The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  “Next week,” says the chubby great-nephew, sounding doubtful.

  The old man emits another horrible reptilian croak, one that nobody understands. He writes, then slides the notepad across to his great-nephew.

  “‘Man makes plans,’” the kid reads. “‘And God laughs.’”

  11

  Sometimes when the younger black hats are caught by the police, they turn haughty and angry and demand their rights as American subjects. And sometimes they break down and cry. Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss. That is part of the policeman’s job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor. Landsman wonders if that’s how it is with Saltiel Lapidus. Tears stream down his cheeks. A glinting thread of mucus dangles from his right nostril.

  “Mr. Lapidus is feeling a little sad,” Berko says. “But he won’t say why.”

  Landsman feels around in the pocket of his overcoat for a package of Kleenex and finds one miraculous sheet. Lapidus hesitates, then takes it and blows his nose with feeling.

  “I swear to you, I didn’t know the man,” Lapidus says. “I don’t know where he lived, who he was. I don’t know anything. I swear on my life. We played chess a few times. He always won.”

  “You’re just grieving for the sake of humanity, then,” Landsman says, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his tone.

  “Exactly right,” Lapidus says, and then he balls the tissue in his fist and tosses that crumpled flower into the gutter.

  “Are you going to take us in?” Fishkin demands. “Because if you are, then I want to call a lawyer. And if you’re not, then you have to let us go.”

  “A black-hat lawyer,” Berko says, and it’s a kind of moan or plea directed toward Landsman. “Woe is me.”

  “Get going, then,” Landsman says.

  Berko gives them a nod. The two men crunch off through the filthy slush of the alley.

  “So, nu, I’m irritated,” Berko says. “I admit this one is starting to irritate me.”

  Landsman nods and scratches at the stubble of his chin in a way that is meant to signify deep ratiocination, but his heart and thoughts are hung up in the memory of chess games that he lost to men who were already old thirty years ago.

  “Did you see that old guy in there?” he says. “By the door. Alter Litvak. Been hanging around the Einstein for years. Used to play my father. Your father, too.”

  “I’ve heard the name.” Berko looks back at the steel fire door that is the Einstein Club’s grand entrance. “War hero. Cuba.”

  “The man has no voice, he has to write everything down. I asked him where I could find him if I needed to talk to him, and he wrote that he was going to Madagascar.”

  “That’s a new one.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Did he know our Frank?”

  “Not well, he said.”

  “Nobody knew our Frank,” Berko says. “But everybody is very sad that he died.” He buttons his coat over his belly, turns up his collar, settles his hat more firmly on his head. “Even you.”

  “Fuck you,” Landsman says. “The yid was nothing to me.”

  “Maybe he was a Russian? That might explain the chess. And your pal Vassily’s behavior. Maybe Lebed or Moskowits is behind the hit.”

  “If he’s Russian, it doesn’t explain what the two black hats were so afraid of,” Landsman says. “Those two don’t know from Moskowits. Russian shtarkers, a gangland hit, it just doesn’t mean that much to your average Bobover.” He gives his chin another few pulls and then makes up his mind. He looks up at the strip of radiant gray sky that stretches along the top of the narrow alley behind the Hotel Einstein. “I wonder what time sunset is tonight.”

  “Why? We’re going to poke a stick into the Harkavy, Meyer? I don’t think Bina will care much for that, we start stirring up the black hats down there.”

  “You don’t, eh?” Landsman smiles. He takes the valet ticket from his pocket. “Then we’d better steer clear of the Harkavy.”

  “Uh-oh. You have that smile.”

  “You don’t like this smile?”

  “Only I’ve noticed what comes after is usually a question that you plan to answer yourself.”

  “How about this one. What kind of a yid, Berko, tell me this, what kind of a yid can make a prison-hard Russian sociopath want to crap in his pants, and bring tears to the eyes of the most pious black hat in Sitka?”

