Don't Ever Get Old (17 page)

“But if he has the gold, what is he doing here?” I asked. “Why wouldn't he be someplace, you know, better?”

“As nursing facilities go, this one is actually fairly upscale,” Tequila said. “It seems like that nurse is dedicated to a pretty small cluster of folks. And the residents get private rooms, and the furniture is nice. Some of the places they put people look like army barracks.”

If a man needed a half ton of gold to buy care like this, I was in trouble. All I needed at my age was to be sent back to an army barracks.

“There are documents here that look like they convey his house to the Meadowcrest Manor,” Tequila said. “If a court had declared him incompetent after his stroke, this place might have been appointed as his guardian, and it would have taken his assets to pay for his care.”

“And Meadowcrest got the treasure too?”

“Nope.” Tequila grinned and ran his tongue over his teeth. “How would they know about it? Even if Ziegler was cogent enough at some point to remember he had it, telling anyone about it would put him in a pretty bad situation, you know, with the war crimes tribunals. He's been in no condition to retrieve it for over a decade.”

Ziegler probably got stuck here after his stroke. He was vulnerable and immobilized, and he couldn't go anywhere on his own, but there would have been nobody he could trust with a secret like that. With no way to get into the box, and no way to find a fence who could convert the gold to cash, the treasure had been left to sit in the bank vault until Ziegler's dementia progressed far enough that he forgot it altogether.

“What are you doing?” Ziegler asked, suddenly upset that Tequila was stuffing papers into his backpack. “I think those things are mine.”

I opened a cupboard above the microwave and found a package of Oreo cookies. I gave a couple to the Nazi and he quieted down. Tequila slid the rest of the papers into his backpack and the key into his pocket. He put the empty box back in its place on the top shelf of the closet and closed the door.

The nurse came by a few minutes later and peeked into the room.

“Did you have a nice visit?” she asked, smiling at us. For a moment, my breath caught in my throat, but Ziegler seemed to have already forgotten that we'd searched his home and swiped his stuff.

“It was an experience,” I told her.

I left the dementia ward, and Ziegler was still locked away, stuck in a web of dull and disconnected moments. When the girl at the front desk buzzed her button to let us out of the building, I was thrilled to be walking out of that place and not trapped inside like the old Nazi. I told myself that even if we never found any treasure, at least he'd got what he deserved.

 

27

We returned to the hotel with the pilfered detritus of the life of Heinrich Ziegler and spread it out all over the desk and coffee table in our suite for closer examination. His letters and ledgers mapped out the life he'd led in St. Louis. No wife, no children. In 1954, eight years after he bribed Jim Wallace, he took out a small-business loan to open a jewelry store.

“If he had a fortune in gold, why would he take out a loan?” Tequila asked.

“Can't use crooked money to start a business that needs to look straight,” I told him.

I was glad to see he wasn't an expert on everything. I didn't know much about gold or jewelry, but I'd unwound a few money-laundering schemes, and I knew how they worked. A person couldn't buy a house or a luxury car with a suitcase full of cash or a gold brick. Even if the seller accepted that kind of payment, at some point he would try to put that money into a bank and somebody official would start asking questions. Used to be, the IRS would start a federal investigation merely because somebody's lifestyle seemed to exceed his earnings. Fox News said disproportionate consumption now indicated excessive indebtedness more often than secret income, but there were still a fair number of waiters and valets attracting the attention of the federal government for underreporting their gratuities.

Gangsters, of course, famously construct chains of legitimate fronts to filter their illicit funds. But Ziegler had no criminal organization and no support. With a jewelry store he could fence the gold himself, a little at a time, by melting it and recasting it as merchandise.

Necklaces made from mezuzahs and menorahs.

Bracelets made from cherished heirlooms that had been smuggled into concentration camps up somebody's ass.

Diamond engagement rings that used to be a Jew's dental fillings.

