The Yiddish Policemen's Union

31

Landsman wakes from a dream of feeding his right ear to the propeller blades of a Cessna 206. He stirs under a clammy blanket, electric but unplugged, in a room not much larger than the cot he’s stretched across. He touches a cautious finger to the side of his head. Where Fligler originally sapped him, the flesh is swollen and moist. Landsman’s left shoulder is killing him, too.

In a narrow window opposite the cot, metal-slat blinds leak the disappointed gray of a November afternoon in southeastern Alaska. It’s not light oozing through so much as a residue of light, a day haunted by the memory of the sun.

Landsman tries to sit up and discovers that his shoulder hurts so much because somebody has been kind enough to handcuff his left wrist to a steel leg of the cot frame. With his arm jerked up over his head, Landsman practiced some kind of brutal chiropractic on his shoulder in the thrashing and tossing of sleep. The same kind soul who chained him was thoughtful enough to remove his trousers, shirt, and jacket, reduc ing him once again to a man in his underpants.

He sits up on his haunches at the head of the cot. Then he eases himself backward off the mattress so that he can squat with his left arm hanging at a more natural angle, his shackled hand resting against the floor. The floor is yellow linoleum, the color of the inside of a used cigarette filter, and as cold as an ME’s stethoscope. It features an extensive collection of dust lemmings and dust wigs and a winged smear of black fly grease. The walls are cinder block painted a thick, glossy shade of dentifrice blue. On the wall beside Landsman’s head, a familiar hand has penned a tiny message for Landsman in the mortar line between two cinder blocks: THIS DETAINMENT CELL COURTESY OF THE GENEROSITY OF NEAL AND RISA NUDELMAN SHORT HILLS NEW JERSEY. He wants to laugh, but the sight of his sister’s droll alphabet in this place raises the hair on the back of his neck.

Apart from the bed, the only other furnishing, in the corner by the door, is a metal wastebasket. The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.

Landsman crouches by the cot for another minute or so, collecting himself like a beggar chasing scattered dimes along the sidewalk. Then he drags the cot to the door and sits down on it. In a way that is both methodical and wild, he begins to kick at the door with his bare heels. It’s a hollow steel door, and it makes a thunderous sound when kicked that’s pleasant for a moment, but then the pleasure palls. Next Landsman tries loud and repeated cries of “Help me, I cut myself and I’m bleeding!” He yells until he is hoarse and kicks until his feet throb. At last he gets tired of kicking and yelling. He needs to urinate. Badly. He looks at the trash can and then at the door. It might be the traces of the “drug in his system, or the hatred he feels for that tiny room in which his sister passed her last night on earth, and for the men who chained him still in underwear to it. Maybe all his enraged yelling has engendered an actual rage. But the idea of being obliged to piss into a Shnapish the Dog wastebasket makes Landsman angry.

He drags the bed over to the window, and shoves the blinds rattling to one side. The windowpane is pebbled glass. Ripples of a green and gray world set in a heavy steel frame. At one time-maybe until very recently there was a latch, but his thoughtful hosts have removed it. Now there is only one way to get the window open. Landsman goes for the wastebasket, dragging the cot back and forth behind him like a handy symbol. He raises the wastebasket, takes aim, and hurls it against the pebbled glass of the tall window. It bounces off and flies back at Landsman, striking him squarely in the forehead. A moment later, he tastes blood for the second time that day as it trickles down his cheek to the corner of his lips.

“Shnapish, you bastard,” he says.

He shoves the cot all the way over against the long wall and then, working with his free hand, tips the mattress off the cot frame. He stands the mattress against the opposite wall. He grabs hold of the cot frame on either side and, lifting from the knees, heaves it up off the ground. He stands there a moment, holding the rickety frame parallel to his body. He wavers under the sudden weight, which is not great but taxes his strength all the same. He takes a step backward, lowers his head, and drives the cot frame through the window. Green lawn and fog blow into Landsman’s dazzled vision. Trees, crows, hovering hornets of broken glass, the gun-barrel-gray waters of the strait, a bright white float plane trimmed in red. Then the cot frame jerks free of Landsman’s grasp and leaps through gaping glass fangs out into the morning.

