The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  “I put in a call or two,” Uncle Hertz says after several minutes of chess-deep concentration on his food. “After you called to say you were coming down.”

  “Did you?” Berko says. “A call or two.”

  “That’s right.” Hertz has a way of smiling, or of producing a smile-like effect, where he lifts only the upper lip on the right side of his mouth, and only for half a second, flashing one yellow incisor. It looks like someone has caught him by the lip on an invisible fishhook and is giving the line a sharp tug. “From what I gather, you have been making a nuisance of yourself, Meyerle. Unprofessional conduct. Erratic behavior. Lost your badge and gun.”

  Whatever else he may have been, for forty years Uncle Hertz was a sworn officer of the law with a federal shield in his billfold. Though he undersells it, the note of reproach is unmistakable. He turns to his son. “And I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says. “Eight weeks away from the void. Two children and, mazel tov and kaynahora, a third on the way.”

  Berko doesn’t bother to ask how his father knows that Ester-Malke is pregnant. It would only feed the old man’s vanity. He just nods and puts away a few more moose meatballs. They are good, the meatballs, moist with hints of rosemary and smoke.

  “You are right,” Berko says. “It’s madness. And I don’t say that I love or care for that buffalo there, look at him, with no badge and no gun, bothering people and running around with frostbite on his kneecaps, any more than I do for my wife or my children, because I don’t. Or that it makes any sense for me to take risks with their future on his behalf, because it doesn’t.” As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation. “But if we’re talking about voids, what can I say, that’s not the type of circumstances I want to be facing without Meyer around.”

  “You see how loyal,” Uncle Hertz tells Landsman. “That’s just how I felt about your father, may his name be for a blessing, but the coward left me high and dry.”

  His tone aspires to lightness, but the subsequent blot of silence seems to darken the remark. They chew their food, and life feels long and ponderous. Hertz gets up and pours himself another shot. He stands by the window, watching the sky that is like a mosaic pieced together from the broken shards of a thousand mirrors, each one tinted a different shade of gray. The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light. Uncle Hertz has always been the most competent, self-assured man Landsman knows, neat as an origami airplane, a quick paper needle folded with precision, impervious to turbulence. Accurate, methodical, dispassionate. There were always hints of shadow, of irrationality and violence, but they were contained behind the wall of Hertz’s mysterious Indian adventures, hidden on the far side of the Line, covered over by him with the careful backward kicks of an animal concealing its spoor. But now a memory surfaces in Landsman from the days following his father’s death, of Uncle Hertz sitting crumpled like a wad of tissue in a corner of the kitchen on Adler Street, shirttails hanging, no order to his hair, shirt misbuttoned, the dwindling contents of a bottle of slivovitz on the kitchen table beside him marking like a barometer the plummeting atmosphere of his grief.

  “We have ourselves a puzzle, Uncle Hertz,” says Landsman. “Is why we’re here.”

  “That and the mayonnaise,” Berko says.

  “A puzzle.” The old man turns from the window, his eyes hard again and wary. “I hate puzzles.”

  “We’re not asking you to solve any,” Berko says.

  “Don’t take that tone with me, John Bear,” the old man snaps. “I don’t care for it.”

  “Tone?” Berko says, his voice stacked like a measure of musical score with a half-dozen tones, a chamber ensemble of insolence, resentment, sarcasm, provocation, innocence, and surprise. “Tone?”

  Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one’s relatives. It’s an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the time of Berko’s first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

  “There’s something we’re trying to explain,” Landsman begins again. “A situation. And there are aspects of the situation that reminded us of you.”

  Uncle Hertz pours another shot of slivovitz, carries it to the table, and sits down. “Start from the start,” he says.

  “The start is a dead junkie in my hotel.”

  “Aha.”

  “You’ve been following it.”

  “I heard something on the radio,” the old man says. “Maybe I read a little something in the paper, too.” He always blames the newspapers for the things he knows. “He was the son of Heskel Shpilman. The one they had such high hopes for when he was a kid.”

  “He was murdered,” Landsman says. “Contrary to what you might have read. And when he died, he was in hiding. He’d been in hiding, from one thing and another, for most of his life, but when he died, I think he was trying to duck some men he had run out on. I was able to trace his movements back to the Yakovy airport last April. He showed up there the day before Naomi died.”

  “This has something to do with Naomi?”

  “These men who were looking for Shpilman. And who, we’re assuming, killed him. Last April they hired Naomi to fly the guy out to a farm they run, supposed to be some kind of a therapy facility for troubled kids. Out in Peril Strait. But when he got there, he panicked. He wanted out. He came to Naomi to help him, and she sneaked him out of there and flew him back to civilization. To Yakovy. She died the next day.”

  “Peril Strait?” the old man says. “These are Natives, then? You’re saying Indians killed Mendel Shpilman?”

  “No,” Berko says. “These men with the youth rehab. On a good thousand acres just north of the village there. It seems to have been built with money from American Jews. The people running it are yids. And as far as we can tell, the place is a front for their real operation.”

  “Which is what? Growing marijuana?”

  “Well, for one thing, they have a herd of Ayrshire dairy cows,” Berko says. “Maybe a hundred head of them.”

