The Yiddish Policemen's Union

26

“Yes,” she says, “I heard from him. From time to time. I don’t want this to sound cynical, Detective, but it was usually when he was in trouble or needed money. Circumstances that, in Mendel’s case, may his name be for a blessing, tended to coincide.”

“When was the last time?”

“Earlier this year. Last spring. Yes, I remember it was the day before Erev Pesach.”

“So, April. Around—”

The lady Rudashevsky takes out a fancy Shoyfer Mazik, starts pressing buttons, and comes up with the date of the day preceding the first evening of Passover. Landsman remarks, a little startled, that it was also the last full day of his sister’s life,

“Where was he calling from?”

“Maybe a hospital. I don’t know. I could hear a public address, a loudspeaker, in the background. Mendel said he was going to disappear. That he had to disappear for a while, that he wouldn’t be able to call. He asked me to send money to a box down in Povorotny that he sometimes used.”

“Did he sound afraid?”

The veil trembles like a theater curtain, secret motions taking place on its other side. She nods slowly.

“Did he say why he needed to disappear? Did he say somebody was after him?”

“I don’t think so. No. Just that he needed money and he was going to disappear.”

“And that’s it.”

“As far as I — No. Yes. I asked him if he was eating. He sometimes — They forget to eat.”

“I know it.”

“And he told me, ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘I just ate a whole big piece of cherry pie.’ ”

“Pie,” Landsman says. “Cherry pie.”

“Does that mean something to you?”

“You never know,” he says, but he can feel his ribcage ringing under the mallet of his heart. “Mrs. Shpilman, you said you heard a loudspeaker. Do you think he might have been calling from an airport?”

“Now that you mention it, yes.”

The car slows and stops. Landsman sits forward and looks out through the smoked glass. They’re in front of the Hotel Zamenhof. Mrs. Shpilman drops her window with a button, and the gray afternoon blows into the car. She raises the veil and peers up at the face of the hotel. She stares at it for a long time. A pair of seedy men, alcoholics, one of whom Landsman once prevented from accidentally urinating into the other’s trouser cuff, stagger out of the hotel’s lobby slung against each other, a human lean-to thrown up against the rain. They put on a vaudeville with a sheet of newspaper and the wind, then lurch off into the night, a couple of tattered moths, The queen of Verbov Island lowers the veil again and puts her window up. Landsman can feel the reproachful questions burning through the black tissue. How can he stand to live in such a dump? Why didn’t he do a better job of protect ing her son?

“Who told you that I lived here?” he thinks to ask her. “Your son-in-law?”

“No, he didn’t mention it. I heard about it from the other Detective Landsman. The one you used to be married to,”

“She told you about me?”

“She telephoned today. Once, many years ago, we had some trouble with a man who was hurting women. A very bad man, a sick man. This was back in the Harkavy, on S. Ansky Street. The women who had been hurt didn’t want to talk to the police. Your ex-wife was very helpful to me then, and I’m still in her debt. She is a good woman. A good police woman.”

“No doubt about it.”

“She suggested to me that if you happened to come around, I wouldn’t be entirely mistaken in putting some confidence in you.”

“That was nice of her,” Landsman says with perfect sincerity.

“She spoke more highly of you than I would have imagined.”

“Like you said, ma’am. She’s a good woman.”

“But you left her anyway.”

“Not because she was a good woman.”

“Because you were a bad man?”

“I think I was,” Landsman says. “She was too polite to say so.”

“It has been many years,” Mrs. Shpilman says.

“But as I recall, politeness was not a great strength of that Jewess.” She pushes the button that unlocks the door. Landsman opens the door and climbs down from the back of the limousine. “At any rate, I’m glad that I hadn’t seen this dreadful hotel before now, or I never would have let you anywhere near me.”

“It’s not much,” Landsman says, rain pattering the brim of his hat. “But it’s home.”

“No, it isn’t,” Batsheva Shpilman says. “But I’m sure it makes it easier for you to think so.”