The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  He sits down. He lights another cigarette.

  “Fuck you,” Landsman concludes. “And fuck Jesus, too, he was a pussy.”

  “Tick a lock, Landsman,” Cashdollar says softly, miming the twist of a key in the hole of his mouth.

  42

  When Landsman steps outside the Ickes Building and fits his hat to his voided head, he finds that the world has sailed into a fog bank. The night is a cold sticky stuff that beads up on the sleeves of his overcoat. Korczak Platz is a bowlful of bright mist, smeared here and there with the pawprints of sodium lamps. Half-blind and cold in his bones, he trudges along Monastir Street to Berlevi Street, then over to Max Nordau Street, with a kink in his back and an ache in his head and a sharp throbbing pain in his dignity. The space recently occupied by his mind hisses like the fog in his ears, hums like a bank of fluorescent tubes. He feels that he suffers from tinnitus of the soul.

  When he drags himself into the lobby of the Zamenhof, Tenenboym hands him two letters. One is from the board, informing him that the hearing into his conduct in the deaths of Zilberblat and Flederman has been scheduled for nine A.M. tomorrow morning. The other letter is a communication from the hotel’s new ownership. A Ms. Robin Navin of the Joyce/Generali Hotel Group has written to inform Landsman that exciting changes are afoot in the coming months for the Zamenhof, to be known as of January 1 as the Luxington Parc Sitka. Part of the general excitement stems from the fact that Landsman’s monthly lease has been terminated, effective on December 1. All the pigeonholes behind the front desk contain long white envelopes, each one slotted with the same fatal bend sinister in twenty-pound laid. Except for the pigeonhole labeled 208. Nothing in that one.

  “You heard about what happened?” Tenenboym says after Landsman has returned from his epistolary journey into the bright, gentile future of the Hotel Zamenhof.

  “I saw it on the television,” Landsman says, though the memory feels secondhand, fogged-over, a construct that his interrogators implanted through persistent questioning.

  “At first they said it was a mistake,” Tenenboym says, gold toothpick jiggling in a corner of his mouth. “Some Arabs making bombs in a tunnel under the Temple Mount. Then they said it was deliberate. The ones fighting the other ones.”

  “Sunnis and Shiites?”

  “Maybe. Somebody got careless with a rocket launcher.”

  “Syrians and Egyptians?”

  “Whoever. The president was on, saying they might have to go in. Saying it’s a holy city to everybody.”

  “That didn’t take long,” Landsman says.

  His only other piece of mail is a postcard advertising a deep discount on lifetime membership at a gym where Landsman worked out for a few months after his divorce. The suggestion was made at the time that exercise might help his moods. It was a good suggestion. Landsman can’t remember if it proved correct or not. The card depicts a fat Jew to the left and a thin Jew to the right. The Jew to the left is haggard, sleepless, sclerotic, straggly, with cheeks like two spoonfuls of sour cream, and two bright, mean little eyes. The Jew to the right is lean, tanned, and trim-bearded, relaxed, self-confident. He looks a lot like one of Litvak’s young men. The Jew of the future, Landsman thinks. The unlikely claim is made by the postcard that the left-hand Jew and the Jew on the right are one and the same person.

  “Did you see them out in the neighborhoods?” Tenenboym says, the golden pick clicking against a bicuspid. “On the television?”

  Landsman shakes his head. “I imagine there was dancing?”

  “Such dancing. Fainting. Crying. A mass orgasm.”

  “Not on an empty stomach, I beg you, Tenenboym.”

  “Blessing the Arabs for fighting with each other. Blessing the memory of Mohammed.”

  “That seems cruel.”

  “One of these black hats was on there saying how he’s going to move over to the Land of Israel, get himself a good seat for when Messiah shows up.” He removes the toothpick and surveys its tip for a hint of treasure, then returns it, disappointed. “Ask me, I say put all those nut jobs on a great big airplane, send them all the hell over there, a black year on them.”

  “That what you say, Tenenboym?”

  “I’ll fly that airplane myself.”

