Pain Killers (42 page)

I saw the warden clearly, jotting something in his moleskin pad. Then Zell and Mengele both stepped in front of me, facing each other.

The doctor’s stance was smug. “Think what they will give for the weight loss formulas.”

Zell leaned back a little, folding his arms, so I could see the warden. He sat perfectly still, staring fixedly at whatever was going on between my thighs—which I was afraid to close for fear of hearing a clank or hitting plastic. The warden’s eyes met mine, but not in a human way. He might as well have been looking at a truck tire.

The warden folded his hands and began building another church. While the old men argued, Tina worked on my wrist buckles. The Irish wolfhound—none of whose body parts, I prayed, I would have to wear home—had either succumbed or settled down for a nap. Hands loose, I could maneuver a little. But I nearly went blind when I caught a full eyeful of Zell. I’d already taken in his purple shirt. The rest of him was a revelation. Harry was decked out like he was going to the fights in 1960: that purple Banlon shirt, black and white houndstooth sports jacket, sharkskin slacks. His head and stomach were larger than I recalled. Maybe he’d heard about Dinah and ate to stuff his feelings.

I spotted Davey, holding the camera. I was still horrified about being filmed, but it was good to see he’d come into his own. Rincin was holding up the back wall, like always. I tried to get his attention. But Mengele went suddenly livid. Bellowing. “Don’t shoot any of this! Stop the camera.”

Davey waved his hand to calm him down. “No worries, Doc. Anything fucked now we can unfuck it later!”

“Attaboy!” Zell shot his son a thumbs-up and plopped down beside the warden. He nudged him with his elbow, chummy as a scout at a high school game. “We get a cock-swap on film, it’ll be Swiss chalets for everybody.”

I felt Tina’s fingers undoing the leather strap that cinched my head. I stayed perfectly still.

Mengele steamed. “You do not understand! Everything I am going to demonstrate—the results are nearly instantaneous. No one but Josef Mengele can make that claim. Not like those quacks on TV. I am real. So
danke.
Thank you very much; I don’t need surgery footage.”

“Why not?”

“Because you could be making a case. Do you think I am stupid? I have lived with a price on my head for sixty years by trusting greedy Jews?”

“Hot damn!” said Zell, hopping out of his chair and wagging his finger. “I like you.” He turned to the warden and shook his head. “Don’t you like him? You hear ‘Angel of Death,’ you think the guy’s gonna be rough around the edges. But, Doc, you got some kinda charm!”

Until then, I had not noticed how much Zell resembled Bill Clinton in his manner. Bill Clinton if he’d been shorter and older and jowlier and his name had been Clintstein. Zell held his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay,
uncle
! Harry gives! Tell me what you got.”

“I told you. I’ve got weight loss, I’ve got—”

“Weight loss!” Zell grabbed the silver pointer out of Mengele’s hand and broke it across his knee. “Are you mentally challenged? What’s your plan? Book some cable time at three A.M. and do infomercials? That it?
‘Sieg Heil, I’m Josef Mengele, you may know me from the Holocaust.’
Talk about chutzpah!” Zell looked back at Davey. “Can you believe this mass-murdering schmuck?”

Davey just shrugged. His father swung around and faced Mengele again, hairy nostrils flaring.

“The Auschwitz Diet? Is that what I’m hearing here?
‘Lose half your body weight in a week or we’ll send you a full refund’
? Am I getting hot?
‘Side effects may include the death of all your relatives.
…’”

Mengele waited patiently for him to finish. “You exaggerate. But why not? Until the National Academy of Sciences calls and offers me a prize, I have a viable commercial product. I have already applied and received patents under an alias.”

Zell’s voice lost some of its bluster. “Is it Alzheimer’s? Is that it? I bet if you’d have cured that first, you wouldn’t have ended up sounding like some demented old grifter. Well, woulda, coulda, shoulda, huh?”

“Accchh! Stop interrupting!” Mengele aimed his weirdly soft-skinned face back to the camera. If he started in on skin care, I might bite.

“Ready when you are,” said Davey.

“Good!” Zell shouted. “Get this Nazi freak for posterity. I swear, it’s like I’m lookin’ at old man Hitler here. I mean, if the Führer, rest his soul, had lived. If he hadn’t stuck cyanide up Eva’s ass and made her shit in his mouth. Don’t deny it—I’ve seen the OSS photos. What is it with you Germans? All the top Nazis—nothin’ but a nest of pervs. And believe me, you, sir, do not disappoint.”

