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

by Friedman, Daniel

“I don’t think so,” I said. I had a couple of seeping abrasions, and I guess my nose had been gushing, though I had been too dazed to even realize it.

  I took the cigarette out of my mouth. It was covered in blood. I laughed at it. “Hey, this thing looks like a used tampon.”

  The girl was moving her finger back and forth in front of my face.

  “Can you follow my finger with your eyes?” she asked. I tried to. “Can you remember what happened to you?”

  The chain of events that had brought me to this point was admittedly a little blurred. “The goddamn air bag punched me in the face. My doctor has me on a blood thinner called Plavix. Keeps me from having a stroke, but it makes me bruise up like a rotten peach. Sometimes I rip myself open jostling against the nightstand, or I cut myself shaving, and we have to go into the emergency room.”

  “I think you’re in shock,” she was saying.

  I’d had a couple of nosebleeds that were bad enough to require trips to the emergency room, just from dry weather. The air bag had hit me really hard.

  “Just tell Rose I am all right. No need to worry her over this. If you need anything, ask my son.”

  Now I was lying on my back, somehow, and being carried toward an ambulance. I wasn’t sure how that had happened. They ratcheted the gurney partway upright, either because I was in shock, or so the blood from my nose would not run down my throat.

  “They got Elijah,” I said. “He told me they were coming for him, and I didn’t believe him, and now Andre is hurt, and they got him.”

  “This mask is to make it easier for you to breathe.” She put it over my face, and I felt the cool flow of air against my damaged nose.

  “It was that scumbag Lefkowitz. He must have told them where we were. I know we weren’t followed to the cemetery. We have to get Lefkowitz. He’ll know where they took Elijah. There’s still time to get him back alive, I think, if we’re lucky.”

  She jabbed a needle into my arm, and then I started to feel sleepy. I was semiconscious at best when they wheeled me out of the ambulance and into the hospital, and while a doctor in surgical scrubs was shouting for units of O neg, I got bored and dozed off.

  SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

  A journalist with a lot of blackheads on his nose had a lot of thoughts about cops: “If I had to choose one convention out of our police thrillers and action-adventures that aggravates me, it would be that the heroes never shoot first,” he said. “They’ve got to let the bad guys open fire before they can retaliate.”

  The interviewer nodded emphatically. “And when they do retaliate, they kill everybody.”

  “See, that’s something we’ve heard for six years in response to 9/11. We didn’t start it, but we’re going to finish it. As long as we don’t strike the first blow, we’re entitled to unlimited and disproportionate retaliation.”

  I snorted at the television. When I was growing up, we were taught that you don’t poke a sleeping bear with a stick.

  “Of course, if they were going for verisimilitude, there are plenty of situations in which it makes sense for a policeman or a soldier to open fire before an aggressor does,” the journalist added.

  “Absolutely,” said the host. “If they let the bad guys shoot first every time, eventually one of the bad guys won’t miss.”

  “I think the real-world bad guys have better aim than the bad guys in most of the movies and television shows we see.”

  “And, of course, you spent some time with real cops while writing your true-crime thriller Last Watch, which is soon to be a major motion picture. How do real cops differ from the cops we see in movies and on television?”

  “I think the thing most people don’t understand is that any interaction a police officer has with members of the public is fraught. When these guys leave for work in the morning, they don’t know if they’ll make it home in one piece. Any time you interact with a police officer, you are dealing with an armed man who knows he is not safe. There are three hundred million firearms in civilian hands. When an officer makes a traffic stop, he doesn’t know whether the driver has a handgun in his glove compartment. When a cop responds to a domestic disturbance, he doesn’t know whether the door is going to be answered by a man holding a shotgun. Every year, a hundred law enforcement officers in this country are killed by suspects.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a lot.”