As a kid in school, Landsman received good marks in physics. Newtonian mechanics, bodies at rest and in motion, actions and reactions, gravity and mass. He found more sense in physics than in anything else they ever tried to teach him. An idea like momentum, for example, the tendency of a body in motion to stay in motion. So maybe Landsman should not be quite so surprised when the cot frame does not content itself with shattering the window. There is a sharp, joint-popping tug on the bones of his shoulder, and he is seized again by the nameless emotion he felt when he tried to climb aboard Mrs. Shpilman’s moving limousine: the sudden awareness, like an inverse satori, that he has made a grave if not fatal error.

This is Landsman’s luck: He lands in a pile of snow.

It’s a furtive, die-hard patch tucked deep into the shadow on the north side of the barracks. The only snow visible in the entire compound, and Landsman falls right into it. His jaws snap together, making each tooth ring out with its own pure tone as the impact of his ass against the ground conducts its Newtonian business with the rest of his skeleton.

He lifts his head up out of the snow. Cold air flows over the back of his neck. For the first time since taking wing, he remarks on the fact that he is freezing. He stands up, his jaw still chiming. Snow streaks his back like welts raised by a wire lash. He lurches and staggers to the left under the weight of the cot frame. It offers to help him sit down again in the snow. Sink into it, plunge his sore head into the cold, clean pile of snow. Close his eyes. Relax.

Just then he hears a soft scrape of soles coming from around the corner of the building, a pair of erasers rubbing away the marks of their own passage. A flawed gait, the extra hop and shuffle of a man with a limp. Landsman takes hold of the cot frame and hoists it, then backs up against the shingled side of the barracks. When he sees one hiking boot, the tweed cuff of Fligler’s trouser leg, he thrusts the cot frame out. As Fligler rounds the corner, the steel edge of the cot frame catches him full in the face. A red hand of blood spreads its fingers across Fligler’s cheeks and forehead. His cane flies up in the air and strikes the pavement with a marimba note. The cot frame, as if shy without its best friend, drags Landsman along with it, onto Fligler, in a heap. The smell of Fligler’s blood fills Landsman’s nostrils. Landsman scrambles to his feet, grabbing with his free hand for the sholem in Fligler’s slack fingers.

He raises the automatic, contemplating shooting the man on the ground with a certain black willingness. Then he glances toward the main house, five hundred feet away. Several dark shapes are moving behind the French doors on this side. The door flies open, and the hole-mouthed pans of big young yids in suits fill the doorway. Landsman envies them their youthful capacity for wonder but still raises the gun in their direction. They duck and pull back, and in their parting, a tall, slim, fair-haired man stands revealed. The new arrival, fresh from the hold of his bright white floatplane. The hair is really something, like a flare of sunlight on a sheet of steel. Penguins on his sweater, baggy corduroy pants. For an instant the man in the penguin sweater frowns at Landsman, looking confused. Then somebody drags him back from the doorway as Landsman tries to take aim.

The cuff digs into Landsman’s wrist, sharp enough to abrade the flesh. He changes his aim, pointing the gun at his own left arm. He squeezes off a single careful shot, and the handcuff slides free, a bangle at his wrist. Landsman lowers the bed frame to the ground with an air of mild regret, as if it’s the body of a bumbling but loyal family retainer who has served the Landsmans well. Then he takes off into the woods toward a gap in the trees. There must be at least twenty young healthy Jews running after him, shouting, cursing, giving orders. For the first minute he expects to see the branching lightning of a bullet in his brain and to go down underneath the slow roll of its thunder. But there is nothing; they must have been given orders not to shoot.

The last thing he wants is any hint of a mess.

Landsman finds himself running along a dirt road, neat and well maintained, marked with red reflectors on metal stakes. He remembers the distant patch of green that he caught sight of from the air, beyond the forest, dotted with piles of snow. He figures this path must lead there. It must lead, at any rate, somewhere.