“Are you through?” Mengele reconfigured his gap-toothed smile for the camera. “Faced with troublesome hip fat you cannot seem to lose? Too much stomach? Well, your worries are over! Apply Mengelatin Fat-Burning Balm just once and see the results within one hour—or your money back! Nurse?”

And there was Tina! In her nurse’s outfit. I rewound the movie of our Christian crack house visit. Vaguely remembered her stuffing something in her purse in the reverend’s bedroom. She stepped on her mark and faced Davey with wholesome delight.

“I had twenty problem pounds after I had my baby. But then I discovered Mengelatin!”

Mengele held up a small brown jar with a shiny gold lid and handed it to her. Tina unscrewed the top and fingered a dollop of yellow goop. “I’ve watched pounds melt away in minutes. What’s the secret?” Tina held the pretty jar up and tapped it. “It’s all in here!”

Then, with no warning, she reached for me. She grabbed a handful of side-tire and rubbed some on. “Spread it just like butter wherever you want to lose.”

Tina demonstrated. Her fingers felt wonderful—for half a second. After that the salve burned like Vicks VapoRub cut with hydrochloric acid. I let out a muffled groan.

“Just lie back,” said Mengele, “and watch your love handles melt away!”

Tina rubbed in slow, lazy circles, unaffected by the chemicals that seemed to be eating through my top layer of skin.

Switching gears, Mengele gave my manhood a little pat. Tina’d spread a hand towel over it, so I still hadn’t seen what I’d be wearing home. I imagined all the little heads Mengele must have patted this way. He was famously gentle with children—when he wasn’t studying the effect of mercury injections in their livers or removing their spines while they were still breathing.

Tina beamed and tapped a few drops of brown fluid out of a bottle that looked like it once held soy sauce. Maybe it
was
soy sauce. Mengele broke out his best Jack Lemmon again. “Of course, there’s one part of the anatomy where lots of fellas might like to put on a pound or two. For you gentlemen, there’s my patented Mengelatin Mega-Men Formula. As I like to say, ‘With M3, you can make normal big, big bigger—’”

“And,” Tina cooed with a wink that hinted I might be playing in the Pee-Wee League, “turn a little man into a happy man.”

The notion of my ex-bride as Vanna White to Mengele’s Pat Sajak was not a welcome one. Before she had a chance to offer anybody the at-home game, Zell barged back up again, waving his arms. “Enough!” he shouted.

Mengele’s face reddened. “Why not?” he hissed at Zell. “Have you ever seen that Jew fraud, Dr. Stein, selling MaxiDerm? ‘I’m Dr. Stein, and I’ve spent my life investigating penile enhancement products.’ The man
looks
like a penis. Unlike his sludge, mine actually works. I know. That’s why I don’t need the surgery. I did the experiments.”

In spite of himself, Zell recoiled. “At Auschwitz? You’re going to say, in a commercial, that you tested your product at Auschwitz?”

“No,” said Mengele, “in an infomercial. And yes, I am only mentioning Auschwitz to you. For now. Now let me rehearse.”

“You’re too good for this,” said Zell, trying another angle. “Set yourself apart. Go with the transplant!”

My tongue felt like a mitten.

Zell pointed at my towel. “Operate on him. After what this prick did to my son, he deserves it!”

Davey’s partial face went red. “I’m fine, Dad. We were just tussling.”

“Definition of FINE,” Zell mocked. ‘ “Fucked-up, Insecure, Nervous and Emotional.’” I could see why his spawn had turned out to be such executive material. Zell leaned close. “Wanna know why my boy’s got a freak show on his neck, Rupert?”

“Dad, please.” Davey lowered his eyes. Even in my current predicament, I felt awful for him.

Zell jumped Davey instantly. “Oh, so now
you’re
going to give me shit? How about we tell everybody your secret?”

Now it was the warden’s turn to speak up. What was
he
getting out of all this? “Harry, I really think—”

“F you!” Zell screamed at him, facing away from me. I stared at the fluorescent lights, where a fat moth had either died or decided to warm its feet on one of the flickering tube lights. Sweat dribbled down my—I now realized—newly shaved chest.

“See,” Zell thundered on, “his mother and I
say
he tried to commit suicide. ’Cause that sounds better. The truth is, he wanted to go around telling people he was an Iraq War vet. Thought he would meet girls. But he wanted to make it look good. So he decided to blow his ear off.
And missed.
”

Zell pointed with both fingers and swept his hands toward the boy as though he were the pretty game-show spokesmodel. “Ladies and gentlemen, my boy Davey!” Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling, cursing. “Thank you, God. You
fuck
! Thank you for this one and the other genius.”

