The Yiddish Policemen's Union

44

A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue. At 12: 03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stucco of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, may be a shammes, but he is no stone.

Driving onto Verbov Island, coming west on Avenue 225, he and Bina catch strong whiffs at every corner of the bubbling tzimmes that is cooking up all over town. The smell blows more intense and richer with both joy and panic on this island than anywhere else. Signs and banners announce the imminent proclamation of the kingdom of David and exhort the pious to prepare for the return to Eret Yisroel. Many of the signs look spontaneous, sprayed in dripping characters on bed linens and sheets of butcher paper. In the side streets, crowds of women and handlers yell at one another, trying to hold down or hyperinflate the price of luggage, concentrated laundry soap, sunscreen, batteries, protein bars, bolts of tropical-weight wool. Deeper into the alleys, Landsman imagines, in the basements and doorways, a quieter market burns like a banked fire: prescription drugs, gold, automatic weapons. They drive past huddled groups of street-corner geniuses spinning commentary on which families are to be given which contracts when they reach the Holy Land, which of the wiseguys will run the policy rackets, the cigarette smuggling, the gun franchises. For the first time since Gaystik took the championship, since the World’s Fair, maybe for the first time in sixty years, or so it feels to Landsman, something is actually happening in the Sitka District. What that something will turn out to be, not even the most learned of the sidewalk rebbes has the faintest idea.

But when they reach the heart of the island, the faithful replica of the lost heart of old Verbov, there is no hint of the end of exile, rampant price gouging, messianic revolution. Down at the wide end of the platz, the house of the Verbover rebbe stands looking solid and eternal as a house in a dream. Smoke hastens like a remittance from its lavish chimney, only to be waylaid by the wind. The morning’s Rudashevskys loiter darkly at their posts, and on the ridge of the house, the black rooster perches, coattails flapping, with his semiautomatic mandolin. Around the platz, women describe the ordinary circuits of their day, pushing strollers, trailing girls and boys too young for school. Here and there they stop to knit and unravel the skeins of breath that tangle them together. Scraps of newsprint, leaves, and dust get up impromptu games of dreydl in the archways of the houses. A pair of men in long coats leans into the wind, making for the rebbe’s house, sidelocks swinging. For the first time the traditional complaint, tantamount to a creed or at least a philosophy, of the Sitka Jew — Nobody gives a damn about us, stuck up here between Hoonah and Hotzeplotz — strikes Landsman as having been a blessing these past sixty years, and not the affliction they had all, in their backwater of geography and history, supposed.

“Who else is going to want to live in this chicken coop?” Bina says, echoing his thought in her own fashion, zipping her orange parka up past her chin. She slams the door of Landsman’s car and trades ritual glares with a gathering of women across the lane from the boundary maven’s shop. “This place is like a glass eye, it’s a wooden leg, you can’t pawn it.”

In front of the somber barn, the bachelor torments a rag with a broom handle. The rag is sloshed in solvent with a psychotropic odor, and the boy has been exiled to three hopeless islands of automobile grease on the cement. He jabs and caresses the rag with the end of his pole. When he takes note of Bina, he does so with a satisfying mixture of horror and awe. If Bina were Messiah come to redeem him in an orange parka, the expression on the pisher’s face would be more or less the same. His gaze gets stuck to her, and then he has to detach it with brutal care, like someone removing his tongue from a frozen pump.

“Reb Zimbalist?” Landsman says.

“He’s there,” says the bachelor, nodding toward the door of the shop. “But he’s really busy.”

“As busy as you?”

The bachelor gives the rag another desultory poke.

“I was in the way.” He makes the citation with a flour ish of self-pity, then aims a cheekbone at Bina without implicating any of his other features of his face in the gesture. “She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.”

“See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.”

The bachelor takes a step backward, and the mop handle disappears behind his back as if somehow it might incriminate him. “Are you going to arrest Reb Itzik?” he says.

“Now,” Landsman says, taking a step toward the bachelor, “why would we want to do that?”

One thing about a Yeshiva bachelor, he knows his way around a question.

“How should I know?” he says. “If I was a fancy pants lawyer, tell me, please, would I be standing out here slopping around with a rag on the end of a stick?”

