“Look at the head on that sheygets, the thing has its own atmosphere,” Landsman says. “Thing has ice caps.”
“Indeed the man has a very big head.”
“Every time I see it, I feel sorry for necks.”
“Maybe I should get my hands around his. Give it some support.”
Brennan puts up his larval white fingers and blinks his little eyes, the colorless blue of skimmed milk. He works up a practiced rueful smile, but Landsman notes that he keeps a good four feet of Ben Maymon Street between him and Berko.
“A need to repeat the rash threats of yore does not, I assure you, exist, Detective Shemets,” the reporter says in his swift and preposterous Yiddish. “Evergreen and ripe with the sap of their original violence they remain.”
Brennan studied German in college and learned his Yiddish from some pompous old German at the Institute, and he talks, somebody once remarked, “like a sausage recipe with footnotes.” A heavy drinker, unsuited by temperament to long twilight and rain. Throws off a false scent of being stolid and slow on the uptake, in a way common among detectives and reporters. But a shlemiel all the same. No one ever seemed more astonished by the splash Dennis Brennan made in Sitka than Brennan himself.
“That I fear your wrath let us agree beforehand, Detective. And that just now I pretended not to see you walking past this desolate hole whose sole recommendation, apart from the fact that the management has forgotten, in my long absence, the state of my credit, is a total lack of newspaper reporters. I knew, however, that with my luck, such a strategy was likely to return at a later time and bite me upon the ass.”
“Nothing is that hungry, Brennan,” Landsman says. “You were probably safe.”
Brennan looks hurt. A sensitive soul, this macrocephalic gentile, a nurser of slights, resistant to banter and irony. His convoluted style of talking makes everything he says sound like a joke, a fact that only compounds the man’s need to be taken seriously.
“Dennis J. Brennan,” Berko says. “Working the Sitka beat again?”
“For my sins, Detective Shemets, for my sins.”
This goes without saying. Assignment to the Sitka bureau of any of the stateside newspapers or networks that bother to maintain one is a proverbial punishment for incompetence or failure. Brennan’s reassignment here must be the mark of some kind of colossal cock-up.
“I thought that was why they sent you away, Brennan,” Berko says, and now he’s the one who isn’t joking. His eyes go dead, and he chews that imaginary piece of Doublemint or seal fat or the gristly knob of Brennan’s heart. “For your sins.”
“The motivation, Detective, for my leaving a cup of terrible coffee and a broken appointment with an informant who, in any case, lacks anything resembling information, to come out here and risk your possible anger.”
“Brennan, please, I beg you to speak American,” Berko says. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I want a story,” Brennan says. “What else? And I know I’ll never get one from you unless I try to clear the air. So. For the record.” Once again he lashes himself to the tiller of his Flying Dutchman version of the mother tongue. “I lack the intention to undo or to take back anything. Inflict suffering on this grossly enlarged head of mine, please, but I stand behind what I wrote, every word of it, to this day. It was accurate and supported and sourced. And yet I do not mind telling you that the whole sorry affair left a bad taste in my mouth—”
“Was it the taste of your ass?” Landsman suggests brightly. “Maybe you’ve been biting upon yourself.”
Brennan sails madly on. Landsman gets the feeling that the goy has been saving up this spiel for a while now. That maybe he’s looking for something more from Berko than a story.
“Certainly it was a good thing for my career, so-called. For a few years. It propelled me out of the boondocks, you should pardon the expression, to L.A., Salt Lake, Kansas City.” As he names the stations of his decline, Brennan’s voice gets lower and softer. “Spokane. But I know that it was a painful thing for you and your family, Detective. And so, if you would allow me, I would like to offer my apology for the hurt that I caused.”
