The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ ignores the question as Mrs. Kalushiner arrives with the eggs, six of them, peeled and arranged on a dish with six round indentations, each the size of an egg’s fat bottom. Salt. Pepper. A jar of mustard.

      “Maybe if they took the leash off him,” Berko says, pointing to Hershel with his thumb, “he would go out for a sandwich or something.”

      “He likes the leash,” Mrs. Kalushiner says. “Without it, he doesn’t sleep.” She leaves them again.

      “That bothers me,” Berko says, watching Hershel.

      “I know what you mean.”

      Berko salts an egg and bites it. His teeth leave castellations in the boiled white. “So this poem, then,” he says. “The verse.”

      “So, naturally,” Landsman says, “everyone assumed the addressee of my father’s verse to be my mother. Starting with my mother.”

      “She fit the description.”

      “So it was generally agreed. That is why I never told anybody what I had deduced. In my first official case as a junior shammes.”

      “Which was?”

      “Which was that if you put together the first letters of each of the six lines of the poem, they spelled out a name. Caissa.”

      “Caissa? What kind of name is that?”

      “I believe it is Latin,” Landsman says. “Caissa is the goddess of chess players.”

      He opens the lid of the pocket chess set that he bought at the drugstore on Korczak Platz. The pieces in play remain as he arranged them at the Taytsh-Shemets apartment earlier that morning, as left behind by the man who called himself Emanuel Lasker. Or by his killer, or by pale Caissa, the goddess of chess players, dropping in to bid farewell to another one of her hapless worshippers. Black down to three pawns, a pair of knights, a bishop, and a rook. White holding on to all of his major and minor pieces and a pair of pawns, one of them a move away from promotion. A strange disordered aspect to the situation, as if the game that led up to this move had been a chaotic one.

      “If it was anything else, Berko,” Landsman says, apologizing with upturned palms. “A deck of cards. A crossword puzzle. A bingo card.”

      “I get it,” Berko says.

      “It had to be an unfinished goddamned game of chess.”

      Berko turns the board around and studies it for a moment or two, then looks up at Landsman. Now is the time for you to ask me, he says with those great dark eyes of his.

      “So. Like I said. I need to ask you a favor.”

      “No,” Berko says, “you don’t.”

      “You heard the lady. You saw her black-flag it. The thing was a piece of shit to begin with. Bina made it official.”

      “You don’t think so.”

      “Please, Berko, don’t start having respect for my judgment now,” Landsman says. “Not after all this work I’ve put into undermining it.”

      Berko has been staring at the dog with increasing fixity. Abruptly, he gets up and goes over to the stage. He clomps up the three wooden steps and stands looking down at Hershel. Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko’s hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport. Berko crouches heavily beside the dog and unhooks the clasp of the leash from the collar. He takes hold of the dog’s head in his massive hands and looks into the dog’s eyes. “Enough already,” he says. “He isn’t coming.”

      The 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.

       10

      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.

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