Pain Killers (37 page)

“Wait,” I said, knowing before I asked, “now I get it. You have this on film.”

Mengele jerked sideways as if struck. He stopped talking.

“You do, don’t you? How much did Zell offer?”

Again, silence. The sound of our collective breathing. And the muffled
womp-womp-womp
of the van’s overworked valves.

I pushed. “What’s the problem? You don’t want to sell? Or Zell won’t pay what you want? Or wait.
Fuck!
This is perfect! He won’t pay anything at all? Let me guess. He threatened to expose you if you wouldn’t give the film to him?”

“Damn,” said Reverend D. “Man’s gettin’ his PI on.”

Mengele just stared, calculating. “A Jew is a Jew. He saw a bargain.”

I thought I saw Tina blink. But I wasn’t sure. Everything was too close and too far away at the same time. The van seemed to be swaying.

Mengele tightened his thin lips. “This is science, not commerce.”

“You know what they say—one man’s science project is another man’s torture porn.”

Mengele bristled. “You—you are truly a Jew. You smell like a Jew. You think like a Jew. Yes, the prisoner suffered and died from my ministrations. But this wasn’t torture. It was humanitarian research. Thanks to his secretions, I discovered the means to generate and harvest something that could help the Fatherland win the war.”

“Yeah?” The reverend suddenly punched the wall. “How’d that work out?”

Mengele faced him, unfazed. “Mercenaries do not get to have opinions,” he said calmly. “Now listen, because we are coming to the sixty-four-thousand-shekel question. If our own bodies generate a substance, is it technically a drug? If it isn’t, does it become one when we remove it and give it to someone else?

“Today,” he said, head held high, “the human body is the future of drug manufacturing. It’s like God was waiting for man to discover this final glory. We needed the freedom of the camps to see it.”

“I’m not thinking about God’s glory,” I said. “I’m thinking how much you could get for your hormone formulas. And how much Zell wanted to get them from you.”

“You think that is what this is about?” He raised his eyes to whatever swastika’d demigod resided in the ceiling of the gas van, then stood and weaved his way toward me. “Let me put it in language you can understand. Fear turns on the epinephrine faucet. Fear is a biological delivery system. Try the spinal fluid of a man reduced to jelly by flashing lights and Wagner.” His mustache nearly scratched my eyes. “Adrenaline has a sweetish taste.”

“Swedish?” the reverend asked. “Like Swedish meatballs?”

“
Dummkopf!
I said it is sweet.”

Tina lolled slightly sideways. I thought she was waking. Mengele smiled at my concern. “Speaking of sweet,” he said, no doubt seeing himself in a movie as the epitome of old-world charm.

The idea of Mengele and my ex-wife…There were so many things in this new world I had to focus on not thinking about.

“You gonna tell him about the horse?” Reverend D asked.

“Horse? Like in heroin?”

“Ah, the horse,” said Mengele, moving his tongue in his mouth, as if the memory were delicious. “You see, the horse is what gave me the idea,” said Mengele.

“For what?” I asked.

“For the whole process.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the reverend. “I had to listen. Now you gonna have to.”

“If you’re through bickering,” said Mengele, chastising the reverend and me. “One of the few intelligent characters I met in São Paulo was a Mexican horse butcher. He’d committed some
indiscretions
in his home country. He, too, was an exile, so—”

“Wait,” I interrupted, “a horse butcher? Is that code for something?”

“It is not code. Europe, if you would let me explain, has retained its taste for horse. But America has outlawed horse butchering, so the animals are sent south of the border. Where—this I learned from Rudolpho—master butchers practice the art of pithing. A skilled operator slips the knife above the withers, in the spinal column, precisely at the base of the neck. Properly done, the procedure leaves the animal able to move its head and nothing else.”

“So what?” I said.

“So this minimizes the risk of injury to the knife artist when he butchers the animal alive.”

“You want to tell me why I’m listening to you drool over horse torture?”

“Ignorant!” Mengele shouted. “If you would stop with your stupid interjections, you would know. Why do devotees prefer to slice the meat off a conscious horse? Because—you see, there is a connection—the adrenaline generated by its terror sweetens the meat.”

The reverend elbowed me. “Nasty, right?”

“You’re the one working for him,” I said.

