The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Page 38

  Landsman looks at Bina. “All right?”

  “We catch whoever killed Mendel Shpilman,” Bina says, “you give us information. Helpful information about Litvak’s disappearance. If he’s still alive, you give me Litvak.”

  “You have a deal,” the boundary maven says. He thrusts out his right claw, all spots and knuckles, and Bina shakes it.

  Landsman, feeling stunned, gets up and shakes hands with the boundary maven. Then he follows Bina out of the shop into the waning day, and his shock intensifies when he finds that Bina is crying. Unlike Zimbalist’s, hers are tears of fury.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” she says, availing herself of a tissue from her endless stash. “That is the kind of thing you would do.”

  “People I know keep having that problem,” Landsman says. “Suddenly acting like me.”

  “We’re law officers. We uphold the law.”

  “People of the book,” Landsman says. “As it were.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Do you want to go back in there and arrest him?” he says. “We can. We have the cable from the tunnel. We can hold him. Start from there.”

  She shakes her head. The bachelor on his map of stains is staring at them, hitching up the seat of his black serge trousers and taking it all in. Landsman decides he’d better get her out of there. He puts his arm around her for the first time in three years and ushers her over to the Super Sport, then goes around to his side and climbs in behind the wheel.

  “The law,” she says. “I don’t even know what law I’m talking about anymore. Now I’m just making this shit up.”

  They sit silently as Landsman wrestles with the perennial detective problem of being obliged to state the obvious.

  “I kind of like this new crazy, confused Bina and all,” he says. “But I feel I have to point out that we have no real leads on the Shpilman case. No witnesses. No suspect.”

  “Well, then, you and your partner had better fucking get me a suspect,” she says. “Hadn’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Let’s go.”

  He starts the ignition, puts the Super Sport in gear.

  “Hold on,” she says. “What’s that?”

  Across the platz, a big black four-by-four pulls up around the east side of the rebbe’s house. Two Rudashevskys get out of it. One goes around to open the rear gate of the vehicle. The other waits at the bottom of the side steps, hands knotted loosely behind him. A moment later, two more Rudashevskys come out of the house, humping several hundred cubic meters of what appears to be hand-painted French luggage. Quickly and with little regard for the laws of solid geometry, the four Rudashevskys manage to fit all of the trunks and bags into the back of the four-by-four.

  Once they have accomplished that feat, a big chunk of the house itself breaks off and falls into their arms, wearing a gorgeous fawncolored alpaca coat. The Verbover rebbe does not look up, or back, or around at the world he rebuilt and is now abandoning. He lets the Rudashevskys do their quantum origami on him, folding him and his canes into the backseat of the four-by-four. The yid just joins his luggage and rolls on.

  Fifty-five seconds later, a second four-by-four pulls up, and two women in long dresses, heads covered, are helped into the back along with their city of baggage and a number of children. The process is repeated with females and children and black four-by-fours for the next eleven minutes.

  “I hope they have a very big airplane,” Landsman says.

  “I didn’t see her,” Bina says. “Did you see her?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t see Big Shprintzl, either.”

  Half a second later, Bina’s Shoyfer rings.

  “Gelbfish. Yes. We did wonder. Yes. I understand.” She snaps the phone shut. “Drive around the back of the house,” she says. “She saw your car.”

  Landsman guides the Super Sport through a narrow alley and into a courtyard behind the rebbe’s house. Apart from the car, there is nothing that would have been out of place a hundred years ago. Stone flags, stucco walls, leaded glass, a long half-timbered gallery. The flags are slick, and water drips from a row of potted ferns that hang from the underside of the gallery.

  “She’s coming out?”

  Bina doesn’t answer, and after a moment, a blue wooden door opens in a low wing of the great high house. The wing is set at a crooked angle to the rest of the building, and it sags with picturesque accuracy. Batsheva Shpilman is still dressed more or less for a funeral, her head and face wrapped in a long, sheer veil. She doesn’t cross the gap of perhaps eight feet separating her from the car; she just stands on the doorstep with the faithful bulk of Shprintzl Rudashevsky looming in the shadows behind her.

