Don't Ever Get Old (16 page)

But that open gate looked damn tempting.

“If the Jew can get through me, every one of you may go through this gate.”

Ziegler wasn't looking for a real fight. He was angry, and he wanted to take it out on somebody. He'd already done plenty to make sure I was in no shape to make much of a contest of it.

Two broken fingers on my right hand were taped with torn strips of bedsheet, but there was no good way to splint up my crushed toes. There were no bandages, either, for the wounds on my back where Ziegler had lashed me, and no antibiotics. My rain-soaked T-shirt was striped with blood and yellow-green pus.

I was so delirious, I barely heard him shouting for me. I was burning with fever, and Wallace was propping me up so I wouldn't fall out of line.

The guards had recently decided they liked strangling me, and the rope burns they'd left on my neck stung when the rain ran over them or when I tried to breathe too deeply. My chest and ribs were mostly purple with bruises.

“How about it, Buuuuuuuck,” Ziegler called in some kind of singsong Kraut version of a cowboy-movie accent. “You got any fight left in you?”

Somebody tousled my hair, and somebody else squeezed my arm. It hurt.

“I reckon I got 'nuff,” I said.

The tendons in his neck stretched taut beneath his flesh as he sneered at me. “Enough for what?”

“I got…” I paused as I stumbled in the mud. “I got 'nuff to fuck you up pretty good.”

He was about to kill me, and my vision was swimming. But I figured I was damn well going to take a swing at the bastard. I folded the broken fingers into my fist. My whole arm screamed with pain, but at least it woke me up a little.

The crowd of prisoners parted, and I stepped into the middle of the parade ground. The storm had turned everything to mud, and each time I lifted a foot to take a step, the ground pulled back against my boot.

Ziegler was a real big sumbitch; he had at least six inches on me, and he must have been close to two hundred and forty pounds of hard, sculpted muscle. He looked like the classical god of Jew bashing. I was greenish pale with illness and gaunt from months of near starvation.

I coughed, long and rattling, and then I spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm into the mud. I rested for a moment with my hands on my knees, and then I lifted myself as erect as I could manage.

“I ain't had a smoke in five weeks, and I sure as shit ain't dying without one,” I told him. I'd have clawed through a brick wall with my fingernails if there was a pack of Lucky Strikes on the other side.

A few of the men cheered, but Ziegler pounced at me, throwing all of his considerable bulk behind a hard right hook.

“You'll die when I tell you to die,” he hissed.

My head was just clear enough and my reflexes were just quick enough that I was able to shift somewhat out of the way, and his hand glanced off the side of my head instead of hitting me full in the face.

While he was off balance from the punch, I threw an arm around his neck. He seemed to know how to box, and he thought that was the same as knowing how to fight. I gouged the thumb of my good hand hard into his eye and showed him the difference.

I heard him yelp, but hanging on to my powerful, writhing foe was almost unbearably painful. I could feel the crust of scabs and hardened goo over my wounds cracking as my flesh twisted with the effort. I ignored my body's protests and tightened my grip on Ziegler's throat, trying to close his windpipe and strangle him unconscious. With one of my arms around his neck and my other hand in his eye, his fists were free to pummel at my belly; but his flailing legs gave him no leverage against the slick, muddy ground, and I held him too close to give him room to throw a proper punch, so there was little force behind the blows. I could have ended it there if he hadn't raked his fingers across my back, ripping everything open from my neck to the crack of my ass.

I howled in agony and dropped him. He scrambled quickly to his feet and hit me twice. One of his punches landed solid, and my head snapped backward. I lunged at him, and we both tumbled to the ground. I managed to yank a boot out of the sucking mud and planted it in the middle of his chest. He flopped back to the ground while I hauled myself upright.

Ziegler shouted in German. I heard a single shot from one of the guard towers, and then I felt an eruption of pain in my right shoulder.

I tried to raise the damaged arm, but it wouldn't respond. It was dead meat, hanging at my side. Blood poured out of me in a hot torrent, and my strength went with it. I collapsed to my knees.

He scrambled to his feet and pivoted around to my defenseless right side.

