Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series)

by Friedman, Daniel

  I sized him up. Dark eyes and dark skin; a waxed pencil-line of mustache beneath a prominent nose. He wore a gray Savile Row–style suit with white chalk stripes. The jacket was cut slim; tailored close enough to his body that I could see he didn’t have a gun underneath it. This was a man I could break six different ways, using just my hands.

  But if he didn’t look like a tough, the fellows he ran with certainly did. There were five of them with us in the dingy basement barroom, and each was as big across as a beef steer. Other than the European’s entourage and a nervous-looking bartender, the place was empty, and one of the goons had settled his bulk in front of the door to make sure it stayed that way. I looked around for another way out, but there wasn’t one. If I needed to escape, I would have to go through that man, and he was awful thick.

  “Talk, then,” I said.

  His heavy eyebrows knit together. “I understand you refused to surrender your weapon as my associates requested.”

  I unbuttoned my own baggy American off-the-rack suit jacket and opened it, so he could see the .357 Magnum hanging at my side.

  “I ain’t accustomed to complying with requests from folks like your associates. And I didn’t survive this long by walking unarmed into basements with men like you. A while back, a real smart fellow told me I should always hang on to my gun.”

  “And yet, surely, you recognize that the fetish object to which you cling affords only illusory protection. That weapon will be woefully insufficient to dispatch us all, should our conversation devolve into gunplay.”

  I didn’t like his smugness, and I didn’t like his condescending tone. But what I liked least of all was the fact that his observation carried an implicit threat. We were down near the river, on a mostly deserted block. If things got sticky, nobody would be coming to help me. Luckily, I was the self-reliant sort.

  “This gun carries a pill for each of you, by my count, and the first is yours, Slick. Illusory or not, your friends would have to be preternatural quick to put me down before I get a shot off. I reckon my fetish object will afford me a fine opportunity to make your evening pretty unpleasant, should our conversation, as you put it, devolve,” I said.

  “I have no doubt of that, Baruch, and I have no desire to test the extent of your dangerousness. People say you are a man who has been through Hell and come out meaner for it, and looking at you, I know what I have heard is the truth. You have the eyes of a feral dog. But I would caution you: I am, in my way, just as unyielding as you.”

  I weighed that, to decide whether to take offense. “You spit out a lot of words, to say a whole lot of nothing, and I ain’t got time to listen to you make noises to amuse yourself. Who the hell are you, and what do you want?”

  “I apologize, most sincerely, if I have been circumspect. I am called Elijah, and I am a gentleman of fortune. I want to offer a proposition to you.”

  “If you heard I take bribes, you heard wrong,” I told him.

  “I didn’t go to all this trouble to offer a bribe,” he said. He punctuated this with a nasal, chirpy laugh. “I wish to engage your participation in a rather elaborate and highly lucrative criminal conspiracy.”

  “You want me in on a job you’re doing.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of a job?”

  He smiled at me, showed me the only thing about him that wasn’t neat. His soft, purple gums were badly receded, exposing the brown roots of his jagged teeth. I’d seen mouths like his before, but never in America. Not even on hopheads. Hell, not even in Alabama. Those gums told a story of a man who had survived an extended period of severe malnutrition. Elijah had been through a hell of his own.

  “I can’t divulge the particulars until you’re inextricably committed to the enterprise,” he said. “Otherwise, perhaps Detective Schatz will arrest me.” He chirped at me again.

  I got real still for a minute and just looked at him; a feral dog catching the scent of a cottonmouth snake.

  “I ain’t interested in your offer,” I said. “As far as arresting you, I’ll keep my options open.” I stood up, and my chair scraped across the floor as I pushed it back. “No hard feelings, Elijah, but this dog prefers to keep his nose clean.” I moved toward the exit. The man at the door didn’t look like he was planning to let me pass, so I stuck my hand inside my jacket.

