The Yiddish Policemen's Union

35

Forty-two miles south of the Sitka city limits, a house crafted from salvage planks and gray shingles teeters on two dozen pilings over a slough. A nameless backwater, riddled with bears and prone to methane flatulence. A graveyard of rowboats, tackle, pickup trucks, and, somewhere deep down, a dozen Russian fur hunters and their Aleut dog-soldiers. At one end of the slough, back in the bushes, a magnificent Tlingit longhouse is being dismantled by salmonberry and devil’s club. At the other end stretches a rocky beach, littered with a thousand black stones on which an ancient people etched the shapes of animals and stars. It was on this beach, in 1854, that those twelve promyshlennikis and Aleuts under Yevgeny Simonof met a bloody end at the hands of a Tlingit chief named Kohklux. Over a century later, the great-great-granddaughter of Chief Kohklux, Mrs. Pullman, became the second Indian wife taken by a five-foot-six Jewish chess player and spymaster named Hertz Shemets.

At chess, as in secret statecraft, Uncle Hertz was known for his sense of the clock, an excess of prudence, and a tiresome depth of preparation. He read up on his opponents, made a fatal study of them. He sought the pattern of weakness, the unresolved complex, the tic. For twenty-five years he conducted a secret campaign against the people on the far side of the Line, trying to weaken their hold on the Indianer-Lands, and in that time he became a recognized authority on their culture and history. He learned to savor the Tlingit language, with its sucking-candy vowels and its chewy consonants. He undertook profound research into the fra grance and heft of Tlingit women.

When he married Mrs. Pullman (no one ever called the lady, may she rest in peace, Mrs. Shemets), he developed an interest in her great-great-grandfather’s victory over Simonof. He spent hours in the library at Bronfman, poring over Tsarist-era maps. He annotated interviews conducted by Methodist missionaries with ninety-nine-year-old Tlingit crones who were six-year-old girls when those war hammers went to work on all those thick Russian skulls. He discovered that in the USGS survey of 1949, the one that set the proper boundaries of the District of Sitka, the Massacre Spot somehow got drawn as Tlingit land. Even though it lies west of the Baranof range, the Massacre Spot is legally Native, a green badge of Indianness daubed on the Jewish side of Baranof Island. When Hertz discovered this error, he had Berko’s stepmother buy up the land with money — as Dennis Brennan later documented — taken from his cointelpro slush fund. He built his spider-legged house on it. And when Mrs. Pullman died, Hertz Shemets inherited the Simonof Massacre Spot. He declared it the world’s crummiest Indian reservation, and himself the world’s crummiest Indian.

“Asshole,” Berko says, with less rancor than Landsman might have expected, contemplating his father’s rickety dwelling through the windshield of the Super Sport.

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

Berko turns to his partner with his eyes rolled back as if to search an inner file on Landsman for the record of a question that needed less answering. “Let me ask you this, Meyer. If you were me, when would you have seen him last?”

Landsman parks the Super Sport behind the old man’s Buick Roadmaster, a mud-streaked blue beast with fake wood panels and a bumper sticke advertising, in Yiddish and American, the WORLD FAMOUS SIMONOF MASSACRE SPOT AND GENUINE TLINGIT LONGHOUSE. Although the roadside attraction has been defunct for a while, the bumper sticker is bright and crisp. There are still a dozen cartons of them stacked in the longhouse.

“Give me a hint,” Landsman says.

“Jokes about foreskins.”

“Oh, right.”

“Every single joke about a foreskin ever devised.”

“I had no idea there were so many,” Landsman says. “It was an education.”

“Come on,” Berko says, climbing out of the car. “Let’s get this over with.”

Landsman eyes the hulk of the Genuine Long house, off in the dry thicket of berry vines and devil’s club, a gaudy-painted wreck. In fact, there is nothing genuine about the Longhouse. Hertz Shemets built it with the help of two Indian brothers-in-law, his nephew Meyer, and his son Berko one summer after the boy came to live on Adler Street. He built it for fun, with no thought of turning it into the roadside attraction that he tried and failed to make of it after his ouster. Berko was fifteen that summer, and Landsman twenty. The kid crafted every surface of his personality to conforrn to the curvature of Landsman’s. He devoted two solid months to the task of training himself to operate a Skilsaw, as Landsman did, with a papiros jiggling on his lip and the smoke stinging his eyes. By then Landsman was already set on taking his police exams, and that summer Berko declared his identical ambition, but if Landsman had been talking about becoming a blowfly, Berko would have found a way to learn to love dung.

Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It’s the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he has long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landsman’s heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in brambles of salmonberry and oblivion.

“Berko,” he says as they crunch across the half-frozen mud of the world’s crummiest Indian reservation. He takes his cousin by the elbow. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Berko says. “It’s no your fault.”

“I’m good now. I’m back,” Landsman says, and the words ring true to his own ear in the moment. “I don’ know what did it. The hypothermia, maybe. Or getting into this whole thing with Shpilman. Or, fine, laying off the booze. But I’m back to my old self.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

“Sure.” Berko might be agreeing with a child or a nut. He might not be agreeing at all. “You seem all right.”

“Ringing endorsement.”

“I don’t want to get into it now, tell me, do you mind? I just want to go in there, hit the old man with our questions, and get back home to Ester-Malke and the boys. That okay with you?”

“That’s fine, Berko. Of course.”

“Thank you.”

They tramp through a congealed sludge of mud and patchy gravel, frozen puddles, each one stretched with a thin drumhead of ice. A cartoon stairway, splintered, wigwagging, leads to a weather-gray cedar front door. The door hangs crooked, crudely winterized with thick strips of rubber.

“When you say it’s not my fault,” Landsman begins.

“Man! I need to piss.”

“The implication is, you think I’m crazy. Mentally ill. Not responsible for my actions.”

“I’m knocking on this door now.”

He knocks twice, hard enough to imperil the hinges.

“Not fit to wear a shield,” Landsman says, truly wishing he could let the subject drop. “In other words.”

“Your ex-wife made that call, not me.”

“But you don’t disagree.”

“What do I know about mental illness?” Berko says. “I’m not the one who was arrested for running naked through the woods, three hours from home, after braining a man with an iron bed frame.”

Hertz Shemets comes to the door, the shave on his jowls as fresh as two droplets of blood. He’s wearing a gray flannel suit over a white shirt, with a poppy-red necktie. He smells like vitamin B, spray starch, smoked fish. He’s tinier than ever, jerky as a wooden man on a stick.

“Old boy,” he calls Landsman, breaking a few of the bones in his nephew’s hand.

“Looking good, Uncle Hertz,” Landsman says. Taking a closer look, he sees that the suit is shiny at the elbows and knees. The necktie bears testimony to some past meal of soup and has been knotted through the soft lapels not of a shirt but of a white pajama top jammed hastily into the trousers. But Landsman is hardly one to criticize. He’s wearing his emergency suit, popped loose from its crevice at the back of his trunk and unballed, a black number in viscose and wool blend with gold buttons meant to look like Roman coins. He borrowed it once, for a last-minute funeral he forgot he was planning to attend, from an unlucky gambler named Gluksman. It manages to look both funereal and gaudy, has fierce wrinkles, and smells of Detroit trunk.

“Thanks for the warning,” Uncle Hertz says, letting go of the wreckage of Landsman’s hand.

“That one there was all for surprising you,” Landsman says, nodding toward Berko. “But I knew you’d want to go out and kill something.”

Uncle Hertz puts his palms together and bows. Like a true hermit, he takes his duties as a host very seriously. If the hunting is poor, then he will have dragged something well marbled out of the deep freeze and put it on the stove with some carrots and onions and a crushed handful of the herbs that he grows and hangs up in a shed behind his cabin. He will have seen to it that there is ice for the whiskey and cold beer for the stew. Above all, he will have wanted to shave and put on a tie.

The old man tells Landsman to go into the house, and Landsman obeys him, which leaves Hertz standing there to face his son. Landsman watches, an interested party like all Jewish men from the moment that Abraham got Isaac to lie down on that mountaintop and bare his pulsing rib cage to the sky. The old man reaches out and takes hold of the sleeve of Berko’s lumberjack shirt. He rolls the fabric between his fingers. Berko submits to the examination with a look of genuine pain on his face. It has to be killing him, Landsman knows, to appear before his father wearing anything but his best Italian finery.

