The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  “What are you going to do, turn him away?” he yelled at Landsman’s mother. “They’re making his life a living hell up there. His mother is dead. Murdered by Jews.”

  In fact, eleven Native Alaskans were killed in the rioting that followed the bombing of a prayer house that a group of Jews had built on disputed land. There are pockets in these islands where the map drawn by Harold Ickes falters and gives way, dotted stretches of the Line. Most of them are too remote or mountainous to be inhabited, frozen or flooded year-round. But some of these crosshatched patches, choice and level and temperate, have proved irresistible over the years to the Jews in their millions. Jews want livable space. In the seventies some of them, mostly members of small Orthodox sects, began to take it.

  The construction of a prayer house at St. Cyril by the splinter from a splinter of a sect from Lisianski was the final outrage for many Natives. It was met with demonstrations, rallies, lawyers, and dark rumblings from Congress over yet another affront to peace and parity by the overweening Jews of the north. Two days before its consecration, somebody—no one ever came forward or was charged—threw a double Molotov through a window, burning the prayer house to its concrete pad. The congregants and their supporters swarmed into the town of St. Cyril, smashing crab traps, breaking the windows of the Alaska Native Brotherhood hall, and setting spectacular fire to a shedful of Roman candles and cherry bombs. The driver of a truckload of angry yids lost control of the wheel and plowed into the grocery store where Laurie Jo worked as a checker, killing her instantly. The Synagogue Riots remain the lowest moment in the bitter and inglorious history of Tlingit-Jewish relations.

  “Is that my fault? Is that my problem?” Landsman’s mother yelled back. “An Indian living in my house, that is something I do not need!”

  The children listened to them for a while, Johnny Bear standing in the doorway, kicking at his duffel bag with the toe of his sneaker.

  “Good thing you don’t speak Yiddish,” Landsman told the younger boy.

  “I don’t need to, dickwad,” said Johnny the Jew. “I been hearing this shit all my life.”

  After the thing was settled—and it had been settled before Landsman’s mother ever started with the yelling—Hertz came in to say goodbye. His son had two inches on him. When he took the boy in his arms for a quick stiff hug, it looked like the side chair was embracing the couch. Then he stepped away.

  “I’m sorry, John,” he said. He gripped his son by the ears and held on tight. He scanned the boy’s face like a telegram. “I want you to know that. I don’t want you ever to look at me and think that I’m feeling anything but sorry.”

  “I want to live with you,” said the boy tonelessly.

  “So you have mentioned.” The words were harsh and the manner callous, but all at once—it shocked the hell out of Landsman—there was a shine of tears in Uncle Hertz’s eyes. “I’m well-known, John, as a complete son of a bitch. You’d be worse off with me than living in the street.” He looked around his sister’s living room, the plastic slipcovers on the furniture, the art like barbed wire, the abstract menorah. “God knows what they’ll make of you here.”

  “A Jew,” said Johnny Bear, and it was hard to tell whether he meant it as a boast or a prediction of ruin. “Like you.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Hertz said. “I’d like to see them manage that. Goodbye, John.”

  He gave Naomi a pat on the head. Just before he went out, he stopped to shake hands with Landsman. “Help your cousin, Meyerle, he’s going to need it.”

  “He looks like he can help himself.”

  “He does, doesn’t he?” said Uncle Hertz. “That at least he gets from me.”

  Now Ber Shemets, as he came in time to style himself, lives like a Jew, wears a skullcap and four-corner like a Jew. He reasons as a Jew, worships as a Jew, fathers and loves his wife and serves the public as a Jew. He spins theory with his hands, keeps kosher, and sports a penis cut (his father saw to it before abandoning the infant Bear) on the bias. But to look at, he’s pure Tlingit. Tartar eyes, dense black hair, broad face built for joy but trained in the craft of sorrow. The Bears are a big people, and Berko stands two meters tall in his socks and weighs in at 110 kilograms. He has a big head, big feet, big belly and hands. Everything about Berko is big except for the baby in his arms, smiling shyly at Landsman with his thatch of black horsehair standing up like magnetized iron filings. Cute as a button, Landsman would be the first to acknowledge, but even after a year, the sight of Pinky still puts a dent in the soft place behind Landsman’s sternum. Pinky was born exactly two years after Django’s due date—September 22.

