The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  “I’m fine,” he tells Landsman from the floor.

  “Sure you are, sweetness,” Landsman says.

  “Just don’t call my wife.”

  “I won’t,” Landsman assures him, but the yid is already out again. Landsman drags the musician out into the back hallway and leaves him on the floor with a phone book under his head for a pillow. Then he goes back to the table and Berko Shemets and takes a well-behaved sip from his glass of bubbles and syrup.

  “Mmm,” he says. “Coke.”

  “So,” says Berko. “This favor of yours.”

  “Yeah,” Landsman says. His resurgent confidence in himself and his intentions, the sense of well-being, is clearly an illusion produced by a snort of lousy vodka. He rationalizes this with the thought that from the point of view of, say, God, all human confidence is an illusion and every intention a joke. “Kind of a big one.”

  Berko knows where Landsman is heading. But Landsman isn’t quite ready to go there yet.

  “You and Ester-Malke,” Landsman says. “You guys applied for residency.”

  “Is that your big question?”

  “No, this is just the buildup.”

  “We applied for green cards. Everybody in the District has applied for a residency card, unless they’re going to Canada or Argentina or wherever. Jesus, Meyer, didn’t you?”

  “I know I meant to,” Landsman says. “Maybe I did. I can’t remember.”

  This is too shocking for Berko to process, and not what Landsman has led them here to say.

  “I did, all right?” Landsman says. “I remember now. Sure. Filled out my I-999 and everything.”

  Berko nods as if he believes Landsman’s lie.

  “So,” Landsman says. “You guys are planning to stick around, then. Stay in Sitka.”

  “Assuming we can get documented.”

  “Any reason to think you won’t?”

  “Just the numbers. They’re saying it’s going to be under forty percent.” Berko shakes his head, which is pretty much the national gesture at the moment when it comes to the question of where the other Sitka Jews are going to go, or what they are going to do, after Reversion. Actually, no guarantees have been made at all—the 40 percent figure is just another rumor at the end of time—and there are some wild-eyed radicals claiming that the actual number of Jews who will be permitted to remain as legal residents of the newly enlarged state of Alaska when Reversion is finally enforced will be closer to 10 or even 5 percent. These are the same people going around calling for armed resistance, secession, a declaration of independence, and so forth. Landsman has paid very little attention to the controversies and rumors, to the most important question in his local universe.

  “The old man?” Landsman says. “Doesn’t he have any juice left?”

  For forty years—as Denny Brennan’s series revealed—Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI’s domestic surveillance program to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Hertz Shemets’s brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other. Starting in the late sixties, Hertz was turned loose on the nascent radical movement among the Tlingit, and in time he pulled its teeth and claws, too.

  But those activities were a front, as Brennan showed, for Hertz’s real agenda: to obtain Permanent Status for the District: P.S., or even, in his wildest dreams, statehood. “Enough wandering,” Landsman can remember his uncle saying to his father, whose soul retained to the day he died a tinge of romantic Zionism. “Enough with expulsions and migrations and dreaming about next year in the camel lands. It’s time for us to take what we can get and stay put.”

  So every year, it turned out, Uncle Hertz diverted up to half his operating budget to corrupt the people who had authorized it. He bought senators, baited congressional honeypots, and above all romanced rich American Jews whose influence he saw as critical to his plan. Three times Permanent Status bills came up and died, twice in committee, once in a bitter and close battle on the floor. A year after that floor fight, the current president of America ran and won on a platform that showcased the long-overdue enforcement of Reversion, pledging to restore “Alaska for Alaskans, wild and clean.” And Dennis Brennan chased Hertz under a log.

  “The old man?” Berko says. “Down there on his vest-pocket Indian reservation? With his goat? And a freezer full of moose meat? Yeah, he’s a fucking gray eminence in the corridors of power. But anyway, it’s looking all right.”

  “Is it?”

  “Ester-Malke and I both already got three-year work permits.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “So they say.”

  “Naturally, you wouldn’t want to do anything to endanger your status.”

  “No.”

  “Disobey orders. Piss somebody off. Neglect your express duty.”

  “Never.”

  “That’s settled, then.” Landsman reaches into the pocket of his blazer and takes out the chess set. “Did I ever tell you about the note my father left when he killed himself?”

  “I heard it was a poem.”

  “Call it doggerel,” Landsman says. “Six lines of Yiddish verse addressed to an unnamed female.”

  “Oho.”

  “No, no. Nothing racy. It was, what, it was an expression of regret for his inadequacy. Chagrin at his failure. An avowal of devotion and respect. A touching statement of gratitude for the comfort she had given him, and above all, for the measure of forgetfulness that her company had brought to him over the long, bitter course of the years.”

  “You have it memorized.”

  “I did. But I noticed something about it that bothered me. So then I made myself forget it.”

  “What did you notice?”

  Landsman ignores the question as Mrs. Kalushiner arrives with the eggs, six of them, peeled and arranged on a dish with six round indentations, each the size of an egg’s fat bottom. Salt. Pepper. A jar of mustard.

