The Yiddish Policemen's Union Page 13

  “Coming through, please,” the maven says, heading for the front steps with their pretty railings of curlicued wrought iron. “Friend Belsky, move aside.”

  The men make way as if Zimbalist is running toward a water bucket holding something on fire. Before they can quite close up the gap, they see Landsman and Berko coming their way and throw down a silence so heavy that Landsman can feel it pressing on the sides of his head. He can hear the snow fizzing and the sizzle each snowflake makes as it hits the top of the gas lamp. The men put on an exhibition of hard looks and innocent looks and looks so blank they threaten to vacuum all the air from Landsman’s lungs. Somebody says, “I don’t see any hammer.”

  Detectives Landsman and Shemets wish them the joy of the Sabbath. Then they turn their attention to the biks by the door, a couple of thickset, red-haired, pop-eyed boys with pug noses and dense woolly beards the rusty gold of brisket gravy. Two red Rudashevskys, biks from a long line of biks, bred for simplicity, density, power, and lightness of foot.

  “Professor Zimbalist,” says the Rudashevsky to the left of the door. “A good Sabbath to you.”

  “And to you, Friend Rudashevsky. I regret to disturb your watch on this peaceful afternoon.” The boundary maven settles the furry ottoman more snugly on his head. Off to a flowery start, but when he goes to open the drawer of his face, no more coin falls out. Landsman reaches into his hip pocket. Zimbalist is just standing there, his arms hanging slack, maybe thinking it’s all his fault, that it was chess that bent the boy from the God-directed angle of his glory, and now Zimbalist has to go in there and tell the father the sorry ending of the tale. So Landsman brushes up against Zimbalist’s shoulder, with his fingers around the cold smooth neck of the pint of Canadian vodka in his pocket. He taps the bottle against Zimbalist’s bony claw until the old fart catches on and palms it.

  “Nu, Yossele, it’s Detective Shemets,” Berko says, taking over the operation, squinting up into the scattering gaslight with a hand over his eyes. The gang of men behind them begins to murmur, sensing now the quick unfolding of something bad and marvelous. The wind jerks the snowflakes back and forth on its hundred hooks. “What’s up, yid?”

  “Detective,” says the Rudashevsky to the right, maybe Yossele’s brother, maybe his cousin. Maybe both at once. “We heard you were in the neighborhood.”

  “This is Detective Landsman, my partner. Could you please tell Rabbi Shpilman that we’d like to have a moment of his time? Please believe, we wouldn’t disturb him at this hour if it wasn’t so important.”

  Black hats, even Verbovers, don’t usually challenge the right or authority of policemen to conduct police business in the Harkavy or on Verbov Island. They don’t cooperate, but they usually don’t interfere. On the other hand, to enter the home of exile’s strongest rabbi, at the very brink of the holiest moment of the week, for that you need a good reason. You need to be coming to tell him, for example, that his only son is dead.

  “A moment of the rebbe’s time?” says a Rudashevsky.

  “If you had a million dollars, please don’t mind my saying so, with all due respect, Detective Shemets,” says the other, broader of shoulder and hairier of knuckle than Yossele, laying a hand over his heart, “it wouldn’t be worth so much as that.”

  Landsman turns to Berko. “Have you got that kind of money on you?”

  Berko jabs Landsman in the side with an elbow. Landsman never walked a black-hat beat in his latke days, groping his way along a murky sea bottom of blank looks and silences that could crush a submarine. Landsman doesn’t know how to show the proper respect.

  “Come, Yossele. Shmerl, sweetness,” Berko croons. “I need to get home to my table. Let us in.”

  Yossele tugs on his brisket-colored chin muffler. Then the other begins to speak in a low, steady undertone. The bik is wearing, hidden by one of his looping auburn sidelocks, a headset-style microphone and earpiece.

  “I am to inquire respectfully,” the bik says after a moment, the force of the order flowing across his features, softening them as it stiffens his diction, “what business brings the distinguished officers of the law to the rebbe’s home so late this Friday afternoon.”

  “Idiots!” Zimbalist says, a slug of vodka in him, careering up the steps like a fool of a bear on a unicycle. He grabs the lapels of Yossele Rudashevsky’s coat and dances with them, left and right, anger and grief. “They’re here about Mendele!”

  The men standing around in front of the Shpilman house have been muttering and commenting and critiquing the performance, but they shut up. Life wheezes in and out of their lungs, rattles in the snot of their noses. The heat of the lantern vaporizes the snow. The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsman feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist’s crying out the name of the rebbe’s lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering among them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it’s just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hour. Or maybe it’s the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night’s sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.

  Yossele turns to Shmerl, the dough of his forehead kneaded, holding on to Zimbalist with the brainless tenderness of a brutal man. Shmerl speaks another few syllables into the heart of the Verbover rebbe’s house. He looks east, west. He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin. Then he eases open the paneled door. Yossele sets old Zimbalist down with a jingling of galoshes clasps and pats him on the cheek. “If you please, Detectives,” he says.

