The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  Zilberblat was yanking so hard on the gun that when Landsman unclenches, the other man goes tumbling backward into the snow. Landsman scrambles on top of Zilberblat. He’s just acting now, without a thought in his head. He yanks his sholem loose and turns it around, and the world pulls the trigger on all its guns. Zilberblat grows a horn of blood from the crown of his head. The cobwebs are now in Landsman’s ears. He can hear only the breath at the back of his throat and his own blood pulsing.

  For an instant a strange peace opens like an umbrella inside Landsman as he straddles the man he just killed, knees burning in the snow. He retains the presence of mind to recognize that this tranquillity is not necessarily a good sign. Then the doubts begin to crowd in around the knowledge of the mess he has made, bystanders gathering around a suicide leaper. Landsman staggers to his feet. He sees the gore on his coat, the tatters of brain, a tooth.

  Two dead humans in the snow. The smell of popcorn, a buttery stink of feet, overwhelms him.

  While he is busy heaving up his guts into the snow, another man wanders out of the Big Macher store. A young man with a rat snout and a loping gait. Landsman retains the wit to mark him as a Zilberblat. This Zilberblat has his arms raised and a wild look on his face. His hands are empty. But when he sees Landsman bleeding and sick on all fours, he abandons his project of surrender. He picks up the automatic lying on the ground by the ruin of his brother. Landsman careens to his feet, and the trail of fire at the back of his head flares up. He feels the ground give way, and then there is a roaring blackness.

  After he dies, he wakes up lying facedown in the snow. He can’t feel snow on his cheek. The wild ringing in his ears is gone. He humps himself up to a sitting position. The blood from the back of his head has scattered rhododendrons in the snow. The man and the woman he shot have not moved, but there is no sign of the young Zilberblat who did or did not shoot and kill him. With a sudden clarity of thought and a mounting suspicion that he has forgotten to die, Landsman pats himself down. His watch, wallet, car keys, cell phone, gun, and badge are gone. He looks for his car parked in the distance, along the frontage road. When he sees that his Super Sport is gone, he knows that he is still alive, because only life could offer such a bitter vista.

  “Another fucking Zilberblat,” he says. “And they’re all like that.”

  He is cold. He considers entering the Big Macher, but the stench of popcorn keeps him away. He turns from the yawning doors and lifts his eyes toward the high hill and beyond it the mountains, black with trees. Then he sits down in the snow. After a while, he lies down. It’s snug and comfortable, and there’s a smell of cool dust, and he closes his eyes and falls asleep, folded up into his nice dark little hole in the wall of the Hotel Zamenhof, and for once in his life, the claustrophobia doesn’t trouble him, not a bit.

  22

  Landsman is holding a baby boy. The baby cries, for no very grave reason. His wailing constricts Landsman’s heart in a pleasurable way. Landsman feels relieved to discover that he has a fat handsome baby who smells of waffles and soap. He squeezes the puffy feet, gauges the weight of the little grandfather in his arms, at once negligible and vast. He turns to Bina to tell her the good news: It was all a mistake. Here is their boy. But there is no Bina to tell, only the memory in Landsman’s nostrils of rain on her hair. And then he wakes up and realizes that the crying baby is Pinky Shemets, having his diaper changed or registering a protest over something or other. Landsman blinks, and the world intrudes in the form of a batik wall covering, and he is hollowed out, as if it’s the first time, by the loss of his son.

  Landsman is lying on Berko and Ester-Malke’s bed, on his side, facing the wall with its dyed linen scene of Balinese gardens and savage birds. Someone has undressed him, leaving him in his underpants. He sits up. The skin at the back of his head prickles, and then a cord of pain goes taut. Landsman pats the site of his injury. A bandage meets his fingers, a crinkly oblong of gauze and tape. Surrounding it, a queer hairless patch of scalp. Memories fall on top of one another with a slapping sound like crime-scene photographs fresh from Dr. Shpringer’s death camera. A jocular emergency room tech, an X ray, an injection of morphine, a looming swab dipped in Betadine. Before that, the light from a streetlamp striping the white vinyl ceiling of an ambulance. And before that. Before the ride in the ambulance. Purple slush. Steam from the spilled contents of a human gut. A hornet at his ear. A red jet bursting from the forehead of Rafi Zilberblat. A cipher of holes in a blank expanse of plaster. Landsman backs away from the memory of what happened in the Big Macher parking lot, so quickly that he bumps right into the pang of losing Django Landsman in his dream.

