The Yiddish Policemen's Union

22

Landsman is holding a baby boy. The baby cries, for no very grave reason. His wailing constricts Landsman’s heart in a pleasurable way. Landsman feels relieved to discover that he has a fat handsome baby who smells of waffles and soap. He squeezes the puffy feet, gauges the weight of the little grandfather in his arms, at once negligible and vast. He turns to Bina to tell her the good news: It was all a mistake. Here is their boy. But there is no Bina to tell, only the memory in Landsman’s nostrils of rain on her hair. And then he wakes up and realizes that the crying baby is Pinky Shemets, having his diaper changed or registering a protest over some thing or other. Landsman blinks, and the world intrudes in the form of a batik wall covering, and he is hollowed out, as if it’s the first time, by the loss of his son.

Landsman is lying on Berko and Ester-Malke’s bed, on his side, facing the wall with its dyed linen scene of Balinese gardens and savage birds. Someone has undressed him, leaving him in his underpants. He sits up. The skin at the back of his head prickles, and then a cord of pain goes taut. Landsman pats the site of his injury. A bandage meets his fingers, a crinkly oblong of gauze and tape. Surrounding it, a queer hairless patch of scalp. Memories fall on top of one another with a slapping sound like crime-scene photographs fresh from Dr. Shpringer’s death camera. A jocular emergency room tech, an X ray, an injection of morphine, a looming swab dipped in Betadine. Before that, the light from a streetlamp striping the white vinyl ceiling of an ambulance. And before that. Before the ride in the ambulance. Purple slush. Steam from the spilled contents of a human gut. A hornet at his ear. A red jet bursting from the forehead of Rafi Zilberblat. A cipher of holes in a blank expanse of plaster. Landsman backs away from the memory of what happened in the Big Macher parking lot, so quickly that he bumps right into the pang of losing Django Landsman in his dream.

“Woe is me,” Landsman says. He wipes his eyes. He would give up a gland, a minor organ, for a papiros.

The bedroom door opens, and Berko comes in, carrying an almost-full pack of Broadways.

“Have I ever told you that I love you?” Landsman says, knowing full well that he never has.

“You never have, thank God,” Berko says. “I got these from the neighbor, the Fried woman. I told her it was a police seizure.”

“I am insanely grateful.”

“I note the adverb.”

Berko notes also that Landsman has been crying; one eyebrow shoots up, hangs suspended, drifts down like a tablecloth settling onto a table.

“Baby okay?” Landsman says.

“Teeth.” Berko takes a coat hanger from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. On the hanger are Landsman’s clothes, neat and brushed. Berko feels around in the hip pocket of Landsman’s blazer and produces a matchbook. Then he comes and stands by the bed and holds out the papiroses and matches.

“I can’t honestly claim,” says Landsman, “that I know what I’m doing here.”

“It was Ester-Malke’s idea. Knowing how you feel about hospitals. They said you didn’t need to stay.”

“Have a seat.”

There is no chair in the room. Landsman slides over, and Berko sits down on the edge of the bed, causing alarm among the bedsprings.

“It’s really okay if I smoke?”

“Not really, no. Go stand by the window,” Landsman tips himself out of the bed. When he rolls up the bamboo shade on the window, he is surprised to see that it’s pouring rain. The smell of rain blows in through the two inches the window has been cranked open, explaining the fragrance of Bina’s hair in his dream. Landsman looks down to the parking lot of the apartment building and observes that the snow has melted and been washed away. The light feels all wrong, too.

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty … two,” Berko says without checking his watch.

“What day is it?”

“Sunday.”

Landsman cranks open the window all the way and hooks his left buttock over the sill. Rain falls on his aching head. He lights his papiros and takes a long drag and tries to decide if he’s disturbed by this information. “Long time since I did that,” he says. “Slept through a whole day.”

“You must have needed it,” Berko observes blandly. A sideways look in Landsman’s direction. “Ester-Malke’s the one who took your pants off, by the way. Just so you know.”

Landsman flicks ash out of the window. “I was shot.”

