Don't Ever Get Old (5 page)

I paused.

“Not sure what that's got to do with Jim, uh, I guess when you get to be my age, it's not always easy to follow a train of thought. Jim and I were in the service together. We were in a Nazi prison camp together. Worst thing that ever happened to me. I almost died in that place. Wouldn't wish Nazi prison on most people I hate, but I'm glad Jim was there.”

“Because he sustained you during that trying time,” said Kind.

“Sure, sure,” I said. “You know, with his love of simple pleasures, like a cold beer on a hot summer day.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Kind.

“Of course, there wasn't any beer in Nazi prison.”

Kind frowned. “No, I'd guess not.”

“No crispy bacon, either.”

“I wouldn't think so.”

“Point is, Jim Wallace was my friend, and I'll miss him,” I said.

“Thank you, Buck,” said Kind, his voice full of warmth I knew I didn't deserve. Anybody who acted that nice had to be playing an angle.

I stepped off the stage, glad to be through with that. But when I got back to my seat, Rose didn't look too pleased.

 

5

Usually, there is a police escort for a funeral procession and I get to drive through red lights on the way to the cemetery, but Jim's crowd was too small. I was disappointed. At the cemetery, we stood in silence and watched them lower the coffin into the ground. It was a gray, rainy morning; at least the weather fit the occasion.

Norris Feely caught up to me and Rose as we walked back toward the cemetery gate. I'd have ducked him, but I don't move that fast.

“Very nice of you to speak today,” he said. But his eyes were squeezed half-shut in a way that didn't look like he thought I was very nice at all.

“Jim and I went back some years,” I replied, ignoring the subtext. “Sorry, again, for your loss.”

“Emily is still pretty broken up about her dad.”

“So sad to hear that,” said Rose. “Is there anything we can do?”

“I just want to see to Jim's interests for her.”

“Mighty decent of you,” I said. “We'll let you go, so you can get busy on that.”

“That's part of why I wanted to talk to you. I figure Emily is entitled to a share of all that gold.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Feely,” I said.

“Oh, stop bullshitting me,” he said. “I know all about the treasure.”

“Hey, I object to you using that sort of language in front of my wife. And I haven't got any gold. You seem to have some very mistaken ideas about Jewish people.”

“You're not the only one Jim shared his secrets with, and I know he set you after Ziegler. If you're hunting him, I want in.”

One thing a cop learns real fast is that people who talk like they think they're in movies are useless or worse. “If you want some of Ziegler's gold, I suppose you'd better take it up with Ziegler,” I told him.

“I don't know how to find him,” Norris sputtered.

“That's the problem you need to solve, then,” I said. “Let me know how it works out.” I was sort of curious about how one might thread that needle myself.

“Jim told me that when you found out Ziegler was alive, you'd hunt him to the gates of hell.”

Jim Wallace had no particular reason to hold me in such esteem, but people seemed to like me despite my best efforts to make them go away and leave me alone. It must have had something to do with my rugged good looks and effervescent charm. But after coming up with a big goose egg at the police station, I didn't deserve the accolades.

“Jim was confused toward the end. I don't know if you noticed, but I am very old. I don't think I'm still the man Jim was remembering when he said that. In fact, it's not even safe for me to be standing here in the rain talking to you. Do you understand? It's mortally dangerous for me to catch the sniffles. What do you expect me to do?”

“I expect you to do what Jim wanted you to do. What he wanted the both of us to do.”

“I'm not real sure I owe anything to Jim.” I'd already missed a great deal of quality news analysis and commentary because of Wallace, and I was a little offended that Norris had not recognized the magnitude of my sacrifice.

“Well, I owe him,” Norris said. “I lost my dad when I was young, and Jim has played a pretty important role in my life since Emily and I got together. I feel like this is … I don't know … his legacy. And I feel like you're squeezing me out of it. You and that slick little preacher.”

I said, “I just met Dr. Kind today, and I didn't like him that much.”

