The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

“You,” she says, making a face like she just tasted earwax on her fingertip. Then, in her refined way, she spits into the cup. From force of wise habit, she takes a long look up and down the alley to see what style of trouble they have brought along. She makes a rapid and brutal study of the giant yarmulke-wearing Indian who wants to come into her place of business. In the past, the people Landsman has brought here, at this hour of the day, have all been twitchy, mouse-eyed shtinkers like Benny “Shpilkes” Plotner and Zigmund Landau, the Heifetz of Informers. Nobody ever looked less like a shtinker than Berko Shemets. And with all due respect to the beanie and the fringes, no way would this be a middleman or even a low-echelon street wiseguy, not with that Indian puss. When, after careful consideration, she can’t fit Berko into her taxonomy of lowlifes, Mrs. Kalushiner spits into her cup. Then she returns her gaze to Landsman and sighs. By one kind of reckoning, she owes Landsman seventeen favors; by another, she ought to give him a punch in the belly. She steps aside and lets them pass.

The place is as empty as an off-duty downtown bus and smells twice as bad. Somebody came through recently with a bucket of bleach to paint in some high notes over the Vorsht’s steady bass line of sweat and urinals. The keen nose can also detect, above or beneath it all, the coat-lining smell of worn dollar bills.

“Sit there,” Mrs. Kalushiner says, without indicating where she would like them to sit. The round tables that crowd the stage wear overturned chairs like sets of antlers. Landsman flips two of them, and he and Berko take their seats away from the stage, by the heavily bolted front door. Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.

“What a doll,” Berko says.

“A sweetheart,” Landsman agrees. “She only comes in here in the mornings. That way she never has to look at the clientele.” The Vorsht is the place where the musicians of Sitka do their drinking, after the theaters and the other clubs close down. Long after midnight they come huddling in, snow on their hats, rain in their cuffs, and pack the little stage, and kill one another with clarinets and fiddles. As usual when angels gather, they draw a following of devils: gangsters, ganefs, and hard-luck women. “She doesn’t care for musicians.”

“But her husband was a—Oh. I get it.”

Nathan Kalushiner, until his death, was the owner of the Vorsht and the king of the C-soprano clarinet. He was a gambler, and a junkie, and a very bad man in many respects, but he could play like there was a dybbuk inside him. Landsman, a music lover, used to look out for the crazy little shkotz and try to extricate him from the ugly situations in which Kalushiner’s poor judgment and gnawed-at soul landed him. Then one day Kalushiner disappeared, along with the wife of a well-known Russian shtarker, leaving Mrs. Kalushiner nothing but the Vorsht and the goodwill of its creditors. Parts of Nathan Kalushiner, but not his C-soprano clarinet, later washed up under the docks up at Yakovy.

“And that’s the guy’s dog?” Berko says, pointing to the stage. At the spot where Kalushiner used to stand and blow every night sits a curly half-terrier mutt, white with brown spots and a black patch around one eye. He’s just sitting, ears raised, as if listening to some echoed voice or music in his brain. A length of slack chain connects him to a steel loop mounted on the wall.

“That’s Hershel,” Landsman says. There’s something painful to him about the dog’s patient mien, his canine air of calm endurance. Landsman looks away. “Five years he’s been standing there.”

“Touching.”

“I guess. The animal, to be honest, he gives me the willies.”

Mrs. Kalushiner reappears, carrying a metal bowl filled with pickled tomatoes and cucumbers, a basket of poppy-seed rolls, and a bowl of sour cream. That’s all balanced along her left arm. The right hand, of course, carries the paper spittoon.

“Beautiful pickles,” Berko suggests, and when that gets him nowhere, he tries, “Cute dog.”

What’s touching, thinks Landsman, is the effort that Berko Shemets is always willing to put into starting a conversation with somebody. The tighter people clam up, the more determined old Berko becomes. That was true of him even as a boy. He had that eagerness to engage with people, especially with his vacuum-packed cousin Meyer.

“A dog is a dog,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. She slams down the pickles and sour cream, drops the basket of rolls, and then retreats to the back room with another clash of beads.