  “That’s for one thing.”

  “For another, they seem to be running some kind of paramilitary training facility. Their leader might be an old man, a Jew. Wilfred Dick got a look at him, he was there. But the face meant nothing to Dick. Whoever he is, he seems to have ties to the Verbovers, or at least to Aryeh Baronshteyn. But we don’t know why or what kind.”

  “There was an American there, too,” Landsman says. “He flew in for a meeting with Baronshteyn and these other mysterious Jews. They all seemed a little worried about the American. They seemed to think he might not be happy with them or how they were running things.”

  The old man gets up from the table and goes to a hutch that separates his eating from his sleep. From a humidor he takes a cigar and rolls it between his palms. He rolls it a long time, back and forth, until it seems to disappear from his thoughts entirely.

  “I hate puzzles,” he says finally.

  “We know that,” Berko says.

  “You know that.”

  Uncle Hertz runs the cigar back and forth under his nose, inhaling deeply, eyes closed, taking pleasure not only in the smell, it seems to Landsman, but in the coolness of the smooth leaf against the flesh of his nostrils.

  “This is my first question,” Uncle Hertz says, opening his eyes. “Maybe my only one.”

  They wait for the question while he trims the cigar, fits it to his narrow lips, works them up and down.

  “What color were the cows?” he says
.

  36

  There was a red one,” Berko says, slow, a bit grudging, like he missed it when the coin got palmed, even though he was staring hard at the magician’s hands.

  “All red?” the old man says. “Red from horn to tail?”

  “She was disguised,” Berko says. “Sprayed with some kind of white pigment. I can’t think of any reason you’d want to do that unless you had something about her that you wanted to hide. Such as that she was, you know.” He winces. “Without blemish.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” the old man says.

  “Who are these people, Uncle Hertz? You know, don’t you?”

  “Who are these people?” Hertz Shemets says. “They’re yids. Yids with a scheme. I know that’s a tautology.”

  He can’t seem to make up his mind to light the cigar. He sets it down, picks it up, sets it down again. Landsman gets the feeling he’s weighing a secret rolled tight in its dark-veined leaf. A course of action, a tricky exchange of pieces.

  “All right,” Hertz says at last, “so I lied: Here’s another question for you. Meyer, maybe you remember a yid, when you were a little boy, he used to come around the Einstein Chess Club. He used to joke with you, you had quite a thing for him. Yid named Litvak.”

  “I saw Alter Litvak the other day,” Landsman says. “At the Einstein.”

  “Did you?”

  “He lost his voice.”

  “Yes, he was in an accident, his throat was crushed by the wheel. His wife was killed. It was out on Roosevelt Boulevard, where they planted all those chokecherry trees. The only one that didn’t die, that was the tree they hit. The only chokecherry tree in the Sitka District.”

  “I remember when they planted those trees,” Landsman says. “For the World’s Fair.”

  “Don’t get wistful on me,” the old man says. “God knows I’ve had my fill of wistful Jews, starting with myself. You never see a wistful Indian.”

  “That’s because they hide them when they hear you’re coming around,” Berko says. “The women and wistful Indians. Shut up and tell us about Litvak.”

  “He used to work for me,” Hertz says. “For many, many years.”

  His tone goes flat, and Landsman is surprised to see that his uncle is angry. Like all Shemetses, Hertz was handed down a hot temper, but it served him ill in his work, so at some point he had it killed.

  “Alter Litvak was a federal agent?” Landsman says.

  “No. He was not. The man has not drawn an official government salary, as far as I know, since he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army thirty-five years ago.”

  “Why are you so angry at him?” Berko says, watching his father through the lantern slits of his eyes.

  Hertz is startled by the question, tries to hide it. “I never get angry,” he says. “Except with you, son.” He smiles. “So he still goes to the Einstein. I didn’t know that. He was always more of a cardplayer than a patzer. He did better in games that favor the bluff. Deceit. Concealment.”

  Landsman remembers the pair of tough-looking young men whom Litvak introduced as his grandnephews. There was one of them in the woods at Peril Strait, he realizes, driving the Ford Caudillo with the shadow in the backseat. The shadow of a man who didn’t want Landsman to get a look at his face.

  “He was there,” Landsman tells Berko. “At Peril Strait. He was the mystery man in the car.”

  “What did Litvak do for you?” Berko says. “For all those many, many years?”

  Hertz hesitates, looking from Berko to Landsman and back. “Some of this, some of that. All strictly off the books. He had a number of useful skills. Alter Litvak may be the most talented man I ever met. He understands systems and control. He is patient and methodical. He used to be incredibly strong. A good pilot, a trained mechanic. Wonderful at orienteering. Very effective as a teacher. As a trainer. Shit.”

  He stares down in mild wonder at the snapped halves of his cigar, one in each hand. He drops them onto his plate of sauce streaks and spreads a napkin over the evidence of his emotion. “The yid betrayed me,” he says. “To that reporter. He collected evidence on me for years and then handed it all over to Brennan.”

  “Why would he do that?” Berko says. “If he was your yid?”

