Berko walks over to the table on the other side of the Russian and Velvel. It’s unoccupied. He picks up a bentwood chair with a ripped cane seat and swings it around to a spot between the table of the black hats and the table where the Russian is breaking Velvel down. He sits down in that grand fat-man way he has, spreading his legs, tossing the flaps of his overcoat behind him, as if he is going to make a fine meal of them all. He takes off his own homburg, palming it by the crown. His Indian hair stands thick and lustrous, threaded lately with silver. Gray hair makes Berko look wiser and kinder, an effect that, though he is relatively wise and fairly kind, he will not hesitate to abuse. The bentwood chair grows alarmed at the scope and contour of Berko’s buttocks.
“Hi!” Berko says to the black hats. He rubs his palms together, then spreads them across his thighs. All the man needs is a napkin to tuck into his collar, a fork, and a knife. “How are you?”
With the art and determination of the very worst actors, the black hats look up, surprised.
“We don’t want any trouble,” the Lubavitcher says.
“My favorite phrase in the Yiddish language,” Berko says sincerely. “Now, how about we get you in on this discussion? Tell us about Frank.”
“We did not know him,” the Lubavitcher says. “Frank who?”
The Bobover says nothing.
“Friend Bobover,” Landsman says gently. “Your name.”
“My name is Saltiel Lapidus,” the Bobover says. His eyes are girlish and shy. He folds his fingers in his lap, on top of his hat. “And I know nothing about anything.”
“You played with this Frank? You knew him?”
Saltiel Lapidus gives his head a hasty shake. “No.”
“Yes,” the Lubavitcher says. “He was known to us.”
Lapidus glares at his friend, and the Lubavitcher looks away. Landsman reads the story. Chess is permitted to the pious Jew, even — alone among games — on the Sabbath. But the Einstein Chess Club is a resolutely secular institution. The Lubavitcher dragged the Bobover into this profane temple on a Friday morning with Sabbath coming and both of them having better things to do. He said everything would be fine, what harm could come of it? And now see.
Landsman is curious, even touched. A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.
“I have seen him here,” the Lubavitcher declares his eyes on his friend, as if to show him they have nothing to fear. “This so-called Frank. Maybe I played him one or two times. In my opinion, he was a highly talented player.”
“Compared to you, Fishkin,” the Russian says, ” monkey is Raul Capablanca.”
“You,” Landsman says to Russian, his voice level, playing a hunch. “You knew he was a heroin addict. How?”
“Detective Landsman,” the Russian says, half reproachfuL “You do not recognize me?”
It felt like a hunch. But it was only a mislaid memory.
“Vassily Shitnovitzer,” Landsman says. It has not been so long — a dozen years — since he arrested a young Russian of that name for conspiracy to sell heroin. A recent immigrant, a former convict swept clear of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Third Russian Republic. A man with broken Yiddish, this heroin dealer, and pale eyes set too close together. “And you knew me all this time.”
“You are handsome fellow. Hard to forget,” Shitnovitzer says. “Also snappy dresser.”
“Shitnovitzer spent a long time in Butyrka,” Landsman tells Berko, meaning the notorious Moscow prison. “Nice guy. Use to sell junk from the kitchen of he coffee shop here.”
“You sold heroin to Frank?” Berko says to Shitnovitzer.
“I am retired,” Vassily Shitnovitzer says, shaking his head. “Sixty-four federal months in Ellensburg, Washington. Worse than Butyrka. Never again I don’t touch that stuff, Detectives, and even if I do, believe me, I don’t go near Frank. I am crazy, but I am not lunatic.”
Landsman feels the bump and the skid as the tires lock. They have just hit something.
“Why not?” Berko says, kindly and wise. “Why does selling smack to Frank make you not just a criminal but a lunatic, Mr. Shitnovitzer?”
There is a small, decisive clink, a bit hollow, like false teeth clapping together. Velvel tips over his king.
“I resign,” says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He’s late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.
“Sit down,” Berko says without turning around. The kid sits down.
A cramp has seized Shitnovitzer’s intestines; that’s how it looks to Landsman.
“Bad mazel,” he says finally,
“Bad mazel,” Landsman repeats, letting his doubt and his disappointment show.
“Like a coat. A hat of bad mazel on his head. So much bad mazel, you don’t want to touch him or share oxygen nearby.”
“I saw him playing five games at once,” Velvel offers. “For a hundred dollars. He won them all. Then I saw him vomiting in the alley.”
“Detectives, please,” Saltiel Lapidus says in a pained voice. “We have nothing to do with this. We know nothing about this man. Heroin. Vomiting in alleys. Please, we’re already uncomfortable enough.”
“Embarrassed,” the Lubavitcher suggests.
“Sorry,” Lapidus concludes. “And we have nothing to say. So, please, may we go?”
“Sure thing,” Berko says. “Take off. Just write down your names and contact information for us before you go.”
He takes out his so-called notebook, a small, fat sheaf of paper held together with an extra-large paper clip. At any given moment it might be found to contain business cards, tides tables, to-do lists, chronological listings of English kings, theories scrawled at three in the morning, five-dollar bills, jotted recipes, folded cocktail napkins with the layout of a South Sitka alley in which a hooker was killed. He shuffles through his notebook until he arrives at a blank scrap of index card, which he hands to Fishkin the Lubavitcher. He holds out his stub of pencil, but, no thank you, Fishkin has a pen of his own. He writes down his name and address and the number of his Shoyfer, then passes it to Lapidus, who does the same.
“Only,” Fishkin says, “don’t call us. Don’t come to our homes. I beg you. We don’t have anything to say. There’s nothing about that Jew that we can tell you.”
Every noz in the District learns to respect the silence of the black hat. It is a refusal to answer that can spread and gather and deepen until, like a fog, it fills the streets of an entire black-hat neighborhood. Black hats wield skillful attorneys, and political clout, and boisterous newspapers, and can enfold a hapless inspector or even a commissioner in a great black-hatted stink that doesn’t go away until the witness or suspect is kicked loose or the charges are dropped. Landsman would need the full weight of the department behind him, and at the very least his skipper’s approval, before he could invite Lapidus and Fishkin into the hotbox of the homicide modular.
He risks a glance at Berko, who risks a slight shake of the head.