The Yiddish Policemen's Union

19

When the telephone wakes him at six the next morning, Landsman is sitting in the wing chair, in his white underpants, with a tender hold on the grip of his M-39.

Tenenboym is just going off duty. “You asked,” he says, and then he hangs up.

Landsman doesn’t remember putting in for a wake up call. He doesn’t remember polishing off the bottle of slivovitz that stands empty on the scratched urethane surface of the oak-veneer tabletop, next to the wing chair. He doesn’t remember eating the noodle pudding whose remaining third now huddles in a corner of a plastic clamshell container beside the bottle of slivovitz. From the position of the shards of painted glass on the floor, he can reconstruct having hurled his 1977 Sitka World’s Fair shot glass against the radiator. Maybe he was feeling frustrated over being unable to make any progress with the pocket chess set that lies facedown under the bed, its minute chessmen sprinkled liberally around the room. But he has no memory of the throw itself, or of shattering glass. He might have been drinking a toast to something or someone, with the radiator standing in for a fireplace. He doesn’t remember. But nothing about the squalid scenery of room 505 can be said to surprise him, least of all the loaded sholem in his hand.

He checks the firing pin safety and returns the gun to its holster, slung across the back of the wing chair. Then he goes over to the wall and drags the pull-down bed from its notch. He peels back the covers and climbs in. The linens are clean, and they smell of the steam press and of the dust in the hole in the wall. Dimly, Landsman recalls conceiving a romantic project, sometime around midnight the night before, to show up for work early, see what forensics and ballistics have made of the Shpilman case, maybe even go out to the islands, the Russian neighborhoods, and try to nudge the patzer ex-con Vassily Shitnovitzer. Do what he can, give it his best shot, before Bina takes a pair of pliers to his teeth and claws at nine. He smiles ruefully at the headstrong young bravo he was last midnight. A six A.M. wake up call.

He pulls the covers up over his head and closes his eyes. Unbidden, the configuration of pawns and pieces lays itself out on a chessboard in his mind, the Black king hemmed in but unchecked at the center of the board, the White pawn on the b file about to become something better. There is no longer any need for the pocket set; to his horror, he has the thing by heart. He tries to drive it from his mind, to expunge it, to sweep aside the pieces and fill in all the white checkers with black. An all-black board, uncorrupted by pieces or players, gambits or endgames, tempo or tactics or material advantage, black as the Baranof Mountains.

He is still lying there, all the white squares of his mind blotted out, in his underpants and socks, when there’s a knock at the door. He sits up, facing the wall, his heart a drum banging in his temples, the sheets pulled down tight over him like he’s a kid hoping to spook somebody. He’s been lying on his stomach, maybe for a while. He remembers hearing, from the bottom of a tomb of black mud, in a lightless cave a mile beneath the surface of the earth, the distant vibrations of his Shoyfer, and sometime after that, the soft chirping of the phone on the oak-veneer table. But he was buried so deep under the mud that even if the telephones had been mere telephones in a dream, he would not have had the strength or the inclination to answer them. His pillow is drenched in a foul brew of drunk-sweat, panic, and saliva. He looks at his watch. It’s ten- twenty.

“Meyer?”

Landsman falls back onto the bed, upside down and tangled in the sheets. “I quit,” he says. “Bina, I resign.”

Bina doesn’t, say anything right away. Landsman hopes she has accepted his resignation — which is super fluous anyway — and returned to the modular, and the man from the Burial Society, and her transition from Jewish policewoman to an officer of the law of the great state of Alaska. Once he is sure she has gone, Landsman will arrange for the maid who changes the bedding and towels once a week to come in and shoot him. Then all she has to do to bury him is return the pull-down bed to its notch in the wall. His claustrophobia, his fear of the dark, will no longer trouble him.

A moment later, he hears the teeth of a key in a lock, and the door of room 505 swings open. Bina creeps in the way you creep into a sickroom, a cardiac ward, expecting a shock, reminders of mortality, grim truths about the body.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see.

She wades through pieces of LandsmaJl’s gray suit and a bath towel and stands at the foot of the bed. Her eyes take in the pink wallpaper patterned with garlands in burgundy flock, the green plush carpet with its random motif of burn spots and mystery stains, the broken glass, the empty bottle, the peeling and chipped veneer of the pressboard furniture. Watching her with his head at the foot of the pull-down bed, Landsman enjoys the look of horror on her face, mostly because if he doesn’t, then he will have to feel ashamed.

“How do you say ‘shit heap’ in Esperanto?” Bina says. She goes over to the veneer table and looks down at the last bedraggled curls of noodle pudding lying in the grease-streaked clamshell.

“At least you ate something.”