Just after the elections that carried the current administration to its first term in power, Dennis J. Brennan wrote a series of articles for his paper. He presented, in careful and dogged detail, the sordid history of corruption, malfeasance, and unconstitutional skullduggery engaged in by Hertz Shemets, over the course of forty years at the FBI. The COINTELPRO program was shut down, its business was farmed out to other departments, and Uncle Hertz was driven into retirement and disgrace. Landsman, who was shocked by nothing, found it tough to get out of bed for a couple of days after the first article ran. He’d known as well as anyone and better than almost everyone that his uncle was badly flawed both as a man and as an officer of the law. But if you wanted to go looking for the reasons that a kid became a noz, it almost never paid to search anywhere but a branch or two up the family tree. Flaws and all, Uncle Hertz was a hero to Landsman. Smart, tough, unremitting, patient, methodical, sure of his actions. If his willingness to cut corners, his bad temper, his secretiveness did not make him a hero, they definitely made him a noz.
“I’m going to put this very gently, Dennis,” Berko says, “because you’re all right. You work hard, you’re a decent writer, and you’re the only guy I know who makes my partner look like a clotheshorse: Fuck you.”
Brennan nods. “I figured you might say that,” he replies, sadly and in American.
“My father’s a fucking hermit,” Berko says. “He’s a mushroom, he lives under a log with the earwigs and the crawly things. Whatever nefarious shit he was up to, he was only doing what he thought was good for the Jews, and you know what’s fucked up about that? He was right, because now look at the motherfucking mess we’re in without him.”
“Jesus, Shemets, I hate to hear that. And I hate to think that a story I wrote had anything to do with—that it led to, in any way—the predicament you yids now find yourself in…. Ah, fuck it. Forget it.”
“Okay,” Landsman says. He grabs hold of Berko’s sleeve again. “Come.”
“Hey, uh, yeah. So where you guys going? What’s up?”
“Just fighting crime,” Landsman says. “Same as last time you blew through here.”
But now that he’s unburdened himself, the hound inside Brennan can smell it on Berko and Landsman. Maybe he could smell it on them from a block away, could see it through the glass, a hitch in Berko’s rolling gait, an extra kilo of stoop in Landsman’s shoulder. Maybe the whole apology routine has been building to the question he drags up, in his native tongue, naked and plain:
“Who died?”
“A yid in a predicament,” Berko tells him. “Dog bites man.”
9
They leave Brennan standing outside the Front Page, with his necktie smacking him on the forehead like a remorseful palm, and walk to the corner of Seward and down Peretz, then turn in just past the Palatz Theater, in the lee of Baranof Castle Hill, to a black door, in a black marble facade, with a big picture window painted black.
“You are not serious,” Berko says.
“In fifteen years I never saw another shammes at the Vorsht.”
“It’s nine-thirty in the morning on a Friday, Meyer. There’s nobody in there but the rats.”
“Not true,” Landsman says. He leads Berko around to the side door and lays his knuckles against it, two taps. “I always figured this was the place to plan my misdeeds, if I ever found myself with misdeeds that needed planning.”
The heavy steel door swings open with a groan, revealing Mrs. Kalushiner, dressed to go to shul or a job at the bank, in a gray skirt suit and black pumps, with her hair done up in pink foam rollers. In her hand she carries a paper cup filled with a liquid that looks like coffee or maybe prune juice. Mrs. Kalushiner chews tobacco. The cup is her constant if not sole companion.
“You,” she says, making a face like she just tasted earwax on her fingertip. Th
en, in her refined way, she spits into the cup. From force of wise habit, she takes a long look up and down the alley to see what style of trouble they have brought along. She makes a rapid and brutal study of the giant yarmulke-wearing Indian who wants to come into her place of business. In the past, the people Landsman has brought here, at this hour of the day, have all been twitchy, mouse-eyed shtinkers like Benny “Shpilkes” Plotner and Zigmund Landau, the Heifetz of Informers. Nobody ever looked less like a shtinker than Berko Shemets. And with all due respect to the beanie and the fringes, no way would this be a middleman or even a low-echelon street wiseguy, not with that Indian puss. When, after careful consideration, she can’t fit Berko into her taxonomy of lowlifes, Mrs. Kalushiner spits into her cup. Then she returns her gaze to Landsman and sighs. By one kind of reckoning, she owes Landsman seventeen favors; by another, she ought to give him a punch in the belly. She steps aside and lets them pass.