“Well, shit,” I said.

His fist hit my head, and there was nothing I could do about it, so he hit me again. My vision swam, and the ground rushed up to kiss me good night. After that, I don't remember anything until I woke up in the hospital, and by then it was November.

 

25

What happens to criminals and villains who escape justice and avoid capture is the same thing that happens to everyone else. They get old.

Josef Mengele, the mad doctor of Auschwitz, enjoyed injecting chemicals into children's eyes and killing and dissecting sets of identical twins. American soldiers actually caught him in 1945, but he got some phony release papers and escaped to South America. He stayed ahead of the people chasing him until 1979. Then he went swimming in the ocean one day, something popped in his brain, and he passed out and drowned.

Alois Brunner was Sancho Panza to Adolf Eichmann's Don Quixote. He was personally responsible for sending one hundred and forty thousand people to the gas chambers. Brunner escaped Germany using a bogus Red Cross passport and fled to Syria, where he was hired as a “government adviser” to teach the Arabs how to torture people. The Mossad sent Brunner some letter bombs in 1961 and in 1980, and they blew off a couple of his fingers. Nobody ever caught him, and nobody knows if he's still alive; the last credible sighting of him was in 1992. Probably he's dead, but if he's not, he's a hundred years old, which is pretty much the same thing.

Old age had found Henry Winters as well. The nurse had washed him, dressed him in clean clothes, and propped him in a plastic-covered recliner wedged next to his freshly made bed, but there was little she could have done to conceal his infirmity.

His mouth hung slack on the left side, and his left eye didn't seem to focus on what he was looking at. I'd been around enough to know a stroke victim when I saw one.

But despite the years and the wrinkles and the loose skin, despite the sagging eyelid and the drooling mouth, I recognized Heinrich Ziegler. He had the same cold in those eyes that he had when he clocked me in the skull. The half of his mouth that was still hooked up to his brain curled in the same contemptuous half sneer.

“Is it him?” Tequila asked.

“I think so,” I said. I turned to Winters. “Do you know me?” I asked him.

“Never seen you before,” he said. “Never seen either of you. Are you the men who took away my house?”

“It's been over sixty years,” Tequila said. “How sure are you?”

“If you check his left arm, on the bicep, below the armpit, you should find his blood type tattooed there. The SS guys did that, in case they were brought into the medics unconscious and needed transfusions. We used the tattoos to identify the criminals after the war, when they tried to hide among the civilians.”

Winters's left arm hung limp at his side, disabled by the stroke. Tequila grabbed it, roughly, and yanked on the neck hole of Winters's sweatshirt to check for the mark.

“Type A,” he said.

That was enough to eliminate all doubt. Henry Winters was Heinrich Ziegler. I leaned forward and showed him my teeth in a way I thought might be menacing. “Hello, Heinrich.”

“My name is Henry,” said Ziegler. He seemed more confused than afraid. “Who are you?”

Tequila dropped the arm, and it fell to Ziegler's side. I remembered not being able to lift my own arm after he'd shot me.

“Nice ink you've got. I've got marks from the war, too.” I pulled my shirt aside and let him see the concave, fist-sized circle of waxy scar tissue on my shoulder where the bullet that had gone in through my back had blown a cone-shaped exit hole through my shoulder. The gesture pinched the strap of my holster tight against my body, reminding me of what I was carrying.

“I know you from the war?” He squinted his good eye. “No, that can't be right. The men I know from the war are young.” He pointed at Tequila. “Maybe I've seen that one.”

“The war was sixty-five years ago,” I growled at him. “This here is my grandson, Jägermeister.”

“Give me a fucking break, Grandpa,” Tequila said.

“Sixty-five years?” Ziegler asked. He thought about it, then he looked at his dead arm and registered surprise that it didn't work. He caught himself and reflexively tried to hide his confusion. “So, uh, I know you from the war, then?”

I narrowed my eyes but didn't say anything.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
he asked, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

I didn't know what I had been expecting to find here, but it wasn't this. “No, I was on the other side,” I told him.

