The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  30

  Landsman comes to on his back, looking up at a row of iron kettles. They dangle with precision on sturdy hooks from a rack three feet above his head. In Landsman’s nostrils, a nostalgic smell of camp kitchen, cooking gas and dish soap, scorched onion, hard water, a faint stink of tackle box. Metal like a chill of foreboding against his nape. He’s stretched out on a long stainless-steel counter, hands cuffed behind his back, jammed up against his sacrum. Barefoot, drooling, ready to be plucked and stuffed in the body cavity with lemon and maybe a nice sprig of sage.

  “I heard some crazy rumors about you,” Landsman says. “Cannibalism I never heard.”

  “I wouldn’t eat you, Landsman,” affirms Baronshteyn. “Not if I was the hungriest man in Alaska and they served you to me with a silver fork. I don’t much care for pickles.” He’s sitting on a high stool to Landsman’s left, arms crossed under the skirts of his lush black beard.

  He’s out of uniform in a pair of new blue dungarees, flannel shirt tucked in at the waist and buttoned almost to the top. A fat hide belt with a heavy buckle and black ranger boots. The shirt too big for his frame, the trousers stiff as plate iron. Except for the skullcap, Baronshteyn looks like a skinny kid done up as a lumberjack for a school play, bogus beard and all. With his boot heels hooked on the rail of the stool, the cuffs of his trousers hike to betray a few hose-pale inches of thin shank.

  “Who is this yid?” says the gaunt giant, Roboy. Landsman cranes his neck and takes in the doctor, if he is a doctor, perched on a steel stool of his own down by Landsman’s feet. Bags under his eyes like smears of graphite. Beside him stands Nurse Fligler, cane hooked over one arm, watching a papiros die in the custody of his right hand, the left hand tucked ominously into the hip pocket of his tweed jacket. “Why do you know him?”

  A panoply of knives, cleavers, choppers, and other tools is ranged along a magnetic rack on the kitchen wall within easy grasp of the industrious chef or shlosser.

  “This yid is a shammes named Landsman.”

  “This is a policeman?” Roboy says. He looks like he just bit into a bonbon filled with some acrid paste. “He carries no badge. Fligler, the man had a badge?”

  “I found no badge or other form of law enforcement labeling,” Fligler says.

  “That is because I had his badge taken away from him,” Baronshteyn says. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”

  “I’ll ask the questions here,” Landsman says, squirming to find a more comfortable way of lying on top of his own cuffed hands. “If you don’t mind.”

  “It doesn’t matter if he has a badge or doesn’t,” Fligler opines. “Out here a Jewish badge means goat shit.”

  “I don’t care for that kind of language, Friend Fligler,” Baronshteyn says. “As I believe I have mentioned before.”

  “You have, but I can never hear it enough,” Fligler says.

  Baronshteyn regards Fligler. In the pits of his skull hidden glands secrete their venom. “Friend Fligler here was all for shooting you and dumping your body in the woods,” he says amiably to Landsman, keeping his eyes on the man with the gun in his pocket.

  “Way out in the woods,” Fligler says. “See what comes along and gnaws on your carcass.”

  “That your treatment plan, Doc?” Landsman says, craning his head around to try to make eye contact with Roboy. “No wonder Mendel Shpilman checked out of here so quick last spring.”

  They feed on the meat of this remark, gauging its flavor and vitamin content. Baronshteyn allows a modicum of reproach to flow into his poisonous gaze. You had the yid, says the look that he flicks at Dr. Roboy. And you let him get away.

  Baronshteyn leans close, craning in from his stool, and speaks, with that menacing tenderness of his. His breath is stale and acrid. Cheese rinds, bread heels, grounds at the bottom of a cup. “What are you doing, Friend Landsman,” he says, “way out here where you don’t belong?”

  Baronshteyn looks genuinely puzzled. The Jew desires to be informed. This may, Landsman thinks, be the only desire the man ever permits himself to feel.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Landsman says, thinking that maybe Baronshteyn has nothing to do with this place, is only a visitor, like Landsman. Maybe he is working the same trail, retracing the recent trajectory of Mendel Shpilman, trying to find the spot where the rebbe’s son crossed the shadow that killed him. “What is this place, a boarding school for wayward Verbovers? Who are these characters? You missed a belt loop, by the way.”

