“The motivation, Detective, for my leaving a cup of terrible coffee and a broken appointment with an informant who, in any case, lacks anything resembling information, to come out here and risk your possible anger.”
“Brennan, please, I beg you to speak American,” Berko says. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I want a story,” Brennan says. “What else? And I know I’ll never get one from you unless I try to clear the air. So. For the record.” Once again he lashes himself to the tiller of his Flying Dutchman version of the mother tongue. “I lack the intention to undo or to take back anything. Inflict suffering on this grossly enlarged head of mine, please, but I stand behind what I wrote, every word of it, to this day. It was accurate and supported and sourced. And yet I do not mind telling you that the whole sorry affair left a bad taste in my mouth—”
“Was it the taste of your ass?” Landsman suggests brightly. “Maybe you’ve been biting upon yourself.”
Brennan sails madly on. Landsman gets the feeling that the goy has been saving up this spiel for a while now. That maybe he’s looking for something more from Berko than a story.
“Certainly it was a good thing for my career, so called. For a few years. It propelled me out of the boondocks, you should pardon the expression, to L.A., Salt Lake, Kansas City.” As he names the stations of his decline, Brennan’s voice gets lower and softer. “Spokane. But I know that it was a painful thing for you and your family, Detective. And so, if you would allow me, I would like to offer my apology for the hurt that I caused.”
Just after the elections that carried the current administration to its first term in power, Dennis J. Brennan wrote a series of articles for his paper. He presented, in careful and dogged detail, the sordid history of corruption, malfeasance, and unconstitutional skullduggery engaged in by Hertz Shemets, over the course of forty years at the FBI. The COINTELPRO program was shut down, its business was farmed out to other departments, and Uncle Hertz was driven into retirement and disgrace. Landsman, who was shocked by nothing, found it tough to get out of bed for a couple of days after the first article ran. He’d known as well as anyone and better than almost everyone that his uncle was badly flawed both as a man and as an officer of the law. But if you wanted to go looking for the reasons that a kid became a noz, it almost never paid to search anywhere but a branch or two up the family tree. Flaws and all, Uncle Hertz was a hero to Landsman. Smart, tough, unremitting, patient, methodical, sure of his actions. If his willingness to cut corners, his bad temper, his secretiveness did not make him a hero, they definitely made him a noz.
“I’m going to put this very gently, Dennis,” Berko says, “because you’re all right. You work hard, you’re a decent writer, and you’re the only guy I know who makes my partner look like a clotheshorse: Fuck you.”
Brennan nods. “I figured you might say that,” he replies, sadly and in American.
“My father’s a fucking hermit,” Berko says. “He’s a mushroom, he lives under a log with the earwigs and the crawly things. Whatever nefarious shit he was up to, he was only doing what he thought was good for the Jews, and you know what’s fucked up about that? He was right, because now look at the motherfucking mess we’re in without him.”
“Jesus, Shemets, I hate to hear that. And I hate to think that a story I wrote had anything to do with — that it led to, in any way — the predicament you yids now find yourself in … Ah, fuck it. Forget it.”
“Okay,” Landsman says. He grabs hold of Berko’s sleeve again. “Come.”
“Hey, uh, yeah. So where you guys going? What’s up?”
“Just fighting crime,” Landsman says. “Same as last time you blew through here.”
But now that he’s unburdened himself, the hound inside Brennan can smell it on Berko and Landsman. Maybe he could smell it on them from a block away, could see it through the glass, a hitch in Berko’s rolling gait, an extra kilo of stoop in Landsman’s shoulder. Maybe the whole apology routine has been building to the question he drags up, in his native tongue, naked and plain:
“Who died?”
“A yid in a predicament,” Berko tells him. “Dog bites man.”
9
They leave Brennan standing outside the Front Page, with his necktie smacking him on the forehead like a remorseful palm, and walk to the corner of Seward and down Peretz, then turn in just past the Palatz Theater, in the lee of Baranof Castle Hill, to a black door, in a black marble facade, with a big picture window painted black.
“You are not serious,” Berko says.
“In fifteen years I never saw another shammes at the Vorsht.”
“It’s nine-thirty in the morning on a Friday, Meyer. There’s nobody in there but the rats.”
“Not true,” Landsman says. He leads Berko around to the side door and lays his knuckles against it, two taps. “I always figured this was the place to plan my misdeeds, if I ever found myself with misdeeds that needed planning.”
The heavy steel door swings open with a groan, revealing Mrs. Kalushiner, dressed to go to shul or a job at the bank, in a gray skirt suit and black pumps, with her hair done up in pink foam rollers. In her hand she carries a paper cup filled with a liquid that looks like coffee or maybe prune juice. Mrs. Kalushiner chews tobacco. The cup is her constant if not sole companion.
“You,” she says, making a face like she just tasted earwax on her fingertip. Then, in her refined way, she spits into the cup. From force of wise habit, she takes a long look up and down the alley to see what style of trouble they have brought along. She makes a rapid and brutal study of the giant yarmulke-wearing Indian who wants to come into her place of business. In the past, the people Landsman has brought here, at this hour of the day, have all been twitchy, mouse-eyed shtinkers like Benny “Shpilkes” Plotner and Zigmund Landau, the Heifetz of Informers. Nobody ever looked less like a shtinker than Berko Shemets. And with all due respect to the beanie and the fringes, no way would this be a middleman or even a low-echelon street wiseguy, not with that Indian puss. When, after careful consideration, she can’t fit Berko into her taxonomy of lowlifes, Mrs. Kalushiner spits into her cup. Then she returns her gaze to Landsman and sighs. By one kind of reckoning, she owes Landsman seventeen favors; by another, she ought to give him a punch in the belly. She steps aside and lets them pass.
The place is as empty as an off-duty downtown bus and smells twice as bad. Somebody came through recently with a bucket of bleach to paint in some high notes over the Vorsht’s steady bass line of sweat and urinals. The keen nose can also detect, above or beneath it all, the coat-lining smell of worn dollar bills.
“Sit there,” Mrs. Kalushiner says, without indicating where she would like them to sit. The round tables that crowd the stage wear overturned chairs like sets of antlers. Landsman flips two of them, and he and Berko take their seats away from the stage, by the heavily bolted front door. Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.
“What a doll,” Berko says.
“A sweetheart,” Landsman agrees. “She only comes in here in the mornings. That way she never has to look at the clientele.” The Vorsht is the place where the musicians of Sitka do their drinking, after the theaters and the other clubs close down. Long after midnight they come huddling in, snow on their hats, rain in their cuffs, and pack the little stage, and kill one another with clarinets and fiddles. As usual when angels gather, they draw a following of devils: gangsters, ganefs, and hard-luck women. “She doesn’t care for musicians.”