The Yiddish Policemen's Union

36

“There was a red one,” Berko says, slow, a bit grudging, like he missed it when the coin got palmed, even though he was staring hard at the magician’s hands.

“All red?” the old man says. “Red from horn to tail?”

“She was disguised,” Berko says. “Sprayed with some kind of white pigment. I can’t think of any reason you’d want to do that unless you had something about her that you wanted to hide. Such as that she was, you know.” He winces. “Without blemish.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” the old man says.

“Who are these people, Uncle Hertz? You know, don’t you?”

“Who are these people?” Hertz Shemets says. “They’re yids. Yids with a scheme. I know that’s a tautology.”

He can’t seem to make up his mind to light the cigar. He sets it down, picks it up, sets it down again. Landsman gets the feeling he’s weighing a secret rolled tight in its dark-veined leaf. A course of action, a tricky exchange of pieces.

“All right,” Hertz says at last, “so I lied: Here’s another question for you. Meyer, maybe you remember a yid, when you were a little boy, he used to come around the Einstein Chess Club. He used to joke with you, you had quite a thing for him. Yid named Litvak.”

“I saw Alter Litvak the other day,” Landsman says.

“At the Einstein.”

“Did you?”

“He lost his voice.”

“Yes, he was in an accident, his throat was crushed by the wheel. His wife was killed. It was out on Roosevelt Boulevard, where they planted all those chokecherry trees. The only one that didn’t die, that was the tree they hit. The only chokecherry tree in the Sitka District.”

“I remember when they planted those trees,” Landsman says. “For the World’s Fair.”

“Don’t get wistful on me,” the old man says. “God knows I’ve had my fill of wistful Jews, starting with myself. You never see a wistful Indian.”

“That’s because they hide them when they hear you’re coming around,” Berko says. “The women and wistful Indians. Shut up and tell us about Litvak.”

“He used to work for me,” Hertz says. “For many, many years.”

His tone goes flat, and Landsman is surprised to see that his uncle is angry. Like all Shemetses, Hertz was handed down a hot temper, but it served him ill in his work, so at some point he had it killed.

“Alter Litvak was a federal agent?” Landsman says.

“No. He was not. The man has not drawn an official government salary, as far as I know, since he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army thirty-five years ago.”

“Why are you so angry at him?” Berko says, watching his father through the lantern slits of his eyes.

Hertz is startled by the question, tries to hide it. “I never get angry,” he says. “Except with you, son.” He smiles. “So he still goes to the Einstein. I didn’t know that. He was always more of a cardplayer than a patzer. He did better in games that favor the bluff. Deceit. Concealment.”

Landsman remembers the pair of tough-looking young men whom Litvak introduced as his grandnephews. There was one of them in the woods at Peril Strait, he realizes, driving the Ford Caudillo with the shadow in the backseat. The shadow of a man who didn’t want Landsman to get a look at his face.

“He was there,” Landsman tells Berko. “At Peril Strait. He was the mystery man in the car.”

“What did Litvak do for you?” Berko says. “For all those many, many years?”

Hertz hesitates, looking from Berko to Landsman and back. “Some of this, some of that. All strictly off the books. He had a number of useful skills. Alter Litvak may be the most talented man I ever met. He understands systems and control. He is patient and methodical. He used to be incredibly strong. A good pilot, a trained mechanic. Wonderful at orienteering. Very effective as a teacher. As a trainer. Shit.”

He stares down in mild wonder at the snapped halves of his cigar, one in each hand. He drops them onto his plate of sauce streaks and spreads a napkin over the evidence of his emotion. “The yid betrayed me,” he says. “To that reporter. He collected evidence on me for years and then handed it all over to Brennan.”

“Why would he do that?” Berko says. “If he was your yid?”

“I really can’t answer your question.” Hertz shakes his head, hating puzzles, faced for the rest of his life with this one. “Money, maybe, though I never knew him to take an interest in the stuff. Certainly not his beliefs. Litvak has no beliefs. No convictions. No loyalty except to the men who serve under him. He saw how things were going when this bunch took over in Washington. He knew that I was through before I knew it myself. I suppose he decided the moment was ripe. Maybe he got tired of working for me, he wanted the job for himself. Even after the Americans got rid of me and shut down their official operations, they still needed a man in Sitka. They really couldn’t find anyone better for their money than Alter Litvak. Maybe he just got tired of losing to me at chess. Maybe he saw a chance to beat me, and he took it. But he was never my yid. Permanent Status never meant anything to him. Neither, I’m certain, does the cause he’s working for now. ”

“The red heifer,” Berko says.

“And so the idea, forgive me,” Landsman says, “but talk me through it. Fine, you have a red heifer without a single flaw. And somehow or other, you get it over to Jerusalem.”

