The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off.

He was both faithful and without a shred of faith,

everyone around him?” “A Tzaddik Ha-Dor is always hidden. That’s a mark of his nature.

Dr. Roboy, in Litvak’s measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence.

The whole village might be nothing but driftwood and wire, flotsam from the drowning of a far-off town.

his ridged forehead looks like one of those domed beehives you see representing Industry in medieval woodcuts.

Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid picture of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless

Betty was a good servant, but she had the Filipino knack for taking intense pleasure in scandal.

His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull.