The Yiddish Policemen's Union

23

A mob of black-hat Jews chugs its way, a freight train of grief, from the gates of the cemetery — the house of life, they call it — up a hillside toward a hole cut into the mud. A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of school girls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid — the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground.

Around the grave site, black clumps of fir trees sway like grieving Chasids. Beyond the cemetery walls, hats and black umbrellas shelter thousands of the unworthiest of the unworthy against the rain. Deep structures of obligation and credit have determined which are permitted to enter the gates of the house of life and which must stand outside kibitzing, with rain soaking into their hose. These deep structures, in turn, have drawn the attention of detectives from Burglary, Contraband, and Fraud. Landsman picks out Skolsky, Burwitz, Feld, and Globus, always with his shirttail hanging out, perched on the roof of a gray Ford Victoria. It’s not every day that the entire Verbover hierarchy comes out and stands around on a hillside, posed in relation to one another like circles on a prosecutor’s flow chart. On the roof of a Wal-Mart a quarter mile away, three Americans in blue windbreakers point their telephoto lenses and the trembling pistil of a condenser microphone. A stout blue cord of latkes and motorcycle units has been stitched through the crowd to keep it from coming undone. The press is here, too, cameramen and reporters from Channel I, from the local papers, crews from the NBC affiliate over in Juneau and a cable news channel. Dennis Brennan, without the sense or maybe enough felt in the world to cover that big head of his against the rain. Then you have the half-believing, and the half-observant, and the modern Orthodox, and the merely credulous, and the skeptical, and the curious, and a healthy delegation from the Einstein Chess Club.

Landsman can see them all from the vantage of his powerlessness and his exile, reunited witla his Super Sport on a barren hilltop across Mizmor Boulevard from the house of life. He’s parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavors of irony. The hoped for houses were never built. Wooden stakes tied with orange flags and nylon cord map out a miniature Zion in the mud around the cul-de-sac, a ghostly eruv of failure. Landsman is flying solo, sober as a carp in a bathtub, clutching a pair of binoculars in his clammy grip. The need for a drink is like a missing tooth. He can’t keep his mind off it, and yet there’s something pleasurable in probing the gap. Or maybe the ache of something missing is just the hole left behind when Bina lifted his badge.

Landsman waits out the funeral in his car, studying it through the good Zeiss lenses and running down the car battery with a CBC radio documentary about the blues singer Robert Johnson, whose singing voice sounds as broken and reedy as a Jew saying kaddish in the rain. Landsman has a carton of Broadways, and he burns them wildly, trying to drive from the Super Sport’s interior a lingering odor of Willy Zilberblat. It’s a foul smell, like a pot of water in which two days ago somebody boiled noodles. Berko tried to persuade Landsman that he was imagining this residue of the little Zilberblat’s brief tenure inside Landsman’s life. But Landsman is happy for the excuse to fumigate with cigarettes, which don’t kill the urge for a drink but somehow dull its bite.

Berko also tried to persuade Landsman to wait a day or two on the matter of Mendel Shpilman’s death by misadventure. As they rode down in the elevator from the apartment, he dared Landsman to look him straight in the eye and tell him that Landsman’s plan for this damp Monday afternoon did not consist of showing up, shorn of his badge and his gun, to hurl impertinent questions at the grieving queen of gangsters as she departed from the house of life and the remains of her only son.

“You can’t get near her,” Berko insisted as he followed Landsman out of the elevator and across the lobby to the door of the Dnyeper. Berko was in his elephantine pajamas. Pieces of a suit were spilling out of his arms. He had his shoes hooked over two fingers, his belt around his neck. From the breast pocket of his mustard pajamas with their white pinstripe the points of two slices of toast protruded like a pocket square. “And even if you can, you still can’t.”

He was making a nice policeman-like distinction between the things that balls could accomplish and those that the breakers of balls would never permit.

“They will stiff-arm you,” Berko said. “They will shake out your pants for the small change. They will bring you up on charges.”

Landsman could not refute the point. Batsheva Shpilman rarely set foot beyond the boundary of her deep and tiny world. But when she did, it was likely to be in a heavy thicket of iron and lawyers. “No badge, no backing, no warrant, no investigation, looking half crazy with egg on your suit, you bother the lady, you could get shot, with only minor aftereffects for the shooters.”

Berko trailed Landsman out of the building, dancing into his socks and shoes, down to the bus stop at the corner.