He could turn the proceeds of his secret treasure into legitimate income by fixing his books to either overstate expenses or understate revenues. Of course, the amount of gold he could launder this way would necessarily be limited by the amount of jewelry he could sell.

“We figured he must have had eight hundred pounds of gold when he went through Wallace's checkpoint,” I said. “How much of that do you think he'd have been able to sell?”

Tequila tapped at his computer keyboard.

“Ingots are nearly pure gold, so their value can be measured by weight,” he said, reading from his screen. “But unalloyed gold is soft, much too soft for jewelry. You can scratch the surface of a gold bar with a fingernail. Jewelers use fourteen-karat gold for most commercial purposes. That's about sixty percent pure. For very fine stuff, they might use eighteen-karat, or a seventy-five percent alloy. So we're talking about twelve to fifteen hundred pounds of jewelry he would have had to move through the store over thirty years.”

“That sounds like an awful lot,” I said.

Tequila's eyes rolled upward as he ran the numbers in his head. “Since he had no supply cost, he could significantly undercut the market price for comparable products if he wanted to move a lot of volume,” he said.

I made a dismissive sort of gesture. “I can't imagine he could cook the books enough to hide that much money laundering through a small business. I bet there's a lot of gold left over.”

“Our estimates rely on some massive assumptions, though,” Tequila said. “We're just guessing about how much gold he had when he met Wallace. And Ziegler probably paid a lot of bribes to get out of Europe. He might have had to abandon some or all of it someplace between Berlin and St. Louis. Gold is very heavy, and he was on the run.”

“I think the fact that he opened a jewelry store gives us a good reason to think he had a pretty big treasure left when he settled here.”

Tequila nodded. “I hope so.”

“So, where do you think he stashed it?” I asked.

“I might have an idea about that,” he said, seeming pleased with himself.

Every bank document we had found in Ziegler's room indicated that he had kept all his accounts with the same SunTrust branch bank. Looked like he'd gotten his home mortgage there, too, and he had a couple of certificates of deposits and a small money market account. In other words, he handled all of his financial business out of the same place.

Tequila had spotted an automatic debit that appeared on each January bank statement. He thought this was the fee for a safe deposit box.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “If I had some secret treasure, I'd put it somewhere I didn't do my regular banking.”

It seemed like odd behavior for a man on the run to have all of his business at one bank. Ziegler must have been either too dumb to cover his tracks or smart enough to figure out that nobody was chasing him.

Tequila shuffled through the papers. “Keeping the box at a different bank would be more suspicious if anyone ever went snooping in his mail and saw the bills.” He paused. “Grandpa, if we find this gold, where are we going to hide it? Whether they killed Kind or not, Feely and Pratt are going to be looking for a piece of it, and Steinblatt might be trouble as well.”

“Before we figure out what to do with our loot, I suppose we ought to work out how we are going to rob that bank,” I told him.

“Rob the bank?” He stood up and ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “We have the key to the box. We just have to go in there and ask them to let us open it.”

I smiled at him. It was easy for people who had no idea what they were talking about to be condescending. “Have you ever been in a bank vault?” I asked him. “Have you ever seen a safe deposit box?”

His blank stare answered my question.

“I guess you can't tour a bank vault on the Internet,” I said, feeling satisfied.

“You probably can, actually.”

“Shut up, Tequila.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Okay, then, Pop, what do we need to get into a safe deposit box?”

The appeal of a safe deposit box is discretion, not security. Whether an object is kept in the box or in the home, its protection against loss or destruction is the same: it's covered by a homeowner's insurance policy. Putting valuables in a bank vault merely assures that nobody but the owner is allowed to see them.

“They won't let anyone open a safe deposit box except for the guy who bought the box. Having the key is not good enough. You have to physically present the box holder.”

“So you want us to break Ziegler out of Meadowcrest to open this thing up?”

I coughed. “Yeah. That seems like a good idea.”

