Don't Ever Get Old (8 page)

The few civilian luxury cars made for Nazi officials during those years, like the big Mercedes 770 Grosser limousine, were built on chassis that could support heavy armor plates designed to withstand machine-gun fire. A car like that would have to be carrying at least eight hundred pounds in the trunk to be riding visibly low on the rear shocks.

That's pretty impressive, in my estimation. Rose recently made me give a family friend, a heavyset lady who doesn't drive anymore, a ride to her doctor's office. When this woman climbed into my Buick, the whole passenger's side of the car sank toward the pavement. Which is probably why GM went into Chapter 11.

Goes to show that even the Nazis took pride in craftsmanship, which is more than can be said for folks these days.

 

10

At one in the morning, Dr. Lawrence Kind decided to stop by again and ring the doorbell ten or fifteen times. I wouldn't have been particularly pleased to see him even under normal circumstances, and I was not happy at all that he woke me in the middle of the night.

I didn't tear into him as much as I might have, though, because he looked pretty torn up already. He was ashen-faced and disheveled; certainly less confident and self-assured than he had been the previous evening.

The whites of his eyes were pink, to match that unsettling reptile mouth of his. There was a rust-colored spot on his shirtsleeve. Could have been blood. Could have been some kind of food stain, maybe tomato sauce. His hair was lank and tangled; not his normal shampooed, Christian coiffure. He stank of stale cigarette smoke, cheap whiskey, and desperation.

“Reverend, do you have any idea what time it is?” I asked

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I have to talk to you about Jim Wallace's gold.”

Well, obviously. I let out a distended, theatrical groan, to make sure he was aware of my annoyance.

“Jim Wallace was flat broke,” I told him. “You were at the funeral. You buried the guy in a cardboard refrigerator box.”

“Emily came to speak to me after he died. She told me about Heinrich Ziegler, and about you. She says her husband is obsessed with the gold, and he thinks you're going to find it and split it with him. You can't let Norris Feely get his hands on that treasure. He's not a nice man, Buck. He treats her quite poorly.”

“Funny, he had so many nice things to say about you,” I said. And when he didn't respond: “I guess you think the money should go to you?”

“To the church,” he said. “To further Christ's divine mission.”

Kind's concern clearly had little to do with giving effect to Jim's wishes. I could hear need around the edges of his voice and see it in the quivering corners of that lascivious pink mouth. He was hurting for cash.

“I don't know if there is any gold, or where it is,” I told the minister. “Norris Feely doesn't know, and neither did Jim Wallace. What do you need that money for, anyway? Your church is enormous.”

He looked at me, eyes brimming, and what he told me sounded like the truth. “Churches are built by the tithing of the flock and the grace of God, but they're also built on credit. God has to make the mortgage payment like everyone else, or I do, rather, and God has led me to you, Buck Schatz.”

I recognized the tone; recognized the look on his face. In Kind's glassy pink eyes, I saw the sort of weary resignation that had crossed the faces of dozens, maybe hundreds, of suspects I'd stared down across an interrogation table. He was about to confess something to me. People had always liked to confess to me. I always told them I couldn't help them. I was never dishonest about that. But they spilled their guts anyway.

Kind could keep his mouth shut as far as I was concerned. Whatever his problems were, I didn't see why I should care about them. “Dr. Kind, I appreciate the work you're doing and the hospitality of the church when we went to the funeral, but there's nothing I can do for you.”

“Please, Mr. Schatz, I've fallen to temptation. I owe too much at the casinos in Mississippi, and some of the money I threw down that hole belonged to the church.” Kind choked back a sob. “I'm underwater. You have to help me.”

He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, striking a mournful pose he must have thought exhibited his boundless oceans of regret. In their minds, people's boring, puerile problems always take on Shakespearean proportions. This degenerate had no self-control; oldest story in the world. I didn't need to hear it again.

