The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Page 37

  She spans an arc of the plywood disk with her fingertips, lifts it, and passes it to Landsman, her face flickering with the glow of his flashlight and with a prankish solemnity he has not seen in years. When they were kids, he would climb to her bedroom in the night, sneaking in and out the window to sleep with her, and this was the face she wore as she eased up the sash.

  “It’s a ladder!” she says. “Meyer, you didn’t go down this? When you came here that night?”

  “Well, no, I was kind of, I wasn’t really—”

  “Yeah, okay,” she says gently. “I know.”

  She lowers herself down one steel cleat at a time, and again Landsman goes after her. He can hear her grunt as she lets herself drop, the metallic scrape of her shoes. Then he falls down into the darkness. She catches hold of him and half succeeds in keeping him on his feet. The lamp on Bina’s forehead splashes light here, here, here, making a hasty sketch of the tunnel.

  It’s another aluminum pipe, running perpendicular to the one they just came down. Landsman’s hat brushes against the arc of it when he stands erect. It ends behind them in a curtain of dank black earth and runs straight away from them, under Max Nordau Street, toward the Blackpool. The air is cold and planetary, with an iron taint. A floor of plywood has been laid, and as they clunk along it, their lights pick out the imprints of the boots of passing men.

  When they reckon themselves to be about halfway across Max Nordau, they meet another pipeline running away to the east and west, linking this tunnel to the network laid against the likelihood of future annihilation. Tunnels leading to tunnels, storehouses, bunkers.

  Landsman considers the cohort of yids who arrived with his father, those who were not broken by suffering and horror but rather somehow resolved. The former partisans, the resisters, Communist gunmen, left-Zionist saboteurs—the rabble, as they were styled in the newspapers of the south—who showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls and fought with Polar Bears like Hertz Shemets their brief, doomed battle for control of the District. They knew, those bold and devastated men, knew as they knew the flavor of their tongues in their mouths, that their saviors would one day betray them. They walked into this wild country that had never seen a Jew and set about preparing for the day when they would be rounded up, sent packing, forced to make a stand. Then, one by one, these wised-up, angry men and women had been coopted, picked off, fattened up, set against one another, or defanged by Uncle Hertz and his endless operations.

  “Not all of them,” Bina says, her voice, like Landsman’s, caroming off the aluminum walls of the tunnel. “Some of them just got comfortable here. They started to forget a little bit. They felt at home.”

  “I guess that’s how it always goes,” Landsman says. “Egypt. Spain. Germany.”

  “They weakened. It’s human to weaken. They had their lives. Come on.”

  They follow the planks until they come to another pipe that opens overhead, also fitted with cleats.

  “You go first this time,” Bina says. “Let me check out your ass for a change.”

  Landsman hoists himself up to the lowest cleat and then mounts to the top. A swatch of weak light shows through a break or hole in the lid that caps this end of the pipe. Landsman pushes against the hatch and it shoves back, a thick sheet of plywood that doesn’t budge or buckle. He puts his shoulder into it.

  “What’s the matter?” Bina says from beneath his feet, her lamp wobbling into his eyes.

  “It won’t move,” Landsman says. “There must be something on it. Or—”

  He feels for the hole, and his hand brushes against something cold and rigid. He recoils, then his fingers return to work out the sense of an iron rod, a cable, pulled taut. He shines his light. A rubberized cable, knotted and fed through the finger hole from the top side, then drawn tight and lashed to the topmost cleat of the ladder underneath.

  “What is it, Meyer? What did they do?”

  “They tied it shut behind them so that nobody could follow them back down,” Landsman says. “Tied it with a nice big piece of string.”

  44

  A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue. At 12:03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stucco of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, may be a shammes, but he is no stone.