Landsman runs through the woods. The dirt track is thick with fallen needles that muffle the thud of his bare heels. He can almost see the heat departing his body, shimmering waves of it that trail along behind. He has a taste at the back of his mouth that’s like the memory of the smell of Fligler’s blood. The links on the broken chain dangle from the handcuff, tinkling. Somewhere a woodpecker is knocking out its brains against the side of a tree. Landsman’s own brain is working too hard, trying to figure these men and their business. The crippled professor type whose TEC-9 Landsman is packing. The doctor with the concrete forehead. The deserted barracks room. The honor ranch that was no such thing. The strapping lads cooling their heels on the property. The golden man in the penguin sweater who will not tolerate a mess.

Meanwhile, another segment of his brain is busy trying to gauge the air temperature — call it 37, 38 degrees F — and from there to calculate or recall some table he might have seen once that gave the time it takes hypothermia to kill a Jewish policeman in his underpants. But the ruling cells of that great ruined organ, addled and drugged, are telling him only to run and keep on running.

The woods give out abruptly, and he’s standing in front of a machine shed, molded gray panels of steel, no windows, with a rippled plastic roof. A scrotal pair of propane tanks huddles against the side of the building. The wind is sharper here, and Landsman feels it like a flow of boiling water over his flesh. He runs around to the other side of the shed. It stands at the edge of a barren expanse of straw-covered ground. Way in the distance, a band of green grass dissolves into the rolling fog. A gravel track leads away from the shed, along the bare field of straw. Fifty yards farther along, the track forks, One fork runs to the east, toward that band of green. The other runs on straight and disappears into a dark stand of trees. Landsman turns back to the shed. A big door on rollers. Landsman drags it thundering to one side. Disassembled refrigeration equipment, cryptic pieces of machines, one wall covered in an Arabic written in lengths of black rubber hose. And, right by the door, one of those three-wheeled electric carts called Zumzums (the District’s number two export, after Shofar-brand cellular telephones). This one is tricked out with a flatbed, the bed lined with a sheet of mud-streaked black rubber. Landsman climbs up behind the wheel. As cold as his ass already is, as cold as the wind is blowing down from the Yukon, the vinyl seat of that Zumzum is even colder. Landsman thumbs its starter switch. He steps on the pedal, and with a thunk and a whirr of differential gears, he’s off. He rumbles up to the fork in the road and hesitates between the woods and that tranquil band of green grass, vanishing like a promise of peacefulness into the fog. Then he smashes down the pedal.

Just before he plunges into the stand of trees, Lands man looks back over his shoulder, and sees the yids of Peril Strait coming after him in a big black Ford Caudillo, splashing gravel as it rounds the corner of the supply shed. Landsman has no idea where it came from or, for that matter, how it got here; he didn’t see any cars at all from the air. It’s five hundred meters behind the Zumzum and gaining easily.

In the woods, gravel gives way to a rough track of packed earth that slips among handsome Sitka spruces, high and secretive. As Landsman whirrs along, he catches sight between the trees of a high chain-link fence topped by gay glinting curls of razor wire. The steel mesh fence is woven with slats of green plastic. In places a gap appears in the green weave of the fence. Through these gaps, Landsman glimpses another steel shed, a clearing, posts, crossbeams, interlaced cables. A huge frame stretched with a web of cargo net, distended coils of barbed wire, rope swings. It might be an athletic facility, some kind of therapeutic playground for patients in recovery. Sure, and the people in the Caudillo might just be bringing him his pants.

The black car is under two hundred yards from him now. The passenger in its front seat rolls down his window and climbs out to sit on the top of his door, steadying himself with one hand on the roof rack. The other hand, Landsman observes, is busy getting ready to fire a handgun. It’s a fair, bearded young man in a black suit, cropped hair, a sober tie like Roboy’s. He takes his time with the shot, reckoning the ever-dwindling distance. A flash blooms around hand, and the back of the Zumzum explodes with a crack and a spray of fiberglass slivers. Landsman lets out a cry and takes his foot off the accelerator pedal. So much for not making a mess.

