“Go,” Landsman says.
Lapidus lurches to his feet like a man defeated by his bowels. The business of coat and galoshes is undertaken with a show of battered dignity. He returns the iron lid of his hat by half-inches to his head, the way you ease down a manhole cover. With a grieving eye, he watches Fishkin sweep his unplayed morning into a hinged wooden box. Side by side, the black hats conduct themselves among the tables, past the other players, who look up to watch them go. Just before they reach the doors, the left leg of Saltiel Lapidus comes unstrung at its tuning key. He sags, gives way, and reaches to steady himself with a hand on the shoulder of his friend. The floor under his feet is bare and smooth. As far as Landsman can tell, there is nothing to catch the toe.
“I never saw such a sad Bobover,” he observes. “Jew was on the verge of tears.”
“You want to push him again?”
“Just an inch or two.”
“That’s all you get with them anyway,” Berko says. They hurry past the patzers: a seedy violinist from the Sitka Odeon; a chiropodist, you see his picture on bus benches. Berko bursts through the doors after Lapidus and Fishkin. Landsman is about to follow when something wistful tugs at his memory, a whiff of some brand of aftershave that nobody wears anymore, the jangling chorus of a song that was moderately pop- ular one August twenty-five summers ago. Landsman turns to the table nearest the door.
An old man sits clenched like a fist around a chessboard, facing an empty chair. He has the pieces set up on their opening squares and has drawn or assigned himself White. Waiting for his opponent to show. Shining skull edged with tufts of grayish hair like pocket lint. The lower part of his face hidden by the cant of his head. Visible to Landsman are the hollows of his temples, his halo of dandruff, the bony bridge of his nose, the grooves on his brow like a grid left in raw pie crust by the tines of a fork. And the furious hunch of his shoulders, gripping the problem of the chess board, planning his brilliant campaign. They were broad shoulders at one time, the shoulders of a hero or a mover of pianos.
“Mr. Litvak,” Landsman says.
Litvak selects his king’s knight the way a painter chooses a brush. His hands remain agile and ropy. He daubs an arcing stroke toward the center of the board; he always favored the hypermodern style of play. At the sight of the Reti Opening and Litvak’s hands, Landsman is flooded, almost knocked down, by the old dread of chess, by the tedium, the irritation, the shame of those days spent breaking his father’s heart over chessboards in the Einstein coffee shop.
He says louder, “Alter Litvak.”
Litvak looks up, puzzled and myopic. He was a man for a fistfight, barrel-chested, a hunter, a fisherman, a soldier. When he reached for a chessman, you saw the flash of the lightning bolt on his big gold Army Ranger ring. Now he looks shrunken, depleted, the king in the story reduced by the curse of eternal life to a cricket in the ashes of the hearth. Only the vaulting nose remains as testament to the former grandeur of his face. Looking at the wreckage of the man, Landsman thinks that if his father had not taken his own life, he would in all likelihood be dead nevertheless.
Litvak makes an impatient or petitioning gestur with his hand. He takes from his breast pocket a marbled black notepad and a fat fountain pen. He wears his beard neatly trimmed, as ever. A houndstooth blazer, tasseled boat shoes, a display handkerchief, a scarf strung through his lapels. The man has not lost his sporting air. In the pleats of his throat is a shining scar, a whitish comma tinged with pink. As he writes in the pad with his big Waterman, Litvak’s breath comes through his great fleshy nose in patient gusts. The scratch of the nib is all that remains to him for a voice. He passes the pad to Landsman. His script is steady and clear.
Do I know you
His gaze sharpens, and he cocks his head to one side, sizing Landsman up, reading the wrinkled suit, the porkpie hat, the face like Hershel the dog’s, knowing Landsman without recognizing him. He takes back the pad and appends one word to his question.
Do I know you Detective
“Meyer Landsman,” Landsman says, handing the old man a business card. “You knew my father. I used to come here with him from time to time. Back when the club was in the coffee shop.”
The red-rimmed eyes widen. Wonder mingles with horror as Mr. Litvak intensifies his study of Landsman, searching for some proof of this unlikely claim. He turns a page in his pad and pronounces his findings in the matter.
Impossible No way Meyerle Landsman could be such a lumpy old sack of onions
“Afraid so,” Landsman says.
What are you doing here terrible chess player
“I was only a kid,” Landsman says, horrified to detect a creak of self-pity in his tone. What an awful place, what wretched men, what a cruel and pointless game. “Mr. Litvak, you don’t happen to know a man, I gather he plays here sometimes, a Jew maybe they call him Frank?”
Yes I know him has he done something wrong
“How well do you know him?”
Not as well as I would like
“Do you know where he lives, Mr. Litvak? Have you seen him recently?”
Months pls say you are not a homicide det.
“Again,” Landsman says, “I’m afraid so.”
The old man blinks. If he is shocked or saddened by the inference, you can’t read it anywhere in his face or body language. But then a man not in control of his emotions would never get very far with the Reti Opening. Maybe there is a hint of shakiness in the word he writes next in his pad.
Overdose?
“Gunshot,” Landsman says.
The door to the club creaks open, and a couple of patzers come in from the alley looking gray and cold. A gaunt scarecrow barely out of his teens, with a trimmed golden beard and a suit that’s too small for him, and a short, chubby man, dark and curly-bearded, in a suit that’s much too large. Their crew cuts look patchy, as if self-inflicted, and they wear matching black crocheted yarmulkes. They hesitate a moment in the doorway, abashed, looking at Mr. Litvak as if they expect to be scolded.
The old man speaks then, inhaling the words, his voice a dinosaurian ghost. It’s an awful sound, a malfunction of the windpipe. A moment after it fades, mun realizes that he said, “My grandnephews.”
Litvak waves them in and passes Landsman’s card to the chubby one.
“Nice to meet you, Detective,” the chubby one says with the hint of an accent, maybe Australian. He takes the empty chair, glances at the board, and smartly brings out his own king’s knight. “Sorry, Uncle Alter. That one was late, as usual.”
The skinny one hangs back with his hand on the open door of the club.
“Landsman!” Berko calls from the alley, where he has Fishkin and Lapidus corralled beside the Dumpster. It appears to Landsman that Lapidus is bawling like a child. “What the hell?”
“Right there,” Landsman says. “I have to go, Mr. Litvak.” For an instant he handles the bones, horn, and leather of the old man’s hand. “Where can I reach you if I need to talk to you some more?”
Litvak writes out an address and tears the leaf from his pad.
“Madagascar?” Landsman says, reading the name of some unimaginable street in Tananarive. “That’s a new one.” At the sight of that faraway address, at the thought of that house on rue Jean Bart, Landsman feels a profound ebb in his will to pursue the matter of the dead yid in 208. What difference will it make if he catches the killer? A year from now, Jews will be Africans, and this old ballroom will be filled with teadancing gentiles, and every case that ever was opened or closed by a Sitka policeman will have been filed in cabinet nine. “When are you leaving?”