Don't Ever Get Old (7 page)

“I brought you this,” he said, and he handed me an ashtray.

I allowed myself a chuckle, and I barely even flinched when he touched my shoulder with his hand; barely even recoiled when his lips peeled back off of his slimy gums. I had not expected the spiritual doctor to have a sense of humor.

“Larry, this is my grandson, Mojito. Mojito lives in New York City, where he spends the money he inherited from my late son.”

“Good to know you, uh, Mojito,” said the preacher.

“It's Tequila,” said Tequila. “It's a fraternity nickname that kind of stuck.”

“Of course,” said Kind.

“Dr. Kind delivered the soul of my dear friend Jim Wallace unto the bosom of the Good Lord Jesus Christ,” I told Tequila.

“I'm sure he appreciated that,” Tequila said.

Kind gave one of his bounteous smiles to Tequila and then fixed his eyes on a point somewhere behind me.

“Good to see you again, Norris,” he said.

I turned around and was surprised to find Feely standing there. Used to be, I was tough to sneak up on, but I'd been having some trouble with my hearing. For some reason, the outside parts of my ears had grown bigger and fleshier, while the inner workings had dramatically scaled back operations. A tangle of bristly hairs had grown in the ear canals, like weeds sprouting in the ruin of an abandoned building.

“Eat shit and die,” Feely told Kind. His eyes were narrowed to little slits, and he was baring his teeth like an angry Chihuahua. I supposed he was trying to be menacing, but since he was basically just a marshmallow covered in hair, he only managed to look a little constipated.

Tequila cocked a questioning eyebrow at me. I shrugged back at him. I had no idea what that was about.

“Buck, I think I'm going to go see how Emily is doing,” Kind said, and he turned his back on Feely and walked toward the sound of Rose and Emily chatting in the kitchen.

I started to follow him, but Feely grabbed my arm. I wondered what they taught in that church that made these people think it was okay to touch me.

“Can we talk in front of him?” he asked, jerking his head in my grandson's direction. There were little beads of sweat on his forehead and on his upper lip.

I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “Norris, you and I don't share any secrets.”

“All right. All right,” he said, his eyes flicking toward Tequila, who was chewing the insides of his face, trying not to laugh.

“You know why that rat-bastard preacher is here, right?” Feely asked me, lowering his voice to a rough whisper.

“Probably because your wife invited him,” I said.

“He's after our treasure, just like I told you. This proves it.”

“Norris, there's no treasure, and there's no us.”

But Norris didn't seem to hear me. His shiny pink cheeks were quivering with rage. “Emily inherited Jim's share, fair and square. We're going to have to do something about Lawrence Kind.”

“Jim doesn't have a share,” Tequila interjected. “He took a bribe and let a war criminal escape.”

“You told him?” Feely slapped a hand against his forehead, which made a sound like creamed corn splattering on a linoleum floor. Then his face screwed up again to show how angry he was, and he jabbed a fat finger into my chest. “Whatever he gets comes out of your cut, Buck.”

I mustered the best snarl I could twist my own sagging jowls into and poked a finger right back at him.

“Norris, I expect you to go apologize to the reverend, and behave yourself in a way that doesn't ruin this evening for Rose,” I told him. “You and Kind can settle up how to divide Jim's piece of nothing on your own time, but don't waste any more of mine. I don't want any part of your delusional fantasies.”

“Well, if that's the way it is, I damn well intend to settle things with that son of a bitch, and with you as well, if you're throwing in with him.” Feely turned and stomped off toward the kitchen.

“Grandpa, you've got some weird-ass friends,” said Tequila.

“And you don't know when to keep your stupid mouth shut,” I told him.

Rose remained unaware of the tension between Kind and Feely as best I could tell, and the dinner was civil, although the conversation was strained and a little awkward.

Norris and Emily had brought over some kind of meat roast with gravy. I found a hair on my portion, and I didn't eat any.