  Baronshteyn’s fingers stray toward his waist, then he sits back and makes a face that resembles a smile. “Who knows you’re here?” he says. “Besides the flyer?”

  Landsman feels a stab of dread for Rocky Kitka, flying upside down through life for hundreds of miles without knowing it. Landsman doesn’t know very much about these yids of Peril Strait, but it seems fairly clear that they can be awfully tough on a bush pilot.

  “What flyer?” he says.

  “I think we have to assume the worst,” Dr. Roboy says. “This facility is clearly compromised.”

  “You have been spending too much time with those people,” Baronshteyn says. “You are starting to talk like them.” Without taking his eyes off Landsman, he unbuckles his belt and feeds it through the loop that he missed. “You may be right, Roboy.” He cinches the belt tight with a distinct air of self-punishment. “But I would be willing to bet that Landsman told nobody. Not even that fat Indian partner of his. Landsman is out on a limb, and he knows it. He has no support. No jurisdiction, no standing, not even a badge. He wouldn’t tell anyone he was going to the Indianer-Lands, because he would be afraid they would try to talk him out of it. Or worse, forbid him to go. They would tell him that his judgment has been impaired by his desire to avenge his sister’s death.”

  Roboy wrings his eyebrows over his nose like a pair of fretful hands. “His sister?” he says. “Who’s his sister?”

  “Am I right, Landsman?”

  “I wish I could reassure you, Baronshteyn. But I wrote out a complete account of everything I know about you and this operation.”

  “Is that right?”

  “The phony youth treatment facility.”

  “I see,” Baronshteyn says with mock gravity. “The phony youth treatment facility. Quite a shocking tale.”

  “A front for your partnership with Roboy and Fligler and their powerful friends.” Landsman’s heart thrashes with the wildness of his guessing. He’s wondering why any Jews would need or want such a large facility out here and how they could manage to persuade the Natives to let them build it. Could they have bought themselves a piece of the Indianer-Lands to build a new McShtetl? Or was this going to be the transfer point for a human-smuggling operation, some kind of Verbover airlift out of Alaska made without benefit of visas or passports? “The fact that you killed Mendel Shpilman and my sister to keep them from talking about what you were doing here. Then used your government connections through Roboy and Fligler to cover up the crash.”

  “You wrote all this down, did you?”

  “Yes, and sent it to my lawyer, to be opened in the case that I should suddenly, for example, vanish from the face of the earth.”

  “Your lawyer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what lawyer would that be?”

  “Sender Slonim.”

  “Sender Slonim, I see,” Baronshteyn says, nodding as if fully persuaded by Landsman’s claim. “A good Jew but a bad lawyer.” He slides down from the stool, and the thud of his boots puts a period to his examination of the prisoner. “I’m satisfied. Friend Fligler.”

  There is a snik and the scrape of a sole against linoleum, and the next thing Landsman knows, a shadow looms at his right eye. The space between the steel tip and Landsman’s cornea can be measured in the flicker of an eyelash. Landsman jerks his head away, but at the other end of the knife, Fligler grabs hold of Landsman’s ear and yanks. Landsman curls up into a ball and tries to roll down from the counter. Fligler smacks
Landsman’s bandaged wound with the head of his cane, and a jagged star bursts across the back of Landsman’s eyes. While he’s busy ringing like a bell of pain, Fligler turns Landsman onto his belly. He climbs on top of him and jerks his head back and lays the knife against his throat.

  “I may not have a badge,” Landsman says with difficulty. He addresses himself to Dr. Roboy, whom he senses to be the least resolute yid in the room. “But I’m still a noz. You people kill me, it’s a world of trouble for whatever you have going here.”

  “Probably not,” Fligler says.

  “Not in all likelihood,” Baronshteyn agrees. “None of you yids is even going to be a policeman two months from now.”

  The thin string of carbon and iron atoms that is the consequential feature of the knife blade burns one degree hotter against Landsman’s windpipe.

  “Fligler…” Roboy says, wiping his mouth with one giant hand.

