Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (13 page)

How many of his crew knew about my meeting with him? His five thick henchmen. The bartender. How many others might have heard about it? What if there were other Jewish cops involved in the scheme who knew he’d met with me?

If I let the robbery happen, I could never be sure my complicity in it would stay secret. If I were a regular white policeman, I could have just reported the contact to the brass and been in the clear, but I was a Jew inside a sick institution, and I had no easy answers.

If the law was so debased and its guardians were so perverted, maybe Brian was right, and I should find myself a new line of work. Maybe Elijah was right, and I should just acclimate myself to a dirty lifestyle. What moral imperative prevented me from helping myself to the contents of that bank vault, at the expense of a faceless victim-entity that was incapable of suffering? Maybe justice was a meaningless concept in a world where the police lined up in force to protect Alvin Kluge and his money from the Negroes he exploited.

Maybe I should have just done whatever Elijah wanted. If I were on the inside of his scheme, I could tie off his loose ends afterward at my leisure.

While I was considering these options and watching the front entrance of the bank, Elijah opened the passenger-side door of my car and slid into the seat.

“Hello, Baruch,” he said.

I damn near jumped out of my skin. How was it even possible to open a car door without making noise? I reached inside my jacket, but Elijah laid a hand on my arm, to keep me from drawing my gun.

“Let’s not be uncivil,” he said. I heard a tap on the back window, and I looked behind me. Elijah had a beefy henchman positioned on each side of the car. If I shot him, they’d shoot me.

“Don’t worry, Baruch,” he said with a little chirp-laugh. “I’m not here to kill you. If I killed you, I would probably attract the attention of the police, who seem, thus far, to be blissfully unaware of my activities. I wonder why you haven’t told them anything.”

“Maybe I have,” I said. “Maybe the net is closing around you, and you can’t even see it.”

He chirped again. “I think not, Baruch. There are fifty cops down in front of Kluge, ready to crush those poor Negroes, and yet there is only you guarding this bank.”

“They’re not all that far away.”

“But they’re far enough, and they won’t be paying attention,” he said. I realized that he’d probably already found another cop to be his inside man on the police force. If that was the case, he knew with certainty that I hadn’t informed the department of his presence in Memphis.

He seemed completely unconcerned about revealing such information in my presence, but I wasn’t overly optimistic that he was likely to let any particularly useful details slip about how he planned to take down the vault. Arrogance, in my experience, frequently carries with it a dose of hubris, but sometimes arrogance is justified, and this seemed like one of those cases. I had a reputation as a pretty smart cop, but it helped that the guys I went after were generally pretty stupid. Elijah was not stupid, and he wasn’t likely to spoil a carefully devised plan by mouthing off to me.

“I wanted to congratulate you on your son Brian’s upcoming bar mitzvah,” he said. He handed me a sealed envelope with the words “For Brian” written on it in a looping script. When I took it from him, I touched the paper only at the edges, so I could dust the thing, later, for fingerprints. I wouldn’t find any; that would have been too easy.

“I will kill you if you go near my family,” I said.

He ignored the threat: “When I was your son’s age, I did not get to study with a rabbi. I did not get a party to celebrate my emergence into manhood. I was living in the ghetto, in a cramped, moldy flat occupied by three other families as well as my parents and my sister. I thought it was the worst place in the world, but that was only because I lacked imagination.

“Hitler was unencumbered by such deficiencies; his mind was a whirling phantasmagoria of barbarity, and from that font sprang Auschwitz. And, to tell the truth, he imagined worse than Auschwitz.”

“A whirling phantasmagoria? Are you shitting me?” I said.

He stopped, and frowned at me for twenty or thirty seconds. I used the pause to consider whether it was redundant to modify “phantasmagoria” with “of barbarity.” I wasn’t sure, but I figured Elijah had probably looked it up at some point. His story seemed rehearsed; a thing he’d told many times before. There was a chilly edge to his voice that made me wonder if any of the people he’d told this to were still alive.

