The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Goldy careers into the room. His tread is heavy and lumbering, a baby monster’s. He doesn’t just climb into the bed, he roils the blankets the way a wire whisk roils a batter. Its like he’s fleeing something, panicked, but when Landsman speaks, asks him what’s wrong, the boy doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, and his heart beats steadily and low. Whatever he was running from, he found shelter from it in his parents’ bed. The kid is sound asleep. He smells like a piece of cut apple that’s starting to turn. He digs his toes into the small of Landsman’s back with care and without mercy. He grinds his teeth. The sound of it is like dull shears on a sheet of tin.

  After an hour of this kind of treatment, around four-thirty, the baby starts to scream, way out on his balcony. Landsman can hear Ester-Malke trying to comfort him. Ordinarily, she would bring him into her bed, but that’s not an option tonight, and it takes her a long time to settle the little grandfather down. By the time Ester-Malke wanders into the bedroom with the baby in her arms, he’s snuffling and quieter and almost asleep. Ester-Malke dumps Pinky between his brother and Landsman and walks out.

  Reunited in their parents’ bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limit of the bed. They chop at Landsman, stab him with their toes, grunt and mutter. They masticate the fiber of their dreams. Around dawn, something very bad happens in the baby’s diaper. It’s the worst night that Landsman has ever spent on a mattress, and that is saying a good deal.

  The coffeemaker begins its expectorations around seven. A few thousand molecules of coffee vapor tumble into the bedroom and worry the hairs inside Landsman’s beak. He hears the shuffle of slippers against the carpet in the hall. He fights long and hard against the impulse to acknowledge that Ester-Malke is standing there, in the doorway of her bedroom, ruing him and every fit of charity toward him that’s ever seized her. He doesn’t care. Why should he care? At last Landsman realizes that in his struggle not to care about anything lie the paradoxical seeds of defeat: So, all right, he cares. He opens one eye. Ester-Malke leans against the doorjamb, hugging herself, surveying the scene of destruction in a place that once was her bed. Whatever the name of the emotion inspired in a mother by the sight of filial cuteness, it competes in her expression with horror and dismay at the spectacle of Landsman in his underpants.

  “I need you out of my bed,” she whispers. “Soon and in a way that’s lasting.”

  “All right,” says Landsman. Taking stock of his wounds, his aches, the prevailing direction of his moods, he sits up. For all the torment of the night, he feels oddly settled. More present, somehow, in his limbs and skin and senses. Somehow, maybe, a little more real. He has not shared a bed with another human being in over two years. He wonders if that is a practice he ought not to have foregone. He takes his clothes from the door and puts them on. Carrying his socks and belt, he follows Ester-Malke back down the hall.

  “Though the couch has its points,” Ester-Malke continues. “For example, it features no babies or four-year-olds.”

  “You have a serious toenail problem among your youth,” Landsman says. “Also something, I think it might be a sea otter, died and is rotting in the little one’s diaper.”

  In the kitchen she pours them each a cup of coffee. Then she goes to the door and retrieves the Tog from the mat that says GET LOST. Landsman sits on his stool at the counter and stares into the murk of the living room where the bulk of his partner rears up from the floor like an island. The couch is a wreck of blankets.

  Landsman is about to tell Ester-Malke I don’t deserve friends like you when she comes back into the kitchen, reading the paper, and says, “No wonder you needed so much sleep.” She bumps into the doorway. Something good or terrible or unbelievable is described on the front page.

  Landsman reaches for his reading glasses in the pocket of his jacket. They are cracked at the nosepiece, each lens severed from its mate. It’s truly a pair of glasses, two monocles on their stems. Ester-Malke gets the electrician’s tape, yellow as a hazard warning, from the drawer under the phone. She binds up the glasses and passes them back to Landsman. The gob of tape is as thick as a filbert. It draws the gaze even of the wearer, leaving him cross-eyed.

  “I’ll bet that looks really good,” he says, taking up the newspaper.

