“Maybe,” Landsman says, then, more slowly, “maybe.”
“God help me, I sense another hunch coming on.”
“You said you’re grateful to me.".
“In a backhanded, ironical way. Yeah.”
“Look, I could use a little backup. I want to have another look at Litvak’s room.”
“We can’t get into the Blackpool. The whole joint is under some kind of secret federal lockdown.”
“Only I don’t want to get into the Blackpool. I want to get under it.”
“Under it?”
“I heard there might be some, well, some tunnels down there.”
“Tunnels.”
“Warsaw tunnels, I heard they’re called.”
“You need me to hold your hand,” she says. “In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.”
“Only in the metaphorical sense,” he says.
43
At the top of the stairs, Bina takes a key-ring flashlight from her cowhide bag and passes it to Landsman. It promotes or possibly allegorizes the services of a Yakovy funeral home. Then she moves aside some dossiers, a sheaf of court documents, a wooden hair brush, a mummified boomerang that may once have been a banana in a Ziploc, a copy of People, and comes up with a slack black harness suggestive of sadomasochistic sex play, equipped with a kind of round canister. She plunges her head into the midst of it and involves her hair with the black webbing. When she sits up and turns her head, a silver lens flares and wanes, raking Landsman’s face. Landsman can feel the imminent darkness, can feel the very word “tunnel” burrowing through his rib cage.
They go down the steps, through the lost-articles room. The taxidermy marten leers at them as they pass. The loop of rope on the door of the crawl space dangles. Landsman tries to recall if he returned it to its hook before his inglorious retreat last Thursday night. He stands there, racking his memory, and then he gives up.
“I’ll go first,” Bina says.
She gets down on her bare knees and works herself into the crawl space. Landsman hangs back. His throbbing pulse, his dry tongue, his autonomic systems are caught up in the tiresome history of his phobia, but the crystal set that is handed out to every Jew, tuned to receive transmissions from Messiah, resonates at the sight of Bina’s ass, the long indented arc of it like some kind of magic alphabet letter, a rune with the power to roll away the stone slab behind which he has entombed his desire for her. He is pierced by the knowledge that no matter how potent a spell it still casts over him, he will never again find himself permitted, wonder of wonders, to bite it. Then it vanishes into the darkness, along with the rest of her, and Landsman is left stranded. He mutters to himself, reasons with himself, dares himself to go in after her, and then Bina says, “Get in here,” and Landsman obeys.
She spans an arc of the plywood disk with her fingertips, lifts it, and passes it to Landsman, her face flickering with the glow of his flashlight and with a prankish solemnity he has not seen in years. When they were kids, he would climb to her bedroom in the night, sneaking in and out the window to sleep with her, and this was the face she wore as she eased up the sash.
“It’s a ladder!” she says. “Meyer, you didn’t go down this? When you came here that night?”
“Well, no, I was kind of, I wasn’t really—”
“Yeah, okay,” she says gently. “I know.”
She lowers herself down one steel cleat at a time, and again Landsman goes after her. He can hear her grunt as she lets herself drop, the metallic scrape of her shoes. Then he falls down into the darkness. She catches hold of him and half succeeds in keeping him on his feet. The lamp on Bina’s forehead splashes light here, here, here, making a hasty sketch of the tunnel.
It’s another aluminum pipe, running perpendicular to the one they just came down. Landsman’s hat brushes against the arc of it when he stands erect. It ends behind them in a curtain of dank black earth and runs straight away from them, under Max Nordau Street, toward the Blackpool. The air is cold and planetary, with an iron taint. A floor of plywood has been laid, and as they clunk along it, their lights pick out the imprints of the boots of passing men.
When they reckon themselves to be about halfway across Max Nordau, they meet another pipeline running away to the east and west, linking this tunnel to the network laid against the likelihood of future annihilation. Tunnels leading to tunnels, storehouses, bunkers.
Landsman considers the cohort of yids who arrived with his father, those who were not broken by suffering and horror but rather somehow resolved. The former partisans, the resisters, Communist gunmen, left-Zionist saboteurs — the rabble, as they were styled in the newspapers of the south — who showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls and fought with Polar Bears like Hertz Shemets their brief, doomed battle for control of the District. They knew, those bold and devastated men, knew as they knew the flavor of their tongues in their mouths, that their saviors would one day betray them. They walked into this wild country that had never seen a Jew and set about preparing for the day when they would be rounded up, sent packing, forced to make a stand. Then, one by one, these wised up, angry men and women had been coopted, picked off, fattened up, set against one another, or defanged by Uncle Hertz and his endless operations.
“Not all of them,” Bina says, her voice, like Landsman’s, caroming off the aluminum walls of the tunnel.
“Some of them just got comfortable here. They started to forget a little bit. They felt at home.”
“I guess that’s how it always goes,” Landsman says.
“Egypt. Spain. Germany.”
“They weakened. It’s human to weaken. They had their lives. Come on.”
They follow the planks until they come to another pipe that opens overhead, also fitted with cleats.
“You go first this time,” Bina says. “Let me check out your ass for a change.”
Landsman hoists himself up to the lowest cleat and then mounts to the top. A swatch of weak light shows through a break or hole in the lid that caps this end of the pipe. Landsman pushes against the hatch and it shoves back, a thick sheet of plywood that doesn’t budge or buckle. He puts his shoulder into it.
“What’s the matter?” Bina says from beneath his eet, her lamp wobbling into his eyes.
“It won’t move,” Landsman says. “There must be something on it. Or—”
He feels for the hole, and his hand brushes against something cold and rigid. He recoils, then his fingers return to work out the sense of an iron rod, a cable, pulled taut. He shines his light. A rubberized cable, knotted and fed through the finger hole from the top side, then drawn tight and lashed to the topmost cleat of the ladder underneath.
“What is it, Meyer? What did they do?”
“They tied it shut behind them so that nobody could follow them back down,” Landsman says. “Tied it with a nice big piece of string.”
44
A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue. At 12: 03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stucco of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, may be a shammes, but he is no stone.
Driving onto Verbov Island, coming west on Avenue 225, he and Bina catch strong whiffs at every corner of the bubbling tzimmes that is cooking up all over town. The smell blows more intense and richer with both joy and panic on this island than anywhere else. Signs and banners announce the imminent proclamation of the kingdom of David and exhort the pious to prepare for the return to Eret Yisroel. Many of the signs look spontaneous, sprayed in dripping characters on bed linens and sheets of butcher paper. In the side streets, crowds of women and handlers yell at one another, trying to hold down or hyperinflate the price of luggage, concentrated laundry soap, sunscreen, batteries, protein bars, bolts of tropical-weight wool. Deeper into the alleys, Landsman imagines, in the basements and doorways, a quieter market burns like a banked fire: prescription drugs, gold, automatic weapons. They drive past huddled groups of street-corner geniuses spinning commentary on which families are to be given which contracts when they reach the Holy Land, which of the wiseguys will run the policy rackets, the cigarette smuggling, the gun franchises. For the first time since Gaystik took the championship, since the World’s Fair, maybe for the first time in sixty years, or so it feels to Landsman, something is actually happening in the Sitka District. What that something will turn out to be, not even the most learned of the sidewalk rebbes has the faintest idea.