The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Page 31

  “I never asked you to observe the religion,” the old man says, not looking up. “I don’t think I ever put any kind of—”

  “It has nothing to do with religion,” Berko says. “It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers.”

  It comes through the mother, of course, one’s being or not being a Jew. But Berko knows that. He’s known it since the day he moved to Sitka. He sees it every time he looks into a mirror.

  “It’s all nonsense,” the old man goes on, a little mumbly, half to himself. “A slave religion. Tying yourself up. Bondage gear! I’ve never worn that nonsense in my life.”

  “No?” Berko says.

  It catches Landsman off guard, how quick and how massive is the transfer of Berko Shemets from the doorway of the cabin to the dining table. Before Landsman can quite understand what is happening, Berko has jerked the ritual undergarment down over the old man’s head. He cradles the head in one arm while, with the other, he winds the knotted fringes around and around, defining in fine strands of wool the contours of the old man’s face. It’s as if he’s packing a statue for shipment. The old man kicks, rakes at the air with his fingernails.

  “You never wore one, eh?” Berko says. “You never fucking wore one! Try mine! Try mine, you prick!”

  “Stop.” Landsman goes to the rescue of the man whose addiction to tactics of sacrifice led, maybe not predictably but directly, to the death of Laurie Jo Bear. “Berko, come on. Stop now.” He takes hold of Berko’s elbow and drags him aside, and when he’s got himself between the two, he starts shoving the big man toward the door.

  “Okay.” Berko throws up his hands and lets Landsman push him a couple of feet in that direction. “Okay, I’m done. Get off me, Meyer.”

  Landsman eases up, letting go of his partner. Berko tucks his tee into his trousers and starts to button his shirt, but all the buttons have flown away. He leaves it, smooths down the black badger of his hair with a wide palm, stoops to retrieve his hat and coat from the floor, and walks out. Night comes curling with the fog into the house on its stilts above the water.

  Landsman turns back to the old man, who is sitting there with his head shrouded in the four-corners, like a hostage who cannot be permitted to see the faces of his captors.

  “You want some help, Uncle Hertz?” Landsman says.

  “I’m fine,” the old man says, his voice faint, muffled by the cloth. “Thank you.”

  “You just want to sit there like that?”

  The old man doesn’t reply. Landsman puts on his hat and walks out.

  They are just getting into the car when they hear the gunshot, a boom that in the darkness maps the mountains, lights them up with reflected echoes, then fades away.

  “Fuck,” Berko says. He is back inside the house before Landsman has even reached the stairs. By the time Landsman runs in, Berko has crouched down beside his father, who has assumed a strange attitude on the floor beside his bed, a hurdler’s stride, one leg drawn to his chest and the other flung out behind him. In his right hand, he keeps a loose grip on a black snub-nosed revolver; in his left hand, the ritual fringe. Berko straightens his father out, rolls him over onto his back, and feels for a pulse at the throat. There is a slick red patch on the right side of the old man’s forehead, just above the corner of his eye. Scorched hair matted with blood. A poor shot, from the look of it.

  “Oh, shit,” Berko says. “Oh, shit, old man. You fucked it up.”

  “He fucked it up,” Landsman agrees.

  “Old man!” Berko shouts, and then he lowers his voice to a guttural rasp and croons something, a word or two, in the language that he left behind.

  They stop the bleeding and pack the wound. Landsman looks around for the bullet and finds the wormhole that it chewed through the plywood wall.

  “Where’d he get this?” Landsman says, picking up the gun. It’s a homely thing, worn at the edges, an old machine. “The .38 Detective Special?”

  “I don’t know. He has a lot of guns. He likes guns. That’s the one thing we had in common.”

  “I think it might be the gun that Melekh Gaystik used in the Café Einstein.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Berko says. He shoulders the burden of his father, and they carry him down to the car and lay him in the backseat on a pile of towels. Landsman switches on the undercover siren that he has used maybe twice in five years. Then they drive back up over the mountain.