“Grazed. They said it’s more like a kind of burn. They didn’t need to stitch it.”

“There were three of them. Rafael Zilberblat. A pisher I made for his brother. And some chicken. The brother took my car, my wallet. My badge and my sholem. Left me there.”

“So it was reconstructed.”

“I wanted to call for help, but the little ratface Jew took my Shoyfer, too.”

The mention of Landsman’s phone makes Berko smile. “What?” Landsman says.

“So, your pisher’s tooling along. North on the Ickes, headed for Yakovy, Fairbanks, Irkutsk.”

“Dh-huh.”

“Your phone rings. Your pisher answers it.”

“And it’s you?”

“Bina.”

“I like it.”

“Two minutes on the phone with the Zilberblat, she has his whereabouts, his description, the name of his dog when he was eleven. A couple of latkes pick him up five minutes later outside Krestov. Your car is fine. Your wallet still had cash in it.”

Landsman affects to take an interest in the way that fire turns cured tobacco to flakes of ash. “And my badge and gun?” he says.

“Ah.”

“Ah.”

“Your badge and your gun are now in the hands of your commanding officer.”

“Does she intend to return them?”

Berko reaches over and smooths the indentation that Landsman left in the surface of his bed.

“It was strictly line of duty,” Landsman says, his tone sounding whiny even to his own ear. “I got a tip on Rafi Zilberblat.” He shrugs and runs his fingers along the bandage at the back of his head. “I just wanted to talk to the yid.”

“You should have called me first.”

“I didn’t want to bother you on a Saturday.”

It’s no excuse, and it comes out even lamer than Landsman hoped.

“Nu, I’m an idiot,” Landsman admits. “And a bad policeman, too.”

“Rule number one.”

“I know. I just felt like doing something right then. I didn’t think it was going to go the way that it went.”

“In any case,” Berko says. “The pisher. The little brother. Calls himself Willy Zilberblat. He confessed on his late brother’s behalf. Says indeed Rafi killed Viktor. With half a pair of scissors.”

“How about that.”

“All other things being equal, I would say Bina has reason to be happy with you on that one. You resolved it very effectively.”

“Half a pair of scissors.”

“How’s that for resourceful?”

“Frugal, even.”

“And the chicken you handled so roughly — that was you, too?”

“It was me.”

“Nicely done, Meyer.” There is no sarcasm in Berko’s tone or face. “You put a pill in Yacheved Flederman.”

“I did not.”

“You had yourself quite a day.”

“The nurse?”

“Our colleagues on the B Squad are delighted with you.”

“That killed that old geezer, what’s his name, Herman Pozner?”

“It was their only open case from last year. They thought she was in Mexico.”

“Fuck me,” Landsman says in American.

“Tabatchnik and Karpas already put in a good word for you with Bina, as I understand.”

Landsman grinds the papiros out against the side of the building, then flicks the butt into the rain. Tabatchnik and Karpas are really kicking the asses of Landsman and Shemets; it’s not even close.

“Even when I have good luck,” he says, “it’s bad luck.” He sighs. “Has there been anything out of Verbov Island?”

“Not a peep.”

“Nothing in the papers?”

“Not in the Licht or the Rut.” These are the leading black-hat dailies. “No rumors that I’ve heard. Nobody’s talking about it. Nothing. Total silence.”

Landsman gets up off the windowsill and goes to the phone on the table beside the bed. He dials a number he memorized years ago, asks a question, gets an answer, hangs up. “The Verbovers picked up Mendel Shpilman’s body late last night.”

The telephone in Landsman’s hand startles, chirping like a robot bird. He passes it to Berko.

“He seems fine,” Berko says after a moment. “Yes, I imagine that he will need some rest. All right.” He lowers the handset and stares at it, covering the mouth piece with the pad of his thumb. “Your ex-wife.”

“I hear you’re fine,” Bina tells Landsman when he gets on the phone.

“So they tell me,” Landsman says.

“Take some time,” she suggests. “Give yourself a break.”

The import takes a second to register, her tone is so gentle and unruff1ed.