  “Baruch,” said Elijah. “You are a warrior. You have killed and imprisoned the enemies of your sovereign. For your labors, you’re rightly owed a prince’s reward, and yet your wife, Rose, and your son, Brian, are deprived of even modest comforts.”

  This wasn’t a sales pitch; it was a threat. This was his backhanded, Continental way of telling me he would hurt my family. I had killed men for less, on his continent and on mine, and I wasn’t averse to doing it again. My hand closed on the grip of the .357.

  He continued. “And all the while, the men who shape society’s strictures so as to funnel wealth to themselves grow fatter and richer with each passing day, while you protect their hegemonic rule and beg them for scraps. How can you say this is clean? How can you believe this to be just?”

  “I’m getting by,” I said, not taking my eyes off the hulking form in the doorway. The big man’s face looked like a boiled ham.

  “Please, let me show you something.” Elijah laid a hand on my shoulder. I dropped my cigarette on the floor and whirled around to face him, drawing the gun from my holster. I had not realized he’d left his seat at the corner booth in the back of the room; he’d moved without making any noise.

  The five thugs all drew down on me, and we had a nice little standoff.

  “Gentlemen, put away your guns,” Elijah said, keeping his voice soft and even. The men obeyed. He turned toward me. The .357 was pointed at his nose. “I’d appreciate it if you would as well, Baruch. It’s only polite.”

  I thought about just going ahead and blowing his sleek little head apart. The five gunmen would probably ventilate me pretty good, but that might be less unpleasant than listening to more of his monologues. It wouldn’t be right, though, to leave Rose a widow. Not with the kid wanting to go to college. I felt I owed it to them to make a reasonable effort to avoid getting myself killed. I holstered the Magnum.

  “Thank you, Baruch,” Elijah said with a gracious nod as he smoothly slipped out of his suit jacket. He folded it once and draped it over the nearest chair. Then he rolled up the left sleeve of his crisp, white dress shirt and showed me his forearm. Near the inside of his elbow, tattooed in blue ink, was the serial number A-62102.

  “A souvenir from the place my childhood ended,” he told me. “And a constant reminder of the lesson I learned there. Society’s veneer of civility and order is false and fragile, and a Jew’s position is always precarious. My parents believed they could be professionals, put down roots, join the community. Their miscalculation was punished, rather severely.”

  “I know who you are. I’ve heard of you.” It had been a bad couple of years for people who owned safes full of cash and the people who insured them, and a few of my better-connected snitches had heard whispers that someone called Elijah was the reason for that. Word was: He’d emptied more banks than the panic of 1929. They said he didn’t know fear, and could move in and out of a place like a ghost. No law enforcement agency had ever gotten close to even proving he existed. And here he was, with his neck within easy reach of my hands.

  He smiled his damaged smile. “A strong, capable Jew shouldn’t be beholden to the goyish establishment. We are society’s eternal outsiders, so what is our stake in social stability? We are imprisoned and executed even when we follow the rules, so why shouldn’t we transgress?”

  He was taking a big risk trying to recruit me. Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was how he worked. Maybe he had a whole network of disaffected Jewish cops working for him. Maybe that’s how he stayed so far ahead of the law.

  “I’m sorry about how things worked out for your people,” I said. “But I’m an American. I bled for this country.”

/>   “You sound like the German Jews who fought for the Fatherland in the Great War. They marched, in proud military lockstep, into the ovens.” He spit on the floor.

  “My answer is no.”

  Elijah’s dark eyes narrowed, and the corners of his thin mouth turned downward. “When I look at you, I think we are kindred souls. It pains me that we will not stand side by side.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is. And here’s a fair warning, since I reckon you’ve seen your share of suffering. Don’t pull any jobs in my town. Because, if you test me, I’ll kill you, kindred soul or not.”

  “Then we shall be enemies.” He gave a nonchalant shrug as he pulled his jacket over his shoulders. “I shall be hunted by the feral dog. This outcome disappoints me, but I find it acceptable. Your pursuit will make my work here more interesting, and when I humiliate you, Baruch Schatz, it will burnish my legend.”

