The Yiddish Policemen's Union

32

In the emergency room at the Indian hospital in St. Cyril, the Indian doctor looks Landsman over and pronounces him fit to be jailed. The doctor’s name is Rau, and he’s from Madras, and he’s heard all of the jokes before. He’s handsome in the Sal Mineo style, big obsidian eyes and a mouth like a cake-icing rose. Mild frostbite, he tells Landsman, nothing serious, though one hour and forty-seven minutes after his rescue Landsman still can’t seem to suppress the temblors that rise from inner faults to shake his body. Cold to the honeycomb of his bones.

“Where’s the big dog with the little thing of brandy around his neck?” Landsman says after the doctor tells him he can take off the blanket and put on the jailhouse clothes that lie in a neat stack beside the sink. “When does he show up?”

“Do you enjoy brandy?” Dr. Rau says, as if he’s reading from a phrase book, as if he has not the slightest interest either in his question or in any answer that Landsman might ever produce. Landsman tags it at once as a classic interrogator’s tone, so cold that it leaves a burn. Dr. Rau’s gaze remains resolutely fixed on an empty corner of the room. “Is that something you feel you need?”

“Who said anything about needing?” Landsman says, fumbling with the button fly of some worn twill trousers. Cotton work shirt, laceless canvas sneaks. They want to dress him like a wino, or a beach bum, or some other kind of loser who turns up naked at your intake desk, homeless, no visible means of support. The shoes are too big, but otherwise, everything’s a perfect fit.

“No craving?” There’s a fleck of ash in the A of the doctor’s name tag. He picks at it with a fingernail. “You’re not feeling the need of a drink right now?”

“Maybe I just want one,” Landsman says. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Maybe,” the doctor says. “Or maybe you are fond of large, salivating dogs.”

“Okay, knock it off, Doc,” Landsman says. “Let’s not play games.”

“All right.” Dr. Rau turns his plump fuce to Landsman. The irises of his eyes are like cast iron. “Based on my examination, I would guess that you are going through alcoholic withdrawal, Detective Landsman. In addition to exposure, you’re also suffering from dehydration, tremors, palpitations, and your pupils are enlarged. Your blood sugar is low, which tells me you probably haven’t been eating. Loss of appetite is another symptom of withdrawal. Your blood pressure is elevated, and your recent behavior appears to have been, from what I gather, quite erratic. Even violent.”

Landsman tugs on the wrinkled lapels of the collar of his chambray work shirt, trying to smooth them out. Like cheap window blinds, they keep rolling them selves up.

“Doctor,” he says, “from one man with X-ray eyeballs to another, I respect your keenness, but tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don’t you think you might take up drinking?”

“That or ranting to strange doctors.”

“The dog with the brandy never gets wise with the frozen guy,” Landsman says wistfully.

“Detective Landsman.”

“Yes, Doc.”

“I have been examining you for the last eleven minutes, and in that time you have produced three prolonged speeches. Rants, I would call them.”

“Yes,” Landsman says, and now his blood begins to flow for the first time: into his cheeks. “It happens sometimes.”

“You like to make speeches?”

“They come and go.”

“Verbal jags.”

“I’ve heard them called that.”

For the first time Landsman notices that Dr. Rau is secretly chewing something, working it with his back teeth. The faint smell of anise leaks from his frosting-pink lips.

The doctor makes a note on Landsman’s chart. “Are you currently under the care of a psychiatrist or taking any medication for depression?”

“Depression? I seem depressed to you?”

“It’s really just a word,” the doctor says. “I’m looking at possible symptoms. From what Inspector Dick has told me, and from my examination of you, it seems at least possible that you might possibly have some kind of mood disorder.”

“You aren’t the first person to say that,” Landsman says. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you.”

“Are you taking medication?”

“No, not really.”

“Not really?”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to.”

“I’m, you know. Afraid I might lose my edge.”

“That explains the drinking, then,” the doctor says. His words seem tinged with a sardonic whiff of licorice. “I hear it does wonders for one’s edge.” He goes to the door, opens it, and an Indian noz comes in to take Landsman away. “In my experience, Detective Landsman, if I may,” the doctor concludes his own jag, “the people who worry about losing their edge, often they fail to see they already lost the blade a long time ago.”

“The swami speaks,” says the Indian noz.

“Lock him up,” the doctor says, tossing Landsman’s file into the tray mounted to the wall.

