The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Page 29

  “But.”

  “But odor or not, business or not, secret or not, I’m sorry, there is no way in hell the Tlingit are ever going to let a bunch of Jews come in here, in the heart of the Indianer-Lands, and build all this. I don’t care how much Jewish coin gets thrown around.”

  “You’re saying not even us Indians are that gutless and debased. To give our worst enemy that kind of toehold.”

  “How about, let’s say, us Jews are the world’s most evil schemers, we run the world from our secret headquarters on the dark side of the moon. But even we have our limitations. Do you like that better?”

  “I’m not going to argue the point.”

  “The Indians would never allow it unless they were expecting some kind of big payoff. Really big. As big as the District, let’s say.”

  “Let’s say,” Dick says, his voice sounding tight.

  “I figured the American angle in all this was whatever channel somebody used to get Naomi’s crash file pulled. But no Jew could ever guarantee a payoff like that.”

  “Penguin Sweater,” Berko says. “He fixes it so the Indians get the District under Native sovereignty once we’re gone. For that, the Indians help the Verbovers and friends set up their secret dairy farm out here.”

  “But what does Penguin Sweater get out of it?” Landsman says. “What’s in it for the U.S.?”

  “You have now arrived at a place of great darkness, Brother Landsman,” Dick says, putting the truck into gear. “Which I fear you will have to enter without Wilfred Dick.”

  “I hate to say this, cousin,” Landsman says to Berko, putting a hand on his shoulder. “But I think we have to go down to the Massacre Spot.”

  “God fucking damn it,” says Berko in American.

  35

  Forty-two miles south of the Sitka city limits, a house crafted from salvage planks and gray shingles teeters on two dozen pilings over a slough. A nameless backwater, riddled with bears and prone to methane flatulence. A graveyard of rowboats, tackle, pickup trucks, and, somewhere deep down, a dozen Russian fur hunters and their Aleut dog-soldiers. At one end of the slough, back in the bushes, a magnificent Tlingit longhouse is being dismantled by salmonberry and devil’s club. At the other end stretches a rocky beach, littered with a thousand black stones on which an ancient people etched the shapes of animals and stars. It was on this beach, in 1854, that those twelve promyshlennikis and Aleuts under Yevgeny Simonof met a bloody end at the hands of a Tlingit chief named Kohklux. Over a century later, the great-great-granddaughter of Chief Kohklux, Mrs. Pullman, became the second Indian wife taken by a five-foot-six Jewish chess player and spymaster named Hertz Shemets.

  At chess, as in secret statecraft, Uncle Hertz was known for his sense of the clock, an excess of prudence, and a tiresome depth of preparation. He read up on his opponents, made a fatal study of them. He sought the pattern of weakness, the unresolved complex, the tic. For twenty-five years he conducted a secret campaign against the people on the far side of the Line, trying to weaken their hold on the Indianer-Lands, and in that time he became a recognized authority on their culture and history. He learned to savor the Tlingit language, with its sucking-candy vowels and its chewy consonants. He undertook profound research into the fragrance and heft of Tlingit women.

  When he married Mrs. Pullman (no one ever called the lady, may she rest in peace, Mrs. Shemets), he developed an interest in her great-great-grandfather’s victory over Simonof. He spent hours in the library at Bronfman, poring over Tsarist-era maps. He annotated interviews conducted by Methodist missionaries with ninety-nine-year-old Tlingit crones who were six-year-old girls when those war hammers went to work on all those thick Russian skulls. He discovered that in the USGS survey of 1949, the one that set the proper boundaries of the District of Sitka, the Massacre Spot somehow got drawn as Tlingit land. Even though it lies west of the Baranof range, the Massacre Spot is legally Native, a green badge of Indianness daubed on the Jewish side of Baranof Island. When Hertz discovered this error, he had Berko’s stepmother buy up the land with money—as Dennis Brennan later documented—taken from his COINTELPRO slush fund. He built his spider-legged house on it. And when Mrs. Pullman died, Hertz Shemets inherited the Simonof Massacre Spot. He declared it the world’s crummiest Indian reservation, and himself the world’s crummiest Indian.

