Pain Killers (43 page)

“Gee, Zell,” I said. “I thought you wanted to ID the butcher, not bring him meat.”

“Fuck you, Rupert. You’re expendable.”

I sat up and backhanded him. Zell rubbed his face and grinned. He seemed to appreciate it.

“See that,” he sneered to Davey, “not everybody’s afraid to hit an old man!”

His face-damaged son stared at his shoes. It made me want to smack Zell again. But Mengele didn’t like to share the spotlight.

“Enough!” he wailed. “I was a
Hauptsturmführer.
You want to know how I got here? My skin!” He stepped to the surgical table and leaned down. “Go ahead, touch it!
Go ahead!
”

I passed. He offered a cheek to Tina, who also passed. Mengele treated us to a pout at the insult.

Side by side, the two stood out as alternate visions of seniorhood: Zell, padded and frizzy haired, a slack-jowled, loud-dressing seventy-something; Mengele, whip thin, wrinkle free and working that peroxide flattop in his nineties.

To my surprise, Zell got in Mengele’s face, rehydrating it with furious sprays of spittle as he ranted. “All those experiments—the suffering, the death, the children—and you want to talk about cosmetics?”

“Six million died,”
Tina piped up,
“but boy, is my skin soft.”
Everybody stared as if surprised that she was there. “It’s fucking disgusting,” she said. “You’re both fucking disgusting.”

Zell snorted. “Coming from you, that’s funny. But I got somethin’ funnier. I got a snitch tells me Dr. Eugenics here likes to look at himself naked in a full-length mirror. Likes to make little girls give him pony rides, too, if you know what I mean. You know what I could get if I had films of that?”

Mengele stiffened. He raised his chin, self-righteous, to show that he was above such concerns. “I will not address personal attacks. But I will defend my country. I have said it before: Germany did nothing your government did not advocate—we just advanced farther downfield. But I’m not a politician; I’m a scientist. I made breakthroughs! I have
notes.
And I’m tired of doing research so Lilly, Searle and Merck can get rich on my back! I discovered so-called Viagra in ’forty-three. Men were coming back from the front too shocked to copulate! We called it
‘Volks-steifer.’
”(Roughly, “folk erection.”) But where was I? Yes—look at my face! I have the skin of a fourteen-year-old!”

“What’d you do with the rest of the body?” I asked. Mengele’s cover-girl complexion blotched with rage.

“The mockery! You know how I came to this country! I was a pariah. But I was flown to America by a cosmetics baron. His wife saw me sunning on the beach in São Paulo. I thought I was headed for glamour. Instead, I get here, and next thing I know I’m testing perfume on convicts.”

Zell winked at Tina. “Who knew the Angel of Death was such a crybaby?” Then he shouted over me to Mengele. “You don’t get it. I could sell raffle tickets for the chance to kill you. I know a dozen Israelis who’d be on the next thing smoking out of Tel Aviv. I could make five million in ten minutes, and a hundred more than that when I sell the DVD. Imagine being the man who captured Mengele!”

I tried to whisper to Tina. “Just tell me what’s in my pants. Please! Did he put something in there? I can’t look.”

But she just hushed me up. “You don’t need to know,” she said. “But I’ll explain later.”

Meanwhile Mengele blabbered on with an old man’s addled, defensive ardor. “As I was saying, I was brought over here by a very big cosmetics man. The Jewish makeup king. One peek at the sheen on my cheekbones and he knew I had something. But the man had boundaries. ‘Doktor Genius’—this is what he called me.

“He came all the way to Brazil. Helped me stage the drowning. I told you, our Big Pharma, your Big Cosmetics—they had deals in prisons all over the world. Soon they won’t even need prisoners. The Third World is wide open. There are two thousand kidney transplants every year in Pakistan alone. And they’re not going to Pakistanis. By the way, how’s that scrotum feeling?”

“I can’t tell!” I blurted back in spite of myself. “What did you put in there?”

“Maybe an alarm clock. Maybe a kitten.” Mengele tittered, his mirth oddly insincere, then stroked his own face. He made a show of stretching each taut, baby-smooth cheek and letting it go. “See the suppleness? The tone? You cannot fake tone.”

On this note of self-satisfaction, he abruptly spun around, as if literally possessed by history. “From earliest memory,” he ranted, “Bavarians have engaged in mass Jew burnings. When I was very young, every schoolbook in Bavaria had an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.
Aliquot Milia—The Several Thousand.
It showed a festival in Wurzburg, in twelve ninety-eight, where locals danced happily and set fire to Jews. There is nothing original about burning Jews. But only the rustic Germans burned them
methodically. Festively.
”

“Germany!” Zell spat. “It’s not a country, it’s some psychotic disease. Who puts people in ovens?”