  Two big stories lead off the news in this morning’s Tog. One is an account of an apparent shoot-out, leaving two dead, in the deserted parking lot of a Big Macher outlet store. The principals were a lone homicide detective, Meyer Landsman, forty-two, and two suspects long sought by Sitka law enforcement in connection with a pair of apparently unrelated murders. The other story is headlined:

  “BOY TZADDIK” FOUND DEAD IN SITKA HOTEL

  The accompanying text whips up a tissue of miracles, evasions, and outright lies about the life and death of Menachem-Mendel Shpilman, late Thursday night, at the Hotel Zamenhof on Max Nordau Street. According to the medical examiner’s office—the examining doctor himself having moved to Canada—the preliminary finding on cause of death is something known in fairy tales as “drug-related misadventure.” “Though little known to the world outside,” the Tog’s man writes,

  in the closed world of the pious, Mr. Shpilman was viewed, for the better part of his early life, as a prodigy, a wonder, and a holy teacher, indeed, as possibly the long-promised Redeemer. The old Shpilman home on S. Ansky Street in the Harkavy was often thronged with visitors and supplicants during Mr. Shpilman’s childhood, with the devout and the curious traveling from as far as Buenos Aires and Beirut to meet the talented boy who was born on the fateful ninth day of the month of Av. Many hoped and even arranged to be present on one of a number of occasions when rumors flew that he was about to “declare his kingdom.” But Mr. Shpilman never made any declarations. Twenty-three years ago, on the day projected for his marriage to a daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe, he all but disappeared, and during the long ignominy of Mr. Shpilman’s recent life, the early promise had largely been forgotten.

  The chaff from the ME’s office is the only item in the story resembling an explanation of the death. Hotel management and the Central Division are said to have declined comment. At the end of the article, Landsman learns that there will be no synagogue service, just the burial itself, at the old Montefiore cemetery, to be presided over by the father of the deceased.

  “Berko said he disowned him,” Ester-Malke says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder. “He said the old man wanted nothing to do with the kid. I guess he changed his mind.”

  Reading the article, Landsman suffers a cramp of envy toward Mendel Shpilman, tempered by pity. Landsman struggled for many years under the weight of fatherly expectations, but he has no idea how it might feel to fulfill or exceed them. Isidor Landsman, he knows, would have loved to father a son as gifted as Mendel. Landsman can’t help thinking that if he had been able to play chess like Mendel Shpilman, maybe his father would have felt he had something to live for, a small messiah to redeem him. Landsman thinks of the letter that he sent his father, hoping to gain his freedom from the burden of that life and those expectations. He considers the years he spent believing that he caused Isidor Landsman a fatal grief. How much guilt did Mendel Shpilman feel? Had he believed what was said of him, in his gift or wild calling? In the attempt to free himself from that burden, did Mendel feel that he must turn his back not only on his father but on all the Jews in the world?

  “I don’t think Rabbi Shpilman ever changes his mind,” Landsman says. “I think somebody would have to change it for him.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “If I had to guess? I’m thinking that maybe it was the mother.”

  “Good for her. Trust a mother not to let them toss her son out like an empty bottle.”

  “Trust a mother,” Landsman says. He studies the photogra
ph in the Tog of Mendel Shpilman at fifteen, beard patchy, sidelocks flying, coolly presiding over a conference of young Talmudists who seethed and sulked around him. “The Taddik Ha-Dor, in Better Days,” reads the caption.

  “What are you thinking about, Meyer?” Ester-Malke says, striking a note of doubt.

  “The future,” Landsman says.

  23

  Amob of black-hat Jews chugs its way, a freight train of grief, from the gates of the cemetery—the house of life, they call it—up a hillside toward a hole cut into the mud. A pine box slick with rain pitches and tosses on the surf of weeping men. Satmars hold umbrellas over the heads of Verbovers. Gerers and Shtrakenzers and Viznitzers link arms with the boldness of schoolgirls on a lark. Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they’ve been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a yid who was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a yid—the shell of a yid, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty-year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground.

