Pain Killers (23 page)

“I don’t know,” I said, my heart sinking as I heard my plan out loud. “I’m going to find it when I get down there.”

“Look at you go,” said the reverend.

I hadn’t realized until now how badly my stomach was churning. I was glad to finally get out of there. I hadn’t gone five steps when Rincin fell in step. “A fascinating day in the marketplace of ideas,” he said.

“Officer Rincin, I really have to use the men’s room.”

“You don’t mind urinating outside, you can go in the trough right by the yard.”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “there’s a little more involved.”

Rincin sighed. “This is something civilians don’t understand. On this job, you train yourself. Your body can’t pinch a loaf whenever it feels like it.”

The way he said it, I wanted to take my body aside and slap it around a little for being so undisciplined. But I was on a schedule. I had to get to Burbank, interview a Christian hooker and find out if Harry Zell had offered me a job or a suicide mission. If there was time left, and I didn’t get killed, I planned to pick up some clown feet and a big red nose for Josef Mengele. But my real mission, much as it pained me, was to find Tina.

Now that she was my ex-wife, and M.I.A., all I could remember were the good things.

A gaggle of prison employees clustered at the east gate under a glassed-in tower box. A crusty old guard, who might have been there when Governor Reagan visited, walked into the road and stood there with a handwritten sign: GUN TRANSFER. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but to the naked eye no one was transferring anything, unless you counted the jumbo takeout Taco Bell bags two young COs were hauling. While I waited, heads rotated fast. I followed in time to see the warden leading a delegation of cameras and suits, one of them huge, into H Unit. Doubtless to show off the wall-to-wall beds that gave the place the rehabilitation-friendly warehouse feeling. Rincin told me the warden didn’t mind fund-raising, he just wished he didn’t have to give so many tours. After
Oz
and all the prison docs, civilians wanted to experience the magic. “What folks never count on,” Rincin’d chuckled, “are the fumes. Cram in a few hundred guys, you’re talkin’ about a lot of ass and feet. It’s stinky enough down there without marching in the pols from Sacramento.” From the oohs and aahs, I wondered if the huge man was Schwarzenegger. (Did he know Mengele? Did his Nazi father?)

I was a pawn. But I didn’t know what the game was. I only knew what it wasn’t: a simple ID job. Not anymore, at least. Tina once told me that when her back was to the wall, she’d try RT. Reverse thinking. Assume everything you know is wrong, and start from there. Maybe the point wasn’t me finding big M. Maybe the point was letting him get his hands on me. That felt suitably paranoid. Was it Zell I should have been worried about all along? One more delightful reason to get my ass down to L.A. and do some digging.

There was an old-fashioned phone booth beside the gift shop. I called the number on Rincin’s card. Left a message about my mother’s heart attack, which I’d just found out about. I said I would be back in time for class tomorrow. Then I stood at the bus stop and tried to decipher bus schedules. A group of schoolgirls was already there, in identical blue uniforms. The one white girl, a pigtailed redhead holding a Bible and a
People
magazine, blew a bubble out at me and yelled, “Fag!”

There was no reason to risk anything to save face with a homophobic twelve-year-old. So I didn’t pick up a shovel and hit her in the face. Instead, I ducked into the gift shop to wait. According to the schedule taped to the door, the next bus was in fifteen minutes. Twitchy the clerk peered up from his Word Find, over his state bifocals, not all that happy about having a customer. I stared at a painting of a red barn and he went back to finding “of” and “ten” in “often.”

Keeping up the Tina reverse mode, I rolled out every fact I had and tried to peek behind them. As in: maybe Zell’s documentary stuff was a front. Why else would he make himself so untraceable? Huge as his prison doc franchise was, maybe it covered something bigger. The documentaries got him in and out of penal institutions all over the country. Maybe he was shooting Mengele’s prison experiments. Cable gold!

Before I could go further down that road, Twitchy stepped from around the corner.

“You the drug guy?”

Before I could congratulate him on his intel, he pushed up his ironed denim sleeves. “See that? Clean as a daisy.”

“Congratulations, how long’s it been?”

“What time is it now?” His laugh morphed into a hacking cough that had me ducking out of spume range. “I did the RD last week. With the sauerkraut.”

