Pain Killers (36 page)

“Results of my hypothermia studies have saved many lives—including those of your Navy SEALs.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be part of your experiments.”

“Too late. You already are. The antique heroin you pilfered? It’s a serum designed to grow ovarian tumors. I mixed it with a compound of dolphinex—the most addictive opiate ever invented.”

“Dolphinex? Never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. Though you may be familiar with its cousin, Dolophine. Both names derived from Adolf. Dolophine is better known in your country as methadone.”

“We’ve met.”

“I assumed as much. Dolphinex was never distributed commercially. It was too effective. One shot and the user literally wants to die if they cannot have more. A result I was particularly pleased with. But then, you know that feeling.”

“You’re talking about the crap in the Red Cross boxes? It wasn’t that great.”

“For a tough number like you, of course not. But addicted prostitutes, whom the state would like to prevent from breeding, will willingly inject it. When they do, they die. Childless. And young. I can hardly wait to see what effect it has on you. In a week or two, I suggest you check for breasts.”

That’s when the floor decided to hit me in the face.

Sweat prickled down my back. I breathed as slowly as I could to counter the blood sloshing around my head. If Mengele had pumped Tina full of cancer juice, I’d take a bullet just to die with my hands squeezing his throat. And I’d die happy.

But the reverend was a step ahead of me. Before I could lunge, he caught my collar and hoisted me up off my feet as if for the doctor’s inspection. Tina’s glazed stare registered nothing.

“So she’s going to have tumors now? In her ovaries?”

“You have no need to worry,” said Mengele. “I gave the Fräulein something else. Also one of my discoveries. It’s very clean. I am proud to say the advances we made at the camps are still bearing fruit today.” Mengele beamed. “My goodness! I’ve gotten so wrapped up I forgot to set us on our way. That’s what happens when men of science begin to talk.”

“
You’re
talking,” I said. “I’m just trying not to puke or laugh in your face.”

“Easy,” Reverend D whispered in my ear. Mengele banged on the roof of the van and I heard the engine turn over. That meant a third person driving. Maybe a fourth riding bitch.

The van lurched downhill.

Rage singed the edge of my vision. I saw Mengele through a tunnel of smoke. He gave off a faint odor. The kind that made dogs bark. “What did you give her?”

“Adrenaline. The finest quality. I use it myself.”

“Adrenaline? The stuff you were selling to gangbangers?”

“Ah, our little detective has been working. Well, let me educate you, Herr Detective.”

“You do that, Hair Doctor.”

“With pleasure. Let us go back sixty years.”

“Dr. Mengele and the Wayback Machine.”

“Excuse me? To get the highest quality, I needed glandular discharge generated in extremis. The more terrified the victims, the more potent the adrenal broth I tapped with my little friend
der Shunt.
”

“A shunt?”

“Ja.”

Mengele tapped his own Adam’s apple. I thought,
What if I bit him? Left his throat exposed the way someone left Dinah Zell’s? Would the rev shoot before I got to chew his larynx?

“I inserted it just so, in the throat,” said Mengele, pride lighting him up like a letter from home.

“Aw, look at
you
!” I cooed. “If there’s anything more pathetic than an old man kvelling about who he used to be, it’s an old Nazi man. Newsflash: you
lost,
Doc. Not your country.
You.
All these other scientific geniuses landed on their feet. Von Braun brought his whole team to New Mexico. Even Erich Traub—Himmler’s mad virologist—got set up on Plum Island. Just him, a forest full of infectable mammals and a lab full of global bacteria. Think they didn’t ferry in a few Fräuleins when the old germ warrior hit them with Lyme disease?”

I had a hunch he wouldn’t hurt me till I stopped. Something you learn when you’re a cop: criminals are narcissists. And Mengele had the narcissist’s hunger to be talked about. Praise was gravy. I wasn’t usually this chatty, but the prospect of imminent death will do that. You want to get it out while you can.

“Then there’s
you
!” I got snarky because I was mad. But not at Mengele. At myself. The man deserved to die, and I was throwing him a one-man roast. “Golden boy Beppo—goin’ all gooey over glandular shunts! How’s it feel to be one of those guys, when you die, people say ‘Gee, I didn’t even know he was still alive.’ I mean, is that really the best memory you have—freaking out slow Gypsies and milking their fear?” I turned to the reverend and shrugged. “You believe Dr. Party-shunt here?”

