Pain Killers (48 page)

“Fuck this,” said Tina. She ripped his mike off and pushed him into the trunk. “We have enough on microcassette. Let’s tape his mouth again.”

“I can’t find the tape. I looked for it before we got out of the car.”

“That fucking car. It’s the size of an ashtray and I still lose everything in it.”

“Well…”

“Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear about the army surplus store on wheels you drive around.”

“Well, we need something. If he starts screaming at a stop sign, somebody’s going to think we have a kidnapped Nazi in the trunk.”

Mengele had been scrutinizing Tina this whole time. Finally he popped the question. “How many?”

“How many what?” She stopped pillaging the glove compartment for gaffer’s tape and regarded him.

“How many have you killed?”

Things went quiet for a second. If the doctor wanted to touch a nerve Tina wasn’t going to show of. “One—that I know of. But what time is it now?”

“Who was he?”

“No, who the fuck are you, to think I would even want to start swapping murder talk with you? What is that, like, porn for you? You and the other mass murderers sippin’ umbrella drinks in Buenos Aires, remembering the good days when you just killed whoever the hell you wanted. No questions asked.”

“You are Catholic?”

“What is this? My eHarmony application? Yes, I’m Catholic. Though I prefer to think I was held captive from birth.”

Mengele stared off. “When I crossed the Brenner Pass, from Innsbruck to Genoa, Catholic priests took me in. Italian monasteries were full of escaped Nazis.”

“One more reason to love the church,” said Tina, digging something out of her glove compartment. “Maybe we can superglue your lips.”

She waggled a tube of superglue in his face. Mengele twitched.

“For broken heels. My mother was big into pumps. It’s the one bit of practical advice she ever gave me: keep glue for your shoes. That and don’t give out your real phone number.” She threw back her head and planted the back of her hand dramatically on her forehead, defeated. “‘I gave my number to your father, and look what happened….’”

Tina screwed the top off the glue. “You know about embarrassing mothers, don’t you, Joe?” She bent toward Mengele. He watched her with his black, assessing eyes. “Can I call you Joe? So what’s best, Joe—coating your top lip with superglue and pressing down, or coating the bottom and pushing up?”

“Wait! There’s the tape,” I said, spotting a roll under the jack.

“Party-poop!”

“Tape’s fun, too,” I said, ripping a strip and handing it to her. Then I steadied him and Tina, her eyes glinting, slapped the silver gaffer’s tape over his mouth and patted his head.

“Aren’t you the best little boy in the world,” Tina said.

I slammed the trunk.

Life was too short to comprehend the Holocaust. Not just the deed itself—the not-quite-finite horrors, all the recorded awfulness—but the web extending from it, forward and backward: the subsurface connections, the local and international enablers and profiteers and believers before, during and after. You could go so far down trying to figure it out you’d never come back up….

The word “genocide” was antiseptic. Pain wasn’t sterile. But if you weren’t there, even if you had relatives there, it was theoretical. Relatives who died in the Holocaust were theoretical. Until I met Mengele.

“The only thing worse than what he did,” Tina said, “is enjoying doing it.”

“Tell me you wouldn’t have enjoyed supergluing his mouth.”

“You can’t arrest a girl for dreaming.”

After that we didn’t say much. Tina laid out the sleeping bags she’d bought from Wal-Mart to surprise me. Neither of us could get a fire going. A cold breeze came off the water and we crawled into a single Scotchgard-smelling bag with our clothes on. Then the moon went behind a cloud, leaving the world beneath it black.

I felt her hand on mine. I heard her voice from very far away, somewhere beyond fatigue. “What do you want to do with him?”

“Let’s decide in the morning.”

In the morning, we decided.

We let him sit in the backseat, miked and muttering into the recorder. After an hour and a half, he stopped seeming human. The thing talking in the backseat had two eyes, two legs, two arms, and bone-white hair growing out below the peroxide and out of his eerily clean ears.

All I had from my trip to Quentin was the leather jacket I’d had on when I arrived. The morning air was chilly enough to need it. When I put it on, for some reason, I stuck my hand in my lapel pocket and felt a lump. Really smushed in there. Tina watched as I tried to work my fingers down to the bottom. Then I pulled it out. A white lump of satin. Opened up, unwrinkled, it was about the same size as a Shazam pie, stitched with a baby-blue star of David. At the center of the star, right on top of the yarmulke, a button puffed up like a satin nipple.