“You would not,” he says. “Bina, please tell me this is not true.”

“Two dead people. By your gun. No witnesses but a kid who didn’t see what happened. It’s automatic. Sus pension with pay, pending a review by the board.”

“They were shooting guns at me. I had a reliable tip, I approached with my gun in my holster, I was polite as a mouse. And they started shooting at me.”

“And of course you’ll get the chance to tell your story. In the meantime, I’m going to keep your shield and your gun in this nice pink plastic Hello Kitty zipper bag that Willy Zilberblat was carrying them around in, okay? And you just try to get yourself all nice and better, all right?”

“This thing could take weeks to sort out,” Landsman says. “By the time I’m back on duty, there might not be a Sitka Central. There are no grounds for a suspension here, and you know it. Under the circumstances, you can keep me on active duty while the review goes forward, and still be running this case totally by the book.”

“There are books,” Bina says. “And there are books.”

“Don’t be cryptic,” he says, and then in American, “What the fuck?”

For a long couple of seconds, Bina doesn’t reply.

“I had a call from Chief Inspector Vayngartner. Last night. Not long,” she says, “after dark.”

“I see.”

“He tells me he just had a call. On his home phone, this is. And I guess the esteemed gentleman on the other end of the line was maybe a little upset about certain behaviors that Detective Meyer Landsman might have been exhibiting in this gentleman’s neighborhood on Friday afternoon. Creating public disturbances. Showing grave disrespect for the locals. Operating without authority or approval.”

“And Vayngartner replied?”

“He said you were a good detective, but you were known to have certain problems.”

And there, Landsman, is the line for your head stone.

“So what did you tell Vayngartner?” he says. “When he called to ruin your Saturday night.”

“My Saturday night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with. As it happens, I told Chief Inspector Vayngartner how you had just been shot.”

“And he said?”

“He said that in light of this fresh evidence, he might have to reconsider long-held atheistic beliefs. And that I should do whatever I could to make sure you were comfortable, and that for the next little time, you got plenty of rest. So that’s what I’m doing. You’re suspended, with full pay, until further notice.”

“Bina. Bina, please. You know how I am.”

“I do.”

“If I can’t work — You can’t—”

“I have to.” The temperature of her voice drops so quickly that ice crystals tinkle on the line. “You know how much of a choice I have in a situation like this.”

“You mean when gangsters pull strings to keep a murder investigation from going forward? That the kind of situation you mean?”

“I answer to the chief inspector,” Bina explains, as if she’s talking to a donkey. She knows perfectly well that there is nothing Landsman hates more than being treated like he’s stupid. “And you answer to me.”

“I wish you hadn’t called my phone,” Landsman says after a moment. “Better you should just have let me die.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Bina says. “Oh, and you’re welcome.”

“And what am I supposed to do now, besides be grateful for having my balls cut off?”

“That’s up to you, Detective. Maybe you could try thinking about the future for a change.”

“The future,” Landsman says. “You mean, what, like flying cars? Hotels on the moon?”

“I mean your future.”

“You want to go to the moon with me, Bina? I hear they still take Jews.”

“Goodbye, Meyer.”

She hangs up. Landsman cuts the connection on his end and stands there for a minute with Berko watching him from the bed. Landsman feels a last surge of anger and enthusiasm blow through him, like a clot of dust being cleared from a pipe. Then he’s empty.

He sits down on the bed. He gets in under the covers and turns his face back to the Balinese scene on the wall and closes his eyes.

“Uh, Meyer?” Berko says. But Landsman doesn’t answer. “You planning to stay in my bed a whole lot longer?”

Landsman sees no percentage in answering the question. After a minute Berko bounces himself off the mattress and onto his feet. Landsman can feel him studying the situation, appraising the depth of black water that separates the two partners, trying to make the right call.

“For what it’s worth,” Berko says finally, “Bina also came to see you in the ER.”

Landsman finds he has no memory of this visit at all. It’s gone, like the squeeze of a baby’s foot against his palm.

“You were doped up pretty good,” Berko says. “Talking many kinds of shit.”

