Morris PI

by Dion Baia

  The nurse broke open the smelling salts and waved them under Laszlo’s nose. He started to come around.

  “So, the government was forced to remove them from society and place them into the ghettos, away from the public. But then what, Herr Morris? We were now at war with all of Europe. How do we realistically take care of such a vast amount of people? An entire population? Numbers that were growing exponentially every day due to the new territories we conquered across Europe. How do you feed millions upon millions of people while feeding an entire army who are fighting two fronts and, at the same time, take care of the citizens at home?” He looked at Walter like he was expecting an answer. “We could not waste vital supplies on such parasites. Something had to be done.”

  Walter’s mouth was parted as he tried to focus on breathing normally. His eyes were wide open, an expression of shock and disbelief on his face as he struggled to watch what was being done to Laszlo. The doctor had fully exposed the middle of his thorax, from his sternum up to his diaphragm.

  “We started a mass deportation and sent them to the concentration and work camps we set up in Dachau, in the hills of Mauthausen, and Buchenwald. This is where the industrialization of mass extermination was perfected, on such a scale it would make the fathers of the Industrial Revolution proud.”

  Walter was so confused, he felt he was losing his mind “Wha…what are you talking about?”

  “Extermination, Herr Morris!”

  The doctor sliced away at the surrounding membranes and the layers that were connected directly to Laszlo’s breastbone. “We started out by simply putting a bullet in them.”

  Walter glanced nervously at Laszlo. He swallowed back waves of nausea and quickly looked away again.

  “But that was a waste of a much-needed bullet, and realistically…,” he clutched Walter’s chin and forcibly turned his head to look at him, “…one cannot have a young soldier executing women and children for fourteen hours a day. It just wasn’t good for morale, you understand.” Mengele nodded and let go of his chin. “So they were driven around in trucks with the tailpipe going into the compartment. We’d burn the bodies, and it was all very effective, but it took thirty minutes and only killed maybe sixty people at a time.” Mengele chuckled. “I must say, I am enjoying our little conversation, Herr Morris.”

  Walter stared vacantly at Laszlo’s impromptu surgery.

  “Work sets you free.”

  Walter didn’t know what to do. “You need to stop. Please…you need to stop. Stop,” but the Doctor wasn’t listening, and Walter was finding it hard to comprehend the unimaginable cruelty being committed in front of him. His eyes were glued in horror on Mengele, watching while he worked, and simultaneously he heard everything the man said.

  “But…” Mengele held the detective’s chin again, turning him until they made eye contact. “You want to know what the KZ is, eh? Or was.”

  Walter blurted out, “Please stop now…please!”

  Laszlo passed out for a second time. The doctor stepped back while the male nurse swooped back in with smelling salts. The nurse slapped Laszlo in the face and he started to regain consciousness.

  “Vast buildings were developed. They each held chambers and were connected to a crematorium. We told them they needed to be disinfected after their long journey, so that lice or fleas wouldn’t enter the camp.” Mengele grinned. “A band of their own people played parlor music while they waited to enter the buildings. We handed them a cake of soap and gave them a hook for their clothes, and even told them to remember the number so they could retrieve their belongings.”

  Walter teared up, unable to cope with what was being said. At the same time Laszlo started to twitch again, and he awoke, convulsing in agony.

  Mengele carried on speaking to Walter without breaking his concentration. “We’d lock them in and gas them with Zyklon B. It’s an industrial disinfectant. There’s no Zyklon A, only B. The bodies would be cremated in the furnaces. We could average three hundred at a time.” He finished his incisions and glanced back to make sure he held eye contact with Walter. “I think our best day was nine thousand out of a single furnace.”

  He handed an instrument to his assistant and the nurse immediately stepped in to control the bleeding, applying gauze to the surrounding tissue of the wound.

  “In forty-two, I was promoted to Hauptsturmführer—eh, captain. I was transferred to Auschwitz, outside of Birkenau. Have you heard of that place yet?”

  Walter shook his head.