“Hey,
fuck
shunts!” The reverend gave a little shiver and rubbed his face. “Man, an hour ago, I didn’t even know what a shunt was. Now I’m ready to stick one of the motherfuckers in my own damn jugular. Bleed out fast, not have to listen to this.”

“Come on, Rev,” I said, “I know you and the old shunt-meister do some business together. I’m sure you’re used to the Master Race routine by now.”

The reverend raised his eyebrows, more amused than defensive. There had to be more in it for him to take orders than to blow a payday and save me. But I guessed I’d find out. “Hey,” said the reverend, “I was you I’d—”

“Stop!”
Mengele shouted, pounding his leg with his fist like a five-year-old. He looked ready to drop to the floor and start kicking it. He might as well have screamed
Respect me! Respect me! Respect me!
“I am telling you something important. If you weren’t so ignorant, you would consider yourselves lucky you get to hear this!”

“‘Lucky’ ain’t the word that comes to mind,” the reverend said, but Mengele was too entranced by his own fantasies of medical mastery to notice.

“I said quiet!” he yelled, and started up again. “Rather than collect the fluid in a tub I hung a small container on the end of the shunt.”

The reverend groaned. “Oh, here we go.”

“Enough! This I did in honor of my new country, of its Vermont, where I have seen calendar photos of natives tapping a tree and collecting buckets of syrup.”

“If you tell me you put it on pancakes,” I said, “I’m going to throw up.”

Mengele glared at me and nibbled his mustache, now so frayed it might have been assembled from schnauzer hair. He made no secret of his enthusiasm for his subject, but at the same time his attitude was detached. “When you revive a man into a situation of complete terror, the spike in his adrenal output is astronomical. That initial spurt is the purest. Unlike semen, where premonitory squirts may be nothing but fluid, adrenaline starts off strong. Zero to a hundred, as you Americans say.”

“We don’t say that about glandular fluid,” I said.

Mengele ignored this, caught up in his own drama. “Let me tell you something else I think will amuse you. Carlos knew I was using the van to kill his race enemies. What he didn’t know was that his enemies were not killed right away. No. I would bring them back to the shelter. Terrorize them. Which I did, in the back room, at night. The walls were already soundproofed. The specimens were intact and easily revivable. Do you want to know what I did to them?”

“What I want to know—and don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “Back then, was everybody like you?”

The question caught Mengele off guard. “Like me how?”

“You know,” I said, “the other SS guys, the other doctors—did they all wake up every day and click their heels ’cause they were so happy to be working in a death camp?”

“Proceed with caution,” said Mengele. “For me, Auschwitz was a living laboratory. In which, among many other achievements, I developed efficient methods of adrenal harvesting. Synthetic equivalents, for reasons mysterious as God, never possessed the same force. Each adrenaline-generating device—”

“Otherwise known as victims, right?” I interrupted.

“Each adrenaline-generating device,” he repeated, “had to be kept in a state of highest terror.”

“Whoa, hold up,” said the rev, who more and more seemed to be feeling his oats. “I’m with Manny on this. Them poor folks you be scarin’ to death—you callin’ them ‘devices.’”

“They owned human organs,” the doctor replied drily. “But scientifically applied terror can weaken a human with such ferocity the system simply collapses. You would be surprised how few ways there really are to generate fear! Oh, I could tell you stories.”

“Nobody wants to hear them!” I shouted. This was a lie. Which might explain why my knee kept pumping up and down on its own until I had to lean on it, like
The Thinker.
Hateful Knee Syndrome. Rage made me want to slam him face-first into the van wall. Some terrible fascination made me want to listen even more. This was the guilty truth, and Mengele seemed to count on it. He waited calmly for further interruption, sneered when there wasn’t any and paraded more stories.

“There was this feisty young Jew from Hungary.”

I had to dig my nails in my palms to keep my hands occupied. The tension seemed to feed him. He needed to make people uncomfortable.

