The Yiddish Policemen's Union

13

Zimbalist, the boundary maven, that learned old fart, he’s ready when a rumor of Indians in a blue hunk of Michigan muscle comes rumbling up to his front door. Zimbalist’s shop is a stone building with a zinc roof and big doors on rollers, at the wide end of a cobbled platz. The platz starts narrow at one end and broadens out like the nose of a cartoon Jew. Half a dozen crooked lanes tumble into it, following paths first laid down by long-vanished Ukrainian goats or aurochs, past housefronts that are faithful copies of lost Ukrainian originals. A Disney shtetl, bright and clean as a freshly forged birth certificate. An artful jumble of mud-brown and mustard-yellow houses, wood and plaster with thatched roofs. Across from Zimbalist’s shop, at the narrow end of the platz, stands the house of Heskel Shpilman, tenth in the dynastic line from the original rebbe of Verbov, himself a famous worker of miracles. Three neat white cubes of spotless stucco, with mansard roofs of blue slate tile and tall windows, shuttered and narrow. An exact copy of the original home, back in Verbov, of the present rebbe’s wife’s grandfather, the eighth Verb over rebbe, right down to the nickel-plated bathtub in the upstairs washroom. Even before they turned to money laundering, smuggling, and graft, Verbover rebbes distinguished them selves from the competition by the splendor of their waistcoats, the French silver on their Sabbath table, the soft Italian boots on their feet.

The boundary maven is small, frail, slope-shouldered, call him seventy-five but looking ten years older. Patchy cinder-gray hair worn too long, sunken dark eyes, and pale skin tinged yellow like a celery heart. He wears a zip cardigan with collar flaps and a pair of old plastic sandals, navy blue, over white socks with a hole for the left big toe and its horn. His herringbone trousers are stained with egg yolk, acid, tar, epoxy fixative, sealing wax, green paint, mastodon blood. The maven’s face is bony, mostly nose and chin, evolved for noticing, probing, cutting straight to gaps, breaches, and lapses. His full ashy beard flutters in the wind like bird fluff caught on a barbed-wire fence. In a hundred years of helplessness, this would be the last face that Landsman would ever turn to hoping for aid or information, but Berko knows more about black-hat life than Landsman ever will.

Standing next to Zimbalist, in front of the arched stone door of the shop, a beardless young bachelor holds an umbrella to keep the snow off the old tart’s head. The black cake of the kid’s hat is already dusted with a quarter inch of frosting. Zimbalist gives him the attention you give a tree in a pot.

“You’re fatter than ever,” he says by way of greeting as Berko swaggers toward him, some ghost of the weight of the war hammer lingering in his gait. “Big as a sofa.”

“Professor Zimbalist,” Berko says, swinging that invisible mallet. “You look like something that fell out of a used vacuum-cleaner bag.”

“Eight years you don’t bother me.”

“Yeah, I thought I’d give you a break.”

“That’s nice. Too bad every other Jew in this accursed potato paring of a District kept right on banging me a kettle all day long.” He turns to the bachelor with the umbrella. “Tea. Glasses. Jam.”

The bachelor murmurs an Aramaic allusion to abject obedience quoted from the Tractate on the Hierarchy of Dogs, Cats, and Mice, opens the door for the boundary maven, and they go in. It’s one vast, echoing room, divided by theory into a garage, a workshop, and an office that’s lined with steel map cabinets, framed testimonials, and all the black-spined volumes of the endless, bottomless Law. The big rolling doors are there to let the vans go in and out. Three vans, judging from the trey of oil stains on the smooth cement floor.

Landsman gets paid — and lives — to notice what normal people miss, but it seems to him that until he walked into Zimbalist the boundary maven’s shop, he hasn’t given enough attention to string. String, twine, rope, cord, tape, filament, lanyard, hawser, and cable; polypropylene, hemp, rubber, rubberized copper, Kevlar, steel, silk, flax, braided velvet. The boundary maven has vast stretches of the Talmud by heart. Topography, geography, geodesy, geometry, trigonometry, they’re a reflex, like sighting along the barrel of a gun. But the boundary maven lives and dies by the quality of his string. Most of it — you can measure it in miles, or in vershts, or in hands, like a bound ary maven — is coiled neatly on spools hung from the wall or stacked neatly, by size, on metal spindles. But a lot of it is heaped here and there in crazes and tangles. Brambles, hair combings, huge thorny elf knots of string and wire, blowing around the shop like tumbleweeds.