Mengele smiled airily. “I don’t remember bombing the camps.”

“Enough!” The warden bulldogged between the quarreling men, using his chin as a wedge. He crooked a finger to the faithful Rincin, who still avoided my eyes. “Gentlemen,” he snapped, his manner commanding. “I suggest you cease the cluster fuck. I’ve done good work with both of you. I say we just shoot the damn thing.”

“Shoot what?” Zell locked his hands in his armpits to keep them from escaping and grabbing the warden around the neck.

“Harry, I
like
the products,” said the warden. “I think there’s something there.” Rincin slowly broke away from the wall and drifted lazily over, like a shark with its first whiff of blood.

“Fuck that,” said Zell. “We turn his ass in and make sure we got exclusive footage of the arrest, and we are
rich.
Richer than you think you’re gonna get with that Christian porno you shot. And I’m not even going to bring up how you tried to cut me out and have that pimp, Reverend D, do your camera work. We’ll just call that a misunderstanding.”

“The reverend is a fine man,” the warden said.

“For a pimp, he’s a prince,” Zell agreed. “So I guess the state won’t mind when they find out you let him waltz in and out of your prison.”

The warden reelevated his hefty chin in front of Zell, tilting his head slightly, as if calibrating the right angle to hit him with it. “Out of respect for you, Mr. Zell, I have always let your sons have…extra privileges.”

“Yak yak. So respect me some more. Let me have Dr. Blond and we’ll both be fartin’ in silk.” He threw his arm over the smaller man’s shoulders. “You want, I could send a check to your charity of choice. I’m talking about one with a lot of zeros after it. There some kind of acromegaly club I can give to? I’m just asking, you know, with that tugboat you got for a jaw…”

“If anything should happen to me,” Mengele informed Zell pleasantly, “the Simon Wiesenthal Center will certainly be informed about our special relationship. Warden,
I
consider you a friend—but it may look like you were keeping me here to line your pockets with money from experiments.”

“To whom?” The warden didn’t react, but he was man enough for proper grammar. “To whom will it look like that?”

“He’s lying,” said Zell. “Like he’s lying about his skin care products. Probably skinned a baby to get that pretty puss. You forget who you’re dealing with, Warden?”

The warden kept his gaze on Mengele, steelier than ever. “Tell me who’s going to think I was lining my pockets.”

“First, my near countryman, Schwarzeneggar,” said Mengele, almost breezily. “What with the prison guards trying to get the governor recalled, your relationship with me may be the weapon he needs to break the union. I enjoy your Matt Drudge, your Rachel Maddow, so I would tell them. I think I would also like to tell
Newsweek,
the
New York Times
and Rupert Murdoch and maybe Steven Spielberg, the Shoah Jew. Believe me, I know how to create a Holocaust.”

“I’m just a documentary filmmaker.” Zell gave a self-deprecating shrug, struck suddenly modest. “Incarceration is the national pasttime. One out of a hundred Americans are in the can. That’s why America loves prison shows. So ninety-nine schmucks who got bubkes can look at that one guy in a cage and feel superior.”

“What about me? I feel like a piece of meat here!” I cried, surprising myself. “There are fourteen hundred other guys at Quentin. I’m not even a prisoner. Why me?”

“You signed a release,” Zell said. “Remember?” To Tina, he added, “You know better than to help him, don’t you, honey?”

Tina smiled sweetly. “I just work here.”

Zell wanted to flirt, but I interrupted. “I thought it was a contract.”

“You need to read all the shit in tiny print on the bottom.”

“My judgment was cloudy. You hit me in the head with a walker.”

“What I hear, that ain’t what’s causing the cloud.” Zell rubbed a meaty hand over his face, then sniffed, as if checking for spoilage. “Here’s the thing, ace: You can Q&A convicts all day. But you can’t legally perform for-profit experiments on them on-screen. You, on the other hand, are not an inmate. You’re an ex-cop. The same rights don’t apply.”

“Silence!” Mengele boasted such an authoritative yell, even Zell shut up. Mengele whirled his finger around over his head. “Cameraman, start again.”

Poor Davey, the Iraq vet wannabe, sighed and hoisted his camera, a Panasonic HDX 9001. “In this vial,” Mengele said, holding up a corked test tube, “I’ve got a custom-made stew of influenza bacillus and the common cold.”