  Something about the way he said that made the hairs on the backs of my hands stand on end. I wondered what sort of monster he kept hidden behind his own fragile veneer of civility. But the circumstances weren’t right for finding out; I was outnumbered and outgunned. So I turned my back on Elijah, to face the slab of muscle still blocking the exit.

  “Get the fuck out of my way,” I said.

  The big man looked over my shoulder at his boss, who must have gestured approval. He moved aside, and I pushed past him, out into the cold and the dark. The door slammed behind me. Startled by a shadow in my peripheral vision, I spun on my heel, drew my gun, and pointed it back toward the narrow entryway, in case somebody was coming out after me.

  Nobody was.

  3

  2009

  Morning wasn’t such a bad time at Valhalla Estates. The dining room had big plate glass picture windows overlooking the facility’s rear lawn, which was lush and sunny and big enough to play a game of touch football on, if anybody had the desire or capacity to do so.

  I was not pleased that this specter from my past had arrived to spoil my breakfast. Breakfast was one of the better parts of my day. I wanted to enjoy it, because later, I’d have to do physical therapy. That was always unpleasant.

  “You didn’t need to make a special trip out here to tell me you’re going to die,” I said. “You could have just sent a save-the-date for the funeral, or something.”

  He cringed a little. There was a sagginess, a pouchiness to the various bulges of his face. Elijah might have been a legend, but he was made of flesh, and he was decaying like everything else.

  “I thought you might want to do something about it,” he said.

  “I don’t want to kill you anymore,” I said to Elijah. “I don’t care a whole lot what happens to you, one way or the other.”

  “There are many words I’d use to describe Buck Schatz, but ‘indifferent’ would not be one of them.”

  I stuck my fork into the eggs and stirred them around on the plate. I was hungry, and I was used to eating around this time, but I didn’t think I could choke down this slop with him watching me.

  “I was a cop. Now I’m not anymore. I haven’t been a cop for a long time. I’ve been retired for more years than I spent working. I used to get paid to care about what people like you did, and what happened to you. Now somebody else has that job. If you need to talk to the police, I don’t suppose it’s too hard to find their number.”

  “So, if you are no longer the police, what are you now?”

  “The way I get through most days is by not asking myself that question,” I said.

  He bared his teeth, and I saw they were straight and white like fresh-scrubbed kitchen tile. There was no natural way to make that out of what he’d had in his mouth the last time I saw him. The legendary thief was wearing a full set of dentures.

  When he didn’t say anything for a minute, I asked him: “What is it you really want?”

  “Help.” He clenched and unclenched those long pianist’s fingers. They were knottier than they’d once been, but the motion of them was still smooth and assured. “I need help.”

  I shoveled some eggs into my mouth. I chewed for longer than eggs ought to require chewing—out of necessity, not for effect—and then I reached across the table to grab the plastic saltshaker. I shook it vigorously over my plate until the gelatinous yellow-white scrambled mass was coated with crystalline flakes. I took another bite, and this time, it was kind of crunchy. My doctor had warned me about my sodium intake, but salt was one of the only things I could still taste.

  “And you came looking for me? To help you?” I asked.

  He nodded a curt, European nod. “I asked for your help once before, and you refused. I thought, perhaps, this time might be different.”

  “That line of reasoning runs into three problems that I can see. First, I’m eighty-eight years old. Second, I’m damn near crippled. And third, I don’t like you.”

  “Baruch,” he said, lowering his voice to a near whisper. “Look at this place you’ve come to live in. Is this where you thought you’d end up? Is this what you wanted for Rose, your wife? The last time I saw you, you were violent and irrational and deeply misguided, but you were fierce and proud and full of dignity. There is no dignity in this place.”