  “I know you want me to say a Verbover,” Berko says. After Berko passed out of the academy, his first billet was the Fifth Precinct, the Harkavy, where the Verbovers landed, along with most of their fellow black hats, after the 1948 arrival of the ninth Verbover rebbe, father-in-law of the present model, with the pitiful remnant of his court. It was a classic ghetto assignment, trying to help and protect people who disdain and despise you and the authority you represent. It ended when the young half-Indian latke took a bullet in the shoulder, two inches from his heart, in the Shavuos Massacre at Goldblatt’s Dairy Restaurant. “I know that’s who you want me to say.”

  This is how Berko once explained to Landsman the sacred gang known as the Chasids of Verbov: They started out, back in the Ukraine, black hats like all the other black hats, scorning and keeping their distance from the trash and hoo-hah of the secular world, inside their imaginary ghetto wall of ritual and faith. Then the entire sect was burned in the fires of the Destruction, down to a hard, dense core of something blacker than any hat. What was left of the ninth Verbover rebbe emerged from those fires with eleven disciples and, among his family, only the sixth of his eight daughters. He rose into the air like a charred scrap of paper and blew to this narrow strip between the Baranof Mountains and the end of the world. And here he found a way to remake the old-style black-hat detachment. He carried its logic to its logical end, the way evil geniuses do in cheap novels. He built a criminal empire that profited on the meaningless tohubohu beyond the theoretical walls, on beings so flawed, corrupted, and hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all.

  “I had the same thought, of course,” Berko confesses. “Which I immediately suppressed.” He claps his big hands over his face and leaves them there for a moment before dragging them slowly down, pulling at his cheeks until they stretch past his chin like the jowl flaps of a bulldog. “Woe is me, Meyer, you want us to go out to Verbov Island?”

  “Fuck, no,” Landsman says in American. “Truth, Berko. I hate that place. If we have to go to an island, I’d much rather go to Madagascar.”

  They stand there in the alley behind the Einstein, thinking through the numerous arguments against and the few that can be made in favor of pissing off the most powerful underworld characters north of the 55th parallel. They attempt to generate alternate explanations for the squirrelly behavior of the patzers in the Einstein.

  “We’d better see Itzik Zimbalist,” Berko says finally. “Anybody else out there, it’s going to be as useful as talking to a dog. And a dog already broke my heart once today.”

  12

  The street grid here on the island is still Sitka’s, ruled and numbered, but apart from that, you are gone, sweetness: starshot, teleported, spun clear through the wormhole to the planet of the Jews. Friday afternoon on Verbov Island, and Landsman’s Chevelle Super Sport surfs the wave of black hats along Avenue 225. The hats in question are felt numbers, with high, dented crowns and mile-wide brims, the kind favored by overseers in plantation melodramas. The women sport head scarves and glossy wigs spun from the hair of the poor Jewesses of Morocco and Mesopotamia. Their coats and long dresses are the finest rags of Paris and New York, their shoes the flower of Italy. Boys careen down the sidewalks on in-line roller skates in a slipstream of scarves and sidelocks, flashing the orange linings of their unzipped parkas. Girls hobbled by long skirts go along braided arm i
n arm, raucous chains of Verbover girls vehement and clannish as schools of philosophy. The sky has turned steely, the wind has died, and the air crackles with the alchemy of children and the promise of snow.

  “Look at this place,” Landsman says. “It’s hopping.”

  “Not one empty storefront.”

  “And more of these no-good yids than ever.”

  Landsman stops for a red at NW Twenty-eighth Street. Outside a corner store, by a study hall, Torah bachelors loiter, Scripture grifters, unmatchable luftmenshen, and garden-variety hoodlums. When they notice Landsman’s car, with its reek of plainclothesman hubris and its inflammatory double-S on the grille, they leave off yelling at one another and give Landsman the Bessarabian fish-eye. He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing.

  “Look at those assholes looking,” Landsman says. “I don’t like it.”

  “Meyer.”

  The truth is, black-hat Jews make Landsman angry, and they always have. He finds that it is a pleasurable anger, rich with layers of envy, condescension, resentment, and pity. He puts the car in gear and shoves open his door.

  “Meyer. No.”

