The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Bina accepts a compliment as if it’s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken. “So you’re saying you’re surprised,” she says.

“I’m surprised.”

“You didn’t hear about Felsenfeld?”

“It’s Felsenfeld. What would I hear?” He recalls Shpringer having asked him the same question the night before, and now the insight comes to him with a keenness worthy of the man who caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. “Felsenfeld skipped.”

“Turned in his badge two nights ago. Left for Melbourne, Australia, last night. His wife’s sister lives there.”

“And now I have to work for you?” He knows it can’t have been Bina’s idea; and the move, even if it’s only for two months, is unquestionably a promotion for her. But he can’t quite believe that she could permit such a thing—that she would be able to stand it. “That’s impossible.”

“Anything is possible nowadays,” Bina says. “I read it in the newspaper.”

All at once the lines of her face are smoothed over, and he sees what a strain it is for her still to be around him, how relieved she is when Berko Shemets walks up.

“Everyone is here!” she says.

When Landsman turns around he finds his partner standing right behind him. Berko owns considerable powers of stealth that, naturally, he attributes to his Indian forebears. Landsman likes to ascribe them to powerful forces of surface tension, the way Berko’s enormous snowshoe feet warp the earth.

“Well, well, well,” Berko says genially. From the first time that Landsman brought Bina home, she and Berko seemed to share an understanding of, an angle on, a laugh at the expense of Landsman, the funny little sorehead in the last panel of a comic strip with the black lily of an exploded cigar wilting in his puss. She holds out her hand, and they shake.

“Welcome back, Detective Landsman,” he says sheepishly.

“Inspector,” she says, “and it’s Gelbfish. Again.”

Berko shuffles carefully through the hand of facts she has just dealt him. “My mistake,” he says. “How’d you like Yakovy?”

“It was all right.”

“Fun town?”

“I really wouldn’t know.”

“Meet anybody?”

Bina shakes her head, blushing, then blushing more deeply at the thought that she was blushing. “I just worked,” she says. “You know me.”

The sodden pink mass of the old sofa disappears around the corner of the modular, and Landsman experiences another moment of insight.

“The Burial Society is coming,” he says. He means the transition task force from the U.S. Interior Department, the advance men for Reversion, come to watch over and prepare the corpse for interment in the grave of history. For the past year or so, they have been murmuring their bureaucratic kaddish over every part of the District bureaucracy, making inventories and recommendations. Laying the foundation, Landsman imagines, so that when anything subsequently goes awry or turns sour, blame can plausibly be laid at the feet of the Jews.

“Gentleman named Spade,” she says. “Showing up sometime Monday, Tuesday at the latest.”

“Felsenfeld,” Landsman says with disgust. Typical that the man would slink out three days before a shomer from the Burial Society is due to come calling. “A black year on him.”

Two more custodians come banging out of the trailer, carrying off the divisional pornography library and a life-size cardboard cutout photograph of the president of America, with his cleft chin, his golfer’s tan, his air of self-importance, worn lightly, quarterback-style. The detectives like to dress the cardboard president in lacy underpants and pelt him with wadded clots of wet toilet paper.

“Time to measure Sitka Central for a shroud,” Berko says, watching it go.

“You don’t even begin to understand,” Bina says, and Landsman understands at once, from the dark seam in her voice, that she is trying to contain, with effort, a quantum of very bad news. Then Bina says, “Inside, boys,” sounding like every other commanding officer Landsman has been obliged to obey. A moment ago the idea of having to serve under his ex-wife even for two months did not seem imaginable, but seeing the way she jerks her head toward the modular and orders them inside gives him reason to hope that his feelings about her, not that he still has any, of course, might turn to the universal gray of discipline.

Following classic refugee tradition the office is as Felsenfeld left it, photographs, half-dead houseplants, bottles of seltzer on the file cabinet next to a family-size tub of antacid chews.

“Sit,” Bina says, going around to the rubberized steel desk chair and settling herself into it with careless resolve. She throws off the orange parka, revealing a dust-brown wool pantsuit worn over a white oxford-cloth shirt, an outfit much more in keeping with Landsman’s idea of how Bina thinks about clothes. He tries and fails not to observe the way her heavy breasts, each of whose moles and freckles he can still project like constellations against the planetarium dome of his imagination, strain against the placket and pockets of her shirt. He and Berko hang their coats on the hooks behind the door and carry their hats in their hands. They each take one of the remaining chairs. Felsenfeld’s wife in her photograph and his children in theirs have not grown any less homely since the last time Landsman looked at them. The salmon and halibut are still astonished to find themselves hanging dead at the end of Felsenfeld’s lines.

