Don't Ever Get Old

by Daniel Friedman

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with loving my grandparents.”

  I sighed and lowered my voice. “Wallace told me that the Nazi guard who beat me up when I was a prisoner escaped Germany alive, with the trunk of his car packed full of gold bars. Wallace took a payoff to let the guy go.”

  “That’s got to mess with your head.”

  “Don’t tell your grandmother about this. It will just upset her.”

  “I’ll keep quiet,” he assured me. I could have done without his patronizing tone. “So after all this time, why did Wallace tell you about this Nazi?”

  “He wanted absolution, or something. Also, I think he expected me to track the guy down; set things right.”

  “Why would he think you’d do that?”

  “Probably because I was a homicide detective for thirty years. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  He waited a couple of beats too long before: “Yeah, of course, Pop.”

  Most people who knew me going back, people like Wallace, still thought of me as police. But I was retired before my grandson was even born. I suspected he just thought of me as old.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  I thought about that for a second. “I’m going to watch Fox News for a while, and later, I am going to work a crossword puzzle while I sit on the toilet.”

  “Right, but what are you going to do about the Nazi?”

  “I’m not going to do anything. When you have the option to do nothing, you should always take it.”

  “Don’t you regret not taking back the dignity he stole from you?”

  I coughed in a way I thought might sound derisive. Regrets were for suckers. The world was full of used-up men, sitting glassy-eyed on park benches staring at nothing or sinking into upholstered chairs in retirement home lobbies, and every one of them was mulling his irrevocable missteps. Wasted chances. Bungled opportunities. Busted romances with fickle women and pear-shaped business deals with crooked partners.

  I took pride in not being one of those sad cases. I was grumpy more for sport than out of necessity. I married the greatest lady I ever met, and I had a distinguished career with the department and retired to a detective’s pension. Ideally, I wouldn’t have had to see my son die, but getting old meant outlasting things that ought to have been permanent.

  The revelation of Heinrich Ziegler’s possible survival did not incite me to vengeful fervor. The war was a long time ago, and fervor required a lot of effort.

  “Whatever he took, I don’t miss anymore,” I said. “Dignity is something we all have to learn to live without, and revenge don’t take much away from men like me and Ziegler. Every other kind of way we are apt to shuffle off this mortal coil is at least as ugly and coming almost as soon.”

  I paused for a second; I had that dry mouth again. I stubbed out the cigarette and took a long gulp from the juice glass. Never easy to confront the reality of the geriatric ICU and the place that comes after. Never easy to recognize what I might share with the doped-up, piss-soaked Wallaces of the world.

  “If Ziegler is still alive, there ain’t much pain I can add to the sorrows he’s facing.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Tequila said. But I could tell from his tone it didn’t make much sense to him at all. There was strain in his voice, and I imagined him wrapping the phone cord around his white knuckles on the other end of the line. Then I remembered phones didn’t have cords anymore.

  “Don’t get me wrong; punishing him might feel good. But sitting on the couch feels pretty good as well. And the couch is in my living room, while Ziegler, if he’s even still alive, could be on any one of several continents. I’m not sure they sell my Lucky Strikes overseas.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud, but even if I had been predisposed to doing things, I was facing mounting limitations. My quarry would be just as feeble, but, regardless, I wasn’t sure I was up to the task of going on any kind of manhunt.

  In the last few years, my stride had grown shorter and more labored. I could see a progressing decrease in my pace on the treadmill at the Jewish Community Center gym. I was down to a sluggish mile and a half per hour, and folks marveled about how I was still so mobile.

  My skin had become dry and thin, almost papery in texture. If I jostled my arm too hard against a doorknob or bumped a knee into the bedside table, I could tear open and leak thin, watery blood all over the carpet. A couple of times, I hadn’t been able to stop bleeding, and Rose had to take me to the emergency room. And it was easy to bump into stuff, because my eyes were failing. I needed a pair of glasses to see distance and a different pair to read. The fuzzy vision was, I guess, a minor blessing; it spared me from having to take a clear look at the mess of bruises and liver spots on my arms and cushioned the blow of seeing my collapsed and sunken features in the bathroom mirror.

  “That treasure in gold bars sounds pretty appealing,” Tequila said.

  “Come on,” I said. “You seriously think you’re going to find lost Nazi gold? Even if he had gold in 1946, why wouldn’t he have spent it all by now?”

  “He’s a fugitive. If he went looking to convert millions of dollars in gold to cash, or if he threw around a lot of money, he’d draw unwanted attention to himself. I think he’d try to avoid attracting notice, so he couldn’t have run through all that treasure. And maybe he’s dead, and the gold is just stashed away someplace, waiting for us to find it.”

  “Terrific. I can buy myself a Maserati and drive it to the grocery store at thirty miles an hour. I can go to a fine restaurant where I’ll pay more and wait longer for food I can barely taste anyway.”

  “You were angry with Wallace because he let Ziegler go. If you don’t at least try to find him, you’re looking the other way, just like your friend did.”

  That stopped me for a second. The little prick had a point.

