“I’m just here for Henry Winters,” I told her, through my clenched teeth.
“Well, you know, with Mr. Winters, a judge had to decide where to put him when he couldn’t take care of himself anymore. You don’t want to end up like that. Nobody ever comes to visit the poor man. It’s so hard to get him out of his room most days. I’m glad you’re here. This will be good for him.”
“A visit from my grandpa brightens anyone’s day,” Tequila assured her.
“Okay. Before you see him, though, I have to give you the warnings, since you are first-time visitors to our facility,” she said. She looked at me. “I’m sure you’ve heard most of this before. You probably know quite a few folks who enjoy the kind of lifestyle places like Meadowcrest offer.”
I did. Had some friends in assisted living and a few in the locked wards. I knew a fair number of other people who had moved on from such places to smaller, danker quarters. But I usually couldn’t stand to visit these hellholes, so when people went away, I didn’t see them much after that, unless they had family who would bring them out to the Jewish Community Center. I’d never actually been on a dementia floor before.
“He’s not going to recognize you,” the nurse explained. “I see him every day, and he can’t recognize me. It doesn’t mean he’s being rude, or that you aren’t important to him, but he has a disease in his brain that affects his ability to recall things. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Okay, that’s good. He’s likely to lose track of the conversation, because he can’t hang on to new memories, not even stuff that is still happening. It doesn’t mean that he’s bored with you. He can’t follow a television program or read a newspaper article either. This is a terrible disease he is living with, so try not to get frustrated with him. When you upset one of the residents, they forget what happened, but they still know they’re upset. When they feel that way, and they don’t know why, they get scared.”
“We certainly wouldn’t want to ruin his afternoon,” I said.
She walked us down a hallway, off the main lobby, and stopped in front of a door with a nameplate that said the resident was Henry Winters. Taped on the door, below the knocker, there was a picture of a Thanksgiving turkey made of construction paper. It was the kind of art project a child might make by tracing the outline of his hand and cutting it out with blunt scissors.
“His grandkids?” I asked, gesturing toward it.
The nurse shook her head. “Regular stimulation slows the progress of the disease, so we do arts and crafts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
Tequila stifled a laugh.
The nurse glared at him over her eyeglasses. She didn’t seem to think anything was funny about former SS officers making construction paper hand-turkeys. “Before you go in, let me make sure he’s up to receiving visitors,” she said.
She knocked, waited a minute, and knocked again.
“Mr. Winters?”
No answer.
“Mr. Winters?”
“Fuck off,” said a voice from the room. No trace of a German accent, but I thought I could detect the faintest hint of the sort of strained precision I’d heard before in the voices of Europeans who had almost mastered the American accent. Or maybe it was just my imagination. I glanced at Tequila, and his worried expression told me I wasn’t the only one thinking that Heinrich Ziegler couldn’t possibly have ended up in Missouri, doing arts and crafts while wearing a stained sweatshirt.
“Our patients can be a little belligerent sometimes,” the nurse said.
“Oh, so can this one,” said Tequila, playfully pointing a finger at me.
I scowled at him.
“That’s why I have a key,” said the nurse, and she unlocked the door and threw it open. The ammonia stink of stale piss was so overpowering that I recoiled. Tequila actually took a step back. The nurse didn’t react at all; no surprise registered on her face. Dealing with such stenches was evidently part of her job.
The room was dark and the miniblinds on the window were shut, but I could make out the shape of a man curled up on a plastic-covered mattress.
“Uh, incontinence is a major problem in the dementia ward,” said the nurse. “These poor folks forget they’ve got to go until it’s too late to get to the toilet. We put disposable absorbent adult undergarments on them, but when the residents are alone in their rooms, a lot of them will strip those off, so we find little surprises in the beds sometimes.”
Tequila couldn’t quite manage not to laugh at that, but I didn’t think it was funny. I was, myself, a slip in the shower away from sporting disposable absorbent adult undergarments while making arts and crafts in a full-service residential community for active seniors.