  There is an urgent-care center at Nayeshtat, but many have died there so they decide to take him all the way in to Sitka General. Along the way, Berko calls his wife. He explains to her, not very coherently, that his father and a man named Alter Litvak were indirectly responsible for his mother’s death during the worst Indian-Jew violence in the sixty-year history of the District, and that his father has shot himself in the head. He tells her that they are going to dump the old man at the Sitka General ER, because he is a policeman, God damn it, and he has a job to do, and because the old man can go and die for all he cares. Ester-Malke appears to accept this project as stated, and Berko hangs up the phone. They disappear into a zone without cellular telephone coverage for ten or fifteen minutes, and when they emerge from it, having said nothing, they are nearly to the city limits and the Shoyfer is ringing.

  “No,” Berko says, and then, more angrily, “No.” He listens to his wife’s reasoning for a little under a minute. Landsman has no idea what she’s saying to him, whether she’s preaching from the text of professional conduct, or of common decency, or of forgiveness, or of the duty of a son to a father that transcends or precedes them all. In the end Berko shakes his head. He looks over the backseat at the old Jew stretched out there. “All right.” He closes the telephone.

  “You can drop me off at the hospital,” he says, sounding defeated. “Just call me when you find that fucking Litvak.”

  37

  I need to speak to Katherine Sweeney,” Bina says into the telephone. Sweeney, the assistant United States Attorney, is earnest and competent and may very well listen to what Bina has called her to say. Landsman reaches over, darts his hand across her desk, and cuts the connection with a fingertip. Bina stares at him with great slow wingbeats of her eyelids. He has taken her by surprise. A rare feat.

  “They are behind this,” Landsman says, his finger on the button.

  “Kathy Sweeney is behind this,” she says, keeping the receiver to her ear.

  “Well, no. I doubt that.”

  “The Sitka U.S. Attorney’s office is behind it?”

  “Maybe. No, probably not.”

  “But you’re saying the Justice Department.”

  “Yes. I don’t know. Bina, I’m sorry. I just don’t know how high up it goes.”

  The surprise has faded; her gaze is steady and unblinking. “Okay. Now, you listen to me. First of all, take your hairy damned finger off of my telephone.”

  Landsman withdraws the offending digit before the laser beams from her eyes can sever it cleanly at the knuckle.

  “Don’t you touch my telephone, Meyer.”

  “Never again.”

  “If the story you have been telling me is true,” Bina says, a teacher addressing a roomful of imbecile five-year-olds, “then I need to tell Kathy Sweeney. I probably need to tell the State Department. I may even need to get hold of the Department of Defense.”

  “But—”

  “Because I don’t know if you are aware of this, but the Holy Land is not part of this precinct.”

  “Granted, of course. But listen. Someone with weight, serious weight, got into the FAA database and vanished that file. The same kind of weight promised the Tlingit Council they could have the District back if they let Litvak run his program out of Peril Strait for a little while.”

  “Dick told you that?”

  “He suggested it strongly. And with all due respect to the Lederers from Boca Raton, I am sure that same weight has been writing checks for the clandestine side of the operation. The training facility. Weapons and
support. The cattle breeding. They are behind this.”

  “The U.S. Government.”

  “This is what I’m saying.”

  “Because they think the idea of a bunch of crazy yids running around Arab Palestine, blowing up shrines and following Messiahs and starting World War Three is a really good idea.”

  “They’re just as crazy, Bina. You know they are. Maybe they’re hoping for World War Three. Maybe they want to crank up a new Crusade. Maybe they think if they do this thing, it will make Jesus come back. Or maybe it has nothing to do with any of that, and it’s all really about oil, you know, securing their supply of the stuff once and for all. I don’t know.”

  “Government conspiracies, Meyer.”

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “Talking chickens, Meyer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You promised.”

  “I know.”

  She picks up the telephone and dials the AUSA.

  “Bina. Please. Hang up the phone.”

  “I have been in a lot of dark corners with you, Meyer Landsman,” she says. “I’m not going to go to this one.”

  Landsman guesses he can’t blame her for that.

