Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (8 page)

“You should see the other guy,” is what she told me. She wasn’t kidding. They had to clean the son of a bitch up with a mop.

After I read that file, I took a calculated risk to my personal safety and I asked her about it.

“I remember his breath against my neck when he grabbed me. He said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’” Even years later, she flinched a little at the memory. “In the end, it was me who found something to show him, just before he died. I showed him his pancreas.”

My mother kept sewing razors into her clothes until her sixty-fourth birthday, in 1956, when Rose bought her an electric washing machine, and I bought her a handgun to keep in her pocketbook.

10

1965

People on television were talking about the strike downtown.

“Ungrateful, is what they are,” said a man the station identified as Mr. Alvin Kluge, of Kluge Shipping and Freight. I squinted at the set and tried to guess how big his neck was. The television screen was a small convex bubble sticking out of a heavy wooden cabinet. The black-and-white image was fuzzy and ghostlike, but I figured the man’s collar size was eighteen inches, at least; a throat too big to get both hands around.

If you were dealing with a customer who had that kind of bulk, and you wanted to choke him out, you had to get behind him and jam a police baton up under his chin, and then press a knee against his back, and pull the baton with both hands, hard enough to close the windpipe. You could bring down a man the size of a small bull that way in twenty seconds, usually without causing much lasting injury.

If you didn’t care whether you injured him or not, there were lots of other ways to bring a man down, no matter how big he was.

“Ungrateful? The lack of perspective is appalling!” Everything Brian said these days sounded like one of the new rabbi’s sermons. “They take and take and take, and then they expect gratitude from the people they exploit.”

“You didn’t use to talk like that,” I said.

“I didn’t use to be aware of the rampant injustice in the world, because I was a small child, and my parents are complacent.”

“You hear that, Rose!” I shouted over the television. “We’re complacent.”

“No, we aren’t!” she yelled back. “We’re Ashkenazi.”

“We give them work. We give them a living. And this is how they thank us,” said Kluge on the TV. His jowls were either quivering with indignation, or else Brian needed to get up and futz with the rabbit ears again.

“You pay them a third less than you’d pay a white man to do the same work,” Brian said.

“How is it any business of yours what a Negro gets paid?” I asked.

“Twenty years ago, when the Germans were marching the Jews into the ovens, the people of Europe were asking each other the same question. How is it any business of ours that Jews are getting shipped off to death camps?”

“Oh, stop being so sanctimonious.”

“Hey, Mom!” Brian yelled. “Dad says I am sanctimonious.”

“No, you aren’t!” she yelled back. “You’re adorable.”

The man on the screen was still talking: “… Shiftless, lazy, unreliable, disloyal. Have to watch them like hawks to make sure they don’t steal.”

“He’s the victim now.” Brian balled up a section of my newspaper and threw it at the television. “This fat, rich vampire thinks he’s the victim.”

“I just don’t see why it’s our problem. I have enough to worry about without opening a vein for the colored. You have to worry about your bar mitzvah.”

“It’s our problem because, twenty years after Auschwitz, it’s happening again,” he said. “Or it’s been happening all along, and it’s still happening.”

“And what are you and the rabbi going to do about it?”

“We can stand up, goddamnit,” Brian said.

“Watch your mouth,” I said.

“Watch your mouth!” yelled Rose.

On television, a black man, identified as labor organizer Longfellow Molloy: “Send us your prayers, ’cause we need God’s help. If you have anything to give, we don’t want to ask for any money except a fair wage for a day’s work, but we’ve got several churches running food drives to help the strikers, and canned goods are deeply appreciated. These men ain’t been paid in weeks, and their children are hungry. And anyone who wants to come down and march with us in front of Kluge Freight is surely welcome. Because they can’t treat people like this. It’s not right.”

Brian continued: “We can stand in solidarity with the men striking for their human rights at Kluge Freight, and with the people who are sitting in at the lunch counters, and with the people who won’t go to the back of the bus.”