  “It’s more than enough to keep that danger on every officer’s mind. And that number would be a lot higher if police weren’t trained to shoot first when confronted by a suspect they have reason to believe is armed. These are men with families. You can’t expect them to give pushers and psychopaths a fair chance to kill them before they retaliate with force. Police shoot and kill about five hundred suspects a year in the United States. Subsequent investigations find the vast majority of those shootings are justified.”

  “Investigations by the police agencies that employ the shooters.”

  “Well, yes.”

  17

  1965

  I was parked on the street in front of the bank building, slouched low in my Dodge and listening to football on the radio. I had a bag of hamburger sandwiches on my passenger seat, and I was sipping on a warm, flat Coke.

  Staking out the bank wasn’t a great plan, and I knew it. There was no way I could keep eyes on both the front door and the side door where the armored trucks made their drops, and I couldn’t really sit out in front of the place for long enough to stop whatever Elijah had going on. I just didn’t have any better ideas.

  I had bought myself some time to work on this by telling my captain that I was looking into Longfellow Molloy; there were plenty of folks on the police force who would have loved to see that smart-talking Negro locked in a jail cell. But I wasn’t planning to give them anything on him, so my excuse wouldn’t justify days or weeks spent chasing Elijah. I was going to have to do something, soon.

  I had several unappealing options: The first was to take a risk, and encourage Greenfield to move the money as soon as possible. I could monitor the loading of the cash onto the armored truck myself, and even escort the package back to Nashville. If I was lucky, and Elijah was putting together a hit on the vault, I might be able to get the money out before he learned of the transfer. But if I was wrong, and he was prepared to hit the truck, I’d be playing right into his hands, and there would probably be a gunfight, and I would probably die.

  My second option was to go after the one remaining lead Paul Schulman had given me. He’d told me Ari Plotkin was involved in Elijah’s scheme. Plotkin was a more refined breed of hood than Schulman, and unlikely to snitch as easily as his low-rent colleague, but I was prepared to hurt him worse, if it meant finding out how to stop the robbery. Unfortunately, if I took Plotkin down, Elijah would find out pretty quickly. He’d know I knew which bank he was robbing, and he’d assume I’d know whatever Plotkin might be able to tell me. He could modify his plans to account for this, and I’d be back where I started.

  My third option was to inform the department of what I’d learned. My delay in reporting my meeting with Elijah and my information about his target would, at best, be seen as an exercise of poor professional judgment on my part. More likely, it would be seen as evidence of a racial defect of some sort.

  This could easily stymie my career advancement for years. Or it might get me fired. Or maybe I’d just start getting put in dangerous situations without proper support, until an unforeseeable tragedy occurred. Any of these outcomes was unacceptable; the less the police department learned about Elijah and his web of Jewish corruption, the better.

  Which led to the fourth option, the one my pride didn’t want to let me consider: I could let Elijah get away with it. Since there was no official investigation, I was free to just walk away from my pursuit. I was a policeman; it wasn’t my job to stop crimes before they happened, only to clean up the mess afterward. Charles Greenfield was entirely nonchalant about the possibility of his bank being robbed, and I di
dn’t see any reason why I should care about it more than he did.

  Elijah wasn’t stealing from people who were struggling to pay their bills. He wasn’t stealing from hungry children. He wasn’t stealing from the Negroes marching in front of Kluge Freight. He was stealing the fully insured contents of a bank vault. It wasn’t a victimless crime, exactly, but the victim lacked a face, and lacked a capacity to suffer. There was nothing in that vault I cared about protecting.

  But I had to protect myself. If Elijah got caught, my foreknowledge of his activities might be revealed. Even if he didn’t get caught, his accomplices might. No law enforcement had ever gotten close to catching Elijah, but the people he worked with weren’t always as good, and weren’t always as lucky. Their next job might not be quite so well planned, or they might do something stupid with their money. Whatever the story, his people ended up in custody sometimes, and, when they did, they ended up talking. This was the only reason anyone knew Elijah existed at all. If his people talked this time, they might say my name.