“Why don’t you two wait in the lobby, and I will bring him out when I get him cleaned up and dressed?”
“I’d prefer to speak to him in private,” I said. “There are some personal matters I’d like to try to discuss.”
She frowned. “Let me clean him up and then I’ll come get you,” she said.
The door closed behind her and we went back to the lobby.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the man on the sofa in the grubby blue sweatshirt. “Do either of you know when they serve lunch here?”
24
As we waited for the nurse to hose the piss off Heinrich Ziegler, I tried to prepare myself to stare into the face of the man who almost killed me. There are things that blur together, rough edges that smooth out, and hard feelings that mellow as I age. The night in September 1944 when Heinrich Ziegler beat me into a coma is not one of them.
We already knew by then that the Germans were in retreat from France. But we’d been hearing it for a while, and we were still waiting to get sprung. Rumor was that we’d retaken Paris in August. But days and then weeks passed, and nobody came to rescue us. Our hopes flagged. If the Germans were really getting beat out there in the world, it just made the ones guarding the prison camp meaner. And Heinrich Ziegler was mean enough to begin with.
Ziegler was not Wehrmacht, regular German army; he was SS, one of Hitler’s elite paramilitary storm troopers and a sincere devotee of the ideology of racial superiority. The very idea of a Jewish army lieutenant offended him.
A man called Baruch Schatz couldn’t hide his enthnoreligious persuasion behind a Tennessee accent. My father had wanted to name me Grant, but my mother thought that would cause problems for me in the schoolyard, what with so many folks in Memphis still sore about the North’s aggression. So instead, I got saddled with a moniker that was perfectly good for my maternal grandfather, who spent his whole life in a nineteenth-century Polish shtetl, but it wasn’t what a fellow wanted stamped on his dog tag when he was captured by the Nazis.
There were five Jewish guys in the camp when I arrived, but they weren’t too durable, and pretty soon they were out on the compost heap, incubating maggots. My situation was slightly better, but still fairly unpleasant. Whenever Ziegler and his guards needed to vent some anger, they would haul me into their offices for what they called an interrogation. They never asked any questions, but after they finished, Wallace and some of the other guys would have to carry me back to my rack.
When Ziegler called everyone to the parade ground that night, the Nazi brass had just denied his last request for ground support to defend the camp and ordered him to take his men and retreat. I didn’t know anything about it. But Ziegler’s jaw was clenched, his eyes were red, and a fat, throbbing vein stood out on his forehead.
Rain was falling in sheets from the slate gray sky, plastering his yellow hair to his scalp. He peeled off his wool uniform jacket, with the SS lightning bolts pinned to the collar, and stood bare-chested in front of the prisoners.
“Do you men want to leave?” he shouted at us in English.
None of us answered. He shouted something in German to his guards, and one of them opened the front gate. The prison was an evacuated village of low-slung houses, which the Germans had surrounded with several rings
of barbed-wire fence. The fences weren’t what kept us in; they were just an obstacle to slow down any would-be escapees while one of the snipers stationed on the camp’s three wooden guard towers lined up a clean rifle shot.
The gate blocked the only clear route out of the prison. It was still covered by one of the towers, but a man running zigzags on foot had about even odds at getting out of rifle range alive, while a guy caught up in a barbed-wire fence was a very easy target. Ziegler usually kept two armed guards on the gate.
Nobody had seriously tried to break out of the camp since we’d arrived. We were unarmed, and the camp was in territory occupied by the enemy. Even if we got out, we had no very good idea where to go. A lot of us had fully embraced the belief that we’d soon be freed, and all of us suspected the guards had some informants among the prisoners, so plotting an escape seemed unnecessary, and unnecessarily dangerous.
But that open gate looked damn tempting.
“If the Jew can get through me, every one of you may go through this gate.”