“You lost me,” I said, peering out the window to see a Chasidic man, clutching a briefcase to his chest, fumble with the keys to a black Mercedes.

“Rapid detox,” he said. “They bring in the old German guy. The doctor. Strap you down, knock you out, and ding-dong-ding, you wake up desmacked. Unstrung. Not so much as a craving.”

“The old German did that? Really old, with blond hair?”

“Straight-up Nazi from Nazi-town,” said Twitch. “Got the accent to prove it. That’s why I trusted him.”

Rapid detox. One more piece of the warped-around-the-edges Mengele puzzle. I considered telling him the doctor made his bones injecting malaria in babies, among other things, before Twitch was a twinkle in his mother’s eye. But I decided to keep it upbeat. “And you feel good, huh?”

“Never better! Scuse me.”

He whipped around and puked into a small bucket behind the counter. When he was done he tamped his mouth with a Kleenex Junior and smiled beatifically.

“Still gettin’ my sea legs.”

“What I hear, they grow back, buddy. You take care of yourself.”

Somebody was letting Mengele practice in a state facility—if knocking some poor bastard out, pumping him full of Narcan and squeezing the dope out of his cells even counted as practice. That same somebody had to be giving him a room and instruments.

“Keep it up!” I said, and backed out the door with one eye on the Chasid now struggling with the trunk of his Benz. “One bucket at a time!”

Twitchy grabbed my wrist before I could get away. “Thing is,” he said. “I got a funny feeling he left something inside. Here, look.”

He grabbed my hand and pressed it to a postage-stamp-sized square on the back of his neck. It felt hard and metallic.

“Could be a locator chip,” I said. “You try and escape, they can track you by satellite.”

Twitchy nodded, taking that in. “I bet the president has one of those.”

I didn’t like where this was going. I waved good-bye, stepped out of the shop and jogged down the small hill, startling the Chasid as he was saying a prayer over his rental car.

“Scuse me,” I said, trying not to sound like an escapee. “You going to Auschwitz?”

“What?” The young Chasid twisted his payots nervously.

“Airport. I mean the airport.” What was wrong with me? “The
airport,
” I stammered, and pointed to my throat, as if that would explain my behavior. “Holocaust Tourette’s.”

“The heartbreak,” he said. His eyes swelled behind his glasses.

“So you are going to the airport, right?”

“I am. Yes. But…”

Clearly the prospect of bringing me along thrilled him more than pork chops.

As we spoke he kept trying to get his trunk open. He aimed his key-beeper from different angles, squatting, then standing up, then reaching over his head. He reminded me of a bullfighter.

“It’s not a geometry problem.” I stepped over and snatched the key chain out of his hand. “Battery’s dead,” I said.

“That can’t be. The radio works.”

“Not that battery. This one.” I bent down to insert the actual key in the trunk and open it.

My new Orthodox friend may have been dressed for shtetl success, but I was the pushy Jew. “So, when’s your flight?”

He threw his briefcase in the back, closed the trunk. Back on the driver’s side, he gripped the handle without opening. He plainly wanted me to leave but had too much conscience to say so. Guilt was such a useful emotion.

“I really appreciate this,” I said. “I’ve got a family emergency, in Los Angeles.”

He didn’t ask, which was just as well. As giddy as I felt making my escape from San Quentin, I wasn’t exactly headed for a fun getaway. I had less than twenty-four hours to locate and grill a born-again hooker, try to unravel Harry Zell’s reality TV–Holocaust connection, and, most embarrassingly, find out the real reason I’d been offered the job of verifying the identity of the Nazi doctor. That, of course, and find the woman I wished I hadn’t divorced.

“So,” I said as we floated over the Golden Gate Bridge, “where do you guys get your suits?”

“This?” He pulled up the flap of his long black jacket. “It’s a
rekel.
”

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“No, it’s called a
rekel.
This one’s got the concealed button, in the Bobover tradition.”

“You don’t mind my asking, how do they treat you at Quentin, you walk in like this?”

“The one lady, in visiting, a Latina—”

“Officer Darlene?”

“You know her?” he said, crestfallen, as if the girl of his dreams had been exposed as a bag of herpes.