  Landsman steps around the open door of the Super Sport. He feels the women watching. He smells the sudden fear on the breath of the men around him, like caries of the teeth. He hears the laughter of the chickens that have not yet met their fates, the hum of the air compressors keeping the carp alive in their tanks. He’s glowing like a needle that you heat to kill a tick.

  “So, nu,” he says to the yids on the corner. “Which one of you buffaloes wants a ride in my sweet nozmobile?”

  A yid steps forward, a fair-skinned slab, low and wide, with a lumpy forehead and a forked yellow beard. “I suggest you return to your vehicle, Officer,” he says softly, reasonably. “And go on where you’re going.”

  Landsman grins. “Is that what you suggest?” he says.

  The other street-corner men step forward now, filling in the space all around the bruiser with the lightning beard. There must be twenty of them, more than Landsman believed at first. Landsman’s glow gutters, flickers like a lightbulb going bad.

  “I’ll put it another way,” says the blond bruiser, a bulge at his hip drawing the attention of his fingers. “Get back in the car.”

  Landsman pulls at his chin. Madness, he thinks. Chasing a theoretical lead in a nonexistent case, you lose your temper for no reason. The next thing you know, you have caused an incident among a branch of black hats with clout, money, and a stockpile of Manchurian and surplus Russian firearms recently estimated by police intelligence, in a confidential report, to be adequate to the needs of a guerrilla insurgency in a small Central American republic. Madness, the reliable madness of Landsman.

  “How about you come over here and make me?” Landsman says.

  That’s when Berko opens his door and displays his ancestral Bear bulk in the street. His profile is regal, worthy of a coin or a carved mountainside. And he carries in his right hand the uncanniest hammer any Jew or gentile is ever likely to see. It’s a replica of the one that Chief Katlian is reported to have swung during the Russian-Tlingit war of 1804, which the Russians lost. Berko fashioned it for the purpose of intimidating yids when he was thirteen and new to their labyrinth, and it has not failed its purpose yet, which is why Berko keeps it in the backseat of Landsman’s car. The head is a thirty-five-pound block of meteorite iron that Hertz Shemets dug up at an old Russian site near Yakovy. The handle was carved with a Sears hunting knife from a forty-ounce baseball bat. Interlocking black ravens and red sea monsters writhe along the shaft, grinning big-toothed grins. Their pigmentation used up fourteen Flair pens. A pair of raven feathers dangles on a leather thong from the top of the shaft. This detail may not be historically accurate, but it works on the yiddish mind to savage effect, saying:

  Indianer.

  The word gets handed up and down the stalls and storefronts. Sitka Jews rarely see or speak to Indians, except in federal court or in the small Jewish towns along the Line. It takes very little imagination for these Verbovers to picture Berko and his hammer engaged in the wholesale spattering of paleface brainpans. Then they catch sight of Berko’s yarmulke, and a flutter of fine white fringe at his waist from his ritual four-corner, and you can feel all that giddy xenophobia drain off the crowd, leaving a residue of racist vertigo. That’s how it goes for Berko Shemets in the District of Sitka when he breaks out the hammer and goes Indian. Fifty years of movie scalpings and whistling arrows and burning Conestogas have their effect on people’s minds. And then sheer incongruity does the rest.

  “Berko Shemets,” says the man with the forked beard, blinking, as big slow feathers of snow begin to fall on his shoulders and hat. “What’s up, yid?”

  “Dovid Sussman,” Berko says, lowering the hammer. “I thought it was you.”

  Onto his cousin he trains his big minotaur eyes full of long suffering and reproach. It was not Berko’s idea to come to Verbov Island. It was not Berko’s idea to pursue the Lasker case after they had been told to lay off. It was not Berko’s idea to flee in shame to a cheap Untershtot flophouse where mystery junkies get capped by the goddess of chess.

  “A sweet Sabbath to you, Sussman,” Berko says, tossing the hammer into the back of Landsman’s car. When it hits the floor, the springs inside the bucket seats ring like bells.