  Driving onto Verbov Island, coming west on Avenue 225, he and Bina catch strong whiffs at every corner of the bubbling tzimmes that is cooking up all over town. The smell blows more intense and richer with both joy and panic on this island than anywhere else. Signs and banners announce the imminent proclamation of the kingdom of David and exhort the pious to prepare for the return to Eretz Yisroel. Many of the signs look spontaneous, sprayed in dripping characters on bed linens and sheets of butcher paper. In the side streets, crowds of women and handlers yell at one another, trying to hold down or hyperinflate the price of luggage, concentrated laundry soap, sunscreen, batteries, protein bars, bolts of tropical-weight wool. Deeper into the alleys, Landsman imagines, in the basements and doorways, a quieter market burns like a banked fire: prescription drugs, gold, automatic weapons. They drive past huddled groups of street-corner geniuses spinning commentary on which families are to be given which contracts when they reach the Holy Land, which of the wiseguys will run the policy rackets, the cigarette smuggling, the gun franchises. For the first time since Gaystik took the championship, since the World’s Fair, maybe for the first time in sixty years, or so it feels to Landsman, something is actually happening in the Sitka District. What that something will turn out to be, not even the most learned of the sidewalk rebbes has the faintest idea.

  But when they reach the heart of the island, the faithful replica of the lost heart of old Verbov, there is no hint of the end of exile, rampant price gouging, messianic revolution. Down at the wide end of the platz, the house of the Verbover rebbe stands looking solid and eternal as a house in a dream. Smoke hastens like a remittance from its lavish chimney, only to be waylaid by the wind. The morning’s Rudashevskys loiter darkly at their posts, and on the ridge of the house, the black rooster perches, coattails flapping, with his semiautomatic mandolin. Around the platz, women describe the ordinary circuits of their day, pushing strollers, trailing girls and boys too young for school. Here and there they stop to knit and unravel the skeins of breath that tangle them together. Scraps of newsprint, leaves, and dust get up impromptu games of dreydl in the archways of the houses. A pair of men in long coats leans into the wind, making for the rebbe’s house, sidelocks swinging. For the first time the traditional complaint, tantamount to a creed or at least a philosophy, of the Sitka Jew—Nobody gives a damn about us, stuck up here between Hoonah and Hotzeplotz—strikes Landsman as having been a blessing these past sixty years, and not the affliction they had all, in their backwater of geography and history, supposed.

  “Who else is going to want to live in this chicken coop?” Bina says, echoing his thought in her own fashion, zipping her orange parka up past her chin. She slams the door of Landsman’s car and trades ritual glares with a gathering of women across the lane from the boundary maven’s shop. “This place is like a glass eye, it’s a wooden leg, you can’t pawn it.”

  In front of the somber barn, the bachelor torments a rag with a broom handle. The rag is sloshed in solvent with a psychotropic odor, and the boy has been exiled to three hopeless islands of automobile grease on the cement. He jabs and caresses the rag with the end of his pole. When he takes note of Bina, he does so with a satisfying mixture of horror and awe. If Bina were Messiah come to redeem him in an orange parka, the expression on the pisher’s face would be more or less the same. His gaze gets stuck to her, and then he has to detach it with brutal care, like someone removing his tongue from a frozen pump.

  “Reb Zimbalist?” Landsman says.


  “He’s there,” says the bachelor, nodding toward the door of the shop. “But he’s really busy.”

  “As busy as you?”

  The bachelor gives the rag another desultory poke. “I was in the way.” He makes the citation with a flourish of self-pity, then aims a cheekbone at Bina without implicating any of his other features of his face in the gesture. “She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.”

  “See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.”

  The bachelor takes a step backward, and the mop handle disappears behind his back as if somehow it might incriminate him. “Are you going to arrest Reb Itzik?” he says.

  “Now,” Landsman says, taking a step toward the bachelor, “why would we want to do that?”

  One thing about a Yeshiva bachelor, he knows his way around a question.

  “How should I know?” he says. “If I was a fancy-pants lawyer, tell me, please, would I be standing out here slopping around with a rag on the end of a stick?”

