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Nine is where they keep the cold cases. Filing a case in cabinet nine saves less space but is otherwise the same as lighting it on fire and taking the ashes out for a walk in a gale-force wind.
“Bury them?” Berko says, hoisting it into a question right at the end.
“Put in a good-faith effort, within the limits of this new policy with the musical name, and then, if that fails, put in a bad-faith effort.” Bina stares at the domed paperweight on Felsenfeld’s desk. Inside the paper weight is a tiny model, a cartoon in cheap plastic, of the Sitka skyline. A jumble of high-rises clustered around the Safety Pin, that lonely digit pointed at the sky as if in accusation. “And then slap a black flag on them.”
“You said eleven,” Landsman says.
“You noticed that.”
“After last night, though, with all due respect, Inspector, and as embarrassing as it is. Well. It’s twelve. Not eleven. Twelve open cases for Shemets and Landsman.”
Bina picks up the slim blue folder that Landsman gave birth to the night before. “This one?” She opens it and studies, or pretends to study, Landsman’s report on the apparent gun murder, at point blank, of the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. “Yes. Okay. Now I want you to watch how this is done.”
She opens the top drawer of Felsenfeld’s desk, which, for the next two months, at least, will be hers. She rummages around inside it, grimacing as if the drawer contains a pile of used foam-rubber earplugs, which, last time Landsman looked, was indeed the case. She pulls out a plastic tab for marking a case folder. A black one. She pries loose the red tab that Landsman attached to the Lasker file early that morning, and substitutes the black one in its place, breathing shallowly the way you do when you clean a nasty wound or sponge up some thing awful from the rug. She ages ten years, it seems to Landsman, in the ten seconds it takes her to make the switch. Then she holds the newly cold case away from her body, tweezing it between two fingers of one hand.
“Effective resolution,” she says.
8
The Noz, as the name implies, is the law enforcement bar, owned by a couple of ex-nozzes, choked with the smoke of noz grievance and gossip. It never closes, and it never runs short of off-duty law enforcement officers to prop up its big oak bar. Just the place, the Noz, if you want to give voice to your outrage over the latest masterwork of bullshit to be handed down by the departmental bigs. So Landsman and Berko steer well clear of the Noz. They walk past the Pearl of Manila, though its Filipino style Chinese donuts beckon like glittering sugar dusted tokens of a better existence. They avoid Feter Shnayer, and Karlinsky’s, and the Inside Passage, and the Nyu-Yorker Grill. This early in the morning, most of them are closed anyway, and the joints that are open tend to service cops, firefighters, para medics.
They hunch up their shoulders against the cold and hurry, the big man and the little one, bumping against each other. The breath comes out of their bodies in billows that twine and are absorbed into the greater fog lying over the Untershtat. Fat streamers of fog twist along the streets, smearing headlights and neon, blotting out the harbor, leaving a track of oily silver beads on the lapels of coats and the crowns of hats.
“Nobody goes to the Nyu-Yorker,” Berko says. “We ought to be fine there.”
“I saw Tabatchnik in there one time.”
“I’m pretty sure Tabatchnik would never steal the plans for your secret weapon, Meyer.”
Landsman only wishes he were in possession of the plans for some kind of death ray, or mind-control beam, something to shake the corridors of power. Put some genuine fear of God into the Americans. Stave off, just for a year, a decade, a century, the tide of Jewish exile.
They are about to brave the grim Front Page, with its clotted milk and its coffee fresh from a stint as a barium enema at Sitka General, when Landsman sees old De
“Too late,” Berko says. “Bastard saw us.”
For a moment Landsman isn’t sure the bastard did.
Bre
“Detective Shemets. A moment.”
“Too late,” Landsman concedes.
He turns, and Bre
“Look at the head on that sheygets, the thing has its own atmosphere,” Landsman says. “Thing has ice caps.”
“Indeed the man has a very big head.”
“Every time I see it, I feel sorry for necks.”
“Maybe I should get my hands around his. Give it some support.”
Bre
“A need to repeat the rash threats of yore does not, I assure you, exist, Detective Shemets,” the reporter says in his swift and preposterous Yiddish. “Evergreen and ripe with the sap of their original violence they remain.”
Bre
“That I fear your wrath let us agree beforehand, Detective. And that just now I pretended not to see you walking past this desolate hole whose sole recommendation, apart from the fact that the management has forgotten, in my long absence, the state of my credit, is a total lack of newspaper reporters. I knew, however, that with my luck, such a strategy was likely to return at a later time and bite me upon the ass.”
“Nothing is that hungry, Bre
Bre
“De
“For my sins, Detective Shemets, for my sins.”
This goes without saying. Assignment to the Sitka bureau of any of the stateside newspapers or networks that bother to maintain one is a proverbial punishment for incompetence or failure. Bre
“I thought that was why they sent you away, Bre