Ziegler wasn’t looking for a real fight. He was angry, and he wanted to take it out on somebody. He’d already done plenty to make sure I was in no shape to make much of a contest of it.
Two broken fingers on my right hand were taped with torn strips of bedsheet, but there was no good way to splint up my crushed toes. There were no bandages, either, for the wounds on my back where Ziegler had lashed me, and no antibiotics. My rain-soaked T-shirt was striped with blood and yellow-green pus.
I was so delirious, I barely heard him shouting for me. I was burning with fever, and Wallace was propping me up so I wouldn’t fall out of line.
The guards had recently decided they liked strangling me, and the rope burns they’d left on my neck stung when the rain ran over them or when I tried to breathe too deeply. My chest and ribs were mostly purple with bruises.
“How about it, Buuuuuuuck,” Ziegler called in some kind of singsong Kraut version of a cowboy-movie accent. “You got any fight left in you?”
Somebody tousled my hair, and somebody else squeezed my arm. It hurt.
“I reckon I got ’nuff,” I said.
The tendons in his neck stretched taut beneath his flesh as he sneered at me. “Enough for what?”
“I got…” I paused as I stumbled in the mud. “I got ’nuff to fuck you up pretty good.”
He was about to kill me, and my vision was swimming. But I figured I was damn well going to take a swing at the bastard. I folded the broken fingers into my fist. My whole arm screamed with pain, but at least it woke me up a little.
The crowd of prisoners parted, and I stepped into the middle of the parade ground. The storm had turned everything to mud, and each time I lifted a foot to take a step, the ground pulled back against my boot.
Ziegler was a real big sumbitch; he had at least six inches on me, and he must have been close to two hundred and forty pounds of hard, sculpted muscle. He looked like the classical god of Jew bashing. I was greenish pale with illness and gaunt from months of near starvation.
I coughed, long and rattling, and then I spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm into the mud. I rested for a moment with my hands on my knees, and then I lifted myself as erect as I could manage.
“I ain’t had a smoke in five weeks, and I sure as shit ain’t dying without one,” I told him. I’d have clawed through a brick wall with my fingernails if there was a pack of Lucky Strikes on the other side.
A few of the men cheered, but Ziegler pounced at me, throwing all of his considerable bulk behind a hard right hook.
“You’ll die when I tell you to die,” he hissed.
My head was just clear enough and my reflexes were just quick enough that I was able to shift somewhat out of the way, and his hand glanced off the side of my head instead of hitting me full in the face.
While he was off balance from the punch, I threw an arm around his neck. He seemed to know how to box, and he thought that was the same as knowing how to fight. I gouged the thumb of my good hand hard into his eye and showed him the difference.
I heard him yelp, but hanging on to my powerful, writhing foe was almost unbearably painful. I could feel the crust of scabs and hardened goo over my wounds cracking as my flesh twisted with the effort. I ignored my body’s protests and tightened my grip on Ziegler’s throat, trying to close his windpipe and strangle him unconscious. With one of my arms around his neck and my other hand in his eye, his fists were free to pummel at my belly; but his flailing legs gave him no leverage against the slick, muddy ground, and I held him too close to give him room to throw a proper punch, so there was little force behind the blows. I could have ended it there if he hadn’t raked his fingers across my back, ripping everything open from my neck to the crack of my ass.
I howled in agony and dropped him. He scrambled quickly to his feet and hit me twice. One of his punches landed solid, and my head snapped backward. I lunged at him, and we both tumbled to the ground. I managed to yank a boot out of the sucking mud and planted it in the middle of his chest. He flopped back to the ground while I hauled myself upright.
Ziegler shouted in German. I heard a single shot from one of the guard towers, and then I felt an eruption of pain in my right shoulder.
I tried to raise the damaged arm, but it wouldn’t respond. It was dead meat, hanging at my side. Blood poured out of me in a hot torrent, and my strength went with it. I collapsed to my knees.
He scrambled to his feet and pivoted around to my defenseless right side.
