The Yiddish Policemen's Union

33

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, staring out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot — no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick’s face. It’s the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

“I hope you’re dressed,” Dick says without turning from the window. The wistful flicker in his eyes has been snuffed. There is no longer anything happening in his face at all. “Because the things I witnessed in those woods — Christ, I almost had to fucking burn my motherfucking bearskin.” He affects to shudder. “The Tlingit Nation doesn’t pay me anywhere near enough to make up for having to look at you standing around in your underpants.”

“The Tlingit Nation,” says Berko Shemets, pronouncing it like the name of a notorious scam or a claim about the location of Atlantis. He intrudes his bulk on the furnishings of Dick’s office. “So, what, they still pay the salaries around here? Because Meyer was just telling me it might be otherwise.”

Dick turns, slow and lazy, and hikes up a corner of his upper lip to bare a few incisors and cuspids. “Johnny the Jew,” he says. “Well, well. Beanie and all. And clearly you haven’t had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut.”

“Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget.”

“Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer.”

In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the, snow.

“Go shit in the ocean,” Dick says in flawless Yiddish. They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. They pound at each other’s backs, searching for the tubercular spots in their slowly dying friendship, sounding the depths of their ancient enmity like a drum. In the year of misery that preceded his defection to the Jewish side of his nature, before his mother was crushed by a runaway truckload of rioting Jews, young John Bear discovered basketball and Wilfred Dick, then a four-foot-two point guard. It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.

“Johnny Bear,” Dick says. “What the fuck, you great big Jew?”

Berko shrugs, rubbing at the back of his neck in a sheepish way that makes him look like a thirteen-year-old center who has just watched something small and nasty squirt past him on a drive to the basket. “Yeah, hey, Willie D.,” he says.

“Sit down, you fat motherfucker,” Dick says. “You, too, Landsman, and all those ugly freckles on your ass crack.”

Berko grins, and they all sit down, Dick on his side of his desk, the Jewish policemen on theirs. The two chairs for visitors are standard scale, along with the bookshelves and everything else in the office apart from Dick’s desk and chair. The effect is fun house, nauseating. Or maybe that’s another symptom of alcoholic withdrawal. Dick takes out his black cigarettes and pushes an ashtray across the desk toward Landsman. He leans back in his chair and puts his boots up on the desk. He wears the sleeves of his Woolrich shirt rolled back. His forearms are ropy and brown. Curling gray hairs peep over his open collar, and his chic eye glasses are folded in the pocket of his shirt.

“There are so many people I would rather be looking at right now,” he says. “Literally millions.”

“Then close your fucking eyes,” Berko suggests. Dick complies. His eyelids are dark and glossy, bruised- looking. “Landsman,” he says, as if enjoying the blindness, “how was your room?”

“The sheets had a touch more lavender water than I care for,” Landsman says. “Other than that, I really have no complaints.”

Dick opens his eyes. “It has been my good fortune as an agent of law enforcement on this reservation to have relatively few dealings with Jews over the years,” he begins. “Oh, and before either of you starts cinching up his sphincter on me over my supposed anti-Semitism, let me just stipulate right now that I don’t give a flying fuck whether I offend your pork-shunning asses or not, and on balance, I would say that I hope I do. The fat man there knows perfectly well, or he should, that I hate everyone equally and without favor, regardless of creed or DNA.”

“Understood,” says Berko.

“We feel the same way about you,” Landsman says.

“My point is that Jews mean bullshit. A thousand laminated layers of politics and lies buffed to a high sheen. Therefore, I believe precisely ass point two per cent of anything that was told to me by this supposed Dr. Roboy, whose credentials, by the way, check out as legitimate but with a certain amount of mud at the bottom, about how you came to be scooting down that road in your skivvies, Landsman, with a Jew cowboy taking potshots at you out the window of his car.”

Landsman starts to explain, but Dick holds up one of his girlish hands, the nails neat and glossy.

“Let me finish. Those gentlemen, no, Johnny, they do not pay my salary, fuck you very much. But through means not given to me to understand, and that I don’t have the stomach to speculate about, those gentlemen have friends, Tlingit friends, who do pay my salary, or to be specific, who sit on the council that does. And if those wise tribal elders were to indicate to me that they would not take it amiss if I booked your partner here, and held him on charges of trespassing and burglary, not to mention conducting an illegal and unauthorized investigation, then that is what I would have to do. Those Jewish squirrels out there at Peril Strait, and I know you know it pains me to say this, for better or worse, they’re my motherfucking Jewish squirrels. And their facility, for as long as they occupy it, comes under the full color and protection of Tribal law enforcement. Even if, after I go to all the trouble to save your freckle-assed life out there, Landsman, and drag you down here and house you at considerable expense, fuck if those Jews don’t seem to lose all interest in you.”

