The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

3

In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat. Landsman tucks himself into the hotel doorway. Two men, one with a cello case strapped to his back, the other cradling a violin or viola, struggle against the weather toward the door of Pearl of Manila across the street. The symphony hall is ten blocks and a world away from this end of Max Nordau Street, but the craving of a Jew for pork, in particular when it has been deep-fried, is a force greater than night or distance or a cold blast off the Gulf of Alaska. Landsman himself is fighting the urge to return to room 505, and his bottle of slivovitz, and his World’s Fair souvenir glass.

Instead, he lights a papiros. After a decade of abstinence, Landsman took up smoking again not quite three years ago. His then-wife was pregnant at the time. It was a much-discussed and in some quarters a long-desired pregnancy—her first—but not a planned one. As with many pregnancies that are discussed too long there was a history of ambivalence in the prospective father. At seventeen weeks and a day—the day Landsman bought his first package of Broadways in ten years—they got a bad result. Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus, code-named Django, had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called. It might cause grave abnormalities. It might have no effect at all. In the available literature, a faithful person could find encouragement, and a faithless one ample reason to despond. Landsman’s view of things—ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything—prevailed. A doctor with half a dozen laminaria dilators broke the seal on the life of Django Landsman. Three months later, Landsman and his cigarettes moved out of the house on Tshernovits Island that he and Bina had shared for nearly all the fifteen years of their marriage. It was not that he couldn’t live with the guilt. He just couldn’t live with it and Bina, too.

An old man, pushing himself like a rickety handcart, weaves a course toward the door of the hotel. A short man, under five feet, dragging a large valise. Landsman observes the long white coat, worn open over a white suit with a waistcoat, and the wide-brimmed white hat pulled down over his ears. A white beard and sidelocks, wispy and thick at the same time. The valise an ancient chimera of stained brocade and scratched hide. The whole right side of the man’s body sags five degrees lower than the left, where the suitcase, which must contain the old boy’s entire collection of lead ingots, weighs it down. The man stops and raises a finger, as if he has a question to pose of Landsman. The wind toys with the man’s whiskers and with the brim of his hat. From his beard, armpits, breath, and skin, the wind plucks a rich smell of stale tobacco and wet flannel and the sweat of a man who lives in the street. Landsman notes the color of the man’s antiquated boots, yellowish ivory, like his beard, with sharp toes and buttons running up the sides.

Landsman recalls that he used to see this nut a lot, back when he was arresting Tenenboym for petty theft and possession. The yid was no younger then and is no older now. People used to call him Elijah, because he turned up in all kinds of unlikely spots, with his pushke box and his indefinable air of having something important to say.

“Darling,” he says to Landsman now. “This is the Hotel Zamenhof, no?”

His Yiddish sounds a bit exotic to Landsman, flavored with Dutch maybe. He is bent and frail, but his face, apart from crow’s-feet around the blue eyes, looks youthful and unlined. The eyes themselves hold a match flame of eagerness that puzzles Landsman. The prospect of a night at the Zamenhof does not often give rise to such anticipation.

“That’s right.” Landsman offers Elijah the Prophet a Broadway, and the little man takes two and tucks one into the reliquary of his breast pocket. “Hot and cold water. Licensed shammes right on the premises.”

“Are you the manager, sweetness?”

Landsman can’t help smiling at that. He steps aside, gesturing toward the door. “The manager’s inside,” he says.

But the little man just stands there getting rained on, his beard fluttering like a flag of truce. He gazes up at the faceless face of the Zamenhof, gray in the murky streetlight. A narrow pile of dirty white brick and slit windows, three or four blocks off the tawdriest stretch of Monastir Street, the place has all the allure of a dehumidifier. Its neon sign blinks on and off, tormenting the dreams of the losers across the street at the Blackpool.

“The Zamenhof,” the old man says, echoing the intermittent letters on the neon sign. “Not the Zamenhof. The Zamenhof.”

Now the latke, a rookie named Netsky, comes jogging up, holding on to his round, flat, wide-brimmed patrolman’s hat.

“Detective,” the latke says, out of breath, and then gives the old man a squint and a nod. “Evening, Grandpa. Right, uh, Detective, sorry, I just got the call, I was hung up for a minute there.” Netsky has coffee on his breath and powdered sugar on the right cuff of his blue coat. “Where’s the dead yid?”

“In two-oh-eight,” Landsman says, opening the door for the latke, then turning back to the old man. “Coming in, Grandpa?”

