Don't Ever Get Old

by Daniel Friedman

  The teller hesitated. “I’ll have to get an approval from my manager.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Tequila. “We appreciate it.”

  I spent the next few minutes shouting at my grandson while the teller consulted with his boss. He came back with the manager and two uniformed security guards in tow.

  “You gentlemen need to leave the premises,” said the manager. He was short, about Tequila’s height, and doughy, with a receded jaw that barely demarcated the boundary between his head and his neck.

  “I’m sure we can discuss this reasonably,” Tequila said.

  “We’ve discussed it already,” said the teller, crossing his arms.

  “If we are unsatisfied with the proof you supply to show that you are the owner of a safe deposit box, we cannot provide you with access to it,” the manager said. “We have procedures in place to protect people who follow the rules.”

  This was, of course, false. The procedures protected the bank and the bank’s interest in the contents of those boxes.

  Nobody ever got a letter from a bank informing them that the bill on a safe deposit box was in arrears, when the box owners died without telling their families about their boxes, the banks waited until the property could be deemed legally abandoned, at which point the banks were entitled to crack open the boxes and sell any valuables at auction.

  “You’re trying to steal my things,” I shouted at him. I meant it, too.

  “You need to go, unless you prefer to have these men escort you out,” the manager told me.

  I sighed sadly. We’d struck out.

  30

  I thought of the .357, tucked in the glove compartment out in the car, but I knew there was no way we could take the treasure by force. I moved slowly, even when I wasn’t carrying bags of gold. And even if I’d been young and fit, the rate of arrest and conviction for bank robbers was damn near a hundred percent; it was the single stupidest crime anyone could commit.

  The bank’s front door would be the only exit, and the whole place was certainly wired with alarms and cameras. If we got out of the building and made it onto the highway somehow, we couldn’t get far before we’d get pulled over or pinned by a roadblock. Force was not an option. If I couldn’t convince these people I owned Ziegler’s safe deposit box, whatever treasure the Nazi had stashed would stay in the vault.

  I would go home and think about moving with Rose into a place like Meadowcrest, for our safety. I couldn’t risk her being injured in another “fall event.” Eventually, I’d get put into a ward with a locked door and a plastic cover on the mattress, and the nurses there would swaddle me in absorbent disposable adult undergarments, and after that, there wouldn’t be much else.

  One of the security guards stepped forward and put a hand on my shoulder. Defeated, I started to head back out to the car.

  “Take your goddamn hand off him,” Tequila said. I guessed he was done being the good cop, not that it mattered anymore.

  I turned around to tell him to give it up, and I saw that Tequila was pointing something silver and shiny at the bank manager. For a second, terror flooded my synapses. It looked as though he’d brought the gun in with him. But then the thing in his hand started talking.

  “What is going on there?” demanded Tequila’s Internet phone. This hadn’t been part of the plan. I had no idea what my grandson was doing or who was on the other end of the call.

  “These people at the bank won’t let us into Grandpa’s safe deposit box, and they are trying to throw us out,” Tequila told the phone. All the softness had fallen out of his face. His eyes were no longer pleading; they’d gone cold. Almost like Ziegler’s.

  “Jesus Christ. Am I going to have to come down and sort things out?” the phone asked.

  “Well, shit, Counselor,” Tequila said, “I sure hope not.” He gave an exaggerated shrug for the benefit of the security guards. “My attorney,” he explained to them, gesturing at the device.

  “Who is in charge over there?” said the phone.

  “Uh, I am,” stammered the bank manager.

  “I have no idea who’s talking, so that’s no help to me,” hissed the voice on the line.

  “I, uh…” The bank manager paused. “What?”

  “Who are you?” asked the voice on the phone, biting off each word as if he were speaking to a very stupid child.

  “I’m assistant branch manager Alan Patterson.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you something, assistant branch manager Alan Patterson. If I have to come down there, your name is going to be Shit. As a matter of fact, I am going to go ahead and just call you Shit, because assistant branch manager Albert whatever-the-fuck-your-name-is requires me to remember way too much about somebody insignificant.”

  “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t talk to me like that,” said Patterson, trying to find his backbone.

  “I’ll bet he’s bloated, like some kind of bloodsucking insect,” said the phone. “A chubby guy with a three-inch penis, on a power trip.”

  “Yeah, he’s kind of bloated,” Tequila said. “Chinless, too.”

  “He sounds chinless,” the phone agreed.

  One of the security guards giggled a little, which seemed to anger bloated, chinless assistant branch manager Alan Patterson. “Is there a point to this?” he growled at Tequila.

  “Here’s a point,” said the phone. “Have you ever heard of a tort called conversion? That means you took things that don’t belong to you and you have to pay for the harm you did. Have you ever heard of a tort called intentional infliction of emotional distress? That means a fragile old man walked into your bank, and you fucked with him, and you have to pay for the harm you did. And if that’s not enough, we can probably come up with various age discrimination claims under state and federal law. Those have statutory damages, so you’ll really have to pay.”

  “Look, there’s no need for that,” stammered the branch manager. Beads of sweat were popping out of his forehead.

