The Yiddish Policemen's Union

15

“You met this ganef,” Landsman half asks Berko as they hump along behind the boundary maven through the Sabbath snow to the rebbe’s door. For the journey across the platz, Zimbalist washed his face and armpits in a sink at the back of the shop. He wet a comb and raked all seventeen of his hairs into a moire across the top of his head. Then he put on a brown corduroy sport coat, an orange down vest, black galoshes, and over everything, a belted bearskin coat trailing a smell of mothballs like a muffler twenty feet long. From a moose antler by the door, the maven took a football or miniature ottoman made of wolverine fur and set it on top of his head. Now he waddles along ahead of the detectives, reeking of naphthalene, looking like a small bear urged by cruel masters to perform demeaning feats. Under an hour before dark, and the snow falling is like pieces of broken daylight. The Sitka sky is dull silver plate and tarnishing fast.

“Yeah, I met him,” Berko says. “They brought me in to see him right after I started working the Fifth Precinct. They had a ceremony in his office, over the study hall on South Ansky Street. He pinned something to the crown of my latke, a gold leaf. After that he used to send me a nice basket of fruit at Purim. Delivered right to my house, even though I never gave out my home address. Every year pears and oranges until we moved out to the Shvartsn-Yam.”

“I hear he’s kind of on the large side.”

“He’s cute. Cute as a fucking button.”

“That stuff the maven was just telling us about Mendel. The wonders and miracles. Berko, you believe any of that?”

“You know it’s not about believing for me, Meyer. It never has been.”

“But do you — I’m curious — do you really feel like you’re waiting for Messiah?”

Berko shrugs, uninterested in the question, keeping his eyes on the track of the black galoshes in the snow. “It’s Messiah,” he says. “What else can you do but wait?”

“And then when he comes, what? Peace on earth?”

“Peace, prosperity. Plenty to eat. Nobody sick or lonely. Nobody selling anything. I don’t know.”

“And Palestine? When Messiah comes, all the Jews move back there? To the promised land? Fur hats and all?”

“I heard Messiah cut a deal with the beavers,” Berko says."No more fur.”

Under the glow of a big iron gas lamp mounted, by an iron bracket, to the front of the rebbe’s house, a loose knot of men is killing the last of the week. Hangers-on, the rebbe-struck, an outright simpleton or two. And the usual impromptu mess of would-be Swiss Guards who make the job tougher for the biks holding up either side of the front door. Everybody’s telling everybody else to go home and bless the light with their families, leave the rebbe to eat his Sabbath dinner in peace already. Nobody’s quite leaving, nobody’s quite sticking around. They swap authentic lies about recent miracles and portents, new Canadian immigration scams, and forty new versions of the story of the Indian with the hammer, how he recited the Alenu while dancing an Indian patch tanz.

When they hear the crunch and chiming of Zimbalist’s galoshes coming toward them across the platz, they leave off making their noises, one by one, like a calliope running out .of steam. Fifty years Zimbalist has been living in their midst and he’s still, by some tangle of choice and necessity, an outsider. He’s a wizard, a juju man, with his fingers on the strings thut ring the District, and his palms cupping the brackish water of their souls every Sabbath. Perched at the tops of the boundary maven’s poles, his crews can see into every window, they can listen in on every telephon call. Or at least that is what these men have heard.

“Coming through, please,” the maven says, headin for the front steps with their pretty railings of curlicued wrought iron. “Friend Belsky, move aside.”

The men make way as if Zimbalist is running toward a water bucket holding something on fire. Before they can quite close up the gap, they see Landsman and Berko coming their way and throw down a silence so heavy that Landsman can feel it pressing on the sides of his head. He can hear the snow fizzing and the sizzle each snowflake makes as it hits the top of the gas lamp. The men put on an exhibition of hard looks and innocent looks and looks so blank they threaten to vacuum all the air from Landsman’s lungs. Somebody says, “I don’t see any hammer.”