  Inside the shop, they have gathered around the big map table, Itzik Zimbalist and his crew, a dozen strapping Jews in yellow coveralls, their chins upholstered with the netted rolls of their beards. The presence of a woman in the shop flits among them like a bothersome moth. Zimbalist is the last to look up from the problem spread out on the table before him. When he sees who has come with the latest thorny question for the boundary maven, he nods and grunts with a suggestion of huffiness, as if Landsman and Bina are late for their appointment.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Bina says, her voice weirdly fluting and unpersuasive in this big male barn. “I’m Inspector Gelbfish.”

  “Good morning,” says the boundary maven.

  His sharp and fleshless face is illegible as a blade or a skull. He rolls up the plan or chart with practiced hands, ties it in a length of cord, and turns to sheath it in the rack, where it disappears among a thousand of its fellows. His movements are those of an old man to whom haste is a forgotten vice. His step is herky-jerk, but his hands mannered and accurate.

  “Lunch is over,” he tells the crew, though there is not a trace of food to be seen.

  The men hesitate, forming an irregular eruv around the boundary maven, ready to shield him from the secular trouble that stands hung with a couple of badges in their midst.

  “Maybe they’d better stick around,” Landsman says. “We might need to talk to them, too.”

  “Go wait in the vans,” Zimbalist tells them. “You’re in the way.”

  They start across the supply area to the garage. One of the crew turns back, pressing doubtfully at the roll of his beard.

  “Seeing as how lunch is over, Reb Itzik,” he says, “is it all right with you if we have our supper now?”

  “Eat your breakfast, too,” Zimbalist says. “You’re going to be up all night.”

  “Lot of work to do?” Bina says.

  “Are you kidding? It’s going to take them years to pack up this mess. I’m going to need a cargo container.”

  He goes to the electric tea kettle and begins to set up three glasses. “Nu, Landsman, I heard maybe you lost the use of that badge of yours for a little while,” he says.

  “You hear a lot, don’t you?” Landsman says.

  “I hear what I hear.”

  “Have you ever heard that people dug tunnels all under the Untershtot, just in case the Americans turned on us and decided to stage an aktion?”

  “I’d say it rings a bell,” Zimbalist says. “Now that you mention it.”

  “So you wouldn’t happen to possess, by any chance, a plan of those tunnels? Showing how they run, where they connect, et cetera?”

  The old man still has his back to them, tearing open the paper envelopes that hold the tea bags. “If I didn’t,” he says, “what kind of a boundary maven would I be?”

  “So if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get somebody, say, into or out of the basement of the Hotel Blackpool on Max Nordau Street without being seen. Could you do that?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Zimbalist says. “I wouldn’t board my mother-in-law’s Chihuahua in that fleabag.”

  He unplugs the kettle before the water has boiled and soaks the tea bags one-two-three. He puts the glasses on a tray with a pot of jam and three small spoons, and they sit down at his desk in the corner. The tea bags surrender their color unwillingly to the tepid water. Landsman hands around papiroses and lights them. From the vans come the sounds of men shouting, or laughing, Landsman isn’t quite sure.

  Bina walks around the workshop, admiring the mass and variety of string, stepping carefully to avoid a tumbleweed of knotted wire, gray rubber with a blood-red copper stump.

  “Ever make a mistake?” Bina asks the boundary maven. “Tell someone he can carry where he’s not allowed to carry? Draw a line where no line needs to be drawn?”

  “I don’t dare to make mistakes,” Zimbalist says. “Carrying on the Sabbath, it’s a serious violation. People start thinking they can’t rely on my maps, I’m through.”

  “We still don’t have a ballistic fingerprint on the gun that killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says with care. “But you saw the wound, Meyer.”

  “I did.”

  “Did it look like it was made by, say, a Glock, or a TEC-9, or any kind of an automatic?”

  “In my humble opinion,” Landsman says, “no.”

  “You spent a lot of quality time with Litvak’s crew and their firearms.”

  “And loved every minute.”

