Pain Killers (47 page)

“I kept shorting them out, but I never had any problem with rejecting them.”

“I think all the cock-and-balls stuff was a diversion.”

I squirmed and she amended her sentiment. “Well, not all. But Mengele really loved you for your liver. He probably has people at insurance companies. Combing for freaks. The reverend’s got a cousin at Folsom, said an old German dude was there a year ago, doing weird shit with a pair of dim-bulb twins from Petaluma.”

“So did Zell hire me to see if Mengele was who he was—or did Mengele hire Zell to go find him a triple liver and man?”

“Probably both,” said Tina. “Break it down, they’re still crabs in a basket, a couple of big-league lowlifes trying to get over on each other.”

By now there was no way around the looming question. I tried to sound only mildly curious, as opposed to gripped by mad-dog, pit-bull-on-hot-tar paranoia. “And why exactly were you there?”

“Manny…The reverend told me Mengele was looking to do a johnson relocation. He said the doctor wanted to take penis enlargement to a whole new level. I guess he heard you had a healthy specimen, ’cause he was going to make you a penis donor.”

“And where would he have heard that?”

“I told you, I might have mentioned it to the reverend. When he was coming on to me. Just to let him know he wasn’t all that compared to my main squeeze.”

“Who wasn’t technically your main squeeze.”

“Manny, come on, we’re getting along so well.”

“Okay, okay. So he wanted to penis transplant. Why should I be bothered that none of this would have happened if maybe, you know, you’d been just a little, you know…discreet.”

“I just told you—I got involved because of what I’d heard.”

“What were you going to do about it?”

“Whatever it took to keep it from happening.”

“That’s a meaningful gesture, from an ex-wife.”

“Just ’cause a girl gives up skiing doesn’t mean she has to dynamite the Alps.”

“I’m flattered. What about Bernstein?”

“Nothing happened. And even if something did—which it didn’t—we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t go there, right?”

There was nothing to do but kiss her on the mouth or jump out of the car and bang my head on a utility pole. So I kissed her.

“Thank God!” Tina said. “I wasn’t sure you’d be okay after the surgery.”

“Why not? Tina—” I started, but she cut me off.

“Now listen, I found a tape recorder in the glove compartment, so I pulled the tape off his mouth, clipped on a little mike. I asked him to talk, you know, for posterity….”

“How’s that working out?

As soon as I opened my door I heard him. His disembodied voice ranted indignantly from behind the seat, as if he’d waited his whole life for the opportunity.

Minutes later, I held my Big Mac in front of my mouth. Untouched. Tina sat with her legs curled under her, absently twirling the straw in the strawberry shake she wasn’t drinking. We could not leave the Wal-Mart lot. We were listening to Mengele….

“…was my
mutti
fat! The word does not do justice! In Gunzberg, she was some kind of…no, I can’t say it. She was an object of scorn. Leave it at that. ‘No need to pay a pfennig for a sideshow,’ my friends would tease, ‘we can go peek at Mengele’s mother in the bathtub!’”

Tina bit her thumb, then stopped. “You know what’s worse than the evil? The self-pity.”

“I’m with you,” I said. “Is he blaming his
mother
?”

“It’s more disgusting than that.” Tina kept her voice soft, which didn’t diminish her contempt. “He’s trying to sound human.”

“…Every day, at precisely noon, Walburga would waddle into my father’s factory with his lunch. The name Mengele, I am proud to say, still graces the flank of German agriculture. Drive through farm country, and you will see that noble name showing proudly on the sides of tractors and threshers. But there was nothing noble about trailing my mother, who plowed through the ranks of sweaty men and oily machinery, her beady eyes fixed on the table ahead, where my father sat, among the men, and endured his daily visit from his three-hundred-and-fifty-pound stoat of a wife.”

Tina nudged me. “Do you know what we can do with this?”

“We could erase it front of him,” I said, opening the door. I re-wrapped my Big Mac and left it on the asphalt for a hungry shopper. I covered my ears, then removed my hands and let the words wash over me again. Mengele’s voice was whiny, defensive, arrogant….