  “A sweet Sabbath to you, too, Detective,” Sussman says. The other yids echo the greeting, a bit unsure. Then they turn away and resume their back-and-forth over a fine point of pot koshering or VIN erasure.

  When they get in the car, Berko slams the door and says, “I hate doing that.”

  They drive down Avenue 225, and every face turns to look at the Indian Jew in the blue Chevrolet.

  “So much for asking a few discreet questions,” Berko says bitterly. “One day, Meyer, so help me, I’m going to use my head knocker on you.”

  “Maybe you should,” Landsman says. “Maybe I would welcome it as therapy.”

  They crawl west on Avenue 225 toward the shop of Itzik Zimbalist. Courts and cul-de-sacs, single-family neo-Ukrainians and condominium units, steep-roofed clapboard structures painted somber colors and built right out to the property lines. The houses jostle and shoulder one another the way black hats do in synagogue.

  “Not a single for-sale sign,” Landsman observes. “Laundry on every line. All the other sects have been packing up the Torahs and the hatboxes. The Harkavy’s half a ghost town. But not the Verbovers. Either they’re totally oblivious to Reversion, or they know something we don’t.”

  “They’re Verbovers,” Berko says. “Which way would you bet?”

  “You’re saying the rebbe put the fix in. Green cards for everyone.” Landsman considers this possibility. He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can’t flourish without the ready services of bagmen and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government. The Verbovers, with their Talmudic grasp of systems, their deep pockets, and the impenetrable face they present to the outer world have broken or rigged many mechanisms of control. But to have figured a way to gaff the entire INS like a Coke machine with a dollar on a string?

  “Nobody has that much weight,” Landsman says. “Not even the Verbover rebbe.”

  Berko ducks his head and gives his shoulders a half-shrug, as if he doesn’t want to say anything more lest terrible forces be unleashed, scourges and plagues and holy tornadoes.

  “Just because you don’t believe in miracles,” he says.

  13

  Zimbalist, the boundary maven, that learned old fart, he’s ready when a rumor of Indians in a blue hunk of Michigan muscle comes rumbling up to his front door. Zimbalist’s shop is a stone building with a zinc roof and big doors on rollers, at the wide end of a cobbled platz. The platz starts narrow at one end and broa
dens out like the nose of a cartoon Jew. Half a dozen crooked lanes tumble into it, following paths first laid down by long-vanished Ukrainian goats or aurochs, past housefronts that are faithful copies of lost Ukrainian originals. A Disney shtetl, bright and clean as a freshly forged birth certificate. An artful jumble of mud-brown and mustard-yellow houses, wood and plaster with thatched roofs. Across from Zimbalist’s shop, at the narrow end of the platz, stands the house of Heskel Shpilman, tenth in the dynastic line from the original rebbe of Verbov, himself a famous worker of miracles. Three neat white cubes of spotless stucco, with mansard roofs of blue slate tile and tall windows, shuttered and narrow. An exact copy of the original home, back in Verbov, of the present rebbe’s wife’s grandfather, the eighth Verbover rebbe, right down to the nickel-plated bathtub in the upstairs washroom. Even before they turned to money laundering, smuggling, and graft, Verbover rebbes distinguished themselves from the competition by the splendor of their waistcoats, the French silver on their Sabbath table, the soft Italian boots on their feet.

  The boundary maven is small, frail, slope-shouldered, call him seventy-five but looking ten years older. Patchy cinder-gray hair worn too long, sunken dark eyes, and pale skin tinged yellow like a celery heart. He wears a zip cardigan with collar flaps and a pair of old plastic sandals, navy blue, over white socks with a hole for the left big toe and its horn. His herringbone trousers are stained with egg yolk, acid, tar, epoxy fixative, sealing wax, green paint, mastodon blood. The maven’s face is bony, mostly nose and chin, evolved for noticing, probing, cutting straight to gaps, breaches, and lapses. His full ashy beard flutters in the wind like bird fluff caught on a barbed-wire fence. In a hundred years of helplessness, this would be the last face that Landsman would ever turn to hoping for aid or information, but Berko knows more about black-hat life than Landsman ever will.