“This is my partner, Professor, Detective Landsman,” Berko says. “You want somebody to bang you a kettle, let me tell you.”

“A pain in the ass like you?”

“Don’t get me started.”

Landsman and the professor shake hands.

“I know this one,” the boundary maven says, coming in close to get a better look at Landsman, giving him the squint-eye as if he’s one of the maven’s ten thousand boundary maps. “That caught the maniac Podolsky. That sent Hyman Tsharny to prison.”

Landsman stiffens and shakes out the foil sheet of his blast shield, ready for an earful. Hyman lshamy, a Verbover dollar washer with a string of video stores, hired two Filipino shlossers — contract killers — to help him cement a tricky business deal. But Landsman’s best informer is Benito Taganes, the Filipino-style Chinese donut king. Benito’s information led Landsman to the roadhouse by the airfield where the hapless shlossers were waiting for a plane, and their testimony put Tsharny away, despite the best efforts of the thickest courtroom kevlar that Verbover money could buy. Hyman Tsharny is still the only Verbover ever to be convicted and sentenced on criminal charges in the District.

“Look at him.” Zimbalist’s face breaks open at th bottom. His teeth are like the pipes of an organ made of bones. His laugh sounds like a handful of rusty fork and nail heads clattering on the ground. “He thinks I give a shit about these people, may their loins be as withered as their souls.” The maven stops laughing. “What, you thought I was one of them?”

It feels like the deadliest question Landsman has ever been asked. “No, Professor,” he says. Landsman also had some doubt that Zimbalist was really a professor, but there in the office, above the head of the bachelor struggling with the electric kettle, are the framed credentials and certificates from the Yeshiva of Warsaw (1939), the Polish Free State (1950), and Bronfman Manual and Technical (1955). Also those testimonials, haskamos, and affidavits, each in its sober black frame, one from what looks to be every rabbi in the District, two-bit and big-time, from Yakovy to Sitka. Landsman makes a show of giving Zimbalist another once-over, but it’s obvious just from the big yarmulke covering the eczema at the back of his skull, with its fancy embroidery of silver thread, that the boundary maven isn’t a Verbover. “I wouldn’t make that mistake.”

“No? What about marrying one of them, like I did? Would you make that mistake?”

“When it comes to marriage I like to let other people make the mistakes,” Landsman says. “My ex-wife, for example.”

Zimbalist waves them over, past the stout oak map table, to a couple of broken ladder-back chairs beside a massive rolltop desk. The bachelor can’t get out of his way fast enough, and the boundary maven grabs him by the ear.

“What are you doing?” He seizes the kid’s hand.

“Look at those fingernails! Feh!” He drops the hand as if it’s a piece of bad fish. “Go, get out of here, get on the radio. Find out where those idiots are and what’s taking so long.”

He pours water into a pot and throws in a fistful of loose tea that looks suspiciously like shredded string. “One eruv they have to patrol. One! I have twelve men working for me, there’s not a single one of them who couldn’t get lost trying to find his foot-fingers at the far end of his socks.”

Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it’s a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker. It has something to do with pretending that telephone poles are doorposts, and that the wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv you’ve drawn — in the case of Zimbalist and his crew, it’s pretty much the whole District — is your house. That way you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place, and walk to shul with a couple of Alka-Seltzers in your pocket, and it isn’t a sin. Given enough string and enough poles, and with a little creative use of existing walls, fences, cliffs, and rivers, you could tie a circle around pretty much any place and call it an eruv.

But somebody has to lay down those lines, survey the territory, maintain the strings and the poles, and guard the integrity of the make-believe walls and doors against weather, vandalism, bears, and the telephone company. That’s where the boundary maven comes in. He has the whole strings-and-poles market cornered. The Verbovers took him up first, and with their strong arm tactics behind him, one by one the Satmar, Bobov, Lubavitch, Ger, and all the other black-hat sects have come to rely on his services and his expertise. When a question arises as to whether or not some particular stretch of sidewalk or lakefront or open field is contained within an eruv, Zimbalist, though not a rabbi, is the one to whom all the rabbis defer. On his maps and his crews and his spools of polypropylene baling twine depends the state of the souls of every pious Jew in the District. By some accounts, he’s the most powerful yid in town. And that’s why he’s allowed to sit down behind his big oak desk with its seventy-two pigeonholes, smack in the middle of Verbov Island, and drink a glass of tea with the man who collared Hyman Tsharny.

“What’s the matter with you?” he says to Berko, casing himself with a rubbery squeak onto an inflatable donut cushion. He takes a package of Broadways from a cigarette clip on his desk. “Why are you going around scaring everybody with that hammer of yours?”