  You come into a wainscoted hall, a door at the far end, on the left a wooden stair leading up to the second floor. The stairs and risers, the wainscot, even the floorboards are all cut from big slabs of some kind of pine, knotty and butter-colored. Along the wall opposite the stairway runs a low bench, also knotty pine, covered in a purple velvet cushion, worn to a shine in patches and bearing six round indentations made by years of Verbover buttocks.

  “The esteemed detectives will please wait here,” Shmerl says.

  He and Yossele return to their posts, leaving Landsman and Berko under the steady but indifferent scrutiny of a third hulking Rudashevsky who lounges against the baluster at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Sit, Professor,” says the indoor Rudashevsky.

  “Thank you,” he says. “But I don’t care to sit.”

  “You all right, Professor?” Berko says, laying a hand on the maven’s arm.

  “A handball court,” Zimbalist says as if in reply to the question. “Who plays handball anymore?”

  Something in the pocket of Zimbalist’s coat catches Berko’s eye. Landsman takes a sudden interest in a small wooden rack affixed to the wall by the door, well stocked with two slick, colorful brochures. One is entitled “Who Is the Verbover Rebbe?” and it informs him that they are standing in the formal or ceremonial entrance of the house, and that the family comes and goes and does its living at the other end, just like in the house of the president of America. The other brochure they’re giving away is called “Five Great Truths and Five Big Lies About Verbover Hasidism.”

  “I saw the movie,” Berko says, reading over Landsman’s shoulder.

  The stair creaks. The Rudashevsky mumbles, as if announcing a change in the dinner menu, “Rabbi Baronshteyn.”

  Landsman knows Baronshteyn only by reputation. Another boy wonder, with a law degree in addition to his rabbi’s smikha, he married one of the rebbe’s eight daughters. He is never photographed, and he never leaves Verbov Island, unless you believe the stories of his sneaking into some South Sitka roach motel in the dead of
night to exact personal retribution on a policy-game skimmer, or on some shlosser who mishandled a hit.

  “Detective Shemets, Detective Landsman. I am Aryeh Baronshteyn, the rebbe’s gabay.”

  Landsman is surprised by how young he is, thirty at the outside. High, narrow forehead, black eyes hard as a couple of stones left on a grave marker. He has concealed his girlish mouth in the manly bloom of a King Solomon beard, fitted with careful streaks of gray to suggest maturity. The sidelocks hang limp and orderly. He has the air of a self-denier, but his clothes betray the old Verbover love of flash. His calves are plump and muscular in their silk garters and white hose. He keeps his long feet encased in brushed black velveteen slippers. The frock coat looks fresh from the bespoke needle of Moses and Sons on Asch Street. Only the plain knit skullcap has a modest air. Underneath it, his brush-cut hair glints like the business end of a paint-stripping rotor. His face displays no trace of wariness, but Landsman can see where wariness has been carefully erased.

  “Reb Baronshteyn,” Berko murmurs, taking off his hat. Landsman does likewise.

  Baronshteyn keeps his hands in the pockets of his frock coat, a satin number with velour lapels and pocket flaps. He’s making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don’t know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.

  “What do you want here?” he says. He mimes a glance at his watch, poking it from the cuff of his milled cotton shirt just long enough for them to read the name of Patek Philippe on its face. “It’s very late.”

  “We’re here to talk to Rebbe Shpilman, Rabbi,” Landsman says. “If your time is so precious, then we surely don’t want to waste it by talking to you.”

  “It isn’t my time that I fear to have you waste, Detective Landsman. And I can tell you right now that if you attempt to display, in this house, the disrespectful attitude and disgraceful behavior for which you are notorious, then you will not remain in this house. Is that clear?”

  “I think you have me mixed up with the other Detective Meyer Landsman,” Landsman says. “I’m the one who’s just doing his job.”

  “Then you are here as part of a murder investigation? May I ask in what way it concerns the rebbe?”

  “We really do need to talk to the rebbe,” Berko says. “If he tells us he’d like to have you present, you’re welcome to stay. But with all due respect, Rabbi, we’re not here to answer your questions. And we aren’t here to waste anybody’s time.”

  “In addition to being his adviser, Detective, I am the rebbe’s attorney. You know that.”

  “We’re aware of that, sir.”

  “My office is across the platz,” Baronshteyn says, going to the front door and holding it open like a gracious doorman. Snow pours down past the open doorway, glowing in the gaslight like an endless jackpot of coins. “I’m sure I will be able to answer whatever questions you have.”

  “Baronshteyn, you puppy. Get out of their way.”

  Zimbalist is on his feet now, hat collapsing over one ear, in his vast mangy coat and his miasma of mothballs and grief.

  “Professor Zimbalist.” Baronshteyn’s tone is one of warning, but his eye grows keen as he takes in the ruin of the boundary maven. He may never have seen Zimbalist in proximity to an emotion. The spectacle clearly interests him. “Have a care.”