  “Asshole,” Berko says, with less rancor than Landsman might have expected, contemplating his father’s rickety dwelling through the windshield of the Super Sport.

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  Berko turns to his partner with his eyes rolled back as if to search an inner file on Landsman for the record of a question that needed less answering. “Let me ask you this, Meyer. If you were me, when would you have seen him last?”

  Landsman parks the Super Sport behind the old man’s Buick Roadmaster, a mud-streaked blue beast with fake wood panels and a bumper sticker advertising, in Yiddish and American, the WORLD-FAMOUS SIMONOF MASSACRE SPOT AND GENUINE TLINGIT LONGHOUSE. Although the roadside attraction has been defunct for a while, the bumper sticker is bright and crisp. There are still a dozen cartons of them stacked in the longhouse.

  “Give me a hint,” Landsman says.

  “Jokes about foreskins.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Every single joke about a foreskin ever devised.”

  “I had no idea there were so many,” Landsman says. “It was an education.”

  “Come on,” Berko says, climbing out of the car. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Landsman eyes the hulk of the Genuine Longhouse, off in the dry thicket of berry vines and devil’s club, a gaudy-painted wreck. In fact, there is nothing genuine about the Longhouse. Hertz Shemets built it with the help of two Indian brothers-in-law, his nephew Meyer, and his son Berko one summer after the boy came to live on Adler Street. He built it for fun, with no thought of turning it into the roadside attraction that he tried and failed to make of it after his ouster. Berko was fifteen that summer, and Landsman twenty. The kid crafted every surface of his personality to conform to the curvature of Landsman’s. He devoted two solid months to the task of training himself to operate a Skilsaw, as Landsman did, with a papiros jiggling on his lip and the smoke stinging his eyes. By then Landsman was already set on taking his police exams, and that summer Berko declared his identical ambition, but if Landsman had been talking about becoming a blowfly, Berko would have found a way to learn to love dung.

  Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It’s the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he has long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landsman’s heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in brambles of salmonberry and oblivion.

  “Berko,” he says as they crunch across the half-frozen mud of the world’s crummiest Indian reservation. He takes his cousin by the elbow. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” Berko says. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m good now. I’m back,” Landsman says, and the words ring true to his own ear in the moment. “I don’t know what did it. The hypothermia, maybe. Or getting into this whole thing with Shpilman. Or, fine, laying off the booze. But I’m back to my old self.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

  “Sure.” Berko might be agreeing with a child or a nut. He might not be agreeing at all. “You seem all right.”

  “Ringing endorsement.”

  “I don’t want to get into it now, tell me, do you mind? I just want to go in there, hit the old man with our questions, and get back home to Ester-Malke and the boys. That o
kay with you?”

  “That’s fine, Berko. Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  They tramp through a congealed sludge of mud and patchy gravel, frozen puddles, each one stretched with a thin drumhead of ice. A cartoon stairway, splintered, wigwagging, leads to a weather-gray cedar front door. The door hangs crooked, crudely winterized with thick strips of rubber.

  “When you say it’s not my fault,” Landsman begins.

  “Man! I need to piss.”

  “The implication is, you think I’m crazy. Mentally ill. Not responsible for my actions.”

  “I’m knocking on this door now.”

  He knocks twice, hard enough to imperil the hinges.

  “Not fit to wear a shield,” Landsman says, truly wishing he could let the subject drop. “In other words.”

  “Your ex-wife made that call, not me.”

  “But you don’t disagree.”

  “What do I know about mental illness?” Berko says. “I’m not the one who was arrested for running naked through the woods, three hours from home, after braining a man with an iron bed frame.”

  Hertz Shemets comes to the door, the shave on his jowls as fresh as two droplets of blood. He’s wearing a gray flannel suit over a white shirt, with a poppy-red necktie. He smells like vitamin B, spray starch, smoked fish. He’s tinier than ever, jerky as a wooden man on a stick.