“Know her? Naw. I just remember her face. She’s got the
cholita
brows? Right? Painted on? She’s very attractive.”

“I think so, too. She’s exotic, you know? Not like the Lubavitcher girls. She always wants to touch my tzitzit.”

He saw my look and waggled the little fringes at his waistcoat. “The knots in the waistcoat. This blue thread, from an animal called the chilazon, you cannot even find anymore.”

By the time we exited the freeway, I’d gotten a course on Chasid fashion.

“Not a lot of guys can pull off the fur hat. But you’re one of them.”

I already regretted the plan forming in my head. But there was no other way.

“Hey, there’s a gas station,” I said. “Let me fill it up.”

“Really?”

He seemed a little surprised when I went around to his window with the gas nozzle.

“Tank’s on the other side,” he said. Then he saw the lighter and put it together. His reaction was less surprise than resignation.

“Roll down the window,” I said.

He shook his head. I didn’t want to shout our conversation, so I put my face close to the window, squishing my lips on the glass.

“I want you to know, my friend, this is not a hate crime.” I didn’t want him to think I didn’t like him, even though I was about to fuck his world up very badly. “I just need some clothes. I don’t
want
to squirt gasoline on you and set you on fire. That’s not
me.
”

“You want my clothes? Why don’t you just ask?” He seemed mystified. “What are clothes?”

“Really?”

“I am happy to help a fellow Jew.”

I ran around to the passenger side and jumped in. The Chasid had a .22 out and pointed at my stomach before the door slammed.

I tugged his gun hand into my stomach. “Pull the trigger,” I said, keeping up a friendly smile. “Go ahead. I’ve got a vest on. That peashooter won’t make a dent.”

I’m not sure what movie I stole that from. But I believe the line was uttered by Elisha Cook, in black and white. It was not enough to make him lower his gun. But I saw his eyes go wide and punched him in the face before he could regroup.

“Park behind the air pump. Give me everything.”

“Owww…okay! I’m sorry about the gun.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “I don’t like punching people I like. The piece made it easier.”

A family of tourists pulled up beside us, and I realized how it would look stripping an Orthodox Jew in a gas station. “Change in plan, Rebbe. Pull behind the bathroom.”

Now that I had the gun, things were a lot less complicated.

Still, when he was down to his tallith, I started to feel bad. He held up the tasseled fringe and smiled sadly.

“This was my grandfather’s, from Lithuania.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “You know where I can buy one? In L.A.?” He pulled out a business card and scribbled an address on the back. “Tell Solly I sent you.” Then he looked up. “But why am I writing it down? I could show you. Give me my clothes back, I’ll take you myself. Get you a deal.”

“Cagey,” I said, “but I’m sorry, I can’t drive around with a guy in his underwear.”

“You can in San Francisco.”

“Funny,” I said.

“You think? I’m an attorney, but I also do some stand-up. You know, a chomedian.
Chomedian,
get it?”

“I get it. You’re the new Seinfeld. Now listen. There are things I have to do, things you’d probably approve of but I can’t talk about. What were you doing at Quentin anyway?”

“I represent Larry Boiget. He’s a Jewish fellow, wants to eat kosher.”

“Fighting the good fight,” I said. “In the tradition of an Orthodox prisoner named Mosher.”

“You know about that?”

“Indeed I do. So I can just get a tallith off the rack?”

“Yes, yes, but what about—”

He stared down at the spindly legs extending from his boxers, as if just discovering what his body looked like, and slunk further down in the seat. I realized I should have done all this in the men’s room. But this was the first time I’d ever stolen a man’s clothes.

“You’re going to leave me here? Like this?”

“You shouldn’t have worn all those blue Massengills.”

“They are called
chilazon.
”

“Chilazon. That’s what I meant.” I pointed his own peashooter at him. “Out.”

A minute later, he was out of the car, crouched between Super and Supreme. I could see the disbelief stamped on his face, as if nothing in life had prepared him for a Jew lying to his face.

“I know, it’s a drag, being shoved out of a car in your boxers. But maybe this’ll make you think next time before you wipe some species off the planet ’cause you need some tallith dye. Extermination is extermination.”

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “What do you know from extermination?”