Don't Ever Get Old (12 page)

Steinblatt's bushy eyebrows knit together with confusion. “Manischewitz? Like the kosher wine?” he asked.

“People call me Tequila,” said Tequila. “It's a fraternity thing. My name is Will.”

“Ah, I understand,” said Steinblatt. He couldn't fully hide his disapproval; growing up in Soviet austerity and fighting for survival on a tiny strip of Middle Eastern turf were probably not experiences that instilled much appreciation for the American college fraternity lifestyle. But poor Yitzchak had to pretend to like Diaspora Jews as part of his job.

Tequila stuck out his hand, and Steinblatt's swallowed it.

“So,” I said. “How did you know Dr. Kind?”

“I didn't know him. Not personally. But he was well-known to my agency. I am here mostly to be speaking to Jews of American South, but also, I am involved in representing Israel among our other friends.”

“Lawrence Kind was Israel's friend?” Tequila asked.

“Oh, very much. The Evangelical Christians have been unwavering allies to state of Israel. They believe our presence there hastens the return of their Christ. Many people here think the political influence of American Jews preserves the special relationship between Israel and the United States, but Evangelicals are at least as important. Christian tourism is also bright area in our economy.”

Most of the mourners had left, so I loosened my necktie and unbuttoned my collar. “Then taking care of Kind fell under your job description?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” said Steinblatt. “I never met him myself, but he was quite close with several of my colleagues, and all are deeply saddened to learn of his passing. He led tourist groups from his church to Israel several times, and the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs helped him organize those. Since I am here in Memphis, I come to share regrets.”

“Nice of you to do,” I said.

Steinblatt tugged at his beard. “He was such a young and vibrant man, and he died such a horrible way. It saddens me greatly. I find that, although I can never get far away from such violence, I can never get used to it, either. Mr. Buckshot, you have also seen a great deal of suffering. How does a man become accustomed to such horror?”

“Some men seem to learn to like it.”

His big, fleshy lips turned downward. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “Are you one of those who relishes this violence?”

I shrugged. “There are worse feelings than putting a couple of holes into a man who's got it coming to him. What about you? Do you like killing?”

“I have seen too much of it, too many wars. Violence is a self-perpetuating monster, and it feeds on the blood of the guilty and innocent alike. I was in Afghanistan, you know, in the war there. Then, I leave Soviet Union for Israel, and we have this Palestinian intifada. The lust for violence among the Arabs is barbaric. I cannot fathom the mind of a man who would blow himself up to kill civilians, and yet these people celebrate such atrocities. One moment, children are sitting in café. Next, boom. In pieces.” He bowed his huge, woolly head. “Even here in America, where there is plenty for all, the violence is unceasing. Things like this happen to people like Dr. Kind. Did you know that the rate of violent death per capita here in Memphis exceeds that of Jerusalem at the height of Palestinian resistance?”

“Probably better off here than in Gaza, though, isn't it?” sniffed Tequila.

“What we do there is self-defense,” Steinblatt insisted. “It is our right to raise our children in cities free from terrorism.”

Tequila frowned at him. “God knows, bombing their homes to rubble will curb their militancy.”

I hit my grandson in the ribs, hard, with my bruised elbow and winced a little at the pain that shot up my arm.

Steinblatt turned to me. “Tell me, Mr. Buckshot, how did you know Dr. Kind?”

“That's actually a funny story,” I said. “I'm sleeping with his wife.”

The big Jew was quiet for a moment, and then his bushy eyebrows arched. “You speak to me with contempt. Have I angered you?”

“You said you were going to meet me at the Jewish Community Center, and then you didn't show up. When a fellow gets older, he starts to feel like time is precious, so I don't like people wasting mine.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “I was unavoidably detained. I hope someday I can make it up to you.”

“It must take something mighty powerful to detain a fellow your size,” I said. “What was it, exactly, that kept you?”

He frowned. “I'm afraid that is a matter I have no liberties to discuss.”

