The Yiddish Policemen's Union

  “That I—I have a little bit of a problem, too. When I get around men. That’s why I don’t really basically get around them a lot. Don’t get any ideas, I don’t like you at all.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I did therapy, twelve-step. I got born again. The only thing that really helped was baking pies.”

  “No wonder they’re so good.”

  “Ha.”

  “He didn’t take you up on your offer.”

  “He wouldn’t. He was very sweet. He buttoned up my shirt. I felt like a little girl. Then he gave me something. Something he said that I could keep.”

  “What was that?”

  She lowers her gaze, and blood colors her face so deeply, Landsman can almost hear the hum of it. Her next words come out thick and whispery.

  “His blessing,” she says. Then, more clearly, “He said he was giving me his blessing.”

  “I’m fairly certain he was gay,” Landsman says. “By the way.”

  “I know,” she says. “He told me. He didn’t use that word. He didn’t really use any word, or if he did, I don’t remember it. I think what he said, it was that he didn’t care to bother with it anymore. He said heroin was simpler and more reliable. Heroin and checkers.”

  “Chess. He played chess.”

  “Whatever. I still got his blessing, right?”

  She seems to need the answer to this question to be yes.

  “Yes,” Landsman says.

  “Funny little Jew. The freaky thing is, I don’t know. It kind of like, worked.”

  “What worked?”

  “The blessing. I mean, I have a boyfriend now. A real one. We’re totally dating, it’s very strange.”

  “I’m happy for you both,” Landsman says, feeling a stab of envy of her, of all these people who were lucky enough to have Mendel Shpilman lay a blessing on them. He thinks of all the times he must have walked right past Mendel, all the chances that he missed. “So, you’re saying, when you gave him the ride to the motel, it was just a, well, a pickup. It was just because you—you were planning to, you know.”

  “Jump his bones? No.” She steps on the cigarette with the toe of her sheepskin boot. “It was a favor. For a friend of mine. Driving him, I mean. She knew the guy. Frank, she called him. She flew him in here from somewhere. She was a pilot. She asked me to give him a lift, help him find a place to stay. Someplace low to the ground, she said. So, whatever, I said I would.”

  “Naomi,” Landsman says. “That was your friend?”

  “Uh-huh. You knew her?”

  “I know how much she liked pie,” Landsman says. “This Frank, he was a client of hers?”

  “I guess so. I don’t really know. I didn’t ask. But they flew in here together. He must have hired her. You could probably find that out with that fancy card you’re carrying.”

  Landsman feels a numbness enter his limbs, a welcome numbness, a sense of doom that is indistinguishable from peacefulness, like the bite of a predator snake that prefers to swallow its victims alive and tranquil. The pie man’s daughter inclines her head toward the untouched slice of apple crumble on the paper plate, taking up the empty space between them on the bench.

  “You are so hurting my feelings,” she says.

  28

  In every picture of them taken during a long stretch of their childhood, Landsman is posed with his arm slung around his sister’s shoulders. In the early ones, the top of her head reaches to just above his belly. In the last such picture, there is a phantom mustache on Landsman’s upper lip, and he has the advantage of an inch, maybe two. The first time you spotted the trend in the pictures, it seemed cute: a big brother looking out for his kid sister. Seven or eight pictures in, the protective gesture took on a menacing air. After a dozen, you started to worry about those Landsman kids. Huddled together, bravely smiling for the camera, like deserving children in the adoption column of a newspaper.

  “Orphaned by tragedy,” Naomi said one night, turning the pages of an old album. The pages were waxed board covered with a crinkly sheet of polyurethane to hold the photos down. The layer of plastic gave the family depicted in the album a preserved quality, as if it had been bagged like evidence. “Two lovable moppets looking for a home.”

  “Only Freydl wasn’t dead yet,” Landsman said, knowing he was handing her a fat straight-line. Their mother had died after a brief, bitter struggle against cancer, having lived just long enough for Naomi to break her heart by dropping out of college.

  Naomi said, “Now you tell me.”