This was too much. I gagged out the last of the rag in my mouth and shouted, “For Christ’s sake, can I get up!”

“No!” said Mengele and Zell at once. Then the head of my penis popped out from under the towel and Zell whistled. “Reminds me of the Red Buttons gag. ‘How can you can tell a Jewish dick from a gentile’s? The Jew’s wearin’ the derby, the gentile’s in a dunce cap.’”

“That’s a good one,” the warden called from his seat.

“I know a joke,” Mengele announced. “What did the hog say to the butcher?” When there were no takers, he continued with a smile that could have poisoned wells. “You bring out the
wurst
in me!”

Crickets. In the silence that followed, I re-hated myself for not killing Mengele the moment I saw him and turned my wrath on Zell. “Why don’t you just turn him in?”

“I will, goddamnit. But he ain’t going anywhere. Why not make money off him first?”

Mengele smirked.

“Let him do some good for the Jews,” Zell snarled, meeting Mengele’s sneer with a fierce gaze of his own. “Ten years doing prison shows, a man makes contacts. I could shoot five episodes of Mengele being Mengele for more dough than he can make in twenty years hockin’ jars of Lotta Cock. And FYI, Dr. Death, half goes to me, the other half to Hadassah. Yours truly buys a lot of trees in Israel. You don’t believe me, ask my accountant.”

“You’re forgetting something,” said Mengele calmly. “Either you help me out, or I go public. About everything. All the experiments. All the money you make and what you’re really doing when you’re pretending to make those
Lockdown
episodes.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zell sniffed.

Mengele picked up a tape measure and slapped it in Tina’s hand, snapping at her to measure my thigh, then put on the jelly. “In five minutes, he will burn off an inch. I want this documented.”

Zell and Mengele glared in each other’s faces. “Gonna rat me out, is that what you’re saying? For
what
?”

Mengele’s mustache chewing grew fevered. He sniffed in my direction. “You think junkie boy hasn’t figured it out?”

“Relapse,” I insisted lamely, though no one noticed.

“I am sick,” Mengele railed, so angry his scalp glowed red through the peroxide buzz cut. “Sick of you getting me jobs, sick of me doing the shit work and you making the money. Sick of doing R&D for Big Pharma money. Tired of testing for epidermal burn after some VP from the Body Factory decides he wants to give sulfuric acid in acne cream a spin. Remember when the doctor from University of Pennsylvania got indicted at Holberg State Prison, for perfume tests? He was the only one as good as me. Try to find anybody else with my talent.”

“Yak yak yak.” Zell, I suspected, was not a well man. His outbursts were all followed by what looked like standing collapse. He slumped. Even his words sounded beat. “Your talent is torturing the incarcerated.”

“Which in your country is called the War on Terror. Except it’s really research and development. Just like it was in the camps.” Mengele was just warming up. “The only difference is that we didn’t hide the death. Or what it was worth. We knew. In your camps, well—as you might say, in your crass way, somebody’s making big dough off Guantánamo. Your ‘top Nazis’ hide truth the same way they hide coffins.”

I was about to tell Davey to film this, but Tina stepped back to me, smiling, and peeled off a pair of skin-tone lab gloves. No wonder she hadn’t burned her fingers down to stumps. Facing me, she lifted the hem of her uniform, revealing nothing but leg, and dipped it in the water glass on Mengele’s instrument table. Very slowly, she wiped off my love handle. “I like that you’re not perfect,” she whispered. “Guys with great bodies really just want to fuck themselves—or each other.”

While these do-gooders debated, she discreetly freed everything that was still buckled, leaving the straps in place. I should have kept my mouth shut. There were other things to deal with—like the fact that I was wearing some kind of crinkling plastic diaper. And had no idea what had been implanted in my scrotum. I knew something happened. But even with my hands free I didn’t have the nerve to look. Zell’s rage had made me like him a little, so I decided to at least try to do my job.

“Hey, Doc,” I said, “what are you really doing here?”

The question took him aback. “Why am I where? In this prison?”

“In this country.”

“Great,” said Zell, drumming his fingers on my leg. “Houdini gets loose and wants story time.” He glared at Tina, who now fussed with the scalpel tray.

“We don’t have all day,” the warden seconded.