  Bina rolls down the window on her side. “You aren’t leaving?” she says.

  “Did you catch him?”

  Bina doesn’t play games or act stupid. She just shakes her head.

  “Then I’m not leaving.”

  “It might take a while. It might take longer than we really have.”

  “I certainly hope not,” says Mendel Shpilman’s mother. “That man Zimbalist is sending his idiots in their yellow pajamas over here to number every stone in this house so that it can be disassembled and then reassembled in Jerusalem. If I’m still here in two weeks, I’m going to be sleeping in Shprintzl’s garage.”

  “It would be my very great honor,” says what is either a very grave talking donkey or Shprintzl Rudashevsky from behind the rebbe’s wife.

  “We will catch him,” Bina says. “Detective Landsman just swore me an oath to that effect.”

  “I know what his promises are worth,” Mrs. Shpilman says. “So do you.”

  “Hey!” Landsman says, but she has already turned and gone back into the crooked little building from which she emerged.

  “All right,” Bina says, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get started. What do we do now?”

  Landsman taps the wheel, considering his promises and their worth. He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be. The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.

  “All day I’ve been craving stuffed cabbage,” he says.

  45

  From the summer of 1986 to the spring of 1988, when they defied the wishes of Bina’s parents and moved in together, Landsman sneaked in and out of the Gelbfish home to make love with her. Every night unless they were quarreling, and sometimes in the thick of a quarrel, Landsman climbed the drainpipe and tumbled in through Bina’s bedroom window to share her narrow bed. Just before dawn she would send him back down again.

  Tonight it took him longer and cost him more effort than his vanity would care to admit. As he passed the halfway mark, just above Mr. Oysher’s dining room window, Landsman’s left loafer slipped, and he dangled free and thrilling over the black void of the Gelbfish backyard. The stars overhead, the Bear, the Snake, exchanged places with the rhododendron and the wreckage of the neighbors’ sukkoh. In regaining a purchase, Landsman tore the leg of his trousers on the aluminum bracket, his old enemy in the struggle for control of the drainpipe. Foreplay between the lovers commenced with Bina balling up a tissue to blot the cut on Landsman’s shin. His shin with its blotches and freckles, with its strange midlife bloom of black hair.

  They lie there on their sides, a couple of aging yids stuck together like pages of an album. Her shoulderblades dig into his chest. The knobs of his patellas are notched against the soft moist backs of her knees. His lips can blow softly across the teacup of her ear. And a part of Landsman that has been the symbol and the site of his loneliness for a very long time has found shelter inside of his commanding officer, to whom he was once married for twelve years. Although, it’s true, his tenure inside her has grown precarious. One good
sneeze could pop him loose.

  “The whole time,” Bina says. “Two years.”

  “The whole time.”

  “Not once.”

  “Not even.”

  “Weren’t you lonely?”

  “Pretty lonely.”

  “And blue?”

  “Black. But never black or lonely enough to kid myself that having sex with a random Jewess was going to make me feel any less.”

  “Actually, random sex only makes it worse,” she says.

  “You speak from experience.”

  “I fucked a couple of men in Yakovy. If that’s what you want to know.”

  “It’s strange,” Landsman says upon reflection. “But I think I do not.”

  “A couple or three.”

  “I don’t need a report.”

  “So, nu,” she says, “so you just beat off ?”

  “With a discipline you might find surprising in a yid so unruly.”

  “And what about now?” she says.

  “Now? Now is madness,” he says. “Not to mention uncomfortable. Plus I think my leg is still bleeding.”

  “I meant,” she says, “what about now, do you feel lonely.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Squashed into this bread box?”

  He buries his nose in the thick soft rasp of Bina’s hair and takes a deep breath. Raisins, vinegar, a salt whiff of the sweat of her nape.

  “What does it smell like?”

  “It smells red,” he says.

  “It does not.”

  “It smells like Rumania.”

