Pain Killers (11 page)

“Hey, I get full dental,” Rincin chimed in. “Even paid for my daughters’ braces.”

Mengele tensed. “Not those kind of benefits.”

“See that,” Movern said, shaking his head. “Rincin always playing them head games.”

Mengele ignored this and kept going, his voice a guttural mixture of pleading and contempt. He did not so much
speak
words as stab them and push them elegantly off of a balcony. “Your people can still be saved.”

“See that? The doc know. He talkin’ about the Rapture.”

Mengele laughed, a hacking half note followed by a cough. “The Rapture is nothing but a terrorist plot, run by Christ instead of bin Laden. And who is Jesus Christ? The illegitimate son of a Jewish bitch.”

“Hey now,” said Reverend D, trying to get a word in.

Cranky clamped his hands on his head like he was trying to keep his thoughts from flying out. “Wait wait wait! You ever see that
Twilight Zone
episode, where the aliens come down with their special book,
To Serve Man,
and all the earthlings are, like, scrambling their asses to get on that spaceship, except for this one dude, who comes running up behind them, and he’s screaming, ‘Turn around, fools! It’s a cookbook!
To Serve Man
!’ It’s like the messiah was a cannibal. Oh, shit! Maybe people think they’ve being Raptured up, and it turns out they’re just, like,
ingredients.
…”

Movern shook his wide head back and forth, jiggling his Gary Coleman jowls. “Ho no! Ho
no
! Ho
no no no no no
!” He crossed his arms over his pigeon chest. “That is the second time my Lord been slandered in this room.”

“Ha! I’ve read about your Lord in Revelation.” Mengele chewed his mustache and scoffed gleefully. “When the warrior Jesus returns, he will invite the righteous to heaven. He will hurl nonbelievers into
a lake of fire.
”

“Tell it!” said the reverend, slapping skin with Roscoe, the professorial ex-Panther, who smiled mildly under his wire-rims. “Old man throwin’ down theory now. He goin’ all Christopher Hitchens.”

Mengele basked in the attention, his mustache gleaming from his own spittle. “What is the Rapture but divine genocide? The only difference between Jesus and Hitler is that Hitler showed up. And instead of a fiery lake we had the ovens.”

“Dude,” Jimmy the white Rasta interrupted, “no disrespect, but Jesus had way better hair.”

Mengele angled a glance at Jimmy. The white Rasta blanched. He didn’t need to know who the old man was to be scared. The old war criminal’s eyes radiated something they did not have words for. You could only feel it. And
yet
…

Beholding Mengele, I was struck less by the banality of evil than its chattiness. Mengele had thoughts he thought were important. He talked like he was standing behind a podium—or at a train siding, lecturing a captive audience.

“The Third Reich is a story the new Germans don’t want to dwell on. Because it happened. The Rapture is a story the evangelicals do nothing but dwell on. Because they
want
it to happen. It’s not the Final Solution, it’s the grand finale. How will six million compare to that holocaust in Revelations?
‘Those who reject him will be cast into a lake of fire.’ Mein Gott!
Every man, woman and baby on earth who has not accepted the Good News—hurled into boiling flames. Buddhist monks, adorable unbaptized babies, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Baha’i…All of them.” Mengele’s eyes bored into me. “You call it End Times. I call it waiting for Jesus to turn on the ovens. Hitler read the Bible, too.”

“Uh-uh. No!” Movern wagged his finger. “Now you see that? That right there?
That
is over the motherfuckin’ line.”

Roscoe shrugged. “The so-called righteous always think they know who deserves to die.”

“Wrong,” said Mengele. “It was
science
. For the select to prevail, millions must be delivered into flames.”

“Been there, done that, huh?” I said. I thought maybe an attaboy would get me on his good side.

“Pops just hurtin’ ’cause he ain’t at the control,” said Reverend D.

Mengele seethed. “I am not your pops.”

“Come on now,” said the reverend. He flashed a smile that showed off his gold dental work. “You sure you never tapped no
schwarze
ass, a sophisticate like you?”

Cranky snapped his fingers, sucking blood out of his chapped lips. “Oh shit, Rev’s punkin’ an old man.”

Even Rincin stopped jingling his keys to watch.

Mengele, if he was Mengele, sat perfectly still, eyes closed to vicious slits. The way he didn’t move made you think he was dangerous in some unspeakable old-man way.