“You’re saying don’t do it, Berko,” Landsman said, “or just don’t do it without you? You think I’ll let you piss away whatever shot you and Ester-Malke have to get through to the other end of Reversion? You’re crazy. I’ve done you a lot of disservices and caused you a lot of trouble over the years, but I hope I’m not that much of an ass. And if you’re saying you don’t think I should do it period, well. . . ”

Landsman stopped marching. The full weight of good sense behind this second argument struck him.

“I don’t know what I’m saying, Meyer. I’m just saying, fuck.” Berko got this look sometimes, more when he was a boy, a shine of sincerity on the whites of his eyes. Landsman had to look away. He turned his face to the wind blowing in off the Sound. “I’m saying at least don’t take the bus, all right? Let me drive you down to the impound yard, at least.”

There was a distant rumble, a screech of air brakes. The 61B Harkavy appeared farther down the promenade, kicking up a shimmering curtain of rain.

“At least this,” Berko said. He hoisted his suit jacket by the collar. He held it out as if he wanted Landsman to put it on. “In the pocket. Take it.”

Landsman weighs the sholem in his hand now — a cute little Beretta .22 with a plastic grip — poisons himself on nicotine, tries to understand the lamentations of this black Delta yid, Mr. Johnson. After a period that he doesn’t bother to note or measure, call it an hour, the long dark train, discharged of its goods, starts back down the hill toward the gates. At the head of it, puffing slowly, head erect, broad-brimmed hat running rain, comes the locomotive bulk of the tenth Verbover rebbe. Behind him come the string of daughters, seven or twelve of them, and their husbands and children, and then Landsman sits up and dials in a crisp Zeiss image of Batsheva Shpilman. He’s been expecting some kind of witchy amalgam of Mrs. Macbeth and American first lady: Marilyn Monroe Kennedy in her pink pillbox hat, with mesmeric spirals for eyes. But as Batsheva Shpilman comes into clear view, right before she falls below the line of mourners jamming the cemetery gates, Landsman remarks a small, bony frame, an old-lady halt in her tread. Her face is concealed behind a black veil. Her clothes are unremarkable, a vehicle for blackness.

As the Shpilmans approach the gates, the line of uniformed nozzes gathers into a tight knot, driving the crowd back. Landsman slips the gun into his hip pocket, switches off the radio, and gets out of the car. The rain has slowed to a steady fine mesh. He begins to lope down the hill toward Mizmor Boulevard. Over the last hour the crowd has swollen, bunching up around the cemetery gates. Jiggling, shifting, prone to sudden mass lurches, animated by the Brownian motion of collective woe. The uniformed latkes are working hard, trying to clear a path between the family and the big black four-by-fours of the funeral cortege.

Landsman scrapes and stumbles, shredding weeds, gathering clots of mud on his shoes. As he exerts him self on the slippery hillside, his injuries start to bother him. He wonders if the doctors missed a broken rib. At one point he loses his footing and slides, his heels cutting ten-foot gouges in the mud, and ends by falling on his ass. He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you’re a pessimist, all omens are bad.

The truth is that he has no plan at all, not even the graceless and rudimentary one that Berko envisioned. Landsman has been a noz for eighteen years, a detective for thirteen, spent the last seven working homicide, a top man, a prince of policemen. He has never been nobody before, a crazy little Jew with a question and a gun. He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.

Mizmor Boulevard is a parking lot, mourners and spectators in a haze of diesel fumes. Landsman threads a course among the bumpers and fenders and then plunges into the mass of people jammed onto the park way strip. Boys and young men, hoping for a better view, have climbed up into the branches of a row of luckless European larches that never quite took root along the median. The yids around Landsman get out of his way, and when they don’t get out of his way, Landsman gives them a hint with the bones of his shoulder.

They smell of lamentation, these yids, long underwear, tobacco smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They’re praying like they’re going. to faint, fainting like it’s a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren’t mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can’t be. It’s something else they feel has gone out of the world, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. This half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that’s too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan. Landsman puts his shoulder to them and mutters, “Pardon me.”

He makes for one great beast of a limousine, a custom twenty-foot stretch four-by-four. The journey from the top of the hill, down the hillside, across the boulevard, through the umbrellas and beards and Jewish ululations to the side of the big-ass limousine has a kind of jumpy, handheld quality in his imagination as he lives it. Amateur footage of an assassination attempt in progress. But Landsman hasn’t come to shoot anybody. He just wants to talk to the lady, get her attention, catch her eye. He just wants to ask her one question. Which question, nu, that he doesn’t know.