Desperate people always thought I had to help them. I didn't have to help them. I was retired from hearing confessions, and even when I had been in that business, I was an instrument of punishment, not a vessel for absolution. But guilty people would get some vague notion that beneath my gruff exterior, I was some kind of softy. Every drunk who beat his girlfriend to death, every junkie who did a murder to get a fix, every arrogant asshole who thought he could make some problem disappear into the Mississippi River; each believed his situation was surrounded by mitigating circumstances. Surely I would weep to know such pain. So, hanging over the abyss, they all confessed unto Buck and threw themselves upon my mercy.

They thought I'd understand. And maybe they were right. Maybe I did understand. But I didn't forgive.

“Tell me what to do, Mr. Schatz,” said Lawrence Kind.

I laid a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you should pray.”

Then I shut the door in his face and went back to bed.

“What was that all about?” Rose asked, half-asleep.

“Next time you decide to make some new friends, you can leave me out of it,” I told her.

 

11

About seven hours later, while I was sipping coffee and looking at the paper, the biggest Russian I ever saw showed up at my house and said he wanted to get to know me.

He didn't need to ring the bell, like Kind had. He just pounded with his meaty fist, and the sound rolled like a thunderclap through the house.

“Mr. Buckshot,” he said when I opened the door. “My name is Yitzchak Steinblatt.”

He was fully six and a half feet and maybe three hundred twenty pounds of thick, rubbery features, dense muscle, and bristly black hair, topped with a yarmulke. He smiled at me the way a grizzly bear might smile at a salmon.

Interesting.

“Pleasure to meet you, Yid's Cock,” I said.

“I am from Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs. I work to maintain the special bond between the Jews of America and the state of Israel. I have come to spend time with Jews of the American South, and I am told, in Memphis, I must speak to Mr. Buckshot. They say you know everyone.”

This was true. “When you've been around, you get around.”

He enveloped my hand with a monstrous paw and shook it with ursine enthusiasm.

“Careful there, big guy,” I said. “I'm on a blood thinner, you know. I bruise pretty easily.”

“I am very sorry.”

“Why don't you come on in, and have a cup of coffee.” No reason to be inhospitable, I figured.

“Rose,” I called out. “We have a visitor from the Israeli government.”

She came in from the kitchen and sized up the Russian for a moment.

“I'll put on a fresh pot.”

We sat at the kitchen table. Steinblatt took his coffee with lots of milk and three packets of Sweet'n Low. I drank mine black and bitter. We didn't speak for a moment. The kitchen was nice in the morning. The window by the table opened out onto Rose's garden, and we got a lot of sunlight through it.

I was glad for the quiet; I needed to decide how to treat this guy. The Israeli Diaspora Ministry seemed like a public relations department, but I figured its operatives probably carried diplomatic credentials. “Diaspora” was the term Israelis used to describe all the Jews who didn't live in Israel, and there were Jews everywhere—all over the United States, in every country in Europe, even in China. An affiliation like that would really let a guy travel.

I looked at the way those big, sinewy hands folded around the coffee mug, and I considered all possible implications of Avram Silver's good job with the Israeli government. Forty-eight hours had elapsed since the former Nazi hunter hung up his phone on me and Tequila. Had he set this behemoth loose on us?

“So when did you make aliyah?” I asked.

“I immigrated to the Jewish homeland in 1992,” Steinblatt said.

“Right after the Soviet Union collapsed.”

“Yes. It was tumultuous time. I feared for the safety of my family.”

“Because you were Jews?”

He paused a tick before answering, and I saw feral intelligence flickering in his dark, deep-set eyes.

“Yes.”

He had to be ex-Russian military or former KGB. An undercover Mossad assassin, right there at my damned kitchen table. Or maybe he was a simple flack for the state of Israel who just happened to be unusually large. My doctor had warned me to report any paranoid feelings; they were an early sign of dementia among the elderly.

I cleared my throat. “So, who was it again who told you to come by and talk to me?”

“I spoke to someone with the Memphis Jewish Federation,” he said.

