“It seems to have fallen out in the course of my vigorous examination of the evidence,” Berko says. “I figure it must have been wedged into the card pocket, or with your keen shammes vision, you would have noticed it. Recognize it?”
“Yes,” Landsman says. “I know it.”
At the airport that serves the raw northern city of Yakovy — the terminus from which you set off, if you are a Jew looking for modest adventure, into the modest bush of the District — tucked away at the far end of the main building, a modest operation offers pie, and only pie, American-style. The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window hangs a whiteboard, and every day the proprietors — a couple of hostile Klondikes and their mysterious daughter — write out a list of the day’s wares: blackberry, apple rhubarb, peach, banana cream. The pie is good, even famous in a modest way. Anybody who has passed through the Yakovy airfield knows it, and there are rumors of people who will fly in from Juneau or Fairbanks or farther away to eat it. Landsman’s late sister was a devotee of the coconut cream in particular.
“So, nu,” Berko says. “So what do you think?”
“I knew it,” Landsman says. “The minute I walked into the room and saw Lasker lying there, I said to myself, Landsman, this whole case is going to turn on a question of pie.”
“So you think it means nothing.”
“Nothing means nothing,” Landsman says, and all of a sudden he feels choked up, throat swollen, eyes burning with tears. Maybe it’s lack of sleep, or too much time spent in the company of his shot glass. Or maybe it’s the sudden image of Naomi, leaning against a wall outside that nameless and inexplicable pie shop, scarfing up a slice of coconut cream pie from a paper plate with a plastic fork, eyes dosed, lips pursed and streaked with white, grooving on a mouthful of cream, crust and custurd in a profound and animal way. “God damn it, Berko, I wish I had some of that pie right now.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Berko says.
7
For twenty-seven years Sitka Central has been temporarily housed in eleven modular buildings in a vacant lot behind the old Russian orphanage. Rumor holds that the modulars began life as a Bible college in Slidell, Louisiana. They are windowless, low-ceilinged, flimsy, and cramped. The visitor finds, packed into the Homicide modular, a reception area, an office for each of the two detective inspectors, a shower stall with a toilet and sink, a squad room (four cubicles, four chairs, four telephones, a chalkboard, and a row of mail slots), an interrogation hotbox, and a break room. The break room comes equipped with a coffee brewer and a small refrigerator. The break room has also long housed a thriving colony of spores that, at a point in the remote past, spontaneously evolved the form and appearance of a love seat. But when Landsman and Berko pull into the gravel lot by the Homicide modular, a pair of Filipino custodians are lugging out the monstrous fungus.
“It’s moving,” Berko says.
People have been threatening for years to get rid of the sofa, but it is a shock to Landsman to see it finally on its way. Enough of a shock that it takes him a second or two to register the woman standing alongside the steps. She is holding a black umbrella and wearing a bright orange parka with a blazing dyed-green ruff of synthetic fur. Her right arm is raised, index finger extended toward the trash bins, like a painting of the angel Michael casting Adam and Eve from the Garden. A lock of corkscrewing red hair has sprung free of the green fur ruff and dangles down over her face. This is a chronic problem for her. When she is kneeling to examine a doubtful stain on the floor of a crime scene, or studying a photograph under a loupe, she has to blow that lock of hair out of the way with a sharp, irritated puff of breath.
Now she is scowling at the Super Sport as Landsman cuts the engine. She lowers her all-banishing hand. From this distance, it looks to Landsman as if the lady is three or four cups the worse for strong coffee, and somebody has already pissed her off once this morning, maybe twice. Landsman was married to her for twelve years, working the same Homicide squad for five. He is sensitive to her moods.
“Tell me you didn’t know about this,” he says to Berko, cutting the engine.
“I still don’t know about it,” Berko says. “I’m hoping if I close my eyes for a second and then open them again, it’s going to turn out not to be true.”
Landsman tries it. “No dice,” he says with regret, and gets out of the car. “Give us a minute.”
“Please, take all the time you want.”
Landsman requires ten seconds to cross the gravel lot. Bina looks happy to see him for a count of three, followed by a two-count of looking anxious and lovely. She plays out the last five seconds by looking ready to mix it up with Landsman, if that’s how he wants things to go.
“What the fuck?” Landsman says, hating to disappoint her.
“Two months of ex-wife,” Bina says. “After that, it’s anybody’s guess.”
Just after their divorce came through, Bina headed south for a year, enrolling in some kind of leadership training program for women police detectives. On her return, she accepted the lofty post of detective inspector at the Yakovy Homicide Section. There she found stimulus and fulfillment leading investigations into the hypothermia deaths of unemployed salmon fishermen amid the drainage channels of the Venice of Northwest Chichagof Island. Landsman hasn’t seen her since his sister’s funeral, and he gathers from the pitying look she gives his old chassis that he has gone further down hill in the months since then.
“Aren’t you happy to see me, Meyer?” she says. “You don’t say anything about my parka?”
“It’s extremely orange,” Landsman says.
“You need to be visible up there,” she says. “In the woods. Or they’ll think you’re a bear and shoot you.”
“It’s a nice color on you,” Landsman hears himself manage. “Goes with your eyes.”
Bina accepts a compliment as if it’s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken. “So you’re saying you’re surprised,” she says.
“I’m surprised.”
“You didn’t hear about Felsenfeld?”
“It’s Felsenfeld. What would I hear?” He recalls Shpringer having asked him the same question the night before, and now the insight comes to him with a keenness worthy of the man who caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. “Felsenfeld skipped.”
“Turned in his badge two nights ago. Left for Melbourne, Australia, last night. His wife’s sister lives there.”
“And now I have to work for you?” He knows it can’t have been Bina’s idea; and the move, even if it’s only for two months, is unquestionably a promotion for her. But he can’t quite believe that she could permit such a thing — that she would be able to stand it. “That’s impossible.”
“Anything is possible nowadays,” Bina says. “I read it in the newspaper.”
All at once the lines of her face are smoothed over, and he sees what a strain it is for her still to be around him, how relieved she is when Berko Shemets walks up.
“Everyone is here!” she says.
When Landsman turns around he finds his partner standing right behind him. Berko owns considerable powers of stealth that, naturally, he attributes to his Indian forebears. Landsman likes to ascribe them to powerful forces of surface tension, the way Berko’s enormous snowshoe feet warp the earth.
“Well, well, well,” Berko says genially. From the first time that Landsman brought Bina home, she and Berko seemed to share an understanding of, an angle on, a laugh at the expense of Landsman, the funny little sorehead in the last panel of a comic strip with the black lily of an exploded cigar wilting in his puss. She holds out her hand, and they shake.