“Have I some obsession with overlarge women? When I came to America, I could have wept at the sight of so many obese lovelies, their monster thighs and buttocks squeezed into stretch pants, children and husbands trailing them through malls like sullen, obedient dogs. Mother never knew that somewhere on this earth there waddled a race of her own kind. Not a ‘master’ race, perhaps. A ‘massive’ race. But a race that she could claim as her own.

“I am not a religious man. But I believe that heaven, for my mother, would be the Reseda Vons: food of every variety, aisles swimming with full-carted women, legs encased in suitcase-sized tumors of lard…”

He was still going strong a half-hour later, after we had decided to drive back to Los Angeles.

“…Only in America would you have a ‘hate crime.’ America was founded on a hate crime. Is it better to kill someone you don’t hate?”

Listening to him had gotten awful before we made it over the bridge. But, as if by silent commitment, neither of us suggested turning the thing off. Much as I wanted to, I didn’t retape his mouth.

If so many had lived through what he had done, then we could endure what he said.

“Isn’t this the fantasy of every Jew,” came the voice of the erstwhile SS
Hauptsturmführer,
“to have ten minutes alone with Mengele? How much did Zell say he could get for the chance to kill me?”

We finally pulled over outside Santa Cruz. Took a random exit for gas, missed the on-ramp getting back on and ended up, as dusk blurred to dark, at the end of a two-lane blacktop that dribbled off into a dirt road through the woods and stopped by the beach.

Outside the car, there was no noise but crickets and surf. We stared up through the trees. Took a little walk to stretch our legs.

“Full moon,” I said inanely.

Tina stared up in contemplation, then closed her eyes. “It looks tired.”

Tina started back for the car and I followed.

“We have to feed him,” I said, in no mood for lunar poetry. “Picnic with Mengele.”

“Hey,” she said, “I’ll glue him down and leave him for the ants. Say the word.”

Mengele was bent double in the trunk. I unfolded him and set him down on the ground. He was sweating, rambling into the tape with his eyes closed. But he did not sound weak. Even now his skin looked fresh—if his odor wasn’t.

“You’re doing the right thing,” he said, “turning me in.”

“Does this look like we’re turning you in?”

Tina came back and kneeled beside him, chewing an egg-salad sandwich. “What do you think is going to happen? Open up.”

His hands were still taped. Tina opened his mouth. She squeezed her sandwich until yellow mush oozed out the side. Then fingered a dollop and dropped it down his gullet.

He swallowed fast so he could keep talking.

“I am a part of history!”

“A lost part. You think we’d hand you over so you can tell your side of the story in a courtroom?”

“Yes, yes! That’s what I want. Finally! A trial. With what I know about your prisons, your government testing, your medical and pharmaceutical corruption…The truth needs to be told. We did not do anything America didn’t want us to do.”

I wanted to throw up. “Here we go…”

“No, listen. I liken it to your William Pierce and—”

“William who?”

Mengele ignored the interruption.

“William Pierce, of the American Nazi Party. He wrote
The Turner Diaries.
He described how to blow up a government building. Timothy McVeigh was so inspired, he blew up a government building in Oklahoma. Very impressive, for a complete methedrine addict. After the bombing, when Pierce was interviewed, he said, ‘I did not make him do it. I just wrote the book.’ Well, America’s laws were on the books—and Hitler read them. And yet you take no responsibility. You inspired us!”

“Triumph of the Willies.” Tina laughed in his face. “Do you have any idea how pathetic you are?” She pulled a Red Bull out of the glove compartment, cracked the top, and handed it to me. I took a gulp. “Can’t you do better than ‘It was America’s idea’?”

Mengele, who’d managed, somehow, to extricate himself from our tape job when we weren’t looking, picked a mustache hair out of his teeth and examined it. If he could actually see it, his eyes were better than mine. “This narrative displeases you? Why, because your textbooks tell you Germany was your enemy? America and Germany shared the same spiritual DNA.”

The thought that we ought to have tied a bow on him and mailed him to Jerusalem was like a persistent itch. “I think you’re taking the twin thing a little far,” I said.

“Am I? We wanted to keep the fatherland pure. Suppress the ‘foreign elements’ in the body of state. And what do your Minutemen want? I have seen your Lou Dobbs foam at the mouth on the subject of immigrants.

“Your president wanted to build a wall. I wanted to build a genetic wall. A barrier to keep inferior chromosomes from crossing the border and polluting our national essence. Are you going to tell me Herr Dobbs does not consider Mexicans
germs
?”