“My partner was disappointed by the welcome we received,” Berko says.

“It lacked that Sabbath glow,” Landsman says, lighting a papiros of his own. “In my opinion.”

Zimbalist slides a three-cornered copper ashtray across the desk. On the side of the ashtray, it says krasny’s tobacco and stationery, which is where Isidor Landsman used to go for his monthly copy of Chess Review. Krasny’s, with its lending library and encyclopedic humidor and annual poetry prize, was crushed by American chain stores years ago, and at the sight of this homely ashtray, the squeeze box of Landsman’s heart gives a nostalgic wheeze.

“Two years of my life I gave those people,” Berko says. “You’d think some of them could remember me. Am I that easy to forget?”

“Let me tell you something, Detective.” With an other squeak of the rubber donut, Zimbalist is up again and pouring tea into three filthy glasses. “The way they breed around here, those people you saw in the street today aren’t the ones you knew eight years ago, those are their grandchildren. Nowadays they’re born pregnant.”

He hands them each a steaming glass, too hot to hold. It scalds the tips of Landsman’s fingers. It smells like grass, rose hips, maybe a hint of string.

“They keep on making new Jews,” Berko says, stirring a spoonful of jam into his glass. “Nobody is making places to put them.”

“That is the truth,” Zimbalist says as his bony ass hits the donut. He grimaces. “Strange times to be a Jew.”

“Not around here, apparently,” says Landsman.

“Strictly life as usual on Verbov Island. A stolen BMW in every driveway and a talking chicken in every pot.”

“These people don’t worry until the rebbe tells them to worry,” Zimbalist says.

“Maybe they don’t have anything to worry about,” Berko says. “Maybe the rebbe already took care of the problem.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

“So don’t believe it.”

One of the garage doors goes sliding back on its wheels, and a white van pulls in, a bright mask of snow on its windshield. Four men in yellow coveralls pile out of the van, their noses red, their beards tied up in black nets. They start blowing their noses and stamping their feet, and Zimbalist has to go over and yell at them for a while. It turns out there was a problem near the reservoir in Sholem-Aleykhem Park, some idiot at Municipal put up a handball wall, right smack in the middle of a make-believe doorway between two light poles.

They all tramp over to the map table in the middle of the office. While Zimbalist gets down the appropriate chart and unrolls it, the crew members take turns nodding and flexing their scowling muscles at Landsman and Berko. After that the crew just ignores them.

“They say the maven has a string map for every city where ten Jewish men ever bumped noses,” Berko says to Landsman. “Clear on back to Jericho.”

“I started that rumor myself,” Zimbalist says, keeping his eyes on the chart. He tracks down the site, and one of the boys sketches in the handball wall with the stub of a pencil. Zimbalist quickly plots out a work around that will hold through sundown tomorrow, a salient in the great imaginary wall of the eruv. He sends his boys back down to the Harkavy to run some plastic pipe up the sides of a couple of nearby phone poles, so that the Satmars who live on the east side of Sholem-Aleykhem Park can take their dogs out for a walk without endangering their souls.

“I’m sorry,” he says, coming back around the desk. He winces. “I don’t enjoy the act of sitting any more. Now, what can I do for you? I doubt very much that you came here with a question about reshus harabim?

“We’re working a homicide, Professor Zimbalist,” Landsman says. “And we have reason to believe the deceased may have been a Verbover, or had ties to the Verbovers, at least at one time.”

“Ties,” the maven says, giving them a glimpse of those pipe-organ stalactites of his. “I suppose I know something about those.”

“He was living in a hotel on Max Nordau Street under the name of Emanuel Lasker.”

“Lasker? Like the chess player?” There’s a crease in the parchment of Zimbalist’s yellow forehead, and deep in the eye sockets, a scrape of f1int and steel: surprise, puzzlement, a memory kindling. “I used to follow the game,” he explains. “A long time ago.”

“So did I,” Landsman says. “So did our dead guy, right up to the end. Next to the body, there was a game all set up. He was reading Siegbert Tarrasch. And he was familiar to the regulars at the Einstein Chess Club. They knew him as Frank.”

“Frank,” the boundary maven says, giving it a Yankee twang. “Frank, Frank, Frank. That was his first name? It’s a common Jewish last name, but a first name, no. You know for a fact he was a Jew, this Frank?”