She turns the wing chair around to face the bed, then lowers her tote to the ground. She studies the seat of the chair. From her face, he can see that she’s wondering if she ought to go after the seat of the chair with something caustic or antibacterial out of her magic bag. At last she lowers herself into the wing chair, a little at a time. She’s dressed in a gray pantsuit, some kind of slick stuff with an iridescent under-sheen of black. Under the jacket she wears a silk shell in celadon green. Her face is bare except for two streaks of brick lip rouge on her mouth. At this hour of the day, her morning effort to control her tangled hair with pins and clips has not yet begun to fail. If she slept well last night, in the narrow bed in her old room, on the top floor of a two-family house on Japonski Island, with old Mr. Oysher and his prosthetic leg bumping around downstairs, it doesn’t show in the hollows and shadows of her face. Her eyebrows are all involved with each other again. Her rouged lips have narrowed to a brick-red seam two millimeters wide.

“So how’s your morning going, Inspector?”

“I don’t like waiting,” she says. “And I especially don’t like waiting for you.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Landsman says. “I quit.”

“It’s funny, but you repeating that particular bit of idiocy does surprisingly little to improve my mood.”

“I can’t work for you, Bina. Come on. That’s just insane. It’s exactly the kind of insanity I would expect from the department right now. If things are that bad, if that’s what it comes to, then forget it. I’m sick of all this play-out-the-string jazz. So, nu, I quit. What do you need me for? Slap black flags on all our cases. Open, closed. Who gives a damn? It’s just a bunch of dead yids anyway.”

“I went through the stack again,” she says. He notes that after all these years, she has retained her thrilling power to ignore him and his bouts of blackness, “I idn’t see anything in any of them that looked like it was going to tie in with the Verbovers.” She reaches to her briefcase and takes out a pack of Broadways, shakes one loose, and fits it to her lips. She says the next eight words in an offhand way that he immediately suspects. “Except for maybe that junkie you found downstairs.”

“You black-flagged that one,” Landsman replies with a policeman’s perfect disingenuousness. “You’re smoking again, too?”

“Tobacco, mercury.” She brushes back a coil of hair and lights her papiros, blows smoke. “Playing out the string.”

“Let me have one.”

She passes him the Broadway and he sits ups, winding himself in a careful toga of bed linens. She looks him over in his splendor as she lights a second papiros. She notes the gray hair around his nipples, the progress of flab at his waist, his bony knees.

“Sleeping in socks and underwear,” she says. “Always a bad sign with you.”

“I guess I have the cafard,” he says. “I guess it kind of hit me last night.”

“Last night?”

“Last year?”

She looks around for something to use as an ashtray.

“Did you and Berko go out to Verbov Island yesterday,” she says, “to poke around this Lasker thing?”

There’s really no point in lying to her. But Landsman has been disobeying orders far too long to start telling the truth about it now.

“You didn’t get a call?” he says.

“A call? From Verbov Island? On a Saturday morning? Who there’s going to call me on a Saturday morning?” Her eyes get shrewd, tight at the corners. “And what are they going to tell me when they do?”

“I’m sorry,” Landsman says. “Excuse me. I can’t hold it anymore.”

He gets up, stands right up in his underwear with a sheet hanging off him. He pads around the pull-down bed to the tiny bathroom with its sink and its steel mirror and its shower head. There’s no curtain, just a drain in the middle of the floor. He closes the door and urinates for a long time, with genuine pleasure. Setting the burning papiros on the edge of the toilet tank, he gives his face some brisk business with soap and a washcloth. There’s a wool bathrobe, white with red, green, yellow, and black stripes in an Indian pattern, on a hook behind the bathroom door. He ties it around himself. He puts the papiros back into his mouth and looks at himself in the scratched rectangle of polished steel that’s mounted above the sink. What he sees there affords him no surprises or unknown depths. He flushes the toilet and goes back into the room.

“Bina,” he says, “I did not know this man. He was put in my way. I was given the opportunity to know him, I suppose, but I declined it. If this man and I had gotten to know each other, possibly we would have become pals. Maybe not. He had his thing with heroin, and that was probably enough for him. It usually is. But whether I knew him or not, and whether we could have grown old together holding hands on a sofa down in the lobby, is neither here nor there. Somebody came into this hotel, my hotel, and shot that man in the back of the head while he was off in dreamland. And that bothers me. Set aside whatever general objections I might have worked up over the years to the underlying concept of homicide. Forget about right and wrong, law and order, police procedure, departmental policy, Reversion, Jews and Indians. This dump is my house. For the next two months, or however long it turns out to be, I live here. All these hard-lucks paying rent on a pull-down bed and a sheet of steel bolted to the bathroom wall, for better or worse, they’re my people now. I can’t honestly say I like them very much. Some of them are all right. Most of them are pretty bad. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let somebody walk in here and put a bullet in their heads.”

Bina has boiled up two cups of instant coffee. She hands one to Landsman. “Black and sweet,” she says. “Right?”

“Bina.”