  When she gets Sweeney on the line, Bina fills her in on the rudiments of Landsman’s tale: The Verbovers and a group of messianic Jews have banded together and are planning to attack an important Muslim shrine in Palestine. She leaves out the supernatural and completely speculative elements. She leaves out the deaths of Naomi Landsman and Mendel Shpilman. She manages to make it sound just far-fetched enough to be credible.

  “I’m going to see if we can maybe track this Litvak down,” she tells Sweeney. “Okay, Kathy. Thanks. I know it does. I hope it is.”

  She hangs up the phone. She picks up the souvenir globe on the desk, with its miniature skyline of Sitka, gives it a shake, and watches the snow come down. She has moved everything else out of the office, the bric-a-brac, the photographs. Just the snow globe and her sheepskins in frames on the wall. A rubber tree and a ficus and a white-spotted pink orchid in a green glass pot. It’s all still as pretty as the underside of a bus. Bina sits in the middle of it in another grim pantsuit, her hair piled up and held in place by metal clasps, rubber bands, and other useful items from her desk drawer.

  “She didn’t laugh,” Landsman says. “Did she?”

  “She’s not the type,” Bina says. “But no. She wants more information. For what it’s worth, I got the feeling this wasn’t the first she’d heard about Alter Litvak. She said she’d like to maybe bring him in if we can find him.”

  “Buchbinder,” Landsman says. “Dr. Rudolf Buchbinder. You remember, he was going out of the Polar-Shtern the other night when you were coming in.”

  “That dentist from down on Ibn Ezra Street?”

  “He told me he was relocating to Jerusalem,” Landsman says. “I thought he was talking nonsense.”

  “The Something Institute,” she remembers.

  “With an M.”

  “Miryam.”

  “Moriah.”

  She gets on her computer and finds a listing for the Moriah Institute in the unlisted-number directory, at 822 Max Nordau Street, seventh floor.

  “Eight-twenty-two,” Landsman says. “Huh.”

  “Isn’t that your block?” Bina dials the telephone number she found.

  “Right across the street,” Landsman says, feeling sheepish. “The Blackpool Hotel.”

  “Machine,” she says. She kills the call with a fingertip and punches in a four-digit. “This is Gelbfish.”

  She arranges for patrolmen and plainclothes officers to stake out the doors and entryways of the Hotel Blackpool. She returns the phone to its cradle and then sits there, looking at it.

  “Okay,” Landsman says. “Let’s go.”

  But Bina doesn’t move.

  “You know, it was nice not having to live with all your bullshit. Not having to put up with twenty-four-hour Landsmania.”

  “I envy you that,” Landsman says.

  “Hertz, Berko, your mother, your father. All of you.” She adds in American, “Bunch of fucking nut jobs.”

  “I know.”

  “Naomi was the only sane person in the family.”

  “She used to say the same thing about you,” Landsman says. “Only she used to say, ‘in the world.’”

  Two quick raps on the door. Landsman gets up, thinking it’s going to be Berko.

  “Hi, there,” says the man at the door in American. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Who are you?” Landsman says.

  “Me is your burial societies,” the man says in wretched but energetic Yiddish.

  “Mr. Spade is here to oversee the transition,” Bina says. “I think I mentioned that he might be coming, Detective Landsman.”

  “I think you did.”

  “Detective Landsman,” Spade says, lapsing mercifully into American. “The notorious.”

  He’s not the potbellied golf type Landsman imagined. He’s too young, plain-faced, big around the chest and shoulders. He’s wearing a gray worsted suit buttoned over a white shirt with a necktie the stippled blue of video static. His neck is a mass of razor bumps and missed whiskers. The protrusion of his Adam’s apple suggests unfathomable depths of earnestness and sincerity. In his lapel he wears a pin in the shape of a stylized fish.

  “How about you and I sit down with your commanding officer for a moment?”

  “All right,” Landsman says. “But I prefer to stand.”

  “Suit yourself. How about we get out of the doorway, though.”

  Landsman steps aside, waving him into the room. Spade shuts the door.

