Pain Killers (38 page)

The reverend shook his head in disgust. “’Cause they were fucking Nazis—and the Nazis lost. Why the fuck you think?”

But Mengele was not to be stopped.

“Where America led, Germany followed,” he rhapsodized. “How to comprehend a country so crude, yet so advanced! Ninety years ago, California adopted ‘pure race’ laws. Public health officials were trained to be on the lookout for oversexed women of lesser races. The signs: extra-large labia and meaty clitori in the inferior races.”

“Maybe I’m just an ex-pimp,” said the reverend, “but all that science sound like an excuse to do nasty shit to me. The whole damn thing stink like perv sex.”

“I shall not even dignify that,” said Mengele, “and if I were you, I would consider my attitude very carefully, Reverend.”

“You let him bitch you out like that?” I said, causing the reverend to shift his wrath to me.

“I ain’t the kind of preacher you get to call a bitch, son.”

While the rev and I bickered, Mengele went from menacing to sentimental. “Hitler wrote something deeply meaningful in
Mein Kampf.
” With that, he closed his eyes and recited, “‘There is today one nation which was the model for the Reich—the United States.’ Today, perhaps, I believe the Führer would have liked to retire to America. Don’t you see? The entire purpose of Nazi science was to keep the unworthy from polluting our pure Nordic blood. Then, lo and behold, a week ago I go to a Whole Foods market, and what do I see? An entire aisle stocked with
blood purifiers.
If only the Führer could see how his work is being carried on. I have no doubt he would have liked to retire to Los Angeles and take up yoga. He swore by homeopathics!”

“Who needs Zyklon B,” I said, “when you can bore people to death?”

I focused on not losing my nerve. Fronting. I couldn’t tell if I was carsick, paranoid, starving, crackling with fear of what my captor would do to Tina or fear that, whatever he did, I’d have to watch. Helpless. Impotent as a shtetl Torah scholar watching a Cossack rape his wife.

When had I not been in this van?

I didn’t know if Tina was coming back from wherever Mengele had chemically launched her. Her once-in-a-while-blinking eyes met mine with no more affect than a statue.
Where was she?

The van banged up and down. The driver must have been taking potholes at sixty. Something dragging from the chassis scraped the asphalt. The racket filled the metal box, then stopped. I made out a thought in this chaos, like a far-off light in the fog:
Maybe fumes have been seeping in all along.
There were smoky fringes in the corner of my vision, as if film were being fed through a projector straight into flames.

I wasn’t scared. I was working my way up to fear. What I felt was a kind of inchoate vagueness. Maybe Mengele had transformed his own body odor into an anesthetic.

The road smoothed out and the van hummed as it picked up speed. Mengele droned on. The guy at the party you had to listen to because he had the drugs. Or the gun.

“By the end, World War Two wasn’t even a war. It was a custody battle. Operation Paperclip. America competed for scientists with the Communists. The Russians and Americans were like pedophiles in an orphanage, stabbing each other in the back to get to the camp scientists and all their knowledge. It makes me sick, all these years the Jews and everyone else decrying the Holocaust.” He imitated what I supposed he thought to be a lisping Jew. “‘Oi oi oi! How could it happen? How could it happen?’ When the Jew knows the truth more than anyone: it is all business.”

“I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want your ass,” said the reverend with equal parts sincerity and sarcasm.

“Yeah, why didn’t they want you?”

“The Jews made me a symbol; why do you think? IBM did more to kill the Jews than I ever did! They invented the computer to keep track of death camp inmates. But does that keep anybody from buying their products? Look!”

He reached in his pocket and carefully slid out a plastic-covered card the size of a credit card slip. He read it out loud.

“Prisoner code eight was ‘Jew.’ Code eleven was ‘Gypsy camp.’ Code zero-zero-one was ‘Auschwitz.’ Code five was ‘execution by order.’ Code six was ‘gas.’ And who made the gas? IG Farben. Parent company of Bayer pharmaceuticals.”

“Can I see that?”

I reached, but he quickly pulled the artifact back, close to his chest. “Are you brain damaged? Do you have any idea what this could get on eBay?”

The reverend shot his cuffs. “I believe I could help you with that.”

“Not now! The point I’m making is,
nothing has changed.
Bayer and Rockefeller paid me to inject typhus into babies; why? Was it torture? No, fever relieves certain conditions. When his temperature exceeds one oh six, a Mongoloid can read the Bible.”