  “Emanuel Lasker was a famous chess player,” Landsman informs Berko, who takes a mug of coffee from Ester-Malke and frowns into the steam. “A German Jew. In the teens and twenties.” He spent the hour between five and six at his computer in the desolate squad room, seeing what he could turn up. “A mathematician. Lost to Capablanca, like everybody else back then. The book was in the room. And a chessboard, set up that way.”

  Berko has heavy eyelids, soulful, bruised-looking, but when he drops them down over those pop eyes, it’s like the beam of a flashlight bleeding through a slit, a look so cold and skeptical it can lead innocent men to doubt their own alibis.

  “And you feel,” he says, with a significant glance at the bottle of beer in Landsman’s hand, “that the configuration of pieces on the board, what?” The slit draws narrower, the beam flares brighter. “Encodes the name of his killer?”

  “In the alphabet of Atlantis,” Landsman says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The Jew played chess. And he tied off with tefillin. And somebody killed him with a great deal of care and discretion. I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing in the chess angle. I can’t get anything out of it. I went through the whole book, but I couldn’t figure out which game he was playing. If any. Those diagrams, I don’t know, I get a headache looking at them. I get a headache just looking at the board, a curse on it.”

  Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels, which was not his intention at all. Berko looks over the top of Pinky’s head at his wife, to see if he really needs to worry about Landsman.

  “Tell you what, Meyer. If you put down that beer,” Berko says, trying and failing not to sound like a policeman, “I’ll let you hold this nice baby. How about that? Look at him. Look at those thighs, come on. You have to squeeze them. Put down the beer, all right? And hold this nice baby for a minute.”

  “He is a nice baby,” Landsman says. He removes another inch of beer from the bottle. Then he puts it down, and shuts up, and takes the baby, and smells him, and does the usual injury to his heart. Pinky smells like yogurt and laundry soap. A hint of his father’s bay rum. Landsman carries the baby to the doorway of the kitchen, and tries not to inhale, and watches as Ester-Malke peels a sheet of waffles from the iron. She is using an old Westinghouse with Bakelite handles in the shape of leaves. It can blast out four crisp waffles at a time.

  “Buttermilk?” Berko says, studying the chessboard now, stroking a finger along his heavy upper lip.

  “What else?” Ester-Malke says.

  “Real, or milk with vinegar?”

  “We did a double-blind test, Berko.” Ester-Malke hands Landsman a plate of waffles in exchange for her younger son, and even though he doesn’t feel like eating, Landsman is happy to make the trade. “You can’t tell the difference, remember?”

  “Well, he can’t play chess, either,” Landsman says. “But look at him pretending.”

  “Fuck you, Meyer,” Berko says. “Okay, now, seriously, which piece is the battleship?”

  The family chess madness had burned out or redirected its energies by the time Berko came to live with Landsman and his mother. Isidor Landsman had been dead for six years, and Hertz Shemets had transferred his skills at feinting and attack to a much larger chessboard. That meant there was no one to teach Berko the game but Landsman, a duty that Land
sman carefully neglected.

  “Butter?” Ester-Malke says. She ladles fresh batter into the cells of the waffle iron while Pinky sits on her hip and offers his unsolicited advice.

  “No butter.”

  “Syrup?”

  “No syrup.”

  “You don’t really want a waffle, do you, Meyer?” Berko says. He abandons the pretense of studying the board and moves on to the volume by Siegbert Tarrasch as if he will be able to make heads or tails of that.

  “Not in all honesty,” Landsman says. “But I know that I should.”

  Ester-Malke eases the lid of the iron down onto the grids of batter. “I’m pregnant,” she says in a mild tone.

  “What?” Berko says, looking up from the book of orderly surprises. “Fuck!” This word is spoken in American, Berko’s preferred language for swearing and harsh talk. He starts working over the stick of imaginary chewing gum that seems to appear in his mouth whenever he’s getting ready to blow. “That’s great, Es. That’s just great. You know? Because there’s still one fucking desk drawer in this shit-ass apartment that doesn’t have a motherfucking baby in it!”

