33

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, staring out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot — no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick’s face. It’s the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

“I hope you’re dressed,” Dick says without turning from the window. The wistful flicker in his eyes has been snuffed. There is no longer anything happening in his face at all. “Because the things I witnessed in those woods — Christ, I almost had to fucking burn my motherfucking bearskin.” He affects to shudder. “The Tlingit Nation doesn’t pay me anywhere near enough to make up for having to look at you standing around in your underpants.”

“The Tlingit Nation,” says Berko Shemets, pronouncing it like the name of a notorious scam or a claim about the location of Atlantis. He intrudes his bulk on the furnishings of Dick’s office. “So, what, they still pay the salaries around here? Because Meyer was just telling me it might be otherwise.”

Dick turns, slow and lazy, and hikes up a corner of his upper lip to bare a few incisors and cuspids. “Johnny the Jew,” he says. “Well, well. Beanie and all. And clearly you haven’t had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut.”

“Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget.”

“Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer.”

In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the, snow.

“Go shit in the ocean,” Dick says in flawless Yiddish. They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. They pound at each other’s backs, searching for the tubercular spots in their slowly dying friendship, sounding the depths of their ancient enmity like a drum. In the year of misery that preceded his defection to the Jewish side of his nature, before his mother was crushed by a runaway truckload of rioting Jews, young John Bear discovered basketball and Wilfred Dick, then a four-foot-two point guard. It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.

“Johnny Bear,” Dick says. “What the fuck, you great big Jew?”

Berko shrugs, rubbing at the back of his neck in a sheepish way that makes him look like a thirteen-year-old center who has just watched something small and nasty squirt past him on a drive to the basket. “Yeah, hey, Willie D.,” he says.

“Sit down, you fat motherfucker,” Dick says. “You, too, Landsman, and all those ugly freckles on your ass crack.”

Berko grins, and they all sit down, Dick on his side of his desk, the Jewish policemen on theirs. The two chairs for visitors are standard scale, along with the bookshelves and everything else in the office apart from Dick’s desk and chair. The effect is fun house, nauseating. Or maybe that’s another symptom of alcoholic withdrawal. Dick takes out his black cigarettes and pushes an ashtray across the desk toward Landsman. He leans back in his chair and puts his boots up on the desk. He wears the sleeves of his Woolrich shirt rolled back. His forearms are ropy and brown. Curling gray hairs peep over his open collar, and his chic eye glasses are folded in the pocket of his shirt.

“There are so many people I would rather be looking at right now,” he says. “Literally millions.”

“Then close your fucking eyes,” Berko suggests. Dick complies. His eyelids are dark and glossy, bruised- looking. “Landsman,” he says, as if enjoying the blindness, “how was your room?”

“The sheets had a touch more lavender water than I care for,” Landsman says. “Other than that, I really have no complaints.”

Dick opens his eyes. “It has been my good fortune as an agent of law enforcement on this reservation to have relatively few dealings with Jews over the years,” he begins. “Oh, and before either of you starts cinching up his sphincter on me over my supposed anti-Semitism, let me just stipulate right now that I don’t give a flying fuck whether I offend your pork-shunning asses or not, and on balance, I would say that I hope I do. The fat man there knows perfectly well, or he should, that I hate everyone equally and without favor, regardless of creed or DNA.”

“Understood,” says Berko.

“We feel the same way about you,” Landsman says.

“My point is that Jews mean bullshit. A thousand laminated layers of politics and lies buffed to a high sheen. Therefore, I believe precisely ass point two per cent of anything that was told to me by this supposed Dr. Roboy, whose credentials, by the way, check out as legitimate but with a certain amount of mud at the bottom, about how you came to be scooting down that road in your skivvies, Landsman, with a Jew cowboy taking potshots at you out the window of his car.”

Landsman starts to explain, but Dick holds up one of his girlish hands, the nails neat and glossy.

“Let me finish. Those gentlemen, no, Johnny, they do not pay my salary, fuck you very much. But through means not given to me to understand, and that I don’t have the stomach to speculate about, those gentlemen have friends, Tlingit friends, who do pay my salary, or to be specific, who sit on the council that does. And if those wise tribal elders were to indicate to me that they would not take it amiss if I booked your partner here, and held him on charges of trespassing and burglary, not to mention conducting an illegal and unauthorized investigation, then that is what I would have to do. Those Jewish squirrels out there at Peril Strait, and I know you know it pains me to say this, for better or worse, they’re my motherfucking Jewish squirrels. And their facility, for as long as they occupy it, comes under the full color and protection of Tribal law enforcement. Even if, after I go to all the trouble to save your freckle-assed life out there, Landsman, and drag you down here and house you at considerable expense, fuck if those Jews don’t seem to lose all interest in you.”

“Talk about verbal jags,” Landsman says to Berko.

To Dick he says, “They got a doctor here, I really think you ought to see him.”

“But much as I’d like to send you back to get your ass hung on a hook by that ex-wife of yours, Landsman,” Dick barrels on, “and try as I might, I can’t seem to let you go without asking just one question, even knowing in advance that you’re both Jews, of a sort, and that any answer you give me is only going to add to the layers of bullshit that are already blinding me with their high Jewish shine.”

They wait for the question, and it comes, and Dick’s manner hardens. All traces of verbosity and teasing vanish.

“Are we talking about a homicide?” he says.

“Yes,” Landsman says at the same time that Berko says, “Officially, no.’”