  “You smell like a Rumanian,” she says. “With shockingly hairy legs.”

  “I’ve become such a geezer.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I can’t even climb stairs. My hair’s falling out.”

  “My ass is like a topographical map.”

  He confirms this information with his fingers. Ridges and depressions, here and there a pimple in high relief. He threads his hands under and over her waist and reaches around to weigh a breast in each hand. At first he retrieves no memory of their former size or estate to compare them with, and he panics a little. Then he decides that they are the same as they have always been, spanned exactly by his palm and his outstretched fingers, formed from some mysterious compound of gravity and give.

  “I’m not going back down that drainpipe,” he says. “I can tell you that much.”

  “I said you could just take the stairs. The drainpipe was your idea.”

  “It was all my idea,” he says. “It was always my idea.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she says.

  They lie there for a long time without saying anything more. Landsman can feel the skin beside him slowly filling with dark wine. A few minutes later, Bina begins to snore. There is no doubt that her snoring has not changed in two years. It has a double-reeded hum, the bumblebee continuo of Mongolian throat-singing. It has the slow grandeur of a whale’s respiration. Landsman begins to drift across the surface of her bed and of the susurration of Bina’s breath. In her arms, in the scent of her on the bed linens—a strong but pleasant smell like new leather gloves—Landsman feels safe for the first time in ages. Drowsy and content. Here you go, Landsman, he thinks. Here is the smell and the hand on your belly that you traded for a lifetime of silence.

  He sits up, wide awake and hateful to himself, craven, more unworthy than ever of the fine kidskin woman in his arms. Yes, all right, Landsman understands, so go shit in the ocean, that he made not the right but the only choice. He understands that the necessity of covering up for the dark deeds of the boys in the top drawer is one that nozzes have been making into a virtue since the dawn of police work. He understands that if he were to try to tell someone, say Dennis Brennan, what he knows, then the boys in the top drawer would find another way to silence him, this time on their own terms. So why is his heart running like a jailbird’s steel cup along the bars of his rib cage? Why does Bina’s fragrant bed suddenly feel like a wet sock, a pair of underpants riding up on him, a wool suit on a hot afternoon? You make a deal, take what you can get, move on. Get over it. So distant men in a sunny country have been lured into killing one another so that while their backs are turned, their sunny country can be boosted and fenced. So the fate of the Sitka District has been sealed. So the killer of Mendel Shpilman, whoever it was, is walking around free. So, so what?

  Landsman gets out of the bed. Discontentment gathers like ball lightning around the chessboard in the pocket of his coat. He unfolds it and contemplates it and thinks, I missed something in the room. No, he didn’t miss anything; but if he missed something, it’s gone by now. Only he didn’t miss anything in the room. But he must have missed something.

  His thoughts are a tattoo needle inking the spade on an ace. They are a tornado going back and forth over the same damn pancaked trailer. They narrow and darken until they describe a tiny black circle, the hole at the back of Mendel Shpilman’s head.

  He re-creates the scene in his imagination, as he saw it that night when Tenenboym knocked on his door. The freckled expanse of pale back. The white underpants. The broken mask of the eyes, the right hand tumbled from the bed to brush the floor with its fingers. The chessboard on the nightstand.

  Landsman lays the board on Bina’s night stand, in the pale of dim light from the lamp, a yellow porcelain affair with a big yellow daisy on the green shade. White facing the wall. Black—Shpilman, Landsman—facing the middle of the room.

  Maybe it’s the context at once familiar and strange, the painted bedstead, the daisy lamp, the daisies on the wallpaper, the dresser in whose top drawer she used to keep her diaphragm. Or maybe it’s the lingering traces of endorphin in his bloodstream. But as Landsman stares at the chessboard, staring at a chessboard, for the first time in his life, feels good. It feels pleasurable, in fact. Standing there, moving the pieces in his mind, seems to slow or at least to dislodge the needle inking over the black spot in his brain. He focuses on the promotion at b8. What if you changed that pawn to a bishop, a rook, a queen, a knight?