Berko and Landsman exchange a quick look. They don’t know anything for sure. The phylacteries in the nightstand could have been a plant or a memento, something left behind by a prior occupant of room 208. Nobody at the Einstein Club claimed to have seen Frank the dead junkie in shul, rocking in the grip of the Standing Prayer.

“We have reason to believe,” Berko repeats calmly, “that he may at one time have been a Verbover Jew.”

“What kind of reason?”

“There were a couple of likely telephone poles,” Landsman says. “We tied a string between them.”

He reaches into his pocket and takes out an envelope.

He passes one of Shpringer’s death Polaroids across the desk to Zimbalist, who holds it at arm’s length, long enough to form the idea that it’s a picture of a corpse. He takes a deep breath and purses his lips, getting ready to lay on them a solid professorial consideration of the evidence at hand. A picture of a dead man, it’s a break, to be honest, in the routine of a boundary maven’s life. Then he looks at the picture, and in the instant before he regains absolute control of his features Landsman sees Zimbalist take a swift punch in the belly. The wind departs his lungs, and the blood drains from his face. In his eyes, the steady maven flicker of intelligence is snuffed out. For a second Landsman is looking at a Polaroid of a dead boundary maven. Then the lights come back on in the old fart’s face. Berko and Landsman wait a little, and then a little more, and Landsman understands that the boundary maven is fighting as hard as he can to maintain that control, to hold on to the chance of making his next words Detectives, I have never seen that man before in my life, and having it sound plausible, inevitable, true.

“Who was he, Professor Zimbalist?” Berko says at last.

Zimbalist sets the photograph down on the desk and looks at it some more, not bothering about what his eyes or his lips might be doing.

“Oy, that boy,” he says. “That sweet, sweet boy.” He takes a handkerchief from the pocket of his zippered cardigan and blots the tears from his cheeks and barks once. It’s a horrible sound. Landsman picks up the maven’s glass of tea and pours it into his own. From his hip pocket, he takes the bottle of vodka he impounded in the men’s room of the Vorsht that morning. He pours two fingers into the glass of tea and then holds the cup out to the old fart.

Zimbalist takes the vodka without a word and knocks it down in one shot. Then he returns the handkerchief to its pocket and gives Landsman his photograph.

“I taught that boy to play chess,” he says. “When that man was a boy, I mean. Before he grew up. I’m sorry, I’m not making sense.” He goes for another Broadway, but he has already smoked them all. It takes him a while to figure this out. He sits there, poking around in the foil with a hooked finger, as if he’s going for the peanut in a package of Cracker Jack. Landsman fixes him up with a smoke. “Thanks, Landsman. Thank you.”

But then he doesn’t say anything, he just sits there watching the papiros burn down. He peers out from his cavernous eyeholes at Berko, then steals a cardplayer peek at Landsman. He’s recovering from the shock now. Trying to map the situation, the lines he cannot cross, the doorways that he mustn’t step through on peril of his soul. The hairy, mottled crab of his hand flicks one of its legs toward the telephone on his desk. In another minute, the truth and darkness of life will once again have been remanded to the custody of lawyers.

The garage door creaks and rumbles, and with a moan of gratitude, Zimbalist starts to pop up again, but this time Berko beats him to his feet. He drops a heavy hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Sit down, Professor,” he says. “I beg you. Take it slow if you have to, but please, sit your ass down on that donut.” He leaves the hand where it is, giving Zimbalist a gentle squeeze, and nods toward the garage. “Meyer.”

Landsman crosses the workshop to the garage and hauls out his shield. He walks directly into the path of the van as if the shield really is a badge that can stop a two-ton Chevy. The driver hits the brakes, and the howl of tires echoes against the cold stone walls of the garage. The driver rolls down his window. He has the full Zimbalist crew equipage: beard in a net, yellow coverall, well developed scowl.

“What gives, Detective?” he wants to know.

“Go take a drive,” Landsman says. “We’re talking.”

He reaches over to the dispatch panel and grabs hold of the skulking bachelor by the collar of his long coat. Dangles the kid like a puppy around to the passenger side of the van and drags open the side door, then tenderly shoves the bachelor into the van. “And take this little pisher with you.”

“Boss?” the driver calls over to the boundary maven. After a moment Zimbalist nods and waves the driver away.

“But where should I go?” the driver says to Landsman.

“I don’t know,” Landsman says. He drags the van’s door shut and shoves it home. “Go buy me a nice present.”

Landsman pounds on the hood of the van, and it rolls back out into the storm of white lines being knit like strings of the boundary maven across the replica housefronts and the blazing gray sky. Landsman pulls the garage door into place and throws the latch.