“Then you kill it,” Berko says. “And you burn it to ashes, and you make a paste of the ashes, and you dab a little of that on your priests. Otherwise they can’t go into the Sanctuary, in the Temple, because they are unclean.” He checks with his father. “Do I have that right?”

“More or less.”

“Okay, but here’s the thing I don’t get. Isn’t there what’s it called?” Landsman says. “That mosque. On the hill there where the Temple used to be?”

“It isn’t a mosque, Meyerle. It’s a shrine,” Hertz says. “Qubbat As-Sakhrah. The Dome of the Rock. The third holiest site in Islam. Built in the seventh cen tury by Abd al-Malik, on the precise site of the two Temples of the Jews. The spot where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, where Jacob saw the ladder reaching up to heaven. The navel of the world. Yes. If you wanted to rebuild the Temple and reinstitute the old rituals, as a way of hastening the coming of Messiah, then you would need to do something about the Dome of the Rock . It’s in the way.”

“Bombs,” Berko says with an exaggerated nonchalance. “Explosives. That part of the package with Alter Litvak?”

“Demolitions,” the old man says. He reaches for his drink, but it’s gone. “Yes, the yid is an expert.”

Landsman pushes back from the table and stands up. He gets his hat from the door. “We need to get back,” he says. “We need to talk to somebody. We need to tell Bina.”

He opens his phone, but there’s no signal this far out from Sitka. He goes to the telephone on the wall, but Bina’s number kicks him right over to voice mail. “You need to find Alter Litvak,” he tells her. “Find him and hold him and do not let him go.”

When he turns back to the table, he sees father and son still sitting there; Berko is putting some intense question to Hertz Shemets without saying anything. Berko has his hands folded in his lap like a well-behaved child, but he is not a well-behaved child, and if he keeps his fingers intertwined, then it is only to prevent them from enacting some mischief or harm. After an interval that feels to Landsman like a very long time, Uncle Hertz looks down.

“The prayer house at St. Cyril,” Berko says. “The riots.”

“The St. Cyril riots,” Hertz Shemets agrees. “God damn it.”

“Berko-”

“God damn it! Indians always said it was the Jews that blew it up.”

“You have to understand the pressure we were under,” Hertz says. “At the time.”

“Oh, I do,” Berko says. “Believe me. The balancing act. The fine line.”

“Those Jews, those fanatics, the people moving into the disputed areas. They were endangering the status of the entire District. Confirming the Americans’ worst fears about what we would do if they gave us Permanent Status.”

“Uh-huh,” Berko says. “Yeah. Okay. And what about Mom? Was she endangering the District, too?”

Uncle Hertz speaks then, or rather the wind emerges from his lungs through the gates of his teeth in a way that resembles human speech. He looks down at his lap and makes the sound again, and Landsman realizes that he’s saying he’s sorry. Speaking a language in which he has never been schooled.

“You know, I think I must have always known,” Berko says, getting up from the table. He takes his hat and coat from the hook. “Because I never liked you. Not from the first minute, you bastard. Come on, Meyer.”

Landsman follows his partner out. Going through the door, he has to get out of the way so that Berko can go back in. Berko tosses aside his hat and coat. He hits himself in the head twice, with both hands at once. Then he crushes an invisible sphere, roughly the size of his father’s cranium, between his outspread fingers.

“I tried my whole life,” he says finally. “I mean, fuck, look at me!” He snatches the skullcap from the back of his head and holds it up, contemplating it with a sudden horror as if it’s the flesh of his scalp. He flicks it toward the old man. It hits Hertz on the nose and falls onto the pile with the napkin, the broken cigar, the moose gravy. “Look at this shit!” He grabs the front of his shirt and yanks it open in a skitter of but tons. He exposes the homely white panel of his fringed four-corners, like the world’s flimsiest flak jacket, his holy white Kevlar, trimmed with a stripe of sea-creature blue. “I hate this fucking thing.” The four-corners comes up over his head, and he shrugs and whips it off, which leaves him in a white cotton tee. “Every damn day of my life, I get up in the morning and put this shit on and pretend to be something I’m not. Something I’ll never be. For you.”

“I never asked you to observe the religion,” the old man says, not looking up. “I don’t think I ever put any kind of—”

“It has nothing to do with religion,” Berko says. “It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers.”

It comes through the mother, of course, one’s being or not being a Jew. But Berko knows that. He’s known it since the day he moved to Sitka. He sees it every time he looks into a mirror.

“It’s all nonsense,” the old man goes on, a little mumbly, half to himself “A slave religion. Tying yourself up. Bondage gear! I’ve never worn that nonsense in my life.”