  “Did that chinless piece of shit just interrupt me?” asked the phone.

  “I, uh, I am sorry,” said Patterson.

  “Nobody cares if you’re sorry. Shut up,” the phone told him. “Now, your bank has insurance, for the amply foreseeable circumstance in which you are stupid or negligent and injure your customers. For example, if that senile old man you’re trying to keep out of his safe deposit box were somehow George-fucking-Clooney, dropping some Ocean’s Eleven shit on your bank, any liability you have for negligence in allowing him access to a safe deposit box would be covered. But your insurer will not cover intentional torts, such as the aforementioned conversion or intentional infliction of emotional distress. Do you understand what that means?”

  The bank manager looked at Tequila, hoping for a way out.

  “Don’t look at me,” Tequila told him. “Answer the question.”

  “I’m not sure what that means,” said Patterson, his voice low and hoarse.

  “It means if you don’t let that man see his stuff, I will sue you. I will take your house,” the phone shrieked. “If you have any money saved to send your chinless kids to college, I will take that. You will be eating cat food when I am done with you. Actually, what you’re doing may also have criminal implications. That means you will be eating prison food. I’ve got a buddy who works for the D.A.’s office. Maybe I’ll play nine holes with him this afternoon and we can discuss all the things the law will let us do to a guy who steals from the elderly.”

  “I don’t—,” Patterson said. It came out as a strangled wheeze. “I didn’t.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Tequila said, his voice soft and soothing. “I think Mr. Patterson will listen to reason.”

  Patterson looked to the two security guards, who had physically backed away from him. He looked over at the teller, who had retreated back to his position behind the counter. Everyone in the bank was looking at us; the chatter of morning commerce had given way to tomblike silence.

 
A tear rolled down Patterson’s chubby cheek, over the slight protrusion of his jawline, and down his neck to dampen his shirt collar.

  “Gentlemen,” the branch manager said to his guards, “the signature card looks like a pretty clear match to me. Let’s get Mr. Winters his safe deposit box from the vault.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said the phone.

  31

  The two security guards ushered me and Tequila into a small office where we could examine the lockbox.

  “It took all three of us to lift this thing,” Patterson said. “It’s really heavy. What on earth are you keeping here?”

  “None of your business,” I told him. “Get out.”

  Patterson used his key on one of the two locks on the safe deposit box and then left us alone with it.

  “What are you waiting for?” Tequila asked. “Open it up.”

  I drummed my fingers on the lid of the box. “What the hell was that with the telephone?” I asked him. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “Deus ex machina,” Tequila said, laughing. “God from the machine.” He waved the Internet phone at me.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” I growled.

  “That was Pete, my roommate. I figured we needed a fallback option.”

  “We were supposed to run the good-cop, bad-cop,” I said. “We had a plan.”

  “And my backup was for when your plan didn’t work,” he told me.

  I scowled at him. “Does Pete’s mother know he has a mouth like that?”

  “Open the goddamn box, Grandpa.”

  “Smartass,” I said as I turned my key in the lock. The safe deposit box popped open. It contained eight gold bars, each about eight inches by three inches, stamped with swastikas.

  I let out a low whistle. Tequila just stared at it, saucer-eyed.

  “I can’t believe there’s really a treasure,” said Tequila. “I wanted to find it, but, deep down, I suspected it was sort of, you know, a MacGuffin.”

  “You should have gone earlier,” I said. “They stop serving breakfast at half-past ten.”

  “Not a McMuffin, Grandpa. I thought the gold was, like, psychological, or symbolic, or something.”

  “You think I would schlep halfway across the country for imaginary gold?”

  “I mean, I knew you thought there was gold, but I thought that the gold represented your desire for meaning at a point in your life when you’re facing infirmity and still trying to make sense of what you saw in the war, and trying to rationalize what happened to Dad.”

  I cocked one eyebrow. “What?”

  “You know, like, you have to go on the quest, because, deep down, you’re a romantic. But I thought we’d never find anything, because there isn’t ultimately any sense to be made of it.”

  I snorted. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Gold is gold, and there it is.”

  He crossed his arms, and annoyance flickered across his features.

  “I guess I felt the same way, kind of,” I said. “I didn’t think there was any way this was ever going to work out for us.”

  I picked up a gold brick. It was small, a little bigger than a candy bar, and it fit easily in my hand. It was heavy, though. I guessed it weighed somewhere around twenty-five pounds.

  “But it’s real, and it’s here, and now, it’s ours,” I said. “So, let’s bag it up and see if we can haul it out of here without getting arrested.”

  32

  Gold bars never looked too heavy in the movies; seemed like people on television were always throwing them at each other and stuffing them in jacket pockets.

  But carrying the real ones around was a little tougher. Four ingots, half our haul, stacked together, took up about as much space as a hardcover book but weighed as much as a set of encyclopedias. So the rolling bags had been a good idea.

  We emptied the box—I grunted with exertion each time I lifted a bar—and gave it back to the teller, locked. He must have noticed it was two hundred pounds lighter, but it was none of his business.

