm that never left his bedside or his pants. But now it was in neither place. He patted himself down with the sheepish method of old man. He stepped backward through his day, working his way to that morning, when, as every morning, he had slid the lighter into his hip pocket. Hadn’t he? All at once he could not remember having pocketed his Zippo that morning, or laying it on the steel shelf last night when he went to sleep. Perhaps he had been forgetting it for days. It might be in Sitka, in the back room at the Blackpool Hotel. It might be anywhere. Litvak lowered himself to the ground, dragged his kit from under the cot, and ransacked it, his heart pounding. No lighter. No matches, either. Only a candle in a juice glass, and a man who did not know how to light it even when he had a source of fire. Litvak turned to the door just as he heard someone approach. A soft knock. He slipped the yahrzeit candle into the hip pocket of his jacket.
“Reb Litvak,” said Micky Vayner. “They’re here, sir.”
Litvak put in his teeth and tucked in his shirt.
I want everyone in quarters I don’t want anybody to see him now
“He isn’t ready,” Micky Vayner said, a little doubtfully, wanting to be reassured. He didn’t know, had never seen Mendel Shpilman. He had only heard stories of long-ago boyish miracles and perhaps caught an acrid whiff of spoiled goods that sometimes curled in the air over the mention of Shpilman’s name.
He is unwell but we will heal him
It was neither part of their doctrine nor necessary to the success of Litvak’s plan for Micky Vayner or any of the Peril Strait Jews to believe that Mendel Shpilman was the Tzaddik Ha-Dor. A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
“We know he’s just a man,” said Micky Vayner dutifully. “We all know that, Reb Litvak. Only a man and nothing more, and this is bigger than any man, what we’re doing.”
It isn’t the man I’m worried about, Litvak wrote. Everyone in quarters
As he stood on the floatplane dock and watched Naomi Landsman help Mendel Shpilman down from the cockpit of her Super Cub, Litvak considered that if he did not know better, he would have taken them for old lovers. There was a brusque familiarity in the way she gripped his upper arm, fished his shirt collar from the lapels of his rumpled pin-striped jacket, picked a string of cellophane from his hair. She watched his face, only his face, as Shpilman eyed Roboy and Litvak; she was tender as an engineer looking for cracks, fatigue in the material. It seemed inconceivable that they had known each other, as far as Litvak was aware, for slightly under three hours. Three hours. That was all it had taken for her to seal up her fate with his.
“Welcome,” Dr. Roboy said, posed beside a wheel chair with his necktie flapping in the breeze. Gold and Turteltoyb, a Sitka boy, jumped down from the plane to the dock, Turteltoyb heavy enough to make it ring like a slammed telephone. The water smacked the pilings. The air smelled of rotten netting and brackish puddles in the bottoms of old boats. It was almost dark, and they all looked vaguely green in the light of the floods on the standards, except for Shpilman, who looked white as a feather and as hollow. “You are genuinely welcome.”
“You didn’t need to send an airplane,” Shpilman said. He had a wry, actorish voice, his diction studied, excellent, with a low, soft underthrob of the sorrowful Ukraine. “I’m perfectly capable of flying on my own.”
“Yes, well—”
“X-ray vision. Bulletproof. The whole bit. Who is the wheelchair for, me?”
He outspread his arms, laid his feet primly side by side, and gave himself a slow once-over, looking prepared to be shocked at what he found. Ill-fitting pin striped suit, hatless, tie loosely knotted, one shirttail hanging out, something teenage in his unruly ginger curls. Impossible to see in that slender fragile frame, that sleepy face, any hint of the monstrous father. Or maybe a little, around the eyes. Shpilman turned to the pilot, affecting to be surprised, even hurt, by the implication that he was so far gone as to need a wheelchair. But Litvak saw that he was putting it on to cover his real surprise and hurt at the implication.
“You said I looked all right, Miss Landsman,” Shpilman said, teasing her, appealing to her, pleading with her.
“You look terrific, kid,” the Landsman told him. She was dressed in blue jeans tucked into high black boots, a man’s white oxford shirt, an old Sitka Central firing range jacket that said LANDSMAN over the pocket. “You look fabulous.”
“Ah, you’re lying, you liar.”
“You look like thirty-five hundred dollars to me, Shpilman,” the Landsman said, not unkindly. “How about we leave it at that?”
“I won’t be needing the wheelchair, doctor,” Shpilman said without reproach. “But thank you for thinking of me.”
“Are you ready, Mendel?” Dr. Roboy asked him in his gentle and sententious way.
“Do I need to be ready?” Mendel said. “If I need to be ready, we may have to push this back a few weeks.”
The words emerged from Litvak’s throat like a kind of verbal dust devil, a tangle of grit and gusts, unbidden. An awful sound, like a glob of burning rubber plunged into a bucket of ice.
“You don’t need to be ready,” Litvak said. “You only need to be here.”
They all looked shocked, horrified, even Gold, who happily could have read a comic book by the light of a burning man. Shpilman turned slowly, a smile tucked into one corner of his mouth like a baby carried on the hip.
“Alter Litvak, I presume,” he said, holding out his hand, scowling at Litvak, affecting to be tough and masculine in a way that mocked toughness and masculinity and his own relative lack of both qualities. “What a grip, oy, it’s like a rock.”
His own grip was soft, warm, not quite dry, eternally a schoolboy’s. Something in Litvak resisted it, the warmth and softness of it. He was himself horrified by the pterosaur echo of his own voice, by the fact that he had spoken at all. He was horrified to see that there was something about Mendel Shpilman, about his puffy face and his bad suit, his kid-prodigy smile and his brave attempt to hide the fact that he was afraid, that had prompted Litvak, for the first time in years, to speak. Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength. He felt, shaking Shpilman’s hot hand, how sound his tactics were. If Roboy could get Shpilman up and running again, then Shpilman could inspire and lead not merely a few hundred armed believers or thirty thousand black-hatted hustlers looking for new turf, but an entire lost and wandering nation. Litvak’s plan was going to work because there was something about Mendel Shpilman that could make a man with a broken voice box want to speak. It was against the something in Shpilman that something in Litvak pushed back, revulsed. He felt an urge to crush that schoolboy hand in his own, to break the bones of it.
“What’s up, yid?” the Landsman said to Litvak. “Long time.”
Litvak nodded, and he shook the Landsman’s hand.