I got rid of everyone a little before nine, explaining that old people had to go to bed early. After the guests left, I made an Oscar Mayer bologna sandwich, on rye bread with mustard and some iceberg lettuce. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

9

The next morning, I woke up feeling kind of unsettled. The malaise was familiar. It was my cop early-warning system, the low rumbling growl my watchdog instinct sent reverberating through my brain stem to let me know somebody nasty was looking for me and planning to make trouble. Rose read some kind of psychology book once and told me that this was my subconscious mind perceiving associations between things I hadn't consciously connected yet. I never paid much attention to that stuff, but it sounded like the kind of thing that might be true.

I hadn't had that feeling in thirty years, though, and it scared me. I wasn't concerned particularly about Norris Feely or Lawrence Kind or Avram Silver; I was mostly just scared about the implications of the tingling at the base of my skull. Paranoia was one of the early symptoms of senile dementia.

I figured a walk on the treadmill would clear my head. But somewhere between the house and the Jewish Community Center, I started getting real suspicious of a red Honda trailing four car lengths behind me.

Sunlight was reflecting off my shadow's windshield, so I couldn't see the driver.

I turned left. So did he.

I changed lanes, and he did as well.

I swallowed hard, wondering what I had stirred up by calling that Israeli. Probably nothing; this probably meant nothing.

It was all in my head.

A couple of weeks previous, I'd had an unpleasant talk with my doctor. He was clutching a folder full of test results and giving me that thin-lipped, scrunched-eyebrow look medical folks get when they're giving you the bad news. He was just a kid, in his early forties, but he'd been taking care of us for about five years, since our old doctor retired to Boca Raton and dropped dead on a golf course from some kind of massive embolism. I guessed the new guy was doing a good enough job; Rose and I were still breathing.

“Buck, I can put you on a medication to try and improve these memory problems you've been having, but I don't necessarily think that's a good idea.”

I tugged at my shirt. “You think I have Alzheimer's, don't you.”

His lips curled downward in his best compassionate frown. “No. Many older patients have some confusion, some memory loss. There are a number of factors that can contribute to these difficulties.”

“How long have I got before I turn into one of those zombies, staggering around a nursing home with no pants on?”

I'd gone for a consultation with a neurologist after an embarrassing episode; I'd been driving in my car, and I realized I didn't know where I was and couldn't remember where I was going. I pulled into a parking lot and called Rose from a pay phone. She had asked me why I didn't call on my cellular. I'd forgotten I had one.

“Your neurological tests don't show sufficient impairment to meet a clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's-type dementia. You may have what we refer to as mild cognitive impairment, but it's difficult to make that kind of distinction in some patients.”

“So you're telling me you don't know whether it's Alzheimer's?”

He avoided looking at me, kept his eyes fixed on the chart. “I've conferred with the neurologist. Your MRI shows no visible lesions on your brain, and my assessment is that you're still pretty sharp for a man your age. Nonetheless, your test results may indicate a pre-Alzheimer's state that we would ordinarily combat with an aggressive drug regimen in a younger patient.”

Over the years, I had dealt with my share of doctors and lawyers and car mechanics. They always started talking technical when they were trying to put something by me.

“Younger than what?”

“Buck, my goal as a provider of medical care to the elderly is to try to provide the maximum number of quality life years to my patients. Do you understand what that means?”

It sounded like a pile to me. “Suppose I don't?”

The doctor put down the chart and leaned against his desk. “It means nobody lives forever. Life is a degenerative, terminal condition.”

I made a phlegmy noise that expressed my contempt. “You missed your calling. You should have been a writer for Hallmark cards.”

The doctor shuffled the papers on his desk. I pulled out my pack of Luckys. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Of course you can't smoke here. This is a hospital.”

“Come on, Doc. You're telling me I'm dying. I could use a cigarette to take the edge off that.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “I did not say you are dying. It's hard to tell the difference between the pre-clinical stages of Alzheimer's and a normally functioning brain in an eighty-seven-year-old patient. Medications commonly prescribed for dementia can cause bruising of the skin and bleeding of the lining of your stomach, which could be problematic when combined with the anticoagulants you're using.”