He bumps along on momentum for another five or ten feet and then comes to a stop. The young man hanging out of the Caudillo’s window raises his firing arm and judges the effect of his shot. The jagged hole in the fiberglass body of the Zumzum is probably disappointing to the poor kid. But he has to be happy about the fact that his moving target has just become stationary. His next shot is going to be a lot easier. The kid lowers his arm again with a patient slowness that is almost ostentatious, almost cruel. In his care and his parsimonious attitude toward bullets, Landsman senses the hallmark of rigorous training and an athlete’s grasp of eternity.

Surrender unfurls across Landsman’s heart like the shadow of a flag. There is no way he can outrace the Caudillo, not in a shot-up Zumzum that on a good day tops out around fifteen miles per hour. A warm blanket, maybe a hot cup of tea: These strike him as adequate recompense for failure. The Caudillo comes charging toward him and then sloshes to a halt in a spray of fallen needles. Three of its doors swing open and three men climb out, lumbering young yids in ill-fitting suits and meteor-black shoes, steering their automatic pistols toward Landsman. The guns seem to thrum in their hands as if they contain wild life or gyroscopes. The gunmen can barely restrain them. Hard boys, neckties flying, their beards trimmed neat along the jawline, their skullcaps small crocheted saucers.

The rear door on the near side remains firmly shut, but behind it Landsman makes out the outline of al fourth man. The hard boys close on Landsman in their matching suits, with their earnest haircuts.

Landsman stands up and turns around with his hands in the air. “You’re clones, right?” he says as the three hard boys surround him. “At the end of the picture, it always turns out to be clones.”

“Shut up,” says the nearest hard boy, speaking American, and Landsman is about to assent when he hears a sound like something both fibrous and doughy being slowly torn in two. In the time it takes him to observe in the eyes of the hard boys that they hear it, too, the sound sharpens and rises to a steady chopping, a sheet of paper caught in the blades of a fan. The sound grows louder and more layered. The hacking cough of an old man. A heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over u lamp. Through the trees a light appears, stitching and staggering like a bumblebee, and suddenly, Landsman knows it for what it is.

“Dick,” he says simply and not without wonder, and a shudder shakes him deep down to his bones. The light is an old six-volt lamp, no more powerful than a large flashlight, flickering and wan in the gloom of the spruce forest. The engine that drives the light toward the party of Jews is a V-Twin, custom-manufactured. You can hear the springs of the front forks as they register every jolt in the road.

“Fuck him,” mutters one of the hard boys. “And his fucking Matchbox motorcycle.”

Landsman has heard different stories about Inspector Willie Dick and his motorcycle. Some say that it was made for a full-grown Bombay millionaire of smaller than average stature, others that it was originally presented as a thirteenth birthday gift to the Prince of’ Wales, and still others that it once belonged to a dare devil freak in a circus down in Texas or Alabama or some exotic place like that. At first glance, it is a stock 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader, gunmetal gray in the sunlight, its stunning chromium trim carefully restored. You have to get up next to it, or see it alongside a normal sized motorcycle, to realize that it is built to two-thirds scale. Willie Dick, though full-grown and thirty-seven years old, is only four feet seven inches tall.

Dick rumbles past the Zumzum, squeaks to a stop, kills the elderly British engine. He climbs off the bike and comes swaggering over to Landsman.

“What the fuck?” he says, pulling off his gloves, black leather gauntlets of the sort that might be worn by Max von Sydow playing Erwin Rommel. His voice is always surprisingly rich and deep, given the boyishness of his frame. He describes a slow circuit of appraisal around the flower of Jewish law enforcement. “Detective Meyer Landsman!” He turns to the hard boys and makes a study of their hardness. “Gentlemen.”

