The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
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he raises Three Hundred Chess Games over his head and prepares, showily, to hurl it across the breakfast bar and into the living-diningroom. This is the Shemets in him coming out. Landsman’s mother was also a big one for the hurling of objects in anger, and the histrionic displays of Uncle Hertz, that cool customer, are rare but legendary.
“Evidence,” Landsman reminds him. Berko raises the book higher, and Landsman says, “Evidence, God damn it!” and then Berko throws it. The book struggles through the air, pages fluttering, and strikes something jingly, probably the silver spice box on the glass-topped dining table. The baby sticks out his lower lip, then sticks it out a little farther, then hesitates, looking from his mother to his father and back. Then he bursts into desolate sobs. Berko glares at Pinky as if betrayed. He goes around the bar to retrieve the mishandled evidence.
“What did Tateh do?” Ester-Malke says to the baby, kissing his cheek and scowling at the large black-edged hole in the air that Berko has left behind. “Did bad Detective Super-sperm throw the silly old book?”
“Good waffle!” Landsman says, setting down his plate untouched. He raises his voice. “Hey, Berko, I’m, uh, I think I’m going to wait down in the car.” He swipes Ester-Malke’s cheek with his lips. “Tell what’s-his-name Uncle Meyerle says goodbye.”
Landsman goes out to the elevators, where the wind whistles down the shafts. The neighbor, Fried, comes out in his long black coat, his white hair combed back and curling at his collar. Fried is an opera singer, and the Taytsh-Shemetses feel he looks down on them. But that is only because Fried has told them he is better than they are. Sitkaniks generally take care to maintain this view of their neighbors, in particular of the Natives and all those who dwell in the south. Fried and Landsman get into the elevator together. Fried asks Landsman if he has found any dead bodies lately, and Landsman asks Fried if he has made any dead composers turn over in their graves lately, and after that, they don’t say anything much. Landsman goes back out to his parking place and gets into the car. He runs the engine and sits in the heat blowing in off the engine. With the smell of Pinky on his collar and the cool dry ghost of Goldy’s hand in his, he plays goalkeeper as a squad of unprofitable regrets mounts a steady attack on his ability to get through a day without feeling anything. He climbs out and smokes a papiros in the rain. He turns his eyes north, across the marina, to the looping aluminum spike on its windswept island. Once more he feels a sharp nostalgia for the fair, for the heroic Jewish engineering of the Safety Pin (officially the Promise of Sanctuary Tower, but nobody calls it that), and for the cleavage of the uniformed lady who used to tear your ticket on the elevator ride to the restaurant at the Safety Pin’s tip. Then he gets back in the car. A few minutes later, Berko comes out of the building and rolls like a bass drum into the Super Sport. He has the book and the pocket chess set in one hand, balancing them atop his left thigh.
“Sorry about all that,” he says. “What a jerk, huh?”
“No big deal.”
“We’ll just have to find a bigger place.”
“Right.”
“Somewhere.”
“That’s the trick.”
“It’s a blessing.”
“You bet. Mazel tov, Berko.”
Landsman’s congratulations are so ironic that they are heartfelt, and they are so heartfelt that they can only come off as insincere, and he and his partner sit there for a while, not going anywhere, listening to them congeal.
“Ester-Malke says she’s so tired, she doesn’t even remember having sex with me,” Berko says with a deep sigh.
“Maybe you didn’t.”
“It’s a miracle, you’re saying. Like the talking chicken in the butcher shop.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A sign and a portent.”
“One way of looking at it.”
“Speaking of signs,” Berko says. He opens the Sitka Public Library’s long-missing copy of Three Hundred Chess Games to its inside back cover and slides the return card from its pasted pocket. Behind the card lies a photograph, a three-by-five color snapshot, glossy with a white border. It is the picture of a literal sign, a rectangle of black plastic into which are stamped three white roman letters, with a stamped white arrow underneath, pointing to the left. The sign dangles on two lengths of slender chain from a dirty white square of acoustic tile.
“PIE,” Landsman reads.
“It seems to have fallen out in the course of my vigorous examination of the evidence,” Berko says. “I figure it must have been wedged into the card pocket, or with your keen shammes vision, you would have noticed it. Recognize it?”
“Yes,” Landsman says. “I know it.”
At the airport that serves the raw northern city of Yakovy—the terminus from which you set off, if you are a Jew looking for modest adventure, into the modest bush of the District—tucked away at the far end of the main building, a modest operation offers pie, and only pie, American-style. The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window hangs a whiteboard, and every day the proprietors—a couple of hostile Klondikes and their mysterious daughter—write out a list of the day’s wares: blackberry, apple rhubarb, peach, banana cream. The pie is good, even famous in a modest way. Anybody who has passed through the Yakovy airfield knows it, and there are rumors of people who will fly in from Juneau or Fairbanks or farther away to eat it. Landsman’s late sister was a devotee of the coconut cream in particular.
“So, nu,” Berko says. “So what do you think?”
“I knew it,” Landsman says. “The minute I walked into the room and saw Lasker lying there, I said to myself, Landsman, this whole case is going to turn on a question of pie.”
“So you think it means nothing.”
“Nothing means nothing,” Landsman says, and all of a sudden he feels choked up, throat swollen, eyes burning with tears. Maybe it’s lack of sleep, or too much time spent in the company of his shot glass. Or maybe it’s the sudden image of Naomi, leaning against a wall outside that nameless and inexplicable pie shop, scarfing up a slice of coconut cream pie from a paper plate with a plastic fork, eyes closed, lips pursed and streaked with white, grooving on a mouthful of cream, crust and custard in a profound and animal way. “God damn it, Berko. I wish I had some of that pie right now.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Berko says.
For twenty-seven years Sitka Central has been temporarily housed in eleven modular buildings in a vacant lot behind the old Russian orphanage. Rumor holds that the modulars began life as a Bible college in Slidell, Louisiana. They are windowless, low-ceilinged, flimsy, and cramped. The visitor finds, packed into the Homicide modular, a reception area, an office for each of the two detective inspectors, a shower stall with a toilet and sink, a squad room (four cubicles, four chairs, four telephones, a chalkboard, and a row of mail slots), an interrogation hotbox, and a break room. The break room comes equipped with a coffee brewer and a small refrigerator. The break room has also long housed a thriving colony of spores that, at a point in the remote past, spontaneously evolved the form and appearance of a love seat. But when Landsman and Berko pull into the gravel lot by the Homicide modular, a pair of Filipino custodians are lugging out the monstrous fungus.
“It’s moving,” Berko says.
People have been threatening for years to get rid of the sofa, but it is a shock to Landsman to see it finally on its way. Enough of a shock that it takes him a second or two to register the woman standing alongside the steps. She is holding a black umbrella and wearing a bright orange parka with a blazing dyed-green ruff of synthetic fur. Her