He snarled. “Reverend D don’t work for nobody but Reverend D.”

“Gentlemen!” Mengele curled and uncurled his tongue, showing what he no doubt thought was his playful side as he sat back down. “I told Carlos and his friends that I turned men into dogs and showed them the cages. They thought I was a
brujo.
”

The old narcissist sat back and crossed his arms. As if allowing me suitable room to be wowed by his story. I yawned in his face.

“Let me ask you something, Doc. Have you found the gland that makes you delusional? The one that excretes hormones that make people think they’re interesting?”

Mengele glared. “Where are you, and where am I? Who is the delusional one?”

I didn’t reply.

“I thought so,” he said. “We have a ride ahead of us. So why don’t I tell you what happened when I tried grafting additional adrenal glands into the glands of healthy males.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Can I just request the gas?”

“That ain’t even a joke you want to make,” the reverend warned.

“On this, I would agree,” said Mengele. “I will choose to ignore it. As I was saying—”

“Just answer the question.”

“I will, but not that one. You see, I had far fewer resources at the pound than I did at Auschwitz. But as the degenerate composer Stravinsky once remarked, ‘The more limitations I have, the more creative I can be.’ So…I managed. I got rid of the gang’s enemies—and I used them for what I could before destroying them.” He stopped to aim his rheumy eyes in my direction. “And I know what you are thinking.”

“If you knew what I was thinking, you would have killed me already.”

“Oh, please,” said Mengele, “if you would stop trying to be so heroic, you might actually learn something.”

“From you? I doubt it.” My mouth had gone dry, but I worked up just enough saliva to spit. “I don’t plan on starting a human hormone farm any time soon.”

“I am talking about ecology,” he said. “Nazis were green! We wasted nothing! Unbeknownst to them, the gang members were like pygmy headhunters, eating their enemies’ hearts.”

The reverend fought back a gag. “Bullshit. No way them bangers gonna eat nigger heart.”

“What the fuck, Rev?” I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard.

To my horror, Mengele shared my revulsion. “A disgusting locution,” he said, looking genuinely disgusted. “You are talking about your own people.”

I snorted. “You’re going to lecture us about disgusting?”

“Ain’t no us, motherfucker!” The reverend glared. “There’s just you, me—and the German.”

Mengele cleared his throat. “Forgive me. I assumed you both grasped the concept of metaphor. The gang was not, of course, consuming the hearts of what you call ‘African-Americans.’ They were consuming their glandular discharge. This is a nice symmetry, no?”

“Nice?”

I kept thinking of that Adidas tennis shoe on the floor of the pound. What its owner must have endured. But now was not the time to dwell on past horrors, with the one in front of me.

“Tina!” I hollered, cupping my hands as if she were across a far abyss. “Tina, can you hear me?” Her mannequin gaze gave back nothing.

“Adrenaline?” I screamed at Mengele. “That’s bullshit. She looks like she drank shellac.”

“Ah!” The remark seemed to please him. “I was hoping you’d notice. People forget adrenaline is not just the fight-or-flight hormone. But when the fight is over, the animal surrenders. Endorphins flood the system, the balm before the claw.”

“Tina!” I yelled again.

Nothing. Her eyes looked like they were placed in their sockets by taxidermists. I stared at my ex-wife and imagined the things I’d say if I ever had the chance. The anger I would promise not to display. The love and kindness I would never again take for granted. I was losing my grip.

“Where are we going?” I yelled.

Mengele slumped. “Where do you think? We’re going to hell,” he said sullenly, “with the rest of your ignorant nation.”

The reverend took offense. “Who you callin’ ignorant, Doc?”

Not for the first time, I wondered if maybe Rev D was on my side. He’d stopped jamming the gun at me twenty minutes ago. I considered shoving him into the old man, then grabbing Tina and leaping out of the moving van. But if the door was locked, I’d be fucked. Even if the reverend
did
seem sympathetic, it didn’t mean he wouldn’t shoot me for the right money.

“You want to know what I never imagined?” Now all pretense of calm was gone. Mengele was steaming. He was roaring. “After holding my breath for decades in shitholes a goat would be ashamed to be seen in, I never imagined I would move to the United States and find more Spanish. Then I arrive, and what do I see? More brown people. I see they are allowed to live, uneducated, ill housed, in order for your country to maintain a supply of restaurant workers and hotel toilet cleaners. A different solution, but just as final.”

