The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

  “Blond,” the Russian says, the very soul of helpfulness. “Freckles. What else, please?”

  Landsman shuffles through his scanty hand of details, trying to decide which one to play. “A student of the game, we’re guessing. Up on his chess history. He had a book by Siegbert Tarrasch in his room. And then there’s the alias he was using.”

  “So astute,” the Russian says without bothering to sound sincere. “A couple of top-dollar shammeses.”

  The remark does not so much rankle Landsman as nudge him half a wisecrack closer to remembering this bony Russian with the peeling skin. “At one time, possibly,” he continues more slowly, groping for the memory, watching the Russian, “the deceased was a pious Jew. A black hat.”

  The Russian tugs his hands out from under his arms. He sits forward in his chair. The ice on his Baltic eyes seems to thaw all at once. “He was smack addict?” His tone barely qualifies as a question, and when Landsman doesn’t immediately deny the charge, he says, “Frank.” He pronounces the name American-style, with a long, sharp vowel and a shadowless R. “Ah, no.”

  “Frank,” Velvel agrees.

  “I—” The Russian slumps, knees spread, hands dangling at his sides. “Detectives, can I tell you one thing?” he says. “Truly, sometimes I hate this lamentable excuse for a world.”

  “Tell us about Frank,” Berko says. “You liked him.”

  The Russian hoists his shoulders, his eyes iced over again. “I do not like anyone,” he says. “But when Frank comes in here, at least I do not run screaming out the door. He is funny. Not handsome man. But handsome voice. Serious voice. Like the man who plays serious music on the radio. At three o’clock in the morning, you know, talking about Shostakovich. He says things in serious voice, it’s funny. Everything he says, always it’s a little bit criticism. Cut of your hair, how ugly your pants, how Velvel jumps every time a person mentions his wife.”

  “True enough,” Velvel says. “I do.”

  “Always teasing you, but, I don’t know why, it don’t piss you off.”

  “It was—You felt like he was harder on himself,” Velvel says.

  “When you play him, even though he wins every time, you feel you play better against him than with the assholes in this club,” the Russian says. “Frank is never asshole.”

  “Meyer,” says Berko, soft. He flies the flags of his eyebrows in the direction of the next table. They have an audience.

  Landsman turns. Two men confront each other over a game in its early stages. One wears the modern jacket and pants and full beard of a Lubavitcher Jew. His beard is dense and black as if shaded in with a soft pencil. A steady hand has pinned a black velour skullcap trimmed with black silk to the black tangle of his hair. His navy overcoat and blue fedora hang from a hook set into the mirrored wall behind him. The lining of his coat and the label of his hat are reflected in the glass. Exhaustion stains the underlids of his eyes: fervent eyes, bovine and sad. His opponent is a Bobover in a long robe, britches, white hose, and slippers. His skin is as pale as a page of commentary. His hat perches on his lap, a black cake on a black dish. His skullcap lies flat as a sewn pocket against the back of his cropped head. To the eye not disillusioned by police work, they might appear to be as lost as any pair of Einstein patzers in the diffused radiance of their game. Landsman would be willing to bet a hundred dollars, however, that neither of them even knows whose move it is. They have been listening to every word at the neighboring table; they are listening now.

  Berko walks over to the table on the other side of the Russian and Velvel. It’s unoccupied. He picks up a bentwood chair with a ripped cane seat and swings it around to a spot between the table of the black hats and the table where the Russian is breaking Velvel down. He sits down in that grand fat-man way he has, spreading his legs, tossing the flaps of his overcoat behind him, as if he is going to make a fine meal of them all. He takes off his own homburg, palming it by the crown. His Indian hair stands thick and lustrous, threaded lately with silver. Gray hair makes Berko look wiser and kinder, an effect that, though he is relatively wise and fairly kind, he will not hesitate to abuse. The bentwood chair grows alarmed at the scope and contour of Berko’s buttocks.

  “Hi!” Berko says to the black hats. He rubs his palms together, then spreads them across his thighs. All the man needs is a napkin to tuck into his collar, a fork, and a knife. “How are you?”

  With the art and determination of the very worst actors, the black hats look up, surprised.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” the Lubavitcher says.