  “Please, Fligler,” Landsman says. “Cut my throat. I’ll thank you for it. Go on, you pussy.”

  From the other side of the kitchen door comes a churn of agitated male voices. A pair of feet scrapes the floor, about to knock, and hesitates. Nothing happens.

  “What is it?” Roboy says bitterly.

  “A word, Doctor,” says a voice, young, American, speaking American.

  “Don’t do anything,” Roboy says. “Just wait.”

  Just before the door swings shut behind Roboy, Landsman hears a voice begin to speak, a rush of angular syllables that do not register on his brain as anything but throaty noise.

  Fligler settles his weight more securely into the small of Landsman’s back. There follows the small awkwardness of strangers in an elevator. Baronshteyn consults his fine Swiss watch.

  “How much of it did I have right?” Landsman says. “Just so I know.”

  “Ha,” Fligler says. “I could laugh.”

  “Roboy is a trained rehabilitation therapist,” Baronshteyn says with a show of tolerant patience, sounding remarkably like Bina when speaking to one of the five billion people, Landsman among them, whom she considers to be on balance an idiot. “They were genuinely trying to help the rebbe’s son. Mendel’s presence here was entirely voluntary. When he made the decision to leave, there was nothing they could do to stop him.”

  “I’m sure the news broke your heart,” Landsman says.

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “I suppose a cleaned-up Mendel Shpilman was no threat to you? To your status as heir apparent?”

  “Oy,” Baronshteyn says. “What you don’t know.”

  The kitchen door opens and Roboy slips back inside, eyebrows arched. Before the door bangs shut, Landsman catches a glimpse of two young men, bearded and dressed in ill-fitting dark suits. Big boys, one with the black snail of an earphone curled in the shell of his ear. On the outside of the door a small plaque reads KITCHEN EQUIPPED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF MR. AND MRS. LANCE PEARLSTEIN PIKESVILLE MD.

  “Eight minutes,” Roboy says. “Ten at the most.”

  “Someone coming?” Landsman says. “Who is it? Heskel Shpilman? Or does he even know you’re here, Baronshteyn? Did you come to cut a deal with these people? Are they moving in on Verbover action? What did they want with Mendel? Were you going to use him to force the rebbe’s hand?”

  “Sounds to me as though you need to read that letter of yours again,” Baronshteyn observes. “Or get Sender Slonim to tell you what it says.”

  Landsman can hear people moving around, chair legs screeching against a wooden floor. In the distance, the whirr and click of an electric motor, a golf cart zipping away.

  “We cannot do this now,” Roboy says, coming close to Landsman, looming over him. His dense beard flocks his entire face from the cheekbones down, flourishing in his nostrils, winding in fine tendrils from the flaps of his ears. “The last thing he wants is any hint of a mess. Okay, Detective.” His slow voice turns syrupy, abruptly warmer. A perfunctory affection suffuses it, and Landsman stiffens, awaiting the bad thing that this surely betokens, which proves to be only a stick in the arm, quick and expert.

  In the dreamy seconds that precede his loss of consciousness, the guttural language that Landsman heard Roboy speaking plays like a recording in his ear, and he makes a dazzling leap into impossible understanding, like the sudden consciousness in a dream of one’s having invented a great theory or written a fine poem that in the morning turns out to be gobbledygook. They are talking, those Jews on the other side of the door, about roses and frankincense. They are standing in a desert wind under the date palms, and Landsman is there, in flowing robes that keep out the biblical sun, speaking Hebrew, and they are all friends and brothers together, and the mountains skip like rams, and the hills like little lambs.

  31

  Landsman wakes from a dream of feeding his right ear to the propeller blades of a Cessna 206. He stirs under a clammy blanket, electric but unplugged, in a room not much larger than the cot he’s stretched across. He touches a cautious finger to the side of his head. Where Fligler originally sapped him, the flesh is swollen and moist. Landsman’s left shoulder is killing him, too.

  In a narrow window opposite the cot, metal-slat blinds leak the disappointed gray of a November afternoon in southeastern Alaska. It’s not light oozing through so much as a residue of light, a day haunted by the memory of the sun.

