“Sit there,” Mrs. Kalushiner says, without indicating where she would like them to sit. The round tables that crowd the stage wear overturned chairs like sets of antlers. Landsman flips two of them, and he and Berko take their seats away from the stage, by the heavily bolted front door. Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.
“What a doll,” Berko says.
“A sweetheart,” Landsman agrees. “She only comes in here in the mornings. That way she never has to look at the clientele.” The Vorsht is the place where the musicians of Sitka do their drinking, after the theaters and the other clubs close down. Long after midnight they come huddling in, snow on their hats, rain in their cuffs, and pack the little stage, and kill one another with clarinets and fiddles. As usual when angels gather, they draw a following of devils: gangsters, ganefs, and hard-luck women. “She doesn’t care for musicians.”
“But her husband was a — Oh. I get it.”
Nathan Kalushiner, until his death, was the owner of the Vorsht and the king of the C-soprano clarinet. He was a gambler, and a junkie, and a very bad man in many respects, but he could play like there was a dybbuk inside him. Landsman, a music lover, used to look out for the crazy little shkotz and try to extricate him from the ugly situations in which Kalushiner’s poor judgment. and gnawed-at soul landed him. Then one day Kalushiner disappeared, along with the wife of a well-known Russian shtarker, leaving Mrs. Kalushiner nothing but the Vorsht and the goodwill of its creditors. Parts of Nathan Kalushiner, but not his C-soprano clarinet, later washed up under the docks up at Yakovy.
“And that’s the guy’s dog?” Berko says, pointing to the stage. At the spot where Kalushiner used to stand and blow every night sits a curly half-terrier mutt, white with brown spots and a black patch around one eye. He’s just sitting, ears raised, as if listening to some echoed voice or music in his brain. A length of slack chain connects him to a steel loop mounted on the wall.
“That’s Hershel,” Landsman says. There’s something painful to him about the dog’s patient mien, his canine air of calm endurance. Landsman looks away. “Five years he’s been standing there.”
“Touching.”
“I guess. The animal, to be honest, he gives me the willies.”
Mrs. Kalushiner reappears, carrying a metal bowl filled with pickled tomatoes and cucumbers, a basket of poppy-seed rolls, and a bowl of sour cream. That’s all balanced along her left arm. The right hand, of course, carries the paper spittoon.
“Beautiful pickles,” Berko suggests, and when that gets him nowhere, he tries, “Cute dog.”
What’s touching, thinks Landsman, is the effort that Berko Shemets is always willing to put into starting a conversation with somebody. The tighter people clam up, the more determined old Berko becomes. That was true of him even as a boy. He had that eagerness to engage with people, especially with his vacuum-packed cousin Meyer.
“A dog is a dog,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. She slams down the pickles and sour cream, drops the basket of rolls, and then retreats to the back room with another clash of beads.
“So I need to ask you a favor,” Landsman says, his gaze on the dog, who has lowered himself to the stage on his arthritic knees and lies with his head on his forepaws. “And I’m hoping very much that you’ll say no.”
“Does this favor have anything to do with ‘effective resolution’? ”
“Are you mocking the concept?”
“Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.” He plucks a pickled tomato from the dish, dabs it in the sour cream, then pokes it neatly into his mouth with a forefinger. He screws up his face with pleasure at the resultant sour squirt of pulp and brine. “Bina looks good.”
“I thought she looked good.”
“A little butch.”
“So you always said.”
“Bina, Bina.” Berko gives his head a bleak shake, one that somehow manages at the same time to look fond. “In her last life, she must have been a weather vane.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Landsman says. “You’re right, but you’re wrong.”
“You’re saying Bina is not a careerist.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“She is, Meyer, and she always has been. That’s one of the things I have always most liked about her. Bina is a smart cookie. She is tough. She is political. She is viewed as loyal, and in two directions, up and down, and that is a hard trick to pull off. She is inspector material all around. In any police force, in any country in the world.”
“She was first in her class,” Landsman says. “At the academy.”
“But you scored higher on the entrance exam.”
“Why, yes,” Landsman says. “I did. Have I mentioned that before?”
“Even U.S. Marshals are smart enough to notice Bina Gelbfish,” Berko says. “If she is trying to make sure there’s a place for her in Sitka law enforcement after Reversion, I’m not going to blame her for that.”
“You make your point,” Landsman says. “Only I don’t buy it. That isn’t why she took this job. Or it’s not the only reason.”
“Why did she, then?”
Landsman shrugs. “I don’t know,” he admits.
“Maybe she ran out of things to do that make sense.”
“I hope not. Or the next thing you know, she’ll be getting back together with you.”
“God forbid.”
“Horrors.”
Landsman pretends to spit three times over his shoulder. Then, right as he’s wondering if this custom has anything to do with the habit of chewing tobacco, Mrs. Kalushiner comes back, dragging the great leg iron of her life.
“I have hard-boiled eggs,” she says menacingly. “I have bagel. I have jellied leg.”
“Just a little something to drink, Mrs. K.,” Landsman says. “Berko?”
“Burp water,” Berko says. “With a twist of lime.”
“You want to eat,” she tells him. It isn’t a guess.
“Why not?” Berko says. “All right, bring me a couple of eggs.”
Mrs. Kalushiner turns to Landsman, and he feels Berko’s eyes on his, daring him and expecting him to order a slivovitz. Landsman can feel Berko’s fatigue, his impatience and irritation with Landsman and his problems. It’s about time he pulled himself together, isn’t it? Find something worth living his life for, and get on it with it.
“Coca-Cola,” Landsman says. “If you please.”
This may be the first thing that Landsman or anyone has ever done to surprise the widow of Nathan Kalushiner. She raises one steel-gray eyebrow, then turns away. Berko reaches for one of the pickled cucumbers, shaking off the peppercorns and cloves that stud its freckled green skin. He crunches it between his teeth and frowns happily.
“It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle,” he says, and then, as if offhand, teasing, “Sure you don’t want another beer?”
Landsman would love a beer. He can taste the bitter caramel of it on the back of his tongue. In the meantime, the one that Ester-Malke gave him has yet to leave his body, but Landsman is getting indications that it has its bags packed and is ready to go. The proposition or appeal that he has determined to make to his partner now strikes him as perhaps the stupidest idea he has ever had, certainly not worth living for. But it will have to do.
“Fuck you,” he says, getting up from the table. “I need to take a leak.”
In the men’s room, Landsman discovers the body of an electric guitarist. From a table at the back of the Vorsht, Landsman has often admired this yid and his playing. He was among the first to import the techniques and attitudes of American and British rock guitarists to the Bulgars and freylekhs of Jewish dance music. He is roughly the same age and background as Landsman, grew up in Halibut Point, and in moments of vainglory, Landsman has compared himself, or rather his detective work, to the intuitive and flashy playing of this man who appears to be dead or passed out in the stall with his money hand in the toilet bowl. The man is wearing a black leather three-piece suit and a red ribbon necktie. His celebrated fingers have been denuded of their rings, leaving ghostly indentations. A wallet lies on the tiled floor, looking empty and distended.