  Then he raises Three Hundred Chess Games over his head and prepares, showily, to hurl it across the breakfast bar and into the living-diningroom. This is the Shemets in him coming out. Landsman’s mother was also a big one for the hurling of objects in anger, and the histrionic displays of Uncle Hertz, that cool customer, are rare but legendary.

  “Evidence,” Landsman reminds him. Berko raises the book higher, and Landsman says, “Evidence, God damn it!” and then Berko throws it. The book struggles through the air, pages fluttering, and strikes something jingly, probably the silver spice box on the glass-topped dining table. The baby sticks out his lower lip, then sticks it out a little farther, then hesitates, looking from his mother to his father and back. Then he bursts into desolate sobs. Berko glares at Pinky as if betrayed. He goes around the bar to retrieve the mishandled evidence.

  “What did Tateh do?” Ester-Malke says to the baby, kissing his cheek and scowling at the large black-edged hole in the air that Berko has left behind. “Did bad Detective Super-sperm throw the silly old book?”

  “Good waffle!” Landsman says, setting down his plate untouched. He raises his voice. “Hey, Berko, I’m, uh, I think I’m going to wait down in the car.” He swipes Ester-Malke’s cheek with his lips. “Tell what’s-his-name Uncle Meyerle says goodbye.”

  Landsman goes out to the elevators, where the wind whistles down the shafts. The neighbor, Fried, comes out in his long black coat, his white hair combed back and curling at his collar. Fried is an opera singer, and the Taytsh-Shemetses feel he looks down on them. But that is only because Fried has told them he is better than they are. Sitkaniks generally take care to maintain this view of their neighbors, in particular of the Natives and all those who dwell in the south. Fried and Landsman get into the elevator together. Fried asks Landsman if he has found any dead bodies lately, and Landsman asks Fried if he has made any dead composers turn over in their graves lately, and after that, they don’t say anything much. Landsman goes back out to his parking place and gets into the car. He runs the engine and sits in the heat blowing in off the engine. With the smell of Pinky on his collar and the cool dry ghost of Goldy’s hand in his, he plays goalkeeper as a squad of unprofitable regrets mounts a steady attack on his ability to get through a day without feeling anything. He climbs out and smokes a papiros in the rain. He turns his eyes north, across the marina, to the looping aluminum spike on its windswept island. Once more he feels a sharp nostalgia for the fair, for the heroic Jewish engineering of the Safety Pin (officially the Promise of Sanctuary Tower, but nobody calls it that), and for the cleavage of the uniformed lady who used to tear your ticket on the elevator ride to the restaurant at the Safety Pin’s tip. Then he gets back in the car. A few minutes later, Berko comes out of the building and rolls like a bass drum into the Super Sport. He has the book and the pocket chess set in one hand, balancing them atop his left thigh.

  “Sorry about all that,” he says. “What a jerk, huh?”

  “No big deal.”

  “We’ll just have to find a bigger place.”

  “Right.”

  “Somewhere.”

  “That’s the trick.”

  “It’s a blessing.”

  “You bet. Mazel tov, Berko.”

  Landsman’s congratulations are so ironic that they are heartfelt, and they are so heartfelt that they can only come off as insincere, and he and his partner sit there for a while, not going anywhere, listening to them congeal.

  “Ester-Malke says she’s so tired, she doesn’t even remember having sex with me,” Berko says with a deep sigh.

  “Maybe you didn’t.”

  “It’s a miracle, you’re saying. Like the talking chicken in the butcher shop.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A sign and a portent.”

  “One way of looking at it.”

  “Speaking of signs,” Berko says. He opens the Sitka Public Library’s long-missing copy of Three Hundred Chess Games to its inside back cover and slides the return card from its pasted pocket. Behind the card lies a photograph, a three-by-five color snapshot, glossy with a white border. It is the picture of a literal sign, a rectangle of black plastic into which are stamped three white roman letters, with a stamped white arrow underneath, pointing to the left. The sign dangles on two lengths of slender chain from a dirty white square of acoustic tile.

