Pain Killers (2 page)

“Which Jews?”

“What do you mean ‘Which Jews?’”

“The ones inside or out? Jews in the penitentiary are different than Jews on the outside.”

“I’m guessing, inside or out, there’s a bunch who’d like to skip a trial and go directly to revenge.”

“Some might want to take him out for revenge. Others to hide complicity. I’m talking about Jews, but not necessarily Jew-Jews.”

“What?”

He stared at me with something like pity, then lifted his heavy old man’s body out of the wing chair.

“Some might want to take him out for revenge. Others to hide complicity. I’m talking about Jews, but not necessarily Jewy Jews.”

“What?”

“As I was trying to tell you, there is a difference between Jews who are incarcerated and those who aren’t. See, inside, white trumps Semite. Plenty of Jews are ALS.”

“They have Lou Gehrig’s Disease?”

“Shmuck! Say that too loud, you’re going to break out in flesh wounds. ALS stands for Aryan Land Sharks. They’re about White Power. The baddest of the bad. They don’t take too kindly to being confused with a charity disease.” He put his hand on my shoulder in an avuncular fashion and shrugged. “It’s a different world. Name’s Harry Zell, by the way.”

What could I say but “Nice to meet you, Harry”?

Zell looked at his watch. His shirtsleeves covered his wrists. I couldn’t see if there was a faded number. But there were many other things to mull over—beginning with the proverbial elephant in the room, swinging its trunk between the double bed and dented portable TV.

“So, Josef Mengele is alive, huh?”

Zell kept his response nonverbal: rubbing his fleshy nose and making an
accch
noise.

“I mean, if it’s true, this is a pretty huge event.”

This time Zell drummed his fingers on the walker.

“Hey! It’s not like you can walk into a man’s place, smack him on the head and ask him to find somebody. Well,” I corrected myself, “you
can.
I’m just saying…
Mengele
? I can’t believe he’s just sitting there. Waiting to be found. If he’s telling people who he is, what makes you think he’ll even be there when I show up? Or that I’ll be able to get past the CNN trucks?”

Zell repeated the
accch
ing and finger drumming, then pursed his meaty lips, sucked in his breath and blew it out in one long sardine-scented sigh, as if a lifetime of disappointment and resignation had prepared him for this one big one.

“He is saying who he is, right?”

“Sure,” said Zell. “There’s another old freak who says he’s Mickey Mantle, three more screaming they’re Jesus, and let’s not talk about Elvis. If you were an
alta kocker
in a jail cell, wouldn’t you want to be somebody else?”

“Maybe. But not a genocidal maniac with a price on his head. Even if it’s him—he got away with it this long, why would he come out of hiding now?”

“Because he wants credit.”

“For what?”

“Exactly! All you know about him is the genocidal maniac stuff—what about the good things?”

“Are you insane?”

“Me, no. But I’m depending on you to tell me if
he
is. His psych eval describes him as borderline schizophrenic. I checked. Who’s gonna believe a schizo in jail? But he doesn’t act out. They don’t have him on file as a gasser or anything.”

“So they don’t know what he did to his patients when he was done with them?”

“Not that kind of gasser. Don’t you watch
Lockdown
? Gassing is when a prisoner throws urine or feces at a guard. Sometimes they make a soup. The thing I do know is he’s vain. So never take him seriously. As in, do not show him respect. Do not react. No matter what he says, no matter how horrible. If it’s him, that will drive him crazy. A vain man at the end of his life. That’s as close as we’re going to get to DNA. I’ll give you ten grand.”

“Ten grand’s not much, considering.”

“I’ll get your house back for you.”

I did not want to argue. I’d been living on fumes for a while. Continuing to live that way seemed suddenly unbearable. But still…

“It’s just too fucking unlikely,” I said.

“Unlikely?” he repeated, brightening for the first time. “Exactly! Looking at your life, I said to myself, ‘Here, Harry, is a man who has never had a problem with the unlikely.’” His voice began to rise, and I kept an eye on his walker in case he tried to swing it again. “I said, ‘Here is a man whose own past history, if you had to stick it in a box and put a title on it, that box would say UN-FUCKING-LIKELY. Here is a man who married a woman he met when she murdered her husband with drain cleaner and broken lightbulbs in a bowl of Lucky Charms.’”