  “There’s no way I know of to find a man who was last seen in Germany in 1946. What do I do? Go to the police station and ask if anyone’s seen a Nazi?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Tequila said. “There’s a whole lot of computerized record sharing these days between local police and federal authorities and even international agencies. If Ziegler’s ever had a run-in with any kind of five-oh, he could turn up in one of those law enforcement databases.”

  There were no computers in the police station when I retired, and I had never learned how to use that set of tools.

  “You really think so?”

  “No,” he said. “But even nothing can get boring when you do it long enough. It can’t hurt to go ask, and then, at least, you can say you didn’t just let Ziegler walk.”

  “Yeah, all right. I’ve got some time to kill before Fox News Sunday comes on, anyway.”

  Something I don’t want to forget:

  Historians consider the Chelmno death camp in Poland a minor extermination facility, because only a hundred and fifty thousand Jews died there. I visited in 1946, and there wasn’t much left of it; when the Nazis closed the camp, they burned the manor house where they processed the victims and they blew up the furnaces they used to incinerate the bodies. Maybe they were ashamed.

  It would make a better story if I said the acrid stench of burning human flesh still hung in the air at the Chelmno site. But it had been two years since the Nazis shut the place down, and it didn’t look or smell like anything special. It was just a muddy field with some patchy grass.

  There is a village called Chelm, which is famous in Yiddish folklore for the wacky misadventures of its population of idiot Jews. It would make a better story if the Chelmno camp were the same place, but it isn’t. I checked. Chelmno is in the middle of Poland, near Lodz, and Chelm is somewhere to the east. The Jews of Chelmno couldn’t have been all that smart, though. They let the SS load them into trucks and gas them with exhaust fumes, with carbon monoxide.

  That was Heinrich Ziegler’s job from late 1941 until the middle of 1942, when he got promoted for his zeal and efficiency. It would make a
better story if I’d found him in the ruins of the camp, wrecked with contrition and self-loathing, waiting for somebody like me to come deal with him. But I didn’t find anything at Chelmno. It was a waste of a trip, to tell the truth.

  All I did was stand there for a little while, in that empty field in the armpit of Poland. I smoked a cigarette. I cursed a few times. Then I got on my motorcycle and went back to town to find someplace where I could get hammered.

  I tried to kill Heinrich Ziegler, and I spent five weeks in a coma for my trouble. Later on, when I learned what he’d done to so many innocent Jews, the weight of my failure seemed almost unbearable. I needed to set it right.

  Even after months of painful recovery, even after the armistice, my hands still wanted Ziegler’s neck. He needed to pay for the dent in my shoulder and for the stripes on my back. And he needed to pay for Chelmno. So I hunted across Europe for the bastard with a pistol snug against my side and a serrated hunting knife tucked into my boot.

  The Germans are a very orderly people, and the Nazis were very diligent about record keeping. In Berlin, I found documentation of every post Ziegler had held: accountings of his grisly work in Poland, dates and numbers in neat columns; matériel requisition forms from the prison camp in France where I’d met him; orders reassigning him to Berlin; carbon copies of the letter they sent to his mother after he got cut up by Soviet machine-gun fire.

  Learning about his death gave me no solace. Ziegler had made me feel helpless, and helplessness was a kind of dirtiness. He had something of mine, and I needed to take it back from him. But I’d been robbed of my chance by forces beyond my control. And control was something I needed, but it was hard to feel like the master of my own destiny in the face of arbitrary slaughter on such a large scale. Learning Ziegler was dead just made everything worse.

  For a while, I tried not to believe it, and I just kept hunting. I went to the places Ziegler had been and asked people about him. Sometimes, I asked hard. But the stories always matched up, always corroborated the records. So, at last, I relented and went down into Poland, to Chelmno, to bear witness to what he’d done there. But there wasn’t anything to see.

  So that’s how my war ended: with a cigarette in a field full of nothing.

  3

  Police headquarters at the Criminal Justice Complex was pretty far downtown, well outside of my normal comfort zone, but I could stay on Poplar Avenue all the way there, so I went ahead and drove.

  Crime was a growth industry in the city of Memphis, and the CJC did a brisk business in locking people up. That much had stayed the same in the thirty-five years I had been retired. A lot was different, though. The junkies and thugs getting ushered around the halls by cops seemed much younger, but bigger and meaner than I remembered from the old days. They also had a lot more tattoos than the ones I knew, and more of them were Mexican. The officers looked a lot younger than they used to as well, and more of them were black.

  The changes threw my equilibrium a little bit, but I was counting on the power of progress. My detecting skills were state-of-the-art as of 1973, but I didn’t have anything approaching an idea about how to use a computer to track down a Nazi fugitive.

  I wondered if Tequila was right that we could find Ziegler using the databases. I saw those things spitting out surprising and crucial information every week on the police procedural programs on television, but it always seemed like an expediency, a story device to get the cops to the killer in fifty minutes with commercials. Surely police work hadn’t gotten that easy. If it had, the criminals would all be out of business.

