Whatever else he may have been, for forty years Uncle Hertz was a sworn officer of the law with a federal shield in his billfold. Though he undersells it, the note of reproach is unmistakable. He turns to his son. “And I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says. “Eight weeks away from the void. Two children and, mazel tov and kaynahora, a third on the way.”
Berko doesn’t bother to ask how his father knows that Ester-Malke is pregnant. It would only feed the old man’s vanity. He just nods and puts away a few more moose meatballs. They are good, the meatballs, moist with hints of rosemary and smoke.
“You are right,” Berko says. “It’s madness. And I don’t say that I love or care for that buffalo there, look at him, with no badge and no gun, bothering people and running around with frostbite on his kneecaps, any more than I do for my wife or my children, because I don’t. Or that it makes any sense for me to take risks with their future on his behalf, because it doesn’t.” As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation. “But if we’re talking about voids, what can I say, that’s not the type of circumstances I want to be facing without Meyer around.”
“You see how loyal,” Uncle Hertz tells Landsman. “That’s just how I felt about your father, may his name be for a blessing, but the coward left me high and dry.”
His tone aspires to lightness, but the subsequent blot of silence seems to darken the remark. They chew their food, and life feels long and ponderous. Hertz gets up and pours himself another shot. He stands by the window, watching the sky that is like a mosaic pieced together from the broken shards of a thousand mirrors, each one tinted a different shade of gray. The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light. Uncle Hertz has always been the most competent, self-assured man Landsman knows, neat as an origami airplane, a quick paper needle folded with precision, impervious to turbulence. Accurate, methodical, dispassionate. There were always hints of shadow, of irrationality and violence, but they were containcd behind the wall of Hertz’s mysterious Indian adventures, hidden on the far side of the Line, covered over by him with the careful backward kicks of an animal concealing its spoor. But now a memory surfaces in Landsman from the days following his father’s death, of Uncle Hertz sitting crumpled like a wad of tissue in a corner of the kitchen on Adler Street, shirt tails hanging, no order to his hair, shirt misbuttoned, the dwindling contents of a bottle of slivovitz on the kitchen table beside him marking like a barometer the plummeting atmosphere of his grief.
“We have ourselves a puzzle, Uncle Hertz,” says Landsman. “Is why we’re here.”
“That and the mayonnaise,” Berko says.
“A puzzle.” The old man turns from the window, his eyes hard again and wary. “I hate puzzles.”
“We’re not asking you to solve any,” Berko says. “Don’t take that tone with me, John Bear,” the old man snaps. “I don’t care for it.”
“Tone?” Berko says, his voice stacked like a measure of musical score with a half-dozen tones, a chamber ensemble of insolence, resentment, sarcasm, provocation, innocence, and surprise. “Tone?”
Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one’s relatives. It’s an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the tim of Berko’s first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes, wheneve they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.
“There’s something we’re trying to explain,” Landsman begins again. “A situation. And there are aspects of the situation that reminded us of you.”
Uncle Hertz pours another shot of slivovitz, carries it to the table, and sits down. “Start from the start,” he says.
“The start is a dead junkie in my hotel.”
“Aha.”
“You’ve been following it.”
“I heard something on the radio,” the old man says. “Maybe I read a little something in the paper, too.” He always blames the newspapers for the things he knows. “He was the son of Heskel Shpilman. The one they had such high hopes for when he was a kid.”
“He was murdered,” Landsman says. “Contrary to what you might have read. And when he died, he was in hiding. He’d been in hiding, from one thing and another, for most of his life, but when he died, I think he was trying to duck some men he had run out on. I was able to trace his movements back to the Yakovy airport last April. He showed up there the day before Naomi died.”
“This has something to do with Naomi?”
“These men who were looking for Shpilman. And who, we’re assuming, killed him. Last April they hired Naomi to fly the guy out to a farm they run, supposed to be some kind of a therapy facility for troubled kids. Out in Peril Strait. But when he got there, he panicked. He wanted out. He came to Naomi to help him, and she sneaked him out of there and flew him back to civilization. To Yakovy. She died the next day.”
“Peril Strait?” the old man says. “These are Natives, then? You’re saying Indians killed Mendel Shpilman?”
“No,” Berko says. “These men with the youth rehab. On a good thousand acres just north of the village there. It seems to have been built with money from American Jews. The people running it are yids. And as far as we can tell, the place is a front for their real operation.”
“Which is what? Growing marijuana?”
“Well, for one thing, they have a herd of Ayrshire dairy cows,” Berko says. “Maybe a hundred head of them.”
“That’s for one thing.”
“For another, they seem to be running some kind of paramilitary training facility. Their leader might be an old man, a Jew. Wilfred Dick got a look at him, he was there. But the face meant nothing to Dick. Whoever he is, he seems to have ties to the Verbovers, or at least to Aryeh Baronshteyn. But we don’t know why or what kind.”
“There was an American there, too,” Landsman says. “He flew in for a meeting with Baronshteyn and these other mysterious Jews. They all seemed a little worried about the American. They seemed to think he might not be happy with them or how they were running things.”
The old man gets up from the table and goes to a hutch that separates his eating from his sleep. From a humidor he takes a cigar and rolls it between his palms. He rolls it a long time, back and forth, until it seems to disappear from his thoughts entirely.
“I hate puzzles,” he says finally.
“We know that,” Berko says.
“You know that.”
Uncle Hertz runs the cigar back and forth under his nose, inhaling deeply, eyes closed, taking pleasure not only in the smell, it seems to Landsman, but in the coolness of the smooth leaf against the flesh of his nostrils.
“This is my first question,” Uncle Hertz says, opening his eyes. “Maybe my only one.”
They wait for the question while he trims the cigar, fits it to his narrow lips, works them up and down.
“What color were the cows?” he says.
36
“There was a red one,” Berko says, slow, a bit grudging, like he missed it when the coin got palmed, even though he was staring hard at the magician’s hands.