“No need to flatter,” I said. “Cops meet all kinds of interesting people. Sometimes they even marry them. I’m glad you did your homework—but what does my checkered past have to do with anything?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I need somebody I can trust. Who’s also desperate,” he added, meeting my eyes. “If you weren’t desperate, you wouldn’t take the job. But if I couldn’t trust you, I wouldn’t want to give it to you. It’s not an easy combination.”

“You still haven’t told me why you want Mengele.”

“The man has his reasons for saying who he is. I have my reasons for finding out the truth.”

I started to say something else, and he held up his hand. “Enough. The warden knows everything. You’ll meet him first.”

I followed him out to the living room, where he stopped to take in the photo of my wife and daughter on the wall.

“Your family?”

His tone was somewhere between inquiry and concern. I gazed at the picture, surprised by the sudden flood of emotion at the sight of my sullen, long-lashed sixteen-year-old daughter and my beautiful, high-cheek-boned newly-ex wife.

“My family, yes. Good to know they’re out there,” I heard myself croak.

When I opened the front door, he stopped and delivered his final instructions.

“Remember, with Mengele, you can be polite, but show no respect. Don’t take him seriously. For him, any disrespect is—”

He didn’t finish. He just grabbed the walker and smashed it into a mirror.

“Do you understand?”

“I get it,” I said, picking glass out of my eyebrow.

“Good. Then we understand each other. You’ll get an envelope with details and cash.”

Zell kicked the walker out of his way and strode with crunching, great man strides out to a waiting limousine.

I shook a few more mirror shards out of my hair, then watched him open the limo door himself and get in. I wasn’t mad about the mirror—why would I want to look at me? Business being what it was, I was not even that upset at Zell’s perverted and violent mode of job recruitment.

No.

What bothered me, more than anything, was that I knew I was going to take the job.

Burbank to San Francisco was a one-hour flight. United only had two rows of first class. It was weirdly satisfying to be sitting in one of them, feeling the eyes of lesser-ticketed humans as they passed by after I’d been boarded and seated. The resentment in their glances was almost tangible:
Why is that shabby bastard sitting in first?

The tickets had been hand-delivered in a gray envelope with the cash, along with a copy of the smiling SS Zell had left on my dresser and a time-projection etching of ninetysomething Mengele. It was odd to see the same technology used for missing-children flyers applied to a nonagenarian Nazi. Instead of baby Nancy at three and thirteen it was Dr. Mengele in his Jack Lemmon–circa–
The Apartment
prime and in his current dotage.

A smaller envelope within contained a passport, driver’s license and Social Security card. It would have been cool, in a
Mission: Impossible
way, if I’d been given a new identity. That scene in every movie where the spy is told, “From now on, you will be Laszlo Toth. You were a furrier in Madrid.” Sadly, this being real life, I was given my own identity. My own SS number, my face on my driver’s license. It was like finding out there’s reincarnation, then coming back as yourself. I had not realized my wallet had been emptied of ID until the walker bandit, Harry Zell, gave it back to me with the tickets. Mostly I used cash, when I had it, so I didn’t pull out my wallet a lot. The credit cards were pretty much there if I had to break into a locked door. Which A) I did not often have to do, and B) never really worked except on TV. In real life, if you don’t have a locksmith and burglar skills, you were pretty much fucked.

Ever thoughtful, Zell had included the San Quentin visitors’ dress code in the envelope. “No blue denim! No orange jumpsuits!” (Because, really, why
wouldn’t
you drop into a state prison dressed like a state prisoner?) But my favorite deal-breaker was “No see-through tops!” Who knew? Zell—or whoever packed his packages—had also thrown in a paperback of
Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul.
I left it in the sick-bag slot.

The only fraudulent part of the paperwork was my state certificate, proof of my status as licensed drug and alcohol counselor. I had a diploma from somewhere called Steinhelm Life-Skills Institute. It looked as legitimate as I did.

From the road, San Quentin might have been a vast, oceanside nineteenth-century resort. The sprawl of brick and stone blended into the upward roll of land over the Pacific. Think Hilton Head, but institutional, with a death house.