  “PIE,” Landsman reads.

  “It seems to have fallen out in the course of my vigorous examination of the evidence,” Berko says. “I figure it must have been wedged into the card pocket, or with your keen shammes vision, you would have noticed it. Recognize it?”

  “Yes,” Landsman says. “I know it.”

  At the airport that serves the raw northern city of Yakovy—the terminus from which you set off, if you are a Jew looking for modest adventure, into the modest bush of the District—tucked away at the far end of the main building, a modest operation offers pie, and only pie, American-style. The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window hangs a whiteboard, and every day the proprietors—a couple of hostile Klondikes and their mysterious daughter—write out a list of the day’s wares: blackberry, apple rhubarb, peach, banana cream. The pie is good, even famous in a modest way. Anybody who has passed through the Yakovy airfield knows it, and there are rumors of people who will fly in from Juneau or Fairbanks or farther away to eat it. Landsman’s late sister was a devotee of the coconut cream in particular.

  “So, nu,” Berko says. “So what do you think?”

  “I knew it,” Landsman says. “The minute I walked into the room and saw Lasker lying there, I said to myself, Landsman, this whole case is going to turn on a question of pie.”

  “So you think it means nothing.”

  “Nothing means nothing,” Landsman says, and all of a sudden he feels choked up, throat swollen, eyes burning with tears. Maybe it’s lack of sleep, or too much time spent in the company of his shot glass. Or maybe it’s the sudden image of Naomi, leaning against a wall outside that nameless and inexplicable pie shop, scarfing up a slice of coconut cream pie from a paper plate with a plastic fork, eyes closed, lips pursed and streaked with white, grooving on a mouthful of cream, crust and custard in a profound and animal way. “God damn it, Berko. I wish I had some of that pie right now.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Berko says.

  7

  For twenty-seven years Sitka Central has been temporarily housed in eleven modular buildings in a vacant lot behind the old Russian orphanage. Rumor holds that the modulars began life as a Bible college in Slidell, Louisiana. They are windowless, low-ceilinged, flimsy, and cramped. The visitor finds, packed into the Homicide modular, a reception area, an office for each of the two detective inspectors, a shower stall with a toilet and sink, a squad room (four cubicles, four chairs, f
our telephones, a chalkboard, and a row of mail slots), an interrogation hotbox, and a break room. The break room comes equipped with a coffee brewer and a small refrigerator. The break room has also long housed a thriving colony of spores that, at a point in the remote past, spontaneously evolved the form and appearance of a love seat. But when Landsman and Berko pull into the gravel lot by the Homicide modular, a pair of Filipino custodians are lugging out the monstrous fungus.

  “It’s moving,” Berko says.

  People have been threatening for years to get rid of the sofa, but it is a shock to Landsman to see it finally on its way. Enough of a shock that it takes him a second or two to register the woman standing alongside the steps. She is holding a black umbrella and wearing a bright orange parka with a blazing dyed-green ruff of synthetic fur. Her right arm is raised, index finger extended toward the trash bins, like a painting of the angel Michael casting Adam and Eve from the Garden. A lock of corkscrewing red hair has sprung free of the green fur ruff and dangles down over her face. This is a chronic problem for her. When she is kneeling to examine a doubtful stain on the floor of a crime scene, or studying a photograph under a loupe, she has to blow that lock of hair out of the way with a sharp, irritated puff of breath.

  Now she is scowling at the Super Sport as Landsman cuts the engine. She lowers her all-banishing hand. From this distance, it looks to Landsman as if the lady is three or four cups the worse for strong coffee, and somebody has already pissed her off once this morning, maybe twice. Landsman was married to her for twelve years, working the same Homicide squad for five. He is sensitive to her moods.

  “Tell me you didn’t know about this,” he says to Berko, cutting the engine.

  “I still don’t know about it,” Berko says. “I’m hoping if I close my eyes for a second and then open them again, it’s going to turn out not to be true.”