  “Woe is me,” Landsman says. He wipes his eyes. He would give up a gland, a minor organ, for a papiros.

  The bedroom door opens, and Berko comes in, carrying an almost-full pack of Broadways.

  “Have I ever told you that I love you?” Landsman says, knowing full well that he never has.

  “You never have, thank God,” Berko says. “I got these from the neighbor, the Fried woman. I told her it was a police seizure.”

  “I am insanely grateful.”

  “I note the adverb.”

  Berko notes also that Landsman has been crying; one eyebrow shoots up, hangs suspended, drifts down like a tablecloth settling onto a table.

  “Baby okay?” Landsman says.

  “Teeth.” Berko takes a coat hanger from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. On the hanger are Landsman’s clothes, neat and brushed. Berko feels around in the hip pocket of Landsman’s blazer and produces a matchbook. Then he comes and stands by the bed and holds out the papiroses and matches.

  “I can’t honestly claim,” says Landsman, “that I know what I’m doing here.”

  “It was Ester-Malke’s idea. Knowing how you feel about hospitals. They said you didn’t need to stay.”

  “Have a seat.”

  There is no chair in the room. Landsman slides over, and Berko sits down on the edge of the bed, causing alarm among the bedsprings.

  “It’s really okay if I smoke?”

  “Not really, no. Go stand by the window.”

  Landsman tips himself out of the bed. When he rolls up the bamboo shade on the window, he is surprised to see that it’s pouring rain. The smell of rain blows in through the two inches the window has been cranked open, explaining the fragrance of Bina’s hair in his dream. Landsman looks down to the parking lot of the apartment building and observes that the snow has melted and been washed away. The light feels all wrong, too.

  “What time is it?”

  “Four-thirty … two,” Berko says without checking his watch.

  “What day is it?”

  “Sunday.”

  Landsman cranks open the window all the way and hooks his left buttock over the sill. Rain falls on his aching head. He lights his papiros and takes a long drag and tries to decide if he’s disturbed by this information. “Long time since I did that,” he says. “Slept through a whole day.”

  “You must have needed it,” Berko observes blandly. A sideways look in Landsman’s direction. “Ester-Malke’s the one who took your pants off, by the way. Just so you know.”

  Landsman flicks ash out of the window. “I was shot.”

  “Grazed. They said it’s more like a kind of burn. They didn’t need to stitch it.”

  “There were three of them. Rafael Zilberblat. A pisher I made for his brother. And some chicken. The brother took my car, my wallet. My badge and my sholem. Left me there.”

  “So it was reconstructed.”

  “I wanted to call for help, but the little ratface Jew took my Shoyfer, too.”

  The mention of Landsman’s phone makes Berko smile.

  “What?” Landsman says.

  “So, your pisher’s tooling along. North on the Ickes, headed for Yakovy, Fairbanks, Irkutsk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your phone rings. Your pisher answers it.”

  “And it’s you?”
/>   “Bina.”

  “I like it.”

  “Two minutes on the phone with the Zilberblat, she has his whereabouts, his description, the name of his dog when he was eleven. A couple of latkes pick him up five minutes later outside Krestov. Your car is fine. Your wallet still had cash in it.”

  Landsman affects to take an interest in the way that fire turns cured tobacco to flakes of ash. “And my badge and gun?” he says.

  “Ah.”

  “Ah.”

  “Your badge and your gun are now in the hands of your commanding officer.”

  “Does she intend to return them?”

