Don't Ever Get Old (3 page)

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.

“This is Google,” he explained to me. “It is the most powerful database in the world. You can find anything with this.”

“They talk about that a lot on Fox News,” I said. “I remember back when the only ‘Google' was the sound a guy made when you punched him in the throat.”

Jennings typed the words
man with no name
into the Google and stared intently at the screen. Then his face lit up, and I leaned toward the machine to see what he'd found.

“Okay, it says you're looking for this man here. He should be easy to find.”

He angled the computer so I could see it.

I was looking at a picture of Clint Eastwood from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
.

“Ain't you two supposed to be friends or something?” Jennings asked. And then he laughed at me.

“Or something,” I said, and I lit a cigarette.

The two of us regarded each other for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then Jennings spoke.

“I got some news for you,” he said as his slack features tightened into a sneer. “These kids here may admire the Buck Schatz they hear about in stories, but I can see past your bullshit. I came up rough on the streets of this town. God knows what would have happened to me if it hadn't been for Max Heller.”

“Aw,” I said. I rubbed at my temples. “For Christ's sake.” The young cops downstairs had been playing a prank after all, to put me together with Heller's protégé. Jennings hadn't even registered to me as somebody unfriendly. I wondered how I had missed the malice in his voice before. I used to be a hard man to fool.

“Don't talk to me about Christ, you Jew bastard.” He pointed an emphatic finger at me. “I go to church. That's one of the things Max taught me to take seriously. He was the closest thing I ever had to a father.”

It was my turn to laugh. “Feel sorry for you, kid.”

“No.” He stood up and leaned over the desk, a sign of aggression. I noticed, about then, that there was nobody else in the room. “You don't get to feel sorry for me. You look like a Mr. Potato Head. I feel sorry for you.”

I didn't say anything. For fifteen years, Max Heller and I sat five feet apart, barely speaking, until he finally got promoted. I thought he was a careerist ass kisser, and he thought I was a loose cannon.

In the movies, we would have become unwilling partners for some reason and learned to respect each other. The reality was less exciting: we nursed a long-simmering mutual animosity, which never built toward much of a climax. Then I retired and mostly forgot about him.

“Forty years Max labored, doing fine, careful police work, locking up killers and closing cases, while you cruised around in a souped-up, nonregulation car, carrying an obscene nonregulation gun, shooting suspects, and getting your picture in the paper.”

It was my turn to stand and point a finger at him. “I don't care what Heller told you. I was the best goddamn cop in the southeastern United States. This department pinned every award they had on my chest and then they made up new ones for me.”

“Oh, don't I know it,” Jennings said. “They tried to award me the Schatz Medal for Exceptional Bravery, and I refused to take the damn thing.”

Nobody ever told me about that; I'd never even heard of this guy. I had not realized I'd gotten so far out of the loop.

“But while you were collecting your silly-ass crackerjack-box prizes, Heller was doing honest policing. You know he closed twice as many homicides as you?”

I grunted. Heller may have mentioned that once or twice. He jumped on open-and-shut cases like a cat on a ball of string, looking to boost his clearance rate. I always let him.

“When they passed him over for director, I never saw such a strong man so beaten down.” Jennings gave me a mean, cold stare. “He knew he was through in police work. Six months later, he was dead.”

“I never did anything to harm Heller's career,” I said.