We had the same idea at once. Tina took the top off the glue while I held Mengele’s head steady. Curiously, he submitted. Too readily, he almost bowed his head. Tina narrated as she squeezed out six tiny dollops on the back of his head “Six drops,” she recited. “One for each point of the Star of David.” For the first time, Mengele’s face betrayed fear. Tina glued the yarmulke on his head at an angle, so it looked like its owner was going for some kind of jaunty urban reggae feel. A nonagenarian Matisyahu.

“Today you are a man,” I said.

“Apparently a very old Jewish man,” Tina added. “The dyed hair and the satin are so working for me.”

“I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a real
alta kocker.
”

Mengele groaned behind the tape over his lips, working his head from side to side. I ripped the tape off and waited. “What’s so important?”

He eyed me with contempt. How could I not know? “I will tell them everything.”

“That’s it? That’s the idea,” I said. “Tell them who you think you are. Give a lot of details. Shrinks love details.”

Tina put her hand on my arm. “That reminds me of something Bernstein told me.”

“Bernstein? Now?”

“No, listen,” she said. “The old warden wanted to hire COs with degrees who were also licensed therapists. But they were more shrink than cop. So it turned into a joke. ‘How can you tell which guard has a degree in psychology? He’s the one with the shiv in his neck.’”

“You both have problems,” Mengele said. “You’re both sick. You should not have children.”

“Too late,” I said. “My first wife was an Aryan gal. I’m a polluter.”

“Me, I’m not popping one out until I know you’re dead. I’m not taking any chances.” Tina took a moment to step back and really take in the new yarmulke-topped Doctor Death. She nodded approvingly. “Say what you will, the man wears that yarmulke.”

It’s our neighbor,” Tina whispered to the receptionist. “He just screams all night. And the things he says…”

She looked away, folded her lips into her mouth, and took a long, brave breath. The scarf was a nice touch. She’d found it in an IHOP bathroom on the way over. We might have had 2.5 kids waiting in the car. The woman could act.

“I am Josef Mengele!” Mengele shouted. “These people are kidnapping one of the most wanted men in the world.”

The receptionist, a ponytailed teen volunteer with PRU on her name tag, was all open smile and helpful concern. “Who’s Josef Mengele?”

Mengele slammed the counter.
“Who is Josef Mengele?”

Pru stopped smiling. She took a step back from the ranting walkin patient before her—a wiry, ready-to-foam old delusional with mustache in his teeth and dyed blond hair.

“I’m sorry,” she said evenly, “were you on television?”

Mengele froze. Pru slid the clipboard forward, a battered black ballpoint dragging on a chain behind it.

“Would you sign your name, Mr…. Whoa! Did you direct
The English Patient
? We saw that in class.”

“That’s Minghella,” Tina said, taking the pen. We’d realized the weak spot in our plan. We couldn’t walk in with an old man in handcuffs. But if his hands were free, there was nothing to keep him from trying to strangle Pru. He wanted to be arrested. So we glued his hands in his pockets—actually one finger of each hand, so we could rip it out if we had to. “I’m afraid he has a condition. He won’t take his hands out of his pockets.” She lowered her eyes as if she didn’t want to embarrass herself or the perky receptionist. She spoke in a stage whisper loud enough for half the waiting room to hear. “And he’s not very…
clean.
”

“We don’t really know him,” I said, doing my best to convey the baffled helplessness of a do-gooder who doesn’t know what to do.

Mengele scanned the room frantically until he found an old man whose demeanor matched his own. A slight, goateed professorial gentleman. “Surely you know Josef Mengele.”

“Mengele is dead. He died on February seven, nineteen seventy-nine, in Bertioga, Brazil. He had a stroke while he was swimming and drowned. He’s buried in Embu das Artes cemetery, under the name Wolfgang Gerhardt.”

I could see Mengele’s ego arm wrestling his paranoia. “You seem to know quite a lot about…him.”

“Sir, please, if you would sign?”

While Mengele was distracted by the attention he so craved, I grabbed his hand. Grinned
What are you gonna do?
to the lovely Pru. Mengele stammered out, “N-no!” I squeezed his fingers around the pen. He pulled back his hand and held it in front of him like something that needed to be bagged and burned.