  “They called the extermination camp at Auschwitz the Konzentrationslager, KZ for short. That is the place Herr Von Stroheim spoke of.”

  Once the nurse was finished, Mengele moved back in and continued his improvised surgery. “You must understand, we are not mad, Herr Morris. We even kept a good amount of the population for labor. But a ‘selection’ had to be made. And as the head doctor of the KZ, I oversaw every aspect of those selections.”

  He tilted his head back, and the perspiration on his brow and forehead were automatically wiped by the older assistant.

  “The deportees arrived by train in groups of six hundred or so, from all across Europe. When they finally reached us, some of our work was already done. Ten percent of them didn’t survive the journey, stacked so close together they couldn’t sit down or even move.” He locked eyes with Walter, hoping to signify the grandeur of his next comment. “So a plan had to be formulated, a method of eliminating this problem.”

  Mengele raised his arms outward in the air to about the height of his shoulders, with his palms facing Walter, like a cross. “I would stand on the platform and they would line up.” He raised his left arm and made a nonchalant gesture with his hand. “To the left, the old, the sick, the crippled, the women with young children, the ones who wouldn’t separate…. To the right, well, those we deemed fit were forced to work hard labor in support of the war effort. Or they were given to external companies, like Bayer, Siemens, and Mercedes, to work in their factories. The others…” His smile widened, as though recalling a fond memory. “I can remember some of the small kinder…excuse me, children. They would be so scared, I would hold their hands and turn their last walk into a game. It was called On the Way to the Chimney.”

  Walter exhaled deeply, clenching his fists to remain calm as rage seared through him.

  The assistant handed the doctor a pair of large shears, ones exactly like a gardener would use.

  Walt’s mind was playing tricks on him again. He was seeing Albert Fish, with his gaunt frame and sunken eyes, but this time he was standing in front of him, right next to Mengele. With that deadly ice-cold stare.

  “I cooked and ate him. How sweet and tender, he was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat his entire body.”

  Fish, a man who had been executed long ago now, stared into Walter’s terrified face like he was about to whisper a secret, just as he really did when they spoke all those years before.

  “I did not fuck him, though. I could have had I wished. He died a virgin….”

  “Nooooo!” Walter yelled, his glare frantically finding its way back to the doctor.

  Mengele looked at him, frowning slightly, and in that instant Walter felt sure the doctor had seen Fish too, but only for a moment. He soon came to his senses again when he saw what was happening to Laszlo. Walt prayed silently for him to stop.

  Mengele continued to address Walter while putting one leg on Laszlo’s shoulder; the nurse put an arm around his neck and held him down. “And those chimneys glowed on the Birkenau horizon for three whole years, Mister Morris.” He held three blood-soaked fingers in front of Walter’s face. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes we’d get up to a dozen transports a day.” Mengele chuckled. “Some of the older prisoners said the smell in the air would change depending on what part of Europe a new transport was from. But the average prisoner would only last twelve wee
ks.”

  Mengele stuck the shears into Laszlo’s thorax and carefully cracked it open, trying hard not to damage any of his surrounding organs. “I didn’t want such an opportunity to go to waste, so I was able to take my pick of the selection, various specimens to help me in my research. Help with my experiments. The Reich was obsessed with eliminating inferior races and replenishing the land with Aryan natives, perfect people. So it was me who would have to research this.”

  Laszlo was panting loudly, hyperventilating. His body shook uncontrollably before he went limp, his head rolled back, and he stared blankly up at the ceiling.

  “My thesis was selective breeding, Herr Morris. If we have young Aryan mothers producing twins, at the very least, we could repopulate the region exponentially and wipe out undesirable tendencies. So the secret was zwillinge…I would collect twins, mostly children under the age of sixteen, and subjects with other oddities, such as dwarfism, and I’d use them in my experiments.”

  Mengele finished using the shears, stepped back, and handed them over to his nurse. His older assistant approached and placed a clamp on either side of Laszlo’s wound, then began to crank open the breastbone to expose his heart.

  Nausea clawed at Walter Morris’s throat and he had to repeatedly swallow to force down bile.

