The Yiddish Policemen's Union

27

“ ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,’ ” says the pie man.

He peers at Landsman across the steel counter of his shop, crossing his arms to show that he is wise to the stratagems of Jews. He narrows his eyes as if he’s trying to spot a typographical error on the face of a counterfeit Rolex. Landsman’s American is just good enough to make him sound suspect.

“That’s right,” Landsman says. He wishes there weren’t a corner missing from his membership card in the Sitka chapter of the Hands of Esau, the international fraternal organization of Jewish police men. It has a six-point shield in one corner. Its text is printed in Yiddish. It carries no authority or weight, not even with Landsman, a member in good standing for twenty years. “We’re all over the world.”

“That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” the pie man says with a show of asperity. “But, mister, I only serve pie.”

“Are you eating pie or aren’t you?” says the pie man’s wife. Like her husband, she is ample and pale. Her hair is the colorless color of a sheet of foil under a wan light. The daughter is in the back among the berries and the crusts. To the bush pilots, hunters, rescue crews, and other regulars who frequent the airfield at Yakovy, it’s considered a piece of luck to spot the pie man’s daughter. Landsman hasn’t seen her for years. “If you don’t want any pie, there is no earthly reason to be wasting your time at this window. People behind you have planes to catch.”

She takes the card from her husband and hands it back to Landsman. He does not blame her for her rudeness. The Yakovy airfield is a key station on the northern route of the world’s shysters, charlatans, grift doctors, and real estate hacks. Poachers, smugglers, wayward Russians. Drug mules, Native criminals, Yankee hard cases. The Yakovy jurisdiction has never quite been defined. Jews, Indians, and Klondikes all make their claims. Her pie has greater moral character than half her clientele. The pie lady has no reason to trust or to coddle Landsman, with his gimcrack card and a shaved patch on the back of his head. Still, her rudeness gives him a sharp pang of regret for the loss of his badge. If Landsman had a badge, he would say, The people behind me can go fuck themselve, lady, and you can give yourself a nice thick boysenberry high colonic. Instead, he makes a show of considering the individuals gathered in a moderately long line behind him. Fisherman, kayakers, small businessmen, some corporate types.

Each of them comes up with a noise or bit of eyebrow semaphore to show that he is eager for pie and losing patience with Landsman and his dog-eared credentials.

“I will have a piece of the apple crumble,” Landsman says. “Of which I have fond memories.”

“The crumble is my favorite,” says the wife, softening a little. She sends her husband to the back counter with a nod. The crumble is there on a gleaming pedestal, a fresh one, uncut. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“A la mode?”

“No, thanks.” Landsman slides the photograph of Mendel Shpilman across the counter. “What about you? Ever seen him?”

The woman eyes the photo with each hand tucked carefully into the opposite armpit. Landsman gauges that she recognizes Shpilman right away. Then she turns to take from her husband a paper plate laden with a slice of crumble. She sets it on a tray with a small Styrofoam cup of coffee and a plastic fork rolled up in a paper napkin.

“Two-fifty,” she says. “Go sit by the bear.”

The bear was shot by yids of the sixties. Doctors, from the look of them, in ski caps and Pendletons, They brim with the odd, bespectacled manliness of that golden period in the history of the District of Sitka. A card, typed in Yiddish and American, is pinned to the wall underneath the photograph of the fatal five men. It says that the bear, shot near Lisianski, was a 3.7-meter, four-hundred-kilo brown. Only its skeleton is preserved inside the glass case beside which Landsman sits down with his slice of apple crumble and his cup of coffee. He has sat here many times in the past, contemplating this terrible ivory xylophone over a piece of pie. Most recently, he sat here with his sister, maybe a year before she died. He was working the Gorsetmacher case. She had just dropped off a party of fishermen coming in from the bush.

Landsman thinks about Naomi. It is a luxury, like a slice of pie. It is as dangerous and welcome as a drink. He invents dialogue for Naomi, the words with which she might mock and ridicule him if she were here. For his sanguinary roll in the snow with those Zilberblat idiots. For drinking ginger ale with a pious old lady in the back of that hypertrophied four-by-four. For thinking he could outlast his drinking problem and stay hyped long enough to find the killer of Mendel Shpilman. For the loss of his badge. For lacking the necessary outrage about Reversion, for having no stance toward it. Naomi claimed that she hated Jews for their meek submission to fate, for the trust they put in God or the gentiles. But then Naomi had a stance toward everything. She policed and maintained her stances; buffed and curated them. She would also, Landsman thinks, have criticized his choice not to take his pie a la mode.

“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” says the pie man’s daughter, sitting down on the bench beside Landsman. She has taken off her apron and washed her hands. Above the elbows, her freckled arms are dusted with flour. There is flour in her blond eyebrows. She wears her hair tied back in a black elastic. She is a hauntingly plain woman with watery blue eyes, about Landsman’s age. She gives off a smell of butter, tobacco, and a sour tang of dough that he finds weirdly erotic. She lights a menthol cigarette and sends a jet of smoke toward him. “That’s a new one.”