  “Did you see anything in their toybox that was not an automatic?”

  “No,” Landsman says. “No, Inspector, I did not.”

  “What does that prove?” Zimbalist says, easing his tender bottom down onto the inflatable-donut cushion of his desk chair. “More importantly, why should I care?”

  “Aside from your general, personal interest in seeing justice done in this matter, of course,” says Bina.

  “Aside from that,” Zimbalist says.

  “Detective Landsman, do you think Alter Litvak killed Shpilman or ordered him killed?”

  Landsman looks right into the boundary maven’s face and says, “He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t just need Mendel. The yid had started to believe in Mendel.”

  Zimbalist blinks and fingers the blade of his nose, thinking this over, as if it is the rumor of a newborn creek that will force him to redraw one of his maps.

  “I do not buy it,” he concludes. “Anybody else. Everybody else. Not that yid.”

  Landsman doesn’t bother to argue. Zimbalist reaches for his tea. A vein of rust twists in the water like the ribbon in a glass marble.

  “What would you do if something you had been telling everybody was one of the lines on your map,” Bina says, “turned out to be, say, a crease? A hair. A stray pen mark. Something like that. Would you tell anyone? Would you go to the rebbe? Would you admit that you made a mistake?”

  “It would never happen.”

  “But if it did. Would you be able to live with yourself?”

  “If you knew you had sent an innocent man to prison for many years, Inspector Gelbfish, for the rest of his life, would you be able to live with yourself ?”

  “It happens all the time,” Bina says. “But here I am.”

  “Well, then,” the maven says. “I guess you know how I feel. By the way, I use the term ‘innocent’ very loosely.”

  “As do I,” says Bina. “No doubt about it.”

  “My whole life, I knew only one man I would use that word to describe.”

  “You’re ahead of me, then,” Bina says.

  “Me, too,” says Landsman, missing Mendel Shpilman as if they had been, for many years, the best of friends. “I am very sorry to say.”

  “You know what people are saying?” Zimbalist says. “These geniuses I dwell among? They’re saying Mendel’s coming back. That it’s all happening just the way it was written. Tha
t when they get to Jerusalem, Mendel is going to be there, waiting for them. Ready to rule over Israel.”

  Tears start to run down the boundary maven’s sallow cheeks. After a moment Bina removes a handkerchief from her bag, clean and pressed. Zimbalist takes it and looks at it for a moment. Then he blows a great tekiah on his shofar of a nose.

  “I would like to see him again,” he says. “I will admit it.”

  Bina hoists her bag to her shoulder, and it resumes its steady mission to drag her down. “Get your things together, Mr. Zimbalist.”

  The old man appears startled. He puffs his lips as if trying to light an invisible cigar. He picks up a loop of rawhide thong lying on his desk, ties a knot in it, and puts it down again. Then he picks it up and unties it. “My things,” he says finally. “Are you saying I’m under arrest?”

  “No,” Bina says. “But I would like you to come down so that we can talk some more. You might want to call your lawyer.”

  “My lawyer,” he says.

  “I think you took Alter Litvak out of his hotel room. I think you’ve done something with him, put him on ice, possibly killed him. I’d like to find out.”

  “You have no evidence,” Zimbalist says. “You’re just guessing.”

  “She has a little evidence,” Landsman says.

  “About three feet,” says Bina. “Can you hang a man with three feet of rope, Mr. Zimbalist?”

  The maven shakes his head, half irritated, half amused, his poise and his bearings regained. “You’re just wasting my time and yours,” he says. “I have a huge amount of work to do. And you, by your own admission, by your own theory, have not found whoever it was that killed Mendele. So with all due respect, why don’t you just worry about that, all right, and leave me alone? Come back when you’ve caught the supposed actual killer, and I’ll tell you what I know about Litvak, which at the moment, by the way, is officially and everlastingly nothing.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Landsman says.

  “All right,” says Bina.

  “All right!” Zimbalist says.