Detectives Landsman and Shemets wish them the joy of the Sabbath. Then they turn their attention to the biks by the door, a couple of thickset, red-haired, pop-eyed boys with pug noses and dense woolly beards the rusty gold of brisket gravy. Two red Rudashcvskys, biks from a long line of biks, bred for simplicity, density, power, and lightness of foot.

“Professor Zimbalist,” says the Rudashevsky to the left of the door. “A good Sabbath to you.”

“And to you, Friend Rudashevsky. I regret to disturb your watch on this peaceful afternoon.” The boundary maven settles the furry ottoman more snugly on his head. Off to a flowery start, but when goes to open the drawer of his face, no more coin falls out. Landsman reaches into his hip pocket. Zimbalist is just standing there, his arms hanging slack, maybe thinking it’s all his fault, that it was chess that bent the boy from the God-directed angle of his glory, and now Zimbalist has to go in there and tell the father the sorry ending of the tale. So Landsman brushes up against Zimbalist’s shoulder, with his fingers around the cold smooth neck of the pint of Canadian vodka in his pocket. He taps the bottle against Zimbalist’s bony claw until the old fart catches on and palms it.

“Nu, Yossele, it’s Detective Shemets,” Berko says, taking over the operation, squinting up into the scatering gaslight with a hand over his eyes. The gang of men behind them begins to murmur, sensing now the quick unfolding of something bad and marvelous. The wind jerks the snowflakes back and forth on its hundred hooks. “What’s up, yid?”

“Detective,” says the Rudashevsky to the right, maybe Yossele’s brother, maybe his cousin. Maybe both at once. “We heard you were in the neighborhood.”

“This is Detective Landsman, my partner. Could you please tell Rabbi Shpilman that we’d like to have a moment of his time? Please believe, we wouldn’t disturb him at this hour if it wasn’t so important.”

Black hats, even Verbovers, don’t usually challenge the right or authority of policemen to conduct police business in the Harkavy or on Verbov Island. They don’t cooperate, but they usually don’t interfere. On the other hand, to enter the home of exile’s strongest rabbi, at the very brink of the holiest moment of the week, for that you need a good reason. You need to be coming to tell him, for example, that his only son is dead.

“A moment of the rebbe’s time?” says a Rudashevsky.

“If you had a million dollars, please don’t mind my saying so, with all due respect, Detective Shemets;” says the other, broader of shoulder and hairier of knuckle than Yossele, laying a hand over his heart, “it wouldn’t be worth so much as that.”

Landsman turns to Berko. “Have you got that kind of money on you?”

Berko jabs Landsman in the side with an elbow. Landsman never walked a black-hat beat in his latke days, groping his way along a murky sea bottom of blank looks and silences that could crush a submarine. Landsman doesn’t know how to show the proper repect.

“Come, Yossele. Shmerl, sweetness,” Berko croons. “I need to get home to my table. Let us in.”

Yossele tugs on his brisket-colored chin muffler. Then the other begins to speak in a low, steady undertone. The bik is wearing, hidden by one of his looping auburn sidelocks, a headset-style microphone and ear- piece.

“I am to inquire respectfully,” the bik says after a moment, the force of the order flowing across his features, softening them as it stiffens his diction, “what business brings the distinguished officers of the law to he rebbe’s home so late this Friday afternoon.”

“Idiots!” Zimbalist says, a slug of vodka in him, reering up the steps like a fool of a bear on a unicycle. He grabs the lapels of Yosse1e Rudashevsky’s coat and dances with them, left and right, anger and grief. “They’re here about Mendele! ”

The men standing around in front of the Shpilman house have been muttering and commenting and critiquing the performance, but they shut up. Life wheezes in and out of their lungs, rattles in the snot of their noses. The heat of the lantern vaporizes the snow. The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsman feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist’s crying out the name of the rebbe’s lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering among them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it’s just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hour. Or maybe it’s the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night’s sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.