“Inspector Dick,” says the one who told Landsman to shut up. The boy has a jailhouse air, honed and stealthy, a toothbrush sharpened to a shiv. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

“With all due respect, Mr. Gold — it is Gold, right? yeah — this is my motherfucking neck of the woods.” Dick steps out from the group centered around Landsman. He stares in to get a look at the shadow watching from behind the closed door of the Caudillo. Landsman can’t be certain, but whoever’s there doesn’t look big enough to be Roboy or the golden man in the penguin sweater. A hunched little shadow, furtive and watchful. “I was here before you, and I’ll be here a long time after you yids are gone.”

Detective Inspector Wilfred Dick is a full-blood Tlingit, descended from the Chief Dick who inflicted the last recorded fatality in the history of Russian-Tlingit relations, shooting and killing a marooned, half-starved Russian submariner he caught raiding his crab traps at Stag Bay in 1948. Willie Dick is married, with nine children by his first and only wife, whom Landsman has never seen. Naturally, she is reputed to be a giantess. In 1993 or ’94 Dick successfully completed the Iditarod dogsled race, coming in ninth among forty-seven finishers. He has a Ph.D. in criminology from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Dick’s first act as an adult male of his tribe was to travel, in an old Boston whaler, from the Dick village at Stag Bay to Tribal Police central headquarters in Angoon, in order to persuade the super intendent to set aside, in his case, the minimum height requirements for Tribal Police officers. The stories of how this was accomplished are slanderous, salacious, hard to believe, or some combination of the three. Willie Dick has all the usual bad qualities of very small, very intelligent men: vanity, arrogance, overcompetitiveness, a long memory for injuries and slights. He is also honest, dogged, and fearless, and he owes Landsman a favor; Dick has a long memory for favors, too.

“I’m trying to imagine what you mad Hebrews are up to, and everyone of my theories is more fucked up than the last one,” he says.

“This man is a patient here,” says Gold. “He was trying to check out a little early, is all.”

“So you were going to shoot him,” Dick says. “That’s some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh?”

He turns back to Landsman and looks him up and down. Dick’s dark face is handsome, in a way, the avid eyes operating from the cover of a sage forehead, the chin dimpled, the nose straight and regu lar. The last time Landsman saw him, Dick kept having to take a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. Now he has given in to senescence and adopted a slick black-and-brushed steel pair of Italian spectacles, the kind worn in thoughtful interviews by aging British rock guitarists. He is dressed in stiff black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a red-and-black-plaid shirt with an open collar. Over his shoulders he wears, as usual, a short cloak, held in place with a braided rawhide thong, made from the skin of a bear he hunted and killed himself. He is an affected creature, Willie Dick — he smokes black cigarettes — but he is a fine homicide detective.

“Jesus Christ, Landsman. You look like a fuckin fetal pig I saw one time pickled in a jar.”

He unties the braided thong with the fingers of one hand and shrugs out of the cloak. Then he tosses it to Landsman. For an instant it’s as cold as steel against Landsman’s body, then wonderfully warm. Dick keeps the grin of mockery in place but, for Landsman’s benefit — only Landsman can see it — extinguishes every last trace of humor from his eyes.

“I spoke to that ex-wife of yours,” he says in a near whisper, the voice he uses to threaten suspects and intimidate witnesses. “After I got your message. You have less fucking right to be here than a fucking eyeless African molerat.” He raises his voice nearly to the point of staginess. “Detective Landsman, what did I tell you I was going to do to your Jewish ass the next time I caught you running around Indian country without benefit of clothing?”

“I d-don’t remember,” Landsman says, seized’ by a violent tremor of gratitude and exposure. “You s-said so many things.”

Dick walks over to the Caudillo, and knocks on the closed door like he wants to come in. The door opens, and Dick stands behind it and converses in a low voice with whoever is sitting inside, keeping warm. After a moment Dick comes back and tells Gold, “Man in charge wants to speak to you.”

Gold goes around the open door to talk to the man in charge. When he comes back, he looks like his sinuses have been pulled out through his ears and he blames Landsman for it. He nods once to Dick.

“Detective Landsman,” Dick says. “I’m very much fucking afraid that you are under arrest.”