“I think you have me mixed up with the other Detective Meyer Landsman,” Landsman says. “I’m the one who’s just doing his job.”

“Then you are here as part of a murder investiga tion? May I ask in what way it concerns the rebbe?”

“We really do need to talk to the rebbe,” Berko says.

“If he tells us he’d like to have you present, you’re welcome to stay. But with all due respect, Rabbi, we’re not here to answer your questions. And we aren’t here to waste anybody’s time.”

“In addition to being his adviser, Detective, I am the rebbe’s attorney. You know that.”

“We’re aware of that, sir.”

“My office is across the platz,” Baronshteyn says, going to the front door and holding it open like a gracious doorman. Snow pours down past the open doorway, glowing in the gaslight like an endless jackpot of coins. “I’m sure I will be able to answer whatever questions you have.”

“Baronshteyn, you puppy. Get out of their way.”

Zimbalist is on his feet now, hat collapsing over one ear, in his vast mangy coat and his miasma of mothballs and grief.

“Professor Zimbalist.” Baronshteyn’s tone is one of warning, but his eye grows keen as he takes in the ruin of the boundary maven. He may never have seen Zimbalist in proximity to an emotion. The spectacle clearly interests him. “Have a care.”

“You tried to take his place. Well, now you have it. How does it feel?” Zimbalist totters a step closer to the gabay. There must be all kinds of cords and tripwires crisscrossing the space between them. But for once the boundary maven seems to have mislaid his string map. “He’s more alive even now than you will ever be, you smelt, you waxworks.”

He crashes past Berko and Landsman, reaching for the banister or the gabay’s throat. Baronshteyn doesn’t flinch. Berko grabs hold of the belt at the waist of the bearskin coat and drags Zimbalist back.

“Who is?” says Baronshteyn. “Who are you talking about?” He looks at Landsman. “Detective, did some thing happen to Mendel Shpilman?”

Landsman will review the performance later with Berko, but his first impression is that Baronshteyn sounds surprised by the possibility.

“Professor,” Berko says. “We appreciate the help Thank you.” He zips up Zimbalist’s sweater and buttons his jacket. He tucks one side of the bearskin coat over the other and knots the belt tightly at the waist “Now, please, go home. Yossele, Shmerl, somebody walk the professor home before his wife gets worried and calls the police.”

Yossele takes Zimbalist by the arm, and they start down the steps.

Berko shuts the door against the cold. “Take us tu the rebbe, counselor,” he says. “Now.”

Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see.

“I suggest we dispense with the pleasantries,” the rebbe says.

His voice comes pitched high, droll, the voice of the well-proportioned, scholarly man he must have been once. Landsman has heard that it’s a glandular disorder. He has heard that the Verbover rebbe, for all his bulk, maintains the diet of a martyr, broth and roots and a daily crust of bread. But Landsman prefers to see the man as distended with the gas of violence and corruption. His belly filled with bones and shoes and the hearts of men, half digested in the acid of his Law.

“Sit down and tell me what you came here to say.”

“We can do that, rebbe,” Berko says.

They each take a chair in front of the rebbe’s desk.

The office is pure Austro-Hungarian empire. Behemoths of mahogany, ebony and bird’s-eye maple crowd the walls, ornate as cathedrals. In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover Clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed. It runs counterclock wise, reverse-numbered with the first twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its recovery was a turning point in the fortunes of the Verbover court and marked the start of Heskel Shpilman’s ascent. Baronshteyn takes up a position behind and to the right of the rebbe, at a lectern where he can keep one eye on the street, one eye on whatever volume is being combed for precedents and justifications, and one eye, a lidless inner eye, on the man who is the center of his existence.

Landsman clears his throat. He is the primary, and this is his job to do. He steals another glance at the Verboover Clock. There are seven minutes remaining in his sorry excuse for a week.

“Before you begin, Detectives,” says Aryeh Baronshteyn, “let me state for the record that I am here in my capacity as attorney to Rabbi Shpilman, Rebbe, if you have any doubt about whether you ought to answer question put to you by the detectives, please refrain from answering, and allow me to ask them to clarify or rephrase it.”

“This isn’t an interrogation, Rabbi Baronshteyn,” Berko says.

“You are welcome here, more than welcome, Aryeh,” the rebbe says. “Indeed, I insist that you be present. But as my gabay and my son-in-law. Not as my lawyer. For this I don’t need a lawyer.”

“If I may, dear Rebbe. These men are homicide detectives. You are the Verbover rebbe. If you don’t need a lawyer, then nobody needs a lawyer. And believe me, everybody needs a lawyer.” Baronshteyn slides a pad of yellow paper from the interior or the lectern, where he no doubt keeps his vials of curare and his necklaces of severed human ears. He unscrews the cap of a fountain pen. “I will at least take notes. On,” he deadpans, “a legal pad.”

The Verbover rebbe contemplates Landsman from deep inside the redoubt of his flesh. He has light eyes, somewhere between green and gold. They’re nothing like the pebbles abandoned by mourners on Baronshteynx tombstone puss. Fatherly eyes that suffer and forgive and find amusement. They know what Landsman has lost, what he has squandered and let slip from his grasp through doubt, faithlessness, and the pursuit of being tough. They understand the furious wobble that throws off the trajectory of Landsman’s good intentions. They comprehend the love affair that Landsman has with violence, his wild willingness to put his body out there on the street to break and to be broken. Until this minute Landsman didn’t grasp what he and every noz in the District, and the Russian shtarkers and small-time wiseguys, and the FBI and the IRS and the ATF, were up against. He never understood how the other sects could tolerate and even defer to the presence of these pious gangsters in their black-hat midst. You could lead men with a pair of eyes like that. You could send them to the very lip of whatever abyss you chose.

“Tell me why you are here, Detective Landsman,” the rebbe says.

Through the door of the outer office comes the muffled jangle of a telephone. There is no phone on desk and none in sight. The rebbe works some feat of semaphore with half an eyebrow and a minor muscle of the eye. Baronshteyn puts down his pen. The ringing swells and dwindles as Baronshteyn slips the black missive of his body through the slot of the office door. A moment later, Landsman hears him answer. The words are unclear, the tone curt, maybe even harsh.