Yossele turns to Shmerl, the dough of his forehead kneaded, holding on to Zimbalist with the brainless tenderness of a brutal man. Shmerl speaks another few syllables into the heart of the Verbover rebbe’s house. He looks east, west. He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin. Then he eases open the paneled door. Yossele sets old Zimbalist down with a jingling of galoshes clasps and pats him on the check. “If you please, Detectives,” he says.

You come into a wainscoted hall, a door at the far end, on the left a wooden stair leading up to the second floor. The stairs and risers, the wainscot, even the floorboards are all cut from big slabs of some kind of pine, knotty and butter-colored. Along the wall opposite the stairway runs a low bench, also knotty pine, covered in a purple velvet cushion, worn to a shine in patches and bearing six round indentations made by years of Verbover buttocks.

“The esteemed detectives will please wait here,” Shmerl says.

He and Yossele return to their posts, leaving Landsman and Berko under the steady but indifferent scrutiny of a third hulking Rudashevsky who lounges against the baluster at the bottom of the stairs.

“Sit, Professor,” says the indoor Rudashevsky.

“Thank you,” he says. “But I don’t care to sit.”

“You all right, Professor?” Berko says, laying a hand on the maven’s arm.

“A handball court,” Zimbalist says as if in reply to the question. “Who plays handball anymore?”

Something in the pocket of Zimbalist’s coat catches Berko’s eye. Landsman takes a sudden interest in a small wooden rack affixed to the wall by the door, well stocked with two slick, colorful brochures. One is entitled “Who Is the Verbover Rebbe?” and it informs him that they are standing in the formal or ceremonial entrance of the house, and that the family comes and goes and does its living at the other end, just like in the house of the president of America. The other brochure they’re giving away is called “Five Great Truths and Five Big Lies About Verbover Hasidism.”

“I saw the movie,” Berko says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder.

The stair creaks. The Rudashevsky mumbles, as if announcing a change in the dinner menu, “Rabbi Baronshteyn.”

Landsman knows Baronshteyn only by reputation. Another boy wonder, with a law degree in addition to his rabbi’s smikha, he married one of the rebbe’s eight daughters. He is never photographed, and he never leaves Verbov Island, unless you believe the stories of his sneaking into some South Sitka roach motel in the dead of night to exact personal retribution on a policy game skimmer, or on some shlosser who mishandled a hit.

“Detective Shemets, Detective Landsman. I am Aryeh Baronshteyn, the rebbe’s gabay.”

Landsman is surprised by how young he is, thirty at the outside. High, narrow forehead, black eyes hard as a couple of stones left on a grave marker. He has concealed his girlish mouth in the manly bloom of a King Solomon beard, fitted with careful streaks of gray to suggest maturity. The sidelocks hang limp and orderly. He has the air of a self-denier, but his clothes betray the old Verbover love of flash. His calves are plump and muscular in their silk garters and white hose. He keeps his long feet encased in brushed black velveteen slippers. The frock coat looks fresh from the bespoke needle of Moses and Sons on Asch Street. Only the plain knit skullcap has a modest air. Underneath it, his brush-cut hair glints like the business end of a paint-stripping rotor. His face displays no trace of wariness, but Landsman can see where wariness has been carefully erased.

“Reb Baronshteyn,” Berko murmurs, taking off his hat. Landsman does likewise.

Baronshteyn keeps his hands in the pockets of his frock coat, a satin number with velour lapels and pocket flaps, He’s making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don’t know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.

“What do you want here?” he says. He mimes a glance at his watch, poking it from the cuff of his milled cotton shirt just long enough for them to read the name of Patek Philippe on its face. “It’s very late.”

“We’re here to talk to Rebbe Shpilman, Rabbi,” Landsman says. “If your time is so precious, then we surely don’t want to waste it by talking to you.”

“It isn’t my time that I fear to have you waste, Detective Landsman. And I can tell you right now that if you attempt to display, in this house, the disrespectful attitude and disgraceful behavior for which you are notorious, then you will not remain in this house. Is that clear?”

“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.”