  “I would make sure they were fed, clothed, and taken care of. You see, I needed to dissect them. And I put it to you, Mister Morris, when does one ever see a set of twins expiring at exactly the same moment? Every millimeter of each body was examined, searching for the slightest of variations developed at birth, thus hopefully bringing us closer to learning why it occurs at a biological level, so we can someday replicate it.”

  The nurse applied gauze and towels to the area bleeding, just like in a normal operating environment. The heart was visible now, frantically beating away. Laszlo was deathly silent, in a state of deep shock.

  Walter let out an anguished scream.

  The doctor ignored the detective’s cries and removed another syringe from out of his bag, along with another small bottle.

  Walt violently shook his head. “No, no, please, no!”

  Mengele was careful to tap out any air bubbles after he withdrew from the vial. He leaned in close to Walter, mere inches from his face. “And to kill the children instantly, at the exact same time,” he gave him a genuinely warm smile, “I personally liked to use a shot of chloroform, right to the aortic chamber.”

  He turned, and with a calming precision, stuck the needle directly into Laszlo’s heart. His body immediately started to convulse, and Mengele watched with an intense curiosity, getting lost in Laszlo’s facial expressions, studying his reaction with a great wonderment.

  After a few moments, Laszlo Strozek took his last breath.

  “Ah, Jesus, no! Jesus! You’re a coward! You didn’t even give him a fighting chance. You bastard, you fucking bastard!” Tears flowed down Walter’s face.

  Mengele turned away from Laszlo and put his arms behind his back. “That was the KZ.”

  Albert Fish was gone, the memories of the past faded. But Walter Morris could no longer distinguish between the monster from so long ago and the one standing just a foot away from him blatantly showing off, excited to talk so openly and honestly about his “work.”

  “But the real question here…is why? Why you didn’t know what the KZ was. Would you like the real ugly truth why people here in America have not heard about the KZ or our other camps yet? Because your wonderful government chose to ignore it; they decided to do nothing. Luckily for us, the entire world did nothing. They all just let it happen. All that death.” The doctor grinned.

  “No, you’re a liar!” Walter screamed. “That’s—that’s why we’re fighting a war over there!”

  “Am I a liar? Is it too incredible to fathom? You don’t think your allies had aerial reconnaissance of every inch of Europe?” Mengele pointed a gloved finger at Walter. “We even encountered systematic bombing outside of Auschwitz but never inside. We know your government had conclusive proof because two of our prisoners escaped in forty-three.”

  He was so close to Walter’s face that their noses briefly touched. “Understand? They could have even used the bright flames from our crematoria chimneys as targets to take the camp out. Three years they burned.”

  Walter shook his head vigorously, trying to somehow make sense of what the doctor was saying to him, denying to the core what he was being told. “They probably didn’t want to hurt the prisoners, you—”

  Mengele shook his head. “Tsk tsk. The barracks were far enough away to be able to successfully destroy the chambers and ovens. Not only could hundreds of thousands of Jews have been saved, but the casualties to them would have been negligible.” He raised an eyebrow. “And, even if they were worried about casualties, why weren’t the railway lines ever targeted to stop the constant flow of insects into the web? Eh, Herr Morris?”

  Walter was horrified. All this information, it was just too much. But what Mengele was saying made sense. That was what scared him. Why did what he was saying make so much sense?

  The record ended, and the repetitive scratching of the needle in the center of the wax disc echoed throughout the space. Walter stared blankly out into the dark room, a mixture of sweat, tears, and spit running down his face. The fogginess of his concussion and the fading memories of Albert Fish had left him altogether, along with whatever naiveté he still had. This senseless barbarity had cleared his mind.

  The doctor finished with his observations of Laszlo’s body and barked out a command in German. One of the sentries next to the double doors left the room. Mengele handed the empty syringe he was holding to his assistant.

  Walter Morris slouched in defeat. His body and mind felt numb, numb to everything, like he’d just downed an entire bottle of bourbon. He was consumed by his own thoughts, the evil, humanity’s naiveté, his mind even second-guessing all he’d been taught to know and love. It seemed wrong, even with the war which had been going on for four years now.