“Well, shit,” I said.
His fist hit my head, and there was nothing I could do about it, so he hit me again. My vision swam, and the ground rushed up to kiss me good night. After that, I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital, and by then it was November.
25
What happens to criminals and villains who escape justice and avoid capture is the same thing that happens to everyone else. They get old.
Josef Mengele, the mad doctor of Auschwitz, enjoyed injecting chemicals into children’s eyes and killing and dissecting sets of identical twins. American soldiers actually caught him in 1945, but he got some phony release papers and escaped to South America. He stayed ahead of the people chasing him until 1979. Then he went swimming in the ocean one day, something popped in his brain, and he passed out and drowned.
Alois Brunner was Sancho Panza to Adolf Eichmann’s Don Quixote. He was personally responsible for sending one hundred and forty thousand people to the gas chambers. Brunner escaped Germany using a bogus Red Cross passport and fled to Syria, where he was hired as a “government adviser” to teach the Arabs how to torture people. The Mossad sent Brunner some letter bombs in 1961 and in 1980, and they blew off a couple of his fingers. Nobody ever caught him, and nobody knows if he’s still alive; the last credible sighting of him was in 1992. Probably he’s dead, but if he’s not, he’s a hundred years old, which is pretty much the same thing.
Old age had found Henry Winters as well. The nurse had washed him, dressed him in clean clothes, and propped him in a plastic-covered recliner wedged next to his freshly made bed, but there was little she could have done to conceal his infirmity.
His mouth hung slack on the left side, and his left eye didn’t seem to focus on what he was looking at. I’d been around enough to know a stroke victim when I saw one.
But despite the years and the wrinkles and the loose skin, despite the sagging eyelid and the drooling mouth, I recognized Heinrich Ziegler. He had the same cold in those eyes that he had when he clocked me in the skull. The half of his mouth that was still hooked up to his brain curled in the same contemptuous half sneer.
“Is it him?” Tequila asked.
“I think so,” I said. I turned to Winters. “Do you know me?” I asked him.
“Never seen you before,” he said. “Never seen either of you. Are you the men who took away my house?”
“It’s been over sixty years,” Tequila said. “How sure are you?”
�
�If you check his left arm, on the bicep, below the armpit, you should find his blood type tattooed there. The SS guys did that, in case they were brought into the medics unconscious and needed transfusions. We used the tattoos to identify the criminals after the war, when they tried to hide among the civilians.”
Winters’s left arm hung limp at his side, disabled by the stroke. Tequila grabbed it, roughly, and yanked on the neck hole of Winters’s sweatshirt to check for the mark.
“Type A,” he said.
That was enough to eliminate all doubt. Henry Winters was Heinrich Ziegler. I leaned forward and showed him my teeth in a way I thought might be menacing. “Hello, Heinrich.”
“My name is Henry,” said Ziegler. He seemed more confused than afraid. “Who are you?”
Tequila dropped the arm, and it fell to Ziegler’s side. I remembered not being able to lift my own arm after he’d shot me.
“Nice ink you’ve got. I’ve got marks from the war, too.” I pulled my shirt aside and let him see the concave, fist-sized circle of waxy scar tissue on my shoulder where the bullet that had gone in through my back had blown a cone-shaped exit hole through my shoulder. The gesture pinched the strap of my holster tight against my body, reminding me of what I was carrying.
“I know you from the war?” He squinted his good eye. “No, that can’t be right. The men I know from the war are young.” He pointed at Tequila. “Maybe I’ve seen that one.”
“The war was sixty-five years ago,” I growled at him. “This here is my grandson, Jägermeister.”
“Give me a fucking break, Grandpa,” Tequila said.
“Sixty-five years?” Ziegler asked. He thought about it, then he looked at his dead arm and registered surprise that it didn’t work. He caught himself and reflexively tried to hide his confusion. “So, uh, I know you from the war, then?”
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