  Lately, when he looks at these pictures, Landsman sees himself as trying to hold his sister down, to keep her from flying off and crashing into a mountain.

  Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, “In everything but sexual preference.”

  It was from an early boyfriend that she had caught the itch to fly. Landsman never asked her what the attraction was, why she had worked so long and hard to get her commercial license and crash the homoidiotic world of male bush pilots. She was not one for pointless speculation, his dashing sister. But as Landsman understands it, the wings of an airplane are engaged in a constant battle with the air that envelops them, denting and baffling and warping it, bending and staving it off. Fighting it the way a salmon fights against the current of the river in which it’s going to die. Like a salmon—that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home—Naomi used up her strength and energy in struggle.

  Not that this effort ever showed in her forthright manner, her cocky bearing, her smile. She had the Errol Flynn style of keeping a straight face only when she was joking, and grinning like a jackpot winner whenever things got rough. Slap a pencil mustache on the Jewess, and you could have sent her swinging from the rigging of a three-master, sword in hand. She was not complicated, Landsman’s little sister, and in that respect, she was unique among the women of his acquaintance.

  “She was a fucking loon,” says the air traffic manager of the Flight Service Station at the Yakovy airport. He’s Larry Spiro, a skinny, stoop-shouldered Jew from Short Hills, New Jersey. A mexican, as the Sitka Jews call their southern cousins; mexicans call the Sitka Jews icebergers, or “the frozen Chosen.” Spiro’s thick eyeglasses correct for astigmatism, and behind them, his eyes have a skeptical wobble. Wiry gray hair stands out all over his head, like beams of outrage in a newspaper cartoon. He wears a white oxford shirt with his monogram on the pocket and a red necktie striped with gold. Slowly, anticipating the shot of whiskey in front of him, he pushes back his sleeves. His teeth are the color of the collar of his shirt.

  “Christ.” Like most mexicans working in the District, Spiro clings fiercely to American. For an East Coast Jew, the District of Sitka constitutes the exile of exiles, Hatzeplatz, the back half acre of nowhere. To speak American for a Jew like Spiro is to keep himself living in the real world, to promise himself that he’s going back soon. He smiles. “I never saw a woman get into so much trouble.”

  They are sitting in the lounge of Ernie’s Skagway Bar and Grill, in the low aluminum slab that was the terminal building back when this was just an airfield at the edge of the bush. They are in a booth at the rear, waiting for their steaks. Ernie’s Skagway is regarded by many as offering the only decent steak dinner between Anchorage and Vancouver. Ernie flies them in from Canada every day, bloody and packed in ice. The decor is minimal as a snack bar’s, vinyl and laminate and steel. The plates are plastic, the napkins crinkly as the paper on a doctor’s table. You order your food at a counter and sit down with a number on a spindle. The waitresses are renowned for their advanced age, ill humor, and physical resemblance to the cabs of long-haul trucks. All the atmosphere in the place is the product of its liquor license and its clientele: pilots, hunters an
d fishermen, and the usual Yakovy mix of shtarkers and sub rosa operators. On a Friday night in season, you can buy or sell anything from moose meat to ketamine, and hear some of the most arrant lies ever put to language.

  At six o’clock on a Monday evening, it’s mostly airport staff and a few loose pilots holding up the bar. Quiet Jews, hard workers, men in knit neckties, and one American bush pilot, half fluent in Yiddish, making the claim that he once flew three hundred miles without realizing he was upside down. The bar itself is an incongruous behemoth, oak, mock Victorian, salvaged from the failure of a cowboy-themed American steak house franchise down in Sitka.

  “Trouble,” Landsman says. “Right up to the end.”

  Spiro frowns. He was the manager on duty at Yakovy when Naomi’s plane flew into Mount Dunkelblum. There was nothing Spiro could have done to prevent the crash, but the subject is painful to him. He zips open his nylon briefcase and pulls out a thick blue folder. It contains a thick document clipped with a heavy clip and several loose sheets.

  “I glanced at the summary again,” he says in a somber tone. “The weather was decent. Her plane was a little overdue for service. Her final communication was routine.”