He started talking again: “Auschwitz, you see, was merely a slave-labor camp where a lot of people happened to be killed, and where four industrial crematoria happened to be running all day and all night, incinerating corpses and fogging the sky with oily black smoke. You hear about Auschwitz because there are people who were in Auschwitz that survived; people who can tell their stories.

“You’ll never meet anyone who was sent to Treblinka. A million people went to Treblinka, but all of them are dead. Treblinka was not a prison camp, like Auschwitz. Treblinka was a factory. Treblinka was a slaughterhouse.

“So, when the SS soldiers came to the filthy ghetto apartment block where we’d been sent after my father’s home and his shop were confiscated, and they waved guns in our faces and cleared everyone out, and when they marched us to the railway station and they packed us so tightly into a shipping car that we could not sit, we were lucky, because the train was only going to Auschwitz.

“I was lucky when I got off the train, smeared with feces and urine that wasn’t all my own. I was lucky when the guards sent me and my father to the right, rather than to the left, where they sent my sister and my mother. I was lucky when my mother refused to be separated from us, and wept and begged, and they shot her in the face while she held my sister in her arms. I was lucky because they only killed my mother, and did not kill me as well.

“I was lucky, because I was in Auschwitz, and people survived Auschwitz. My father was lucky, too, but he didn’t appreciate the good fortune that HaShem had bestowed upon him. After he saw what they did to my mother, my father could not eat. He could not raise his voice to praise the Lord’s name. He probably would have died on a pile of mildewed straw if the guards hadn’t dragged him out of the barracks each morning for roll call. On the day he could no longer stand on the parade ground, they beat him to death. If we want HaShem’s blessings, the rabbis say, we must meet Him halfway. My father could not take advantage of the opportunity that God gave him by sending us to Auschwitz.

“Of course, most of the rabbis got sent to Treblinka, so perhaps they weren’t as wise as they thought.”

Here, he chirped cheerily.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“I want you to know,” he said. “I want you to understand the hypocrisy implicit in your position. I want you to understand how ludicrous and self-defeating it is for a Jew to serve as an agent of coercion on behalf of the Christian state, and I want you to try to comprehend the inescapable logic of my way of doing things.”

“Well, I ain’t going anywhere, I guess, as long as you’ve got those guns pointed at me,” I said. “So, go ahead and convince me.”

He smiled, and I flinched a little. Those Auschwitz teeth of his were tough to look at.

“After my father died, I knew that I had to get out of that place, so I waited and I listened. I was assigned to a labor detail of twenty prisoners supervised by two SS guards. Each day, we went to an evacuated Polish village near the edge of the camp, and we stripped salvageable materials from the buildings, which were scheduled for demolition. One of the guards was a corrupt and greedy man. He stole from the salvage, and he ferreted away anything of value he found abandoned in the houses.

“One day, I approached and spoke to him as he smoked a cigarette outside the house, out of earshot of his partner. It was dangerous to do this; speaking to a guard could get you shot. But I knew how to pique this man’s interest.

“I told him that my father had been a wealthy shopkeeper before the Nuremberg Laws nationalized Jewish property. I told him that, when we learned we were to be sent to the ghetto, my father had hidden away his wealth; cash and jewelry. He’d hoped we could recover it after the war. I told the guard I was the only person left alive who knew where this treasure was hidden, and I promised it to him, if he could get me out of the camp.

“He thought about it for a few minutes, and then he went inside the house and bashed the other guard’s skull in with the butt of his rifle, and he shot all the other Jews on the detail. Then he grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me into the woods, and told me to wait there.

“I imagine he told his superiors that the Jews had attacked his partner and he had killed them in retribution. But how he justified his butchery was not my business. All I know is that, according to official records, I was killed that day, in that ruined Polish village, and buried in a mass grave. People survived Auschwitz, but I am not one of them. I am numbered among the dead.

“I waited in the woods until nightfall, when I heard someone calling from the road. I crept to the edge of the forest, keeping to the shadows, and I saw a young woman in a little cart pulled by an old mule. I went to her, and she hid me under a pile of old rags, and drove me back to her shabby farmhouse. She said she was the guard’s lover, and he had told her to spirit me away, so that they could get my treasure. I didn’t wait for him to return, however. I found a knife and stabbed her to death, and I stole everything of value from her house. I had to stick the knife into her fifteen times before she stopped struggling. My resolve never wavered.