  I took a seat on a bench in the squad room, next to a handcuffed teenager who had tattooed some kind of tribal pattern on his face and neck in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his acne scars. I waited long enough to burn through three Luckys before a young officer asked me why I was there. He was a white kid, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, but already overweight and balding. I asked to see half a dozen people who were pretty green when I left, people I thought might still be around. They had all died or retired, so I told the kid to send me to somebody in homicide.

  “I’ll call up there now and see if anybody can talk to you,” he said. “What case are you here about?”

  “Oh, I want to see if you folks can help me look some information up in the police computer, and maybe I could look at some old mug shots. I used to be a cop.”

  He picked up his telephone receiver. “You got a name, Officer?” he asked me.

  “I’m retired detective Baruch Schatz.”

  “Baruch?”

  “Yeah. It’s Jewish.”

  He squinted at me. “Wait, you’re not Buck Schatz, are you?”

  “People call me that.”

  His authoritative cop frown broke into a broad grin. “Holy shit, man, you’re a legend. I can’t believe you’re still alive.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Most days, neither can I.”

  The kid shouted to a black cop who was messing with the coffee machine at the back of the room. “Yo, Andre? Guess who this old motherfucker is right here.”

  “Is that your new boyfriend?” Andre was a little taller than the kid at the desk, and in better shape, with close-cropped hair and straight teeth.

  “This is Buck Schatz.”

  “Fuck you, you lying piece of shit.”

  “No lie. And fuck you.”

  Not everything had changed; cops still talked pretty much the same way they always had. Nobody ever tells a man with a gun to watch his language.

  They paged somebody from homicide to come to see me, and while I waited, they asked me the same questions young cops always ask:

  Yes, it’s true that I hunted down a serial killer and brought him in on my own, while the rest of the department sat around scratching their asses. No, I didn’t break his legs; I just smashed his nose with the butt of my pistol.

  No, it’s not true that Clint Eastwood followed me around to learn to be Dirty Harry, but Don Siegel, the Jewish guy who directed the picture, did call me on the phone to ask me some questions.

  Yeah, it’s true I once ventilated three heavies that a crooked city councilman sent after me. No, they were white men; that happened way back when all the crooked politicians in town and most of the thugs who worked for them were white.

  For the record, it ain’t true that I was the leading cause of death among scumbags in Memphis from 1957 to 1962. People used to say that, and it sounded good. But somebody actually counted it up once, and I was only tied for fourth, behind other scumbags, drug overdoses, and other cops. The tie was with car accidents.

  “Damn, Buck. You used to be one hard-ass son of a bitch.”

  “Used to be,” I said.

  I shot the bull with them until the detective from homicide came out of the elevator.

  “Shit,” he said as he walked toward me. “You’re really Buck Schatz. I thought these kids were playing some kind of prank on me.”

  He told me his name was Randall Jennings, and I shook his hand. He was medium height, early forties, white. Dark hair, graying at the temples. Rumpled suit. Yellowish sweat stains on his shirt collar. Mustache.

  “You know, I always wondered what I’d say if I ever met you,” he said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “How’d a guy with so many enemies manage to live so long?”

  I smiled, and I told Randall Jennings my favorite story from the war.

  Before we hit the beach at Normandy, General Eisenhower came to wish us luck. I got close enough to shake his hand, and I asked him if he had any suggestions as to how I might stay alive to see my wife again.

  When Ike looked at me, there was real sadness in his eyes, because he knew a lot of us wouldn’t survive the next couple of days. And I’ll never forget what he told me.

  “Soldier,” he said, squeezing my shoulder, “when you have nothing left to hang on to, you just hang on to your gun.”

  It seemed like good advice, so I followed it.

  “That’s
it?” Jennings asked, unimpressed. “That’s your secret?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “But it’s no small edge in the longevity game for a man to be able to put something persuasive between himself and anyone looking to do him harm.”

  He scratched thoughtfully at the stubble on his chin. “Now the story we tell here is that the day Buck Schatz took his pension, he slammed his gun down on Captain Heller’s desk and told the old man to shove that piece right up his fat ass.”

  I chuckled a little. “I told Max Heller to stuff my badge. The gun was not department issued. It was mine, and I hung on to it.”

  Jennings laughed at that. “So, what brings you to the CJC today?” he asked.

  “I am trying to find a man I know from way back. I thought he was dead, but then I heard recently, maybe he’s not. I wanted to see if you could look for him with your computer.”

  He raised an eyebrow at my request. “This guy killed somebody?”

  “Not that I know of. At least not lately.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “That’s my problem. I figure he’s operating under an alias, but I don’t know what it is. He’d have fake papers, good ones, under the pseudonym.”

  “So you want me to find you a man with no name?”

  “Yeah. With your computer. I see on the television that y’all have access to all kinds of databases and satellites and DNA. Whenever the case looks like a dead end, the TV cops always find some impossible connection on the Internet. I thought you might be able to dig up a police report or a mug shot. Even a traffic citation would give me more recent information than I have right now.”

  “All right. Let’s see what I can do for you.”

  We rode the elevator up to the homicide office. Jennings led me to his cubicle and sat down in front of his computer, and I grabbed a chair on the other side of the desk.