“You think I should have been discharged, don’t you?”

“No, Meyer.”

“I know I go a little too far. Play the hunches. The loose-cannon routine.”

“You think I’m angry because they gave you back your badge and your gun?”

“Well, not so much that, no. But the hearing being canceled. I know how much you like things done by the book.”

“I do like things done by the book,” she says, her voice tight. “I believe in the book.”

“I know you do.”

“If you and I had played it by the book a little more,” she says, and something dangerous seems to well up between them. “You and your hunches, a black year on them.”

He wants to tell it to her then: the story that has been telling him for the past three years. How, after Django was husked from her body, Landsman stopped the doctor in the hall outside the operating room. Bina had instructed Landsman to ask this good doctor whether there was some use, some aim or study, to which the half-grown bones and organs might be put.

“My wife was wondering,” Landsman began, then faltered.

“Whether there was any visible defect?” the doctor said. “No. Nothing at all. The baby appeared to be normal.” He remarked, too late, the look of horror blooming on Landsman’s face. “Of course, that doesn’t mean there was nothing wrong.”

“Of course,” Landsman said.

He never saw this doctor again. The ultimate fate of the little body, of the boy Landsman sacrificed to the god of his own dark hunches, was something he had neither the heart nor the stomach to investigate.

“I made the same fucking deal, Meyer,” Bina says before he can confess to her. “For my silence.”

“That you get to keep being a cop?” “No. That you do.”

“Thanks,” Landsman says. “Bina, thanks a lot. I’m grateful.”

She presses her face into her hands and massages her temples. “I’m grateful to you, too,” she says. “I’m grateful for the reminder of just how messed up all of this is.”

“My pleasure,” he says. “Glad I could help.”

“Fucking Mr. Cashdollar. The man’s hair doesn’t move. It’s like it’s welded to his head.”

“He said he had nothing to do with Naomi,” Landsman says. He pauses and nibbles on his lip. “He said it was the man who had the job before him.”

He tries to keep his head up while he says it, but after a moment he finds himself looking at the stitches of his shoes. Bina reaches, hesitates, then gives his shoulder a squeeze. She leaves her hand on him for all of two seconds, just long enough to rip a seam or two in Landsman.

“Also he denied any involvement in Shpilman. I forgot to ask him about Litvak, though.” Landsman looks up, and she takes her hand away. “Did Cashdollar tell you where they took him? Is he on his way to Jerusalem?”

“He tried to look mysterious about it, but I think he was just without a clue. I overheard him on his cell phone, telling somebody they were bringing in a forensic team from Seattle to go over the room at the Blackpool. Maybe that Was something he wanted me to hear. But I have to say they all seemed nonplussed about our friend Alter Litvak. They seem to have no idea where he is. Maybe he took the money and ran. He could be halfway to Madagascar by now.”

“Maybe,” Landsman says, then, more slowly, “maybe.”

“God help me, I sense another hunch coming on.”

“You said you’re grateful to me.".

“In a backhanded, ironical way. Yeah.”

“Look, I could use a little backup. I want to have another look at Litvak’s room.”

“We can’t get into the Blackpool. The whole joint is under some kind of secret federal lockdown.”

“Only I don’t want to get into the Blackpool. I want to get under it.”

“Under it?”

“I heard there might be some, well, some tunnels down there.”

“Tunnels.”

“Warsaw tunnels, I heard they’re called.”

“You need me to hold your hand,” she says. “In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.”

“Only in the metaphorical sense,” he says.

43

At the top of the stairs, Bina takes a key-ring flashlight from her cowhide bag and passes it to Landsman. It promotes or possibly allegorizes the services of a Yakovy funeral home. Then she moves aside some dossiers, a sheaf of court documents, a wooden hair brush, a mummified boomerang that may once have been a banana in a Ziploc, a copy of People, and comes up with a slack black harness suggestive of sadomasochistic sex play, equipped with a kind of round canister. She plunges her head into the midst of it and involves her hair with the black webbing. When she sits up and turns her head, a silver lens flares and wanes, raking Landsman’s face. Landsman can feel the imminent darkness, can feel the very word “tunnel” burrowing through his rib cage.

They go down the steps, through the lost-articles room. The taxidermy marten leers at them as they pass. The loop of rope on the door of the crawl space dangles. Landsman tries to recall if he returned it to its hook before his inglorious retreat last Thursday night. He stands there, racking his memory, and then he gives up.

“I’ll go first,” Bina says.

She gets down on her bare knees and works herself into the crawl space. Landsman hangs back. His throbbing pulse, his dry tongue, his autonomic systems are caught up in the tiresome history of his phobia, but the crystal set that is handed out to every Jew, tuned to receive transmissions from Messiah, resonates at the sight of Bina’s ass, the long indented arc of it like some kind of magic alphabet letter, a rune with the power to roll away the stone slab behind which he has entombed his desire for her. He is pierced by the knowledge that no matter how potent a spell it still casts over him, he will never again find himself permitted, wonder of wonders, to bite it. Then it vanishes into the darkness, along with the rest of her, and Landsman is left stranded. He mutters to himself, reasons with himself, dares himself to go in after her, and then Bina says, “Get in here,” and Landsman obeys.

She spans an arc of the plywood disk with her fingertips, lifts it, and passes it to Landsman, her face flickering with the glow of his flashlight and with a prankish solemnity he has not seen in years. When they were kids, he would climb to her bedroom in the night, sneaking in and out the window to sleep with her, and this was the face she wore as she eased up the sash.

“It’s a ladder!” she says. “Meyer, you didn’t go down this? When you came here that night?”

“Well, no, I was kind of, I wasn’t really—”

“Yeah, okay,” she says gently. “I know.”

She lowers herself down one steel cleat at a time, and again Landsman goes after her. He can hear her grunt as she lets herself drop, the metallic scrape of her shoes. Then he falls down into the darkness. She catches hold of him and half succeeds in keeping him on his feet. The lamp on Bina’s forehead splashes light here, here, here, making a hasty sketch of the tunnel.

It’s another aluminum pipe, running perpendicular to the one they just came down. Landsman’s hat brushes against the arc of it when he stands erect. It ends behind them in a curtain of dank black earth and runs straight away from them, under Max Nordau Street, toward the Blackpool. The air is cold and planetary, with an iron taint. A floor of plywood has been laid, and as they clunk along it, their lights pick out the imprints of the boots of passing men.

When they reckon themselves to be about halfway across Max Nordau, they meet another pipeline running away to the east and west, linking this tunnel to the network laid against the likelihood of future annihilation. Tunnels leading to tunnels, storehouses, bunkers.

Landsman considers the cohort of yids who arrived with his father, those who were not broken by suffering and horror but rather somehow resolved. The former partisans, the resisters, Communist gunmen, left-Zionist saboteurs — the rabble, as they were styled in the newspapers of the south — who showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls and fought with Polar Bears like Hertz Shemets their brief, doomed battle for control of the District. They knew, those bold and devastated men, knew as they knew the flavor of their tongues in their mouths, that their saviors would one day betray them. They walked into this wild country that had never seen a Jew and set about preparing for the day when they would be rounded up, sent packing, forced to make a stand. Then, one by one, these wised up, angry men and women had been coopted, picked off, fattened up, set against one another, or defanged by Uncle Hertz and his endless operations.