  How many of his crew knew about my meeting with him? His five thick henchmen. The bartender. How many others might have heard about it? What if there were other Jewish cops involved in the scheme who knew he’d met with me?

  If I let the robbery happen, I could never be sure my complicity in it would stay secret. If I were a regular white policeman, I could have just reported the contact to the brass and been in the clear, but I was a Jew inside a sick institution, and I had no easy answers.

  If the law was so debased and its guardians were so perverted, maybe Brian was right, and I should find myself a new line of work. Maybe Elijah was right, and I should just acclimate myself to a dirty lifestyle. What moral imperative prevented me from helping myself to the contents of that bank vault, at the expense of a faceless victim-entity that was incapable of suffering? Maybe justice was a meaningless concept in a world where the police lined up in force to protect Alvin Kluge and his money from the Negroes he exploited.

  Maybe I should have just done whatever Elijah wanted. If I were on the inside of his scheme, I could tie off his loose ends afterward at my leisure.

  While I was considering these options and watching the front entrance of the bank, Elijah opened the passenger-side door of my car and slid into the seat.

  “Hello, Baruch,” he said.

  I damn near jumped out of my skin. How was it even possible to open a car door without making noise? I reached inside my jacket, but Elijah laid a hand on my arm, to keep me from drawing my gun.

  “Let’s not be uncivil,” he said. I heard a tap on the back window, and I looked behind me. Elijah had a beefy henchman positioned on each side of the car. If I shot him, they’d shoot me.

  “Don’t worry, Baruch,” he said with a little chirp-laugh. “I’m not here to kill you. If I killed you, I would probably attract the attention of the police, who seem, thus far, to be blissfully unaware of my activities. I wonder why you haven’t told them anything.”

  “Maybe I have,” I said. “Maybe the net is closing around you, and you can’t even see it.”

  He chirped again. “I think not, Baruch. There are fifty cops down in front of Kluge, ready to crush those poor Negroes, and yet there is only you guarding this bank.”

  “They’re not all that far away.”

  “But they’re far enough, and they won’t be paying attention,” he said. I realized that he’d probably already found another cop to be his inside man on the police force. If that was the case, he knew with certainty that I hadn’t informed the department of his presence in Memphis.

  He seemed completely unconcerned about revealing such information in my presence, but I wasn’t overly optimistic that he was likely to let any particularly useful details slip about how he planned to take down the vault. Arrogance, in my experience, frequently carries with it a dose of hubris, but sometimes arrogance is justified, and this seemed like one of those cases. I had a reputation as a pretty smart cop, but it helped that the guys I went after were generally pretty stupid. Elijah was not stupid, and he wasn’t likely to spoil a carefully devised plan by mouthing off to me.

  “I wanted to congratulate you on your son Brian’s upcoming bar mitzvah,” he said. He handed me a sealed envelope with the words “For Brian” written on it in a looping script. When I took it from him, I touched the paper only at the edges, so I could dust the thing, later, for fingerprints. I wouldn’t find any; that would have been too easy.

  “I will kill you if you go near my family,” I said.

  He ignored the threat: “When I was your son’s age, I did not get to study with a rabbi. I did not get a party to celebrate my emergence into manhood. I was living in the ghetto, in a cramped, moldy flat occupied by three other families as well as my parents and my sister. I thought it was the worst place in the world, but that was only because I lacked imagination.

  “Hitler was unencumbered by such deficiencies; his mind was a whirling phantasmagoria of barbarity, and from that font sprang Auschwitz. And, to tell the truth, he imagined worse than Auschwitz.”

  “A whirling phantasmagoria? Are you shitting me?” I said.

  He stopped, and frowned at me for twenty or thirty seconds. I used the pause to consider whether it was redundant to modify “phantasmagoria” with “of barbarity.” I wasn’t sure, but I figured Elijah had probably looked it up at some point. His story seemed rehearsed; a thing he’d told many times before. There was a chilly edge to his voice that made me wonder if any of the people he’d told this to were still alive.