“So, where’s the Big Blue Ox?” the old man says at last.

“I don’t know,” Berko says. “But I think he may have your pajama bottoms.”

Berko smooths the pinched place that his father made in his sleeve. He walks past the old man and comes into the house. “Asshole,” he says, under his breath, almost. He excuses himself to use the toilet.

“Slivovitz,” the old man says, going for the bottles, a huddled skyline like a miniature replica of the Shvartsn-Yam on a black enamel tray. “Isn’t that it?”

“Seltzer,” Landsman says. When his uncle arches an eyebrow, he shrugs. “I got a new doctor. Indian fellow. Wants me to grve up booze.”

“And since when do you listen to doctors or Indians?”

“Since never,” Landsman admits.

“Self-medication is a Landsman tradition.”

“So is being a Jew,” Landsman says. “Look where that’s got us.”

“Strange times to be a Jew,” the old man agrees.

He turns from the bar and presents Landsman with a highball glass fitted with a lemon-slice yarmulke. Then he pours himself a generous shot of slivovitz and raises it to Landsman with an expression of humorous cruelty that Landsman knows well and in which he long since ceased to see any humor.

“To strange times,” the old man says.

He eases it back, and when he looks at Landsman, he glows like a man who just said something witty that broke up a room. Landsman knows how much it must be killing Hertz to watch the skiff he poled for so many years, with all his craft and strength, drifting ever nearer to the falls of Reversion. He pours himself a second quick one and knocks it back with no show of pleasure. Now it’s Landsman’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

“You have your doctor,” Uncle Hertz says. “I have mine.”

Uncle Hertz’s cabin is a single large room with a loft that goes all the way around three sides. All the trim and furnishing is horn, bone, sinew, hide, and pelt. You reach the loft by a steep companionway at the back, next to the kitchenette. In one corner is the old man’s bed, neatly made. Beside the bed, on a small, round table, stands a chessboard. The pieces are rosewood and maple. One of White’s maple knights is missing its left horse ear. One of Black’s rosewood pawns has a blond flaw on its knob. The board has a neglected, chaotic air; a Vicks inhaler stands amid the pieces at one end, a possible threat to White’s king at e1.

“I see you’re playing the Mentholyptus Defense,” Landsman says, turning the board to get a better look. “Correspondence game?”

Hertz is crowding Landsman, exhaling his breath of plum brandy, the undernote of herring so oily and sharp you can feel the little bones in it. Jostled, Landsman tips the whole thing to the ground with a clatter.

“You were always the master of that move,” Hertz says. “The Landsman Gambit.”

“Shit, Uncle Hertz, I’m sorry.” Landsman crouches and gropes around under the old man’s bed for the pieces.

“Don’t worry about it!” the old man says. “It’s all right. It wasn’t a game, I was just fooling around. I don’t play by mail anymore. I live and die by the sacrifice. I like to dazzle them with some crazy, beautiful combination. Tough to do that on a postcard. Do you recognize the set?”

Hertz helps Landsman return the pieces to their box, also maple, lined with green velveteen. The inhaler he slips into a pocket.

“No,” Landsman says. Landsman is the one, executing the Landsman Gambit during a tantrum many years ago, who cost the White knight its ear.

“What do you think? You gave it to him.”

There are five books stacked on the nightstand by the old man’s bed. A Yiddish translation of Chandler. A French biography of Marcel Duchamp. A paperback attack on the wily agenda of the Third Russian Republic that was popular in the U. S. the year before. A Peterson field guide to marine mammals. And something called Kampf, in the original German, by Emanuel Lasker,

The toilet flushes, and there is the sound of Berko dashing water over his hands.

“Suddenly, everybody’s reading Lasker,” Landsman says. He picks up the book, heavy, black, the title embossed in gilded black letter, and is mildly surprised to discover that it has nothing to do with chess. No diagrams, no figurine queens and horses, just page after page of thorny German prose. “So the man was a philosopher, too?”

“He considered it his true calling. Even though he was a genius at chess and higher mathematics. I’m sorry to say, as a philosopher, maybe he wasn’t such a genius. Why, who else is reading Emanuel Lasker? Nobody reads Emanuel Lasker anymore.”