“So what’s the deal, man-to-man? Do you just, like, make shit up and believe it?”

“This was world-changing science, believe me. After the war, I can tell you, I found out what was what. There are no countries, there are no wars—there are wardens who run the world and inmates who live in it. One nation runs all nations: Business-land.”

“And all these years, you still can’t get your passport stamped.”

“Enough!” Mengele shouted, producing a peculiar old pistol.

“Jesus, is that a Luger?”

“It is.” He put the gun away and sniffed. It was getting very close in the van. “If I wanted a new gun I could get one. Now listen to me: there are Jews who will tell you of the good things Mengele did. But do you hear about them? No!”

“I’ll bite,” I said. “Tell me something good.”

My plan now was to wait till he fell into some swoon of heroic memory, then stomp on his foot and knee him in the face when he fell forward. I’d just have to take my chances with the reverend. You had to die of something.

“I developed something sweet,” Mengele declared. “Exitotoxin, so that the Jews would eat their gruel. You know it as aspartame.”

“You invented aspartame?”

“As more than a sweetener, I’m afraid.”

“What’s that mean?” Tina lived on Diet Cokes. Now I had to worry about sugar-free Nazi pop?

“What it means,” the doctor explained, “is that once consumed, it breaks down into amino acids and methanol, degrades to formalde-hyde, morphs the brain of whoever consumes it into a neurodegenerative stew of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s. Sometimes all three. But did I get a patent? Do I get residuals? What do
you
think? In nineteen sixty-seven, IG Farben and Monsanto started a joint venture to put aspartame in drinks—using my formula. Your Donald Rumsfeld pushed it through the FDA for his friends at IG Farbenfabriken—whose own palate was sweetened with General Motors money during the war. The fruits of the Holocaust!”

“You sure you’re not taking more credit than you deserve? Just a teensy bit?”

“What?” Mengele went red-faced. “You don’t understand. For America and Germany, eugenics was our arms race. A race to save the race! Grateful Americans sent me a gold-plated bust of an Aryan youth for my work with irradiated benches. I found a way to sterilize fifty inferior males at once. Sit them down on my irradiated metal, pretend they were there to fill out a dental chart, and before you could say Richard Wagner their sperm would be as useless as toothpaste.”

He closed his eyes, his voice now weaker. He fumbled in the pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out the bullet-shaped canister. He sprayed it up his nose. And sat up again, re-revived. “Why do I mention the radioactive gonads? Because one of my counts, at Nuremberg, centered on this very breakthrough. Which I had planned on coming to the States to market. But never mind. I was the evil radiator. Meanwhile—this is the injustice!—since the twenties, in America, children had been slipping their feet into shoe-fitting fluoroscopes. Every shoe store had to have one.
Scientific shoe-fitting.
What fun to see your foot bone there in the radioscope! Do I need to tell you that a decade later there was an epidemic of deadly cancers and genital deformities? But did anybody prosecute shoe salesmen? Was the inventor of the foot fluoroscope forced to abandon his family and migrate south of the border? Quaker Oats paid Harvard to feed retarded children oatmeal spiked with radioactive tracers. The object was to see how preservatives move through the body. Were any Quakers hung? Was anyone from Harvard charged?”

Reverend D responded without smiling. “Remember, Doc, anger is a luxury we can’t afford. Right, Manny? You’re the recovery guy;
tell ’im
!”

“Reverend’s right,” I said, unearthing another nugget of recovery: “You’re angry ’cause you’re afraid. And what is fear? False Evidence Appearing Real!”

The classes in San Quentin might as well have happened in another galaxy. There was Mengele and pre-Mengele. And right now there was Maximum Mengele. I waited desperately for Tina to blink again, to give some sign that she was alive. I’d seen her like this once before, attractively embalmed and propped up, when she’d scored us some ketamine, then done it all herself when she got tired of waiting for me to come home. I walked in to find her in a total K-hole, flat on her back on the kitchen floor. Her eyes were open but her body was stiff, as though plucked prematurely from the pod where she’d been deanimated until arrival on Saturn. I tuned back to Mengele’s ranting.

“Was I angry when von Braun, who ran slave camps and developed the V-2, was flown to Hyannis Port?”

“Rocket man again? You must be mad,” I said. “You won’t shut up about it.”

Jimmy the Rasta had been right. The von Braun thing killed him. It was almost worth the unpleasantness just to listen to his torment.