I gave my name at a gate that looked like an overgrown toll booth. A steely blond woman took my driver’s license and picked a green receiver from a wall phone. While I waited I took in a ruined gazebo halfway up a curving driveway to the right: a tiny haven, ringed by stone nymphs, where a robber baron might have thrown a birthday party for his daughter in 1911. W. C. Fields might have lumbered out of it with a croquet mallet and a flask.

“Officer Rincin will be down to meet you in a few minutes.”

There was nowhere to wait. The sun was merciless. I watched an older prisoner in denim and a blue shirt push a wheelbarrow over to a bed of flaming red flowers by the entry road. He kneeled down and touched the first one, gave it a moment, tamped the ground around it a little, then moved on to the next flower and did the same thing. On one level, this scenario stood out as a profound statement about man’s ability to transcend his surroundings and experience beauty even in the direst circumstance. On another, it was a guy kneeling in dirt, blowing his bad breath on a flower, a guy who’d grow old and die sleeping four feet from a toilet.

A screen door slammed. I saw a pair of middle-aged ladies in straw hats and vacation wear step from a small building I hadn’t noticed. The San Quentin gift shop. I checked the pathway down from the brick administration building, saw no one hurrying my way, and headed over for some souvenirs. Sometimes you just have to pamper yourself.

Inside, the ladies giggled over a wooden paddle with a droopy convict in stripes painted on it, over the caption BETTER BE GOOD.

“Is this not the cutest?”

“Ed can put this up right over the bar!”

Lucky Ed. They were still tittering when I stepped inside. The shop occupied a small white room with four glass cases and walls hung with prisoner art and handiwork. A handwritten sign over the old-fashioned cash register said GO AHEAD, SHOPLIFT! Behind the register was a closed door.

I wandered to the first counter. Leather goods. Wallets, belts with eagle-clutching-the-flag buckles the size of hubcaps, and some snazzy handcuff holders. Next to that, management had arranged a paddle display—from spatula-sized on up to small snow shovel. Each smacker was decorated with the same droopy, hand-painted convict as the one the ladies were holding. Beetle Bailey in stripes.

What really impressed were the paintings. An array of pastel-tinged sunsets, azure waves over rocky shores—nature scenes—filled every inch of wall space behind the counters. Whoever painted them had spent a lot more time in motel rooms, staring at the pictures over the chained-down TV, than in actual nature. No doubt, after enough seventy-nine-hour blinds-closed binges, smoking meth under the bed, those pink skies and shiny seascapes
were
nature.

“See something you like?”

A small, perfectly proportioned blond man in a blue prison shirt eyed me nervously from behind the counter. I hadn’t seen him come through the door, and he made sure to keep that burp gun–era register between us. His face was an unlined fifty. A faded patchwork of tattoos blued his chest where his collar opened.

“All the paintings you see here are done by inmates,” he recited. “You’ll notice there are no signatures, only their prisoner number.”

The counter in front of him contained a dozen key chains: dominoes on one side, a drawing of the prison and gun tower and SQ on the other. He backed up a little when I approached. Startled. I found myself speaking slowly.

“How much are the key chains?”

“Four fifty.”

I pulled out a twenty. “I’ll take four.”

As he reached in the case to grab them, I saw that he was missing his middle fingers. Before I could decide whether to ask about them, he whispered, “Got a lighter?”

“Don’t smoke anymore.”

In fact, I did have a lighter. You never know when you’ll need to fake some charm or camaraderie by lighting somebody’s Camel. But I didn’t tell him.

“We’re not supposed to either.” He kept his voice low, eyes aimed at the counter. “That’s why a pack goes for thirty dollars.”

“Thirty, huh? Next time I’ll bring a carton.”

His eight fingers fluttered with excitement. But they stopped when I didn’t say anything else. What I wanted to ask was how much he got for snitching out visitors. You didn’t get to be gift shop trustee by slipping the hacks free cup holders. He started to make change from the cash drawer, then stopped. He stared at the money in his hand as though he had no idea how it got there.

“Keep the change,” I said.

Tension came off him like steam. “There’s change?”

When he handed me the bag, he looked me in the eye for the first time.