“One day, after he’d heard I had operated on his brother, he saw me. He was on a work detail, cleaning the ramps. No more than a boy of fifteen. He saw me and he spit in my face. The guard grabbed him and I showed him my scalpel. Again, he spit in my face. I cut off his tongue, and even then, before passing out he spit blood at me.”

“Boy had heart. He woulda done well at Q,” the reverend said, to no one in particular. “Say whatchu want, there’s Jews got big
huevos.
”

“For as long as we let them have them.” Mengele smiled, making his little joke. “But this one had a soldier’s will, I admit.” The memory gave rise to a chuckle. “He was fast enough to pick his tongue out of the dirt and throw
that
in my face before the guard could stop him. For that, the capos were furious and showed no kindness as they dragged him, at my request, to my laboratory in Building Ten. But I needed to know: what is the source of this will? I suspected amphetamines. But when I performed the autopsy—for reliable results, of course, the subject must still be alive—his system was clean. Not just of drugs. I mean devoid of calories or stimulants. This made the chemical composition of the work camp resident easy to quantify. He was a churning pain factory. And pure pain made for pure adrenaline. It was almost as if his fear nourished him. So of course, I nourished the fear. It was the least I could do.”

I was starting to feel dizzy. The closeness of the van, the unnatural light, just standing on my feet for so long…

“What’s more powerful, hate or pain?” I heard myself ask. Availing myself of a killer’s opinion was not condoning it. It seemed all right to ask him a few things if I knew I was going to kill him later.

“Pain or hate. The eternal question,” Mengele replied with something like approval. “A question no one who wants to understand the human race can afford not to ask.”

“See that,” said the reverend, “the man’s game better than yours. He makin’ it look like you ’n’ him be about the same shit.”

“Peas in a pod, is that not the expression?” Mengele took out a hand mirror and checked his hair. “Science does not care who calls it science,” he said as he slicked down a patch up front. “You may ask, did I give the spitting Jew an anesthetic? Well, does nature?
No!
And yes. Suffering was essential. The threat of it. But then, what fear and pain produce, in any man, is a way to handle fear and pain.”

“Oh, that’s deep,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said Mengele, “you will appreciate the concept when you experience it. The adrenal glands are like jet engines. When they have fuel, they can choose their course. When they’re out of fuel, gravity chooses for them. They have no choice. For truly broken men, just the chance to lie down—even if it comes with knives attached—is a tremendous blessing.”

“I’d like to lie down,” I said. “Does listening to you count as torture?”

I actually tried to kneel, hoping to just tip sideways, but at a nod from Mengele the reverend grabbed me again and hoisted me up.

“Mr. Rupert, I have not finished with the Hungarian.” Mengele sounded a little hurt.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” I said.

“Nor could I,” Mengele continued, “but that was the pleasure of camp work—the sweep of cases you encounter.”

“Pleasure?” I said.

“Let the man talk,” the reverend snapped. I decided he was playing it smart—backing Mengele one minute, me the next. Covering the angles. As Mengele slid his mirror back in his pocket, the reverend winked.

“You will appreciate this,” said the doctor, aiming his comment pointedly in my direction. “In the middle of surgery, I saw this Jew look down at his own exposed liver, and the sight of it made him weep with joy. Later, as he sputtered prayers on his deathbed, I removed the liver and held it over him, and I understood: to his pain-maddened eyes, the organ was a newborn baby in my hands. His tears were tears of bliss that he had given birth.
‘Mein kindela!’
”

The reverend groaned again. “You never hear of a brother pullin’ this kinda ill shit.”

“You like giving people pain, doctor? Just between us girls.”

“What I was giving him was a chance for
glory
!” Mengele straightened in what I imagined he considered a display of his full and imposing power. “Even a parasite can have his moment of honor.”

“Finally,” I said, “I know what to put on my headstone.”

“Mockery is understandable.” Mengele smiled, no doubt knowing the last thing I wanted was his understanding. “The Jew’s hallucination moved me so much that, in the end, I
did
administer morphine. To myself. It was a treat I allowed myself on special occasions. Did I mention he spit in my face—again!—before he expired? He died honorably.”

“With you holding his liver.”

“As I would a beautiful baby.”