“No?” Berko says.

It catches Landsman off guard, how quick and how massive is the transfer of Berko Shemets from the doorway of the cabin to the dining table. Before Landsman can quite understand what is happening, Berko has jerked the ritual undergarment down over the old man’s head. He cradles the head in one arm while, with the other, he winds the knotted fringes around and around, defining in fine strands of wool the contours of the old man’s face. It’s as if he’s packing a statue for shipment. The old man kicks, rakes at the air with his fingernails.

“You never wore one, eh?” Berko says. “You never fucking wore one! Try mine! Try mine, you prick!”

“Stop.” Landsman goes to the rescue of the man whose addiction to tactics of sacrifice led, maybe not predictably but directly, to the death of Laurie Jo Bear. “Berko, come on. Stop now.” He takes hold of Berko’s elbow and drags him aside, and when he’s got himself between the two, he starts shoving the big man toward the door.

“Okay.” Berko throws up his hands and lets Landsman push him a couple of feet in that direction. “Okay, I’m done. Get off me, Meyer.”

Landsman eases up, letting go of his partner. Berko tucks his tee into his trousers and starts to button his shirt, but all the buttons have flown away. He leaves it, smooths down the black badger of his hair with a wide palm, stoops to retrieve his hat and coat from the floor, and walks out. Night comes curling with the fog into the house on its stilts above the water.

Landsman turns back to the old man, who is sitting there with his head shrouded in the four-corners, like a hostage who cannot be permitted to see the faces of his captors.

“You want some help, Uncle Hertz?” Landsman says.

“I’m fine,” the old man says, his voice faint, muffled by the cloth. “Thank you.”

“You just want to sit there like that?”

The old man doesn’t reply. Landsman puts on his hat and walks out.

They are just getting into the car when they hear the gunshot, a boom that in the darkness maps the mountains, lights them up with reflected echoes, then fades away.

“Fuck,” Berko says. He is back inside the house before Landsman has even reached the stairs. By the time Landsman runs in, Berko has crouched down beside his father, who has assumed a strange attitude on the floor beside his bed, a hurdler’s stride, one leg drawn to his chest and the other flung out behind him. In his right hand, he keeps a loose grip on a black snub-nosed revolver; in his left hand, the ritual fringe. Berko straightens his father out, rolls him over onto his back, and feels for a pulse at the throat. There is a slick red patch on the right side of the old man’s forehead, just above the corner of his eye. Scorched hair matted with blood. A poor shot, from the look of it.

“Oh, shit,” Berko says. “Oh, shit, old man. You fucked it up.”

“He fucked it up,” Landsman agrees.

“Old man!” Berko shouts, and then he lowers his voice to a guttural rasp and croons something, a word or two, in the language that he left behind.

They stop the bleeding and pack the wound. Landsman looks around for the bullet and finds the worm hole that it chewed through the plywood wall.

“Where’d he get this?” Landsman says, picking up the gun. It’s a homely thing, worn at the edges, an old machine. “The .38 Detective Special?”

“I don’t know. He has a lot of guns. He likes guns.

That’s the one thing we had in common.”

“I think it might be the gun that Melekh Gaystik used in the Cafe Einstein.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Berko says. He shoulders the burden of his father, and they carry him down to the car and lay him in the backseat on a pile of towels. Landsman switches on the undercover siren that he has used maybe twice in five years. Then they drive back up over the mountain.

There is an urgent-care center at Nayeshtat, but many have died there so they decide to take him all the way in to Sitka General. Along the way, Berko calls his wife. He explains to her, not very coherently, that his father and a man named Alter Litvak were indirectly responsible for his mother’s death during the worst Indian-Jew violence in the sixty-year history of the District, and that his father has shot himself in the head. He tells her that they are going to dump the old man at the Sitka General ER, because he is a policeman, God damn it, and he has a job to do, and because the old man can go and die for all he cares. Ester-Malke appears to accept this project as stated, and Berko hangs up the phone. They disappear into a zone without cellular telephone coverage for ten or fifteen minutes, and when they emerge from it, having said nothing, they are nearly to the city limits and the Shoyfer is ringing.

“No,” Berko says, and then, more angrily, “No.”

He listens to his wife’s reasoning for a little under a minute. Landsman has no idea what she’s saying’ to him, whether she’s preaching from the text of profesional conduct, or of common decency, or of forgiveness, or of the duty of a son to a father that transcends or precedes them all. In the end Berko shakes his head. He looks over the backseat at the old Jew stretched out there. “All right.” He closes the telephone.

“You can drop me off at the hospital,” he says, sounding defeated. “Just call me when you find that fucking Litvak.”