“No,” Elijah says, with a hint of mild emotion that Landsman can’t quite read. It might be regret, or relief, or the grim satisfaction of a man with a taste for disappointment. The flicker trapped in the old man’s eyes has given way to a film of tears. “I was only curious. Thank you, Officer Landsman.”

“It’s Detective now,” Landsman says, startled that the old man has retrieved his name. “You remember me, Grandpa?”

“I remember everything, darling.” Elijah reaches into a hip pocket of his bleach yellow coat and takes out his pushke, a wooden casket, about the size of a box meant for index cards, painted black. On the front of the box, Hebrew words are painted: L’ERETZ YISROEL. Cut into the top of the box is a narrow slit for coins or a folded dollar bill. “A small donation?” Elijah says.

The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles. Observant Jews around the world have not abandoned their hope to dwell one day in the land of Zion. But Jews have been tossed out of the joint three times now—in 586 BCE, in 70 CE and with savage finality in 1948. It’s hard even for the faithful not to feel a sense of discouragement about their chances of once again getting a foot in the door.

Landsman gets out his wallet and pokes a folded twenty into Elijah’s pushke. ‘Lots of luck,” he says.

The little man hoists his heavy valise and starts to shuffle away. Landsman reaches out and pulls at Elijah’s sleeve, a question formulating in his heart, a child’s question about the old wish of his people for a home. Elijah turns with a look of practiced wariness. Maybe Landsman is some kind of troublemaker. Landsman feels the question ebb away like the nicotine in his bloodstream.

“What you got in the bag, Grandpa?” Landsman says. “Looks heavy.”

“It’s a book.”

“One book?”

“It’s very big.”

“Long story?”

“Very long.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about Messiah,” Elijah says. “Now please take your hand off of me.”

Landsman lets go. The old man straightens his back and raises his head. The clouds on his eyes blow over, and he looks angry, disdainful, and not in the least old.

“Messiah is coming,” he says. It isn’t quite a warning and yet somehow as a promise of redemption, it lacks a certain warmth.

“That works out well,” Landsman says, jerking his thumb toward the hotel lobby. “As of tonight we have a vacancy.”

Elijah looks hurt, or maybe just disgusted. He opens the black box and looks inside. He takes out the twenty-dollar bill that Landsman gave him and hands it back. Then he picks up his suitcase, settles his floppy white hat down over his head, and trudges off into the rain.

Landsman crumples the twenty and drops it into his hip pocket. He grinds his papiros under his shoe and goes into the hotel.

“Who’s the nut?” Netsky says.

“They call him Elijah. He’s harmless,” says Tenenboym from behind the steel mesh of the reception window. “You used to see him around sometimes. Always pimping for Messiah.” Tenenboym clacks a gold toothpick against his molars. “Listen, Detective, I’m not supposed to say anything. But I might as well tell you. Management is sending out a letter tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait to hear this,” Landsman says.

“The owners sold out to a Kansas City concern.”

“They’re tossing us.”

“Maybe,” Tenenboym says. “Maybe not. Nobody’s status is clear. But it’s not out of the question that you might have to move out.”

“Is that what it’s going to say in the letter?”

Tenenboym shrugs. “The letter’s all written in lawyer.”

Landsman puts Netsky the latke on the front door. “Don’t tell them what they heard or saw,” he reminds him. “And don’t give them a hard time, even if they look like they could use one.”

Menashe Shpringer, the criminalist working the graveyard shift, blows into the lobby in a black coat and fur hat, with a rattling of rain. In one hand Shpringer carries a dripping umbrella. With the other he tows a chrome caddy to which his black vinyl toolbox and a plastic bin, with holes for handles, are strapped with bungee cord. Shpringer is a fireplug, his bowed legs and simian arms affixed to his neck without apparent benefit of shoulders. His face is mostly jowl and his ridged forehead looks like one of those domed beehives you see representing Industry in medieval woodcuts. The bin is blazoned with the single word EVIDENCE in blue letters.

“Are you leaving town?” Shpringer says. It’s not an uncommon greeting these days. A lot of people have left town in the past couple of years, fled the District for the short roster of places that will welcome them, or that have tired of hearing about pogroms secondhand and are hoping to throw one for themselves. Landsman says that as far as he knows, he is not going anywhere. Most of the places that will take Jews require that you have a near relative living there. All of Landsman’s nearest relatives are dead or facing Reversion themselves.

“Then let me say goodbye to you now, forever,” Shpringer says. “Tomorrow night at this time I will be basking in the warm Saskatchewan sun.”

“Saskatoon?” Landsman guesses.