“Did I embarrass myself with her?” Landsman manages to ask in a tiny voice.

“Yes,” Berko says, “I fear that you did.”

Then he withdraws from his own bedroom and leaves Landsman there to puzzle out the question, if he can muster the strength, of how much further he can sink.

Landsman can hear them talking about him in the hushed tones reserved for madmen, assholes, and unwanted guests. All through the rest of the afternoon, as they eat their dinner. Through the uproar of bath and ass-powdering and a bedtime story that requires Berko Shemets to honk like a goose. Landsman lies on his side with a burning seam at the back of his skull and drifts in and out of consciousness of the smell of rain at the window, the murmuring and clamor of the family in the other room. Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman’s soul. First he can’t lift his head off the mattress. Then he can’t seem to open his eyes. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Goldy careers into the room. His tread is heavy and lumbering, a baby monster’s. He doesn’t just climb into the bed, he roils the blankets the way a wire whisk roils a batter. Its like he’s fleeing something, panicked, but when Landsman speaks, asks him what’s wrong, the boy doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, and his heart beats steadily and low. Whatever he was running from, he found shelter from it in his parents’ bed. The kid is sound asleep. He smells like a piece of cut apple that’s starting to turn. He digs his toes into the small of Landsman’s back with care and without mercy. He grinds his teeth. The sound of it is like dull shears on a sheet of tin.

After an hour of this kind of treatment, around four-thirty, the baby starts to scream, way out on his balcony. Landsman can hear Ester-Malke trying to comfort him. Ordinarily, she would bring him into her bed, but that’s not an option tonight, and it takes her a long time to settle the little grandfather down. By the time Ester-Malke wanders into the bedroom with the baby in her arms, he’s snuffling and quieter and almost asleep. Ester-Malke dumps Pinky between his brother and Landsman and walks out.

Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limit of the bed. They chop at Landsman, stab him with their toes, grunt and mutter. They masticate the fiber of their dreams. Around dawn, something very bad happens in the baby’s diaper. It’s the worst night that Landsman has ever spent on a mattress, and that is saying a good deal.

The coffeemaker begins its expectorations around seven. A few thousand molecules of coffee vapor tumble into the bedroom and worry the hairs inside Landsman’s beak. He hears the shuffle of slippers against the carpet in the hall. He fights long and hard against the impulse to acknowledge that Ester-Malke is standing there, in the doorway of her bedroom, ruing him and every fit of charity toward him that’s ever seized her. He doesn’t care. Why should he care? At last Landsman realizes that in his struggle not to care about any thing lie the paradoxical seeds of defeat: So, all right, he cares. He opens one eye. Ester-Malke leans against the doorjamb, hugging herself, surveying the scene of destruction in a place that once was her bed. Whatever the name of the emotion inspired in a mother by the sight of filial cuteness, it competes in her expression with horror and dismay at the spectacle of Landsman in his underpants.

“I need you out of my bed,” she whispers. “Soon and in a way that’s lasting.”

“All right,” says Landsman. Taking stock of his wounds, his aches, the prevailing direction of his moods, he sits up. For all the torment of the night, he feels oddly settled. More present, somehow, in his limbs and skin and senses. Somehow, maybe, a little more real. He has not shared a bed with another human being in over two years. He wonders if that is a practice he ought not to have foregone. He takes his clothes from the door and puts them on. Carrying his socks and belt, he follows Ester-Malke back down the hall.

“Though the couch has its points,” Ester-Malke continues. “For example, it features no babies or four-year-olds.”

“You have a serious toenail problem among your youth,” Landsman says. “Also something, I think it might be a sea otter, died and is rotting in the little one’s diaper.”

In the kitchen she pours them each a cup of coffee.

Then she goes to the door and retrieves the Tog from the mat that says GET LOST. Landsman sits on his stool at the counter and stares into the murk of the living room where the bulk of his partner rears up from the floor like an island. The couch is a wreck of blankets.