Norris balled his hairy sausage fingers into puffy little fists. “Don't lie to me.” His voice was high and strained, like a fiddle with its strings pulled too tight. “Y'all are already fast friends. My wife had the generosity to drive you home less than an hour after her father died, and you barely thanked her. We invited you to join us for dinner, and you turned us down. But within five minutes of meeting you, smooth Reverend Larry is giving you a big ol' hug. I'm sure he's already got designs on my share of the money, and you seem inclined to let him have it.”

“What makes you think Kind even knows about the treasure?”

“He visited the hospital just before Jim died, and the two of them spoke, alone. I'm pretty sure Jim told the story, and it's the sort of thing the reverend would find very interesting. Kind always makes time in his busy schedule to visit the dying, and he's gotten real good at wringing bequests out of them.”

There was no point in bothering to pretend this was interesting. I didn't give a damn about church politics. “Well, if Kind is looking for the treasure, he's doing it without my help. I've got no idea if there's any gold, or how to find it if it exists.”

“I'm supposed to believe the great detective is sitting out the treasure hunt?”

“Norris, I worked homicide, and I retired thirty-five years ago. I was a mediocre detective in a department that was more concerned with spraying fire hoses at colored folks than it was with solving murders. Being a homicide detective isn't a hard job if you don't care a whole lot about being good at it. I'd find a dead girl, so I'd lock up her boyfriend. If the case was any more complicated than that, most of the time there was no arrest. I have no idea how to track a man down, with nothing to work from other than the fact that somebody saw him sixty years ago halfway around the world.”

Feely didn't say anything, but he had finally managed an expression that looked to me like genuine sadness. Or maybe he just had gas. It was hard to tell.

“Come on, Norris, Jim didn't exactly provide us with a treasure map. The trail is cold. Maybe there's no trail at all.”

He let out a little moan. “For whatever it's worth, it's not just about the money,” he said. “I cared a lot for the old man. Miss him.”

The fact that he felt that point needed clarification meant that it mostly was about money to him, which I knew anyway. But at least he was decent enough to lie about it.

I lit a cigarette. “Forget about the gold,” I told him. “Take care of your wife.”

He lowered his head, muttered something that indicated capitulation, and walked away, toward the sound of Emily's sobs. But I knew that guy was too pigheaded and too greedy to be rebuffed for long by an appeal to common sense and human decency.

 

6

As soon as we pulled out of the cemetery parking lot, Rose shot me a look that let me know I was in for an earful.

“Buck, what was that man talking about?”

“I don't know.” I made a dismissive gesture. “Probably just crazy. Don't worry about it.”

She kept that stare fixed on me. The only sound in the car was the rhythmic scraping of the wipers across the windshield.

“Buck, do you think I am going to believe you when you talk about how it's not hard to be a mediocre detective?”

“That one was one hundred percent true. My problem was that I never got the hang of not caring.”

She frowned at me. “What are you getting yourself mixed up in?”

There was no use in lying to Rose. She'd had far too long to learn my habits.

“I'm not mixed up in anything. Jim Wallace told me before he died that Heinrich Ziegler, the Nazi, escaped Germany. I kind of want to find him, you know, so I can take his gold.”

Rose drummed her knuckles on the inside of the window. That meant she was annoyed. “Nazis don't have gold, Buck. You're thinking of leprechauns.”

She had a point. Every time I said it out loud, the idea of chasing Nazi gold seemed ridiculous. In my mind, it made sense; it felt like something I had to do.

“So, what are you going to do?” Rose asked. “You're going to catch this man, after all these years, when nobody else has?”

“Reckon so. I've got nothing better to do.”

“You can't run off to Europe or South America or Egypt chasing after a phantom. How are we going to keep track of your medications?”

“I don't know. I doubt I'll even find enough clues to lead me out of Memphis. The trail is cold.”

“But, even if you don't find anything, once you start hunting Nazis and treasure, you're going to run afoul of some dangerous folks.”

