The Yiddish Policemen's Union

7

For twenty-seven years Sitka Central has been temporarily housed in eleven modular buildings in a vacant lot behind the old Russian orphanage. Rumor holds that the modulars began life as a Bible college in Slidell, Louisiana. They are windowless, low-ceilinged, flimsy, and cramped. The visitor finds, packed into the Homicide modular, a reception area, an office for each of the two detective inspectors, a shower stall with a toilet and sink, a squad room (four cubicles, four chairs, four telephones, a chalkboard, and a row of mail slots), an interrogation hotbox, and a break room. The break room comes equipped with a coffee brewer and a small refrigerator. The break room has also long housed a thriving colony of spores that, at a point in the remote past, spontaneously evolved the form and appearance of a love seat. But when Landsman and Berko pull into the gravel lot by the Homicide modular, a pair of Filipino custodians are lugging out the monstrous fungus.

“It’s moving,” Berko says.

People have been threatening for years to get rid of the sofa, but it is a shock to Landsman to see it finally on its way. Enough of a shock that it takes him a second or two to register the woman standing alongside the steps. She is holding a black umbrella and wearing a bright orange parka with a blazing dyed-green ruff of synthetic fur. Her right arm is raised, index finger extended toward the trash bins, like a painting of the angel Michael casting Adam and Eve from the Garden. A lock of corkscrewing red hair has sprung free of the green fur ruff and dangles down over her face. This is a chronic problem for her. When she is kneeling to examine a doubtful stain on the floor of a crime scene, or studying a photograph under a loupe, she has to blow that lock of hair out of the way with a sharp, irritated puff of breath.

Now she is scowling at the Super Sport as Landsman cuts the engine. She lowers her all-banishing hand. From this distance, it looks to Landsman as if the lady is three or four cups the worse for strong coffee, and somebody has already pissed her off once this morning, maybe twice. Landsman was married to her for twelve years, working the same Homicide squad for five. He is sensitive to her moods.

“Tell me you didn’t know about this,” he says to Berko, cutting the engine.

“I still don’t know about it,” Berko says. “I’m hoping if I close my eyes for a second and then open them again, it’s going to turn out not to be true.”

Landsman tries it. “No dice,” he says with regret, and gets out of the car. “Give us a minute.”

“Please, take all the time you want.”

Landsman requires ten seconds to cross the gravel lot. Bina looks happy to see him for a count of three, followed by a two-count of looking anxious and lovely. She plays out the last five seconds by looking ready to mix it up with Landsman, if that’s how he wants things to go.

“What the fuck?” Landsman says, hating to disappoint her.

“Two months of ex-wife,” Bina says. “After that, it’s anybody’s guess.”

Just after their divorce came through, Bina headed south for a year, enrolling in some kind of leadership training program for women police detectives. On her return, she accepted the lofty post of detective inspector at the Yakovy Homicide Section. There she found stimulus and fulfillment leading investigations into the hypothermia deaths of unemployed salmon fishermen amid the drainage channels of the Venice of Northwest Chichagof Island. Landsman hasn’t seen her since his sister’s funeral, and he gathers from the pitying look she gives his old chassis that he has gone further down hill in the months since then.

“Aren’t you happy to see me, Meyer?” she says. “You don’t say anything about my parka?”

“It’s extremely orange,” Landsman says.

“You need to be visible up there,” she says. “In the woods. Or they’ll think you’re a bear and shoot you.”

“It’s a nice color on you,” Landsman hears himself manage. “Goes with your eyes.”

Bina accepts a compliment as if it’s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken. “So you’re saying you’re surprised,” she says.

“I’m surprised.”

“You didn’t hear about Felsenfeld?”

“It’s Felsenfeld. What would I hear?” He recalls Shpringer having asked him the same question the night before, and now the insight comes to him with a keenness worthy of the man who caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. “Felsenfeld skipped.”

“Turned in his badge two nights ago. Left for Melbourne, Australia, last night. His wife’s sister lives there.”

“And now I have to work for you?” He knows it can’t have been Bina’s idea; and the move, even if it’s only for two months, is unquestionably a promotion for her. But he can’t quite believe that she could permit such a thing — that she would be able to stand it. “That’s impossible.”

“Anything is possible nowadays,” Bina says. “I read it in the newspaper.”

All at once the lines of her face are smoothed over, and he sees what a strain it is for her still to be around him, how relieved she is when Berko Shemets walks up.

“Everyone is here!” she says.

When Landsman turns around he finds his partner standing right behind him. Berko owns considerable powers of stealth that, naturally, he attributes to his Indian forebears. Landsman likes to ascribe them to powerful forces of surface tension, the way Berko’s enormous snowshoe feet warp the earth.

