The Yiddish Policemen's Union

41

Landsman pisses away the next twenty-four hours in the hum of a chalk-white room with a milk white carpet on the seventh floor of the Harold Ickes Federal Building on Seward Street.

In teams of two, six men with the variegated surnames of doomed crewmen in a submarine movie rotate in and out of the room in four-hour shifts. One is a black man and one a Latino, and the others are fluid pink giants with haircuts that occupy the neat interval between astronaut and pedophile scoutmaster. Gum chewers, overgrown boys with good manners and Bible-school smiles. In each of them at moments Landsman sniffs out the diesel heart of a policeman, but he is baffled by the fairings of their southern and gentile glamour. Despite the smoke screen of back talk that Landsman puts up, they make him feel rattletrap, a two-stroke old beater.

No one threatens him or tries to intimidate him.

Everyone addresses him by rank, taking care to pronounce Landsman’s name the way he prefers. When Landsman turns surly, flippant, or evasive, the Americans display forbearance and schoolteacher poise. But when Landsman dares to give out with a question of his own, an extinguishing silence rains down like a thousand gallons of water dropped from a plane. The Americans will say nothing about the whereabouts or situation of Detective Shemets or Inspector Gelbfish. They have nothing to say, either, about Alter Litvak’s vanishing act, and they appear never to have heard of Mendel Shpilman or Naomi Landsman. They want to know what Landsman knows, or thinks he knows, about U. S. involvement in the attack on the Qubbat As Sakhrah, and about the perpetrators, principals, ancillaries, and victims of that attack. And they do not want him to know what they know, if anything, about any of that. They have been so well trained in their art that they are deep into the second shift before Landsman realizes that the Americans are asking him the same roughly two dozen questions over and over, inverting and rephrasing and coming at them from odd angles. Their questions are like the fundamental moves of the six different chess pieces, endlessly recombined until they number with the neurons in the brain.

At regular intervals Landsman is provided with terrible coffee and a series of increasingly rigid apricot and cherry Danish. At one point he is shown into a break room and invited to inhabit a sofa. The coffee and Danish rotate in and out of the chalk-white room of Landsman’s brain while he jams his eyes shut and pretends to nap. Then it is time to go back to the steady white noise of the walls, the laminate tabletop, the squeak of vinyl under his ass.

“Detective Landsman.”

He opens his eyes and sees woozy black moire on brown. Landsman’s cheekbone is numb from the pressure of the tabletop against it. He hoists his head, leaving behind a puddle of spit. A sticky filament connects his lip to the table, then snaps.

“Ick,” says Cashdollar. He takes a little package of Kleenex out of the right pocket of his sweater and slides it across the table to Landsman, past an open box of Danish. Cashdollar has on a new sweater, a dark gold cardigan with front panels of coffee-brown suede, leather buttons, suede patches on the elbows. He’s sitting upright on a metal chair, necktie knotted, cheeks smooth, blue eyes softened by attractive jet-pilot wrin kles. His hair is the precise gold of the foil in a package of Broadways. He smiles without enthusiasm or cruelty. Landsman wipes his face and the mess he made on the table during his nap.

“Are you hungry? Would you like a drink?” Landsman says he would like a glass of water. Cashdollar reaches into the left pocket of his sweater and takes out a small bottle of mineral water. He tips it on its side and rolls it across the table to Landsman. He is not a young man, but there is something boyishly serious about the way he aims the bottle and launches it and steers it with body English to its destination. Landsman uncaps the bottle and takes a swallow. He doesn’t really care for mineral water.

“I used to work for a man,” Cashdollar says. “The man who had this job before me. He had a lot of cute catchphrases he liked to drop into a conversation. It’s kind of a common trait among people who do what I do. We come out of the military, you know, we come out of the business world. We tend to like our catchphrases. Shibboleths. That’s a Hebrew word, you know. Judges, Chapter 12. Are you sure you aren’t hungry? I can get you a bag of potato chips. Cup of noodles. There’s a microwave.”

“No, thanks,” Landsman says. “So. Shibboleths.”

“This man, my predecessor. He used to say, ‘We are telling a story, Cashdollar. That’s what we do.” The voice he adopts to quote his former superior is bigger and not as folksy as his own prim tenor twang. More pompous. “ ‘Tell them a story, Cashdollar. That’s all the poor suckers want.’ Only he didn’t say ‘suckers.’ ”

“People who do what you do,” Landsman says. “Meaning what? Sponsor terrorist attacks on Muslim holy places? Start in with the Crusades all over again? Kill innocent women who never did anything but fly their small airplanes and try to help somebody out of a jam once in awhile? Shoot defenseless junkies in the head? Excuse me, I forget what it is you do, you people with your shibboleths.”

“First of all, Detective, we had nothing to do with Menashe Shpilman’s death.” He pronounces Shpilman’s Hebrew name “Men-ashy.” “I was as shocked and puzzled by that as anybody. I never met the fellow, but I know he was a remarkable individual with remarkable abilities, and we are very much worse off without him. How about a cigarette?” He holds out an un opened package of Winstons. “Come on. I know you like to smoke. There you go.” He produces a package of matches and passes them with the Winstons across the table.

“Now, as for your sister, hey, listen. I am so very sorry about your sister. No, I really am. For what it’s worth, and I suppose that’s not a lot, you have my sincere apology on that. That was a bad call made by the man who preceded me in this job, the fellow I was just talking about. And he paid for it. Not with his life, of course.” Cashdollar bares his big square teeth. “Maybe you wish he had. But he paid. He was wrong. The man was wrong about a lot of things. For one, huh-uh, sorry.” He gives his head a gentle shake. “But we aren’t telling a story.”