  “Maybe if they took the leash off him,” Berko says, pointing to Hershel with his thumb, “he would go out for a sandwich or something.”

  “He likes the leash,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. “Without it, he doesn’t sleep.” She leaves them again.

  “That bothers me,” Berko says, watching Hershel.

  “I know what you mean.”

  Berko salts an egg and bites it. His teeth leave castellations in the boiled white. “So this poem, then,” he says. “The verse.”

  “So, naturally,” Landsman says, “everyone assumed the addressee of my father’s verse to be my mother. Starting with my mother.”

  “She fit the description.”

  “So it was generally agreed. That is why I never told anybody what I had deduced. In my first official case as a junior shammes.”

  “Which was?”

  “Which was that if you put together the first letters of each of the six lines of the poem, they spelled out a name. Caissa.”

  “Caissa? What kind of name is that?”

  “I believe it is Latin,” Landsman says. “Caissa is the goddess of chess players.”

  He opens the lid of the pocket chess set that he bought at the drugstore on Korczak Platz. The pieces in play remain as he arranged them at the Taytsh-Shemets apartment earlier that morning, as left behind by the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. Or by his killer, or by pale Caissa, the goddess of chess players, dropping in to bid farewell to another one of her hapless worshippers. Black down to three pawns, a pair of knights, a bishop, and a rook. White holding on to all of his major and minor pieces and a pair of pawns,
one of them a move away from promotion. A strange disordered aspect to the situation, as if the game that led up to this move had been a chaotic one.

  “If it was anything else, Berko,” Landsman says, apologizing with upturned palms. “A deck of cards. A crossword puzzle. A bingo card.”

  “I get it,” Berko says.

  “It had to be an unfinished goddamned game of chess.”

  Berko turns the board around and studies it for a moment or two, then looks up at Landsman. Now is the time for you to ask me, he says with those great dark eyes of his.

  “So. Like I said. I need to ask you a favor.”

  “No,” Berko says, “you don’t.”

  “You heard the lady. You saw her black-flag it. The thing was a piece of shit to begin with. Bina made it official.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “Please, Berko, don’t start having respect for my judgment now,” Landsman says. “Not after all this work I’ve put into undermining it.”

  Berko has been staring at the dog with increasing fixity. Abruptly, he gets up and goes over to the stage. He clomps up the three wooden steps and stands looking down at Hershel. Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko’s hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport. Berko crouches heavily beside the dog and unhooks the clasp of the leash from the collar. He takes hold of the dog’s head in his massive hands and looks into the dog’s eyes. “Enough already,” he says. “He isn’t coming.”

  The dog regards Berko as if sincerely interested in this bit of news. Then he lurches to his hind legs and hobbles over to the steps and tumbles carefully down them. Toenails clacking, he crosses the concrete floor to the table where Landsman sits and looks up as if for confirmation.

  “That’s the straight emes, Hershel,” Landsman tells the dog. “They used dental records.”

  The dog appears to consider this; then, much to Landsman’s surprise, he walks over to the front door. Berko gives Landsman a look of reprimand: What did I tell you? He darts a glance toward the beaded curtain, then slides back the bolt, turns the key, and opens the door. The dog trots right out as if he has pressing business elsewhere.

  Berko comes back to the table, looking like he has just liberated a soul from the wheel of karma. “You heard the lady. We have nine weeks,” he says. “Give or take. We can afford to waste a day or two looking busy while we poke around into this dead junkie from your flop.”

  “You are going to have a baby,” Landsman says. “There will be five of you.”

  “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying, that’s five Taytsh-Shemetses we are going to fuck over if somebody is looking for reasons to deny people their residency cards, as widely reported, and one of those reasons is a recent citation for acting in direct contradiction of orders from a superior officer, not to mention egregious flouting of departmental policy, however idiotic and craven.”

  Berko blinks and pops another pickled tomato into his mouth. He chews it, and sighs. “I never had a brother or a sister,” he says. “All I ever had was cousins. Most of them were Indians, and they didn’t want to know me. Two were Jews. One of those Jews, may her name be a blessing, is dead. That leaves me with you.”

  “I appreciate this, Berko,” Landsman says. “I want you to know that.”

  “Fuck that shit,” Berko says in American. “We’re going to the Einstein, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Landsman says. “That’s where I figured we ought to start.”

  Before they can stand up or try to settle things with Mrs. Kalushiner, there is a scratching at the front door and then a long, low moan. The sound is human and forlorn, and it makes the hair on Landsman’s nape stand erect. He goes to the front door and lets in the dog, who climbs back up onto the stage to the place where he has worn away the paint on the floorboards, and sits, ears raised to catch the sound of a vanished horn, waiting patiently for the leash to be restored.

