The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
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for her. When she is kneeling to examine a doubtful stain on the floor of a crime scene, or studying a photograph under a loupe, she has to blow that lock of hair out of the way with a sharp, irritated puff of breath.
Now she is scowling at the Super Sport as Landsman cuts the engine. She lowers her all-banishing hand. From this distance, it looks to Landsman as if the lady is three or four cups the worse for strong coffee, and somebody has already pissed her off once this morning, maybe twice. Landsman was married to her for twelve years, working the same Homicide squad for five. He is sensitive to her moods.
“Tell me you didn’t know about this,” he says to Berko, cutting the engine.
“I still don’t know about it,” Berko says. “I’m hoping if I close my eyes for a second and then open them again, it’s going to turn out not to be true.”
Landsman tries it. “No dice,” he says with regret, and gets out of the car. “Give us a minute.”
“Please, take all the time you want.”
Landsman requires ten seconds to cross the gravel lot. Bina looks happy to see him for a count of three, followed by a two-count of looking anxious and lovely. She plays out the last five seconds by looking ready to mix it up with Landsman, if that’s how he wants things to go.
“What the fuck?” Landsman says, hating to disappoint her.
“Two months of ex-wife,” Bina says. “After that, it’s anybody’s guess.”
Just after their divorce came through, Bina headed south for a year, enrolling in some kind of leadership training program for women police detectives. On her return, she accepted the lofty post of detective inspector at the Yakovy Homicide Section. There she found stimulus and fulfillment leading investigations into the hypothermia deaths of unemployed salmon fishermen amid the drainage channels of the Venice of Northwest Chichagof Island. Landsman hasn’t seen her since his sister’s funeral, and he gathers from the pitying look she gives his old chassis that he has gone further downhill in the months since then.
“Aren’t you happy to see me, Meyer?” she says. “You don’t say anything about my parka?”
“It’s extremely orange,” Landsman says.
“You need to be visible up there,” she says. “In the woods. Or they’ll think you’re a bear and shoot you.”
“It’s a nice color on you,” Landsman hears himself manage. “Goes with your eyes.”
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