Mengele blasted something from a spritzer up his nose and perked up. “But life is imperfect! I love America!” he exclaimed. “Hitler himself understood that without America, there would have been no Reich.”

“You blaming us?” I asked.

“Blaming? I am thanking. Listen to me! My earliest hero was J. Marion Sims. In eighteen seventy-five, he did experiments on African-American slave women in Alabama to find a cure for vaginal fistulas.
With no anesthetic!
And this man is considered the father of gynecology. Oh yes! Americans showed the Germans how to apply eugenics. How to use the inferior man to serve the superior. Would you like another example?”

“No,” said the reverend and I at the same time.

Mengele ignored us, swept up in his own saga. “Let’s discuss the environment. German scientists practiced recycling before America even had such a word.”

“What are you talking about,” I asked him, “making lampshades out of skin?”

“I am talking about this van!” Mengele declared. “What truer example of recycling—a self-contained germ elimination vehicle, designed to keep the race pure and the air clean at the same time. Nazi genius.”

For an instant, after he said that, the reverend and I both fought back nausea. It was not so much that death was all around us. It was that we were
inside
of death. Mengele reached behind him and tapped a fine-meshed metal vent. I spotted a single long black hair in the grate and thought my knees would buckle.

The reverend spoke deliberately. “This where you pump the shit in?”

“The
shit,
as you call it, is carbon monoxide. Which would be pumped out there if we did not pump it in here. Instead of harming the lungs of innocent citizens, it goes into the lungs of scum. And it does not even require a chemical engineer to do the job. Even Carlos was able to do it.”

“No need for the past tense,” I said. “Carlos is still alive.” I tried to sound matter-of-fact, or as matter-of-fact as I could locked in a van with a mass murderer. “Carlos is probably back on Avenue Fifty-five by now, rounding up homies. You didn’t know he’s a shot caller?”

“Shot caller?” Mengele smiled his hideous smile again. “Is that like
capo de tutti capi
?”

I smiled back at him. “Keep laughing, Doc. You have no idea of the shitstorm comin’ your way.”

“You see,” said Mengele, not without a hint of admiration. “The Jew is a natural liar.”

He was right. Carlos was probably dead. But why not make the old prick sweat if I had a chance?

“Carlos is hard-core, Doc. You disrespect him, he’s gonna come after you. There’s probably a dozen low-riders right now, full of twelve-year-olds with shotguns lookin’ to make their bones. All lookin’ for this van. Soon as they spot this van, they’re gonna start blastin’.”

Mengele didn’t even pretend to listen. He waited for the words to stop, studying the reverend and me with eyes that absorbed the light like black sponges. “Do you know why I wanted to go to San Quentin?” He blurted the answer immediately. “Testicular transplants.”

“Don’t want to know about it,” said the reverend.

Mengele tongued his lip fur with delight. “This makes you squeamish? Relax. This was a while ago! In nineteen nineteen, military surgeons were experimenting with new solutions for genital trauma. And so they came to San Quentin and inserted testicles of recently executed inmates and goats into the scrotums of living prisoners.”

“That is wrong,” said the reverend.

“What is wrong,” Mengele sputtered, suddenly erupting, “is that every time some so-called medical atrocity is uncovered, there are the inevitable comparisons to Dr. Mengele. Well, I have news. Prisoners have always been like two-legged petri dishes. You think I invented the idea of using incarcerated subjects? True scientists have always known their value.”

“Doctor, excuse me,” I said, “but if you’re going to keep talking, I’m going to need some adrenaline….”

“You do not fool me,” he said. “You’re fascinated.”

I didn’t reply. If he was right, I was not going to admit it. So Mengele just kept going. “Merck pharmaceutical infected four hundred prison inmates in Chicago with malaria. Did anybody take Mr. Merck’s company away? No. As a matter of fact, your
Life
magazine, in June 1945, detailed medical experiments conducted on state prisoners by the American Office of Scientific Research and Development in
their
effort to develop a vaccine for malaria. A noble effort. And yet, after the Allies emerged victorious, three Nazi doctors who did death camp malaria studies were hung. Why?”