Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's union

“And blue?”

“Black. But never black or lonely enough to kid myself that having sex with a random Jewess was going to make me feel any less.”

“Actually, random sex only makes it worse,” she says.

“You speak from experience.”

“I fucked a couple of men in Yakovy. If that’s what you want to know.”

“It’s strange,” Landsman says upon reflection. “But I think I do not.”

“A couple or three.”

“I don’t need a report.”

“So, nu,” she says, “so you just beat off?”

“With a discipline you might find surprising in a yid so unruly.”

“And what about now?” she says.

“Now? Now is madness,” he says. “Not to mention uncomfortable. Plus I think my leg is still bleeding.”

“I meant,” she says, “what about now, do you feel lonely. ”

“You’re kidding, right? Squashed into this bread box?”

He buries his nose in the thick soft rasp of Bina’s hair and takes a deep breath. Raisins, vinegar, a salt whiff of the sweat of her nape.

“What does it smell like?”

“It smells red,” he says.

“It does not.”

“It smells like Rumania.”

“You smell like a Rumanian,” she says. “With shockingly hairy legs.”

“I’ve become such a geezer.”

“Me, too.”

“I can’t even climb stairs. My hair’s falling out.”

“My ass is like a topographical map.”

He confirms this information with his fingers. Ridges and depressions, here and there a pimple in high relief. He threads his hands under and over her waist and reaches around to weigh a breast in each hand. At first he retrieves no memory of their former size or estate to compare them with, and he panics a little. Then he decides that they are the same as they have always been, spanned exactly by his palm and his outstretched fingers, formed from some mysterious compound of gravity and give.

“I’m not going back down that drainpipe,” he says. “I can tell you that much.”

“I said you could just take the stairs. The drainpipe was your idea.”

“It was all my idea,” he says. “It was always my idea.”

“Don’t I know it,” she says.

They lie there for a long time without saying anything more. Landsman can feel the skin beside him slowly filling with dark wine. A few minutes later, Bina begins to snore. There is no doubt that her snoring has not changed in two years. It has a double-reeded hum, the bumblebee continuo of Mongolian throat-singing. It has the slow grandeur of a whale’s respiration. Landsman begins to drift across the surface of her bed and of the susurration of Bina’s breath. In her arms, in the scent of her on the bed linens-a strong but pleasant smell like new leather gloves-Landsman feels safe for the first time in ages. Drowsy and content. Here you go, Landsman, he thinks. Here is the smell and the hand on your belly that you traded for a lifetime of silence.

He sits up, wide awake and hateful to himself, craven, more unworthy than ever of the fine kidskin woman in his arms. Yes, all right, Landsman understands, so go shit in the ocean, that he made not the right but the only choice. He understands that the necessity of covering up for the dark deeds of the boys in the top drawer is one that nozzes have been making into a virtue since the dawn of police work. He understands that if he were to try to tell someone, say Dennis Brennan, what he knows, then the boys in the top drawer would find another way to silence him, this time on their own terms. So why is his heart running like a jailbird’s steel cup along the bars of his rib cage? Why does Bina’s fragrant bed suddenly feel like a wet sock, a pair of underpants riding up on him, a wool suit on a hot afternoon? You make a deal, take what you can get, move on. Get over it. So distant men in a sunny country have been lured into killing one another so that while their backs are turned, their sunny country can be boosted and fenced. So the fate of the Sitka District has been sealed. So the killer of Mendel Shpilman, whoever it was, is walking around free. So, so what?

Landsman gets out of the bed. Discontentment gathers like ball lightning around the chessboard in the pocket of his coat. He unfolds it and contemplates it and thinks, I missed something in the room. No, he didn’t miss anything; but if he missed something, it’s gone by now. Only he didn’t miss anything in the room. But he must have missed something.

His thoughts are a tattoo needle inking the spade on an ace. They are a tornado going back and forth over the same damn pancaked trailer. They narrow and darken until they describe a tiny black circle, the hole at the back of Mendel Shpilman’s head.

He re-creates the scene in his imagination, as he saw it that night when Tenenboym knocked on his door. The freckled expanse of pale back. The white underpants. The broken mask of the eyes, the right hand tumbled from the bed to brush the floor with its fingers. The chessboard on the nightstand.

Landsman lays the board on Bina’s night stand, in the pale of dim light from the lamp, a yellow porcelain affair with a big yellow daisy on the green shade. White facing the wall. Black-Shpilman, Landsman-facing the middle of the room.

Maybe it’s the context at once familiar and strange, the painted bedstead, the daisy lamp, the daisies on the wallpaper, the dresser in whose top drawer she used to keep her diaphragm. Or maybe it’s the lingering traces of endorphin in his bloodstream. But as Landsman stares at the chessboard, staring at a chessboard, for the first time in his life, feels good. It feels pleasurable, in fact. Standing there, moving the pieces in his mind, seems to slow or at least to dislodge the needle inking over the black spot in his brain. He focuses on the promotion at b8. What if you changed that pawn to a bishop, a rook, a queen, a knight?

Landsman reaches for a chair to take White’s place at the board, to sit down in his imagination for a friendly game against Shpilman. There’s a chair at the desk, painted to match the daisy-green bed, in the corner of Bina’s room. It’s right about where the fold-down desk would be in relation to the bed in Shpilman’s room at the Zamenhof. Landsman lowers himself into the green chair, eyes on the board.

A knight, he decides. And then Black has to move the pawn at d7-but to where? He settles in to play it out, not because of some forlorn hope that it might lead him to the killer, but because he really needs, all of a sudden, to play the game out. And then, as if the seat is wired to administer a charge, Landsman leaps to his feet. He yanks the green chair one-handed into the air. Four round indentations in the low-pile white carpet, faint but distinct.

He always assumed that Shpilman, as the reception clerks all reported, never had visitors, that the game he left behind was a form of chess solitaire played from memory, from the pages of Three Hundred Chess Games, maybe just against himself. But if Shpilman did have a visitor, maybe that visitor pulled up a chair to sit down at the board across from his opponent. Across the cardboard chessboard from his victim. And that phantom patzer’s chair would have left indentations in the carpet. No doubt by now they have faded or been vacuumed over. But they might be visible in one of Shpringer’s photographs, boxed up in some storage room at the forensic lab.

Landsman steps into his trousers, buttons his shirt, knots his tie. He takes his coat from the door and, carrying his shoes, goes to pull the covers more snugly over Bina. As he bends to switch off the bedside light, a rectangle of paper falls out of his coat pocket. It’s the postcard he received from the gym that he used to frequent, with its offer of a lifetime membership good for the next two months. He studies the glossy side of the card, with its enchanted Jew. Before; after. Fat; thin. Start here; finish there. Wise; happy. Chaos; order. Exile; homeland. Before, a neat diagram in a book, its grid carefully crosshatched at the black squares and annotated like a page of Talmud; after, a battered old chessboard with a Vicks inhaler at b8.