  Landsman tries to sit up and discovers that his shoulder hurts so much because somebody has been kind enough to handcuff his left wrist to a steel leg of the cot frame. With his arm jerked up over his head, Landsman practiced some kind of brutal chiropractic on his shoulder in the thrashing and tossing of sleep. The same kind soul who chained him was thoughtful enough to remove his trousers, shirt, and jacket, reducing him once again to a man in his underpants.

  He sits up on his haunches at the head of the cot. Then he eases himself backward off the mattress so that he can squat with his left arm hanging at a more natural angle, his shackled hand resting against the floor. The floor is yellow linoleum, the color of the inside of a used cigarette filter, and as cold as an ME’s stethoscope. It features an extensive collection of dust lemmings and dust wigs and a winged smear of black-fly grease. The walls are cinder block painted a thick, glossy shade of dentifrice blue. On the wall beside Landsman’s head, a familiar hand has penned a tiny message for Landsman in the mortar line between two cinder blocks: THIS DETAINMENT CELL COURTESY OF THE GENEROSITY OF NEAL AND RISA NUDELMAN SHORT HILLS NEW JERSEY. He wants to laugh, but the sight of his sister’s droll alphabet in this place raises the hair on the back of his neck.

  Apart from the bed, the only other furnishing, in the corner by the door, is a metal wastebasket. The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.

  Landsman crouches by the cot for another minute or so, collecting himself like a beggar chasing scattered dimes along the sidewalk. Then he drags the cot to the door and sits down on it. In a way that is both methodical and wild, he begins to kick at the door with his bare heels. It’s a hollow steel door, and it makes a thunderous sound when kicked that’s pleasant for a moment, but then the pleasure palls. Next Landsman tries loud and repeated cries of “Help me, I cut myself and I’m bleeding!” He yells until he is hoarse and kicks until his feet throb. At last he gets tired of kicking and yelling. He needs to urinate. Badly. He looks at the trash can and then at the door. It might be the traces of the drug in his system, or the hatred he feels for that tiny room in which his sister passed her last night on earth, and for the men who chained him still in underwear to it. Maybe all his enraged yelling has engendered an actual rage. But the idea of being ob
liged to piss into a Shnapish the Dog wastebasket makes Landsman angry.

  He drags the bed over to the window, and shoves the blinds rattling to one side. The windowpane is pebbled glass. Ripples of a green and gray world set in a heavy steel frame. At one time—maybe until very recently—there was a latch, but his thoughtful hosts have removed it. Now there is only one way to get the window open. Landsman goes for the wastebasket, dragging the cot back and forth behind him like a handy symbol. He raises the wastebasket, takes aim, and hurls it against the pebbled glass of the tall window. It bounces off and flies back at Landsman, striking him squarely in the forehead. A moment later, he tastes blood for the second time that day as it trickles down his cheek to the corner of his lips.

  “Shnapish, you bastard,” he says.

  He shoves the cot all the way over against the long wall and then, working with his free hand, tips the mattress off the cot frame. He stands the mattress against the opposite wall. He grabs hold of the cot frame on either side and, lifting from the knees, heaves it up off the ground. He stands there a moment, holding the rickety frame parallel to his body. He wavers under the sudden weight, which is not great but taxes his strength all the same. He takes a step backward, lowers his head, and drives the cot frame through the window. Green lawn and fog blow into Landsman’s dazzled vision. Trees, crows, hovering hornets of broken glass, the gun-barrel-gray waters of the strait, a bright white floatplane trimmed in red. Then the cot frame jerks free of Landsman’s grasp and leaps through gaping glass fangs out into the morning.

  As a kid in school, Landsman received good marks in physics. Newtonian mechanics, bodies at rest and in motion, actions and reactions, gravity and mass. He found more sense in physics than in anything else they ever tried to teach him. An idea like momentum, for example, the tendency of a body in motion to stay in motion. So maybe Landsman should not be quite so surprised when the cot frame does not content itself with shattering the window. There is a sharp, joint-popping tug on the bones of his shoulder, and he is seized again by the nameless emotion he felt when he tried to climb aboard Mrs. Shpilman’s moving limousine: the sudden awareness, like an inverse satori, that he has made a grave if not fatal error.