  “My favorite phrase in the Yiddish language,” Berko says sincerely. “Now, how about we get you in on this discussion? Tell us about Frank.”

  “We did not know him,” the Lubavitcher says. “Frank who?”

  The Bobover says nothing.

  “Friend Bobover,” Landsman says gently. “Your name.”

  “My name is Saltiel Lapidus,” the Bobover says. His eyes are girlish and shy. He folds his fingers in his lap, on top of his hat. “And I know nothing about anything.”

  “You played with this Frank? You knew him?”

  Saltiel Lapidus gives his head a hasty shake. “No.”

  “Yes,” the Lubavitcher says. “He was known to us.”

  Lapidus glares at his friend, and the Lubavitcher looks away. Landsman reads the story. Chess is permitted to the pious Jew, even—alone among games—on the Sabbath. But the Einstein Chess Club is a resolutely secular institution. The Lubavitcher dragged the Bobover into this profane temple on a Friday morning with Sabbath coming and both of them having better things to do. He said everything would be fine, what harm could come of it? And now see.

  Landsman is curious, even touched. A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.

  “I have seen him here,” the Lubavitcher declares, his eyes on his friend, as if to show him they have nothing to fear. “This so-called Frank. Maybe I played him one or two times. In my opinion, he was a highly talented player.”

  “Compared to you, Fishkin,” the Russian says, “a monkey is Raúl Capablanca.”

  “You,” Landsman says to the Russian, his voice level, playing a hunch. “You knew he was a heroin addict. How?”

  “Detective Landsman,” the Russian says, half reproachful. “You do not recognize me?”

  It felt like a hunch. But it was only a mislaid memory.

  “Vassily Shitnovitzer,” Landsman says. It has not been so long—a dozen years—since he arrested a young Russian of that name for conspiracy to sell heroin. A recent immigrant, a former convict swept clear of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Third Russian Republic. A man with broken Yiddish, this heroin dealer, and pale eyes set too close together. “And you knew me all this time.”

  “You are handsome fellow. Hard to forget,” Shitnovitzer says. “Also snappy dresser.”

  “Shitnovitzer spent a long time in Butyrka,” Landsman tells Berko, meaning the notorious Moscow prison. “Nice guy. Use to sell junk from the kitchen of the coffee shop here.”

  “You sold heroin to Frank?” Berko says to Shitnovitzer.

  “I am retired,” Vassily Shitnovitzer says, shaking his head. “Sixty-four federal months in Ellensburg, Washington. Worse than Butyrka. Never again I don’t touch that stuff, Detectives, and even if I do, believe me, I don’t go near Frank. I am crazy, but I am not lunatic.”

  Landsman feels the bump and the skid as the tires lock. They have just hit something.

  “Why not?” Berko says, kindly and wise. “Why does selling smack to Frank make you not just a criminal but a lunatic, Mr. Shitnovitzer?”

  There is a small, decisive clink, a bit hollow, like false teeth clapping together. Velvel tips over his king.

  “I resign,” says Velvel. He takes off
his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He’s late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.

  “Sit down,” Berko says without turning around. The kid sits down.

  A cramp has seized Shitnovitzer’s intestines; that’s how it looks to Landsman.

  “Bad mazel,” he says finally.

  “Bad mazel,” Landsman repeats, letting his doubt and his disappointment show.

  “Like a coat. A hat of bad mazel on his head. So much bad mazel, you don’t want to touch him or share oxygen nearby.”

  “I saw him playing five games at once,” Velvel offers. “For a hundred dollars. He won them all. Then I saw him vomiting in the alley.”

  “Detectives, please,” Saltiel Lapidus says in a pained voice. “We have nothing to do with this. We know nothing about this man. Heroin. Vomiting in alleys. Please, we’re already uncomfortable enough.”

  “Embarrassed,” the Lubavitcher suggests.

  “Sorry,” Lapidus concludes. “And we have nothing to say. So, please, may we go?”

  “Sure thing,” Berko says. “Take off. Just write down your names and contact information for us before you go.”