Mengele could barely wait to swallow another bite of pie before rambling on.

“Hitler understood that no border could prevent penetration by unhygienic strains of human. In stadium speeches, Himmler, the ex–chicken farmer, was fond of sharing his solution for infestation by poultry nit. It’s a parasite. It survives by sucking hen ovaries. ‘The war to save the race is waged on two fronts. There is the path of blood—eliminate the living vermin—and there is the bloodless method: sterilize them, ensuring that this will be the last generation of nits.’”

“All right,” said Tina, “you had me till hen ovaries. Time to cover the old schnitzel hole. Come on.”

“No! Please.” Mengele’s tone was at once commanding and abject. “Just eleven more items. Please.”

“He’s counted,” I said.

Mengele held up a hand for silence, then began his litany. “Nazi scientists were the first to warn against asbestos, alcohol, artificial food dyes—and these are just the A’s. We were the first to promote vegetarianism. First to recognize the value of fiber and condemn white bread. First to establish the link between tobacco and lung cancer. You might condemn our methods of research, but would you prefer that the nurse did not put lead over your reproductive organs during X-rays? That mercury leak out of your fillings? Did children have to die so that we could discover the value of vitamins? Would that knowledge keep you from taking vitamins?”

“The Chinese think they invented pizza,” said Tina. “Is this the bedtime story you recite so you can sleep at night?”

“Jet propulsion, guided missiles, synthetic fuel, nuclear fission, computers, calculators, electron microscopes, data processing, hormone therapy…The first television broadcast strong enough to leave the earth, what was it? Hitler’s speech at the nineteen thirty-nine Olympics.”

“No wonder UFOs make themselves scarce. They probably think we’re a planet of Hitlers.”

“It’s not exactly a stretch.”

Mengele tongued chunks of egg goo off his mustache. It was so thorough, it was like he had a little animal living in his mouth. All we could do was stare at him.

“Did your sarcasm,” he wanted to know, “prevent you from drinking methadone when you wanted to withdraw from opiates?”

I deflected the question. “I hear Göring had a taste for the hard stuff.”

“Göring was a degenerate. But that is another subject. The softness at the heart of Western civilization prevented it from making the discoveries I just told you about. Why did medical science flourish under Hitler? Because we had no fear of pain.”

“You mean no fear of other people’s pain.”

“Why do you treat me like an enemy? All I did was connect the dots America’s best thinkers laid out at Cold Harbor, the womb from which American eugenics was sprung. Davenport at Harvard—”

“Who cares?” Tina barged in. “You’re
here.
There are lots of evil assholes in the world, but I can only fit one in my trunk.”

I edged her away before she lost it. Or got any closer to Mengele. I still had the image of Laurence Olivier in
Marathon Man
with his up-the-sleeve switchblade. But catch him in repose, mouth sagging, spit bubble swelling and shrinking on his lips while he snored like a one-year-old—you could forget his crimes. We’d logged enough road time that he’d morphed into a crabby bachelor uncle who needed to be driven to doctor points. Which was probably dangerous. Mengele was as cagey as they come. Maybe cagey enough to lull us into thinking he was a harmless old coot before flicking a six-inch blade out of his shirtsleeve and slitting our throats. I gave Tina a little
stay cool
squeeze on the shoulder. “Easy, baby,” I said.

Mengele stewed. Whatever hardships he’d endured after a half century on the run, not getting his way appeared not to be one of them. We had passed down a sleepy lane of large California Craftsman houses and deep shady yards overhung by avocado trees and gently swaying palms. I saw the doctor watching the passing estates with something like hunger. Though, truth be told, I didn’t know if he wanted to occupy one of those white-picket-fence homes or kill everybody in them. “Must be galling,” I said, “just because you don’t qualify as a Good Nazi, you don’t get invited over here with all those other scientists.”

“My enemy did not approve of me. There was a time when that was a badge of honor.”

It occurred to me that his arrogance must have been an effort. He seemed to be getting smaller by the second. I could see it dawn on him: we might not be picking up the phone and dialing Interpol any time soon.

“Come on, Doc.” I opened the trunk and patted the tire-well bump. “In you go.”

Mengele stared into it as if it were full of faces staring back.