Zell deflated. “You’re really going to do this?”

The doctor did not bother to answer. He bit the cork out, snatched a Q-tip from his surgery tray, stuck it in the tube and swabbed my mouth before I saw it coming.

The stuff soiled my tongue. I instantly started to sneeze. The bad kind of sneeze. The kind that explodes up from your toes and breaks stitches and shatters capillaries. The kind that ends with blood.

“Don’t worry,” Mengele said, back in Nazi pitchman mode. “One spritz of genetically enhanced immuno-spray, and I guarantee, you could French-kiss a leper and never catch a sniffle!”

The doctor tried to sound peppy. “Just watch how it stops the sneezing.”

I sneezed again and all but shoved my quivering snout at him. He averted his head and spritzed. Seconds after a mist of antidote hit my nostrils, the sneezes ceased.

“Would you look at that!” Mengele beamed. “Would everybody look at that!”

I’d had enough. Hands and feet now free, I jackknifed forward and launched sideways off the table, knocking Zell into Tina before hitting the floor. “Well, hello!” he boomed. Tina punched him in the throat. “Aucchh. What the fuck! What the
fuck
!” Zell yammered, nursing his Adam’s apple.

I jumped up, feeling ridiculous in my man diaper but more frightened about what kind of ornamental bag I had underneath. But Mengele was still pitching. “See that? Triple threat!” he declared gamely. “Lose weight! Grow bigger! Cure the common cold.” But whatever lid the warden had been able to keep on the situation was about to blow off. The steel door to the conference room slammed open and banged off the wall like a gunshot. Bernstein burst in shirtless. His physique was yard perfect, his entire epidermis a celebration of Aryan supremacy in sword and thunderbolt, flaming swastika, fiery tits and Torahs. He looked ready to spontaneously combust.

“B-B-Bernie?” stammered Daddy Zell.

The max-inked Aryan Semite ignored his old man. Instead he raised an arm to salute Mengele. “Heil, A-hole! How’s it feel to be yesterday’s Nazi?”

The warden swung into action, shouting at Bernstein, “You best think about what you’re doing, boy!”

“I’m done thinkin’,” he said. “I been thinkin’ my whole dumb life.”

Mengele chewed his mustache frantically. But Zell, reassessing the situation, was ecstatic. “That’s right, son. This is your chance to redeem yourself. Show the world Harry Zell’s boy is not really some Nazi schmuck. He’s a Jew.”

The proud dad wiped his eyes, delirious.
Imploring.

“Shoot him, the way we talked about. Be a Maccabee! Be the Jew who killed Mengele.”

He clamped his hand over his heart, no doubt imagining future bragging rights, as hammy-sincere as Zero Mostel doing Tevye. “I can just imagine it!” he gushed.
“‘That’s my boy! That’s my boy! He’s the Jew who killed Mengele!’”

Quickly, he swung his rye-bread-colored head my way. “And it better be Mengele.”

“We’re back to that?”

Zell grabbed my face and squeezed. “You know how much cash I’ve laid out for this?” He smiled at the warden. “In my business you need options.”

Zell shoved me aside. Tina stepped next to me, transfixed. “Fathers and sons.”

“Bernstein!” the warden shouted. “I am not your enemy. I am your friend. And as your friend I—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Bernstein’s eyes were full of water. “You hear me?
Shut the fuck up!
”

I’d never been in a prison riot, let alone while wearing a diaper. I kept my back to the wall. Tina squeezed my arm and stared in disgusted wonder at Mengele. “If there were any justice, an army of ninety-year-old twins would pile in here with scalpels and syringes in their teeth….”

Mengele eased himself away from the ALS brother. Bernstein head-faked and Mengele stumbled backward, knocking a chair over.

“Now that’s the kind of footage Harry Zell is after. That sings,” said Zell as he exhorted his tattooed pride and joy. “You can do this, son.
You can do this!
”

I saw Rincin raise his shades to look at the warden, who waved a hand, palm down and flat, in response.
Easy, there…
But Bernstein wasn’t listening. Almost lazily, he eased a homemade pig-sticker—sharpened screwdriver taped to sawed-off broom handle—out of his blues. He kept his arm straight, holding the weapon by its tip, alongside his leg.

Things went electric. I thought Zell was going to stroke out from screaming. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” Over and over. And then, shifting to the son manning the camera, “You’re getting this, Davey?”

Davey wasn’t listening to Dad. He had the camera aimed at Bernstein. When he raised his eye from the viewfinder, I saw something pass between them.