“Thirty below they had today,” Shpringer says. “That was the high.”

“Look at it this way,” Landsman says. “You could be living in this dump.”

“The Zamenhof.” In his memory, Shpringer pulls Landsman’s file, and frowns at its contents. “That’s right. Home sweet home, eh?”

“It suits me in my current style of life.”

Shpringer smiles a thin smile from which almost every trace of pity has been erased.

“Which way to the dead man?” he says.

4

First thing Shpringer screws in all the lightbulbs that Lasker loosened. Then he lowers his safety glasses and goes to work.

He gives Lasker a manicure and pedicure and looks inside his mouth for a severed finger or a bronze doubloon. He lifts prints with his dust and brush. He takes 317 Polaroids. He takes pictures of the corpse, the room, the perforated pillow, the fingerprints he has raised. He takes a picture of the chessboard.

“One for me,” Landsman says.

Shpringer snaps a second shot of the board that the murder obliged Lasker to abandon. Then he hands it to Landsman, an eyebrow raised.

“Valuable clue,” Landsman says.

One piece at a time, Shpringer undoes the dead man’s Nimzo-Croatian Defense or whatever it is he had going, zipping each chessman into its own baggie.

“How’d you get so dirty?” he says without looking at Landsman.

Landsman notices the bright brown dust clinging to his shoe tops, his cuffs, the knees of his pants. “I was looking in the basement. There’s a huge, I don’t know, service pipe down there.” He feels the blood flow into his cheeks. “I had to check it out.”

“A Warsaw tunnel,” Shpringer says. “They go all through this part of the Untershtat.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“When the greeners got here after the war. The ones who had been in the ghetto at Warsaw. At Bialystok. The ex-partisans. I guess some of them didn’t trust the Americans very much. So they dug tunnels. Just in case they had to fight again. That’s the real reason it’s called the Untershtat.”

“A rumor, Shpringer. An urban myth. It’s just a utility pipe.”

Shpringer grunts. He bags the bath towel, the hand towel, and a worn tile of soap. He counts the ginger pubic hairs pasted to the toilet seat and then bags each one. “Speaking of rumors,” he says, “what do you hear from Felsenfeld?”

Felsenfeld is Inspector Felsenfeld, the squad commander. “What do you mean, what do I hear from him? I just saw him this afternoon,” Landsman says. “I didn’t hear anything from him, the man hasn’t uttered three words together in ten years. What kind of question is that? What rumors?”

“Just wondering.”

Shpringer is running his fingers in their latex glove across the freckled skin of Lasker’s left arm. It bears needle tracks and faint marks where the deceased tied himself off.

“Felsenfeld’s hand was on his belly all day,” Landsman says, reflecting. “Maybe I heard him say ‘reflux.’” Then: “What do you see?”

Shpringer frowns at the flesh above Lasker’s elbow, where the tourniquet marks are bunched. “Looks like he used a belt,” he says. “Only his belt is too wide to have made these marks.” He has already put Lasker’s belt, along with two pairs of gray trousers and two blue blazers, into a brown paper bag.

“His works are in the drawer, in a black zip,” Landsman says. “I didn’t look too close.”

Shpringer opens the drawer in Lasker’s bedside table and takes out the black toilet kit. He unzips it and then makes a funny sound in his throat. The cover of the kit opens toward Landsman. At first Landsman can’t see what has caught Shpringer’s interest.

“What do you know about this Lasker?” Shpringer says.

“I’m willing to venture that on occasion he played chess,” Landsman says. One of the three books in the room is a creased and broken-backed paperback edition of Three Hundred Chess Games by Siegbert Tarrasch. It has a manila pocket pasted to its inside back cover, with a return card that shows it was last borrowed from the central branch of the Sitka Public Library in July 1986. Landsman can’t help thinking that he first made love to his future ex-wife in July 1986. Bina was twenty at the time, and Landsman was twenty-three, and it was the height of the northern summer. July 1986 is the date stamped onto the card in the pocket of Landsman’s illusions. The other two books are cheap Yiddish thrillers. “Beyond that I know goat shit.”

As Shpringer has inferred from the marks on Lasker’s arm, the deceased’s apparent tourniquet of choice was a leather strap, black, about half an inch wide. Shpringer pulls it out of the zip and holds it up between two fingers as if it might bite. Halfway along the strap hangs a small leather box designed to hold a slip of paper on which a scribe, with ink and a feather, has written four passages from the Torah. Each morning the pious Jew twines one of these doodads along his left arm, ties another to his forehead, and prays for understanding of the kind of God Who obliges somebody to do something like that every damn day of his life. But there is nothing inside the box on Emanuel Lasker’s prayer strap. It’s just the thing he chose to use to dilate the vein in his arm.

