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“The motivation, Detective, for my leaving a cup of terrible coffee and a broken appointment with an informant who, in any case, lacks anything resembling information, to come out here and risk your possible anger.”
“Bre
“I want a story,” Bre
“Was it the taste of your ass?” Landsman suggests brightly. “Maybe you’ve been biting upon yourself.”
Bre
“Certainly it was a good thing for my career, so called. For a few years. It propelled me out of the boondocks, you should pardon the expression, to L.A., Salt Lake, Kansas City.” As he names the stations of his decline, Bre
Just after the elections that carried the current administration to its first term in power, De
“I’m going to put this very gently, De
Bre
“My father’s a fucking hermit,” Berko says. “He’s a mushroom, he lives under a log with the earwigs and the crawly things. Whatever nefarious shit he was up to, he was only doing what he thought was good for the Jews, and you know what’s fucked up about that? He was right, because now look at the motherfucking mess we’re in without him.”
“Jesus, Shemets, I hate to hear that. And I hate to think that a story I wrote had anything to do with — that it led to, in any way — the predicament you yids now find yourself in … Ah, fuck it. Forget it.”
“Okay,” Landsman says. He grabs hold of Berko’s sleeve again. “Come.”
“Hey, uh, yeah. So where you guys going? What’s up?”
“Just fighting crime,” Landsman says. “Same as last time you blew through here.”
But now that he’s unburdened himself, the hound inside Bre
“Who died?”
“A yid in a predicament,” Berko tells him. “Dog bites man.”
9
They leave Bre
“You are not serious,” Berko says.
“In fifteen years I never saw another shammes at the Vorsht.”
“It’s nine-thirty in the morning on a Friday, Meyer. There’s nobody in there but the rats.”
“Not true,” Landsman says. He leads Berko around to the side door and lays his knuckles against it, two taps. “I always figured this was the place to plan my misdeeds, if I ever found myself with misdeeds that needed pla
The heavy steel door swings open with a groan, revealing Mrs. Kalushiner, dressed to go to shul or a job at the bank, in a gray skirt suit and black pumps, with her hair done up in pink foam rollers. In her hand she carries a paper cup filled with a liquid that looks like coffee or maybe prune juice. Mrs. Kalushiner chews tobacco. The cup is her constant if not sole companion.
“You,” she says, making a face like she just tasted earwax on her fingertip. Then, in her refined way, she spits into the cup. From force of wise habit, she takes a long look up and down the alley to see what style of trouble they have brought along. She makes a rapid and brutal study of the giant yarmulke-wearing Indian who wants to come into her place of business. In the past, the people Landsman has brought here, at this hour of the day, have all been twitchy, mouse-eyed shtinkers like Be
The place is as empty as an off-duty downtown bus and smells twice as bad. Somebody came through recently with a bucket of bleach to paint in some high notes over the Vorsht’s steady bass line of sweat and urinals. The keen nose can also detect, above or beneath it all, the coat-lining smell of worn dollar bills.
“Sit there,” Mrs. Kalushiner says, without indicating where she would like them to sit. The round tables that crowd the stage wear overturned chairs like sets of antlers. Landsman flips two of them, and he and Berko take their seats away from the stage, by the heavily bolted front door. Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.
“What a doll,” Berko says.
“A sweetheart,” Landsman agrees. “She only comes in here in the mornings. That way she never has to look at the clientele.” The Vorsht is the place where the musicians of Sitka do their drinking, after the theaters and the other clubs close down. Long after midnight they come huddling in, snow on their hats, rain in their cuffs, and pack the little stage, and kill one another with clarinets and fiddles. As usual when angels gather, they draw a following of devils: gangsters, ganefs, and hard-luck women. “She doesn’t care for musicians.”