But when they reach the heart of the island, the faithful replica of the lost heart of old Verbov, there is no hint of the end of exile, rampant price gouging, messianic revolution. Down at the wide end of the platz, the house of the Verbover rebbe stands looking solid and eternal as a house in a dream. Smoke hastens like a remittance from its lavish chimney, only to be waylaid by the wind. The morning’s Rudashevskys loiter darkly at their posts, and on the ridge of the house, the black rooster perches, coattails flapping, with his semiautomatic mandolin. Around the platz, women describe the ordinary circuits of their day, pushing strollers, trailing girls and boys too young for school. Here and there they stop to knit and unravel the skeins of breath that tangle them together. Scraps of newsprint, leaves, and dust get up impromptu games of dreydl in the archways of the houses. A pair of men in long coats leans into the wind, making for the rebbe’s house, sidelocks swinging. For the first time the traditional complaint, tantamount to a creed or at least a philosophy, of the Sitka Jew — Nobody gives a damn about us, stuck up here between Hoonah and Hotzeplotz — strikes Landsman as having been a blessing these past sixty years, and not the affliction they had all, in their backwater of geography and history, supposed.
“Who else is going to want to live in this chicken coop?” Bina says, echoing his thought in her own fashion, zipping her orange parka up past her chin. She slams the door of Landsman’s car and trades ritual glares with a gathering of women across the lane from the boundary maven’s shop. “This place is like a glass eye, it’s a wooden leg, you can’t pawn it.”
In front of the somber barn, the bachelor torments a rag with a broom handle. The rag is sloshed in solvent with a psychotropic odor, and the boy has been exiled to three hopeless islands of automobile grease on the cement. He jabs and caresses the rag with the end of his pole. When he takes note of Bina, he does so with a satisfying mixture of horror and awe. If Bina were Messiah come to redeem him in an orange parka, the expression on the pisher’s face would be more or less the same. His gaze gets stuck to her, and then he has to detach it with brutal care, like someone removing his tongue from a frozen pump.
“Reb Zimbalist?” Landsman says.
“He’s there,” says the bachelor, nodding toward the door of the shop. “But he’s really busy.”
“As busy as you?”
The bachelor gives the rag another desultory poke.
“I was in the way.” He makes the citation with a flour ish of self-pity, then aims a cheekbone at Bina without implicating any of his other features of his face in the gesture. “She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.”
“See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.”
The bachelor takes a step backward, and the mop handle disappears behind his back as if somehow it might incriminate him. “Are you going to arrest Reb Itzik?” he says.
“Now,” Landsman says, taking a step toward the bachelor, “why would we want to do that?”
One thing about a Yeshiva bachelor, he knows his way around a question.
“How should I know?” he says. “If I was a fancy pants lawyer, tell me, please, would I be standing out here slopping around with a rag on the end of a stick?”
Inside the shop, they have gathered around the big map table, Itzik Zimbalist and his crew, a dozen strapping Jews in yellow coveralls, their chins upholstered with the netted rolls of their beards. The presence of a woman in the shop flits among them like a bothersome moth. Zimbalist is the last to look up from the problem spread out on the table before him. When he sees who has come with the latest thorny question for the boundary maven, he nods and grunts with a suggestion of huffiness, as if Landsman and Bina are late for their appointment.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Bina says, her voice weirdly fluting and unpersuasive in this big male barn. “I’m Inspector Gelbfish.”
“Good morning,” says the boundary maven.
His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull. He rolls up the plan or chart with practiced hands, ties it in a length of cord, and turns to sheath it in the rack, where it disappears among a thousand of its fellows. His movements are those of an old man to whom haste is a forgotten vice. His step is herky-jerk, but his hands mannered and accurate.
“Lunch is over,” he tells the crew, though there is not a trace of food to be seen.
The men hesitate, forming an irregular eruv around the boundary maven, ready to shield him from the secular trouble that stands hung with a couple of badges in their midst.
“Maybe they’d better stick around,” Landsman says. “We might need to talk to them, too.”
“Go wait in the vans,” Zimbalist tells them. “You’re in the way.”
They start across the supply area to the garage. One of the crew turns back, pressing doubtfully at the roll of his beard.
“Seeing as how lunch is over, Reb Itzik,” he says, “is it all right with you if we have our supper now?”
“Eat your breakfast, too,” Zimbalist says. “You’re going to be up all night.”
“Lot of work to do?” Bina says.
“Are you kidding? It’s going to take them years to pack up this mess. I’m going to need a cargo container.”
He goes to the electric tea kettle and begins to set up three glasses. “Nu, Landsman, I heard maybe you lost the use of that badge of yours for a little while,” he says.
“You hear a lot, don’t you?” Landsman says.
“I hear what I hear.”
“Have you ever heard that people dug tunnels all under the Untershtat, just in case the Americans turned on us and decided to stage an aktion?”
“I’d say it rings a bell,” Zimbalist says. “Now that you mention it.”
“So you wouldn’t happen to possess, by any chance, a plan of those tunnels? Showing how they run, where they connect, et cetera?”
The old man still has his back to them, tearing open the paper envelopes that hold the tea bags. “If I didn’t,” he says, “what kind of a boundary maven would I be?”
“So if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get somebody, say, into or out of the basement of the Hotel Blackpool on Max Nordau Street without being seen. Could you do that?”
“Why would I want to do that?” Zimbalist says. “I wouldn’t board my mother-in-law’s Chihuahua in that fleabag.”
He unplugs the kettle before the water has boiled and soaks the tea bags one-two-three. He puts the glasses on a tray with a pot of jam and three small spoons, and they sit down at his desk in the corner. The tea bags surrender their color unwillingly to the tepid water. Landsman hands around papiroses and lights them. From the vans come the sounds of men shouting, or laughing, Landsman isn’t quite sure.