Michael Chabon

by The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  “Where’s the big dog with the little thing of brandy around his neck?” Landsman says after the doctor tells him he can take off the blanket and put on the jailhouse clothes that lie in a neat stack beside the sink. “When does he show up?”

  “Do you enjoy brandy?” Dr. Rau says, as if he’s reading from a phrase book, as if he has not the slightest interest either in his question or in any answer that Landsman might ever produce. Landsman tags it at once as a classic interrogator’s tone, so cold that it leaves a burn. Dr. Rau’s gaze remains resolutely fixed on an empty corner of the room. “Is that something you feel you need?”

  “Who said anything about needing?” Landsman says, fumbling with the button fly of some worn twill trousers. Cotton work shirt, laceless canvas sneaks. They want to dress him like a wino, or a beach bum, or some other kind of loser who turns up naked at your intake desk, homeless, no visible means of support. The shoes are too big, but otherwise, everything’s a perfect fit.

  “No craving?” There’s a fleck of ash in the A of the doctor’s name tag. He picks at it with a fingernail. “You’re not feeling the need of a drink right now?”

  “Maybe I just want one,” Landsman says. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Maybe,” the doctor says. “Or maybe you are fond of large, salivating dogs.”

  “Okay, knock it off, Doc,” Landsman says. “Let’s not play games.”

  “All right.” Dr. Rau turns his plump face to Landsman. The irises of his eyes are like cast iron. “Based on my examination, I would guess that you are going through alcoholic withdrawal, Detective Landsman. In addition to exposure, you’re also suffering from dehydration, tremors, palpitations, and your pupils are enlarged. Your blood sugar is low, which tells me you probably haven’t been eating. Loss of appetite is another symptom of withdrawal. Your blood pressure is elevated, and your recent behavior appears to have been, from what I gather, quite erratic. Even violent.”

  Landsman tugs on the wrinkled lapels of the collar of his chambray work shirt, trying to smooth them out. Like cheap window blinds, they keep rolling themselves up.

  “Doctor,” he says, “from one man with X-ray eyeballs to another, I respect your keenness, but tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don’t you think you might take up drinking?”

  “That or ranting to strange doctors.”

  “The dog with the brandy never gets wise with the frozen guy,” Landsman says wistfully.

  “Detective Landsman.”

  “Yes, Doc.”

  “I have been examining you for the last eleven minutes, and in that time you have produced three prolonged speeches. Rants, I would call them.”

  “Yes,” Landsman says, and now his blood begins to flow for the first time: into his cheeks. “It happens sometimes.”

  “You like to make speeches?”

  “They come and go.”

  “Verbal jags.”

  “I’ve heard them called that.”

  For the first time Landsman notices that Dr. Rau is secretly chewing something, working it with his back teeth. The faint smell of anise leaks from his frosting-pink lips.

  The doctor makes a note on Landsman’s chart. “Are you currently under the care of a psychiatrist or taking any medication for depression?”

  “Depression? I seem depressed to you?”

  “It’s really just a word,” the doctor says. “I’m looking at possible symptoms. From what Inspector Dick has told me, and from my examination of you, it seems at least possible that you might possibly have some kind of mood disorder.”

  “You aren’t the first person to say that,” Landsman says. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you.”

  “Are you taking medication?

  “No, not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to.”

  “I’m, you know. Afraid I might lose my edge.”

  “That explains the drinking, then,” the doctor says. His words seem tinged with a sardonic whiff of licorice. “I hear it does wonders for one’s edge.” He goes to the door, opens it, and an Indian noz comes in to take Landsman away. “In my experience, Detective Landsman, if I may,” the doctor concludes his own jag, “the people who worry about losing their edge, often they fail to see they already lost the blade a long time ago.”

  “The swami speaks,” says the Indian noz.

  “Lock him up,” the doctor says, tossing Landsman’s file into the tray mounted to the wall.

  The Indian noz has a head like a redwood burl and the worst haircut Landsman has ever seen, some kind of ungodly hybrid of a high-and-tight and a pompadour. He leads Landsman through a series of blank hallways, up a flight of steel stairs, to a room at the back of the St. Cyril jail. It has an ordinary steel door, no bars. It’s reasonably clean and reasonably well lit. The bunk has a mattress, a pillow, and a blanket, folded trim. The toilet has a seat. There’s a metal mirror bolted to the wall.

  “The VIP suite,” says the Indian noz.

  “You should see where I live,” Landsman says. “It’s almost as nice as this.”

  “Nothing personal,” the noz says. “The inspector wanted to make sure you knew that.”

  “Where is the inspector?”

  “Dealing with this. We get a complaint from those people, he has nine flavors of shit to deal with.” A humorless grin contorts his face. “You fucked up that gimpy little Jew pretty bad.”

  “Who are they?” Landsman says. “Sergeant, what the fuck are those Jews up to over there?”