“So I need to ask you a favor,” Landsman says, his gaze on the dog, who has lowered himself to the stage on his arthritic knees and lies with his head on his forepaws. “And I’m hoping very much that you’ll say no.”

“Does this favor have anything to do with ‘effective resolution’?”

“Are you mocking the concept?”

“Not necessary,” Berko says. “The concept mocks itself.” He plucks a pickled tomato from the dish, dabs it in the sour cream, then pokes it neatly into his mouth with a forefinger. He screws up his face with pleasure at the resultant sour squirt of pulp and brine. “Bina looks good.”

“I thought she looked good.”

“A little butch.”

“So you always said.”

“Bina, Bina.” Berko gives his head a bleak shake, one that somehow manages at the same time to look fond. “In her last life, she must have been a weather vane.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Landsman says. “You’re right, but you’re wrong.”

“You’re saying Bina is not a careerist.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“She is, Meyer, and she always has been. That’s one of the things I have always most liked about her. Bina is a smart cookie. She is tough. She is political. She is viewed as loyal, and in two directions, up and down, and that is a hard trick to pull off. She is inspector material all around. In any police force, in any country in the world.”

“She was first in her class,” Landsman says. “At the academy.”

“But you scored higher on the entrance exam.”

“Why, yes,” Landsman says. “I did. Have I mentioned that before?”

“Even U.S. Marshals are smart enough to notice Bina Gelbfish,” Berko says. “If she is trying to make sure there’s a place for her in Sitka law enforcement after Reversion, I’m not going to blame her for that.”

“You make your point,” Landsman says. “Only I don’t buy it. That isn’t why she took this job. Or it’s not the only reason.”

“Why did she, then?”

Landsman shrugs. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe she ran out of things to do that make sense.”

“I hope not. Or the next thing you know, she’ll be getting back together with you.”

“God forbid.”

“Horrors.”

Landsman pretends to spit three times over his shoulder. Then, right as he’s wondering if this custom has anything to do with the habit of chewing tobacco, Mrs. Kalushiner comes back, dragging the great leg iron of her life.

“I have hard-boiled eggs,” she says menacingly. “I have bagel. I have jellied leg.”

“Just a little something to drink, Mrs. K.,” Landsman says. “Berko?”

“Burp water,” Berko says. “With a twist of lime.”

“You want to eat,” she tells him. It isn’t a guess.

“Why not?” Berko says. “All right, bring me a couple of eggs.”

Mrs. Kalushiner turns to Landsman, and he feels Berko’s eyes on his, daring him and expecting him to order a slivovitz. Landsman can feel Berko’s fatigue, his impatience and irritation with Landsman and his problems. It’s about time he pulled himself together, isn’t it? Find something worth living his life for, and get on it with it.

“Coca-Cola,” Landsman says. “If you please.”

This may be the first thing that Landsman or anyone has ever done to surprise the widow of Nathan Kalushiner. She raises one steel-gray eyebrow, then turns away. Berko reaches for one of the pickled cucumbers, shaking off the peppercorns and cloves that stud its freckled green skin. He crunches it between his teeth and frowns happily.

“It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle,” he says, and then, as if offhand, teasing, “Sure you don’t want another beer?”

Landsman would love a beer. He can taste the bitter caramel of it on the back of his tongue. In the meantime, the one that Ester-Malke gave him has yet to leave his body, but Landsman is getting indications that it has its bags packed and is ready to go. The proposition or appeal that he has determined to make to his partner now strikes him as perhaps the stupidest idea he has ever had, certainly not worth living for. But it will have to do.

“Fuck you,” he says, getting up from the table. “I need to take a leak.”

In the men’s room, Landsman discovers the body of an electric guitarist. From a table at the back of the Vorsht, Landsman has often admired this yid and his playing. He was among the first to import the techniques and attitudes of American and British rock guitarists to the Bulgars and freylekhs of Jewish dance music. He is roughly the same age and background as Landsman, grew up in Halibut Point, and in moments of vainglory, Landsman has compared himself, or rather his detective work, to the intuitive and flashy playing of this man who appears to be dead or passed out in the stall with his money hand in the toilet bowl. The man is wearing a black leather three-piece suit and a red ribbon necktie. His celebrated fingers have been denuded of their rings, leaving ghostly indentations. A wallet lies on the tiled floor, looking empty and distended.

