The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
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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.
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