Litvak stopped putting away the pieces and looked out the window again. Cormorants, gulls, a dozen fanciful variations on the basic duck, having no names in Yiddish. At any moment anyone of them, wings spread against the sunset, might be taken for an approaching Piper Super Cub, coming in low from the southwest. Looking at the sky was making Litvak nervous, too. But theirs was not by definition an endeavor that attracted men with the talent for waiting.
I hope that he is the Tz H-D I really do
“No, you don’t,” Roboy said. “That’s a lie. You’re just in it for the stakes. For the game.”
Following the accident that took Litvak’s wife and his voice, it was Dr. Rudolf Buchbinder, the mad dentist of Ibn Ezra Street, who had rebuilt his jaw, restored its masonry in acrylic and titanium. And when Litvak found himself addicted to painkillers, it was the dentist who had sent him for treatment to an old friend, Dr. Max Roboy. Years later, when Cashdollar asked his man in Sitka for help fulfilling the divinely inspired mission of the president of America, Litvak thought at once of Buchbinder and Roboy.
It had taken a lot longer, not to mention every last ounce of chutzpah Litvak had, to work Heskel Shpilman into the plan. Endless pilpul and haggling through Baronshteyn. Stiff resistance from career men at Justice who viewed Shpilman and Litvak — with justice — as a ganglord and a hatchetman. At last, after months of false alarms and cancellations, a meeting with the big man at the Ringelblum Avenue Baths.
A Tuesday morning, snow twisting down in sloppy helixes, four inches of new snow on the ground. Too new, too early for the snowplow. At the corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn, a chestnut vendor, snow on his red umbrella, hiss and shimmer of the roasting box, parallel grooves of his cart wheels framing the slurry of his footprints in the snow. So quiet you could hear the clockwork thunking in the traffic signal box and the vibration of the pager on the hip of the gunman by the door. A pair of gunmen, those great red bears they kept to guard the body of the Verbover rebbe.
As the Rudashevsky biks handed Litvak along from the door, up the cement stairs with the vinyl treads, down the mine shaft of a hallway to the front door of the baths, the fists of their faces all cupped a minor light. Mischief, pity, the glint of a prankster, a torturer, a priest preparing to uncover the cannibal god. As for the ancient Russian cashier in his steel cage, the burly attendant in his bunker of folded white towels, these yids had no eyes at all, as far as Litvak ever knew. They kept their heads down, blinded by fear and discretion. They were elsewhere, drinking coffee at the Polar Shtern, still at home in their beds with their wives. The baths were not even open for business at this hour. There was nobody here, nobody at all, and the attendant who slid a pair of threadbare towels across the counter to Litvak was a ghost serving up a winding sheet to a dead man.
Litvak stripped and hung up his clothes on two led hooks. He could smell the tidal flux of the baths, chlorine and armpit and a ripe salt vapor that might on second thought have been the pickle factory on the ground floor. There was nothing to weaken him, if that was part of the intent, in obliging him to take off his clothes. His scars were numerous, in certain instances horrible, and they had their effect. He heard a low whistle from one of the two Rudashevskys working the locker room. Litvak’s body was a parchment scribed by pain and violence on which they could only hope to make the barest exegesis. He slipped his pad from the hip pocket of his jacket on its hook.
Like what you see?
The Rudashevskys could not agree on a fitting reply.
One nodded; the other shook his head. They exchanged responses, to the satisfaction of neither. Then they gave him up and sent him through the misty glass door to the steam room, to confront the body they guarded.
That body, the horror and the splendor of it, naked as a giant bloodshot eyeball without a socket. Litvak had seen it only once before, years ago, topped with a fedora, rolled tight as a wad of Pinar del Rio into a stiff black greatcoat that swept the toes of his dainty black boots. Now it emerged ponderous from the steam, a slab of wet limestone webbed with a black lichen of hair. Litvak felt like a fogbound airplane buffeted by updrafts into the surprise of a mountain. The belly pregnant with elephant triplets, the breasts full and pendulous, each tipped with a pink lentil of a nipple. The thighs great hand-rolled marbled loaves of halvah. Lost in the shadows between them, a thick umbilicus of grayish-brown meat.
Litvak lowered the uninsulated armature of his frame to the hot grid of tiles opposite the rabbi. The time he had passed Shpilman in the street, the man’s eyes lay in the ambit of shadow cast by the sundial of his hat brim. Now they were trained on Litvak an his vandalized body. They were kindly eyes, Litvak thought, or eyes whose employer had schooled them in the uses of kindliness. They read Litvak’s scars, the puckered purple mouth on his right shoulder, th slashes of red velour on his hip, the pit in his left thigh deep enough to hold an ounce of gin. They offered sympathy, regard, even gratitude. The war in Cuba was notorious for its futility, brutality, and waste. Its veterans had been shunned on their return. No one had offered them forgiveness, understanding, a chance at healing. Heskel Shpilman was offering Litvak and his war-torn hide all three.
“The nature of your handicap,” the rebbe said, “has been explained to me, along with the substance of your offer.” His girlish voice, baffled by steam and porcelain tile, seemed to emerge from someplace other than the kettledrum chest. “I see you’ve brought along your pad and a pen, in spite of my clear instructions that you were to carry nothing at all.”
Litvak held up the offending items, beaded with steam. He could feel the warp, the buckle, in the pages of his pad.
“You won’t need them.” The birds of Shpilman’s hands roosted on the rock of his belly, and he closed his eyes, depriving Litvak of their sympathy, real or feigned, and leaving Litvak to stew for a minute or two in the steam. Litvak had always hated a shvitz. But this fixture of the old Harkavy, secular and squalid, was the only place that the Verbover rebbe could contrive to do private business away from his court, his gabay, his world. “I don’t plan to require any further response or inquiry from you.”
Litvak nodded and prepared to stand. His mind told him that Shpilman would not have bothered to summon him to this nude and one-sided interview if he planned to turn Litvak down. But he felt in his gut that the errand was doomed, that Shpilman had called him down to Ringelblum Avenue to deliver the refusal in all the elephantine authority of his person.
“I want you to know, Mr. Litvak, that I have been giving a great deal of consideration to this proposal. I have attempted to follow its logic from every angle.
“Let’s begin with our southern friends. If it were simply a case of their wanting something, some tangible feature or resource … oil, for example. Or if they were prompted by a more purely strategic concern with regard to Russia or Persia. In either case, they clearly don’t need us. However difficult a conquest the Holy Land might be, our physical presence, our willingness to fight, our arms, can’t make a great difference to their battle plan. I have studied their claims of support for the Jewish cause in Palestine, and their theology, and to the extent that I can, based on Rabbi Baronshteyn’s reports, I have tried to form a judgment of the gentiles and their aims. And I can only conclude that when they say they wish to see Jerusalem restored to Jewish sovereignty, they mean it. Their reasoning, the so-called prophecies and apocrypha whose supposed authority underlies this wish, maybe it all strikes me as laughable. Abominable, even. I pity the gentiles for their childlike trust in the imminent return of one who never in the first place departed, let alone arrived. But I am quite sure that they, in turn, pity us our own tardy Messiah. As a foundation for a partnership, mutual pity is not to be despised.