  “I really can’t answer your question.” Hertz shakes his head, hating puzzles, faced for the rest of his life with this one. “Money, maybe, though I never knew him to take an interest in the stuff. Certainly not his beliefs. Litvak has no beliefs. No convictions. No loyalty except to the men who serve under him. He saw how things were going when this bunch took over in Washington. He knew that I was through before I knew it myself. I suppose he decided the moment was ripe. Maybe he got tired of working for me, he wanted the job for himself. Even after the Americans got rid of me and shut down their official operations, they still needed a man in Sitka. They really couldn’t find anyone better for their money than Alter Litvak. Maybe he just got tired of losing to me at chess. Maybe he saw a chance to beat me, and he took it. But he was never my yid. Permanent Status never meant anything to him. Neither, I’m certain, does the cause he’s working for now.”

  “The red heifer,” Berko says.

  “And so the idea, forgive me,” Landsman says, “but talk me through it. Fine, you have a red heifer without a single flaw. And somehow or other, you get it over to Jerusalem.”

  “Then you kill it,” Berko says. “And you burn it to ashes, and you make a paste of the ashes, and you dab a little of that on your priests. Otherwise they can’t go into the Sanctuary, in the Temple, because they are unclean.” He checks with his father. “Do I have that right?”

  “More or less.”

  “Okay, but here’s the thing I don’t get. Isn’t there—what’s it called?” Landsman says. “That mosque. On the hill there where the Temple used to be?”

  “It isn’t a mosque, Meyerle. It’s a shrine,” Hertz says. “Qubbat As-Sakhrah. The Dome of the Rock. The third holiest site in Islam. Built in the seventh century by Abd al-Malik, on the precise site of the two Temples of the Jews. The spot where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, where Jacob saw the ladder reaching up to heaven. The navel of the world. Yes. If you wanted to rebuild the Temple and reinstitute the old rituals, as a way of hastening the coming of Messiah, then you would need to do something about the Dome of the Rock. It’s in the way.”

  “Bombs,” Berko says with an exaggerated nonchalance. “Explosives. That part of the package with Alter Litvak?”

  “Demolitions,” the old man says. He reaches for his drink, but it’s gone. “Yes, the yid is an expert.”

  Landsman pushes back from the table and stands up. He gets his hat from the door. “We need to get back,” he says. “We need to talk to somebody. We need to tell Bina.”

  He opens his phone, but there’s no signal this far out from Sitka. He goes to the telephone on the wall, but Bina’s number kicks him right over to voice mail. “You need to find Alter Litvak,” he tells her. “Find him and hold him and do not let him go.”

  When he turns back to the table, he sees father and son still sitting there; Berko is putting some intense question to Hertz Shemets without saying anything. Berko has his hands folded in his lap like a well-behaved child, but he is not a well-behaved child, and if he keeps his fingers intertwined, then it is only to prevent them from enacting some mischief or harm. After an interval that feels to Landsman like a very long time, Uncle Hertz looks down.

  “The prayer house at St. Cyril,” Berko says. “The riots.”

  “The St. Cyril riots,” Hertz Shemets agrees.

  “God damn it.”

  “Berko—”

  “God damn it! Indians always said it was the Jews that blew it up.”

  “You have to understand the pressure we were under,” Hertz says. “At the time.”

  “Oh, I do,” Berko says. “Believe me. The balancing act. The fine line.”

  “Those Jews, those fanatics, the people moving into the disputed areas. They we
re endangering the status of the entire District. Confirming the Americans’ worst fears about what we would do if they gave us Permanent Status.”

  “Uh-huh,” Berko says. “Yeah. Okay. And what about Mom? Was she endangering the District, too?”

  Uncle Hertz speaks then, or rather the wind emerges from his lungs through the gates of his teeth in a way that resembles human speech. He looks down at his lap and makes the sound again, and Landsman realizes that he’s saying he’s sorry. Speaking a language in which he has never been schooled.

  “You know, I think I must have always known,” Berko says, getting up from the table. He takes his hat and coat from the hook. “Because I never liked you. Not from the first minute, you bastard. Come on, Meyer.”

  Landsman follows his partner out. Going through the door, he has to get out of the way so that Berko can go back in. Berko tosses aside his hat and coat. He hits himself in the head twice, with both hands at once. Then he crushes an invisible sphere, roughly the size of his father’s cranium, between his outspread fingers.

  “I tried my whole life,” he says finally. “I mean, fuck, look at me!” He snatches the skullcap from the back of his head and holds it up, contemplating it with a sudden horror as if it’s the flesh of his scalp. He flicks it toward the old man. It hits Hertz on the nose and falls onto the pile with the napkin, the broken cigar, the moose gravy. “Look at this shit!” He grabs the front of his shirt and yanks it open in a skitter of buttons. He exposes the homely white panel of his fringed four-corners, like the world’s flimsiest flak jacket, his holy white Kevlar, trimmed with a stripe of sea-creature blue. “I hate this fucking thing.” The four-corners comes up over his head, and he shrugs and whips it off, which leaves him in a white cotton tee. “Every damn day of my life, I get up in the morning and put this shit on and pretend to be something I’m not. Something I’ll never be. For you.”