  “You tried to take his place. Well, now you have it. How does it feel?” Zimbalist totters a step closer to the gabay. There must be all kinds of cords and tripwires crisscrossing the space between them. But for once the boundary maven seems to have mislaid his string map. “He’s more alive even now than you will ever be, you smelt, you waxworks.”

  He crashes past Berko and Landsman, reaching for the banister or the gabay’s throat. Baronshteyn doesn’t flinch. Berko grabs hold of the belt at the waist of the bearskin coat and drags Zimbalist back.

  “Who is?” says Baronshteyn. “Who are you talking about?” He looks at Landsman. “Detective, did something happen to Mendel Shpilman?”

  Landsman will review the performance later with Berko, but his first impression is that Baronshteyn sounds surprised by the possibility.

  “Professor,” Berko says. “We appreciate the help. Thank you.” He zips up Zimbalist’s sweater and buttons his jacket. He tucks one side of the bearskin coat over the other and knots the belt tightly at the waist. “Now, please, go home. Yossele, Shmerl, somebody walk the professor home before his wife gets worried and calls the police.”

  Yossele takes Zimbalist by the arm, and they start down the steps.

  Berko shuts the door against the cold. “Take us to the rebbe, counselor,” he says. “Now.”

  16

  Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see.

  “I suggest we dispense with the pleasantries,” the rebbe says.

  His voice comes pitched high, droll, the voice of the well-proportioned, scholarly man he must have been once. Landsman has heard that it’s a glandular disorder. He has heard that the Verbover rebbe, for all his bulk, maintains the diet of a martyr, broth and roots and a daily crust of bread. But Landsman prefers to see the man as distended with the gas of violence and corruption. His belly filled with bones and shoes and the hearts of men, half digested in the acid of his Law.

  “Sit down and tell me what you came here to say.”

  “We can do that, rebbe,” Berko says.

  They each take a chair in front of the rebbe’s desk. The office is pure Austro-Hungarian empire. Behemoths of mahogany, ebony and bird’s-eye maple crowd the walls, ornate as cathedrals. In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover Clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed. It runs counterclockwise, reverse-numbered with the first twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Its recovery was a turning point in the fortunes of the Verbover court and marked the start of Heskel Shpilman’s ascent. Baronshteyn takes up a position behind and to the right of the rebbe, at a lectern where he can keep one eye on the street, one eye on whatever volume is being combed for precedents and justifications, and one eye, a lidless inner eye, on the man who is the center of his existence.

  Landsman clears his throat. He is the primary, and this is his job to do. He steals another glance at the Verbover Clock. There are seven minutes remaining in this sorry excuse for a week.

  “Before you begin, Detectives,” says Aryeh Baronshteyn, “let me state for the record that I am here in my capacity as attorney to Rabbi Shpilman. Rebbe, if you have any doubt about whether you ought to answer a question put to you by the detectives, please refrain from answering, and allow me to ask them to clarify or rephrase it.”

  “This isn’t an interrogation, Rabbi Baronshteyn,” Berko says.

  “You are welcome here, more than welcome, Aryeh,” the rebbe says. “Indeed, I insist that you be present. But as my gabay and my son-in-law. Not as my lawyer. For this I don’t need a lawyer.”

  “If I may, dear Rebbe. These men are homicide detectives. You are the Verbover rebbe. If you don’t need a lawyer, then nobody needs a lawyer. And believe me, everybody needs a lawyer.” Baronshteyn slides a pad of yellow paper from the interior of the lectern, where he no doubt keeps his vials of curare and
his necklaces of severed human ears. He unscrews the cap of a fountain pen. “I will at least take notes. On,” he deadpans, “a legal pad.”

  The Verbover rebbe contemplates Landsman from deep inside the redoubt of his flesh. He has light eyes, somewhere between green and gold. They’re nothing like the pebbles abandoned by mourners on Baronshteyn’s tombstone puss. Fatherly eyes that suffer and forgive and find amusement. They know what Landsman has lost, what he has squandered and let slip from his grasp through doubt, faithlessness, and the pursuit of being tough. They understand the furious wobble that throws off the trajectory of Landsman’s good intentions. They comprehend the love affair that Landsman has with violence, his wild willingness to put his body out there on the street to break and to be broken. Until this minute Landsman didn’t grasp what he and every noz in the District, and the Russian shtarkers and small-time wiseguys, and the FBI and the IRS and the ATF, were up against. He never understood how the other sects could tolerate and even defer to the presence of these pious gangsters in their black-hat midst. You could lead men with a pair of eyes like that. You could send them to the very lip of whatever abyss you chose.

  “Tell me why you are here, Detective Landsman,” the rebbe says.

  Through the door of the outer office comes the muffled jangle of a telephone. There is no phone on the desk and none in sight. The rebbe works some feat of semaphore with half an eyebrow and a minor muscle of the eye. Baronshteyn puts down his pen. The ringing swells and dwindles as Baronshteyn slips the black missive of his body through the slot of the office door. A moment later, Landsman hears him answer. The words are unclear, the tone curt, maybe even harsh.

  The rebbe catches Landsman trying to eavesdrop and puts his eyebrow muscles to more strenuous use.