“Nu, how about you start over?” he says to Zimbal ist when he sits down again in the ladder back chair. He crosses his legs and lights another papiros for each of them. “We have plenty of time.”

“Come on, Professor,” Berko says. “You know the victim since he’s a boy, right? All those memories have got to be going around and around in your head right now. As bad as you feel, it’s going to feel better if you just start talking.”

“It isn’t that,” the boundary maven says. “It’s — It isn’t that.” He takes the lit papiros from Landsman, and this time he smokes most of it before he starts to talk. He is a learned yid, and he likes to have his thoughts I order.

“His name is Menachem,” he begins. “Mendel. He is, or was, thirty-eight, a year older than you, Detective Shemets, but he had the same birthday, August fifteenth, isn’t that right? Eh? I thought so. You see? This is the map cabinet.” He taps his hairless dom “Maps of Jericho, Detective Shemets, Jericho and Tyre.”

Tapping the map cabinet gets a little out of control and he knocks the yarmulke off his head. When he grabs at it, ash cascades all down his sweater.

“Mendele’s IQ was measured at one-seventy,” he continues. “By the time he was eight or nine, he could read Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Spanish, Latin, Greek. The most difficult texts, the thorniest tangle of logic and argument. By then Mendele was already a much better chess player than I could ever hop to be. He had a remarkable memory for recorded games; he had only to read a transcript once, and after that, he could reproduce it on a board or in his head, move by move, without a mistake. When he was older and they didn’t let him play so much anymore, he would work through famous games in his head. He must have known three, four hundred games by heart.”

“That’s what they used to say about Melekh Gayik,” Landsman says. “He had that kind of mind for the game.”

“Melekh Gaystik,” Zimbalist says. “Gaystik was a freak. It was not human, the way Gaystik played. He had a mind like some kind of bug, the only thing he new to do was eat you. He was rude. Filthy. Mean. Mendele wasn’t like that at all. He made toys for his sisters, dolls out of clothespins and felt, a house from a box of oatmeal. Always glue on his fingers, a clothespin in his pocket with a face on it. I would give him twine for the hair. Eight little sisters hanging off him all the time. A pet duck that used to follow him around like a dog.” Zimbalist’s thin brown lips hitch themselves up at the corners. “Believe it or not, I once arranged for a match to be played between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik. You could do such things — Gaystik was always broke and in debt, and he would have played against a half-drunk bear if the money was right. The boy was twelve at the time, Gaystik twenty-six. It was the year before he won the championship at Petersburg. They played three games in the back of my shop, which at that time — you remember, Detective — was on Ringel blum Avenue. I offered Gaystik five thousand dollars to play against Mendele. The boy won the first and the third. The second game he had Black and played Gaystik to a draw. Yes, Gaystik was only too happy to keep the match a secret.”

“Why?” Landsman wants to know. “Why did the games have to be kept secret?”

“Because this boy,” the boundary maven says. “The one who died in a hotel room on Max Nordau Street. Not a nice hotel, I imagine.”

“A fleabag,” Landsman says.

“He was shooting heroin into his arm?”

Landsman nods, and after a hard second or two, Zimbalist nods, too.

“Yes. Of course. Nu. The reason why I was obliged to arrange the games in secret was that this boy had been forbidden to play chess with outsiders. Somehow or other, I never learned how, Mendele’s father got wind of the match against Gaystik. It was a near thing for me. In spite of the fact that my wife was a relative of the father, I almost lost his haskama, which at that time was the foundation of my business. I built this whole operation on that endorsement.”

“The father. You’re not saying — it was Heskel Shpilman,” Berko says. “The man there in the picture is the son of the Verbover rebbe.”

Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.

“That’s right,” Zimbalist says at last. “Mendel Shpilman, The only son. He had a twin brother who was born dead. Later, that was interpreted as a sign.”

Landsman says, “A sign of what? That he would be a prodigy? That he would turn out to be a junkie living in a cheap Untershtat flop?”

“Not that,” says Zimbalist. “That nobody imagined.”

“They said … they used to say … ” Berko begins. He screws up his face, as if he knows what he’ll say next is going to irk Landsman or give him cause for scorn. He unscrews his brown eyes, lets it pass. He can’t bring himself to repeat it. “Mendel Shpilman. Dear God. I heard some stories.”

“A lot of stories,” Zimbalist says. “Nothing but stories till he was twenty years old.”

“What kind of stories?” Landsman says, duly irked. “Stories about what? Tell me already, damn you.”