The place is as empty as an off-duty downtown bus and smells twice as bad. Somebody came through recently with a bucket of bleach to paint in some high notes over the Vorsht’s steady bass line of sweat and urinals. The keen nose can also detect, above or beneath it all, the coat-lining smell of worn dollar bills.
“Sit there,” Mrs. Kalushiner says, without indicating where she would like them to sit. The round tables that crowd the stage wear overturned chairs like sets of antlers. Landsman flips two of them, and he and Berko take their seats away from the stage, by the heavily bolted front door. Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.
“What a doll,” Berko says.
“A sweetheart,” Landsman agrees. “She only comes in here in the mornings. That way she never has to look at the clientele.” The Vorsht is the place where the musicians of Sitka do their drinking, after the theaters and the other clubs close down. Long after midnight they come huddling in, snow on their hats, rain in their cuffs, and pack the little stage, and kill one another with clarinets and fiddles. As usual when angels gather, they draw a following of devils: gangsters, ganefs, and hard-luck women. “She doesn’t care for musicians.”
“But her husband was a—Oh. I get it.”
Nathan Kalushiner, until his death, was the owner of the Vorsht and the king of the C-soprano clarinet. He was a gambler, and a junkie, and a very bad man in many respects, but he could play like there was a dybbuk inside him. Landsman, a music lover, used to look out for the crazy little shkotz and try to extricate him from the ugly situations in which Kalushiner’s poor judgment and gnawed-at soul landed him. Then one day Kalushiner disappeared, along with the wife of a well-known Russian shtarker, leaving Mrs. Kalushiner nothing but the Vorsht and the goodwill of its creditors. Parts of Nathan Kalushiner, but not his C-soprano clarinet, later washed up under the docks up at Yakovy.
“And that’s the guy’s dog?” Berko says, pointing to the stage. At the spot where Kalushiner used to stand and blow every night sits a curly half-terrier mutt, white with brown spots and a black patch around one eye. He’s just sitting, ears raised, as if listening to some echoed voice or music in his brain. A length of slack chain connects him to a steel loop mounted on the wall.
“That’s Hershel,” Landsman says. There’s something painful to him about the dog’s patient mien, his canine air of calm endurance. Landsman looks away. “Five years he’s been standing there.”
“Touching.”
“I guess. The animal, to be honest, he gives me the willies.”
Mrs. Kalushiner reappears, carrying a metal bowl filled with pickled tomatoes and cucumbers, a basket of poppy-seed rolls, and a bowl of sour cream. That’s all balanced along her left arm. The right hand, of course, carries the paper spittoon.
“Beautiful pickles,” Berko suggests, and when that gets him nowhere, he tries, “Cute dog.”
What’s touching, thinks Landsman, is the effort that Berko Shemets is always willing to put into starting a conversation with somebody. The tighter people clam up, the more determined old Berko becomes. That was true of him even as a boy. He had that eagerness to engage with people, especially with his vacuum-packed cousin Meyer.
“A dog is a dog,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. She slams down the pickles and sour cream, drops the basket of rolls, and then retreats to the back room with another clash of beads.
“So I need to ask you a favor,” Landsman says, his gaze on the dog, who has lowered himself to the stage on his arthritic knees and lies with his head on his forepaws. “And I’m hoping very much that you’ll say no.”
“Does this favor have anything to do with ‘effective resolution’?”
“Are you mocking the concept?”
“Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.” He plucks a pickled tomato from the dish, dabs it in the sour cream, then pokes it neatly into his mouth with a forefinger. He screws up his face with pleasure at the resultant sour squirt of pulp and brine. “Bina looks good.”
“I thought she looked good.”
“A little butch.”
“So you always said.”
“Bina, Bina.” Berko gives his head a bleak shake, one that somehow manages at the same time to look fond. “In her last life, she must have been a weather vane.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Landsman says. “You’re right, but you’re wrong.”
“You’re saying Bina is not a careerist.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“She is, Meyer, and she always has been. That’s one of the things I have always most liked about her. Bina is a smart cookie. She is tough. She is political. She is viewed as loyal, and in two directions, up and down, and that is a hard trick to pull off. She is inspector material all around. In any police force, in any country in the world.”
