Bina walks around the workshop, admiring the mass and variety of string, stepping carefully to avoid a tumbleweed of knotted wire, gray rubber with a blood red copper stump.
“Ever make a mistake?” Bina asks the boundary maven. “Tell someone he can carry where he’s not allowed to carry? Draw a line where no line needs to be drawn?”
“I don’t dare to make mistakes,” Zimbalist says. “Carrying on the Sabbath, it’s a serious violation. People start thinking they can’t rely on my maps, I’m through.”
“We still don’t have a ballistic fingerprint on the gun that killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says with care. “But you saw the wound, Meyer.”
“I did.”
“Did it look like it was made by, say, a Glock, or a TEC-9, or any kind of an automatic?”
“In my humble opinion,” Landsman says, “no.”
“You spent a lot of quality time with Litvak’s crew and their firearms.”
“And loved every minute.”
“Did you see anything in their toybox that was not an automatic?”
“No,” Landsman says. “No, Inspector, I did not.”
“What does that prove?” Zimbalist says, easing his tender bottom down onto the inflatable-donut cushion of his desk chair. “More importantly, why should I care?”
“Aside from your general, personal interest in seeing justice done in this matter, of course,” says Bina.
“Aside from that,” Zimbalist says.
“Detective Landsman, do you think Alter Litvak killed Shpilman or ordered him killed?”
Landsman looks right into the boundary maven’s face and says, “He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t just need Mendel. The yid had started to believe in Mendel.”
Zimbalist blinks and fingers the blade of his nose, thinking this over, as if it is the rumor of a newborn creek that will force him to redraw one of his maps.
“I do not buy it,” he concludes. “Anybody else. Everybody else. Not that yid.”
Landsman doesn’t bother to argue. Zimbalist reaches for his tea. A vein of rust twists in the water like the ribbon in a glass marble.
“What would you do if something you had been telling everybody was one of the lines on your map,” Bina says, “turned out to be, say, a crease? A hair. A stray pen mark. Something like that. Would you tell anyone? Would you go to the rebbe? Would you admit that you made a mistake?”
“It would never happen.”
“But if it did. Would you be able to live with your self?”
“If you knew you had sent an innocent man to prison for many years, Inspector Gelbfish, for the rest of his life, would you be able to live with yourself?”
“It happens all the time,” Bina says. “But here I am.”
“Well, then,” the maven says. “I guess you know how I feel. By the way, I use the term ‘innocent’ very loosely.”
“As do I,” says Bina. “No doubt about it.”
“My whole life, I knew only one man I would use that word to describe.”
“You’re ahead of me, then,” Bina says.
“Me, too,” says Landsman, missing Mendel Shpilman as if they had been, for many years, the best of friends. “I am very sorry to say.”
“You know what people are saying?” Zimbalist says. “These geniuses I dwell among? They’re saying Mendel’s coming back.That it’s all happening just the way it was written. That when they get to Jerusalem, Mendel is going to be there, waiting for them. Ready to rule over Israel.”
Tears start to run down the boundary maven’s sallow cheeks. After a moment Bina removes a handkerchief from her bag, clean and pressed. Zimbalist takes it and looks at it for a moment. Then he blows a great tekiah on his shofar of a nose.
“I would like to see him again,” he says. “I will admit it.”
Bina hoists her bag to her shoulder, and it resumes its steady mission to drag her down. “Get your things together, Mr. Zimbalist.”
The old man appears startled. He puffs his lips as if trying to light an invisible cigar. He picks up a loop of rawhide thong lying on his desk, ties a knot in it, and puts it down again. Then he picks it up and unties it. “My things,” he says finally. “Are you saying I’m under arrest?”
“No,” Bina says. “But I would like you to come down so that we can talk some more. You might want to call your lawyer.”
“My lawyer,” he says.
“I think you took Alter Litvak out of his hotel room. I think you’ve done something with him, put him on ice, possibly killed him. I’d like to find out.”
“You have no evidence,” Zimbalist says. “You’re just guessing.”
“She has a little evidence,” Landsman says.
“About three feet,” says Bina. “Can you hang a man with three feet of rope, Mr. Zimbalist?”
The maven shakes his head, half irritated, half amused, his poise and his bearings regained. “You’re just wasting my time and yours,” he says. “I have a huge amount of work to do. And you, by your own admission, by your own theory, have not found who ever it was that killed Mendele. So with all due respect, why don’t you just worry about that, all right, and leave me alone? Come back when you’ve caught the supposed actual killer, and I’ll tell you what I know about Litvak, which at the moment, by the way, is officially and everlastingly nothing.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Landsman says.
“All right,” says Bina.
“All right!” Zimbalist says.
Landsman looks at Bina. “All right?”
“We catch whoever killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says, “you give us information. Helpful information about Litvak’s disappearance. If he’s still alive, you give me Litvak.”
“You have a deal,” the boundary maven says. He thrusts out his right claw, all spots and knuckles, and Bina shakes it.
Landsman, feeling stunned, gets up and shakes hands with the boundary maven. Then he follows Bina out of the shop into the waning day, and his shock intensifies when he finds that Bina is crying. Unlike Zimbalist’s, hers are tears of fury.
“I can’t believe I did that,” she says, availing herself of a tissue from her endless stash. “That is the kind of thing you would do.”
“People I know keep having that problem,” Landsman says. “Suddenly acting like me.”
“We’re law officers. We uphold the law.”
“People of the book,” Landsman says. “As it were.”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you want to go back in there and arrest him?” he says. “We can. We have the cable from the tunnel. We can hold him. Start from there.”
She shakes her head. The bachelor on his map of stains is staring at them, hitching up the seat of his black serge trousers and taking it all in. Landsman decides he’d better get her out of there. He puts his arm around her for the first time in three years and ushers her over to the Super Sport, then goes around to his side and climbs in behind the wheel.
“The law,” she says. “I don’t even know what law I’m talking about anymore. Now I’m just making this shit up.”
They sit silently as Landsman wrestles with the perennial detective problem of being obliged to state the obvious.
“I kind of like this new crazy, confused Bina and all,” he says. “But I feel I have to point out that we have no real leads on the Shpilman case. No witnesses. No suspect.”
“Well, then, you and your partner had better fucking get me a suspect,” she says. “Hadn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Let’s go.”