“But much as I’d like to send you back to get your ass hung on a hook by that ex-wife of yours, Landsman,” Dick barrels on, “and try as I might, I can’t seem to let you go without asking just one question, even knowing in advance that you’re both Jews, of a sort, and that any answer you give me is only going to add to the layers of bullshit that are already blinding me with their high Jewish shine.”
They wait for the question, and it comes, and Dick’s manner hardens. All traces of verbosity and teasing vanish.
“Are we talking about a homicide?” he says.
“Yes,” Landsman says at the same time that Berko says, “Officially, no.’”
“Two,” Landsman insists. “Two, Berko. I make them for Naomi, too.”
“Naomi?” Berko says. “Meyer, what the fuck?”
Landsman goes over it from the beginning, leaving out nothing relevant, from the knock on the door of his room at the Zamenhof to his interview with Mrs. Shpilman, from the pie man’s daughter who sent him into the FAA records to the presence of Aryeh Baronshteyn at Peril Strait.
“Hebrew?” Berko says. “Mexicans speaking Hebrew?”
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Landsman says.
“Not synagogue Hebrew, either.” Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It’s only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls. “I only caught a word or two. It was fast and I couldn’t follow it. I guess that was the idea.”
He tells them about waking in the room where Naomi wrote her epitaph on a wall, about the barracks and the training course and the groups of idle young men with guns.
As he tells it, Dick gets more and more interested in spite of himself, asking questions, poking his nose into the affair with an instinctive, stubborn love of stinks.
“I knew your sister,” he says when Landsman winds up at the rescue in the woods of Peril Strait. “I was sorry when she died. And this holy fudge-packer sounds like exactly the kind of stray mutt she would have risked her ass for.”
“But what did they want from Mendel Shpilman, these Jews with their visitor who doesn’t like messes?” Berko says. “That’s the part I don’t get. What are they doing out there?”
The questions strike Landsman as inevitable, logical, and key, but they seem to cool Dick’s ardor for the case.
“You have nothing,” he says, his mouth a bloodless hyphen. “And let me tell you, Landsman, with these Peril Strait Jews, such is far from the case. They have so much weight behind them, gentlemen, let me tell you, they could make you a diamond out of a fossilized turd.”
“What do you know about them, Willie?” Berko says.
“I don’t know shit.”
“The man in the Caudillo,” Landsman says. “The one you went over and talked to. He was also an American?”
“I would say not, a shriveled-up raisin of a yid. He didn’t care to tell me his name. And I’m not supposed to inquire. Being as how the Tribal Police official policy on that place, as I think I may have already mentioned, is ‘I don’t know shit.’ ”
“Come on, Wilfred,” Berko says. “We’re talking about Naomi.”
“I appreciate that. But I know enough about Landsman here — fuck, I know enough about homicide detectives period — to know that sister or no sister, this is not about finding out the truth. It’s not about getting the story right. Because you and I, we know, gentlemen, that the story is whatever we decide it is, and however nice and neat we make it, in the end a story is never going to make a damn bit of difference to the dead. What you want, Landsman, is to pay those fuckers back. But that is never going to happen. You are never going to get them. No fucking way.”
“Willie boy,” Berko says. “Come clean. So, don’t do it for him. Don’t do it because his sister, Naomi, was such a great fucking kid.”
By means of the silence that follows, he supplies a third reason for Dick to clue them in.
“You’re saying,” Dick says, “that I should do it for you.”
“I am saying that.”
“Because of all we once meant to each other in the springtime of our lives.”
“I might not go that far.”
“That is so fucking touching,” Dick says. He leans forward and pushes the button on his intercom. “Minty, get my bearskin out of the trash and bring it in here, so I can throw up on it.” He lets up on the button before Minty can reply. “I’m not doing fuck-all for you, Detective Berko Shemets. But because I liked your sister, Landsman, I’ll tie the same knot in your brain that those squirrels have tied in mine, and let you try to figure out what the hell it means.”
The door opens, and a young, wide woman comes, in, half again as tall as her boss, carrying the bearskin cloak like it contains the photoresidue of the risen body of Jesus Christ. Dick springs to his feet, grabs the cloak, and, with a grimace, as if fearing contamination, knots it around his neck by the thong.
“Find that one a coat and a hat,” he says, jerking a thumb toward Landsman. “Something with a nice stink on it, salmon guts or muscatel. Take the coat off Marvin Klag, he’s passed out in A7.”
34
In the summer of 1897, members of the party of the Italian mountaineer Abruzzi, fresh from their conquest of Mount Saint Elias, inflamed barflies and telegraph operators in the town of Yakutat with a tale of having seen, from the slopes of the second-highest Alaskan peak, a city in the sky. Streets, houses, towers, trees, moving crowds of people, chimneys trailing smoke. A great civilization, in the midst of the clouds. A certain Thornton in the party passed around a photograph; the city captured on Thornton’s blurred plate was afterward identified as Bristol, England, some twenty-five hundred transpolar miles away. Ten years later, the explorer Peary blew a fortune in a bid to strike Crocker Land, a land of lofty peaks that he and his men had glimpsed dangling in the sky on a prior journey north. Fata morgana, the phenomenon was called. A mirror made of weather and light and the imagination of men raised on stories of heaven.
Meyer Landsman sees cows, red-spotted white milk cows milling like angels in a wide green afterlife of grass.
The three policemen drove all the way back down to Peril Strait so that Dick could wow them with this doubtful vision. Crammed for two hours into the cab of Dick’s pickup, they smoked and abused one another, bumping along Tribal Route 2. Back through deep miles of forest. Potholes the size of bathtubs. Rain tossed in vandalistic handfuls at the windshield. Back through the village of Jims, a row of steel roofs along an inlet, houses jumbled like the last ten cans of beans on a grocery shelf before the hurricane hits. Dogs and boys and basketball hoops, an old flatbed embodied by weeds and spiky sprays of crowberry, a chimera of truck and leaf. Just past the portable Assembly of God church the paved tribal route gave way to sand and gravel. Five miles farther, it devolved to a mere slash cut through the ooze. Dick swore and fought the stick as his big GMC surfed the tides of mud and grit. The brake and gas were rigged to suit a man of his stature, and he handled them like Horowitz sailing through a storm of Liszt. Every time they hit a bump, some critical piece of Landsman was crushed by a tumbling slab of Shemets.