“Okay, listen, boys,” Bina says. She is a woman for belling cats and taking bulls by the horns. “We’re all aware of the awkwardness of the situation here. It could be weird enough if I just used to squad with you both. The fact that one of you used to be my husband, and the other one my, uh, cousin, well, shit.” The last word is spoken in flawless American, as are the next four. “Know what I’m saying?”

She pauses, seeming to await a response. Landsman turns to Berko. “You were the cousin, right?”

Bina smiles to show Landsman that she doesn’t think he’s particularly funny. She reaches around behind her and drags over from their place on the file cabinet a pile of pale blue file folders, each of them at least half an inch thick and all of them flagged with a tab of cough-syrup-red plastic. At the sight of it, Landsman’s heart sinks, just as it does when by ill chance he happens to meet his own regard in a mirror.

“See these?”

“Yes, Inspector Gelbfish,” Berko says, sounding strangely insincere. “I see them.”

“Know what they are?”

“I know they can’t be our open cases,” Landsman says. “All piled up together on your desk.”

“One good thing about Yakovy?” Bina says.

They await their chief’s report on her travels.

She says, “The rain. Two hundred inches a year. Rains the smart ass right out of people. Even yids.”

“That’s a lot of rain,” Berko says.

“Now, just listen to me. And listen carefully, please, because I will be speaking bullshit. In two months a U.S. Marshal is going to stride into this godforsaken modular with his cut-rate suit and his Sunday-school way of talking and request that I turn over the keys to the freak show that is the B Squad file cabinets, over which, as of this morning, it is my honor to preside.” They are talkers, the Gelbfishes, speech makers and reasoners and aces of wheedling. Bina’s father nearly talked Landsman out of marrying her. On the night before the wedding. “And really, I say that sincerely. You both know that I have been working my ass off my whole adult life, hoping that one day I’d be fortunate enough to park it in this chair, behind this desk, and try to maintain the grand Sitka Central tradition that every once in a while we catch a murderer and put him in jail. And now here I am. Until the first of January.”

“We feel the same way, Bina,” Berko says, sounding more sincere this time. “Freak show and all.”

Landsman says that it goes double for him.

“I appreciate that,” she says. “And I know how bad you feel about … this.”

She rests her long, freckled hand on the stack of files. If accurately gathered, it will comprise eleven folders, the oldest dating back over two years. There are three other pairs of detectives in the Homicide section, and none of them could boast of such a fine, tall stack of unsolved cases.

“We’re close on the Feytel,” Berko says. “We’re just waiting on the district attorney there. And Pinsky. And the Zilberblat thing. Zilberblat’s mother—”

Bina holds up her hand, cutting Berko off. Landsman says nothing. He is too ashamed to speak. As far as he is concerned, that pile of folders is a monument to his recent decline. That it’s not another ten inches taller testifies to the steadfastness his big little cousin Berko has shown in carrying him.

“Stop,” Bina says. “Just stop right there. And pay attention, because this is the part where I flash my fluent grasp of bullshit.”

She reaches behind her back and takes a sheet of paper from her in-box, as well as another, much thinner blue file that Landsman recognizes at once, since he created it himself at four-thirty that morning. She reaches into the breast pocket of her suit jacket and takes out a pair of half-glasses that Landsman has never seen before. She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.

“A policy has been formulated by the wise Jews who oversee our destiny as police officers of the Sitka District,” Bina begins. She scans the sheet of paper with an air of agitation, even dismay. “It takes off from the admirable principle that when authority is turned over to the U.S. Marshal for Sitka, it would be a nice thing for everyone, not to mention providing adequate posterior coverage, if there were no active cases outstanding.”

“Give me a fucking break, Bina,” Berko says in American. He has grasped from the start what Inspector Gelbfish is getting at. It takes Landsman another minute to catch on.

“No cases outstanding,” he repeats with idiotic calm.

“This policy,” Bina says, “has been given the catchy name of ‘effective resolution.’ Essentially, what that means is, you are to devote exactly as much time to resolving your outstanding cases as there remain days in your tenure as homicide detectives carrying the District shield. Say roughly nine weeks. You have eleven cases outstanding. You can, you know, divvy it up however you want. However you want to work it, that’s fine with me.”

“Wrap up?” Berko says. “You mean—”

“You know what I mean, Detective,” Bina says. There is no emotion in her voice and no readable expression on her face. “Stick them to whatever sticky people you can find. If they won’t stick, use a little glue. The rest of them”—a hint of a catch in her voice—“just black-flag and file in cabinet nine.”