“While I was being condescended to by brown-skinned cretins, kissing President Stroessner’s cankered ass to stay in Paraguay, Wernher von Braun was rubbing thighs with Jackie Kennedy, listening to Pablo Casals at White House dinners. So he used Jewish prisoners as slave labor to build V-2 missiles. What did JFK care? Dead Jews don’t matter when you need to go to the moon. One small step for man, one giant step for Nazi science! The president painted von Braun’s swastika red, white and blue and made him a hero. Americans are so self-righteous because they do not even know their own history.”

“Somebody be sittin’ on the pity pot,” said the reverend. “You had your run,
Swasti-cuz
! Have a little dignity. Don’t be dyein’ your hair an’ shit. Makes you look like some bathhouse toad ain’t heard the eighties is over.”

I still didn’t know the deal the two had worked out. But mutual respect was plainly not part of the contract.

“Am I kidnapped,” I asked to annoy him, “or do you just need to lock people in vans to get them to listen to your life story?” Mengele stiffened. Still unaccustomed to mockery from subhumans. “I guess Auschwitz was the high point, huh? And I don’t mean ’cause it looks good on a résumé. I mean ’cause of all the research opportunities! The
freedom
! Spot a fresh set of mixed-sex teen twins? March them back to the lab for your famous climate study. Plunge Ugo and Uta naked in a vat of freezing water. Then march them outside, dripping wet, in the Polish winter, so they have to do things to each other to keep from dying of hypothermia. If you take notes, it’s science.”

How often does anyone have the chance to chat with a living nightmare? There was so much to ask.

“Did you follow,” I heard myself ask, “in ’eighty-five, when your victims had a reunion in Jerusalem? They tried you in absentia. The saddest was the man who only appeared behind a curtain, because you had removed his penis when he was a boy. He was still ashamed.”

“They were not victims. They were subjects. No one expects a layman to understand science.”

“Really? How fat was your mother to make you need to do that?”

“My mother?”

Reverend D reached over and slapped the back of my head. “Boy, like my toothless grandma used to say, ‘If I was you, I would put my
mouf
in the
mouf
garage and shut the motherfucking garage door.’”

I let that go. Some other time I could parse the reverend’s loyalties. For now, my mouth was all I had to hurt Mengele. “Was Walburga proud you followed in her footsteps?”

Mengele stiffened, as close to confusion as I’d seen him. “My mother? What are you talking about?”

“You both made cripples.”

“Oh, snap!” laughed the reverend, earning a Mengelic glower.

“So,” I continued, “there’s no mandatory retirement age for mass murderers? You just switch to pets? How could you even be who you say you are? You were declared dead by drowning years ago.”

“Please. The São Paulo coroner was bribed. It is not hard to persuade an international committee that wants to be persuaded.”

“And so you survived to go peroxide and put down schnauzers.”

“That,” he said, “is unfortunate.”

“Yeah, especially for the schnauzers, huh, Beppo?”

This alone seemed to sting him. But it wasn’t the Mama’s-boy nickname that wound him up. It was accusing him of hurting animals.

“I love all God’s creatures,” he protested. “Which does not include the vermin—the Jews, the Gypsies, the Slavs, the homosexuals. We were doing what needed to be done to save humanity. We were willing to be beasts in the eyes of the world. To save what was finest in us. But animals. Oh no! With them we have a sacred bond. In Germany, you know, we passed the Tierschutzgesetz.”

“Sounds like it hurt,” the reverend chuckled, in no way cowed by the old bottle-blond’s glare.

“For your information, that means the Animal Rights Act. Germany,” Mengele proudly declared, “was the first country in the world that defined rights for animals. Tierschutzgesetz declared that they, too, have souls.”

“Then how can you stand there in Highland Park and kill them?”

“Quite easily. The Tierschutzgesetz applied to German dogs. Let me explain to you one of my greatest discoveries, Mengele’s Law. By definition, every species contains within it the best strain of itself. Think of it as the species equivalent of the master race. My triumph is the development of Mengelatin, a substance so powerful it can only be described as ‘the elixir of life.’ This contribution—and its race-saving applications—would be salvation enough to make up for the so-called six million. Fellow scientists would reward me for the formulaic elegance as for my patent and the sweep of its applications. I am not without compassion,” he pronounced grandly. “Even those breeds below master race could benefit.”