The musician snores once. Landsman employs those intuitive and flashy skills in feeling at the man’s carotid for a pulse. It’s steady. The air around the musician hums almost to burning with the radiance of alcohol. The wallet seems to have been rifled of its cash and identification. Landsman pats down the musician and finds a fifth of Canadian vodka in the left hip pocket of his leather blazer. They got his cash but not his booze. Landsman doesn’t want a drink. In fact, he feels a lurch inside him at the idea of pouring this garbage into his belly, some kind of moral muscle that recoils. He chances a quick peek into the cobwebby root cellar of his soul. He can’t help noticing that this pulse of revulsion for what is, after all, a popular brand of Canadian vodka seems to have something to do with his ex-wife, with her being back in the Sitka again and looking so strong and juicy and Bina. The daily sight of her is going to be torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.

Landsman uncaps the bottle of vodka and takes a long stiff pull. It burns like a compound of solvent and lye. Several inches remain in the bottle when he is through, but Landsman himself is filled top to bottom with nothing but the burn of remorse. All the old parallels it once pleased him to draw between the guitarist and himself are turned against him. After a brief but vigorous debate, Landsman decides not to throw the bottle in the trash, where it will be of no use to anyone. He transfers it to the snug hip pocket of his own decline. He drags the musician out of the stall and carefully dries his right hand. Last he takes the piss he came in here to take. The music of Landsman’s urine against porcelain and water lures the musician into opening his eyes.

“I’m fine,” he tells Landsman from the floor.

“Sure you are, sweetness,” Landsman says.

“Just don’t call my wife.”

“I won’t,” Landsman assures him, but the yid is already out again. Landsman drags the musician out into the back hallway and leaves him on the floor with a phone book under his head for a pillow. Then he goes back to the table and Berko Shemets and takes a well-behaved sip from his glass of bubbles and syrup.

“Mmm,” he says. “Coke.”

“So,” says Berko. “This favor of yours.”

“Yeah,” Landsman says. His resurgent confidence in himself and his intentions, the sense of well-being, is clearly an illusion produced by a snort of lousy vodka. He rationalizes this with the thought that from the point of view of, say, God, all human confidence is an illusion and every intention a joke. “Kind of a big one.”

Berko knows where Landsman is heading. But Landsman isn’t quite ready to go there yet.

“You and Ester-Malke,” Landsman says. “You guys applied for residency.”

“Is that your big question?”

“No, this is just the buildup.”

“We applied for green cards. Everybody in the District has applied for a residency card, unless they’re going to Canada or Argentina or wherever. Jesus, Meyer, didn’t you?”

“I know I meant to,” Landsman says. “Maybe I did. I can’t remember.”

This is too shocking for Berko to process, and not what Landsman has led them here to say.

“I did, all right?” Landsman says. “I remember now. Sure. Filled out my I-999 and everything.”

Berko nods as if he believes Landsman’s lie.

“So,” Landsman says. “You guys are planning to stick around, then. Stay in Sitka.”

“Assuming we can get documented.”

“Any reason to think you won’t?”

“Just the numbers. They’re saying it’s going to be under forty percent.” Berko shakes his head, which is pretty much the national gesture at the moment when it comes to the question of where the other Sitka Jews are going to go, or what they are going to do, after Reversion. Actually, no guarantees have been made at all—the 40 percent figure is just another rumor at the end of time—and there are some wild-eyed radicals claiming that the actual number of Jews who will be permitted to remain as legal residents of the newly enlarged state of Alaska when Reversion is finally enforced will be closer to 10 or even 5 percent. These are the same people going around calling for armed resistance, secession, a declaration of independence, and so forth. Landsman has paid very little attention to the controversies and rumors, to the most important question in his local universe.

