Dick rumbles past the Zumzum, squeaks to a stop, kills the elderly British engine. He climbs off the bike and comes swaggering over to Landsman.
“What the fuck?” he says, pulling off his gloves, black leather gauntlets of the sort that might be worn by Max von Sydow playing Erwin Rommel. His voice is always surprisingly rich and deep, given the boyishness of his frame. He describes a slow circuit of appraisal around the flower of Jewish law enforcement. “Detective Meyer Landsman!” He turns to the hard boys and makes a study of their hardness. “Gentlemen.”
“Inspector Dick,” says the one who told Landsman to shut up. The boy has a jailhouse air, honed and stealthy, a toothbrush sharpened to a shiv. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
“With all due respect, Mr. Gold — it is Gold, right? yeah — this is my motherfucking neck of the woods.” Dick steps out from the group centered around Landsman. He stares in to get a look at the shadow watching from behind the closed door of the Caudillo. Landsman can’t be certain, but whoever’s there doesn’t look big enough to be Roboy or the golden man in the penguin sweater. A hunched little shadow, furtive and watchful. “I was here before you, and I’ll be here a long time after you yids are gone.”
Detective Inspector Wilfred Dick is a full-blood Tlingit, descended from the Chief Dick who inflicted the last recorded fatality in the history of Russian-Tlingit relations, shooting and killing a marooned, half-starved Russian submariner he caught raiding his crab traps at Stag Bay in 1948. Willie Dick is married, with nine children by his first and only wife, whom Landsman has never seen. Naturally, she is reputed to be a giantess. In 1993 or ’94 Dick successfully completed the Iditarod dogsled race, coming in ninth among forty-seven finishers. He has a Ph.D. in criminology from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Dick’s first act as an adult male of his tribe was to travel, in an old Boston whaler, from the Dick village at Stag Bay to Tribal Police central headquarters in Angoon, in order to persuade the super intendent to set aside, in his case, the minimum height requirements for Tribal Police officers. The stories of how this was accomplished are slanderous, salacious, hard to believe, or some combination of the three. Willie Dick has all the usual bad qualities of very small, very intelligent men: vanity, arrogance, overcompetitiveness, a long memory for injuries and slights. He is also honest, dogged, and fearless, and he owes Landsman a favor; Dick has a long memory for favors, too.
“I’m trying to imagine what you mad Hebrews are up to, and everyone of my theories is more fucked up than the last one,” he says.
“This man is a patient here,” says Gold. “He was trying to check out a little early, is all.”
“So you were going to shoot him,” Dick says. “That’s some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh?”
He turns back to Landsman and looks him up and down. Dick’s dark face is handsome, in a way, the avid eyes operating from the cover of a sage forehead, the chin dimpled, the nose straight and regu lar. The last time Landsman saw him, Dick kept having to take a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Now he has given in to senescence and adopted a slick black-and-brushed steel pair of Italian spectacles, the kind worn in thoughtful interviews by aging British rock guitarists. He is dressed in stiff black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a red-and-black-plaid shirt with an open collar. Over his shoulders he wears, as usual, a short cloak, held in place with a braided rawhide thong, made from the skin of a bear he hunted and killed himself. He is an affected creature, Willie Dick — he smokes black cigarettes — but he is a fine homicide detective.
“Jesus Christ, Landsman. You look like a fuckin fetal pig I saw one time pickled in a jar.”
He unties the braided thong with the fingers of one hand and shrugs out of the cloak. Then he tosses it to Landsman. For an instant it’s as cold as steel against Landsman’s body, then wonderfully warm. Dick keeps the grin of mockery in place but, for Landsman’s benefit — only Landsman can see it — extinguishes every last trace of humor from his eyes.
“I spoke to that ex-wife of yours,” he says in a near whisper, the voice he uses to threaten suspects and intimidate witnesses. “After I got your message. You have less fucking right to be here than a fucking eyeless African molerat.” He raises his voice nearly to the point of staginess. “Detective Landsman, what did I tell you I was going to do to your Jewish ass the next time I caught you running around Indian country without benefit of clothing?”
“I d-don’t remember,” Landsman says, seized’ by a violent tremor of gratitude and exposure. “You s-said so many things.”
Dick walks over to the Caudillo, and knocks on the closed door like he wants to come in. The door opens, and Dick stands behind it and converses in a low voice with whoever is sitting inside, keeping warm. After a moment Dick comes back and tells Gold, “Man in charge wants to speak to you.”
Gold goes around the open door to talk to the man in charge. When he comes back, he looks like his sinuses have been pulled out through his ears and he blames Landsman for it. He nods once to Dick.
“Detective Landsman,” Dick says. “I’m very much fucking afraid that you are under arrest.”
32
In the emergency room at the Indian hospital in St. Cyril, the Indian doctor looks Landsman over and pronounces him fit to be jailed. The doctor’s name is Rau, and he’s from Madras, and he’s heard all of the jokes before. He’s handsome in the Sal Mineo style, big obsidian eyes and a mouth like a cake-icing rose. Mild frostbite, he tells Landsman, nothing serious, though one hour and forty-seven minutes after his rescue Landsman still can’t seem to suppress the temblors that rise from inner faults to shake his body. Cold to the honeycomb of his bones.
“Where’s the big dog with the little thing of brandy around his neck?” Landsman says after the doctor tells him he can take off the blanket and put on the jailhouse clothes that lie in a neat stack beside the sink. “When does he show up?”
“Do you enjoy brandy?” Dr. Rau says, as if he’s reading from a phrase book, as if he has not the slightest interest either in his question or in any answer that Landsman might ever produce. Landsman tags it at once as a classic interrogator’s tone, so cold that it leaves a burn. Dr. Rau’s gaze remains resolutely fixed on an empty corner of the room. “Is that something you feel you need?”
“Who said anything about needing?” Landsman says, fumbling with the button fly of some worn twill trousers. Cotton work shirt, laceless canvas sneaks. They want to dress him like a wino, or a beach bum, or some other kind of loser who turns up naked at your intake desk, homeless, no visible means of support. The shoes are too big, but otherwise, everything’s a perfect fit.
“No craving?” There’s a fleck of ash in the A of the doctor’s name tag. He picks at it with a fingernail. “You’re not feeling the need of a drink right now?”
“Maybe I just want one,” Landsman says. “Did you ever think of that?”
“Maybe,” the doctor says. “Or maybe you are fond of large, salivating dogs.”
“Okay, knock it off, Doc,” Landsman says. “Let’s not play games.”