  “Mm,” says Landsman.

  “Were you looking for something new?” Spiro’s tone is not quite pitying but prepared to turn that way if necessary.

  “I don’t know, Spiro. I’m just looking.”

  Landsman takes the folder, and pages quickly through the thick document—a copy of the FAA investigator’s final determination—then sets it aside and picks up one of the loose sheets underneath.

  “That’s the flight plan you were asking about. For the morning before the crash.”

  Landsman studies the form, which affirms the intention of pilot Naomi Landsman to fly her Piper Super Cub from Peril Strait, Alaska, to Yakovy, D.S., carrying one passenger. The form looks like a computer printout, its blanks neatly filled in twelve-point Times Roman.

  “So she phoned this one in, is that it?” Landsman checks the time stamp. “That morning at five-thirty.”

  “She used the automated system, yes. Most people do.”

  “Peril Strait,” Landsman says. “That’s where? Out by Tenakee, right?”

  “South of there.”

  “So, we’re talking about a what—a two-hour flight from there to here?”

  “More or less.”

  “I guess she was feeling optimistic,” Landsman says. “She put her arrival time at a quarter past six. Forty-five minutes from the time the thing was filed.”

  Spiro has the kind of mind that is drawn to and repelled by anomaly. He takes the folder from Landsman and turns it around. He pages through the stack of documents that he collected and copied after agreeing to let Landsman buy him a steak.

  “She did arrive at a quarter past six,” he says. “It’s noted right here in the AFSS log. Six-seventeen.”

  “So either—Let me get this straight. Either she made the two-hour hop from Peril Strait to Yakovy in less than forty-five minutes,” Landsman says, “or else… Or else she changed her flight plan to come to Yakovy, when she was already en route and heading someplace else.”

  The steaks come; the waitress takes away their number on its pole and leaves their thick slabs of Canadian beef. They smell good and they look good. Spiro ignores them. He has forgotten his drink. He sifts through the pile of pages.

  “Okay, here’s the day before. She flew from Sitka to Peril Strait with three passengers. She took off at four and closed out her flight plan at six-thirty. Okay, so then it’s dark when they get there. She’s planning to stay overnight. Then the next morning…” Spiro stops. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Here’s—I’m guessing this was her original flight plan. Looks like she was planning to go back to Sitka the next morning. Originally. Not to come here to Yakovy.”

  “With how many passengers?”

  “None.”

  “After she’s been flying a while, supposedly headed for Sitka, and alone but actually with a mystery passenger on board, she suddely switches her destination to Yakovy.”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Peril Strait,” Landsman says. “What’s in Peril Strait?”

  “What’s anywhere? Moose, bears. Deer. Fish. Anything a Jew wants to kill.”

  “I don’t think so,” Landsman says. “I don’t think this was a fishing trip.”

  Spiro frowns, then gets up and goes over to the bar. He sidles up to the American pilot, and they converse. The pilot looks wary, perhaps constitutionally so. But he nods and follows Spiro back to the booth.

  “Rocky Kitka,” Spiro says. “Detective Landsman.” Then he sits down and takes care of his steak.

  Kitka has on black leather jeans and a matching vest worn over his bare skin, which is covered from wrists to throat to the waistband of his pants in Native-themed tattooing. Big-toothed whales and beavers and, down his left biceps, a snake or an eel with a sly expression in its eye.

  “You’re a pilot?” Landsman says.

  “No, I’m a policeman.” He laughs with a touching sincerity at his own display of wit.

  “Peril Strait,” Landsman says. “You’ve been there?”

  Kitka shakes his head, but Landsman disbelieves him at once.

  “Know anything about the place?”

  “Just the way it looks from the sky.”

  “Kitka,” Landsman says. “That’s a Native name.”

  “My father’s Tlingit. My mother’s Scotch-Irish and German and Swedish. Pretty much everything in there but Jew.”

  “Lot of Natives at Peril Strait?”

  “Nothing but.” Kitka says it with simple authority, then recalls his claim not to know anything about Peril Strait, and his eyes slide away from Landsman’s, lighting on the steak. He looks extremely hungry.