“She was first in her class,” Landsman says. “At the academy.”
“But you scored higher on the entrance exam.”
“Why, yes,” Landsman says. “I did. Have I mentioned that before?”
“Even U.S. Marshals are smart enough to notice Bina Gelbfish,” Berko says. “If she is trying to make sure there’s a place for her in Sitka law enforcement after Reversion, I’m not going to blame her for that.”
“You make your point,” Landsman says. “Only I don’t buy it. That isn’t why she took this job. Or it’s not the only reason.”
“Why did she, then?”
Landsman shrugs. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe she ran out of things to do that make sense.”
“I hope not. Or the next thing you know, she’ll be getting back together with you.”
“God forbid.”
“Horrors.”
Landsman pretends to spit three times over his shoulder. Then, right as he’s wondering if this custom has anything to do with the habit of chewing tobacco, Mrs. Kalushiner comes back, dragging the great leg iron of her life.
“I have hard-boiled eggs,” she says menacingly. “I have bagel. I have jellied leg.”
“Just a little something to drink, Mrs. K.,” Landsman says. “Berko?”
“Burp water,” Berko says. “With a twist of lime.”
“You want to eat,” she tells him. It isn’t a guess.
“Why not?” Berko says. “All right, bring me a couple of eggs.”
Mrs. Kalushiner turns to Landsman, and he feels Berko’s eyes on his, daring him and expecting him to order a slivovitz. Landsman can feel Berko’s fatigue, his impatience and irritation with Landsman and his problems. It’s about time he pulled himself together, isn’t it? Find something worth living his life for, and get on it with it.
“Coca-Cola,” Landsman says. “If you please.”
This may be the first thing that Landsman or anyone has ever done to surprise the widow of Nathan Kalushiner. She raises one steel-gray eyebrow, then turns away. Berko reaches for one of the pickled cucumbers, shaking off the peppercorns and cloves that stud its freckled green skin. He crunches it between his teeth and fro
wns happily.
“It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle,” he says, and then, as if offhand, teasing, “Sure you don’t want another beer?”
Landsman would love a beer. He can taste the bitter caramel of it on the back of his tongue. In the meantime, the one that Ester-Malke gave him has yet to leave his body, but Landsman is getting indications that it has its bags packed and is ready to go. The proposition or appeal that he has determined to make to his partner now strikes him as perhaps the stupidest idea he has ever had, certainly not worth living for. But it will have to do.
“Fuck you,” he says, getting up from the table. “I need to take a leak.”
In the men’s room, Landsman discovers the body of an electric guitarist. From a table at the back of the Vorsht, Landsman has often admired this yid and his playing. He was among the first to import the techniques and attitudes of American and British rock guitarists to the Bulgars and freylekhs of Jewish dance music. He is roughly the same age and background as Landsman, grew up in Halibut Point, and in moments of vainglory, Landsman has compared himself, or rather his detective work, to the intuitive and flashy playing of this man who appears to be dead or passed out in the stall with his money hand in the toilet bowl. The man is wearing a black leather three-piece suit and a red ribbon necktie. His celebrated fingers have been denuded of their rings, leaving ghostly indentations. A wallet lies on the tiled floor, looking empty and distended.
The musician snores once. Landsman employs those intuitive and flashy skills in feeling at the man’s carotid for a pulse. It’s steady. The air around the musician hums almost to burning with the radiance of alcohol. The wallet seems to have been rifled of its cash and identification. Landsman pats down the musician and finds a pint of Canadian vodka in the left hip pocket of his leather blazer. They got his cash but not his booze. Landsman doesn’t want a drink. In fact, he feels a lurch inside him at the idea of pouring this garbage into his belly, some kind of moral muscle that recoils. He chances a quick peek into the cobwebby root cellar of his soul. He can’t help noticing that this pulse of revulsion for what is, after all, a popular brand of Canadian vodka seems to have something to do with his ex-wife, with her being back in the Sitka again and looking so strong and juicy and Bina. The daily sight of her is going to be torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
Michael Chabon Page 7