“I was just wondering, because around the same time you were standing me up at the center, somebody was murdering Lawrence Kind.”

His big hands clenched into fists. “Are you accusing me of this?”

I lit a cigarette. “I'm just observing things.”

“I do not appreciate the implication, sir.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Yid's Cock, do you know a guy named Avram Silver?”

“I do not,” he said, and his voice had turned hard. “Now, if you will excuse, I must get to another appointment.”

“With who?” Tequila asked.

Stony silence from Steinblatt.

“Don't let me hold you up. I know you have important things to do. Whoever you're seeing, send them my best wishes. I do know everyone Jewish in Memphis.”

The big Russian gave a curt nod and stalked away from us.

“What a nice guy,” I said to Tequila. “I wonder if your grandmother would like to have him over to the house for supper sometime.”

 

18

Tequila was sitting in my spot on the sofa and getting damn smug about his Internet. He'd turned on his computer after the funeral, and by dinnertime he had uncovered information that would have required a proper detective to burn a lot of shoe leather and cigarettes, waste a lot of time in the records room and the newspaper morgue, and probably bust a few heads as well.

I turned up the volume on the television to drown out the self-satisfied little purring noises he was making as he tapped on his keys. Some academic types were talking about old war movies on the History Channel. I liked old war movies, and I wanted to write what they were saying into my memory notebook.

“I think the continuing significance of Nazis as mass culture villains is connected to the fact that this is an unambiguous evil that has been essentially defanged,” said a bearded, bespectacled man on the screen. It took me a second to recognize him as the same NYU film professor who had been popping up on every channel the last few weeks, talking about the end of the tough-guy era.

“We can hate them,” the professor continued, “but we don't need to fear them, because they are vanquished. They are buried. They are an anachronism.”

“How are you getting on the Internet?” I asked Tequila. “I don't have any Internet in here, and your computer isn't even plugged in.”

“I'm piggybacking on your neighbor's WiFi network.”

“Oh. That makes sense,” I said, even though it made no sense at all.

“If they're buried, though, then why do we persist in digging them up?” asked the red-faced, heavyset television host. “Why preserve, as you say, an anachronism as the most prominent incarnation of absolute evil in our symbolic vernacular?”

Tequila glanced up from his screen to look at mine. “Why do you watch this?” he asked.

“Why does anybody do anything?”

For six bucks on his credit card, Tequila had obtained the St. Louis police file on Avram Silver, which included the address of the house Silver had been arrested breaking into. Heinrich Ziegler's house. The report listed the home owner as being one Henry Winters, so we knew Ziegler's alias. And a search of real estate transaction records, a few keystrokes on Tequila's keyboard, told us he sold the house in 1996. He had listed a place called the Meadowcrest Manor as his forwarding address.

“Meadowcrest Manor?” I asked Tequila. “Do you think he cashed in his gold bars and bought some kind of mansion?”

“No,” said Tequila. “Look at this.”

The computer screen explained that Meadowcrest Manor was a full-service community for active seniors. In other words, a rest home. I shuddered.

“The Nazis are universally recognizable, even by audiences poorly acquainted with history,” said the bearded professor. “Jackboots and swastikas and German accents form an easy shorthand for wickedness. But we can hate the Nazis without fearing them, because they are alien to our experience. Because they are gone.”

“I ran a LexisNexis search on the St. Louis papers for Henry Winters, and didn't find any obituaries, so as best I can tell, he's still there, at Meadowcrest,” Tequila said.

Ziegler had been shut in the rest home for more than a decade. Served him right to be locked up, but he was the most formidable enemy I ever confronted, the only one ever to push me to the precipice. How could he have decayed so much?

“So, we can vilify them without finding reflections of ourselves in them because they are foreign and because they are relics of an era that has limited modern relevance,” said the television host.

The computer also had a contact number for the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs, and it had an office in New York. Tequila had called them with a new kind of cellular phone that was itself a tiny Internet. I couldn't understand how he dialed the thing; it had no buttons.