“The old man?” Landsman says. “Doesn’t he have any juice left?”

For forty years—as Denny Brennan’s series revealed—Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI’s domestic surveillance program to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Hertz Shemets’s brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other. Starting in the late sixties, Hertz was turned loose on the nascent radical movement among the Tlingit, and in time he pulled its teeth and claws, too.

But those activities were a front, as Brennan showed, for Hertz’s real agenda: to obtain Permanent Status for the District: P.S., or even, in his wildest dreams, statehood. “Enough wandering,” Landsman can remember his uncle saying to his father, whose soul retained to the day he died a tinge of romantic Zionism. “Enough with expulsions and migrations and dreaming about next year in the camel lands. It’s time for us to take what we can get and stay put.”

So every year, it turned out, Uncle Hertz diverted up to half his operating budget to corrupt the people who had authorized it. He bought senators, baited congressional honeypots, and above all romanced rich American Jews whose influence he saw as critical to his plan. Three times Permanent Status bills came up and died, twice in committee, once in a bitter and close battle on the floor. A year after that floor fight, the current president of America ran and won on a platform that showcased the long-overdue enforcement of Reversion, pledging to restore “Alaska for Alaskans, wild and clean.” And Dennis Brennan chased Hertz under a log.

“The old man?” Berko says. “Down there on his vest-pocket Indian reservation? With his goat? And a freezer full of moose meat? Yeah, he’s a fucking gray eminence in the corridors of power. But anyway, it’s looking all right.”

“Is it?”

“Ester-Malke and I both already got three-year work permits.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“So they say.”

“Naturally, you wouldn’t want to do anything to endanger your status.”

“No.”

“Disobey orders. Piss somebody off. Neglect your express duty.”

“Never.”

“That’s settled, then.” Landsman reaches into the pocket of his blazer and takes out the chess set. “Did I ever tell you about the note my father left when he killed himself?”

“I heard it was a poem.”

“Call it doggerel,” Landsman says. “Six lines of Yiddish verse addressed to an unnamed female.”

“Oho.”

“No, no. Nothing racy. It was, what, it was an expression of regret for his inadequacy. Chagrin at his failure. An avowal of devotion and respect. A touching statement of gratitude for the comfort she had given him, and above all, for the measure of forgetfulness that her company had brought to him over the long, bitter course of the years.”

“You have it memorized.”

“I did. But I noticed something about it that bothered me. So then I made myself forget it.”

“What did you notice?”

Landsman ignores the question as Mrs. Kalushiner arrives with the eggs, six of them, peeled and arranged on a dish with six round indentations, each the size of an egg’s fat bottom. Salt. Pepper. A jar of mustard.

“Maybe if they took the leash off him,” Berko says, pointing to Hershel with his thumb, “he would go out for a sandwich or something.”

“He likes the leash,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. “Without it, he doesn’t sleep.” She leaves them again.

“That bothers me,” Berko says, watching Hershel.

“I know what you mean.”

Berko salts an egg and bites it. His teeth leave castellations in the boiled white. “So this poem, then,” he says. “The verse.”

“So, naturally,” Landsman says, “everyone assumed the addressee of my father’s verse to be my mother. Starting with my mother.”

“She fit the description.”

“So it was generally agreed. That is why I never told anybody what I had deduced. In my first official case as a junior shammes.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that if you put together the first letters of each of the six lines of the poem, they spelled out a name. Caissa.”

“Caissa? What kind of name is that?”

“I believe it is Latin,” Landsman says. “Caissa is the goddess of chess players.”

He opens the lid of the pocket chess set that he bought at the drugstore on Korczak Platz. The pieces in play remain as he arranged them at the Taytsh-Shemets apartment earlier that morning, as left behind by the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. Or by his killer, or by pale Caissa, the goddess of chess players, dropping in to bid farewell to another one of her hapless worshippers. Black down to three pawns, a pair of knights, a bishop, and a rook. White holding on to all of his major and minor pieces and a pair of pawns, one of them a move away from promotion. A strange disordered aspect to the situation, as if the game that led up to this move had been a chaotic one.