In the end somebody beats him to it: in fact, a dozen men. The reporters have tunneled their way through the black hats like Landsman, digging with their scapulae and elbows. When the diminutive woman in the black veil totters through the gates on the arm of her son-in-law, they haul out the questions they have brought. They unpocket them like stones and throw them all at once. They vandalize the woman with questions. She pays no attention; her head never turns, the veil never trembles or parts. Baronshteyn guides the dead man’s mother to the hulk of the limo. The chauffeur climbs down from the stretch four-by-four’s passenger seat. He’s a jockey-shaped Filipino with a scar on his chin like a second smile. He runs to open the door for his employer. Landsman is still a couple of hundred feet away. He isn’t going to make it in time to ask her a question, or to do anything at all.

A growl, a feral rolling in the throat, low and half human, a rumble of warning or dark admonition: one of the black hats standing by the cars has taken a reporter’s question amiss. Or maybe he’s taken them all amiss, along with the style in which they were tendered. Landsman sees the angry black hat, wide, blond, tieless, his shirttails untucked , and recognizes him as Dovid Sussman, the yid whom Berko Shemets teased out on Verbov Island. A bruiser with a bulge at the hinge of his jaw and another under his left arm. Sussman throws an arm around the neck of Dennis Brennan, poor thing, gets him in a choke hold. Lecturing Brennan with his teeth at his ear, Sussman drags the reporter back, out of the path of the family as they come through the gates.

That’s when one of the latkes steps in to intervene, which, after all, is what he’s there for. But because he’s scared — the kid looks scared — maybe he’s too free with his truncheon when it comes to the bones of Dovid Sussman’s head. There’s a sick snap, and then Sussman turns to liquid and pours himself onto the ground at the latke’s feet.

For an instant the crowd, the afternoon, the whole wide world of Jews breathes in and forgets to breathe out again. After that it’s madness, a Jewish riot, at once violent and verbal, fat with intemperate accusations and implacable curses. Skin diseases are called down, damnations and hemorrhages. Yelling, surging black hats, sticks and fists, shouting and screaming, beards fluttering like crusader flags, swearing, the smell of churning mud, of blood and ironed trousers. Two men carry a banner stretched between poles, bidding fare well to their lost prince Menachem; somebody grabs one pole and somebody else grabs another. The banner tears loose and gets sucked into the gears of the crowd. The poles are put to work on the jaws and craniums of policemen. The word FAREWELL painstakingly painted on the banner gets torn free and spat out. It sails into the air over the heads of the mourners and the policemen, the gangsters and the pious, the living and the dead.

Landsman loses track of the rebbe, but he sees a bunch of Rudashevskys pile the mother, Batsheva, into the back of the four-by-four. The chauffeur grabs the driver’s-side door and kicks up into his seat like a gymnast. The Rudashevskys pound on the side of the car, saying, “go go go.” Landsman, still groping in his pockets for the shining coin of one good question, watches, and watching, he notices a suite of small things. The Filipino chauffeur is rattled. He doesn’t fasten his shoulder strap. He doesn’t give a good solid cattle-clearing blast on his horn. And the stem of the lock at the top of the door panel never drops. The chauffeur simply throws the long black four-by-four into gear and rolls forward, gaining too much speed for such a crowded area.

Landsman steps back as the four-by-four shoulders its way toward him. A strand of mourners detaches itself from the greater black braid and drags along behind Batsheva Shpilman’s four-by-four. A slipstream of sorrow. For an instant the mourners hanging on to the car serve to block the Rudashevskys’ view of the four-by-four, and of anyone fool enough to try to climb inside it. Landsman nods, catching the rhythm of the crowd’s madness and his own. He watches for his moment and wiggles his fingers. When the car rumbles by, he yanks open the rear door.

Instantly, the power of the engine is translated into a sense of panic in his legs. It’s like a proof of the physics of his foolishness, the inescapable momentum of his own bad luck. As he gets dragged along beside the car for fifteen feet or so, he finds time to wonder if this was how the end came for his sister, a quick demonstration of gravity and mass. His wrists strain their cables. Then he gets a knee up into the limousine’s interior and tumbles in.