Landsman is about to tell Ester-Malke I don’t deserve friends like you when she comes back into the kitchen, reading the paper, and says, “No wonder you needed so much sleep.” She bumps into the doorway. Something good or terrible or unbelievable is described on the front page.

Landsman reaches for his reading glasses in the pocket of his jacket. They are cracked at the nosepiece, each lens severed from its mate. It’s truly a pair of glasses, two monocles on their stems. Ester-Malke gets the electrician’s tape, yellow as a hazard warning, from the drawer under the phone. She binds up the glasses and passes them back to Landsman. The gob of tape is as thick as a filbert. It draws the gaze even of the wearer, leaving him cross-eyed.

“I’ll bet that looks really good,” he says, taking up the newspaper.

Two big stories lead off the news in this morning’s Tog. One is an account of an apparent shoot-out, leaving two dead, in the deserted parking lot of a Big Macher outlet store. The principals were a lone homicide detective, Meyer Landsman, forty-two, and two suspects long sought by Sitka law enforcement in connection with a pair of apparently unrelated murders. The other story is headlined:

The accompanying text whips up a tissue of miracles, evasions, and outright lies about the life and death of Menachem-Mendel Shpilman, late Thursday night, at the Hotel Zamenhof on Max Nordau Street. According to the medical examiner’s office — the examining doctor himself having moved to Canada — the preliminary finding on cause of death is something known in fairy tales as “drug-related misadventure.” “Though little known to the world outside,” the Tog’s man writes,

in the closed world of the pious, Mr. Shpilman was viewed, for the better part of his early life, as a prodigy, a wonder, and a holy teacher, indeed, as possibly the long promised Redeemer. The old Shpilman home on S. Ansky Street in the Harkavy was often thronged with visitors and supplicants during Mr. Shpilman’s childhood, with the devout and the curious traveling from as far as Buenos Aires and Beirut to meet the talented boy who was born on the fateful ninth day of the month of Av. Many hoped and even arranged to be present on one of a number of occasions when rumors flew that he was about to “declare his kingdom.” But Mr. Shpilman never made any declarations. Twenty-three years ago, on the day projected for his marriage to a daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe, he all but disappeared, and during the long ignominy of Mr. Shpilman’s recent life, the early promise had largely been forgotten.

The chaff from the ME’s office is the only item in the story resembling an explanation of the death. Hotel management and the Central Division are said to have declined comment. At the end of the article, Landsman learns that there will be no synagogue service, just the burial itself, at the old Montefiore cemetery, to be presided over by the father of the deceased.

“Berko said he disowned him,” Ester-Malke says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder. “He said the old man wanted nothing to do with the kid. I guess he changed his mind.”

Reading the article, Landsman suffers a cramp of envy toward Mendel Shpilman, tempered by pity. Landsman struggled for many years under the weight of fatherly expectations, but he has no idea how it might feel to fulfill or exceed them. Isidor Landsman, he knows, would have loved to father a son as gifted as Mendel. Landsman can’t help thinking that if he had been able to play chess like Mendel Shpilman, maybe his father would have felt he had something to live for, a small messiah to redeem him. Landsman thinks of the letter that he sent his father, hoping to gain his freedom from the burden of that life and those expectations. He considers the years he spent believing that he caused Isidor Landsman a fatal grief. How much guilt did Mendel Shpilman feel? Had he believed what was said of him, in his gift or wild calling? In the attempt to free himself from that burden, did Mendel feel that he must turn his back not only on his father but on all the Jews in the world?

“I don’t think Rabbi Shpilman ever changes his mind,” Landsman says. “I think somebody would have to change it for him.”

“Who would that be?”

“If I had to guess? I’m thinking that maybe it was the mother.”

“Good for her. Trust a mother not to let them toss her son out like an empty bottle.”

“Trust a mother,” Landsman says. He studies the photograph in the Tog of Mendel Shpilman at fifteen, beard patchy, sidelocks flying, coolly presiding over a conference of young Talmudists who seethed and sulked around him. “The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, in Better Days,” reads the caption.

“What are you thinking about, Meyer?” Ester Malke says, striking a note of doubt.

“The future,” Landsman says.