Prison was full-up with gangsters and hit men. But these were all small-timers. The real mass practitioners were the ones who ran the country. I had a feeling the old German was thinking the same thing.

Mengele allowed himself a sour smirk—just enough to show he knew he didn’t belong.

“Let’s stick to the topic,” I said. “We’re supposed to be talking about addiction. So let’s break it down. In the beginning, a man takes a drug; in the end, the drug takes the man….”

I’d sat through enough twelve-step meetings—either as participant or on the job—to march out my share of lifesaving clichés. For a cop with a quota, church basements full of recovering junkies and drunks were great places to fish for parole violators. A lot of substance abusers washed onto the shores of sobriety with outstanding warrants. Though it was an article of faith in law enforcement that AA and NA members didn’t snitch on each other. (SLA—Sex and Love Anonymous—was apparently a different story. My experience with them was limited.)

“One’s too many, a thousand’s not enough,” I said, marching out a sobriety chestnut. Somehow it was deeply gratifying when Movern and the reverend nodded.

I followed that up with another slogan. “We’re only as sick as our secrets. What we need to do now is start talking about the stuff that we got loaded to keep from thinking about.” I pointed to the man who might be Mengele. “Does that make any sense, Mr.—I’m sorry, what was your name again? Mr. Mongol?”

He seethed. “It is actually
doctor.
Dr. Mengele!”

“Dr. Mendel?”

“
Mengele!
Are you mentally ill?”

“Excuse me. Doctor, what did drugs do for you? What did they do
to
you? You were a…what again?”

He glared and I smiled innocently.

A part of me screamed,
Turn him in! Call the authorities!
Another part wanted to fuck with him. Not for personal pleasure. For
my race.
But taunting was candy-ass, considering the crime. Left to my own devices, I lacked the moral clarity to do anything more enlightened than rub his face in the dirt, make him scream
“I’m a filthy little Nazi!”
six million times.

Mengele nibbled his lip hair. I could see his conflict: driven to sell himself, but knowing he was casting his master race pearls before San Quentin swine. He stared in a middle distance, as if watching a movie of himself played by Tom Cruise. “Many many years ago, I was an important man. Doing important research. In some very unpleasant conditions. There were times when it was up to me whether this one lived or that one died.”

“So you were in the service industry?” I asked him.

“Sound like he a shot caller,” the reverend said.

“I was a
scientist.
”

“Where did you work?”

“At the end, a little town in Poland.”

I waited, eyes wide with polite interest.

“Auschwitz.”

Hearing the word in real life, in real time, as opposed to in some documentary, set my nerves quivering. La Eme maintained KOS rules for members of the ALS. Kill on sight. What standing orders did Jews have for encounters with Nazi death camp doctors?

“I made the selections. I was the only one who could do my job sober. Others fell apart. They drank. Took morphine and cocaine and engaged in the most debauched sexual practices with prisoners. They had no discipline. The SS demands discipline.”

“You were in the SS?” I asked the way you might ask a neighbor if he’d ever been to Cleveland. I lifted my arm, tapped under my armpit. “Did you get the tattoo?”

I broke it down for the others. “When you get into the SS, they put your blood type under your arm.”

Jimmy giggled into his hand. “Dude, you know a little too much about this Nazi shit.”

“I’m a bit of a buff,” I admitted.

“Don’t take no
buff,
” Cranky snorted. “Gang ink is gang ink.”

“And look,” said Mengele, “what happened to you for having your affiliation on your neck. No, I did not get the tattoo.”

Davey pounded his fist on the desk. “Stop interrupting my doctor!”

“Stop interrupting
your
doctor?”

Mengele beamed. “Thank you, David.” The failed suicide lowered his eyes and batted his Bambi lashes.

“You should have seen David when I met him, right, David?”

Davey managed a no-lip smile. “Ah yooshed to tawk lak ish.”

“You must be very proud of your progress,” I said with no sincerity whatsoever. “But wait…you did surgery inside?”

Mengele was happy to accept my awe.

“Doc,” said Rincin from his corner, tapping the side of his nose again, “remember there’s rats in the rafters.”

Mengele sat back in his chair, imperious. Pleased with himself. “Mengele is not afraid of rats.”

He eyed Davey critically, extending a hand in front of him as though already carving and replacing. “I am going to make him Nordic.”