“That’s even more true now than it was a week ago,” Berko says, coming out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a toweL He gravitates naturally toward the dinner table. The big wood-block table is laid for three. The plates are enameled tin, the glasses plastic, and the knives have bone handles and fearsome blades, the kind you might use to cut the liver still throbbing from the abdomen of a bear. There is a pitcher of iced tea and an enameled pot of coffee. The meal that Hertz Shemets has prepared is plentiful, hot, and heavily weighted toward moose.

“Moose chili,” the old man says. “I ground the meat last fall, I have it in vacuum bags in the deep freeze. Killed the moose, too, of course. A cow, a thousand pounder. The chili I made today, the beans are kidney beans, and I threw in a can of turtle beans I had lying around. Only I wasn’t sure it would be enough, so I heated up a few more things I had in the freezer. There’s a quiche lorraine- that’s egg, naturally, with tomato and bacon, the bacon is moose bacon. I smoked it myself.”

“The eggs are moose eggs,” Berko says, duplicatin perfectly his father’s mildly pompous tone.

The old man points to a white glass bowl piled high with uniform meatballs in a reddish-brown gravy. “Swedish meatballs,” he says. “Moose meatballs. And then some cold roast moose, if anybody wants a sandwich. I baked the bread myself. And the mayonnaise is homemade. I can’t abide mayonnaise from a jar.”

They sit down to eat with the lonely old man. Years ago his dining room was a lively region, the only table in these divided islands at which Indians and Jews regularly sat down together to eat good food without rancor. There was California wine to drink and be expatiated upon by the old man. Silent types, hard cases, and the odd special agent or lobbyist from Washington mingled with totem carvers, chess bums, and Native fishermen. Hertz submitted to the raillery of Mrs. Pullman. He was the kind of domineering old cutthroat who chose to marry a woman who would knock him down a peg or two in front of his friends. Somehow it only made him look stronger.

“I put in a call or two,” Uncle Hertz says after several minutes of chess-deep concentration on his food. “After you called to say you were coming down.”

“Did you?” Berko says. “A call or two.”

“That’s right.” Hertz has a way of smiling, or of producing a smile-like effect, where he lifts only the upper lip on the right side of his mouth, and only for half a second, flashing one yellow incisor. It looks like someone has caught him by the lip on an invisible fish hook and is giving the line a sharp tug. “From what I gather, you have been making a nuisance of yourself, Meyerle. Unprofessional conduct. Erratic behavior. Lost your badge and gun.”

Whatever else he may have been, for forty years Uncle Hertz was a sworn officer of the law with a federal shield in his billfold. Though he undersells it, the note of reproach is unmistakable. He turns to his son. “And I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says. “Eight weeks away from the void. Two children and, mazel tov and kaynahora, a third on the way.”

Berko doesn’t bother to ask how his father knows that Ester-Malke is pregnant. It would only feed the old man’s vanity. He just nods and puts away a few more moose meatballs. They are good, the meatballs, moist with hints of rosemary and smoke.

“You are right,” Berko says. “It’s madness. And I don’t say that I love or care for that buffalo there, look at him, with no badge and no gun, bothering people and running around with frostbite on his kneecaps, any more than I do for my wife or my children, because I don’t. Or that it makes any sense for me to take risks with their future on his behalf, because it doesn’t.” As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation. “But if we’re talking about voids, what can I say, that’s not the type of circumstances I want to be facing without Meyer around.”

“You see how loyal,” Uncle Hertz tells Landsman. “That’s just how I felt about your father, may his name be for a blessing, but the coward left me high and dry.”