  I was relieved but not surprised by his lack of comment; the bank’s service to a box renter was to keep other people from ever looking at the box’s contents. Whatever went in or out of the box was the owner’s affair, not the bank’s. They’d accepted me as the owner, so now they would look the other way.

  It took Tequila two trips to drag the duffel bags through the lobby, wheels squeaking under the weight of the cargo. In the parking lot, I helped him heave the bags into the trunk of my Buick. Exhausted from the effort, he leaned, gasping for air, against the side of the car.

  “How much do you think that weighs?” he asked.

  “Maybe two hundred pounds, total,” I told him. “Possibly more.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows at me and then slid with a grunt into the driver’s seat. I climbed into the car as well.

  As the Buick rumbled out of the parking lot, it looked like we had gotten away clean: no sirens or flashing lights on the horizon, nobody rushing out of the bank behind us.

  We’d be prominent players on their security videos for the day, between the scene we’d made getting into the box and dragging the heavy bags through the lobby, but that was a worthwhile risk, considering the reward.

  “There’s sixteen ounces in a pound,” Tequila said. “And gold is trading for around nine hundred and fifty dollars an ounce on commodities markets.”

  “So that’s a pretty decent haul?”

  “A little over three million dollars, although it may be less if we have to sell it to some sort of shady fence,” he said. “Still, not a bad morning’s work.”

  I glanced in the rearview. “We may not be done working yet,” I told him. “I think we’ve made a friend.”

  Following a few car lengths back was a black Chevrolet sedan with dark windows. He’d picked us up as we’d pulled away from the bank, and he had been behind us since.

  “Are you sure?” Tequila asked.

  “I think I saw him yesterday as well.” The traffic light up ahead was about to change. “Quick, take the left.”

  “But I’m using MapQuest directions. I’ll get lost.”

  “Shut up and take the damn turn.”

  We fishtailed through the intersection, going pretty fast, just as the light changed from yellow to red. My seat belt yanked itself taut across my chest as my weight shifted against the momentum of the car, and I knew I would be bruised later. The sedan ran the red light. Somebody coming across had to slam his brakes to avoid hitting the Chevy, and we heard a chorus of protesting car horns behind us.

  “We’ve got ourselves a tail all right,” I said.

  Tequila glanced at me nervously. “Should I call the police?”

  I snorted. “With three million dollars’ worth of stolen gold in the trunk? Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that.”

  “Okay, so what am I supposed to do, then?”

  “What do you think?” I asked. “We shake him.”

  Tequila glanced in the rearview and mashed down on the pedal. “I’ve never been in a car chase,” he told me. “I am not sure how to handle this.”

  He swerved the Buick through a gap in traffic, narrowly avoiding a beat-up Plymouth hatchback.

  “Go as fast as you can,” I told him. “And try not to hit anything.”

  Tequila zipped the car through another yellow light, and our shadow ran through behind him.

  “I’m not sure I can lose this guy,” he said.

  I opened the glove compartment and found my sidearm. I thought I could take out our pursuer’s tires or maybe just punch a slug through the windshield and plant it in the driver’s face. I started to roll down the window.

  “What are you doing, Pop? You’re going to get us arrested. Or killed.”

  He was probably right. I wasn’t a cop anymore, and hanging out of a car window shooting into traffic would be considered indiscreet. I holstered the gun and grabbed my memory notebook, to have something to hang on to.

  “Let’s try t
o lose him on a corner,” I said. “Do you know how to drift with your hand brake?”

  “Uh, I think I did that in a video game,” Tequila said.

  The kid had never learned to drive properly; Brian had let Fran teach him. I tried to keep my voice calm and steady. I didn’t want to scare him any more than necessary.

  “You’re going to enter the turn at speed, then you’re going to cut your wheel hard, and pop the hand brake to lock the back wheels up. That should cause them to lose their grip on the road, and the back of the car should spin into the turn. You’re going to be cutting the wheel back in the opposite direction, to control the spin, and when you are facing the right way, you release the brake and punch the gas. Understand?”

  “I think so,” he said with a total lack of conviction. He glanced in the rearview, eyes wide with panic, and almost clipped the side-view mirror off a Range Rover. “Which intersection? When do I do it?”

  I looked around. I had known St. Louis pretty well once, but I hadn’t been able to maintain my grasp on that information. I had no idea where we were.

  “Doesn’t matter. Whenever you want to turn. You’re not trying to go anyplace particular, except away from that Chevy. If you do the drift turn right, he’ll go right past as we swing around the corner.”

  “Okay. I’m going to do this. Fuck me, I’m going to do this.”

  He gripped the brake. I could see his hand was shaking. His teeth were clenched, and he was sweating. He couldn’t drive well enough to shake our tail, and if he tried, he would wreck the car and we would die.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s too dangerous. It was a bad idea.”

  His eyes flicked away from the road a moment to look at me. “I can do it, Grandpa.”

  “Getting into a chase is more dangerous than dealing with anybody who could be tailing us,” I told him. “And if we get arrested for traffic violations, we will lose the treasure anyway. Slow down, and drive the speed limit.”