The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon
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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.
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.
A member of the Einstein Chess Club named Melekh Gaystik won the world championship title over the Dutchman Jan Timman at St. Petersburg in 1980. The World’s Fair fresh in their memory, Sitkaniks viewed Gaystik’s triumph as further proof of their merit and identity as a people. Gaystik was subject to fits of rage, black moods, and bouts of incoherence, but these flaws were overlooked in the general celebration.
One fruit of Gaystik’s victory was the gift of the hotel ballroom by the Einstein management, free of rent, to the chess club. Hotel weddings were out of vogue, and management had been trying for years to clear the patzers, with their mutterings and smoke, from the coffee shop. Gaystik provided management the excuse they needed. They sealed off the main doors of the ballroom so that you could enter only through the back, off an alley. They pulled up the fine ashwood parquetry and laid down a demented checkerboard of linoleum in shades of soot, bile, and surgical-scrub green. The modernist chandelier was replaced by banks of fluorescent tubes bolted to the high concrete ceiling. Two months later, the young world champion wandered into the old coffee shop where Landsman’s father had once made his mark, sat down in a booth at the back, took out a Colt .38 Detective Special, and shot himself in the mouth. There was a note in his pocket. It said only I liked things better the way they were before.
“Emanuel Lasker,” the Russian says to the two detectives, looking up from the chessboard, under an old neon clock that advertises the defunct newspaper, the Blat. He is a skeletal man, his skin thin, pink, and peeling. He wears a pointed black beard. His eyes are close-set and the color of cold seawater. “Emanuel Lasker.” The Russian’s shoulders hunch, and he ducks his head, and his rib cage swells and narrows. It looks like laughter, but no sound comes out. “I wish that he does come around here.” Like that of most Russian immigrants, the man’s Yiddish is experimental and brusque. He reminds Landsman of somebody, though Landsman can’t say whom. “I give him such a kick to his ass for him.”
“You ever look at his games?” the Russian’s opponent wants to know. He is a young man with pudding cheeks and rimless glasses and a complexion tinged with green, like the white of a dollar bill. The lenses of his glasses ice over as he aims them at Landsman. “You ever look at his games, Detective?”
“Just to make this clear,” Landsman says, “that isn’t the Lasker we have in mind.”
“This man was only using the name as an alias,” Berko says. “Otherwise we’d be looking for a man who’s already been dead sixty years.”
“You look at Lasker’s games today,” the young man continues, “there’s too much complexity. He makes everything too hard.”
“Only it seems complexity to you, Velvel,” says the Russian, “for the reason of how much you are simple.”
The shammeses have interrupted their game in its dense middle stages with the Russian, playing White, holding an unassailable knight outpost. The men are still caught up in their game, the way a pair of mountains gets caught up in a whiteout. Their natural impulse is to treat the detectives with the abstract contempt they reserve for all kibitzers. Landsman wonders if he and Berko ought to wait until the players have finished and then try again. But there are other games in progress, other players to question. Around the old ballroom, legs scratch the linoleum like fingernails on a chalkboard. Chessmen click like the cylinder turning in Melekh Gaystik’s .38. The men—there are no women here—play by means of steadily hectoring their opponents with self-aspersions, chilly laughter, whistling, harumphs.
“As long as we’re making things clear,” Berko says, “this man who called himself Emanuel Lasker, but was not the noted world champion born in Prussia in 1868, has died, and we are investigating that death. In our capacity as homicide detectives, which we mentioned but without, it seems, making much of an impression.”
“A Jew with blond hair,” the Russian says.
“And freckles,” Velvel says.
“You see,” the Russian says. “We pay close attention.” He snatches up one of his rooks the way you pluck at a stray hair on somebody’s collar. Together his fingers and the rook take their trip down the file and break the bad news to the Black’s remaining bishop with a tap.
Velvel speaks Russian now, with a Yiddish accent, offering his wishes for the resumption of friendly relations between his opponent’s mother and a well-endowed stallion.
“I am orphan,” the Russian says.
He sits back in his chair as if expecting his opponent