  “Detective Landsman. I have reason to believe,” Spade says, “that you have been conducting an unauthorized and, given the fact that you are currently under suspension—”

  “With pay,” Landsman says.

  “—illegal investigation into a case that has been officially designated inactive. With help from Detective Berko Shemets, also unauthorized. And, taking a wild guess, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you turned out to have been helping him, too, Inspector Gelbfish.”

  “She has been nothing but a pain in the ass, actually,” Landsman says. “To be honest. No help at all.”

  “I just called the AUSA’s office,” Bina says.

  “Did you really?”

  “They may be taking this one over.”

  “For real?”

  “It’s out of my jurisdiction. There’s been—there may have been—a threat. Against a foreign target. By District residents.”

  “Huh-uh!” Spade looks at once scandalized and pleased. “A threat? Get out of town!”

  A cold dense fluid fills Bina’s gaze, somewhere between mercury and sludge. “I’m trying to find a man named Alter Litvak,” she says, a great weariness dragging at the corners of her voice. “He may or may not be involved with this threat. In any case, I’d like to see what he knows about the murder of Mendel Shpilman.”

  “Uh-huh,” Spade says amiably, a little distracted, maybe, like someone pretending to take an interest in the minutiae of your life while surfing some inner Internet of his mind. “Okay, but, see, the thing is, ma’am. Speaking as—What do you call it again? The man from the, uh, Burial Society who sits with the corpse when it’s a Jew?”

  “They call that a shoymer,” Bina says.

  “Right. Speaking as the local shoymer around here, I have to say: No. What you are going to do is to leave this mess, and Mr. Litvak, alone.”

  Bina waits a long time before saying anything. The weariness of her voice seems to flow into her shoulders, her jaw, the lines of her face. “Are you mixed up in this, Spade?” she says.

  “Me personally? No, ma’am. The transition team? Huh-uh. The Alaska Reversion Commission? No way. The truth is, I don’t know very much about this mess at all. And what I do know, I’m not at liberty to say. I’m in resource management, Inspector. That’s what I do. And I’m here to t
ell you, with all due respect, that enough of your resources have already been wasted on this matter.”

  “They are my resources, Mr. Spade,” Bina says. “For two more months, I can talk to whatever witnesses I want to talk to. I can arrest whoever I want to arrest.”

  “Not if the AUSA tells you to back off.”

  The telephone rings.

  “That will be the AUSA,” Landsman says.

  Bina picks up the phone. “Hello, Kathy,” she says. She listens for a minute, nodding, saying nothing. Then she says, “I understand,” and hangs up the phone. Her voice is calm and devoid of feeling. There’s a tight smile on her face, and she ducks her head in humility, as if she has been beaten fair and square. Landsman can feel that she is deliberately not looking at him, because if she looks at him, she might tear up. And he knows how outraged Bina Gelbfish has to get before there is any danger of tears.

  “And I had everything fixed up so nice,” she says.

  “And this place, let me tell you,” Landsman says. “Before you got here, it was a shambles.”

  “I was just going to hand it all over to you,” she tells Spade. “All wrapped up. Free of crumbs. No loose strings.”

  She worked it with such care, accumulated the credits, kissed the asses that needed to be kissed. Swept out the stables. Tied up Sitka Central and attached herself to the top like a decorative bow.

  “I even got rid of that wretched love seat,” she says. “What the hell is going on here, Spade?”

  “I honestly don’t know, ma’am. And even if I did know, I would say that I didn’t.”

  “Your orders are to keep things smooth on this end.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The other end being Palestine.”

  “I don’t know much about Palestine,” Spade says. “I’m from Lubbock. My wife is from Nacogdoches, though, and that’s only about forty miles from Palestine.”

  Bina looks blank for a moment, and then understanding seems to redden her cheeks like anger. “Don’t you stand there and make jokes,” she says. “Don’t you dare.”

  “No, ma’am,” Spade says, and it’s his turn to go a little red.

  “I take this job very seriously, Mr. Spade. And you had better, let me tell you, you had better fucking take me seriously.”