  “It’s a retreat center,” the sergeant says with the same burning lack of emotion that Dr. Rau put into his questions about Landsman’s alcoholism. “For wayward Jew youth trapped by the scourge of crime and drugs. Anyways, that’s what I heard. Have yourself a nice nap, Detective.”

  After the Indian noz leaves, Landsman crawls into the bunk and pulls the blanket over his head, and before he can prevent himself, before he has time even to feel something and know that he is feeling it, a sob gets wrenched loose from some deep niche and fills his windpipe. The tears that burn his eyes are like his alcoholic tremors: They have no use, and he can’t seem to get on top of them. He clamps his pillow down over his face and feels for the first time how utterly alone Naomi left him.

  To calm himself, he goes back to Mendel Shpilman on the bed in room 208. He imagines himself lying on the pulldown bed in that wallpapered cell, running through the moves of Alekhine’s second game against Capablanca at Buenos Aires in 1927, while the smack turned his blood into a flood of sugar and his brain into a lapping tongue. So. Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket. All right. Then a lot of wasted years. Hustling chess for drug money. Cheap hotels. Hiding himself from the incompatible destinies chosen for him by his genes and by his God. Then one day some men dig him up and dust him off and take him away to Peril Strait. A place with a doctor, a facility built through the generosity of the Barrys and the Marvins and the Susies of Jewish America, where they can clean him up, patch him together. Why? Because they need him. Because they intend to restore him to practical use. And he wants to go with them, these men. He agrees to do so. Naomi never would have flown Shpilman and his escorts if she sniffed any kind of coercion in the job. So there is something in it—money, the promise of healing or recaptured glory, reconciliation with the family, an eventual payoff in drugs—for Shpilman. But when he arrives at Peril Strait to start his new life, something changes Shpilman’s mind. Something that he learns, or realizes, or sees. Or maybe he just gets cold feet. And turns for help to the woman who served any number of people, generally the most lost, as the only friend they had in the world. Naomi flies him out again, changing
her flight plan en route, and finds him a ride to a cheap motel with the pie man’s daughter. In payment for her hubris, these mystery Jews crash Naomi’s airplane for her. Then they go out hunting for Mendel Shpilman, gone to ground again. Hiding from his possible selves. Lying there in his room at the Zamenhof, facedown on the bed, too far gone to think about Alekhine and Capablanca and the Queen’s Indian Defense. Too far gone to hear the knock on the door.

  “You don’t have to knock, Berko,” Landsman says. “This is a jail.”

  There’s a rattle of keys, and then the Indian noz throws open the door. Berko Shemets stands behind him. He has dressed himself as for a safari deep into the bush. Jeans, flannel shirt, lace-up leather hiking boots, a grayish-brown fisherman’s vest equipped with seventy-two pockets, sub-pockets, and sub-sub-pockets. At first glance, he looks almost like a typical if rather large Alaskan bush runner. You can hardly make out the polo-player insignia that ornaments his shirt. Berko’s usual discreet skullcap has been laid aside in favor of an outsize embroidered number, cylindrical, a dwarf fez. Berko always lays on the Jew a little thick when he is obliged to travel to the Indianer-Lands. Landsman can’t tell from here, but his partner is probably wearing his Star of David cuff links, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Landsman tells him. “I know I’m always sorry, but this time, believe me, I could not be sorrier.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Berko says. “Come on, he wants to see us.”

  “Who does?”

  “The emperor of the French.”

  Landsman gets up from the bed, goes to the sink, throws some water on his face.

  “Am I free to go?” he asks the Indian noz as he walks out the door of the cell. “You’re telling me I’m free to go?”

  “You’re a free man,” says the noz.

  “Don’t you believe it,” says Landsman.

  33

  From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow-capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, staring out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick’s face. It’s the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

  “I hope you’re dressed,” Dick says without turning from the window. The wistful flicker in his eyes has been snuffed. There is no longer anything happening in his face at all. “Because the things I witnessed in those woods—Christ, I almost had to fucking burn my motherfucking bearskin.” He affects to shudder. “The Tlingit Nation doesn’t pay me anywhere near enough to make up for having to look at you standing around in your underpants.”

  “The Tlingit Nation,” says Berko Shemets, pronouncing it like the name of a notorious scam or a claim about the location of Atlantis. He intrudes his bulk on the furnishings of Dick’s office. “So, what, they still pay the salaries around here? Because Meyer was just telling me it might be otherwise.”

  Dick turns, slow and lazy, and hikes up a corner of his upper lip to bare a few incisors and cuspids. “Johnny the Jew,” he says. “Well, well. Beanie and all. And clearly you haven’t had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut.”

  “Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget.”

  “Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer.”

  In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the snow.

  “Go shit in the ocean,” Dick says in flawless Yiddish.

  They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. They pound at each other’s backs, searching for the tubercular spots in their slowly dying friendship, sounding the depths of their ancient enmity like a drum. In the year of misery that preceded his defection to the Jewish side of his nature, before his mother was crushed by a runaway truckload of rioting Jews, young John Bear discovered basketball and Wilfred Dick, then a four-foot-two point guard. It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.

