Landsman thinks about Naomi. It is a luxury, like a slice of pie. It is as dangerous and welcome as a drink. He invents dialogue for Naomi, the words with which she might mock and ridicule him if she were here. For his sanguinary roll in the snow with those Zilberblat idiots. For drinking ginger ale with a pious old lady in the back of that hypertrophied four-by-four. For thinking he could outlast his drinking problem and stay hyped long enough to find the killer of Mendel Shpilman. For the loss of his badge. For lacking the necessary outrage about Reversion, for having no stance toward it. Naomi claimed that she hated Jews for their meek submission to fate, for the trust they put in God or the gentiles. But then Naomi had a stance toward everything. She policed and maintained her stances; buffed and curated them. She would also, Landsman thinks, have criticized his choice not to take his pie a la mode.
“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” says the pie man’s daughter, sitting down on the bench beside Landsman. She has taken off her apron and washed her hands. Above the elbows, her freckled arms are dusted with flour. There is flour in her blond eyebrows. She wears her hair tied back in a black elastic. She is a hauntingly plain woman with watery blue eyes, about Landsman’s age. She gives off a smell of butter, tobacco, and a sour tang of dough that he finds weirdly erotic. She lights a menthol cigarette and sends a jet of smoke toward him. “That’s a new one.”
She tucks the cigarette into her mouth and holds out her hand to take the membership card. She pretends not to struggle with its text. “I can read Yiddish, you know,” she says finally. “It’s not like it’s fucking Aztec or whatever.”
“I really am a policeman,” Landsman says. “I’m just making a private inquiry today. That is why I don’t use the badge.”
“Show me the picture,” she says. Landsman hands her the mug shot of Mendel Shpilman. She nods, and the carapace of her weariness splits along a momentary seam.
“Miss, you knew him?”
She hands back the mug shot. Shakes her head, makes a dismissive frown. “What happened to him?” she says.
“He was murdered,” Landsman says. “Shot in the head.”
“That’s harsh,” she says. “Oh, Jesus.”
Landsman takes a fresh package of tissues from the pocket of his overcoat and passes them to her. She blows her nose and then balls up the tissue in her fist.
“How did you know him?” Landsman says.
“I gave him a ride,” she says. “One time. That’s it.”
“To where?”
“A motel down on Route Three. I liked him. He was funny. He was sweet. Kind of homely. Kind of a mess. He told me he had a, you know, a problem. With drugs. But that he was trying to get better. He seemed — He just had this way about him.”
“Comforting? ”
“Mm. No. He was just, uh, really, I don’t know. Really there. For like an hour, I thought I was in love with him.”
“But you weren’t really?”
“I guess I never really got the chance to find out.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“You’re a cop, all right,” she says. “A ‘noz,’ isn’t that it? ”
“That’s right.”
“No, I didn’t have sex with him. I wanted to. I invited myself into the motel room with him. I guess I kind of, like, you know. Threw myself at him. That’s no reflection on him. Like I said, he was super nice and all, but he was a mess. His teeth. Anyway, I guess he picked up on it.”
“Picked up on what?”
“That I — I have a little bit of a problem, too. When I get around men. That’s why I don’t really basically get around them a lot. Don’t get any ideas, I don’t like you at all.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I did therapy, twelve-step. I got born again. The only thing that really helped was baking pies.”
“No wonder they’re so good.”
“Ha.”
“He didn’t take you up on your offer.”
“He wouldn’t. He was very sweet. He buttoned up my shirt. I felt like a little girl. Then he gave me something. Something he said that I could keep.”
“What was that?”
She lowers her gaze, and blood colors her face so deeply, Landsman can almost hear the hum of it. Her next words come out thick and whispery.
“His blessing,” she says. Then, more clearly, “He said he was giving me his blessing.”
“I’m fairly certain he was gay,” Landsman says. “By the way.”
“I know,” she says. “He told me. He didn’t use that word. He didn’t really use any word, or if he did, I don’t remember it. I think what he said, it was that he didn’t care to bother with it anymore. He said heroin was simpler and more reliable. Heroin and checkers.”
“Chess. He played chess.”
“Whatever. I still got his blessing, right?”
She seems to need the answer to this question to be yes.
“Yes,” Landsman says.
“Funny little Jew. The freaky thing is, I don’t know. It kind of like, worked.”
“What worked?”
“The blessing. I mean, I have a boyfriend now. A real one. We’re totally dating, it’s very strange.”
“I’m happy for you both,” Landsman says, feeling a stab of envy of her, of all these people who were lucky enough to have Mendel Shpilman lay a blessing on them. He thinks of all the times he must have walked right past Mendel, all the chances that he missed. “So, you’re saying, when you gave him the ride to the motel, it was just a, well, a pickup. It was just because you you were planning to, you know.”
“Jump his bones? No.” She steps on the cigarette with the toe of her sheepskin boot. “It was a favor. For a friend of mine. Driving him, I mean. She knew the guy. Frank, she called him. She flew him in here from somewhere. She was a pilot. She asked me to give him a lift, help him find a place to stay. Someplace low to the ground, she said. So, whatever, I said I would.”
“Naomi,” Landsman says. “That was your friend?”
“Uh-huh. You knew her?”
“I know how much she liked pie,” Landsman says.
“This Frank, he was a client of hers?”
“I guess so. I don’t really know. I didn’t ask. But they flew in here together. He must have hired her. You could probably find that out with that fancy card you’re carrying.”
Landsman feels a numbness enter his limbs, a welcome numbness, a sense of doom that is indistinguishable from peacefulness, like the bite of a predator snake that prefers to swallow its victims alive and tranquil. The pie man’s daughter inclines her head toward the untouched slice of apple crumble on the paper plate, taking up the empty space between them on the bench.
“You are so hurting my feelings,” she says.
28
In every picture of them taken during a long stretch of their childhood, Landsman is posed with his arm slung around his sister’s shoulders. In the early ones, the top of her head reaches to just above his belly. In the last such picture, there is a phantom mustache on Landsman’s upper lip, and he has the advantage of an inch, maybe two. The first time you spotted the trend in the pictures, it seemed cute: a big brother looking out for his kid sister. Seven or eight pictures in, the protective gesture took on a menacing air. After a dozen, you started to worry about those Landsman kids. Huddled together, bravely smiling for the camera, like deserving children in the adoption column of a newspaper.
“Orphaned by tragedy,” Naomi said one night, turning the pages of an old album. The pages were waxed board covered with a crinkly sheet or polyurethane to hold the photos down. The layer of plastic gave the family depicted in the album a preserved quality, as if it had been bagged like evidence. “Two lovable moppets looking for a home.”