I gulped. “Plastic surgery?”

“Transplant,” Mengele replied almost dreamily, talking more to himself than me. “The things you can do, when you have a
supply.
…”

“Right on, Kaiser!” Rasta Jimmy pumped his arm. “My man was a soldier. Hey, we all do shit we wanna forget. Without the drugs and alcohol, there ain’t nothin’ to hold the memories down. Shit backs up like a clogged toilet. Same with them old ’nam dogs, sleepin’ under bridges. Dudes back from Iraq and that there Afghanee-stan.”

“Look at you two,” I said. “From different worlds, but connecting.”

Cranky craned his speed-kinked neck sideways and up, like he was trying to bite the ceiling. “Don’t be goin’ all after-school special, homes. Next thing you’ll be tellin’ us
addiction is color-blind
and all that bullshit.”

“You sound like you’ve heard it all before.”

“Prison ministry come in here, talkin’ about how if we pray, Jesus gonna take the craving away.”

“Uh-
huh
!” Reverend D nodded his head. “That is
exactly
what he can do. I know, ’cause he help me. Prison ministries is a growth industry, too.”

Cranky wiped sweat off his face. “Jesus wanted to help, he coulda come down from heaven and got me an eight ball when I was hurtin’.”

Movern, who’d been resting a plump cheek on his reedy arms, suddenly revived. “I done stuff I cain’t admit to my own self. On the real. There’s thoughts in my head I ain’t even
let
my ass think.”

Mengele reentered the conversation. “None of you understand. You
can
not understand!” His smirk was superior but mirthless.

“Hey, guten Tag there, buddy!” Jimmy the Rasta tried to high-five Mengele, who ignored him. “Like, I don’t know what kinda gnarly shit you were involved in—but, dude, we’ve all pulled some skeevy shit, be-fucking-lieve me. But, like, there’s nothin’ you can’t unload, man. You won’t have to work so hard to forget once you give it up.”

Mengele gripped his peroxide, sunken-templed head. “I do not want to forget anything. I want to
remember.
But I feel memories slipping away.” The words came out burnished, as if he’d said them thousands of times, millions. In front of mirrors when there were mirrors; in his head when there was nothing but a bed and a chair. “I have records, notebooks. Experiments down to the last decimal. In sixty-seven years, I have never let my data out of my sight. Now I want the world to know. I have found a way to end congenital diseases, to vaccinate against speech defects, so many things.” His face tensed, neck tendons taut as watch springs. I braced myself for his shouting. Instead, his voice dropped to a whisper, a faint lament. “I have a contribution to make to the world. To the
children…
”

“
Children!” I repeated.
“Awww!”

This time his sneer was perfunctory. But his eyes looked like they could squirt battery acid. “They called me a monster, but my experiments can save generations of youngsters! There was a
reason
I removed their organs.”

What made the performance more arresting was that it didn’t
look
like a performance. He might have been standing in a Santiago slum, shilling for the Christian Children’s Fund with Sally Struthers, in bloated but sincere post–
All in the Family
feed-the-hungry mode. He spoke like he believed.

“Holly-cost never happened,” Jimmy stated flatly. “It’s like the moon shot. Fake. ’Cept, for the Holly-cost, somebody staged them pictures of bodies and smokestacks. Then voi-fuckin’-la, Jews get their own country and more aid than we give to all other countries combined. Read your David Black. Maybe a few thousand died. Tops. And guess what? They probably killed themselves. Just like a Gypsy twisting a baby’s arm so it’ll get more money from saps.”

I snuck a glance at Rincin. He gazed approvingly at the dread-locked David Duke.

“People,” I said, “let’s stick to addiction. Not history.”

“One and the same, youngster.” Roscoe again. He spoke without rancor. “See, the white man made addiction part of the black man’s history. Part of his own, too. Addiction to genocide, addiction to destroying the planet. Addiction to fear. Addiction—”

“We get it, Roscoe, that’s—”

“Oh, he just warming up,” Movern let me know.

“No thing,” Roscoe continued. “I just read, in
Harper’s Magazine,
where they laid the blueprint of a slave ship on the middle passage on top of one for the supermax at Pelican Bay. It’s almost a match! What’s that tell us? Break it down, addiction ain’t nothing but slavery—and this country was founded by slavery. That’s why I say this country is addicted to addiction.”