  Berko reaches over and smooths the indentation that Landsman left in the surface of his bed.

  “It was strictly line of duty,” Landsman says, his tone sounding whiny even to his own ear. “I got a tip on Rafi Zilberblat.” He shrugs and runs his fingers along the bandage at the back of his head. “I just wanted to talk to the yid.”

  “You should have called me first.”

  “I didn’t want to bother you on a Saturday.”

  It’s no excuse, and it comes out even lamer than Landsman hoped.

  “Nu, I’m an idiot,” Landsman admits. “And a bad policeman, too.”

  “Rule number one.”

  “I know. I just felt like doing something right then. I didn’t think it was going to go the way that it went.”

  “In any case,” Berko says. “The pisher. The little brother. Calls himself Willy Zilberblat. He confessed on his late brother’s behalf. Says indeed Rafi killed Viktor. With half a pair of scissors.”

  “How about that.”

  “All other things being equal, I would say Bina has reason to be happy with you on that one. You resolved it very effectively.”

  “Half a pair of scissors.”

  “How’s that for resourceful?”

  “Frugal, even.”

  “And the chicken you handled so roughly—that was you, too?”

  “It was me.”

  “Nicely done, Meyer.” There is no sarcasm in Berko’s tone or face. “You put a pill in Yacheved Flederman.”

  “I did not.”

  “You had yourself quite a day.”

  “The nurse?”

  “Our colleagues on the B Squad are delighted with you.”

  “That killed that old geezer, what’s his name, Herman Pozner?”

  “It was their only open case from last year. They thought she was in Mexico.”

  “Fuck me,” Landsman says in American.

  “Tabatchnik and Karpas already put in a good word for you with Bina, as I understand.”

  Landsman grinds the papiros out against the side of the building, then flicks the butt into the rain. Tabatchnik and Karpas are really kicking the asses of Landsman and Shemets; it’s not even close.

  “Even when I have good luck,” he says, “it’s bad luck.” He sighs. “Has there been anything out of Verbov Island?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “Nothing in the papers?”

  “Not in the Licht or the Rut.” These are the leading black-hat dailies. “No rumors that I’ve heard. Nobody’s talking about it. Nothing. Total silence.”

  Landsman gets up off the windowsill and goes to the phone on the table beside the bed. He dials a number he memorized years ago, asks a question, gets an answer, hangs up. “The Verbovers picked up Mendel Shpilman’s body late last night.”

  The telephone in Landsman’s hand startles, chirping like a robot bird. He passes it to Berko.

  “He seems fine,” Berko says after a moment. “Yes, I imagine that he will need some rest. All right.” He lowers the handset and stares at it, covering the mouthpiece with the pad of his thumb. “Your ex-wife.”

  “I hear you’re fine,” Bina tells Landsman when he gets on the phone.

  “So they tell me,” Landsman says.

  “Take some time,” she suggests. “Give yourself a break.”

  The import takes a second to register, her tone is so gentle and unruffled.

  “You would not,” he says. “Bina, please tell me this is not true.”

  “Two dead people. By your gun. No witnesses but a kid who didn’t see what happened. It’s automatic. Suspension with pay, pending a review by the board.”

  “They were shooting guns at me. I had a reliable tip, I approached with my gun in my holster, I was polite as a mouse. And they started shooting at me.”

  “And of course you’ll get the chance to tell your story. In the meantime, I’m going to keep your shield and your gun in this nice pink plastic Hello Kitty zipper bag that Willy Zilberblat was carrying them around in, okay? And you just try to get yourself all nice and better, all right?”

  “This thing could take weeks to sort out,” Landsman says. “By the time I’m back on duty, there might not be a Sitka Central. There are no grounds for a suspension here, and you know it. Under the circumstances, you can keep me on active duty while the review goes forward, and still be running this case totally by the book.”

  “There are books,” Bina says. “And there are books.”

  “Don’t be cryptic,” he says, and then in American, “What the fuck?”