Inside the shop, they have gathered around the big map table, Itzik Zimbalist and his crew, a dozen strapping Jews in yellow coveralls, their chins upholstered with the netted rolls of their beards. The presence of a woman in the shop flits among them like a bothersome moth. Zimbalist is the last to look up from the problem spread out on the table before him. When he sees who has come with the latest thorny question for the boundary maven, he nods and grunts with a suggestion of huffiness, as if Landsman and Bina are late for their appointment.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Bina says, her voice weirdly fluting and unpersuasive in this big male barn. “I’m Inspector Gelbfish.”

“Good morning,” says the boundary maven.

His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull. He rolls up the plan or chart with practiced hands, ties it in a length of cord, and turns to sheath it in the rack, where it disappears among a thousand of its fellows. His movements are those of an old man to whom haste is a forgotten vice. His step is herky-jerk, but his hands mannered and accurate.

“Lunch is over,” he tells the crew, though there is not a trace of food to be seen.

The men hesitate, forming an irregular eruv around the boundary maven, ready to shield him from the secular trouble that stands hung with a couple of badges in their midst.

“Maybe they’d better stick around,” Landsman says. “We might need to talk to them, too.”

“Go wait in the vans,” Zimbalist tells them. “You’re in the way.”

They start across the supply area to the garage. One of the crew turns back, pressing doubtfully at the roll of his beard.

“Seeing as how lunch is over, Reb Itzik,” he says, “is it all right with you if we have our supper now?”

“Eat your breakfast, too,” Zimbalist says. “You’re going to be up all night.”

“Lot of work to do?” Bina says.

“Are you kidding? It’s going to take them years to pack up this mess. I’m going to need a cargo container.”

He goes to the electric tea kettle and begins to set up three glasses. “Nu, Landsman, I heard maybe you lost the use of that badge of yours for a little while,” he says.

“You hear a lot, don’t you?” Landsman says.

“I hear what I hear.”

“Have you ever heard that people dug tunnels all under the Untershtat, just in case the Americans turned on us and decided to stage an aktion?”

“I’d say it rings a bell,” Zimbalist says. “Now that you mention it.”

“So you wouldn’t happen to possess, by any chance, a plan of those tunnels? Showing how they run, where they connect, et cetera?”

The old man still has his back to them, tearing open the paper envelopes that hold the tea bags. “If I didn’t,” he says, “what kind of a boundary maven would I be?”

“So if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get somebody, say, into or out of the basement of the Hotel Blackpool on Max Nordau Street without being seen. Could you do that?”

“Why would I want to do that?” Zimbalist says. “I wouldn’t board my mother-in-law’s Chihuahua in that fleabag.”

He unplugs the kettle before the water has boiled and soaks the tea bags one-two-three. He puts the glasses on a tray with a pot of jam and three small spoons, and they sit down at his desk in the corner. The tea bags surrender their color unwillingly to the tepid water. Landsman hands around papiroses and lights them. From the vans come the sounds of men shouting, or laughing, Landsman isn’t quite sure.

Bina walks around the workshop, admiring the mass and variety of string, stepping carefully to avoid a tumbleweed of knotted wire, gray rubber with a blood red copper stump.

“Ever make a mistake?” Bina asks the boundary maven. “Tell someone he can carry where he’s not allowed to carry? Draw a line where no line needs to be drawn?”

“I don’t dare to make mistakes,” Zimbalist says. “Carrying on the Sabbath, it’s a serious violation. People start thinking they can’t rely on my maps, I’m through.”

“We still don’t have a ballistic fingerprint on the gun that killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says with care. “But you saw the wound, Meyer.”

“I did.”

“Did it look like it was made by, say, a Glock, or a TEC-9, or any kind of an automatic?”

“In my humble opinion,” Landsman says, “no.”

“You spent a lot of quality time with Litvak’s crew and their firearms.”

“And loved every minute.”

“Did you see anything in their toybox that was not an automatic?”

“No,” Landsman says. “No, Inspector, I did not.”

“What does that prove?” Zimbalist says, easing his tender bottom down onto the inflatable-donut cushion of his desk chair. “More importantly, why should I care?”

“Aside from your general, personal interest in seeing justice done in this matter, of course,” says Bina.

“Aside from that,” Zimbalist says.

“Detective Landsman, do you think Alter Litvak killed Shpilman or ordered him killed?”