The Indian noz has a head like a redwood burl and the worst haircut Landsman has ever seen, some kind of ungodly hybrid of a high-and-tight and a pompadour. He leads Landsman through a series of blank hallways, up a flight of steel stairs, to a room at the back of the St. Cyril jail. It has an ordinary steel door, no bars. It’s reasonably clean and reasonably well lit. The bunk has a mattress, a pillow, and a blanket, folded trim. The toilet has a seat. There’s a metal mirror bolted to the wall.

“The VIP suite,” says the Indian noz.

“You should see where I live,” Landsman says. “It’s almost as nice as this.”

“Nothing personal,” the noz says. “The inspector wanted to make sure you knew that.”

“Where is the inspector?”

“Dealing with this. We get a complaint from those people, he has nine flavors of shit to deal with.” A humorless grin contorts his face. “You fucked up that gimpy little Jew pretty bad.”

“Who are they?” Landsman says. “Sergeant, what the fuck are those Jews up to over there?”

“It’s a retreat center,” the sergeant says with the same burning lack of emotion that Dr. Rau put into his questions about Landsman’s alcoholism. “For wayward Jew youth trapped by the scourge of crime and drugs. Anyways, that’s what I heard. Have yourself a nice nap, Detective.”

After the Indian noz leaves, Landsman crawls into the bunk and pulls the blanket over his head, and before he can prevent himself, before he has time even to feel something and know that he is feeling it, a sob gets wrenched loose from some deep niche and fills his windpipe. The tears that burn his eyes are like his alcoholic tremors: They have no use, and he can’t seem to get on top of them. He clamps his pillow down over his face and feels for the first time how utterly alone Naomi left him.

To calm himself, he goes back to Mendel Shpilman on the bed in room 208. He imagines himself lying on the pulldown bed in that wallpapered cell, running through the moves of Alekhine’s second game against Capablanca at Buenos Aires in 1927, while the smack turned his blood into a flood of sugar and his brain into a lapping tongue. So. Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket. All right. Then a lot of wasted years. Hustling chess for drug money. Cheap hotels. Hiding himself from the incompatible destinies chosen for him by his genes and by his God. Then one day some men dig him up and dust him off and take him away to Peril Strait. A place with a doctor, a facility built through the generosity of the Barrys and the Marvins and the Susies of Jewish America, where they can clean him up, patch him together. Why? Because they need him. Because they intend to restore him to practical use. And he wants to go with them, these men. He agrees to do so. Naomi never would have flown Shpilman and his escorts if she sniffed any kind of coercion in the job. So there is something in it — money, the promise of healing or recaptured glory, reconciliation with the family, an eventual payoff in drugs — for Shpilman. But when he arrives at Peril Strait to start his new life, something changes Shpilman’s mind. Something that he learns, or realizes, or sees. Or maybe he just gets cold feet. And turns for help to the woman who served any number of people, generally the most lost, as the only friend they had in the world. Naomi flies him out again, changing her flight plan en route, and finds him a ride to a cheap motel with the pie man’s daughter. In payment for her hubris, these mystery Jews crash Naomi’s airplane for her. Then they go out hunting for Mendel Shpilman, gone to ground again. Hiding from his possible selves. Lying there in his room at the Zamenhof, facedown on the bed, too far gone to think about Alekhine and Capablanca and the Queen’s Indian Defense. Too far gone to hear the knock on the door.

“You don’t have to knock, Berko,” Landsman says.

“This is a jail.”

There’s a rattle of keys, and then the Indian noz throws open the door. Berko Shemets stands behind him. He has dressed himself as for a safari deep into the bush. Jeans, flannel shirt, lace-up leather hiking boots, a grayish-brown fisherman’s vest equipped with seventy-two pockets, sub-pockets, and sub-sub-pockets.

At first glance, he looks almost like a typical if rather large Alaskan bush runner. You can hardly make out the polo-player insignia that ornaments his shirt. Berko’s usual discreet skullcap has been laid aside in favor of an outsize embroidered number, cylindrical, a dwarf fez, Berko always lays on the Jew a little thick when he is obliged to travel to the Indianer-Lands. Landsman can’t tell from here, but his partner is probably wearing his Star of David cuff links, too.

“I’m sorry,” Landsman tells him. “I know I’m always sorry, but this time, believe me, I could not be sorrier.”

“We’ll see about that,” Berko says. “Come on, he wants to see us.”

“Who does?”

“The emperor of the French.”

Landsman gets up from the bed, goes to the sink, throws some water on his face.

“Am I free to go?” he asks the Indian noz as he walks out the door of the cell. “You’re telling me I’m free to go?”

“You’re a free man,” says the noz.

“Don’t you believe it,” says Landsman.