  Landsman stuffs the letter from the Joyce/Generali Hotel Group back into its envelope and slides it across the counter to Tenenboym. “Toss that for me, would you?”

  “You have thirty days, Detective,” Tenenboym says. “You will find something.”

  “You bet I will,” Landsman says. “We’ll all find something.”

  “Unless something finds us first, am I right?”

  “What about you? They going to let you keep your job?”

  “My status remains under review.”

  “That sounds hopeful.”

  “Or hopeless.”

  “One or the other.”

  Landsman takes the elevatoro to the fifth floor. He walks down the corridor, his overcoat slung on a crooked fingertip from one shoulder, loosening his necktie with the other hand. The door to his room hums its simple lyric: five-oh-five. It means nothing. Lights in the fog. Three Arabic numerals. Invented in India, actually, like the game of chess, but disseminated by Arabs. Sunnis, Shiites. Syrians, Egyptians. Landsman wonders how long it will take the various contending factions in Palestine to figure out that none of them was responsible for the attack. A day or two, maybe a week. Just long enough for terminal confusion to set in, Litvak to get his boys in place, Cashdollar to send in the air support. Next thing you know, Tenenboym’s working as the night manager of the Jerusalem Luxington Parc.

  Landsman gets into bed and takes out the pocket chess set. His attention flits along the lines of force, hops from square to square in pursuit of the killer of Mendel Shpilman and Naomi Landsman. Landsman finds, to his surprise and relief, that he already knows who the killer is—it is the Swiss-born physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and mediocre chess player Albert Einstein. Einstein with his fog of hair and his enormous sweater-jacket and his eyes like tunnels reaching deep into the darkness of time itself. Landsman pursues Albert Einstein across the milk-white, chalk-white ice, hopping from square to shadowed square across relativistic chessboards of culpability and atonement, across the imaginary land of penguins and Eskimos that the Jews never quite managed to inherit.

  His dream makes a knight move, and with characteristic fervor, his little sister, Naomi, begins to explain to Landsman Einstein’s famous proof of the Eternal Return of the Jew and how it can be measured only in terms of the Eternal Exile of the Jew, a proof that the great man deduced from observing the wobble in the wing of an airplane and the drift of a dark bloom of smoke rising from the slope of an ice mountain. Landsman’s dream calves other slow iceberg dreams, and the ice hums with fluorescence. At some point the humming that has plagued Landsman and his people since the dawn of time, which some in their foolishness have mistaken for the voice of God, gets trapped in the windows of room 505 like sunlight in the heart of an iceberg.

  Landsman opens his eyes. In the seams of the venetian blinds, daylight buzzes like a trapped fly. Naomi is dead again, and that fool of an Einstein is innocent of all wrongdoing in the Shpilman case. Landsman knows nothing at all. He feels an ache in his abdomen that he takes at first for sorrow before determining, a moment later, that what he’s feeling is hunger. The desire, in fact, for stuffed cabbage. He checks his Shoyfer for the time, but the battery has died. The day clerk reports, when Landsman calls down to the desk, that it is 9:09 A.M., Thursday. Stuffed cabbage! Every Wednesday night is Rumania night at the Vorsht, and Mrs. Kalushiner always has something left over the next morning. The old bat serves the finest sarmali in Sitka. At once light and dense, favoring hot pepper over sweet-and-sour, drizzled with fresh sour cream, topped with sprigs of fresh dill. Landsman shaves and dresses in the same blown suit and a tie from off the doorknob. He is ready to consume his own weight in sarmali. But when he gets downstairs, he glances at the clock ov
er the mail slots and realizes that he is nine minutes late for his hearing before the review committee.

  By the time Landsman comes scrabbling like a dog on slick tile down the corridor of the Administration modular, into room 102, he is twenty-two minutes late. He finds nothing but a long veneer table with five chairs, one for each member of the review board, and his commanding officer, sitting on the edge of the table, legs dangling, crossed at the ankle, her pointy-toed pumps aiming straight for Landsman’s heart. The five big high-backed leather chairs are empty.