Landsman looks right into the boundary maven’s face and says, “He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t just need Mendel. The yid had started to believe in Mendel.”

Zimbalist blinks and fingers the blade of his nose, thinking this over, as if it is the rumor of a newborn creek that will force him to redraw one of his maps.

“I do not buy it,” he concludes. “Anybody else. Everybody else. Not that yid.”

Landsman doesn’t bother to argue. Zimbalist reaches for his tea. A vein of rust twists in the water like the ribbon in a glass marble.

“What would you do if something you had been telling everybody was one of the lines on your map,” Bina says, “turned out to be, say, a crease? A hair. A stray pen mark. Something like that. Would you tell anyone? Would you go to the rebbe? Would you admit that you made a mistake?”

“It would never happen.”

“But if it did. Would you be able to live with your self?”

“If you knew you had sent an innocent man to prison for many years, Inspector Gelbfish, for the rest of his life, would you be able to live with yourself?”

“It happens all the time,” Bina says. “But here I am.”

“Well, then,” the maven says. “I guess you know how I feel. By the way, I use the term ‘innocent’ very loosely.”

“As do I,” says Bina. “No doubt about it.”

“My whole life, I knew only one man I would use that word to describe.”

“You’re ahead of me, then,” Bina says.

“Me, too,” says Landsman, missing Mendel Shpilman as if they had been, for many years, the best of friends. “I am very sorry to say.”

“You know what people are saying?” Zimbalist says. “These geniuses I dwell among? They’re saying Mendel’s coming back.That it’s all happening just the way it was written. That when they get to Jerusalem, Mendel is going to be there, waiting for them. Ready to rule over Israel.”

Tears start to run down the boundary maven’s sallow cheeks. After a moment Bina removes a handkerchief from her bag, clean and pressed. Zimbalist takes it and looks at it for a moment. Then he blows a great tekiah on his shofar of a nose.

“I would like to see him again,” he says. “I will admit it.”

Bina hoists her bag to her shoulder, and it resumes its steady mission to drag her down. “Get your things together, Mr. Zimbalist.”

The old man appears startled. He puffs his lips as if trying to light an invisible cigar. He picks up a loop of rawhide thong lying on his desk, ties a knot in it, and puts it down again. Then he picks it up and unties it. “My things,” he says finally. “Are you saying I’m under arrest?”

“No,” Bina says. “But I would like you to come down so that we can talk some more. You might want to call your lawyer.”

“My lawyer,” he says.

“I think you took Alter Litvak out of his hotel room. I think you’ve done something with him, put him on ice, possibly killed him. I’d like to find out.”

“You have no evidence,” Zimbalist says. “You’re just guessing.”

“She has a little evidence,” Landsman says.

“About three feet,” says Bina. “Can you hang a man with three feet of rope, Mr. Zimbalist?”

The maven shakes his head, half irritated, half amused, his poise and his bearings regained. “You’re just wasting my time and yours,” he says. “I have a huge amount of work to do. And you, by your own admission, by your own theory, have not found who ever it was that killed Mendele. So with all due respect, why don’t you just worry about that, all right, and leave me alone? Come back when you’ve caught the supposed actual killer, and I’ll tell you what I know about Litvak, which at the moment, by the way, is officially and everlastingly nothing.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Landsman says.

“All right,” says Bina.

“All right!” Zimbalist says.

Landsman looks at Bina. “All right?”

“We catch whoever killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says, “you give us information. Helpful information about Litvak’s disappearance. If he’s still alive, you give me Litvak.”

“You have a deal,” the boundary maven says. He thrusts out his right claw, all spots and knuckles, and Bina shakes it.

Landsman, feeling stunned, gets up and shakes hands with the boundary maven. Then he follows Bina out of the shop into the waning day, and his shock intensifies when he finds that Bina is crying. Unlike Zimbalist’s, hers are tears of fury.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she says, availing herself of a tissue from her endless stash. “That is the kind of thing you would do.”

“People I know keep having that problem,” Landsman says. “Suddenly acting like me.”

“We’re law officers. We uphold the law.”

“People of the book,” Landsman says. “As it were.”

“Fuck you.”

“Do you want to go back in there and arrest him?” he says. “We can. We have the cable from the tunnel. We can hold him. Start from there.”