  10

  The north end of Peretz Street is all slab concrete, steel pillars, aluminum-rimmed windows double-glazed against the cold. The buildings in this part of the Untershtot went up in the early fifties, rapidly assembled shelter machines built by survivors, with a kind of noble ugliness. Now they have only the ugliness of age and vacancy. Empty storefronts, papered-over glass. In the windows of 1911, where Landsman’s father used to attend meetings of the Edelshtat Society before the storefront gave way to a beauty-supply outlet, a plush kangaroo with a sardonic leer holds a cardboard sign: AUSTRALIA OR BUST. At 1906 the Hotel Einstein looks, as some wag remarked on its opening to the public, like a rat cage stored in a fish tank. It is a favorite venue for the suicides of Sitka. It is also, by custom and charter, the home of the Einstein Chess Club.

  A member of the Einstein Chess Club named Melekh Gaystik won the world championship title over the Dutchman Jan Timman at St. Petersburg in 1980. The World’s Fair fresh in their memory, Sitkaniks viewed Gaystik’s triumph as further proof of their merit and identity as a people. Gaystik was subject to fits of rage, black moods, and bouts of incoherence, but these flaws were overlooked in the general celebration.

  One fruit of Gaystik’s victory was the gift of the hotel ballroom by the Einstein management, free of rent, to the chess club. Hotel weddings were out of vogue, and management had been trying for years to clear the patzers, with their mutterings and smoke, from the coffee shop. Gaystik provided management the excuse they needed. They sealed off the main doors of the ballroom so that you could enter only through the back, off an alley. They pulled up the fine ashwood parquetry and laid down a demented checkerboard of linoleum in shades of soot, bile, and surgical-scrub green. The modernist chandelier was replaced by banks of fluorescent tubes bolted to the high concrete ceiling. Two months later, the young world champion wandered into the old coffee shop where Landsman’s father had once made his mark, sat down in a booth at the back, took out a Colt .38 Detective Special, and shot himself in the mouth. There was a note in his pocket. It said only I liked things better the way they were before.

  “Emanuel Lasker,” the Russian says to the two detectives, looking up from the chessboard, under an old neon clock that advertises the defunct newspaper, the Blat. He is a skeletal man, his skin thin, pink, and peeling. He wears a pointed black beard. His eyes are close-set and the color of cold seawater. “Emanuel Lasker.” The Russian’s shoulders hunch, and he ducks his head, and his rib cage swells and narrows. It looks like laughter, but no sound comes out. “I wish that he does come around here.” Like that of most Russian immigrants, the man’s Yiddish is experimental and brusque. He reminds Landsman of somebody, though Landsman can’t say whom. “I give him such a kick to his ass for him.”

  “You ever look at his games?” the Russian’s opponent wants to know. He is a young man with pudding cheeks and rimless glasses and a complexion tinged with green, like the white of a dollar bill. The lenses of his glasses ice over as he aims them at Landsman. “You ever look at his games, Detective?”

  “Just to make this clear,” Landsman says, “that isn’t the Lasker we have in mind.”

  “This man was only using the name as an alias,” Berko says. “Otherwise we’d be looking for a man who’s already been dead sixty years.”

  “You look at Lasker’s games today,” the young man continues, “there’s too much complexity. He makes everything too hard.”

  “Only it seems complexity to you, Velvel,” says the Russian, “for the reason of how much you are simple.”

  The shammeses have interrupted their game in its dense middle stages with the Russian, playing White, holding an unassailable knight outpost. The men are still caught up in their game, the way a pair of mountains gets caught up in a whiteout. Their natural impulse is to treat the detectives with the abstract contempt they reserve for all kibitzers. Landsman wonders if he and Berko ought to wait until the players have finished and the
n try again. But there are other games in progress, other players to question. Around the old ballroom, legs scratch the linoleum like fingernails on a chalkboard. Chessmen click like the cylinder turning in Melekh Gaystik’s .38. The men—there are no women here—play by means of steadily hectoring their opponents with self-aspersions, chilly laughter, whistling, harumphs.

  “As long as we’re making things clear,” Berko says, “this man who called himself Emanuel Lasker, but was not the noted world champion born in Prussia in 1868, has died, and we are investigating that death. In our capacity as homicide detectives, which we mentioned but without, it seems, making much of an impression.”

  “A Jew with blond hair,” the Russian says.

  “And freckles,” Velvel says.

  “You see,” the Russian says. “We pay close attention.” He snatches up one of his rooks the way you pluck at a stray hair on somebody’s collar. Together his fingers and the rook take their trip down the file and break the bad news to the Black’s remaining bishop with a tap.

  Velvel speaks Russian now, with a Yiddish accent, offering his wishes for the resumption of friendly relations between his opponent’s mother and a well-endowed stallion.

  “I am orphan,” the Russian says.

  He sits back in his chair as if expecting his opponent to require some time to recover from the loss of his bishop. He knots his arms around his chest and jams his hands into his armpits. It is the gesture of a man who wants to smoke a papiros in a room where the habit has been forbidden. Landsman wonders what his father would have done with himself if the Einstein Chess Club had banned smoking while he was alive. The man could go through a whole pack of Broadways in a single game.