  Landsman reaches for a chair to take White’s place at the board, to sit down in his imagination for a friendly game against Shpilman. There’s a chair at the desk, painted to match the daisy-green bed, in the corner of Bina’s room. It’s right about where the fold-down desk would be in relation to the bed in Shpilman’s room at the Zamenhof. Landsman lowers himself into the green chair, eyes on the board.

  A knight, he decides. And then Black has to move the pawn at d7—but to where? He settles in to play it out, not because of some forlorn hope that it might lead him to the killer, but because he really needs, all of a sudden, to play the game out. And then, as if the seat is wired to administer a charge, Landsman leaps to his feet. He yanks the green chair one-handed into the air. Four round indentations in the low-pile white carpet, faint but distinct.

  He always assumed that Shpilman, as the reception clerks all reported, never had visitors, that the game he left behind was a form of chess solitaire played from memory, from the pages of Three Hundred Chess Games, maybe just against himself. But if Shpilman did have a visitor, maybe that visitor pulled up a chair to sit down at the board across from his opponent. Across the cardboard chessboard from his victim. And that phantom patzer’s chair would have left indentations in the carpet. No doubt by now they have faded or been vacuumed over. But they might be visible in one of Shpringer’s photographs, boxed up in some storage room at the forensic lab.

  Landsman steps into his trousers, buttons his shirt, knots his tie. He takes his coat from the door and, carrying his shoes, goes to pull the covers more snugly over Bina. As he bends to switch off the bedside light, a rectangle of paper falls out of his coat pocket. It’s the postcard he received from the gym that he used to frequent, with its offer of a lifetime membership good for the next two months. He studies the glossy side of the card, with its enchanted Jew. Before; after. Fat; thin. Start here; finish there. Wise; happy. Chaos; order. Exile; homeland. Before,
a neat diagram in a book, its grid carefully crosshatched at the black squares and annotated like a page of Talmud; after, a battered old chessboard with a Vicks inhaler at b8.

  Landsman feels it then. A hand laid on his, two degrees warmer than normal. A quickening, an unfurling like a banner in his thoughts. Before and after. The touch of Mendel Shpilman, moist, electric, conveying some kind of strange blessing on Landsman. And then nothing but the cold air of Bina Gelbfish’s childhood bedroom. The flowering O’Keeffe vagina on the wall. The stuffed Shnapish sagging on a bookshelf beside Bina’s wristwatch and her cigarettes. And Bina, sitting up in bed, propped on an elbow, watching him, sort of the way she watched those kids go after that hapless penguin piñata.

  “You still do that humming thing,” she says. “When you’re thinking. Like Oscar Peterson, only with no piano.”

  “Fuck,” Landsman says.

  “What, Meyer?”

  “Bina!” It’s Guryeh Gelbfish, that old whistling marmot, from across the hall. An ancient terror momentarily seizes Landsman. “Who is there with you?”

  “Nobody, Pa, go to sleep!” Again she says, in a low whisper, “Meyer, what?”

  Landsman sits down on the edge of the bed. Before; after. The exaltation of understanding; then understanding’s bottomless regret.

  “I know what kind of a gun killed Mendel Shpilman,” he says.

  “All right,” Bina says.

  “It wasn’t a chess game,” Landsman says after a moment. “On the board in Shpilman’s room. It was a problem. It seems obvious now, I should have seen it, the setup was so freaky. Somebody came to see Shpilman that night, and Shpilman posed him a problem. A tricky one.” He moves the pieces of the pocket chess set, his grasp of them sure, his hand steady. “White is all set up to promote his pawn, see. And he wants to promote it to a knight. That’s called underpromotion, because usually, you want to get yourself a queen. With a knight here, he has three different ways to mate, he thinks. But that’s a mistake, because it leaves Black—that was Mendel—with a way to drag the game out. If you’re White, you have to ignore the obvious thing. Just make a dull move with the bishop, here at c2. You don’t even notice it at first. But after you make it, every move Black has leads directly to a mate. He can’t move without finishing himself. He has no good moves.”