Landsman opens his eyes. In the seams of the venetian blinds, daylight buzzes like a trapped fly. Naomi is dead again, and that fool of an Einstein is innocent of all wrongdoing in the Shpilman case. Landsman knows nothing at all. He feels an ache in his abdomen that he takes at first for sorrow before determining, a moment later, that what he’s feeling is hunger. The desire, in fact, for stuffed cabbage. He checks his Shoyfer for the time, but the battery has died. The day clerk reports, when Landsman calls down to the desk, that it is 9:09 A.M., Thursday. Stuffed cabbage! Every Wednesday night is Rumania night at the Vorsht, and Mrs. Kalushiner always has something left over the next morning. The old bat serves the finest sarmali in Sitka. At once light and dense, favoring hot pepper over sweet-and-sour, drizzled with fresh sour cream, topped with sprigs of fresh dill. Landsman shaves and dresses in the same blown suit and a tie from off the doorknob. He is ready to consume his own weight in sarmali. But when he gets downstairs, he glances at the clock over the mail slots and realizes that he is nine minutes late for his hearing before the review committee.
By the time Landsman comes scrabbling like a dog on slick tile down the corridor of the Administration modular, into room 102, he is twenty-two minutes late. He finds nothing but a long veneer table with five chairs, one for each member of the review board, and his commanding officer, sitting on the edge of the table, legs dangling, crossed at the ankle, her pointy toed pumps aiming straight for Landsman’s heart. The five big high-backed leather chairs are empty.
Bina looks like hell, only hotter. Her seagull-brown suit is rumpled and misbuttoned. Her hair appears to be tied back with a plastic drinking straw. Her panty hose are long gone, her legs bare and dappled with pale freckles. Landsman recalls with a strange pleasure the way she would trash a laddered pair of stockings, shredding them into a pompon of rage before tossing them into the can.
“Stop looking at my legs,” she says. “Cut it out, Meyer. Look at my face.”
Landsman complies, staring right down the bores of her double-barreled gaze. “I overslept,” he says. “I’m sorry. They kept me for twenty-four hours, and by the time—”
“They kept me for thirty-one hours,” she says. “I just got out.”
“So fuck me and my whining, for starters.”
“For starters.”
“How was it by you?”
“They were so nice,” Bina says bitterly. “I totally folded. Told them. everything.”
“Same here.”
“So,” she says, gesturing to the room around them with upturned hands, like she just made something disappear. Her jocular tone is not a good sign. “Guess what?”
“I’m dead,” Landsman tries. “The board sprinkled me with quicklime and plowed me under.”
“As a matter of fact,” she says, “I got a call on my mobile this morning, in this room, at eight-fifty-nine. After I made a total ass of myself and screamed my head off until they let me out of the Federal Building, so I could get down here and make sure I was in that chair behind you, on time and ready to stand up and support my detective.”
“Um.”
“Your hearing was canceled.”
Bina reaches into her bag, rummages around, and comes out with a gun. She adds it to the battery comprising her rifled gaze and the toes of her pointed shoes. A chopped M-39. A manila tag dangles on a string from its barrel. She arcs it toward Landsman’s head. He manages to catch the gun but fumbles the badge holder that comes flying after it. Then comes a little bag with Landsman’s clip. Another brief search of her bag produces a murderous-looking form and its triplicate henchmen. “After you go ahead and break your head on this DPD-2255, Detective Landsman, you will have been reinstated, with full pay and benefits, as an active member of the District Police, Sitka Central Division.”
“I’m back on the job.”
“For, what is it, five more weeks? Enjoy.” Landsman weighs the sholem like a Shakespearean hero contemplating a skull. “I should have asked for a million dollars,” he says. “I’ll bet he would have coughed it up.”
“God damn him,” Bina says. “God damn them all. I always knew they were there. Down there in Washington. Up there over our heads. Holding the strings. Setting the agenda. Of course I knew that. We all knew that. We all grew up knowing that, right? We are here on sufferance. Houseguests. But they ignored us for so long. Left us to our own devices. It was easy to kid yourself. Make you think you had a little autonomy, in a small way, nothing fancy. I thought I was working for everyone. You know. Serving the public. Upholding the law. But really I was just working for Cashdollar.”
“You think I should have been discharged, don’t you?”
“No, Meyer.”
“I know I go a little too far. Play the hunches. The loose-cannon routine.”
“You think I’m angry because they gave you back your badge and your gun?”
“Well, not so much that, no. But the hearing being canceled. I know how much you like things done by the book.”
“I do like things done by the book,” she says, her voice tight. “I believe in the book.”
“I know you do.”
“If you and I had played it by the book a little more,” she says, and something dangerous seems to well up between them. “You and your hunches, a black year on them.”
He wants to tell it to her then: the story that has been telling him for the past three years. How, after Django was husked from her body, Landsman stopped the doctor in the hall outside the operating room. Bina had instructed Landsman to ask this good doctor whether there was some use, some aim or study, to which the half-grown bones and organs might be put.
“My wife was wondering,” Landsman began, then faltered.
“Whether there was any visible defect?” the doctor said. “No. Nothing at all. The baby appeared to be normal.” He remarked, too late, the look of horror blooming on Landsman’s face. “Of course, that doesn’t mean there was nothing wrong.”
“Of course,” Landsman said.
He never saw this doctor again. The ultimate fate of the little body, of the boy Landsman sacrificed to the god of his own dark hunches, was something he had neither the heart nor the stomach to investigate.
“I made the same fucking deal, Meyer,” Bina says before he can confess to her. “For my silence.”
“That you get to keep being a cop?” “No. That you do.”
“Thanks,” Landsman says. “Bina, thanks a lot. I’m grateful.”
She presses her face into her hands and massages her temples. “I’m grateful to you, too,” she says. “I’m grateful for the reminder of just how messed up all of this is.”
“My pleasure,” he says. “Glad I could help.”
“Fucking Mr. Cashdollar. The man’s hair doesn’t move. It’s like it’s welded to his head.”
“He said he had nothing to do with Naomi,” Landsman says. He pauses and nibbles on his lip. “He said it was the man who had the job before him.”
He tries to keep his head up while he says it, but after a moment he finds himself looking at the stitches of his shoes. Bina reaches, hesitates, then gives his shoulder a squeeze. She leaves her hand on him for all of two seconds, just long enough to rip a seam or two in Landsman.
“Also he denied any involvement in Shpilman. I forgot to ask him about Litvak, though.” Landsman looks up, and she takes her hand away. “Did Cashdollar tell you where they took him? Is he on his way to Jerusalem?”
“He tried to look mysterious about it, but I think he was just without a clue. I overheard him on his cell phone, telling somebody they were bringing in a forensic team from Seattle to go over the room at the Blackpool. Maybe that Was something he wanted me to hear. But I have to say they all seemed nonplussed about our friend Alter Litvak. They seem to have no idea where he is. Maybe he took the money and ran. He could be halfway to Madagascar by now.”