  He started talking again: “Auschwitz, you see, was merely a slave-labor camp where a lot of people happened to be killed, and where four industrial crematoria happened to be running all day and all night, incinerating corpses and fogging the sky with oily black smoke. You hear about Auschwitz because there are people who were in Auschwitz that survived; people who can tell their stories.

  “You’ll never meet anyone who was sent to Treblinka. A million people went to Treblinka, but all of them are dead. Treblinka was not a prison camp, like Auschwitz. Treblinka was a factory. Treblinka was a slaughterhouse.

  “So, when the SS soldiers came to the filthy ghetto apartment block where we’d been sent after my father’s home and his shop were confiscated, and they waved guns in our faces and cleared everyone out, and when they marched us to the railway station and they packed us so tightly into a shipping car that we could not sit, we were lucky, because the train was only going to Auschwitz.

  “I was lucky when I got off the train, smeared with feces and urine that wasn’t all my own. I was lucky when the guards sent me and my father to the right, rather than to the left, where they sent my sister and my mother. I was lucky when my mother refused to be separated from us, and wept and begged, and they shot her in the face while she held my sister in her arms. I was lucky because they only killed my mother, and did not kill me as well.

  “I was lucky, because I was in Auschwitz, and people survived Auschwitz. My father was lucky, too, but he didn’t appreciate the good fortune that HaShem had bestowed upon him. After he saw what they did to my mother, my father could not eat. He could not raise his voice to praise the Lord’s name. He probably would have died on a pile of mildewed straw if the guards hadn’t dragged him out of the barracks each morning for roll call. On the day he could no longer stand on the parade ground, they beat him to death. If we want HaShem’s blessings, the rabbis say, we must meet Him halfway. My father could not take advantage of the opportunity that God gave him by sending us to Auschwitz.

  “Of course, most of the rabbis got sent to Treblinka, so perhaps they weren’t as wise as they thought.”

  Here, he chirped cheerily.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “I want you to know,” he said. “I want you to understand the hypocrisy implicit in your position. I want you to understand how ludicrous and self-defeating it is for a Jew to serve as an agent of coercion on behalf of the Christian state, and I
want you to try to comprehend the inescapable logic of my way of doing things.”

  “Well, I ain’t going anywhere, I guess, as long as you’ve got those guns pointed at me,” I said. “So, go ahead and convince me.”

  He smiled, and I flinched a little. Those Auschwitz teeth of his were tough to look at.

  “After my father died, I knew that I had to get out of that place, so I waited and I listened. I was assigned to a labor detail of twenty prisoners supervised by two SS guards. Each day, we went to an evacuated Polish village near the edge of the camp, and we stripped salvageable materials from the buildings, which were scheduled for demolition. One of the guards was a corrupt and greedy man. He stole from the salvage, and he ferreted away anything of value he found abandoned in the houses.

  “One day, I approached and spoke to him as he smoked a cigarette outside the house, out of earshot of his partner. It was dangerous to do this; speaking to a guard could get you shot. But I knew how to pique this man’s interest.

  “I told him that my father had been a wealthy shopkeeper before the Nuremberg Laws nationalized Jewish property. I told him that, when we learned we were to be sent to the ghetto, my father had hidden away his wealth; cash and jewelry. He’d hoped we could recover it after the war. I told the guard I was the only person left alive who knew where this treasure was hidden, and I promised it to him, if he could get me out of the camp.

  “He thought about it for a few minutes, and then he went inside the house and bashed the other guard’s skull in with the butt of his rifle, and he shot all the other Jews on the detail. Then he grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me into the woods, and told me to wait there.

  “I imagine he told his superiors that the Jews had attacked his partner and he had killed them in retribution. But how he justified his butchery was not my business. All I know is that, according to official records, I was killed that day, in that ruined Polish village, and buried in a mass grave. People survived Auschwitz, but I am not one of them. I am numbered among the dead.