“Um, Pru? All right if I just put his name down?”

“Really, sweetie, he’s a nice man.” Tina took the young volunteer’s hand, going girl-to-girl. “Just a little, you know, n-u-t-t-y,
lonely
since the wife…”

“We’re just the folks down the street,” I said.

“Good Samaritans.” Tina squeezed Pru’s hand and whispered. “Last week he said he was Einstein.”

“What scares me,” I said to her, checking to make sure no one else was listening, “are the children.”

“What?” Pru put her hand to her throat.

Tina took my arm. “Now, honey…We don’t know for sure.”

“Why would she make it up?” I looked to Pru for validation. “The girl’s eight years old.”

A sprinkling of harried middle-aged caretaker children and their Alzheimer-age parents looked up from their
Newsweek
s.

Pru nodded stiffly. Tina took her wrist. “We probably shouldn’t even have said anything. That’s how rumors get started.”

We’d chosen Stanford because the psych ward had a geriatric wing. Mengele puffed himself up to full Selektor mode. He pointed at the dazed faces around the waiting room, squinting at each individually, startling them as he thrust a bony forefinger in their direction. “You! You! You—NO! You! You! You—NO! You—NO! You! You!
Schnell!
”

Pru backed away, picked up the phone. Banged a key.

The doctor arrived a few seconds later. Tall, slender, in long white coat, stethoscope around his neck. Shiny black hair and deep orange-brown skin. All topped by a lovely orange silk turban.

“I am Dr. Patel, how can I help you today, sir?”

Mengele stopped pointing and stared. He’d gone pale, a sheen of sweat on his placenta-softened skin. He studied the doctor’s skull as if estimating its dimensions. I should have let him have some calipers. Mengele walked beside the doctor and studied his jawline and occiput. “Where were you born?”

“I am from Pakistan. Please, come with me.”

“I want another doctor.”

It got ugly fast. Tina held my arm.
Concerned.
After a brief, intense exchange, Dr. Patel left and another physician stepped forward, this one short, thick, black, bald and in no mood to have her time wasted. Her tag said DR. BROWN. “No, no, no! Another doctor!” Mengele snarled before she could open her mouth. “I want another doctor! This is the problem with America, they let your mother breed.”

The doctor laughed. “Oh, we could have some fun with you. Umm-
hmmmh.
”

A pair of married (or brother-and-sister) oldsters on seats facing us took each others’ hands. They stared openly, the man canny and attentive and his wife in child-eyed panic.

Tina watched like it was Brecht. I waved to Pru, to get her attention. She excused herself from a sporty eightysomething with madras shorts over unabashedly varicose legs adjusting his oxygen at the sign-in desk.

“Is there, um, security we could call?”

“It’s his lunch.”

Dr. Patel and his successor stood with their arms crossed, conferring as Mengele lapped nervously at his mustache, searching for a word. Now the whole waiting room was on alert; even the senile were jittery.

“Another doctor?” I said to Pru. “A supervisor?”

“Is there no white man?” Mengele roared behind me. “Are there nothing but vermin? Has the world turned to
shit
?”

The third gerontologist, maintaining his equanimity, scooped the sign-in sheet off the counter and glanced at it. He was fiftyish, slightly slumped, with sad eyes and frizzy hair into which he’d clipped a knit yarmulke with a Star of David in powder blue on a white background.

“Sydney Goldstein?”

Mengele jerked as if wearing one of his own shock collars.

“Mr. Goldstein, I’m Dr. Stern. I hear you’ve been making a lot of noise. Why don’t you come with me?”

“Goldstein? I am no Goldstein. I am Josef Mengele, Doktor Stern.”

Dr. Stern froze. Mengele looked gratified. Finally, respect.

“I want a trial! I have valuable information.”

“I see,” said the doctor.

Dr. Stern took Mengele’s left arm by the elbow. The old man shook his hand off viciously.

“Get your Jew hands off me. I am Mengele! I want a trial. I know things about your government! I have cures. I can help!”

Napkin still tucked in his collar, the security guard returned from lunch in time to take Mengele’s other arm. He was as old as the doctor but Latino, with a limp and a gut. Mengele stared at the second man’s club foot with professional disgust.