  I set the fork down. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I know you’re here because you need access to nursing care, due to your failing health. If you help me, I’ll pay you enough that you can hire a full-time nurse and buy a fine house outfitted with all the fixtures you need to ease your slide into decrepitude. I know about the fortune you lost, Baruch. If you make a friend of me, I can replace all of it.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be your friend. Why do people have such a hard time understanding that I ain’t friendly?”

  “If you won’t help me, then kill me, damn you,” said Elijah. “At least deprive my pursuers that satisfaction.”

  I hesitated, long enough to think about the kind of damage I could do with my fork. I considered the pale blue bulge of his jugular vein, throbbing beneath the loose flesh of his jaw. I wasn’t sure, though, whether I was fit enough to lunge across the table, and I didn’t want him bleeding all over my eggs. “What kind of help do you want from me?” I asked.

  He stared straight into my eyes, without a trace of a smile, or I’d have thought he was putting me on. “I need you to keep me safe for as long as you’re able, and if I am killed, I want you to rain vengeance upon my enemies.”

  “I don’t rain a lot of vengeance on people these days. Sometimes I dribble urine down the front of my pants, but that’s as close as I get.”

  “I saw you on the news a few months ago. You blew a man’s head apart at close range with a pistol. You’re the meanest son of a bitch I ever met, Baruch. You’re mean in a way I never learned to be, no matter how bitter I became. You’re meaner than the soldier who shot my mother in the head. He looked pale and scared. You never looked scared. You never looked uncertain. Mean doesn’t weaken with age; it just curdles and gets more pungent. And, today, I need mean on my side.”

  I always enjoyed hearing about my more attractive traits, but: “If you’re in danger, call the police.”

  “I do not lightly subject myself to the coercive power of the State. I don’t know those people. They aren’t Jews.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You don’t want to call the police, because you are a criminal, and you need help with some kind of a crime.”

  He leaned forward and bared his teeth again, as if he were shocked by the very suggestion. “I am reformed,” he told me. “I’ve become a philanthropist. I administer a charity that has helped hundreds of Jewish refugees immigrate to Israel.”

  I would have thought he was lying, except that a charitable foundation was probably a great way to launder stolen money.

  “Why don’t you ask Israel for help?” I said, liking the idea of Elijah going halfway around the world to a place where I wouldn’t have to deal with this.

  “I’m not going to run, this time. I’m to
o old to run.”

  “Philanthropists don’t usually get into the kind of trouble you say you’re in.”

  “Not everyone wants Jews to get rescued.”

  That sounded like a load. I ate some more of my salty eggs. They tasted like the sea, if the sea came from inside of a chicken. “And I’m too old to help you. I got nowhere to hide you, and no means to protect you. If you want to be safe, you have to go to the police.”

  He sank into stylish, European reverie as he considered his options. I ignored him and focused on the eggs. I was thinking about going back through the chow line to get a bagel. The staff at Valhalla had an amazing way of cooking them, so they came out burned on the bottom but still frozen in the middle.

  “If I go to the police, will you wield your influence to assure that I am protected? Will you make my safety your personal responsibility? Will you see to it that the danger I am facing is taken seriously, and that I am not subject to persecution?”

  “You’ll have to admit to whatever you’re involved in. You’ll have to confess to everything you have ever done, and you’ll have to tell the officers about these people who are after you.”

  He sat, contemplating his options, while I chewed. “That’s acceptable,” he said at last. “But I am not depending on the police. I am depending on you. I want you to assure my safety, and if I am killed, I want my vengeance to be a matter of honor for you.”

  “Whatever you say,” I told him. “If you’re going to turn yourself in, I’ll broker your surrender. You ought to get a lawyer first.”

  “I’ll look into that.”

  “Well, you might want to hurry, since you’re going to be dead soon,” I said. “Or, don’t. If you wait long enough, the problem will most likely solve itself.”

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  Early in my career, I responded to a domestic disturbance call, involving a man in a leather coat who called himself Liminal Doug. He stood in the doorway of his shitty duplex and explained to me that, when a pimp truly loves a bitch, he sometimes needs to go upside her head.