  Bina looks like hell, only hotter. Her seagull-brown suit is rumpled and misbuttoned. Her hair appears to be tied back with a plastic drinking straw. Her panty hose are long gone, her legs bare and dappled with pale freckles. Landsman recalls with a strange pleasure the way she would trash a laddered pair of stockings, shredding them into a pompon of rage before tossing them into the can.

  “Stop looking at my legs,” she says. “Cut it out, Meyer. Look at my face.”

  Landsman complies, staring right down the bores of her doublebarreled gaze. “I overslept,” he says. “I’m sorry. They kept me for twenty-four hours, and by the time—”

  “They kept me for thirty-one hours,” she says. “I just got out.”

  “So fuck me and my whining, for starters.”

  “For starters.”

  “How was it by you?”

  “They were so nice,” Bina says bitterly. “I totally folded. Told them everything.”

  “Same here.”

  “So,” she says, gesturing to the room around them with upturned hands, like she just made something disappear. Her jocular tone is not a good sign. “Guess what?”

  “I’m dead,” Landsman tries. “The board sprinkled me with quicklime and plowed me under.”

  “As a matter of fact,” she says, “I got a call on my mobile this morning, in this room, at eight-fifty-nine. After I made a total ass of myself and screamed my head off until they let me out of the Federal Building, so I could get down here and make sure I was in that chair behind you, on time and ready to stand up and support my detective.”

  “Um.”

  “Your hearing was canceled.”

  Bina reaches into her bag, rummages around, and comes out with a gun. She adds it to the battery comprising her rifled gaze and the toes of her pointed shoes. A chopped M-39. A manila tag dangles on a string from its barrel. She arcs it toward Landsman’s head. He manages to catch the gun but fumbles the badge holder that comes flying after it. Then comes a little bag with Landsman’s clip. Another brief search of her bag produces a murderous-looking form and its triplicate henchmen. “After you go ahead and break your head on this DPD-2255, Detective Landsman, you will have been reinstated, with full pay and benefits, as an active member of the District Police, Sitka Central Division.”

  “I’m back on the job.”

  “For, what is it, five more weeks? Enjoy.”

  Landsman weighs the sholem like a Shakespearean hero contemplating a skull. “I should have asked for a million dollars,” he says. “I’ll bet he would have coughed it up.”

  “God damn him,” Bina says. “God damn them all. I always knew they were there. Down there in Washington. Up there over our heads. Holding the strings. Setting the agenda. Of course I knew that. We all knew that. We all grew up knowing that, right? We are here on sufferance. Houseguests. But they ignored us for so long. Left us to our own devices. It was easy to kid yourself. Make you think you had a little autonomy, in a small way, nothing fancy. I thought I was working for everyone. You know. Serving the public. Upholding the law. But really I was just working for Cashdollar.”

  “You think I should have been discharged, don’t you?”

  “No, Meyer.”

  “I know I go a little too far. Play the hunches. The loose-cannon routine.”

  “You think I’m angry because they gave you back your badge and your gun?”

  “Well, not so much that, no. But the hearing being canceled. I know how much you like things done by the book.”

  “I do like things done by the book,” she says, her voice tight. “I believe in the book.”

  “I know you do.”

  “If you and I had played it by the book a little more,” she says, and something dangerous seems to well up between them. “You and your hunches, a black year on them.”

  He wants to tell it to her then: the story that has been telling him for the past three years. How, after Django was husked from her body, Landsman stopped the doctor in the hall outside the operating room. Bina had instructed Landsman to ask this good doctor whether there was some use, some aim or study, to which the half-grown bones and organs might be put.

  “My wife was wondering,” Landsman began, then faltered.

  “Whether there was any visible defect?” the doctor said. “No. Nothing at all. The baby appeared to be normal.” He remarked, too late, the look of horror blooming on Landsman’s face. “Of course, that doesn’t mean there was nothing wrong.”

  “Of course,” Landsman said.

  He never saw this doctor again. The ultimate fate of the little body, of the boy Landsman sacrificed to the god of his own dark hunches, was something he had neither the heart nor the stomach to investigate.