  Around the grave site, black clumps of fir trees sway like grieving Chasids. Beyond the cemetery walls, hats and black umbrellas shelter thousands of the unworthiest of the unworthy against the rain. Deep structures of obligation and credit have determined which are permitted to enter the gates of the house of life and which must stand outside kibitzing, with rain soaking into their hose. These deep structures, in turn, have drawn the attention of detectives from Burglary, Contraband, and Fraud. Landsman picks out Skolsky, Burwitz, Feld, and Globus, always with his shirttail hanging out, perched on the roof of a gray Ford Victoria. It’s not every day that the entire Verbover hierarchy comes out and stands around on a hillside, posed in relation to one another like circles on a prosecutor’s flow chart. On the roof of a Wal-Mart a quarter mile away, three Americans in blue windbreakers point their telephoto lenses and the trembling pistil of a condenser microphone. A stout blue cord of latkes and motorcycle units has been stitched through the crowd to keep it from coming undone. The press is here, too, cameramen and reporters from Channel 1, from the local papers, crews from the NBC affiliate over in Juneau and a cable news channel. Dennis Brennan, without the sense or maybe enough felt in the world to cover that big head of his against the rain. Then you have the half-believing, and the half-observant, and the modern Orthodox, and the merely credulous, and the skeptical, and the curious, and a healthy delegation from the Einstein Chess Club.

  Landsman can see them all from the vantage of his powerlessness and his exile, reunited with his Super Sport on a barren hilltop across Mizmor Boulevard from the house of life. He’s parked in a cul-de-sac some developer laid out, paved, then saddled with the name of Tikvah Street, the Hebrew word denoting hope and connoting to the Yiddish ear on this grim afternoon at the end of time seventeen flavors of irony. The hoped-for houses were never built. Wooden stakes tied with orange flags and nylon cord map out a miniature Zion in the mud around the cul-de-sac, a ghostly eruv of failure. Landsman is flying solo, sober as a carp in a bathtub, clutching a pair of binoculars in his clammy grip. The need for a drink is like a missing tooth. He can’t keep his mind off it, and yet there’s something pleasurable in probing the gap. Or maybe the ache of something missing is just the hole left behind when Bina lifted his badge.

  Landsman waits out the funeral in his car, studying it through the good Zeiss lenses and running down the car battery with a CBC radio documentary about the blues singer Robert Johnson, whose singing voice sounds as broken and reedy as a Jew saying kaddish in the rain. Landsman has a carton of Broadways, and he burns them wildly, trying to drive from the Super Sport’s interior a lingering odor of Willy Zilberblat. It’s a foul smell, like a pot of water in which two days ago somebody boiled noodles. Berko tried to persuade Landsman that he was imagining this residue of the little Zilberblat’s brief tenure inside Landsman’s life. But Landsman is happy for the excuse to fumigate with cigarettes, which don’t kill the urge for a drink but somehow dull its bite.

  Berko also tried to persuade Landsman to wait a day or two on the matter of Mendel Shpilman’s death by misadventure. As they rode down in the elevator from the apartment, he dared Landsman to look him straight in the eye and tell him that Landsman’s plan for this damp Monday afternoon did not consist of showing up, shorn of his badge and his gun, to hurl impertinent questions at the grieving queen of gangsters as she departed from the house of life and the remains of her only son.

  “You can’t get near her,” Berko insisted as he followed Landsman out of the elevator and across the lobby to the door of the Dnyeper. Berko was in his elephantine pajamas. Pieces of a suit were spilling out of his arms. He had his shoes hooked over two fingers, his belt around his neck. From the breast pocket of his mustard pajamas with their white pinstripe the points of two slices of toast protruded like a pocket square. “And even if you can, you still can’t.”

  He was making a nice policeman-like distinction between the things that balls could accomplish and those that the breakers of balls would never permit.