His tone aspires to lightness, but the subsequent blot of silence seems to darken the remark. They chew their food, and life feels long and ponderous. Hertz gets up and pours himself another shot. He stands by the window, watching the sky that is like a mosaic pieced together from the broken shards of a thousand mirrors, each one tinted a different shade of gray. The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light. Uncle Hertz has always been the most competent, self-assured man Landsman knows, neat as an origami airplane, a quick paper needle folded with precision, impervious to turbulence. Accurate, methodical, dispassionate. There were always hints of shadow, of irrationality and violence, but they were containcd behind the wall of Hertz’s mysterious Indian adventures, hidden on the far side of the Line, covered over by him with the careful backward kicks of an animal concealing its spoor. But now a memory surfaces in Landsman from the days following his father’s death, of Uncle Hertz sitting crumpled like a wad of tissue in a corner of the kitchen on Adler Street, shirt tails hanging, no order to his hair, shirt misbuttoned, the dwindling contents of a bottle of slivovitz on the kitchen table beside him marking like a barometer the plummeting atmosphere of his grief.

“We have ourselves a puzzle, Uncle Hertz,” says Landsman. “Is why we’re here.”

“That and the mayonnaise,” Berko says.

“A puzzle.” The old man turns from the window, his eyes hard again and wary. “I hate puzzles.”

“We’re not asking you to solve any,” Berko says. “Don’t take that tone with me, John Bear,” the old man snaps. “I don’t care for it.”

“Tone?” Berko says, his voice stacked like a measure of musical score with a half-dozen tones, a chamber ensemble of insolence, resentment, sarcasm, provocation, innocence, and surprise. “Tone?”

Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one’s relatives. It’s an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the tim of Berko’s first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes, wheneve they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

“There’s something we’re trying to explain,” Landsman begins again. “A situation. And there are aspects of the situation that reminded us of you.”

Uncle Hertz pours another shot of slivovitz, carries it to the table, and sits down. “Start from the start,” he says.

“The start is a dead junkie in my hotel.”

“Aha.”

“You’ve been following it.”

“I heard something on the radio,” the old man says. “Maybe I read a little something in the paper, too.” He always blames the newspapers for the things he knows. “He was the son of Heskel Shpilman. The one they had such high hopes for when he was a kid.”

“He was murdered,” Landsman says. “Contrary to what you might have read. And when he died, he was in hiding. He’d been in hiding, from one thing and another, for most of his life, but when he died, I think he was trying to duck some men he had run out on. I was able to trace his movements back to the Yakovy airport last April. He showed up there the day before Naomi died.”

“This has something to do with Naomi?”

“These men who were looking for Shpilman. And who, we’re assuming, killed him. Last April they hired Naomi to fly the guy out to a farm they run, supposed to be some kind of a therapy facility for troubled kids. Out in Peril Strait. But when he got there, he panicked. He wanted out. He came to Naomi to help him, and she sneaked him out of there and flew him back to civilization. To Yakovy. She died the next day.”

“Peril Strait?” the old man says. “These are Natives, then? You’re saying Indians killed Mendel Shpilman?”

“No,” Berko says. “These men with the youth rehab. On a good thousand acres just north of the village there. It seems to have been built with money from American Jews. The people running it are yids. And as far as we can tell, the place is a front for their real operation.”

“Which is what? Growing marijuana?”

“Well, for one thing, they have a herd of Ayrshire dairy cows,” Berko says. “Maybe a hundred head of them.”

“That’s for one thing.”

“For another, they seem to be running some kind of paramilitary training facility. Their leader might be an old man, a Jew. Wilfred Dick got a look at him, he was there. But the face meant nothing to Dick. Whoever he is, he seems to have ties to the Verbovers, or at least to Aryeh Baronshteyn. But we don’t know why or what kind.”

“There was an American there, too,” Landsman says. “He flew in for a meeting with Baronshteyn and these other mysterious Jews. They all seemed a little worried about the American. They seemed to think he might not be happy with them or how they were running things.”

The old man gets up from the table and goes to a hutch that separates his eating from his sleep. From a humidor he takes a cigar and rolls it between his palms. He rolls it a long time, back and forth, until it seems to disappear from his thoughts entirely.

“I hate puzzles,” he says finally.

“We know that,” Berko says.

“You know that.”

Uncle Hertz runs the cigar back and forth under his nose, inhaling deeply, eyes closed, taking pleasure not only in the smell, it seems to Landsman, but in the coolness of the smooth leaf against the flesh of his nostrils.

“This is my first question,” Uncle Hertz says, opening his eyes. “Maybe my only one.”

They wait for the question while he trims the cigar, fits it to his narrow lips, works them up and down.

“What color were the cows?” he says.