“Well, well, well,” Berko says genially. From the first time that Landsman brought Bina home, she and Berko seemed to share an understanding of, an angle on, a laugh at the expense of Landsman, the funny little sorehead in the last panel of a comic strip with the black lily of an exploded cigar wilting in his puss. She holds out her hand, and they shake.

“Welcome back, Detective Landsman,” he says sheepishly,

“Inspector,” she says, “and it’s Gelbfish. Again.” Berko shuffles carefully through the hand of facts she has just dealt him. “My mistake,” he says. “How’d you like Yakovy?”

“It was all right.”

“Fun town?”

“I really wouldn’t know.”

“Meet anybody?”

Bina shakes her head, blushing, then blushing more deeply at the thought that she was blushing. “I just worked,” she says. “You know me.”

The sodden pink mass of the old sofa disappears around the corner of the modular, and Landsman experiences another moment of insight.

“The Burial Society is coming,” he says. He means the transition task force from the U. S. Interior Department, the advance men for Reversion, come to watch over and prepare the corpse for interment in the grave of history. For the past year or so, they have been murmuring their bureaucratic kaddish over every part of the District bureaucracy, making inventories and recommendations. Laying the foundation, Landsman imagines, so that when anything subsequently goes awry or turns sour, blame can plausibly be laid at the feet of the Jews.

“Gentleman named Spade,” she says. “Showing up sometime Monday, Tuesday at the latest.”

“Felsenfeld,” Landsman says with disgust. Typical that the man would slink out three days before a shomer from the Burial Society is due to come calling. “A black year on him.”

Two more custodians come banging out of the trailer, carrying off the divisional pornography library and a life-size cardboard cutout photograph of the president of America, with his cleft chin, his golfer’s tan, his air of self-importance, worn lightly, quarterback-style. The detectives like to dress the cardboard president in lacy underpants and pelt him with wadded clots of wet toilet paper.

“Time to measure Sitka Central for a shroud,” Berko says, watching it go.

“You don’t even begin to understand,” Bina says, and Landsman understands at once, from the dark seam in her voice, that she is trying. to contain, with effort, a quantum of very bad news. Then Bina says, “Inside, boys,” sounding like every other commanding officer Landsman has been obliged to obey. A moment ago the idea of having to serve under his ex-wife even for two months did not seem imaginable, but seeing the way she jerks her head toward the modular and orders them inside gives him reason to hope that his feelings about her, not that he still has any, of course, might turn to the universal gray of discipline.

Following classic refugee tradition the office is as Felsenfeld left it, photographs, half-dead houseplants, bottles of seltzer on the file cabinet next to a family size tub of antacid chews.

“Sit,” Bina says, going around to the rubberized steel desk chair and settling herself into it with careless resolve. She throws off the orange parka, revealing a dust-brown wool pantsuit worn over a white oxford cloth shirt, an outfit much more in keeping with Landsman’s idea of how Bina thinks about clothes. He tries and fails not to observe the way her heavy breasts, each of whose moles and freckles he can still project like constellations against the planetarium dome of his imagination, strain against the placket and pockets of her shirt. He and Berko hang their coats on the hooks behind the door and carry their hats in their hands. They each take one of the remaining chairs. Felsenfeld’s wife in her photograph and his children in theirs have not grown any less homely since the last time Landsman looked at them. The salmon and halibut are still astonished to find themselves hanging dead at the end of Felsenfeld’s lines.

“Okay, listen, boys,” Bina says. She is a woman for belling cats and taking bulls by the horns. “We’re all aware of the awkwardness of the situation here. It could be weird enough if I just used to squad with you both. The fact that one of you used to be my husband, and the other one my, uh, cousin, well, shit.” The last word is spoken in flawless American, as are the next four. “Know what I’m saying?”

She pauses, seeming to await a response. Landsman turns to Berko. “You were the cousin, right?”

Bina smiles to show Landsman that she doesn’t think he’s particularly funny. She reaches around behind her and drags over from their place on the file cabinet a pile of pale blue file folders, each of them at least half an inch thick and all of them flagged with a tab of cough syrup-red plastic. At the sight of it, Landsman’s heart sinks, just as it does when by ill chance he happens to meet his own regard in a mirror.

“See these?”

“Yes, Inspector Gelbfish,” Berko says, sounding strangely insincere. “I see them.”

“Know what they are?”

“I know they can’t be our open cases,” Landsman says. “All piled up together on your desk.”

“One good thing about Yakovy?” Bina says. They await their chief’s report on her travels.

She says, “The rain. Two hundred inches a year. Rains the smart ass right out of people. Even yids.”

“That’s a lot of rain,” Berko says.

