Butcher

He will not recall camouflaging the ride or the force of concentration it took to persevere.

A huge, injured monster lies in thick woods, his superhuman life-support system working overtime to save him.

Illinois seems galaxies away. He is a dying man, drowning in deep, black water. The whirlpool pulls him back under before he can sort his situation out.

Just as Dr. Emil Shtolz was a monster, he is a monster. Daniel Bunkowski had killed, some said, more than any other living human, but some said that about the good doctor. Each had taken hundreds of lives. Shtolz might have won had the body count included animals.

Neither man had a normal conscience. Each considered himself to be far above rules or laws. Each had only disdain for mankind. Each man was, in his own way, of superior and, in fact, unmeasurably high intellect. Each had enormous talents. Each found pleasure in the act of mutilation. Each had murdered in terrible ways and performed the vilest acts imaginable.

The psychiatric bibles, the continually revised diagnostic statistical manuals, found ways to describe such men. They were “sick.” Such descriptions reflected society's lack of willingness to define, quantify, or even recognize, the existence of clinical evil. It underscored a massive oddity: many of the same human beings who believe in God refuse categorically to believe in the devil.

But perhaps there are good monsters as well as bad.

A clear image drifts past the battered memory banks: seven paramedics, cops, monkey men and women, straining to roll his dead weight onto a gurney. The barking noise that is somewhere on the audio scale between a loud lawnmower and a powerful outboard motor starting—the closest sound he makes to a human laugh—escapes his throat. Two of them drop their handholds in fear and this convulses him further, even though the result sends his immense bulk to the hard surface.

Black clouds of pain relent, he hears a siren wail, sees an unfamiliar vehicle roof He is crammed into an ambulance. The authorities have found him—had he not escaped? It must have been after the beating—his head roared and one eye was firmly shut. The muddled chronology is all too confusing. His monitors sign off.

The darkness puddles into dappled green and gold fuzztone. The wounded bear is curiously mortal feeling, trembling, but from neither fear nor trauma. Cold? Surely not. Time nudges a sticky inner clock and one hand ticks through coagulated fogsleep, moves the inert gigantus forward one square, back two.

'Are we awake?” A nurse, black as his mood, and wide as a living-room sofa, white teeth smiling. “You gots to eat. Keep up your strength, big boy!” This convulses the room and he hears several persons laughing. He studies a blur in front of him. “Eat, now,” she says, trying to poke something in his maw. He is ravenous and inhales the puny portion and part of her meaty hand and arm. He would like to barbecue her and pork out. Chaingang Bunkowski, gravitationally challenged by a quarter ton of baby fat, is not what one might term a picky eater. Even he will not swallow this trash and he spits it in the fat chocolate face. She growls at him, which he ignores, focusing in on a plate of overcooked liver, something that might have been Jell-O, a tapioca-like puke. He hurls the plate in the direction of humanity.

“Food!” he demands, in a Hammond organ bass. He wants a couple of dozen pizza supremes, a few hundred blueberry pancakes swimming in hot butter and sweet syrup, a couple of sides of ribs, nurse-kabob, a hundred of those little White Castle bellybombers. He could eat wood.

He careens to his feet and against some hospital crap, bounces heavily off a wall, people are shouting, pawing at him, one massive arm knocks fools this way and that as he stumbles out into the hall. A woman recovering from cataract surgery peers out into the hall through her good eye. He sees her with his good eye. Turns, bends over. The hospital gown that barely covered his balls, much less his behemoth flanks, is wide open. The hairiest back and nastiest nether regions she has ever seen on anything, man or animal, shoots her the grossest moon in Christendom, as he shakily waddles through the screaming hospital personnel, pushing his tonnage full steam ahead, moving in the direction of vulnerability.

He grabs a small doctor, his ticket out, and together they find the biggest XXXL white coat in the building. With that halfway covering his butt, and the gown halfway covering his nuts, he and the frightened man negotiate the steps to the parking lot.

A parked vehicle feels right. The driver gives off the proper victim scent; the beast reacts, acts, locks onto the heartbeat, strikes, and drives.

Daniel dreams all of this—in deep limbo.

Aaron Kamen and Sharon Kamen

24

Kansas City

It had been a weekend of killer headaches, the worst he could recall, and he could remember some dillies. Aaron Kamen arched his neck up, then stood and stretched, putting his hands on his hips and swiveling from side to side. Saturday morning services, he'd been saying Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, when a Godzilla-like migraine had enveloped him. It had stayed with him for two days, one of those things that neither medication nor sleep seems to shake. He had to wear them off. This one started somewhere down in the shoulders and worked its way up the spine, across the top of his head, and settled above the eyes. Maybe that was it, he thought, taking off his glasses and rubbing his aching eyes. He cleaned his glasses with a tissue and put them back on. His head was throbbing. Maybe it wasn't a migraine, maybe he needed to get his prescription lenses adjusted. He glanced at the time. The two extra-strength Tylenol hadn't had time to kick in. He'd busy himself.

The tape box read Microcassette—Contains 10 Pieces, and he shook it gently, absent-mindedly, as he thought what to do about the woman. He would call. That was it. He couldn't wait any longer, it wouldn't stop nudging.

The tapes were neatly labeled in his firm printing, each title in block-lettered caps. SHTOLZ/PURDY, A. He finally got it out of the case, the small box difficult to handle in his big, thick-fingered hands. They were the hands of a man who'd labored hard all his life; beat-up, broken, rough-hewn hands with a workingman's calluses, even though he now did only paper work. Only paper work, he smiled. Nobody would believe how much work paper work could be.

Aaron Kamen felt the toll of his age, as he inserted the tape into the recording device plugged into his telephone.

“Hello,” he heard himself say from the miniature speaker.

“Is this Mr. Kamen?” He pressed stop when he heard her voice again and went to find a pen. Some notebook paper. He'd already forgotten the killer headache. His tunnel vision was locked back in on the woman, on finding her and making sure she was all right. The sense of something gone amiss was very strong. He wanted to hear the tape one more time before he began with the authorities. He'd make sure he took notes this time.

“This is he,” he answered. A small silver thing, a sleek machine with little holes and controls, a miracle that could record voices over a phone.

“Are you the one who tries to find Nazis from the war?” She spoke with a heavy accent.

“I try to do that,” he said simply, “yes.'

“I'm calling because I know where there is a Nazi. I read about you two years ago when they had a story in the paper about you finding that guard from the camp. Then I called the operator and got your number from the Kansas City phone directory, that's how I found you.'

“Yes.” He'd let the caller go on at her own pace.

“I was taken by them when I was a young girl in Germany. They didn't know I was Jewish at first and when they found out they ... did things to me. They killed my son, my baby. They were going to kill me, too. It was a doctor for the SS. Shtolz! I saw this man again. All these years. Twice I saw him. The first time I wasn't sure, but now I've seen him again. He's the one murdered my baby.” Her voice was full of pain.

“Emil Shtolz you saw?” He tried to keep his voice calm and measured, but every fiber in him was alert.