The Yiddish Policemen's Union

11

Sometimes when the younger black hats are caught by the police, they turn haughty and angry and demand their rights as American subjects. And sometimes they break down and cry. Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, ley the abyss. That is part of the policeman’s job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor. Landsman wonders if that’s how it is with Saltiel Lapidus. Tears stream down his cheeks. A glinting thread of mucus dangles from his right nostril.

“Mr. Lapidus is feeling a little sad,” Berko says. “But he won’t say why.”

Landsman feels around in the pocket of his overcoat for a package of Kleenex and finds one miraculous sheet. Lapidus hesitates, then takes it and blows his nose with feeling.

“I swear to you, I didn’t know the man,” Lapidus says. “I don’t know where he lived, who he was. I don’t know anything. I swear on my life. We played chess a few times. He always won.”

“You’re just grieving for the sake of humanity, then,” Landsman says, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his tone.

“Exactly right,” Lapidus says, and then he balls the tissue in his fist and tosses that crumpled flower into the gutter.

“Are you going to take us in?” Fishkin demands. “Because if you are, then I want to call a lawyer. And if you’re not, then you have to let us go.”

“A black-hat lawyer,” Berko says, and it’s a kind of moan or plea directed toward Landsman. “Woe is me.”

“Get going, then,” Landsman says.

Berko gives them a nod. The two men crunch off through the filthy slush of the alley.

“So, nu, I’m irritated,” Berko says. “I admit this one is starting to irritate me.”

Landsman nods and scratches at the stubble of his chin in a way that is meant to signify deep ratiocination, but his heart and thoughts are hung up in the memory of chess games that he lost to men who were already old thirty years ago.

“Did you see that old guy in there?” he says. “By the door. Alter Litvak. Been hanging around the Einstein for years. Used to play my father. Your father, too.”

“I’ve heard the name.” Berko looks back at the steel fire door that is the Einstein Club’s grand entrance. “War hero. Cuba.”

“The man has no voice, he has to write everything down. I asked him where I could find him if I needed to talk to him, and he wrote that he was going to Madagascar.”

“That’s a new one.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did he know our Frank?”

“Not well, he said.”

“Nobody knew our Frank,” Berko says. “But everybody is very sad that he died.” He buttons his coat over his belly, turns up his collar, settles his hat more firmly on his head. “Even you.”

“Fuck you,” Landsman says. “The yid was nothing to me.”

“Maybe he was a Russian? That might explain the chess. And your pal Vassily’s behavior. Maybe Lebed or Moskowits is behind the hit.”

“If he’s Russian, it doesn’t explain what the two black hats were so afraid of,” Landsman says. “Those two don’t know from Moskowits. Russian shtarkers, a gangland hit, it just doesn’t mean that much to your average Bobover.” He gives his chin another few pulls and then makes up his mind. He looks up at the strip of radiant gray sky that stretches along the top of the narrow alley behind the Hotel Einstein. “I wonder what time sunset is tonight.”

“Why? We’re going to poke a stick into the Harkavy, Meyer? I don’t think Bina will care much for that, we start stirring up the black hats down there.”

“You don’t, eh?” Landsman smiles. He takes the valet ticket from his pocket. “Then we’d better steer clear of the Harkavy.”

“Uh-oh. You have that smile.”

“You don’t like this smile?”

“Only I’ve noticed what comes after is usually a question that you plan to answer yourself".

“How about this one. What kind of a yid, Berko, tell me this, what kind of a yid can make a prison-hard Russian sociopath want to crap in his pants, and bring tears to the eyes of the most pious black hat in Sitka?”

“I know you want me to say a Verbover,” Berko says. After Berko passed out of the academy, his first billet was the Fifth Precinct, the Harkavy, where the Verbovers landed, along with most of their fellow black hats, after the 1948 arrival of the ninth Verbover rebbe, father-in-law of the present model, with the pitiful remnant of his court. It was a classic ghetto assignment, trying to help and protect people who disdain and despise you and the authority you represent. It ended when the young half-Indian latke took a bullet in the shoulder, two inches from his heart, in the Shavuos Massacre at Goldblatt’s Dairy Restaurant. “I know that’s who you want me to say.”

This is how Berko once explained to Landsman the sacred gang known as the Chasids of Verbov: They started out, back in the Ukraine, black hats like all the other black hats, scorning and keeping their distance from the trash and hoo-hah of the secular world, inside their imaginary ghetto wall of ritual and faith. Then the entire sect was burned in the fires of the Destruction, down to a hard, dense core of something blacker than any hat. What was left of the ninth Verbover rebbe emerged from those fires with eleven disciples and, among his family, only the sixth of his eight daughters. He rose into the air like a charred scrap of paper and blew to this narrow strip between the Baranof Mountains and the end of the world. And here he found a way to remake the old-style black-hat detachment. He carried its logic to its logical end, the way evil geniuses do in cheap novels. He built a criminal empire that profited on the meaningless tohubohu beyond the theoretical walls, on beings so flawed, corrupted, and hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all.

“I had the same thought, of course,” Berko confesses. “Which I immediately suppressed.” He claps his big hands over his face and leaves them there for a moment before dragging them slowly down, pulling at his cheeks until they stretch past his chin like the jowl flaps of a bulldog. “Woe is me, Meyer, you want us to go out to Verbov Island?”

“Fuck, no,” Landsman says in American. “Truth, Berko. I hate that place. If we have to go to an island, I’d much rather go to Madagascar.”

They stand there in the alley behind the Einstein, thinking through the numerous arguments against and the few that can be made in favor of pissing off the most powerful underworld characters north of the 55th parallel. They attempt to generate alternate explanations for the squirrelly behavior of the patzers in the Einstein.

“We’d better see Itzik Zimbalist,” Berko says finally. “Anybody else out there, it’s going to be as useful as talking to a dog. And a dog already broke my heart once today.”