“You didn't talk to Avram Silver?”

His face hung slack and expressionless. “I don't know who that is.”

I took a long sip from my coffee.

“Let me tell you a story,” I said, wagging a finger at him. “I used to be a police detective, back in the prehistoric days, before I got old. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“A rookie cop recently asked me how I could tell when an investigation was heading in the right direction. It's an interesting question, one I have been thinking about. Part of it is intuition, and part of it is instinct. I also know I am making progress when facts that don't seem to relate to anything start fitting together into a logical story.”

He nodded. “Makes sense.”

“But mostly, I know I am on the right track when some kind of heavy shows up to try to intimidate me.”

“Heavy?”

“Yeah. An enforcer. A goon. Muscle. Meat on the hoof. You follow?”

His expression was unchanged, as far as I could tell. I squinted to make sure, since his face was so hairy.

“I think I understand,” he said.

“Sometimes they make overt threats,” I continued, keeping an even, conversational tone. “Sometimes they behave in a friendly or at least polite manner, while still managing to convey that unmistakable menacing subtext. Sometimes they don't even talk to me; they just show up and give me the stink-eye.”

The Russian set the coffee cup carefully on his saucer.

“I remember this one case. Somebody had strangled a girl in a cheap apartment in a run-down part of midtown, and I liked a highly placed aide to the mayor as the killer.”

“This sounds like story out of detective novel,” said Steinblatt. His voice was flat and calm and toneless. He was a hard guy to get a read on.

“I know, right? But these powerful guys always had mistresses, and the mistresses always threatened to tell the wives, and these guys always killed the mistresses. Whenever we showed up at an apartment or a hotel room with a dead girl inside it, somebody would have to check to see if the mayor had an alibi.”

“So what did you do about this politician?”

“Well, you know, I am a man of class and subtlety, so I kicked in the door of his house at five in the morning, threw the cuffs on him in front of his kids, and frog-walked him into the police station in his bathrobe, so all the press I'd tipped off could take his picture.”

Yitzchak flashed his grizzly bear grin. “I imagine he didn't like that.”

“I suppose not,” I said. “But, since I didn't have any evidence, I had to cut him loose after twenty-four hours, and the same afternoon, a heavy showed up outside the police station, a guy about your size, actually. He didn't say anything to me, but when he saw me notice him, he just nodded and cracked his knuckles.”

I glanced at the Russian's big hands, resting on my kitchen table.

“The next morning, I stopped at the coffee shop for a cup and a short stack, and there was the same guy, standing across the street. And he nodded, and cracked his knuckles. And when I left work, there he was again, nodding and cracking. I went bowling with some of my buddies, and this guy was outside the bowling alley, with his goddamn knuckles.”

“Did that frighten you?”

“It was a little disconcerting. This guy kept showing up everywhere I went for a couple of days, and when I tried to take my family out to dinner, and he was waiting for me at the restaurant, where my wife and son could see him, I decided I'd had enough.”

“What did you do?”

“I shot him.”

I finished the coffee and slammed the mug down on the table.

The big Jew didn't flinch at the noise, he just stroked his beard. “That is a good story. Thank you for sharing it.”

“You sure you never heard of Avram Silver?”

“I don't believe so.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why don't you meet me at the Jewish Community Center at around four this afternoon, and I will introduce you to some people.”

“I would like that very much.”

I was there, on time, waiting. He didn't show up, though.

 

12

Later that night, I found myself in the enormous auditorium of Lawrence Kind's shopping mall church, thinking about Yitzchak Steinblatt and those dangerous hands of his.

Kind wasn't being very conversational. I didn't hold it against him, since somebody had hacked off his lower jaw and flung it against the wall, leaving a red splotch on the white stucco.

“That happened while he was still alive,” said Detective Randall Jennings, pointing at the stain.

“I guess he was not at peace in his final moments,” I said.

“Guess not,” Jennings agreed.

I lit a cigarette, and nobody told me to put it out.