He was torn, as he had always been, between his natural impulse to admire a competent practitioner of a difficult trade and his suspicion that the woman was a lesbian, a human category that he failed almost on principle to understand.
“All right, then,” she said. She was still holding on to Shpilman, and as the wind picked up, she moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulder, drawing him to her, giving him a squeeze. She scanned the greenish faces of the men who waited for her to hand over the cargo. “You going to be all right, then?”
Litvak wrote in his pad and passed it to Roboy.
“It’s late,” Roboy said. “And dark. Let us put you up for the night.”
She appeared to consider rejecting the offer for a I moment. Then she nodded. “Good idea,” she said.
At the bottom of the long, winding stair, Shpilman stopped to take in the particulars of the climb and the platform of the inclined elevator, and he seemed to suffer a qualm — a foreshock, a sudden access of understanding of everything that would from now on be expected of him. With a certain drama, he collapsed into Roboy’s wheelchair.
“I left my cape at home,” he said.
When they reached the top, he stayed in the chair and allowed the Landsman to wheel him into the main building. The strain of travel or the step he had finally taken or the plummeting level of heroin in his blood stream was beginning to tell. But when they reach the room on the ground floor that had been prepared for him — a bed, a desk, a chair, and a fine English chess set — he rallied. He reached into the pocket of his creased suit and took out a black and bright-yellow cardboard package.
“Nu, I understand a mazel tov is in order?” he said passing out half a dozen fine-looking Cohiba cigars. The smell of them, even unlit and three feet from his nostrils was enough to whisper promises to Litvak of well-earned respite, clean sheets, hot water, brown women, the quiet aftermath of brutal battles. “They tell me it’s a girl.”
For a moment nobody knew what he was talking about, and then they all laughed nervously, except for Litvak and Turteltoyb, whose cheeks turned the color of borscht. Turteltoyb knew, as each of them knew, that Shpilman was not to be provided with any details of the plan, including the newborn heifer, until Litvak gave the order.
Litvak knocked the cigar from Shpilman’s soft hand. He scowled at Turteltoyb, hardly able to see him through the blood-red broth of his own anger. The certainty he had felt down on the dock that Shpilman would serve their needs was turned abruptly on its head. A man like Shpilman, a talent like Shpilman’s, could never serve anyone; it could only be served, above all by the one who wielded it. No wonder the poor bastard had been hiding from it for so long.
Out
They read his message and filed one by one out of the room, last of all the Landsman, who made a point of asking where she would be sleeping and then of telling Mendel pointedly that she would see him in the morning. At the time Litvak had a vague idea she might be arranging a tryst, but his notion of her as a lesbian canceled it out before he had time to give it any consideration. It didn’t occur to Litvak that the Jewess, in her readiness for any adventure, was already laying the groundwork for the daring escape that Mendel had not yet decided to attempt. The Landsman struck a match, puffed at her cigar to get it lit. Then she sauntered out.
“Don’t hold it against the boy, Reb Litvak,” Shpilman said when they were alone. “People have a way of telling me things. But I guess you noticed that. Please, have a cigar. Go on. It’s a very good one.”
Shpilman picked up the corona that Litvak had knocked from his grasp, and when Litvak neither accepted nor refused it, the yid lifted it to Litvak’s mouth and fitted it gently between his lips. It hung there, exuding its smells of gravy and cork and mesquite, cuntish smells that stirred old longings. There was a click, and a scrape, and then Litvak leaned wonderingly forward and poked the end of the cigar into the flame of his own Zippo lighter. He felt the momentary shock of a miracle. Then he grinned and nodded his thanks, feeling a kind of giddy relief at the belated arrival of a logical explanation: He must have left the lighter back in Sitka, where Gold or Turteltoyb had found it and brought it along on the flight to Peril Strait. Shpilman had borrowed it and, with his junkie instincts, pocketed it after lighting a papiros. Yes, good.
The cigar caught with a crackle and flared. When Litvak looked back up from the glowing coal, Shpilman was staring at him with those strange mosaic eyes, flecks of gold and green. Good, Litvak told himself again. A very good cigar.
“Go ahead,” Shpilman said. He pressed the Zippo into Litvak’s hand. “Go, Reb Litvak. Light the candle. There’s no prayer you say. There’s nothing you have to do or feel. You just light it. Go on.”
As logic drained away from the world, never entirely to return, Shpilman reached into Litvak’s jacket pocket and took out the glass and the wax and the wick. For this trick, Litvak could make himself no explanation. He took the candle from Shpilman and set it on a table. He struck the flint with a scratch of his thumb. He felt the intense warmth of Shpilman’s hand on his shoulder. The fist of his heart begin to slacken its grip, the way it might when the day came that he finally set foot in the home where he was meant to dwell. It was a terrifying sensation. He opened his mouth.
“No,” he said in a voice that had in it, to his wonder, a note of the human.
He snapped the lighter shut and knocked Shpilman’s hand aside with such violence that Shpilman lost his balance, stumbled, and hit his head on the metal shelf. The force of the blow jarred loose the candle and sent it crashing to the tile floor. The glass cracked into three large pieces. The cylinder of wax split in two.
“I don’t want it,” Litvak croaked. “I’m not ready.” But when he looked down at Shpilman, sprawled on the floor, dazed, bleeding from a cut on his right temple, he knew that it was already too late.
40
Just as Litvak lays down his pen, you can hear a tumult outside: half a curse, glass breaking, the wind huffing out of somebody’s lungs. Then Berko Shemets comes promenading into the bedroom. He has Gold’s head nestled under one arm like a nice roast and the rest of Gold draggling along behind. The ganef’s heels plow deep furrows in the carpet. Berko slams the door behind them. He has his sholem out, and it hungers like a compass needle for the magnetic north of Alter Litvak. Hertz’s blood is mapped across Berko’s hunting shirt and jeans. Berko’s hat is pushed back in a way that makes his face look all brow and eye whites. The head of Gold glares oracular from the crook of Berko’s arm.
“You should shit blood and pus,” Gold intones. “You should get scabies like Job.”
Berko’s gun swings around to get a look at the young yid’s brain in its breakable container. Gold stops struggling, and the gun resumes its one-eyed inspection of Alter Litvak’s chest.
“Berko,” Landsman says. “What’s this craziness?” Berko heaves his gaze toward Landsman like a great burden. He opens his lips, closes them, draws a breath.
He seems to have something important that he wants to express, a name, a spell, an equation that can bend time or unknit the strings of the world. Or maybe he’s trying to keep from coming unknit himself.
“That yid,” he says, and then softer, his voice a little husky, “My mother.”
Landsman has maybe seen a photograph of Laurie Jo Bear. He manages to scare up a vague memory of teased black bangs, pinkish glasses, a wiseass smile. But the woman is not even a ghost to him. Berko used to tell stories about life in the Indianer Lands. Basketball, seal hunts, drunks and uncles, Willie Dick stories, the story of the human ear on the table. Landsman doesn’t remember any stories about the mother. He supposes that he always knew there had to be some kind of cost to Berko in turning himself inside out the way he did, some kind of heroic feat of forgetting. He just never bothered to think of it as a loss. A failure of imagination, a worse sin in a shammes than going into a hot place with no backup. Or maybe it was the same sin in a different form.