“Nobody cares where you sit on a bus,” I said. “You don’t even ride the bus. Your mother drives you everywhere. If you were on a bus full of Negroes, you’d be scared out of your mind.”

“I’m not scared of Negroes. I’m scared of a society that can mistreat a whole group of people based on arbitrary characteristics. The rabbi says there are seven times as many blacks in America as Jews. Anything that can be done to them can be done to us much more easily.”

“He’s right about that,” I said. “We are vulnerable. And that’s why we should stay out of what’s not our business, lest our insertion of our big, Semitic noses into their feud reminds the goyim and the
schvartzes
that they all love Jesus, and they think we killed him.”

“All that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”

He might have been right. He seemed right enough that I felt bad about discouraging him. But I always liked doing nothing, when given the opportunity, and I thought doing nothing was generally a prudent course of action. Evil was probably going to flourish anyway.

I did nothing, immediately, about my meeting with Elijah. Maybe I should have reported it to my superiors, but Brian was right: The Department had been doing wrong by the coloreds, and I wasn’t sure wrongs wouldn’t befall Jews if I let people know that a gang of Jewish robbers was trying to corrupt Jewish police officers, thereby forming a Jewish conspiracy. Neither the Memphis Police as an institution, nor the various people who comprised it could be trusted to handle information like that in a sane way.

I’d overheard plenty of nasty comments around other cops: stuff about cheap Jews and Jews controlling government and Jewish bankers. None of them were especially ashamed to say these things when I was within earshot.

Memphis law enforcement had what you might call a checkered history on race. In 1919, Mayor Frank Monteverde was elected with the support of the black community after promising to integrate the police department. So he hired three black detectives.

These men were charged exclusively with arresting black criminals, because it would be unfair to subject white men to arrest by Negro officers. But when they raided a gambling den frequented by black patrons, the white crime boss who owned the operation took umbrage at having his place searched by Negroes, and sent a mob to lynch the detectives.

The blacks escaped, but one of them discharged his weapon and injured a white man during the altercation. As a result, all the blacks were fired from the force and the Memphis Police remained entirely white until 1948.

During that period—from around the time I was born until just before the war—a man named Clifford Davis was Memphis’s Commissioner of Public Safety, and he was some kind of big to-do in the Ku Klux Klan; a wizard or a dragon or a fairy or something. During his tenure in office, the police force was about two-thirds Klansmen. By the mid-’60s, things had gotten more progressive, but only slightly. The reason Davis gave up running the police was that he got elected to the United States House of Representatives. And then, he got reelected another twelve times.

There were still very few black officers on the force, and only four Jews, but an awful lot of the boys Davis hired were still around, and some of them were wearing fancy epaulets and answering to intimidating titles. A Jew was something less than white to these people, but it was close enough to get by, as long as they were focusing their bigotry on other preoccupations. So, I was loath to call attention to my heritage.

It was entirely conceivable that, if they found out what Elijah was doing, they’d put the handful of Jewish cops on the Memphis police force on an open-ended unpaid leave, and then the department might carry out some kind of campaign of intimidation against the Jewish community.

I didn’t take a bullet in France to get treated like my grandparents were treated in the old country or, worse, to get treated like a Negro, so I had to take care of this problem on my own, quietly. I’d run Elijah out of town, and if he wouldn’t run, I’d bury him someplace out of the way. No reason to give the redneck brass cause to go on a Jew hunt in the department.

11

1965

“Let me tell you something about Memphis, Detective,” said Longfellow Molloy, the labor agitator. “Memphis don’t make nothin’. Memphis don’t grow nothin’. Memphis exists but for one purpose: Memphis moves things. The rail lines and the highway and the river all come together in this place. Memphis is one of the five biggest inland ports in the history of Western civilization. Fifteen million tons of cargo come through here, ship to shore, and shore to ship. Loaded and unloaded, from the bellies of barges into the trailers of trucks. Onto train cars. And do you know how fifteen million tons of cargo gets loaded and unloaded in this town every year?”

I knew he’d only asked the question so he could answer it himself, so I sat quiet and let him blow off steam.