“Oh,” he said. Then he looked at me again, and for a moment, comprehension seemed to flicker across his face. “So, you've come to kill me, then?” he asked, almost like he wanted it.

It was a good question; there was a time I would have killed him. I became very conscious of the weight of the handgun tucked in my armpit and, for some reason, acutely aware of a corner of my memory notebook that was jabbing into my side.

I had told myself the objective here was to defy death or face it down, to rain justice on a villain even though people like my doctor thought I was feeble and fragile; even though my own grandson thought I had lost my marbles. I wanted to carry a gun and hunt a dangerous fugitive, to put my boot against the throat of something evil one last time. I wanted to prove that Buck Schatz wasn't the kind of person who could be leveled by a “fall event” or “cognitive impairment.”

But seeing hard, cruel Heinrich Ziegler crushed by age stripped away that pretense; I was a coward. I'd used my pursuit of this man as an excuse to flee from the things I couldn't handle: Rose's injury and my own mortality. And what a cruel irony that my escape attempt had brought me here, where the Enemy I was afraid to face was wrapped all around, crawling on the walls, oozing from the electrical sockets, waving the wasted shell that used to be Ziegler at me like a rag doll.

“Get something,” I said quietly, to myself, as I reached into my jacket to touch the butt of the gun. “Get something persuasive between myself and whatever means to do me harm.”

“Grandpa?” Tequila looked at me, his expression blank and questioning; he didn't seem to know what our trip was about. I wasn't sure he knew what he wanted me to do. Even with the tension between us, he trusted implicitly that whatever I chose was the right thing.

Had I come here to kill him? How could I? Looking at him was like staring into a damn mirror.

“How's about it, Heinrich?” I asked. “You got any fight left in you?”

His good eye was aimed at me, but there wasn't any sign of comprehension there. The three of us spent a long, silent moment looking at each other.

“No,” I said finally. “No, Heinrich, I'm not going to kill you.”

Ziegler wiped drool from his face with the back of his hand. “Who are you people?” he asked, and his right brow knit with confusion. “Can you help me get back to my house?”

“Yeah, uh, so we saw him. I guess we've done what we came here to do,” I told Tequila.

He crossed his arms impatiently. “The gold, Grandpa.”

“Shit.” The gold. That was what I wanted. That was still out there to chase. I wondered how I could have let it slip my mind.

“Tell me about the gold, Ziegler,” I growled.

“I want to go home,” Ziegler said. He pouted and stuck out his wet chin.

Disgusted, I slapped him hard across the face. “What happened to the gold you swiped in Berlin?”

“Make new friends, but keep the old,” said the Nazi. “One is silver, the other's gold.”

“Maybe he's talking about Avram Silver,” Tequila suggested. “Or the Silver Gulch Casino.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “It's nonsense. His mind has turned to mush. We won't get anything more out of him.”

I looked around. Ziegler's little apartment was maybe two hundred square feet. He had a kitchenette area set off from the sleeping space, with a few cupboards, a steel sink, a small refrigerator, and a microwave oven. He had his plastic-covered bed, his plastic-covered chair, and a chest of drawers. Small closet.

He sure wasn't stashing any treasure here. Was he spending it to live in this place? Had he buried it in some secret spot and forgotten about it? If he had, it was lost. We needed to get some kind of clue here, or this was the end of the trail.

Ziegler rubbed his cheek where I'd slapped him. “Who are you people?” he asked. “Why does my face hurt?”

“Toss the room,” I told Tequila.

He scratched his head. “Toss?”

“Search the place, goddamn it. And hurry up; get it done before that nurse comes back.”

 

26

On a high shelf in Ziegler's closet, we found a promising lead: a box containing his financial and health records, assorted correspondence, and an old-looking key in a small brown paper envelope, secreted away among his bank statements.

“What do you think this unlocks?” Tequila asked.

“From the look of it, maybe a safe deposit box,” I told him. I turned to the much-diminished god of Jew bashing. “Hey, Ziegler, have you got a safe deposit box?”

“Who are you?”

“If he has any treasures, I'll bet they're in that box,” Tequila suggested, ignoring the drooling wreck in the plastic-covered armchair.