  “No white people?”

  “One or two, maybe, tucked away back in the coves.”

  “And Jews?” Landsman says.

  Kitka gets a hard look in his eye, a protective look. “Like I said. I just know it to fly past.”

  “I’m making a little investigation,” Landsman says. “It turns out there might be something over there to interest a Jew from Sitka.”

  “That’s Alaska over there,” Kitka says. “A Jewish cop, with all due respect, he can ask questions all day long in that neighborhood, isn’t nobody has to answer them.”

  Landsman slides over in the booth. “Come on, sweetness,” he says in Yiddish. “Stop looking at it. It’s yours. I didn’t touch it.”

  “You aren’t going to eat it?”

  “I have no appetite, I don’t know why.”

  “It’s the New York, isn’t it? I love the New York.”

  Kitka sits down, and Landsman slides the plate toward him. He drinks his cup of coffee and watches the two men destroy their dinners. Kitka looks much happier when he’s done, less wary, less fearful of being set up.

  “Shit, that is good meat,” he says. He takes a long swallow of ice water from a red plastic schooner. He looks at Spiro, then away, then back at Landsman, then away again. He stares into the water glass. “Price of a meal,” he says bitterly. Then: “They got some kind of honor ranch. I hear. For religious Jews that get hooked on drugs and whatnot. I guess even those beards of yours, they get into the drugs and the drinking and the petty crime.”

  “That makes sense, they’d want to put it someplace out of the way,” Spiro says. “There’s a lot of shame involved.”

  “I don’t know,” Landsman says. “It’s not easy to get permission to start a Jewish business of any kind on the other side of the Line. Not even a do-good business like that.”

  “Like I said,” Kitka says. “I just heard a few things. Probably it’s bullshit.”

  “Weird,” says Spiro. He’s in the world of the dossier again, flipping back and forth among the pages.

  Landsman says, “Tell me what’s weird.”

  “Well, I’m looking throug
h all this, and you know what I don’t see? I don’t see her flight plan for—for the fatal one. Yakovy back to Sitka.” He takes out his Shoyfer and hits two keys and waits. “I know she filed one. I remember seeing it. Bella? Spiro. Are you busy? Uh-huh. Okay. Listen. Can you check something for me? I need you to pull a flight plan from the system.” He gives the on-duty manager Naomi’s name and the date and time of her final flight. “Can you run that? Yeah.”

  “Did you know my sister, Mr. Kitka?” Landsman says.

  “You might say that,” Kitka says. “She kicked my ass one time.”

  “Join the club,” Landsman says.

  “That can’t be,” Spiro says, his voice tight. “Could you check again?”

  Now no one says anything. They just watch Spiro listening to Bella at the other end of the line.

  “Something’s not right, Bella,” Spiro says finally. “I’m coming back over there.”

  He hangs up, looking as if his fine steak has begun to disagree with him.

  “What is it?” Landsman says. “What’s the matter?”

  “She can’t find the flight plan in the system.” He stands up and gathers together the scattered pages of Naomi’s file. “But I know that can’t be right, because it’s referenced by number right here in the crash report.” He stops. “Or not.”

  Again he bats back and forth the pages of the thick clipped sheaf of close-typed pages that comprise the results of the FAA investigation into Naomi’s fatal encounter with the northwest slope of Mount Dunkelblum.

  “Somebody’s been in this file,” he says at last, unwillingly at first, his mouth a slit. As the conclusion spreads through his mind, he relaxes into it. Goes slack. “Somebody with weight.”

  “Weight,” Landsman says. “The kind of weight it takes, for example, to get permission to build a Jewish rehab center on BIA land?”

  “Too much weight for me,” Spiro says. He slams the cover of the file shut, stuffs it under his arm. “I can’t be here with you anymore, Landsman. I’m sorry. Thanks for the steak dinner.”

  After he goes, Landsman takes out his cell phone and dials a number in the Alaskan area code. When the woman on the other end answers, he says, “Wilfred Dick.”