His mouth fell open. “Seriously?”

“No.”

He clenched his slack-hanging jaw and rearranged his face into a pensive frown. “So what are we going to do, then?”

I pulled a blue Social Security card and a red-and-white Medicare card out of my pocket, each with the name “Henry Winters” printed on them. I'd swiped them from Ziegler's dresser while Tequila had been going through the closet. As an older guy myself, it felt profoundly wrong to swipe somebody's Medicare card. But Winters was, after all, Heinrich Ziegler, and these identification documents were bogus, or at least they were fraudulently obtained. I wiggled the cards at Tequila.

“I figure I can be Henry Winters,” I said.

He didn't look impressed. “How are you going to make that work?”

“One thing I might try is friendly misdirection and gentle persuasion. But if that fails, I'm going to scream like a maniac. That scares the shit out of people. They worry that if I get too worked up, I might have a heart attack.”

“This sounds like it will be embarrassing,” Tequila said.

“Let's hope it's embarrassing enough. The more awkward the situation is, the less clearly they'll think it through.”

Tequila looked at the Social Security card for a minute and then frowned at me. “Do you really think you can pull this off?”

“I spent thirty years tricking people into confessing to murder,” I told him. “This can't be much harder.”

That made him smile a little. “Want to lay odds on how likely it is we'll find gold in there?”

“Of course there's gold in there,” I said. “What else would a Nazi fugitive keep in his safe deposit box?” We were quiet for long enough to ponder the possibility that we were gearing up to do something insane.

When that got too uncomfortable to bear, Tequila said, “Do you want to join me and Yael for dinner tonight?”

I could think of things less appealing than watching my grandson nuzzle some woman he'd just met. But not many.

“That's the dark-haired girl from the restaurant?”

“Yeah. She's here looking at Washington University for her graduate program, but if she gets off the wait list, she might go to Columbia.”

“That's nice. What kind of name is Yael?”

“It's Hebrew.”

I moved the gunk in my throat around with a long, rattling cough. “That's what I thought,” I said. “So she's Israeli?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Doesn't that throw up a few red flags for you? You know, with Avram Silver and Yitzchak Steinblatt maybe chasing us?”

Tequila's mouth dropped open again. “She's not a spy, Grandpa.”

“She liked you, right away. That doesn't make you suspicious? You're not very likable. I've known you since you were born, and I don't like you.”

He fiddled with the band on his watch. “She was already here at the hotel when we arrived. We didn't have a reservation or anything.”

“Silver has known all along that Ziegler was in St. Louis. It would have been an easy trick for his people to get here ahead of us. And don't underestimate the Mossad.”

“She's not Mossad, Grandpa. She's a graduate student. Why don't you join us for dinner and you'll see there's no reason to be suspicious.”

I flipped open the cover of my memory notebook and saw, on that first page, what the doctor had told me.

“Paranoia is an early symptom of dementia in the elderly,” I whispered, almost to myself.

“Exactly,” Tequila said.

“All right.” I conceded the point. Sometimes things were coincidental. There were lots of Israelis around.

 

28

Almost every Jew, even the really liberal ones, has at least a little bit of affection for the state of Israel. It symbolizes the resolve of the Jewish people to walk away from the second-class minority status that had stoked the historic crimes like the Holocaust. Israel is also a shelter of last resort in the very plausible event of future persecution. And it represents the Zionist conviction that protection against the forces that conspired to destroy us should be obtained by Jewish sovereignty and force of arms rather than through begging or buying protection from ruling majority regimes.

It is a nation of people, like my great-grandfather Herschel, who are sick of being burned and want to hold the torch.

Where American Jews have become a soft-handed class of dentists and accountants and film professors, the Israelis are battle-hardened, sand-blasted warriors. The country's policy of mandatory conscription, for women as well as for men, meant every sabra, every native-born Israeli, knew how drive a Jeep off-road and fire a rifle.