  “They will stiff-arm you,” Berko said. “They will shake out your pants for the small change. They will bring you up on charges.”

  Landsman could not refute the point. Batsheva Shpilman rarely set foot beyond the boundary of her deep and tiny world. But when she did, it was likely to be in a heavy thicket of iron and lawyers. “No badge, no backing, no warrant, no investigation, looking half crazy with egg on your suit, you bother the lady, you could get shot, with only minor aftereffects for the shooters.”

  Berko trailed Landsman out of the building, dancing into his socks and shoes, down to the bus stop at the corner.

  “You’re saying don’t do it, Berko,” Landsman said, “or just don’t do it without you? You think I’ll let you piss away whatever shot you and Ester-Malke have to get through to the other end of Reversion? You’re crazy. I’ve done you a lot of disservices and caused you a lot of trouble over the years, but I hope I’m not that much of an ass. And if you’re saying you don’t think I should do it period, well…”

  Landsman stopped marching. The full weight of good sense behind this second argument struck him.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying, Meyer. I’m just saying, fuck.” Berko got this look sometimes, more when he was a boy, a shine of sincerity on the whites of his eyes. Landsman had to look away. He turned his face to the wind blowing in off the Sound. “I’m saying at least don’t take the bus, all right? Let me drive you down to the impound yard, at least.”

  There was a distant rumble, a screech of air brakes. The 61B Harkavy appeared farther down the promenade, kicking up a shimmering curtain of rain.

  “At least this,” Berko said. He hoisted his suit jacket by the collar. He held it out as if he wanted Landsman to put it on. “In the pocket. Take it.”

  Landsman weighs the sholem in his hand now—a cute little Beretta .22 with a plastic grip—poisons himself on nicotine, tries to understand the lamentations of this black Delta yid, Mr. Johnson. After a period that he doesn’t bother to note or measure, call it an hour, the long dark train, discharged of its goods, starts back down the hill toward the gates. At the head of it, puffing slowly, head erect, broad-brimmed hat running rain, comes the locomotive bulk of the tenth Verbover rebbe. Behind him come the string of daughters, seven or twelve of them, and their husbands and children, and then Landsman sits up and dials in a crisp Zeiss image of Batsheva Shpilman. He’s been expecting some kind of witchy amalgam of Mrs. Macbeth and American first lady: Marilyn Monroe Kennedy in her pink pillbox hat, with mesmeric spirals for eyes. But as Batsheva Shpilman comes into clear view, right before she falls below the line of mourners jamming the cemetery gates, Landsman remarks a small, bony frame, an old-lady halt in her tread. Her face is concealed behind a black veil. Her clothes are unremarkable, a vehicl
e for blackness.

  As the Shpilmans approach the gates, the line of uniformed nozzes gathers into a tight knot, driving the crowd back. Landsman slips the gun into his hip pocket, switches off the radio, and gets out of the car. The rain has slowed to a steady fine mesh. He begins to lope down the hill toward Mizmor Boulevard. Over the last hour the crowd has swollen, bunching up around the cemetery gates. Jiggling, shifting, prone to sudden mass lurches, animated by the Brownian motion of collective woe. The uniformed latkes are working hard, trying to clear a path between the family and the big black four-by-fours of the funeral cortege.

  Landsman scrapes and stumbles, shredding weeds, gathering clots of mud on his shoes. As he exerts himself on the slippery hillside, his injuries start to bother him. He wonders if the doctors missed a broken rib. At one point he loses his footing and slides, his heels cutting ten-foot gouges in the mud, and ends by falling on his ass. He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you’re a pessimist, all omens are bad.

  The truth is that he has no plan at all, not even the graceless and rudimentary one that Berko envisioned. Landsman has been a noz for eighteen years, a detective for thirteen, spent the last seven working homicide, a top man, a prince of policemen. He has never been nobody before, a crazy little Jew with a question and a gun. He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.