She tucks the cigarette into her mouth and holds out her hand to take the membership card. She pretends not to struggle with its text. “I can read Yiddish, you know,” she says finally. “It’s not like it’s fucking Aztec or whatever.”

“I really am a policeman,” Landsman says. “I’m just making a private inquiry today. That is why I don’t use the badge.”

“Show me the picture,” she says. Landsman hands her the mug shot of Mendel Shpilman. She nods, and the carapace of her weariness splits along a momentary seam.

“Miss, you knew him?”

She hands back the mug shot. Shakes her head, makes a dismissive frown. “What happened to him?” she says.

“He was murdered,” Landsman says. “Shot in the head.”

“That’s harsh,” she says. “Oh, Jesus.”

Landsman takes a fresh package of tissues from the pocket of his overcoat and passes them to her. She blows her nose and then balls up the tissue in her fist.

“How did you know him?” Landsman says.

“I gave him a ride,” she says. “One time. That’s it.”

“To where?”

“A motel down on Route Three. I liked him. He was funny. He was sweet. Kind of homely. Kind of a mess. He told me he had a, you know, a problem. With drugs. But that he was trying to get better. He seemed — He just had this way about him.”

“Comforting? ”

“Mm. No. He was just, uh, really, I don’t know. Really there. For like an hour, I thought I was in love with him.”

“But you weren’t really?”

“I guess I never really got the chance to find out.”

“Did you have sex with him?”

“You’re a cop, all right,” she says. “A ‘noz,’ isn’t that it? ”

“That’s right.”

“No, I didn’t have sex with him. I wanted to. I invited myself into the motel room with him. I guess I kind of, like, you know. Threw myself at him. That’s no reflection on him. Like I said, he was super nice and all, but he was a mess. His teeth. Anyway, I guess he picked up on it.”

“Picked up on what?”

“That I — I have a little bit of a problem, too. When I get around men. That’s why I don’t really basically get around them a lot. Don’t get any ideas, I don’t like you at all.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I did therapy, twelve-step. I got born again. The only thing that really helped was baking pies.”

“No wonder they’re so good.”

“Ha.”

“He didn’t take you up on your offer.”

“He wouldn’t. He was very sweet. He buttoned up my shirt. I felt like a little girl. Then he gave me something. Something he said that I could keep.”

“What was that?”

She lowers her gaze, and blood colors her face so deeply, Landsman can almost hear the hum of it. Her next words come out thick and whispery.

“His blessing,” she says. Then, more clearly, “He said he was giving me his blessing.”

“I’m fairly certain he was gay,” Landsman says. “By the way.”

“I know,” she says. “He told me. He didn’t use that word. He didn’t really use any word, or if he did, I don’t remember it. I think what he said, it was that he didn’t care to bother with it anymore. He said heroin was simpler and more reliable. Heroin and checkers.”

“Chess. He played chess.”

“Whatever. I still got his blessing, right?”

She seems to need the answer to this question to be yes.

“Yes,” Landsman says.

“Funny little Jew. The freaky thing is, I don’t know. It kind of like, worked.”

“What worked?”

“The blessing. I mean, I have a boyfriend now. A real one. We’re totally dating, it’s very strange.”

“I’m happy for you both,” Landsman says, feeling a stab of envy of her, of all these people who were lucky enough to have Mendel Shpilman lay a blessing on them. He thinks of all the times he must have walked right past Mendel, all the chances that he missed. “So, you’re saying, when you gave him the ride to the motel, it was just a, well, a pickup. It was just because you you were planning to, you know.”

“Jump his bones? No.” She steps on the cigarette with the toe of her sheepskin boot. “It was a favor. For a friend of mine. Driving him, I mean. She knew the guy. Frank, she called him. She flew him in here from somewhere. She was a pilot. She asked me to give him a lift, help him find a place to stay. Someplace low to the ground, she said. So, whatever, I said I would.”

“Naomi,” Landsman says. “That was your friend?”

“Uh-huh. You knew her?”

“I know how much she liked pie,” Landsman says.

“This Frank, he was a client of hers?”

“I guess so. I don’t really know. I didn’t ask. But they flew in here together. He must have hired her. You could probably find that out with that fancy card you’re carrying.”

Landsman feels a numbness enter his limbs, a welcome numbness, a sense of doom that is indistinguishable from peacefulness, like the bite of a predator snake that prefers to swallow its victims alive and tranquil. The pie man’s daughter inclines her head toward the untouched slice of apple crumble on the paper plate, taking up the empty space between them on the bench.

“You are so hurting my feelings,” she says.