Nine is where they keep the cold cases. Filing a case in cabinet nine saves less space but is otherwise the same as lighting it on fire and taking the ashes out for a walk in a gale-force wind.

“Bury them?” Berko says, hoisting it into a question right at the end.

“Put in a good-faith effort, within the limits of this new policy with the musical name, and then, if that fails, put in a bad-faith effort.” Bina stares at the domed paperweight on Felsenfeld’s desk. Inside the paperweight is a tiny model, a cartoon in cheap plastic, of the Sitka skyline. A jumble of high-rises clustered around the Safety Pin, that lonely digit pointed at the sky as if in accusation. “And then slap a black flag on them.”

“You said eleven,” Landsman says.

“You noticed that.”

“After last night, though, with all due respect, Inspector, and as embarrassing as it is. Well. It’s twelve. Not eleven. Twelve open cases for Shemets and Landsman.”

Bina picks up the slim blue folder that Landsman gave birth to the night before. “This one?” She opens it and studies, or pretends to study, Landsman’s report on the apparent gun murder, at point blank, of the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. “Yes. Okay. Now I want you to watch how this is done.”

She opens the top drawer of Felsenfeld’s desk, which, for the next two months, at least, will be hers. She rummages around inside it, grimacing as if the drawer contains a pile of used foam-rubber earplugs, which, last time Landsman looked, was indeed the case. She pulls out a plastic tab for marking a case folder. A black one. She pries loose the red tab that Landsman attached to the Lasker file early that morning, and substitutes the black one in its place, breathing shallowly the way you do when you clean a nasty wound or sponge up something awful from the rug. She ages ten years, it seems to Landsman, in the ten seconds it takes her to make the switch. Then she holds the newly cold case away from her body, tweezing it between two fingers of one hand.

“Effective resolution,” she says.

8

The Noz, as the name implies, is the law enforcement bar, owned by a couple of ex-nozzes, choked with the smoke of noz grievance and gossip. It never closes, and it never runs short of off-duty law enforcement officers to prop up its big oak bar. Just the place, the Noz, if you want to give voice to your outrage over the latest masterwork of bullshit to be handed down by the departmental bigs. So Landsman and Berko steer well clear of the Noz. They walk past the Pearl of Manila, though its Filipino-style Chinese donuts beckon like glittering sugar-dusted tokens of a better existence. They avoid Feter Shnayer, and Karlinsky’s, and the Inside Passage, and the Nyu-Yorker Grill. This early in the morning, most of them are closed anyway, and the joints that are open tend to service cops, firefighters, paramedics.

They hunch up their shoulders against the cold and hurry, the big man and the little one, bumping against each other. The breath comes out of their bodies in billows that twine and are absorbed into the greater fog lying over the Untershtat. Fat streamers of fog twist along the streets, smearing headlights and neon, blotting out the harbor, leaving a track of oily silver beads on the lapels of coats and the crowns of hats.

“Nobody goes to the Nyu-Yorker,” Berko says. “We ought to be fine there.”

“I saw Tabatchnik in there one time.”

“I’m pretty sure Tabatchnik would never steal the plans for your secret weapon, Meyer.”

Landsman only wishes he were in possession of the plans for some kind of death ray, or mind-control beam, something to shake the corridors of power. Put some genuine fear of God into the Americans. Stave off, just for a year, a decade, a century, the tide of Jewish exile.

They are about to brave the grim Front Page, with its clotted milk and its coffee fresh from a stint as a barium enema at Sitka General, when Landsman sees old Dennis Brennan’s khaki ass taking up a tottering stool at the counter. The press pretty well abandoned the Front Page years ago, when the Blat went under and the Tog moved its offices to a new building out by the airport. But Brennan left Sitka for fortune and glory a while back. He must have just blown back into town pretty recently. It’s a safe bet nobody’s told him the Front Page is dead.

“Too late,” Berko says. “Bastard saw us.”

For a moment Landsman isn’t sure the bastard did. Brennan’s back is to the door, and he’s studying the stocks page of the prominent American newspaper whose Sitka bureau he constituted before he got his big break. Landsman takes hold of Berko’s coat and starts to tow his partner down the street. He has thought of the perfect place for them to talk, maybe get a bite, without being overheard.

“Detective Shemets. A moment.”

“Too late,” Landsman concedes.

He turns, and Brennan’s there, that large-headed man, hatless and coatless, necktie blown over his shoulder, a penny in his left loafer, bankrupt in the right. Patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, its color a practical shade of gravy stain. His cheek could use a shave and his pate a fresh coat of wax. Maybe things didn’t go so well for Dennis Brennan out in the big time.

“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.