  For a long couple of seconds, Bina doesn’t reply.

  “I had a call from Chief Inspector Vayngartner. Last night. Not long,” she says, “after dark.”

  “I see.”

  “He tells me he just had a call. On his home phone, this is. And I guess the esteemed gentleman on the other end of the line was maybe a little upset about certain behaviors that Detective Meyer Landsman might have been exhibiting in this gentleman’s neighborhood on Friday afternoon. Creating public disturbances. Showing grave disrespect for the locals. Operating without authority or approval.”

  “And Vayngartner replied?”

  “He said you were a good detective, but you were known to have certain problems.”

  And there, Landsman, is the line for your headstone.

  “So what did you tell Vayngartner?” he says. “When he called to ruin your Saturday night.”

  “My Saturday night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with. As it happens, I told Chief Inspector Vayngartner how you had just been shot.”

  “And he said?”

  “He said that in light of this fresh evidence, he might have to reconsider long-held atheistic beliefs. And that I should do whatever I could to make sure you were comfortable, and that for the next little time, you got plenty of rest. So that’s what I’m doing. You’re suspended, with full pay, until further notice.”

  “Bina. Bina, please. You know how I am.”

  “I do.”

  “If I can’t work—You can’t—”

  “I have to.” The temperature of her voice drops so quickly that ice crystals tinkle on the line. “You know how much of a choice I have in a situation like this.”

  “You mean when gangsters pull strings to keep a murder investigation from going forward? That the kind of situation you mean?”

  “I answer to the chief inspector,” Bina explains, as if she’s talking to a donkey. She knows perfectly well that there is nothing Landsman hates more than being treated like he’s stupid. “And you answer to me.”

  “I wish you hadn’t called my phone,” Landsman says after a moment. “Better you should just have let me die.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” Bina says. “Oh, and you’re welcome.”

  “And what am I supposed to do now, besides be grateful for having my balls cut off?”

  “That’s up to you, Detective. Maybe you could try thinking about the future for a change.”

  “The future,” Landsman says. “You mean, what, like flying cars? Hotels on the moon?”

  “I mean your future.”

  “You want to go to the moon with me, Bina? I hear they still take Jews.”

  “Goodbye, Meyer.”

  She hangs up. Landsman cuts the connection on his end a
nd stands there for a minute with Berko watching him from the bed. Landsman feels a last surge of anger and enthusiasm blow through him, like a clot of dust being cleared from a pipe. Then he’s empty.

  He sits down on the bed. He gets in under the covers and turns his face back to the Balinese scene on the wall and closes his eyes.

  “Uh, Meyer?” Berko says. But Landsman doesn’t answer. “You planning to stay in my bed a whole lot longer?”

  Landsman sees no percentage in answering the question. After a minute Berko bounces himself off the mattress and onto his feet. Landsman can feel him studying the situation, appraising the depth of black water that separates the two partners, trying to make the right call.

  “For what it’s worth,” Berko says finally, “Bina also came to see you in the ER.”

  Landsman finds he has no memory of this visit at all. It’s gone, like the squeeze of a baby’s foot against his palm.

  “You were doped up pretty good,” Berko says. “Talking many kinds of shit.”

  “Did I embarrass myself with her?” Landsman manages to ask in a tiny voice.

  “Yes,” Berko says, “I fear that you did.”

  Then he withdraws from his own bedroom and leaves Landsman there to puzzle out the question, if he can muster the strength, of how much further he can sink.

  Landsman can hear them talking about him in the hushed tones reserved for madmen, assholes, and unwanted guests. All through the rest of the afternoon, as they eat their dinner. Through the uproar of bath and ass-powdering and a bedtime story that requires Berko Shemets to honk like a goose. Landsman lies on his side with a burning seam at the back of his skull and drifts in and out of consciousness of the smell of rain at the window, the murmuring and clamor of the family in the other room. Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman’s soul. First he can’t lift his head off the mattress. Then he can’t seem to open his eyes. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams.