Detective now,” Landsman says, startled that the old man has retrieved his name. “You remember me, Grandpa?”
“I remember everything, darling.” Elijah reaches into a hip pocket of his bleach yellow coat and takes out his pushke, a wooden casket, about the size of a box meant for index cards, painted black. On the front of the box, Hebrew words are painted: L’ERETZ YISROEL. Cut into the top of the box is a narrow slit for coins or a folded dollar bill. “A small donation?” Elijah says.
The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles. Observant Jews around the world have not abandoned their hope to dwell one day in the land of Zion. But Jews have been tossed out of the joint three times now—in 586 BCE, in 70 CE and with savage finality in 1948. It’s hard even for the faithful not to feel a sense of discouragement about their chances of once again getting a foot in the door.
Landsman gets out his wallet and pokes a folded twenty into Elijah’s pushke. ‘Lots of luck,” he says.
The little man hoists his heavy valise and starts to shuffle away. Landsman reaches out and pulls at Elijah’s sleeve, a question formulating in his heart, a child’s question about the old wish of his people for a home. Elijah turns with a look of practiced wariness. Maybe Landsman is some kind of troublemaker. Landsman feels the question ebb away like the nicotine in his bloodstream.
“What you got in the bag, Grandpa?” Landsman says. “Looks heavy.”
“It’s a book.”
“One book?”
“It’s very big.”
“Long story?”
“Very long.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about Messiah,” Elijah says. “Now please take your hand off of me.”
Landsman lets go. The old man straightens his back and raises his head. The clouds on his eyes blow over, and he looks angry, disdainful, and not in the least old.
“Messiah is coming,” he says. It isn’t quite a warning and yet somehow as a promise of redemption, it lacks a certain warmth.
“That works out well,” Landsman says, jerking his thumb toward the hotel lobby. “As of tonight we have a vacancy.”
Elijah looks hurt, or maybe just disgusted. He opens the black box and looks inside. He takes out the twenty-dollar bill that Landsman gave him and hands it back. Then he picks up his suitcase, settles his floppy white hat down over his head, and trudges off into the rain.
Landsman crumples the twenty and drops it into his hip pocket. He grinds his papiros under his shoe and goes into the hotel.
“Who’s the nut?” Netsky says.
“They call him Elijah. He’s harmless,” says Tenenboym from behind the steel mesh of the reception window. “You used to see him around sometimes. Always pimping for Messiah.” Tenenboym clacks a gold toothpick against his molars. “Listen, Detective, I’m not supposed to say anything. But I might as well tell you. Management is sending out a letter tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait to hear this,” Landsman says.
“The owners sold out to a Kansas City concern.”
“They’re tossing us.”
“Maybe,” Tenenboym says. “Maybe not. Nobody’s status is clear. But it’s not out of the question that you might have to move out.”
“Is that what it’s going to say in the letter?”
Tenenboym shrugs. “The letter’s all written in lawyer.”
Landsman puts Netsky the latke on the front door. “Don’t tell them what they heard or saw,” he reminds him. “And don’t give them a hard time, even if they look like they could use one.”
Menashe Shpringer, the criminalist working the graveyard shift, blows into the lobby in a black coat and fur hat, with a rattling of rain. In one hand Shpringer carries a dripping umbrella. With the other he tows a chrome caddy to which his black vinyl toolbox and a plastic bin, with holes for handles, are strapped with bungee cord. Shpringer is a fireplug, his bowed legs and simian arms affixed to his neck without apparent benefit of shoulders. His face is mostly jowl and his ridged forehead looks like one of those domed beehives you see representing Industry in medieval woodcuts. The bin is blazoned with the single word EVIDENCE in blue letters.
“Are you leaving town?” Shpringer says. It’s not an uncommon greeting these days. A lot of people have left town in the past couple of years, fled the District for the short roster of places that will welcome them, or that have tired of hearing about pogroms secondhand and are hoping to throw one for themselves. Landsman says that as far as he knows, he is not going anywhere. Most of the places that will take Jews require that you have a near relative living there. All of Landsman’s nearest relatives are dead or facing Reversion themselves.
“Then let me say goodbye to you now, forever,” Shpringer says. “Tomorrow night at this time I will be basking in the warm Saskatchewan sun.”
“Saskatoon?” Landsman guesses.
“Thirty below they had today,” Shpringer says. “That was the high.”
“Look at it this way,” Landsman says. “You could be living in this dump.”
“The Zamenhof.” In his memory, Shpringer pulls Landsman’s file, and frowns at its contents. “That’s right. Home sweet home, eh?”
“It suits me in my current style of life.”
Shpringer smiles a thin smile from which almost every trace of pity has been erased.
“Which way to the dead man?” he says.
First thing Shpringer screws in all the lightbulbs that Lasker loosened. Then he lowers his safety glasses and goes to work.
He gives Lasker a manicure and pedicure and looks inside his mouth for a severed finger or a bronze doubloon. He lifts prints with his dust and brush. He takes 317 Polaroids. He takes pictures of the corpse, the room, the perforated pillow, the fingerprints he has raised. He takes a picture of the chessboard.
“One for me,” Landsman says.
Shpringer snaps a second shot of the board that the murder obliged Lasker to abandon. Then he hands it to Landsman, an eyebrow raised.
“Valuable