  “Old boy,” he calls Landsman, breaking a few of the bones in his nephew’s hand.

  “Looking good, Uncle Hertz,” Landsman says. Taking a closer look, he sees that the suit is shiny at the elbows and knees. The necktie bears testimony to some past meal of soup and has been knotted through the soft lapels not of a shirt but of a white pajama top jammed hastily into the trousers. But Landsman is hardly one to criticize. He’s wearing his emergency suit, popped loose from its crevice at the back of his trunk and unballed, a black number in viscose and wool blend with gold buttons meant to look like Roman coins. He borrowed it once, for a last-minute funeral he forgot he was planning to attend, from an unlucky gambler named Gluksman. It manages to look both funereal and gaudy, has fierce wrinkles, and smells of Detroit trunk.

  “Thanks for the warning,” Uncle Hertz says, letting go of the wreckage of Landsman’s hand.

  “That one there was all for surprising you,” Landsman says, nodding toward Berko. “But I knew you’d want to go out and kill something.”

  Uncle Hertz puts his palms together and bows. Like a true hermit, he takes his duties as a host very seriously. If the hunting is poor, then he will have dragged something well marbled out of the deep freeze and put it on the stove with some carrots and onions and a crushed handful of the herbs that he grows and hangs up in a shed behind his cabin. He will have seen to it that there is ice for the whiskey and cold beer for the stew. Above all, he will have wanted to shave and put on a tie.

  The old man tells Landsman to go into the house, and Landsman obeys him, which leaves Hertz standing there to face his son. Landsman watches, an interested party like all Jewish men from the moment that Abraham got Isaac to lie down on that mountaintop and bare his pulsing rib cage to the sky. The old man reaches out and takes hold of the sleeve of Berko’s lumberjack shirt. He rolls the fabric between his fingers. Berko submits to the examination with a look of genuine pain on his face. It has to be killing him, Landsman knows, to appear before his father wearing anything but his best Italian finery.

  “So, where’s the Big Blue Ox?” the old man says at last.

  “I don’t know,” Berko says. “But I think he may have your pajama bottoms.”

  Berko smooths the pinched place that his father made in his sleeve. He walks past the old man and comes into the house. “Asshole,” he says, under his breath, almost. He excuses himself to use the toilet.

  “Slivovitz,” the old man says, going for the bottles, a huddled skyline like a miniature replica of the Shvartser-Yam on a black enamel tray. “Isn’t that it?”

  “Seltzer,” Landsman says. When his uncle arches an eyebrow, he shrugs. “I got a new doctor. Indian fellow. Wants me to give up booze.”

  “And since when do you listen to doctors or Indians?”

  “Since never,” Landsman admits.

  “Self-medication is a Landsman tradition.”

  “So is being a Jew,” Landsman says. “Look where that’s got us.”

  “Strange times to be a Jew,” the old man agrees. He turns from the bar and presents Landsman with a highball glass fitted with a lemon-slice yarmulke. Then he pours himself a generous shot of slivovitz and raises it to Landsman with an expression of humorous cruelty that Landsman knows well and in which he long since ceased to see any humor.

  “To strange times,” the old man says.

  He eases it back, and when he looks at Landsman, he glows like a man who just said something witty that broke up a room. Landsman knows how much it must be killing Hertz to watch the skiff he poled for so many years, with all his craft and strength, drifting ever nearer to the falls of Reversion. He pours himself a second quick one and knocks it back with no show of pleasure. Now it’s Landsman’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “You have your doctor,” Uncle Hertz says. “I have mine.”

  Uncle Hertz’s cabin is a single large room with a loft that goes all the way around three sides. All the trim and furnishing is horn, bone, sinew, hide, and pelt. You reach the loft by a steep companionway at the back, next to the kitchenette. In one corner is the old man’s bed, neatly made. Beside the bed, on a small, round table, stands a chessboard. The pieces are rosewood and maple. One of White’s maple knights is missing its left horse ear. One of Black’s rosewood pawns has a blond flaw on its knob. The board has a neglected, chaotic air; a Vicks inhaler stands amid the pieces at one end, a possible threat to White’s king at e1.

