Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman Read Free Book Online

off to Europe or South America or Egypt chasing after a phantom. How are we going to keep track of your medications?”
    â€œI don’t know. I doubt I’ll even find enough clues to lead me out of Memphis. The trail is cold.”
    â€œBut, 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?”
    â€œBuck, you always find somebody dangerous to get on the wrong side of.”
    â€œWell, I like to keep things interesting. And anyway, I’ve always been good at handling dangerous people.”
    â€œMaybe 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.
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    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.
    â€œEnglish?” I asked.
    â€œToo late,” she said. “Gone. All dead.”
    â€œHeinrich 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.
    â€œWhere 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