“Now, just listen to me. And listen carefully, please, because I will be speaking bullshit. In two months a U.S. Marshal is going to stride into this godforsaken modular with his cut-rate suit and his Sunday-school way of talking and request that I turn over the keys to the freak show that is the B Squad file cabinets, over which, as of this morning, it is my honor to preside.” They are talkers, the Gelbfishes, speech makers and reasoners and aces of wheedling. Bina’s father nearly talked Landsman out of marrying her. On the night before the wedding. “And really, I say that sincerely. You both know that I have been working my ass off my whole adult life, hoping that one day I’d be fortunate enough to park it in this chair, behind this desk, and try to maintain the grand Sitka Central tradition that every once in a while we catch a murderer and put him in jail. And now here I am. Until the first of January.”

“We feel the same way, Bina,” Berko says, sounding more sincere this time. “Freak show and all.”

Landsman says that it goes double for him.

“I appreciate that,” she says. “And I know how bad you feel about … this.”

She rests her long, freckled hand on the stack of files. If accurately gathered, it will comprise eleven folders, the oldest dating back over two years. There are three other pairs of detectives in the Homicide section, and none of them could boast of such a fine, tall stack of unsolved cases.

“We’re close on the Feytel,” Berko says. “We’re just waiting on the district attorney there. And Pinsky. And the Zilberblat thing. Zilberblat’s mother—”

Bina holds up her hand, cutting Berko off. Landsman says nothing. He is too ashamed to speak. As far as he is concerned, that pile of folders is a monument to his recent decline. That it’s not another ten inches taller testifies to the steadfastness his big little cousin Berko has shown in carrying him.

“Stop,” Bina says. “Just stop right there. And pay attention, because this is the part where I flash my fluent grasp of bullshit.”

She reaches behind her back and takes a sheet of paper from her in-box, as well as another, much thinner blue file that Landsman recognizes at once, since he created it himself at four-thirty that morning. She reaches into the breast pocket of her suit jacket and takes out a pair of half-glasses that Landsman has never seen before. She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.

“A policy has been formulated by the wise Jews who oversee our destiny as police officers of the Sitka District,” Bina begins. She scans the sheet of paper with an air of agitation, even dismay. “It takes off from the admirable principle that when authority is turned over to the U.S. Marshal for Sitka, it would be a nice thing for everyone, not to mention providing adequate posterior coverage, if there were no active cases outstanding.”

“Give me a fucking break, Bina,” Berko says in American. He has grasped from the start what Inspector Gelbfish is getting at. It takes Landsman another minute to catch on.

“No cases outstanding,” he repeats with idiotic calm.

“This policy,” Bina says, “has been given the catchy name of ‘effective resolution.’ Essentially, what that means is, you are to devote exactly as much time to resolving your outstanding cases as there remain days in your tenure as homicide detectives carrying the District shield. Say roughly nine weeks. You have eleven cases outstanding. You can, you know, divvy it up however you want. However you want to work it, that’s fine with me.”

“Wrap up?” Berko says. “You mean—”

“You know what I mean, Detective,” Bina says.

There is no emotion in her voice and no readable expression on her face. “Stick them to whatever sticky people you can find. If they won’t stick, use a little glue. The rest of them” — a hint of a catch in her voice — “just black-flag and file in cabinet nine.”

Nine is where they keep the cold cases. Filing a case in cabinet nine saves less space but is otherwise the same as lighting it on fire and taking the ashes out for a walk in a gale-force wind.

“Bury them?” Berko says, hoisting it into a question right at the end.

“Put in a good-faith effort, within the limits of this new policy with the musical name, and then, if that fails, put in a bad-faith effort.” Bina stares at the domed paperweight on Felsenfeld’s desk. Inside the paper weight is a tiny model, a cartoon in cheap plastic, of the Sitka skyline. A jumble of high-rises clustered around the Safety Pin, that lonely digit pointed at the sky as if in accusation. “And then slap a black flag on them.”

“You said eleven,” Landsman says.

“You noticed that.”

“After last night, though, with all due respect, Inspector, and as embarrassing as it is. Well. It’s twelve. Not eleven. Twelve open cases for Shemets and Landsman.”

Bina picks up the slim blue folder that Landsman gave birth to the night before. “This one?” She opens it and studies, or pretends to study, Landsman’s report on the apparent gun murder, at point blank, of the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. “Yes. Okay. Now I want you to watch how this is done.”

She opens the top drawer of Felsenfeld’s desk, which, for the next two months, at least, will be hers. She rummages around inside it, grimacing as if the drawer contains a pile of used foam-rubber earplugs, which, last time Landsman looked, was indeed the case. She pulls out a plastic tab for marking a case folder. A black one. She pries loose the red tab that Landsman attached to the Lasker file early that morning, and substitutes the black one in its place, breathing shallowly the way you do when you clean a nasty wound or sponge up some thing awful from the rug. She ages ten years, it seems to Landsman, in the ten seconds it takes her to make the switch. Then she holds the newly cold case away from her body, tweezing it between two fingers of one hand.

“Effective resolution,” she says.