“You’re on your own. The black flag stays put. You get caught, you get in a jam, you get your knees broken by Rudashevskys, I don’t know anything about it.” She goes over to her bag and takes out an accordion file thick with folders. She puts it on the veneer table. “The forensic is only a partial. Shpringer sort of left it hanging. Blood and hair. Latents. It isn’t much. The ballistics are still out.”

“Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn’t Lasker. This guy—”

She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

“I don’t know anything about it,” she says. She removes her hand. She takes a sip of instant coffee and makes a face. “Feh.”

She puts down the cup, picks up her bag, and goes to the door. She stops and looks back at Landsman, standing there in the bathrobe that she bought for him on his birthday when he turned thirty-five.

“You have some nerve,” she says. “I can’t believe you and Berko went out there.”

“We had to tell him his son was dead.”

“His son.”

“Mendel Shpilman. The rebbe’s only son.”

Bina opens her mouth, then closes it. Not astonished so much as engaged, sinking her terrier teeth into the information, gnawing on the bloody joint of it. Landsman can see that she likes the way it gives against the sharp grip of her jaw. But her eyes take on a weariness that Landsman recognizes. Bina will never lose her detective’s appetite for people’s stories, Landsman thinks, of puzzling her way back through them from the final burst of violence to the first mistake. But sometimes a shammes gets a little tired of that hunger.

“And what did the rebbe say?” She lets go of the doorknob with an air of genuine regret.

“He seemed a little bitter.”

“Did he seem surprised?”

“Not especially, but I don’t know what you can make of that. I take it the kid had been heading down the chute for a long time. Do I think Shpilman would have fed his own son a bullet? In theory, sure. That goes double for Baronshteyn.”

Her bag hits the floor like a body. She stands and works her shoulder in a small aching circle. He could offer to massage it for her, bur wisely, he refrains.

“I suppose I can expect a phone call,” she says. “From Baronshteyn. As soon as there are three stars in the sky.”

“Well, I wouldn’t listen too carefully when he tries to tell you how broken up he is that Mendel Shpilman is out of the picture. Everybody loves it when the prodigal returns, except for the guy that’s been sleeping in his pajamas.” Landsman takes a sip of the coffee, dreadfully bitter and sweet.

“The prodigal.”

“He was some kind of a miracle kid. At chess, at Torah, at languages. I heard a story today about him healing a woman’s cancer, not that I really believe that, but I guess there were a lot of stories going around about him inside the black-hat world. That he might be the Tzaddik Ha-Dor — you know what that is?”

“Sort of. Yes. Anyway, I know what the words mean,” Bina says. Her father, Guryeh Gelbfish, is a learned man in the traditional sense, and he squandered a certain portion of his learning on his only child, a girl. “The righteous man of this generation.”

“So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing up for work, one per generation, for the past couple of thousand years, right? Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.”

“He is despised and rejected of men,” Bina says, or rather, recites. “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” says Landsman. “Anyone. A bum. A scholar. A junkie. Even a shammes.”

“I guess it could be,” Bina says. She works it out in her mind, the road from wonder-working prodigy of the Verbovers to murdered junkie in a flophouse on Max Nordau Street. The story adds up in a way that appears to sadden her. “Anyway, I’m glad it isn’t me.”

“You don’t want to redeem the world anymore?”

“Did I used to want to redeem the world?”

“I think that you did, yes.”

She considers it, rubbing the side of her nose with a finger, trying to remember. “I guess I got over it,” she says, but Landsman doesn’t buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman. “It’s all talking chickens to me now.”

She should probably exit on that line, but she stands around for another fifteen seconds of unredeemed time, leaning against the door, watching Landsman fiddle with the frayed ends of his bathrobe sash.

“What are you going to tell Baronshteyn when he calls?” Landsman says.

“That you were totally out of line, and I’ll see that you come up for a board. I may have to lift your shield. I’ll try to fight it, but with this shomer from the Burial Society coming — Spade, a curse on him — I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver. And neither do you.”

“Okay, you warned me,” Landsman says. “I have been warned.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Now? Now I want to put a touch on the mother. Shpilman said nobody ever heard from Mendel or spoke to him. But for some reason, I’m not inclined to take his word for it.”

“Batsheva Shpilman. That is going to be a tough touch,” Bina says. “Especially for a man.”

“True,” Landsman says with a display of wistfulness.

“No,” Bina says. “No, Meyer. Forget it. You are on your own.”

“She’ll be at the funeral. All you need to do is—”

“All I need to do,” Bina says, “is stay out of the way of shomers, watch my ass, and get through the next two months without setting fire to it.”

“I’d be happy to watch your ass for you,” Landsman says, just for old times’ sake.

“Get dressed,” Bina says. “And do yourself a favor? Clean this shit up. Look at this dump. I can’t believe you’re living like this. Sweet God, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed, from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself.

“Only every time I see your face,” Landsman says.