She shakes her head. The bachelor on his map of stains is staring at them, hitching up the seat of his black serge trousers and taking it all in. Landsman decides he’d better get her out of there. He puts his arm around her for the first time in three years and ushers her over to the Super Sport, then goes around to his side and climbs in behind the wheel.

“The law,” she says. “I don’t even know what law I’m talking about anymore. Now I’m just making this shit up.”

They sit silently as Landsman wrestles with the perennial detective problem of being obliged to state the obvious.

“I kind of like this new crazy, confused Bina and all,” he says. “But I feel I have to point out that we have no real leads on the Shpilman case. No witnesses. No suspect.”

“Well, then, you and your partner had better fucking get me a suspect,” she says. “Hadn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Let’s go.”

He starts the ignition, puts the Super Sport in gear.

“Hold on,” she says. “What’s that?”

Across the platz, a big black four-by-four pulls up around the east side of the rebbe’s house. Two Rudashevskys get out of it. One goes around to open the rear gate of the vehicle. The other waits at the bottom of the side steps, hands knotted loosely behind him. A moment later, two more Rudashevskys come out of the house, humping several hundred cubic meters of what appears to be hand-painted French luggage. Quickly and with little regard for the laws of solid geometry, the four Rudashevskys manage to fit all of the trunks and bags into the back of the four-by-four.

Once they have accomplished that feat, a big chunk of the house itself breaks off and falls into their arms, wearing a gorgeous fawn-colored alpaca coat. The Verbover rebbe does not look up, or back, or around at the world he rebuilt and is now abandoning. He lets the Rudashevskys do their quantum origami on him, folding him and his canes into the backseat of the four-by-four. The yid just joins his luggage and rolls on.

o Fifty-five seconds later, a second four-by-four pulls up, and two women in long dresses, heads covered, are helped into the back along with their city of baggage and a number of children. The process is repeated with females and children and black four-by-fours for the next eleven minutes.

“I hope they have a very big airplane,” Landsman says.

“I didn’t see her,” Bina says. “Did you see her?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see Big Shprintzl, either.” Half a second later, Bina’s Shoyfer rings.

“Gelbfish. Yes. We did wonder. Yes. I understand.”

She snaps the phone shut. “Drive around the back of the house,” she says. “She saw your car.”

Landsman guides the Super Sport through a narrow alley and into a courtyard behind the rebbe’s house. Apart from the car, there is nothing that would have been out of place a hundred years ago. Stone flags, stucco walls, leaded glass, a long half-timbered gallery. The flags are slick, and water drips from a row of potted ferns that hang from the underside of the gallery.

“She’s coming out?”

Bina doesn’t answer, and after a moment, a blue wooden door opens in a low wing of the great high house. The wing is set at a crooked angle to the rest of the building, and it sags with picturesque accuracy. Batsheva Shpilman is still dressed more or less for a funeral, her head and face wrapped in a long, sheer veil. She doesn’t cross the gap of perhaps eight feet separating her from the car; she just stands on the doorstep with the faithful bulk of Shprintzl Rudashevsky loomi ng in the shadows behind her.

Bina rolls down the window on her side. “You aren’t leaving?” she says.

“Did you catch him?”

Bina doesn’t play games or act stupid. She just shakes her head.

“Then I’m not leaving.”

“It might take a while. It might take longer than we really have.”

“I certainly hope not,” says Mendel Shpilman’s mother. “That man Zimbalist is sending his idiots in their yellow pajamas over here to number every stone in this house so that it can be disassembled and then reassembled in Jerusalem. If I’m still here in two weeks, I’m going to be sleeping in Shprintzl’s garage.”

“It would be my very great honor,” says what is either a very grave talking donkey or Shprintzl Rudashevsky from behind the rebbe’s wife.

“We will catch him,” Bina says. “Detective Landsman just swore me an oath to that effect.”

“I know what his promises are worth,” Mrs. Shpilman says. “So do you.”

“Hey!” Landsman says, but she has already turned and gone back into the crooked little building from which she emerged.

“All right,” Bina says, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get started. What do we do now?”

Landsman taps the wheel, considering his promises and their worth. He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be. The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.

“All day I’ve been craving stuffed cabbage,” he says.