The Israeli agency confirmed that Yitzchak Steinblatt was its employee, that he was in Memphis, and that he matched the description of the man I'd spoken to. So his story checked out. But then again, a secret assassin would be able to manufacture a passable cover.

Older sorts of networks supplied helpful information as well. While Tequila busied himself with the Googles, I'd spent an hour kibitzing with the resident gossips and all-purpose oracles ensconced in the lobby of the Jewish Community Center, and they confirmed for me that the big Russian hadn't met with any rabbis or scheduled speeches at any synagogues or arranged to do much of anything else.

“So does that mean he has nothing to do with anything?” Tequila asked.

“Does he look like someone who has nothing to do with anything?”

“He's really big.”

I scowled at him.

“Well, if Steinblatt killed Kind, I don't see how the wife could also have been involved,” Tequila said. “We're suspicious of everyone, but they can't all have done the murder.”

“What I learned from being a cop is that nobody's innocent,” I said. But he was right. We were long on paranoia and had no evidence of anything. My doctor had told me paranoia was an early symptom of dementia in the elderly.

“Precisely,” said the bearded professor on the television as an ugly little smirk crawled across his face. “We don't fear them the way we might fear modern foreign enemies, or illness, or the unhinged and dangerous people who might be living in our neighborhoods, who might have insinuated themselves into our communities, into our lives.”

“We don't fear them, in other words, the way we fear the things that are actually going to kill us,” said the host.

I sucked a lungful of smoke out of a Lucky Strike. Cigarettes are the best treatment, in my opinion, for existential panic.

“Honey, could you make a pot of coffee?” I shouted in the general direction of where I thought Rose might be.

“She's already turned in for the night. I'll get it,” said Tequila, and he started to stand up.

Rose shuffled out of the bedroom. “Don't you dare,” she scolded him. “I've been fixing coffee for longer than you've been alive.”

“It's no trouble,” Tequila said as he rose to his feet. “Why don't you go back to bed?”

“Shut up and leave it alone,” I told him.

“Okay,” said Tequila. He paused for a moment as Rose made her way to the kitchen, and then he slid back down onto the couch. “Uh, so, let's assume Steinblatt is a Mossad assassin working with Avram Silver, to get Heinrich Ziegler's gold. Why is he hanging around here? Why doesn't he go straight to St. Louis?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe he doesn't know where it is.”

“Okay,” said Tequila. “What's here that he needs?”

“Maybe something to do with Wallace? Maybe Norris Feely has a clue we don't know about.” I wondered if I was the first person ever to suspect Feely of having a clue.

Tequila scratched his chin. “Wallace told you he hadn't seen Ziegler since 1946, right?”

“Maybe there's more to the story that he didn't tell me.”

“No,” Tequila said. “It's not Wallace. It's got to be you. He showed up after you called Silver. He came to your house.”

I lit another cigarette. “But I don't know anything. The only real clue we found is the one Silver gave us. It's been nearly twenty years since Silver fled the country with that dossier, and as far as we know, he's never done anything about it. Now, we make a phone call and ask a few questions, and he's got an angry Jewish giant sniffing around after us?”

“Fe-Fi-Oy-Vey,” said Tequila.

“How do you take yours, Billy?” Rose called.

“Cream and sugar?” he yelled back to her.

From the kitchen, the sound of cupboards opening and closing. “I've got half-and-half and some Sweet'N Low.”

“Black is fine.”

I lit another cigarette. “Silver had some plan to get the gold, and he's worried that we might get to it first,” I said. “Maybe he's been waiting for Ziegler to die, and now we've startled him. Maybe he's getting rid of other people who might be chasing the treasure.”

“So if you think Steinblatt killed Kind, how do Pratt and Felicia fit into the story?”

“I learned a few things in thirty years on the streets of this town, and let me tell you, nobody's innocent.”

“Yeah, Grandpa. You already said—”

He was interrupted by a loud clattering noise.