  When the sentry came back into the room, he was leading a blindfolded female by the hand. It was Caldonia Jones. Mengele removed the blindfold, and she opened her eyes. Her pupils were an unnatural ocean blue.

  “Our insurance policy,” he told Walter. “I was told she needed to be kept alive, so I gave her a bilateral transorbital lobotomy.” He indicated with his pinky finger at the top of her ocular sockets. “I entered the brain via the orbital cavities here and here, with…well, in layman’s terms I would call it an ice pick. So it would keep her nice and docile while she holidayed with us.” He pointed to her pupils. “And here, methylene injections to make her a true Aryan. Ha! Hitler used to love that.”

  Walter glanced at Caldonia, who was in a catatonic state. “My God… My dear God, no!” He broke down sobbing.

  “I did my research. I looked you up. The child murderer Albert Fish killed your brother when he was ten, yes? Ate him too? You confronted him in jail. He believed he was saving innocent souls from Hell on Earth.” Mengele leaned in like he was speaking for only Walter to hear. “Did you see the evil in his eyes as you see in mine?” Mengele whispered. “Do you think your brother was saved?”

  Teary-eyed, Morris looked over at Caldonia. She was standing opposite Karl, staring out into empty space.

  “No response? Well, let us get on with it, then.”

  It was at that precise moment that Walter Eugene Morris broke. A big piece of Walter died away. Morris stared out into space, contemplating what he’d just witnessed and learned. And all he could do was react like any man would when they break.

  Just quietly sob.

  Mengele smiled at him. He gave another command in German to his assistants. The nurse rolled the cart with the large black box over to the detective and, without resistance, started hooking up various wires to his fingers on the right hand. Meanwhile, the older assistant loaded
a Luger and chambered a round, then handed the pistol to Mengele, who placed it in his waistband.

  Seeing the butt of the weapon woke Morris from his stupor, and his eyes traveled up the doctor’s frame, taking in every little detail until he reached his face, where he found Mengele staring right back at him. All at once, the blood rushed to Morris’s head as anger flooded through his veins.

  Mengele calmly nodded at him, one learned man to the other. The detective appeared to have garnered the doctor’s respect, so being straight with him was the only decent thing to do. “I’m not going to shoot you, Herr Morris. No, none of that, unfortunately. We are on the dark side of the moon. We are too deep into the black forest for that. We must take our time here. And for the sake of full disclosure, I would like you to know that this experience and you have made me completely reevaluate my preconceived perceptions of the Negro. Because of that, I will be entirely honest with you. You have knowledge that we want, and as one professional to another…,” he motioned to the large ghoul standing motionless in the middle of the room, “…I would really like to repay you for what you did to Karl.”

  The nurse walked over to the record player, flipped the 78 over, and put the needle down. The Pied Pipers’ song “Dream” began to play. Mengele closed his eyes and his head swayed to the dreamy melody. “Beautiful, just beautiful.” He opened his eyes and nodded, a smug smile remaining on his face. “American music.”

  He moved close to examine the wires connected to Morris, making sure everything was perfectly in order, then stood tall with his arms clasped behind his back.

  “I will now ask you some questions, Herr Morris. It is in your best interest to be honest with me. Every time you do not answer a question correctly, you will be electrocuted. From there, I will start to remove a phalanges bone for every incorrect answer. After the fifty-six bones that make up the joints of your fingers and toes are gone, I will place electrodes on your temples and your scrotum. For every false answer you give me, a current will be passed throughout your body that will send you into epileptic convulsions.” Mengele didn’t skip a beat. “I will resuscitate you of course, and for every false answer you give me after that, a small pin will be inserted into your eyeball, after three pins, leads will be added, and you will be electrocuted through those. By that time, when your eyeballs reach boiling point and are turning into liquid, you will be begging for me to end your life.” He chuckled. “Let us hope by that point I am still feeling this optimistic.”