“No?”

“Huh-uh. The story, Detective Landsman, is telling us. Just like it has done from the beginning. We’re part of the story. You. Me.”

The book of matches comes from a place in Washington, D.C., called Hogate’s Seafood, at Ninth and Maine Avenue, SW. The very restaurant, if he remembers his history, in front of which Delegate Anthony Dimond, prime opponent of the Alaskan Settlement Act, was run down by a taxicab while chasing an errant rum bun into the street.

Landsman strikes a match.

“Jesus?” he says, looking up cross-eyed over the flame.

“Jesus, too.”

“Jesus is okay with me.”

“I’m glad. He’s okay with me, too. And Jesus wasn’t keen on killing, on hurting people, on destruction. I know that. The Qubbat As-Sakhrah was a fine old piece of architecture, and Islam is a venerable religion, and other than the fact that it’s completely mistaken on a fundamental level, I have no quarrel with it per se. I wish there was some way to do this job that didn’t require taking such actions. But sometimes there isn’t. And Jesus knew that. ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ Right? I mean, those are Jesus, words. The man could be fairly harsh when he needed to be.”

“He was kick-ass,” Landsman suggests.

“Yes, he was. Now, you might not credit the fact, but the end times are coming. And I for one very much look forward to seeing them come. But for that to happen, Jerusalem and the Holy Land have to belong to the Jews again. That’s what it says in the Book. Sadly, there is no way to do that without some bloodshed, unfortunately. Without a certain amount of destruction. That’s just what is written, you know? But I am trying very hard, unlike my immediate predecessor, to hold all that down to the absolute minimum. For Jesus’ sake and for the sake of my own soul and all our sakes. To keep things running clean. Hold this operation together until we have it sorted out over there. Lay us down some facts on the ground.”

“You don’t want anybody to know you’re behind it. You people who do what you do.”

“Well, but, that’s kind of our MO, if you know what I mean.”

“And you want me to keep my mouth shut.”

“I know it’s asking a lot.”

“Just until you lay these facts down on Jerusalem. Move some Arabs out and some Verbovers in. Rename a few streets.”

“Just until we get some of that good old critical mass going. Straighten out some of the noses this has put out of joint. And then get busy, you know. Fulfilling what is written.”

Landsman takes a swallow of mineral water. It’s warm and tastes of the inside of the pocket of a cardigan. “I want my gun and my badge,” he says. “And that’s what I want.”

“I love policemen,” Cashdollar says without much enthusiasm. “I really do.” He covers his mouth with one hand and takes a contemplative breath through his nostrils. His hand sports a manicure, but one thumb nail has been gnawed. “It’s going to get awfully Indian around here, mister. Just between you and me. You get your gun and badge back, you don’t stand to hold on to them for very long. Tribal P won’t be hiring too many Jewboys to serve and protect.”

“Maybe not. But they’ll take Berko.”

“They aren’t taking anyone who doesn’t have the paper.”

“Oh, yeah,” Landsman says. “That’s the other thing I want.”

“You’re talking about a lot of paper, Detective Landsman.”

“You need a lot of quiet.”

“Indeed I do,” Cashdollar says.

Cashdollar studies Landsman for a long second or two, and Landsman understands from a certain alertness in the man’s eyes, a look of anticipation, that there is a gun concealed somewhere on Cashdollar’s person and an itch in his finger to go with it. There are more direct ways of keeping Landsman’s mouth shut than buying him off with a gun and some documentation. Cashdollar gets up from the chair and returns it carefully to its place under the table. He starts to work his thumb into his teeth but thinks better of it.

“If I could just get my Kleenex back?”

Landsman tosses the package, but it goes awry, and Cashdollar fumbles the catch. The package of Kleenex splats down into the box of stale Danish, landing in a shiny patch of red jelly. Anger opens a seam in Cashdollar’s placid gaze, through which you can see the banished shades of monsters and aversions. The last thing he wants, Landsman remembers, is any hint of a mess. Cashdollar tweezes a Kleenex from the package and uses it to wipe the package off, then tucks the rest back into the safety of his right pocket. He fidgets the bottom button of his sweater back through its button hole, and in the brief tug of woolen waistband over hip, Landsman spots the bulge of the sholem.

“Your partner,” he tells Landsman, “has a great deal to lose. A very great deal. So does your ex-wife. A fact that they both recognize all too well. Maybe it’s time you came to the same conclusion about yourself.”

Landsman considers the things that remain his to lose: a porkpie hat. A travel chess set and a Polaroid picture of a dead messiah. A boundary map of Sitka, profane, ad hoc, encyclopedic, crime scenes and low dives and chokeberry brambles, printed on the tangles of his brain. Winter fog that blankets the heart, summer afternoons that stretch endless as arguments among Jews. Ghosts of Imperial Russia traced in the onion dome of St. Michael’s Cathedral, and of Warsaw in the rocking and sawing of a cafe violinist. Canals, fishing boats, islands, stray dogs, canneries, dairy restaurants. The neon marquee of the Baranof Theatre reflected on wet asphalt, colors running like watercolor as you come out of a showing of Welles’s Heart of Darkness, which you have just seen for the third time, with the girl of your dreams on your arm.

“Fuck what is written,” Landsman says. “You know what?” All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He’s tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. “I don’t care what is written. I don’t care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son’s throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don’t care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag.”

He sits down. He lights another cigarette.

“Fuck you,” Landsman concludes. “And fuck Jesus, too, he was a pussy.”

“Tick a lock, Landsman,” Cashdollar says softly, miming the twist of a key in the hole of his mouth.