  He takes out his so-called notebook, a small, fat sheaf of paper held together with an extra-large paper clip. At any given moment it might be found to contain business cards, tides tables, to-do lists, chronological listings of English kings, theories scrawled at three in the morning, five-dollar bills, jotted recipes, folded cocktail napkins with the layout of a South Sitka alley in which a hooker was killed. He shuffles through his notebook until he arrives at a blank scrap of index card, which he hands to Fishkin the Lubavitcher. He holds out his stub of pencil, but, no thank you, Fishkin has a pen of his own. He writes down his name and address and the number of his Shoyfer, then passes it to Lapidus, who does the same.

  “Only,” Fishkin says, “don’t call us. Don’t come to our homes. I beg you. We don’t have anything to say. There’s nothing about that Jew that we can tell you.”

  Every noz in the District learns to respect the silence of the black hat. It is a refusal to answer that can spread and gather and deepen until, like a fog, it fills the streets of an entire black-hat neighborhood. Black hats wield skillful attorneys, and political clout, and boisterous newspapers, and can enfold a hapless inspector or even a commissioner in a great black-hatted stink that doesn’t go away until the witness or suspect is kicked loose or the charges are dropped. Landsman would need the full weight of the department behind him, and at the very least his skipper’s approval, before he could invite Lapidus and Fishkin into the hotbox of the homicide modular.

  He risks a glance at Berko, who risks a slight shake of the head.

  “Go,” Landsman says.

  Lapidus lurches to his feet like a man defeated by his bowels. The business of coat and galoshes is undertaken with a show of battered dignity. He returns the iron lid of his hat by half-inches to his head, the way you ease down a manhole cover. With a grieving eye, he watches Fishkin sweep his unplayed morning into a hinged wooden box. Side by side, the black hats conduct themselves among the tables, past the other players, who look up to watch them go. Just before they reach the doors, the left leg of Saltiel Lapidus comes unstrung at its tuning key. He sags, gives way, and reaches to steady himself with a hand on the shoulder of his friend. The floor under his feet is bare and smooth. As far as Landsman can tell, there is nothing to catch the toe.

  “I never saw such a sad Bobover,” he observes. “Jew was on the verge of tears.”

  “You want to push him again?”

  “Just an inch or two.”

  “That’s all you get with them anyway,” Berko says.

  They hurry past the patzers: a seedy violinist from the Sitka Odeon; a chiropodist, you see his picture on bus benches. Berko bursts through the doors after Lapidus and Fishkin. Landsman is about to follow when something wistful tugs at his memory, a whiff of some brand of aftershave that nobody wears anymore, the jangling chorus of a song that was moderately popular one August twenty-five summers ago. Landsman turns to the table nearest the door.

  An old man sits clenched like a fist around a chessboard, facing an empty chair. He has the pieces set up on their opening squares and has drawn or assigned himself White. Waiting for his opponent to show. Shining skull edged with tufts of grayish hair like pocket lint. The lower part of his face hidden by the cant of his head. Visible to Landsman are the hollows of his temples, his halo of dandruff, the bony bridge of his nose, the grooves on his brow like a grid left in raw pie crust by the tines of a fork. And the furious hunch of his shoulders, gripping the problem of the chessboard, planning his brilliant campaign. They were broad shoulders at one time, the shoulders of a hero or a mover of pianos.

  “Mr. Litvak,” Landsman says.

  Litvak selects his king’s knight the way a painter chooses a brush. His hands remain agile and ropy. He daubs an arcing stroke toward the center of the board; he always favored the hypermodern style of play. At the sight of the Réti Opening and Litvak’s hands, Landsman is flooded, almost knocked down, by the old dread of chess, by the tedium, the irritation, the shame of those days spent breaking his father’s heart over the chessboards in the Einstein coffee shop.

  He says louder, “Alter Litvak.”

  Litvak looks up, puzzled and myopic. He was a man for a fistfight, barrel-chested, a hunter, a fisherman, a soldier. When he reached for a chessman, you saw the flash of the lightning bolt on his big gold Army Ranger ring. Now he looks shrunken, depleted, the king in the story reduced by the curse of eternal life to a cricket in the ashes of the hearth. Only the vaulting nose remains as testament to the former grandeur of his face. Looking at the wreckage of the man, Landsman thinks that if his father had not taken his own life, he would in all likelihood be dead nevertheless.