  “Johnny Bear,” Dick says. “What the fuck, you great big Jew?”

  Berko shrugs, rubbing at the back of his neck in a sheepish way that makes him look like a thirteen-year-old center who has just watched something small and nasty squirt past him on a drive to the basket. “Yeah, hey, Willie D.,” he says.

  “Sit down, you fat motherfucker,” Dick says. “You, too, Landsman, and all those ugly freckles on your ass crack.”

  Berko grins, and they all sit down, Dick on his side of his desk, the Jewish policemen on theirs. The two chairs for visitors are standard scale, along with the bookshelves and everything else in the office apart from Dick’s desk and chair. The effect is fun house, nauseating. Or maybe that’s another symptom of alcoholic withdrawal. Dick takes out his black cigarettes and pushes an ashtray across the desk toward Landsman. He leans back in his chair and puts his boots up on the desk. He wears the sleeves of his Woolrich shirt rolled back. His forearms are ropy and brown. Curling gray hairs peep over his open collar, and his chic eyeglasses are folded in the pocket of his shirt.

  “There are so many people I would rather be looking at right now,” he says. “Literally millions.”

  “Then close your fucking eyes,” Berko suggests.

  Dick complies. His eyelids are dark and glossy, bruised-looking. “Landsman,” he says, as if enjoying the blindness, “how was your room?”

  “The sheets had a touch more lavender water than I care for,” Landsman says. “Other than that, I really have no complaints.”

  Dick opens his eyes. “It has been my good fortune as an agent of law enforcement on this reservation to have relatively few dealings with Jews over the years,” he begins. “Oh, and before either of you starts cinching up his sphincter on me over my supposed anti-Semitism, let me just stipulate right now that I don’t give a flying fuck whether I offend your pork-shunning asses or not, and on balance, I would say that I hope I do. The fat man there knows perfectly well, or he should, that I hate everyone equally and without favor, regardless of creed or DNA.”

  “Understood,” says Berko.

  “We feel the same way about you,” Landsman says.

  “My point is that Jews mean bullshit. A thousand laminated layers of politics and lies buffed to a high sheen. Therefore, I believe precisely ass point two percent of anything that was told to me by this supposed Dr. Roboy, whose credentials, by the way, check out as legitimate but with a certain amount of mud at the bottom, about how you came to be scooting down that road in your skivvies, Landsman, with a Jew cowboy taking potshots at you out the window of his car.”

  Landsman starts to explain, but Dick holds up one of his girlish hands, the nails neat and glossy.

  “Let me finish. Those gentlemen, no, Johnny, they do not pay my salary, fuck you very much. But through means not given to me to understand, and that I don’t have the stomach to speculate about, those gentlemen have friends, Tlingit friends, who do pay my salary, or to be specific, who sit on the council that does. And if those wise
tribal elders were to indicate to me that they would not take it amiss if I booked your partner here, and held him on charges of trespassing and burglary, not to mention conducting an illegal and unauthorized investigation, then that is what I would have to do. Those Jewish squirrels out there at Peril Strait, and I know you know it pains me to say this, for better or worse, they’re my motherfucking Jewish squirrels. And their facility, for as long as they occupy it, comes under the full color and protection of Tribal law enforcement. Even if, after I go to all the trouble to save your freckle-assed life out there, Landsman, and drag you down here and house you at considerable expense, fuck if those Jews don’t seem to lose all interest in you.”

  “Talk about verbal jags,” Landsman says to Berko. To Dick he says, “They got a doctor here, I really think you ought to see him.”

  “But much as I’d like to send you back to get your ass hung on a hook by that ex-wife of yours, Landsman,” Dick barrels on, “and try as I might, I can’t seem to let you go without asking just one question, even knowing in advance that you’re both Jews, of a sort, and that any answer you give me is only going to add to the layers of bullshit that are already blinding me with their high Jewish shine.”

  They wait for the question, and it comes, and Dick’s manner hardens. All traces of verbosity and teasing vanish.

  “Are we talking about a homicide?” he says.

  “Yes,” Landsman says at the same time that Berko says, “Officially, no.”

  “Two,” Landsman insists. “Two, Berko. I make them for Naomi, too.”

  “Naomi?” Berko says. “Meyer, what the fuck?”

  Landsman goes over it from the beginning, leaving out nothing relevant, from the knock on the door of his room at the Zamenhof to his interview with Mrs. Shpilman, from the pie man’s daughter who sent him into the FAA records to the presence of Aryeh Baronshteyn at Peril Strait.

  “Hebrew?” Berko says. “Mexicans speaking Hebrew?”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me,” Landsman says. “Not synagogue Hebrew, either.” Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It’s only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls. “I only caught a word or two. It was fast and I couldn’t follow it. I guess that was the idea.”