hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all.
“I had the same thought, of course,” Berko confesses. “Which I immediately suppressed.” He claps his big hands over his face and leaves them there for a moment before dragging them slowly down, pulling at his cheeks until they stretch past his chin like the jowl flaps of a bulldog. “Woe is me, Meyer, you want us to go out to Verbov Island?”
“Fuck, no,” Landsman says in American. “Truth, Berko. I hate that place. If we have to go to an island, I’d much rather go to Madagascar.”
They stand there in the alley behind the Einstein, thinking through the numerous arguments against and the few that can be made in favor of pissing off the most powerful underworld characters north of the 55th parallel. They attempt to generate alternate explanations for the squirrelly behavior of the patzers in the Einstein.
“We’d better see Itzik Zimbalist,” Berko says finally. “Anybody else out there, it’s going to be as useful as talking to a dog. And a dog already broke my heart once today.”
12
The street grid here on the island is still Sitka’s, ruled and numbered, but apart from that, you are gone, sweetness: starshot, teleported, spun clear through the wormhole to the planet of the Jews. Friday afternoon on Verbov Island, and Landsman’s Chevelle Super Sport surfs the wave of black hats along Avenue 225. The hats in question are felt numbers, with high, dented crowns and mile-wide brims, the kind favored by overseers in plantation melodramas. The women sport head scarves and glossy wigs spun from the hair of the poor Jewesses of Morocco and Mesopotamia. Their coats and long dresses are the finest rags of Paris and New York, their shoes the flower of Italy. Boys careen down the sidewalks on in-line roller skates in a slipstream of scarves and sidelocks, flashing the orange linings of their unzipped parkas. Girls hobbled by long skirts go along braided arm in arm, raucous chains of Verbover girls vehement and clannish as schools of philosophy. The sky has turned steely, the wind has died, and the air crackles with the alchemy of children and the promise of snow.
“Look at this place,” Landsman says. “It’s hopping.”
“Not one empty storefront.”
“And more of these no-good yids than ever.”
Landsman stops for a red at NW Twenty-eighth Street. Outside a corner store, by a study hall, Torah bachelors loiter, Scripture grifters, unmatchable luftmenshen, and garden-variety hoodlums. When they notice Landsman’s car, with its reek of plainclothesman hubris and its inflammatory double-S on the grille, they leave off yelling at one another and give Landsman the Bessarabian fish-eye. He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing.
“Look at those assholes looking,” Landsman says. “I don’t like it.”
“Meyer.”
The truth is, black-hat Jews make Landsman angry, and they always have. He finds that it is a pleasurable anger, rich with layers of envy, condescension, resentment, and pity. He puts the car in gear and shoves open his door.
“Meyer. No.”
Landsman steps around the open door of the Super Sport. He feels the women watching. He smells the sudden fear on the breath of the men around him, like caries of the teeth. He hears the laughter of the chickens that have not yet met their fates, the hum of the air compressors keeping the carp alive in their tanks. He’s glowing like a needle that you heat to kill a tick.
“So, nu,” he says to the yids on the corner. “Which one of you buffaloes wants a ride in my sweet nozmobile?”
A yid steps forward, a fair-skinned slab, low and wide, with a lumpy forehead and a forked yellow beard. “I suggest you return to your vehicle, Officer,” he says softly, reasonably. “And go on where you’re going.”
Landsman grins. “Is that what you suggest?” he says.
The other street-corner men step forward now, filling in the space all around the bruiser with the lightning beard. There must be twenty of them, more than Landsman believed at first. Landsman’s glow gutters, flickers like a lightbulb going bad.
“I’ll put it another way,” says the blond bruiser, a bulge at his hip drawing the attention of his fingers. “Get back in the car.”
Landsman pulls at his chin. Madness, he thinks. Chasing a theoretical lead in a nonexistent case, you lose your temper for no reason. The next thing you know, you have caused an incident among a branch of black hats with clout, money, and a stockpile of Manchurian and surplus Russian firearms recently estimated by police intelligence, in a confidential report, to be adequate to the needs of a guerrilla insurgency in a small Central American republic. Madness, the reliable madness of Landsman.
“How about you come over here and make me?” Landsman says.
That’s when Berko opens his door and displays his ancestral Bear bulk in the street. His profile is regal, worthy of a coin or a carved mountainside. And he carries in his right hand the uncanniest hammer any Jew or gentile is ever likely to see. It’s a replica of the one that Chief Katlian is reported to have swung during the Russian-Tlingit war of 1804, which the Russians lost. Berko fashioned it for the purpose of intimidating yids when he was thirteen and new to their labyrinth, and it has not failed its purpose yet, which is why Berko keeps it in the backseat of Landsman’s car. The head is a thirty-five-pound block of meteorite iron that Hertz Shemets dug up at an old Russian site near Yakovy. The handle was carved with a Sears hunting knife from a forty-ounce baseball bat. Interlocking black ravens and red sea monsters writhe along the shaft, grinning big-toothed grins. Their pigmentation used up fourteen Flair pens. A pair of raven feathers dangles on a leather thong from the top of the shaft. This detail may not be historically accurate, but it works on the yiddish mind to savage effect, saying:
Indianer.
The word gets handed up and down the stalls and storefronts. Sitka Jews rarely see or speak to Indians, except in federal court or in the small Jewish towns along the Line. It takes very little imagination for these Verbovers to picture Berko and his hammer engaged in the wholesale spattering of paleface brainpans. Then they catch sight of Berko’s yarmulke, and a flutter of fine white fringe at his waist from his ritual four-corner, and you can feel all that giddy xenophobia drain off the crowd, leaving a residue of racist vertigo. That’s how it goes for Berko Shemets in the District of Sitka when he breaks out the hammer and goes Indian. Fifty years of movie scalpings and whistling arrows and burning Conestogas have their effect on people’s minds. And then sheer incongruity does the rest.
“Berko Shemets,” says the man with the forked beard, blinking, as big slow feathers of snow begin to fall on his shoulders and hat. “What’s up, yid?”
“Dovid Sussman,” Berko says, lowering the hammer. “I thought it was you.”
Onto his cousin he trains his big minotaur eyes full of long suffering and reproach. It was not Berko’s idea to come to Verbov Island. It was not Berko’s idea to pursue the Lasker case after they had been told to lay off. It was not Berko’s idea to flee in shame to a cheap Untershtot flophouse where mystery junkies get capped by the goddess of chess.
“A sweet Sabbath to you, Sussman,” Berko says, tossing the hammer into the back of Landsman’s car. When it hits the floor, the springs inside the bucket seats ring like bells.
“A sweet Sabbath to you, too, Detective,” Sussman says. The other yids echo the greeting, a bit unsure. Then they turn away and resume their back-and-forth over a fine point of pot koshering or VIN erasure.
When they get in the car, Berko slams the door and says, “I hate doing that.”
They drive down Avenue 225, and every face turns to look at the Indian Jew in the blue Chevrolet.
“So much for asking a few discreet questions,” Berko says bitterly. “One day, Meyer, so help me, I’m going to use my head knocker on you.”
“Maybe you should,” Landsman says. “Maybe I would welcome it as therapy.”
They crawl west on Avenue 225 toward the shop of Itzik Zimbalist. Courts and cul-de-sacs, single-family neo-Ukrainians and condominium units, steep-roofed clapboard structures painted somber colors and built right out