  Litvak makes an impatient or petitioning gesture with his hand. He takes from his breast pocket a marbled black notepad and a fat fountain pen. He wears his beard neatly trimmed, as ever. A houndstooth blazer, tasseled boat shoes, a display handkerchief, a scarf strung through his lapels. The man has not lost his sporting air. In the pleats of his throat is a shining scar, a whitish comma tinged with pink. As he writes in the pad with his big Waterman, Litvak’s breath comes through his great fleshy nose in patient gusts. The scratch of the nib is all that remains to him for a voice. He passes the pad to Landsman. His script is steady and clear.

  Do I know you

  His gaze sharpens, and he cocks his head to one side, sizing Landsman up, reading the wrinkled suit, the porkpie hat, the face like Hershel the dog’s, knowing Landsman without recognizing him. He takes back the pad and appends one word to his question.

  Do I know you Detective

  “Meyer Landsman,” Landsman says, handing the old man a business card. “You knew my father. I used to come here with him from time to time. Back when the club was in the coffee shop.”

  The red-rimmed eyes widen. Wonder mingles with horror as Mr. Litvak intensifies his study of Landsman, searching for some proof of this unlikely claim. He turns a page in his pad and pronounces his findings in the matter.

  Impossible No way Meyerle Landsman could be such a lumpy old sack of onions

  “Afraid so,” Landsman says.

  What are you doing here terrible chess player

  “I was only a kid,” Landsman says, horrified to detect a creak of self-pity in his tone. What an awful place, what wretched men, what a cruel and pointless game. “Mr. Litvak, you don’t happen to know a man, I gather he plays here sometimes, a Jew maybe they call him Frank?”

  Yes I know him has he done something wrong

  “How well do you know him?”

  Not as well as I would like

  “Do you know where he lives, Mr. Litvak? Have you seen him recently?”

  Months pls say you are not a homicide det.

  “Again,�
�� Landsman says, “I’m afraid so.”

  The old man blinks. If he is shocked or saddened by the inference, you can’t read it anywhere in his face or body language. But then a man not in control of his emotions would never get very far with the Réti Opening. Maybe there is a hint of shakiness in the word he writes next in his pad.

  Overdose?

  “Gunshot,” Landsman says.

  The door to the club creaks open, and a couple of patzers come in from the alley looking gray and cold. A gaunt scarecrow barely out of his teens, with a trimmed golden beard and a suit that’s too small for him, and a short, chubby man, dark and curly-bearded, in a suit that’s much too large. Their crew cuts look patchy, as if self-inflicted, and they wear matching black crocheted yarmulkes. They hesitate a moment in the doorway, abashed, looking at Mr. Litvak as if they expect to be scolded.

  The old man speaks then, inhaling the words, his voice a dinosaurian ghost. It’s an awful sound, a malfunction of the windpipe. A moment after it fades, Landsman realizes that he said, “My grandnephews.”

  Litvak waves them in and passes Landsman’s card to the chubby one.

  “Nice to meet you, Detective,” the chubby one says with the hint of an accent, maybe Australian. He takes the empty chair, glances at the board, and smartly brings out his own king’s knight. “Sorry, Uncle Alter. That one was late, as usual.”

  The skinny one hangs back with his hand on the open door of the club.

  “Landsman!” Berko calls from the alley, where he has Fishkin and Lapidus corralled beside the Dumpster. It appears to Landsman that Lapidus is bawling like a child. “What the hell?”

  “Right there,” Landsman says. “I have to go, Mr. Litvak.” For an instant he handles the bones, horn, and leather of the old man’s hand. “Where can I reach you if I need to talk to you some more?”

  Litvak writes out an address and tears the leaf from his pad.

  “Madagascar?” Landsman says, reading the name of some unimaginable street in Tananarive. “That’s a new one.” At the sight of that faraway address, at the thought of that house on rue Jean Bart, Landsman feels a profound ebb in his will to pursue the matter of the dead yid in 208. What difference will it make if he catches the killer? A year from now, Jews will be Africans, and this old ballroom will be filled with tea-dancing gentiles, and every case that ever was opened or closed by a Sitka policeman will have been filed in cabinet nine. “When are you leaving?”