I looked at the expanding purple mark on my arm, from where the nurse had pricked me to take a blood sample.

“You're telling me I have Alzheimer's and you're not going to do anything about it.”

“I'm not saying that at all. Your recent episode may have been caused by dehydration. Remember, the pills you take also function as diuretics. But even if you are suffering from the early stages of dementia, it will take six to eight years for the disease to progress to a point of causing significant impairment. Patients in your age group face more immediate hazards such as complications from cold or flu, heart attacks, stroke, and injuries from household mishaps. Frail patients on complicated medications are extremely vulnerable to harmful drug interactions, so I don't want to give you more pills.”

So that was it. I was too old to be worth treating. I was so brittle, I might topple over like a rotten tree in a stiff wind.

“Look,” said the doctor. “Many studies show that simple exercises to improve mental acuity can be very effective in staving off the progression of mild dementia.”

I crossed my arms. “I'm getting a little old for calisthenics.”

“No. I want you to try to make an effort to do puzzles, like the crossword or Sudoku.”

“Sudoku?” I asked. “Sounds Japanese.”

“Uh, it's, like, a grid. With numbers on it.”

“Tell you what: I'll look at the crossword.”

“Good, good. And you should also try to keep a notebook with you and write down things you don't want to forget. A lot of experts say that making a conscious effort at recall slows the deterioration of the memory.”

I was not happy with his suggestions. “This seems an awful lot like doing nothing,” I told him. “Placebo effect, or what have you.”

“Keep the notebook, Buck. The way I see it, you have two choices here; you can decide to trust me or not.” He smiled. “And let me tell you something about paranoia—”

I looked in the rearview as the Honda pulled under a shade tree, breaking the glare on the windshield for a moment. In the driver's seat, I saw a lumpy shape that could have been Norris Feely.

I made another left turn, and so did the Honda. If I kept turning corners trying to shake him, I was likely to get myself lost again. I turned on my hazard lights and pulled off the road, and my shadow cruised past. The driver was a heavyset woman.

No tail, or at least that car wasn't tailing me. Used to be, I could trust my instincts. I pulled my notebook out of my right chest pocket and wrote down the red car's license tag number.

Then I flipped back to the first page, on which I'd written:

“Something I don't want to forget: Doctor says paranoia is an early symptom of dementia.”

I thought about it for a minute, and I scratched out the note about the Honda.

 

Something I don't want to forget:

As worked up as folks seemed to be getting over the Nazi gold, after sixty years, I had to wonder where somebody like Ziegler could have got his hands on such a treasure. As it turns out, when the Jews of Europe were evacuated to ghettos and death camps, Hitler's regime confiscated all their assets. Genocide, it seems, isn't a charitable enterprise; liquidity is the best reason for liquidating people.

The Nazis converted the wealth they plundered into gold bullion, and it was a damn lucrative business. The take from this racket added up to billions, and that's in 1945 dollars. They stashed a lot of the gold in official buildings in Berlin, and after the war, the fleeing Nazi brass stole as much as they could carry with them. That's how they financed their false identities and fraudulent official documents. That's how they bought protection from Arab and South American regimes. That's how the most wanted men on earth escaped capture for decades.

And if Ziegler had looted one of Hitler's caches, he could have got away with a staggering amount of treasure. Jim Wallace told me that Ziegler came through his checkpoint in a big Mercedes-Benz and that the car was weighed down by the heavy gold in the trunk.

According to Tequila's Internet, there was very little civilian industrial production in Germany after 1938, because all the factories were converted to war production. Hitler seized and scrapped most private cars to fuel his war effort. So the only sort of Mercedes-Benz automobile Ziegler might have been driving in 1946 would have been built for war, meant to carry lots of men or heavy guns and shells.