“Black hands,” he said. “Black hands do all that lifting. Memphis earns its bread from moving things, and black folks do all the moving. Fifteen million tons, ship to shore, and shore to ship. We carry it. Those men marching outside the offices of Kluge Shipping bear this city on their backs seven days a week for a dollar seventy-five an hour. We’re trying to organize and ask for the square deal every hardworking American deserves. And you come up here and you treat us like criminals. You come into my office, where I do the Lord’s work, and you treat me like a low-life thug. Sir, I will not have it.”

Paul Schulman had given me two leads on Elijah: that the target was somehow related to striking freight workers, and that Ari Plotkin had a piece of the job. Plotkin was simpler to get at; I could just pick him up and kick the shit out of him until he spilled whatever he knew. But if I did, Elijah would know about it immediately, and my best lead would be burned. So I’d decided to sniff around the strike first. And since I didn’t really know who else to talk to, I decided to pay a visit to the angry black man I’d seen on the TV. Not exactly brilliant deductive work on my part, I’ll admit, but I never said I was Sherlock Holmes.

Molloy described himself an “activist” or an “organizer,” but he was more of an instigator. He’d come to Memphis a few months earlier and rented a small office across the street from the downtown skyscraper that housed the headquarters of Kluge Shipping and Freight. Kluge was one of dozens of companies that handled river cargo, and it was a medium-sized outfit at best, but it was notable for paying poorly, and its laborers were almost all black, so it was an ideal target for a civil rights rabble-rouser. The forklift operators and longshoremen were receptive to his talk about wage inequalities and dignity, and he was starting to cause pain in many rich, white asses.

Over the course of the last couple of months, Molloy had gotten more than half the company’s colored workers organized. Six weeks previous, 120 men had walked out of the company’s facility on Governor’s Island. Since then, they’d been marching around in front of Kluge’s downtown office, waving signs, hassling businessmen, and frightening secretaries.

“A group of black workers try to affiliate themselves with a white labor union, and they are rebuffed, even though all who work with their hands ought to be brothers,” Molloy said. “And when those workers try to organize and peacefully demonstrate for a decent wage, they get themselves surrounded by fifty cops armed with clubs and guns and fire hoses and vicious dogs.”

“There ain’t no dogs over there.”

“Maybe there ain’t no dogs yet, but sooner or later, they always bring the dogs.”

We sat there looking at each other, while I thought about the time some drunk SS guards threw a Jewish kid from Detroit named Marc Grossman into a toilet shed, and then shoved a couple of German shepherds that they’d starved for a few days in behind him. The Krauts watched the proceedings with their noses pressed against a greasy window, and the next day, they made us clean up the mess.

“Fifty cops, Detective,” Molloy said. “No more than half the strikers are picketing on any given day, and we gotta keep a few protesters out on Governor’s Island so the scabs have to cross a picket line to get onto the job site. The rest of the men have to take on day labor a couple times a week to keep their roofs, or they have to see to their children when they send their wives out to clean white folks’ houses. Fifty cops to subdue sixty freight workers, plus a few dozen concerned citizens who show up to support our cause. And then they send you up here to hassle me. You don’t scare me, Detective. I think it’s you people who are scared. You and your cronies see what’s going on outside, and you know that ain’t just a few disgruntled longshoremen protesting a freight company. You know it’s the start of something. Things cannot keep being the way they’ve been.”

There was a little philosophical question I always liked to think about when schmucks were yammering at me: Did the man’s character shape his worldview, or did his worldview shape his character?

I wasn’t smart enough to figure whether the chicken came before the egg, but either way it worked out, a man’s view of society revealed something about his own tendencies. I, for example, believed the world was hard and dangerous, so I was hard and dangerous myself. Similarly, conspiracy theorists and paranoids, the folks who suspected everyone of plotting against them, were often treacherous.

“I don’t need to listen to this,” I said to him.

“And I don’t need police coming up into my office. But I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. If you’re going to arrest me, let’s spare the foreplay.” He presented his wrists to me.