  “I see you’re playing the Mentholyptus Defense,” Landsman says, turning the board to get a better look. “Correspondence game?”

  Hertz is crowding Landsman, exhaling his breath of plum brandy, the undernote of herring so oily and sharp you can feel the little bones in it. Jostled, Landsman tips the whole thing to the ground with a clatter.

  “You were always the master of that move,” Hertz says. “The Landsman Gambit.”

  “Shit, Uncle Hertz, I’m sorry.” Landsman crouches and gropes around under the old man’s bed for the pieces.

  “Don’t worry about it!” the old man says. “It’s all right. It wasn’t a game, I was just fooling around. I don’t play by mail anymore. I live and die by the sacrifice. I like to dazzle them with some crazy, beautiful combination. Tough to do that on a postcard. Do you recognize the set?”

  Hertz helps Landsman return the pieces to their box, also maple, lined with green velveteen. The inhaler he slips into a pocket.

  “No,” Landsman says. Landsman is the one, executing the Landsman Gambit during a tantrum many years ago, who cost the White knight its ear.

  “What do you think? You gave it to him.”

  There are five books stacked on the nightstand by the old man’s bed. A Yiddish translation of Chandler. A French biography of Marcel Duchamp. A paperback attack on the wily agenda of the Third Russian Republic that was popular in the U.S. the year before. A Peterson field guide to marine mammals. And something called Kampf, in the original German, by Emanuel Lasker.

  The toilet flushes, and there is the sound of Berko dashing water over his hands.

  “Suddenly, everybody’s reading Lasker,” Landsman says. He picks up the book, heavy, black, the title embossed in gilded black letter, and is mildly surprised to discover that it has nothing to do with chess. No diagrams, no figurine queens and horses, just page after page of thorny German prose. “So the man was a philosopher, too?”

  “He considered it his true calling. Even though he was a genius at chess and higher mathematics. I’m sorry to say, as a philosopher, maybe he wasn’t such a genius. Why, who else is reading Emanuel Lasker? Nobody reads Emanuel Lasker anymore.”

&
nbsp; “That’s even more true now than it was a week ago,” Berko says, coming out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. He gravitates naturally toward the dinner table. The big woodblock table is laid for three. The plates are enameled tin, the glasses plastic, and the knives have bone handles and fearsome blades, the kind you might use to cut the liver still throbbing from the abdomen of a bear. There is a pitcher of iced tea and an enameled pot of coffee. The meal that Hertz Shemets has prepared is plentiful, hot, and heavily weighted toward moose.

  “Moose chili,” the old man says. “I ground the meat last fall, I have it in vacuum bags in the deep freeze. Killed the moose, too, of course. A cow, a thousand-pounder. The chili I made today, the beans are kidney beans, and I threw in a can of turtle beans I had lying around. Only I wasn’t sure it would be enough, so I heated up a few more things I had in the freezer. There’s a quiche lorraine—that’s egg, naturally, with tomato and bacon, the bacon is moose bacon. I smoked it myself.”

  “The eggs are moose eggs,” Berko says, duplicating perfectly his father’s mildly pompous tone.

  The old man points to a white glass bowl piled high with uniform meatballs in a reddish-brown gravy. “Swedish meatballs,” he says. “Moose meatballs. And then some cold roast moose, if anybody wants a sandwich. I baked the bread myself. And the mayonnaise is homemade. I can’t abide mayonnaise from a jar.”

  They sit down to eat with the lonely old man. Years ago his dining room was a lively region, the only table in these divided islands at which Indians and Jews regularly sat down together to eat good food without rancor. There was California wine to drink and be expatiated upon by the old man. Silent types, hard cases, and the odd special agent or lobbyist from Washington mingled with totem carvers, chess bums, and Native fishermen. Hertz submitted to the raillery of Mrs. Pullman. He was the kind of domineering old cutthroat who chose to marry a woman who would knock him down a peg or two in front of his friends. Somehow it only made him look stronger.