“I lived out the war on the run, and I survived by taking whatever I needed. I never called it stealing. I don’t believe stealing is a thing that exists. The Nuremberg Laws that nationalized my family’s assets also endowed me, from a very young age, with a deep skepticism toward the concept of property rights. It’s not as if the ostensibly rightful owners of this country’s wealth have come by it honestly, any more than the beneficiaries of the Nuremburg confiscations earned theirs. Men strip the hills of timber and then blast deep scars in the earth to find coal, with the state’s full blessing, and yet I am a criminal for occasionally helping myself to a few stacks of paper. Kluge builds himself a limestone mansion with the proceeds of Negro misery, and you’re camping out in your car to stop me from stealing the payroll he’s refusing to disperse to his workers. As far as I am concerned, people are entitled to keep what they have only for as long as they are able to stop me from taking it from them.”

“Maybe I don’t see it that way,” I said. “Maybe I think actions need to have consequences.”

“What will you do? Lock me up? Kill me? I have already been locked up. I have already been killed. These things happened and will happen again, not because I am a criminal, but because I am a Jew. So why should I not be a criminal as well? Why should I spare anyone’s property?”

The smart thing to do would have been to humor him, and see if I could draw him out a little and get him to reveal something about his plans, but finesse had never been my specialty, and I was sick of listening to the asshole.

“Because I am a feral dog,” I told him. “And I don’t like you shitting where I eat.”

He chirped. “I feel sorry for you, Baruch. You are a grumpy sentinel crouching here, eating your cheap, greasy food and holding your futile, lonely vigil. But what is going to happen is going to happen, and you can’t do anything about it.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose we shall,” he said, and he slid noiselessly out of the car. I had an idea that I should make an exception to my general policy about fair play, and just shoot the son of a bitch in the back, so I kicked my door open and climbed to my feet, drawing my gun as I stood. But somehow, Elijah and his men had already vanished.

I picked up the envelope he’d given me, still holding it by the edges, and opened it by slitting the side with my pocketknife. It contained a store-bought birthday card for a child
ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY
. Tucked inside the card, I found three one-hundred-dollar bills; he’d thrown away as much money as I was paid for two weeks of hard work, just to taunt me.

Technically, I should have turned the card and the bills over to the department, as evidence. Maybe a specialist could have done a better job of checking it for fingerprints, and found something useful on it. Or maybe the serial numbers on the bills might have connected Elijah to some robbery.

But I was already too deep into my one-man vigilante mission, or my cover-up operation, or whatever it was. I pocketed the bills. There was really nothing else I could do.

Maybe Elijah was trying to push me down a slippery slope. Or maybe I was already sliding. Maybe I’d been sliding for a long time.

18

1965

I never thought of myself as an emotional man, but I was furious at Elijah. He’d put my family and my livelihood at risk, and he was contemptuous toward my values; toward the life I’d built and the stuff I stood for.

The thing that made me angriest was the fact that he was probably right. I was ensconced within and dependent upon a system I couldn’t trust. I worked side by side with men whom I didn’t like, and who didn’t like me, and I might be forced, on any given day, to rely on these men in a situation that involved mortal peril.

But what the hell was I supposed to do? Join Elijah and his herd of Jewish buffalo? I had a family to take care of, and a synagogue membership and a mother. I wasn’t a rootless, vengeful ghost.

Elijah knew I’d figured out that he was robbing the Cotton Planters bank, so getting Greenfield to move the money was now too dangerous a gamble to consider. But since Elijah knew that I knew, I felt like I wouldn’t be tipping too many cards by pursuing Ari Plotkin, the local hood Paul Schulman had told me was involved in the scheme.

Plotkin was a world-class sanctimonious shitball. He had a picturesque little ranch-style house within walking distance of the synagogue. He davened three times a day, and his wife wore a wig and kept a strictly kosher kitchen, to the point where he’d bought her separate dishwashers for their meat and milk dishes. And he paid for his proper Jewish lifestyle with theft and fraud.