“Talk about verbal jags,” Landsman says to Berko.

To Dick he says, “They got a doctor here, I really think you ought to see him.”

“But much as I’d like to send you back to get your ass hung on a hook by that ex-wife of yours, Landsman,” Dick barrels on, “and try as I might, I can’t seem to let you go without asking just one question, even knowing in advance that you’re both Jews, of a sort, and that any answer you give me is only going to add to the layers of bullshit that are already blinding me with their high Jewish shine.”

They wait for the question, and it comes, and Dick’s manner hardens. All traces of verbosity and teasing vanish.

“Are we talking about a homicide?” he says.

“Yes,” Landsman says at the same time that Berko says, “Officially, no.’”

“Two,” Landsman insists. “Two, Berko. I make them for Naomi, too.”

“Naomi?” Berko says. “Meyer, what the fuck?”

Landsman goes over it from the beginning, leaving out nothing relevant, from the knock on the door of his room at the Zamenhof to his interview with Mrs. Shpilman, from the pie man’s daughter who sent him into the FAA records to the presence of Aryeh Baronshteyn at Peril Strait.

“Hebrew?” Berko says. “Mexicans speaking Hebrew?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Landsman says.

“Not synagogue Hebrew, either.” Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It’s only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls. “I only caught a word or two. It was fast and I couldn’t follow it. I guess that was the idea.”

He tells them about waking in the room where Naomi wrote her epitaph on a wall, about the barracks and the training course and the groups of idle young men with guns.

As he tells it, Dick gets more and more interested in spite of himself, asking questions, poking his nose into the affair with an instinctive, stubborn love of stinks.

“I knew your sister,” he says when Landsman winds up at the rescue in the woods of Peril Strait. “I was sorry when she died. And this holy fudge-packer sounds like exactly the kind of stray mutt she would have risked her ass for.”

“But what did they want from Mendel Shpilman, these Jews with their visitor who doesn’t like messes?” Berko says. “That’s the part I don’t get. What are they doing out there?”

The questions strike Landsman as inevitable, logical, and key, but they seem to cool Dick’s ardor for the case.

“You have nothing,” he says, his mouth a bloodless hyphen. “And let me tell you, Landsman, with these Peril Strait Jews, such is far from the case. They have so much weight behind them, gentlemen, let me tell you, they could make you a diamond out of a fossilized turd.”

“What do you know about them, Willie?” Berko says.

“I don’t know shit.”

“The man in the Caudillo,” Landsman says. “The one you went over and talked to. He was also an American?”

“I would say not, a shriveled-up raisin of a yid. He didn’t care to tell me his name. And I’m not supposed to inquire. Being as how the Tribal Police official policy on that place, as I think I may have already mentioned, is ‘I don’t know shit.’ ”

“Come on, Wilfred,” Berko says. “We’re talking about Naomi.”

“I appreciate that. But I know enough about Landsman here — fuck, I know enough about homicide detectives period — to know that sister or no sister, this is not about finding out the truth. It’s not about getting the story right. Because you and I, we know, gentlemen, that the story is whatever we decide it is, and however nice and neat we make it, in the end a story is never going to make a damn bit of difference to the dead. What you want, Landsman, is to pay those fuckers back. But that is never going to happen. You are never going to get them. No fucking way.”

“Willie boy,” Berko says. “Come clean. So, don’t do it for him. Don’t do it because his sister, Naomi, was such a great fucking kid.”

By means of the silence that follows, he supplies a third reason for Dick to clue them in.

“You’re saying,” Dick says, “that I should do it for you.”

“I am saying that.”

“Because of all we once meant to each other in the springtime of our lives.”

“I might not go that far.”

“That is so fucking touching,” Dick says. He leans forward and pushes the button on his intercom. “Minty, get my bearskin out of the trash and bring it in here, so I can throw up on it.” He lets up on the button before Minty can reply. “I’m not doing fuck-all for you, Detective Berko Shemets. But because I liked your sister, Landsman, I’ll tie the same knot in your brain that those squirrels have tied in mine, and let you try to figure out what the hell it means.”

The door opens, and a young, wide woman comes, in, half again as tall as her boss, carrying the bearskin cloak like it contains the photoresidue of the risen body of Jesus Christ. Dick springs to his feet, grabs the cloak, and, with a grimace, as if fearing contamination, knots it around his neck by the thong.

“Find that one a coat and a hat,” he says, jerking a thumb toward Landsman. “Something with a nice stink on it, salmon guts or muscatel. Take the coat off Marvin Klag, he’s passed out in A7.”