“If it was anything else, Berko,” Landsman says, apologizing with upturned palms. “A deck of cards. A crossword puzzle. A bingo card.”

“I get it,” Berko says.

“It had to be an unfinished goddamned game of chess.”

Berko turns the board around and studies it for a moment or two, then looks up at Landsman. Now is the time for you to ask me, he says with those great dark eyes of his.

“So. Like I said. I need to ask you a favor.”

“No,” Berko says, “you don’t.”

“You heard the lady. You saw her black-flag it. The thing was a piece of shit to begin with. Bina made it official.”

“You don’t think so.”

“Please, Berko, don’t start having respect for my judgment now,” Landsman says. “Not after all this work I’ve put into undermining it.”

Berko has been staring at the dog with increasing fixity. Abruptly, he gets up and goes over to the stage. He clomps up the three wooden steps and stands looking down at Hershel. Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko’s hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport. Berko crouches heavily beside the dog and unhooks the clasp of the leash from the collar. He takes hold of the dog’s head in his massive hands and looks into the dog’s eyes. “Enough already,” he says. “He isn’t coming.”

The dog regards Berko as if sincerely interested in this bit of news. Then he lurches to his hind legs and hobbles over to the steps and tumbles carefully down them. Toenails clacking, he crosses the concrete floor to the table where Landsman sits and looks up as if for confirmation.

“That’s the straight emes, Hershel,” Landsman tells the dog. “They used dental records.”

The dog appears to consider this; then, much to Landsman’s surprise, he walks over to the front door. Berko gives Landsman a look of reprimand: What did I tell you? He darts a glance toward the beaded curtain, then slides back the bolt, turns the key, and opens the door. The dog trots right out as if he has pressing business elsewhere.

Berko comes back to the table, looking like he has just liberated a soul from the wheel of karma. “You heard the lady. We have nine weeks,” he says. “Give or take. We can afford to waste a day or two looking busy while we poke around into this dead junkie from your flop.”

“You are going to have a baby,” Landsman says. “There will be five of you.”

“I hear what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying, that’s five Taytsh-Shemetses we are going to fuck over if somebody is looking for reasons to deny people their residency cards, as widely reported, and one of those reasons is a recent citation for acting in direct contradiction of orders from a superior officer, not to mention egregious flouting of departmental policy, however idiotic and craven.”

Berko blinks and pops another pickled tomato into his mouth. He chews it, and sighs. “I never had a brother or a sister,” he says. “All I ever had was cousins. Most of them were Indians, and they didn’t want to know me. Two were Jews. One of those Jews, may her name be a blessing, is dead. That leaves me with you.”

“I appreciate this, Berko,” Landsman says. “I want you to know that.”

“Fuck that shit,” Berko says in American. “We’re going to the Einstein, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Landsman says. “That’s where I figured we ought to start.”

Before they can stand up or try to settle things with Mrs. Kalushiner, there is a scratching at the front door and then a long, low moan. The sound is human and forlorn, and it makes the hair on Landsman’s nape stand erect. He goes to the front door and lets in the dog, who climbs back up onto the stage to the place where he has worn away the paint on the floorboards, and sits, ears raised to catch the sound of a vanished horn, waiting patiently for the leash to be restored.

10

The north end of Peretz Street is all slab concrete, steel pillars, aluminum-rimmed windows double-glazed against the cold.

The buildings in this part of the Untershtat went up in the early fifties, rapidly assembled shelter machines built by survivors, with a kind of noble ugliness. Now they have only the ugliness of age and vacancy. Empty storefronts, papered-over glass. In the windows of 1911, where Landsman’s father used to attend meetings of the Edelshtat Society before the storefront gave way to a beauty-supply outlet, a plush kangaroo with a sardonic leer holds a cardboard sign: AUSTRALIA OR BUST. At 1906 the Hotel Einstein looks, as some wag remarked on its opening to the public, like a rat cage stored in a fish tank. It is a favorite venue for the suicides of Sitka. It is also, by custom and charter, the home of the Einstein Chess Club.