I laughed. “Like who? Feely?”

“Buck, you always find somebody dangerous to get on the wrong side of.”

“Well, I like to keep things interesting. And anyway, I've always been good at handling dangerous people.”

“Maybe you're not as good anymore as you used to be,” she said.

The thought had already occurred to me. “Best thing about dying, sweetheart, is that you only have to go to one more funeral.”

She didn't seem to think that was cute. “Buck, you've got to ask yourself: is this about what you're chasing after, or what you're running away from?”

I didn't have an answer for her.

Rose and I buried our only son six years ago. He was fifty-two, and he's gone. We're still here. Dragging that reality around gets exhausting. I was a hard man, once. Immovable, like the face of a mountain. But wind and rain can erode even granite if they have enough years to do it. No matter how tough you think you are, if you live long enough, eventually you get all squishy.

The rain kept beating on the roof of the car, and we rode the rest of the way home without saying anything.

 

Something I don't want to forget:

Heinrich Ziegler grew up in a little village in the Bavarian countryside, in a cottage with a thatched straw roof and stone walls and a view of the Alpine foothills. It was probably kind of charming, but when I went there after the war, I wasn't in a mood to be charmed.

I banged on the door so hard that it rattled in its frame, and a middle-aged woman opened it. She squinted at my fatigues and at the American insignia sewn on them, and then she started wailing and threw herself at me, thrashing her thin arms and beating at my chest with her tiny fists. I grabbed her wrist, wrenched it behind her back, and threw her to the ground.

She bared her teeth and hissed at me like an alley cat.

“English?” I asked.

“Too late,” she said. “Gone. All dead.”

“Heinrich Ziegler?”

She started crying, so I decided to search the house. Inside, it was dark. Dishes were piled in the sink, and roaches scuttled across the kitchen floor. On the side table in the bedroom, I found four hand-delivered letters, notifying Greta Ziegler of the deaths of her sons Gustav, Albert, and Heinrich, and of her husband, Karl.

I picked up the papers and took them outside, where Ziegler's mother was still crying in the dirt.

“Where is he buried?” I asked, pointing at Heinrich's name on the paper. I shouted it at her a couple more times before she pointed toward a church steeple just visible over a rise in the distance. I threw the letters on the ground and stepped on them as I stalked back toward my motorcycle.

She'd lost everyone she cared about, but I didn't have sympathy for any Germans. As far as I was concerned, the whole damn lot of them richly deserved whatever
tsuris
they got.

The churchyard was full of fresh graves, and the three Ziegler brothers were buried there, along with their father. I looked at Heinrich's grave marker for a while. The dates matched the letters, and the letters matched the records I'd seen in Berlin. I smoked a cigarette, and when I was finished, I ground it out on the stone, leaving a black smudge.

A lot of people have lied to me over the years, enough that I can usually spot the giveaways. If Greta Ziegler showed any sign of falsehood, I don't remember it. She really thought her son was dead. I don't think Heinrich tipped his mother off to his con; he abandoned her to her grief, and he ran. Maybe he couldn't face her, couldn't go home after the things he'd seen and the things he'd done. Or maybe he just didn't care.

 

7

Billy called the house the next morning to let me know he was a much better detective than I was. When the phone rang, I was moving my oatmeal around a bowl and giving Rose trouble about how it wasn't hot enough.

“How's it going, Pop?”

“I'm still here,” I said.

“I shared your story with a girl I know who volunteers for the Anti-Defamation League.”

“Yeah, so?”

“We figured that your friend Jim Wallace couldn't have been the only person to see Ziegler and recognize him, so we thought that we might get some more information from people who keep track of fugitive war criminals. She told me I should check with an organization called the Simon Wiesenthal Center. They do advocacy for human rights, they fight anti-Semitism, and they used to spend a lot of time hunting down Nazis.”

“I've heard of that.”

“Yeah,” said Tequila. “So I called them up. They gave me all kinds of fascinating information about your friend.”