“That’s a new one,” Shpringer says. “Tying off with tefillin.”

“Now that I think about it,” Landsman says, “he had the look. Like maybe he used to be black hat. They take on a kind of a—I don’t know. They look shorn.”

Landsman pulls on a glove and, gripping Lasker’s chin, tilts from side to side the dead man’s head with its swollen mask of blood vessels. “If he used to wear a beard, then it was a while ago,” he says. “Skin tone on his face is even.”

He lets go of Lasker’s face and steps away from the body. It would not be quite accurate to say that he pegged Lasker for a former black hat. But with the chin of a fat boy, and the air of ruination, Landsman figured Lasker for having once been something more than a sockless junkie in a cheap hotel. He sighs. “What I wouldn’t give to be lying on the sunny beaches of Saskatoon.”

There are noises in the hallway, and the rattle of metal and straps, and the next moment two workers from the morgue come in with a collapsible gurney. Shpringer tells them to bring the evidence bin and the bags he has filled, and then lumbers out, one wheel of his trolley squeaking as he goes.

“Piece of shit,” Landsman informs the morgue boys, meaning the case, not the victim. This judgment does not appear to surprise or come to them as news. Landsman goes back up to his room to rejoin his bottle of slivovitz and the World’s Fair shot glass that has captured his affections. He sits down in the chair by the pressboard desk, with a dirty shirt for a seat cushion. He takes the Polaroid out of his pocket and studies the game that Lasker left behind, trying to decide whether the next move was to be White’s or Black’s, and what would be the next move after that. But there are too many pieces, and it is too difficult to hold the moves in his head, and Landsman doesn’t own anything like a chess set on which to lay it all out. After a few minutes he feels himself drifting off to sleep. But no, he isn’t going to do that, not when he knows that what awaits him are trite Escher dreams, woozy checkerboards, giant rooks casting phallic shadows.

He takes off his clothes, and steps under the shower, and lies down for half an hour with his eyes wide open, taking memories—of his little sister in her Super Cub, of Bina in the summer of 1986—out of their plastic bags. He studies them as if they are transcriptions, in a dusty book stolen from the library, of bygone checkmates and brilliancies. After half an hour of that useful pursuit, he gets up and puts on a clean shirt and tie, and goes down to Sitka Central to file his report.

5

Landsman learned to hate the game of chess at the hands of his father and his uncle Hertz. The brothers-in-law were boyhood friends back in Lodz, fellow members of the Makkabi Youth Chess Club. Landsman remembers how they used to talk about the day, in the summer of 1939, when the great Tartakower dropped by to put on a demonstration for the boys of the Makkabi. Savielly Tartakower was a Polish citizen, a grandmaster, and a character famous for having said “The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made.” He came from Paris to report on a tournament for a French chess journal and to visit with the director of the Makkabi Youth Chess Club, an old comrade from his days on the Russian front in the army of Franz Josef. At the director’s urging, Tartakower now proposed a game against the club’s best young player, Isidor Landsman.

They sat down together, the strapping war veteran in his bespoke suit and harsh good humor, and the stammering fifteen-year-old with a wall eye, a receding hairline, and a mustache that was often mistaken for a sooty thumbprint. Tartakower drew Black, and Landsman’s father chose the English Opening. For the first hour, Tartakower’s play was inattentive, even autonomic. He left his great chess engine idling and played by the book. Thirty-four moves in, with genial scorn, he offered Landsman’s father a draw. Landsman’s father needed to piss, his ears were ringing, he was only staving off the inevitable. But he declined. His game by now was based on nothing but feel and desperation. He reacted, he refused exchanges, his sole assets a stubborn nature and a wild sense of the board. After seventy moves and four hours and ten minutes of play, Tartakower, not so genial anymore, repeated his earlier offer. Landsman’s father, plagued by tinnitus, about to wet his pants, accepted. In later years Landsman’s father sometimes let on that his mind, that queer organ, never quite recovered from the ordeal of this game. But of course there were worse ordeals to come.

“That was not in the least enjoyable,” Tartakower is supposed to have told Landsman’s father, rising from his chair. Young Hertz Shemets, with his unfailing eye for weakness, spotted a tremor in Tartakower’s hand, holding a hastily fetched glass of Tokay. Then Tartakower pointed to Isidor Landsman’s skull. “But I’m sure it was preferable to being obliged to live in there.”