  “I made the same fucking deal, Meyer,” Bina says before he can confess to her. “For my silence.”

  “That you get to keep being a cop?”

  “No. That you do.”

  “Thanks,” Landsman says. “Bina, thanks a lot. I’m grateful.”

  She presses her face into her hands and massages her temples. “I’m grateful to you, too,” she says. “I’m grateful for the reminder of just how messed up all of this is.”

  “My pleasure,” he says. “Glad I could help.”

  “Fucking Mr. Cashdollar. The man’s hair doesn’t move. It’s like it’s welded to his head.”

  “He said he had nothing to do with Naomi,” Landsman says. He pauses and nibbles on his lip. “He said it was the man who had the job before him.”

  He tries to keep his head up while he says it, but after a moment he finds himself looking at the stitches of his shoes. Bina reaches, hesitates, then gives his shoulder a squeeze. She leaves her hand on him for all of two seconds, just long enough to rip a seam or two in Landsman.

  “Also he denied any involvement in Shpilman. I forgot to ask him about Litvak, though.” Landsman looks up, and she takes her hand away. “Did Cashdollar tell you where they took him? Is he on his way to Jerusalem?”

  “He tried to look mysterious about it, but I think he was just without a clue. I overheard him on his cell phone, telling somebody they were bringing in a forensic team from Seattle to go over the room at the Blackpool. Maybe that was something he wanted me to hear. But I have to say they all seemed nonplussed about our friend Alter Litvak. They seem to have no idea where he is. Maybe he took the money and ran. He could be halfway to Madagascar by now.”

  “Maybe,” Landsman says, then, more slowly, “maybe.”

  “God help me, I sense another hunch coming on.”

  “You said you’re grateful to me.”

  “In a backhanded, ironical way. Yeah.”

  “Look, I could use a little backup. I want to have another look at Litvak’s room.”

  “We can’t get into the Blackpool. The whole joint is under some kind of secret federal lockdown.”

  “Only I don’t want to get into the Blackpool. I want to get under it.”

  “Under it?”

  “I heard there might be some, well, some tunnels down there.”

  “Tunnels.”

  “Warsaw tunnels, I heard they’re called.”

  “You need me to hold your hand,” she says. “In a deep dark nasty old tunnel.”

  “Only in the metaphorical sense,” he says.

  43

  At the top of the stairs, Bina takes a key-ring flashlight from her cowhide bag and passes it to Landsman. It promotes or possibly allegorizes the services of a
Yakovy funeral home. Then she moves aside some dossiers, a sheaf of court documents, a wooden hairbrush, a mummified boomerang that may once have been a banana in a Ziploc, a copy of People, and comes up with a slack black harness suggestive of sadomasochistic sex play, equipped with a kind of round canister. She plunges her head into the midst of it and involves her hair with the black webbing. When she sits up and turns her head, a silver lens flares and wanes, raking Landsman’s face. Landsman can feel the imminent darkness, can feel the very word “tunnel” burrowing through his rib cage.

  They go down the steps, through the lost-articles room. The taxidermy marten leers at them as they pass. The loop of rope on the door of the crawl space dangles. Landsman tries to recall if he returned it to its hook before his inglorious retreat last Thursday night. He stands there, racking his memory, and then he gives up.

  “I’ll go first,” Bina says.

  She gets down on her bare knees and works herself into the crawl space. Landsman hangs back. His throbbing pulse, his dry tongue, his autonomic systems are caught up in the tiresome history of his phobia, but the crystal set that is handed out to every Jew, tuned to receive transmissions from Messiah, resonates at the sight of Bina’s ass, the long indented arc of it like some kind of magic alphabet letter, a rune with the power to roll away the stone slab behind which he has entombed his desire for her. He is pierced by the knowledge that no matter how potent a spell it still casts over him, he will never again find himself permitted, wonder of wonders, to bite it. Then it vanishes into the darkness, along with the rest of her, and Landsman is left stranded. He mutters to himself, reasons with himself, dares himself to go in after her, and then Bina says, “Get in here,” and Landsman obeys.