Butcher

isn't worth as much now that it might get flooded.'

“That's terrible.'

“Oh, well,” he ground the ignition, “it was getting flooded with backwater every couple of years anyway. I guess that's why it's called the spillway, eh?'

Some dark, troubling thing was dogging his trail. He felt it close at hand, ominous and unswerving. Something bad was coming. It grated like a loud, unanswered phone, and Meara put the truck in gear and floored the accelerator, driving straight into its teeth.

Then and Now

Dr. Emil Shtolz

and Anna Kaplan

14

Munchen—1944

The kindly looking physician in the white smock bids the two armed Waffen-SS guards to leave the room. They are the ones the patients whisper about, the ones they call Ignorant and Knowing behind their backs— Schoppen and Wissende. He nods in the direction of the operating bay and the nurse takes one end of the table and the two of them push the wheeled work surface, rather like a gurney, next to some lab equipment. He begins reading as she plugs tubes into vials and retorts, attaches electrodes. There is little sense of what is about to come.

He is glancing at a translation of a paper on gerontomorphises. His interests are wide and he studies the words with interest, feeling a light touch as a power cord brushes against his smock, hearing an almost inaudible “Excuse me, Herr Doktor.” He steps back a bit and looks up from his reading material. The patient's eyes are riveted on him. He smiles into the man's gaze.

“You're being a fine, cooperative patient.” Through the door he can hear Ignorant and Knowing laughing together out in the hallway, their voices loud and grating.

The man on the wheeled table, small, with salt-and-pepper hair visible where the head has not been shaved, makes a movement with his mouth like a grimace and the physician smiles again.

“Nothing to worry about,” the doctor begins to say, soothingly, as he feels something strike him. He looks down at the spit, gets a tissue, and wipes it from his white coat.

“Nazi pig,” the patient says, and curses him, telling him to lie in the ground and burn. The physician looks at the man sadly. “You treat us like animals because you have power now, but you will not live forever. I will go to my spiritual reward, but you, you will—'

The nurse places an object over the man's mouth and his words are muffled as he says, “rot in Hades. God will not forgive your crimes!'

The man in the white coat leans near and says in soft, gentle tones, “It will not help you to struggle,” as he observes the patient straining at the leather straps. “Listen to me a moment. It is only natural that you are afraid, that you feel hatred and fear. But please do not be afraid. This process will be virtually painless, I assure you.” The man's eyes look daggers at him. “You have no way of knowing how important you are. You're part of a scientific breakthrough that will someday benefit all mankind.'

“You're wasting your breath, I'm afraid,” another man says, coming out of the operating bay and hearing his colleague. “I've tried to do the same thing with these people and they seem incapable of understanding.'

“If they could only know. We're all making history together here.'

“That's right. And of course no one wants to undergo surgery, however painless or scientifically valuable their contribution might be.” The younger physician moves into the bright light that floods the doorway. “But better here than in the Auschwitz Special Treatment Units, eh?'

The older physician nods and raises his bushy eyebrows in agreement. The young one turns, and the man on the table sees the sign of the devil on his face and his heart almost stops with fear. The younger one with the reddish-purple mark on his face, what the patients call the Tear of Satan, is the one they call the Boy Butcher.

“Just think,” he says to the wide-eyed patient, nodding to the anesthesiologist, “our contribution to medical science could be the one that leads to a new dawn for the race of man. Perhaps your name will live on for eternity. Bring the baby in,” he tells the nurse.

The three persons begin attaching more apparatus to the man who is strapped to the wheeled table. The younger physician begins to make marks on the patient's freshly shaved skull. In a very soft voice he tells the man what to expect, telling him in that manner he has that is at once solicitous and threatening.

“You will lose your sensitivity but you will not lose consciousness at first,” he says, almost in a lover's whisper. The bright light glints on bone saws and drills. “So don't be surprised at some slight discomfort as we begin the discorporation process.” The man on the table faints as the Boy Butcher whispers gentle words of unspeakable promise.

This is Riestermann's play-pretty, the younger physician thinks. Doomed to instant failure, of course. Uncle Hans, which is how he thinks of his avuncular mentor and benefactor, is caught up in a series of tests involving the discorporation of human infant brains, in which attempts are being made to keep fresh brain transplants living in a host. Literally countless animals and now babies have been unsuccessfully discorporated. The series clearly cannot succeed, yet Uncle Hans perseveres. This dead Jew will be nothing more than numbers in a ledger, lines on a graph. Number cipher cipher, of Adult Non-Aryan Male Host Subjects/Infant Brain cipher cipher. Empty, dead numbers.

Next week looks much more promising, he thinks. They will turn out a lot of skullcaps next week. That is their little joke between them. They make real skullcaps for the Jews here.

He does not see himself as a monster, this Boy Butcher. In Emil Shtolz's twisted mind he is the perfect Renaissance man, German by birth, Italian by spirit. A genius, they say, a young star of the Reich. Learned. Suave. An elitist who already is master of the operating room, the drawing room, or the bedroom. Especially the latter, where he can give free reign to the other Emil, the one to whom a tortured scream is music. In his mind he knows he is far above the laws that constrain lesser mortals, and even beyond the laws of God. Men like Emil are a law unto themselves.

When the operation is finished, he discards his cap, mask, gloves, and bloodied gown, and leaves the surgical bay, passing the lab annex and his office, and turning to walk quickly down the hallway. It has excited him, all the blood, the feeling of power when he exposes the brains, knowing that he and Uncle Hans are free to have their fun, all in the name of the program. He is very excited by the time he pulls his heavy ring of keys out, fumbling with the locked door of room number three.

“Hello, my darling,” he says, and the little girl runs to him, her arms outstretched.

15

The first premonition of what he would remember only as the bad times came a couple of weeks later, unexpectedly. He was in his office, reading, when the older doctor's voice caused the younger man to look up from his papers. He heard a nurse saying something to Herr Doktor, and Riestermann saying “Danke,” as he came around the corner and into view.

“Busy?” asked Riestermann.

“Just reading.'

“Who have you scheduled for tomorrow, the host subject?'

“Um, I have Number Twelve.'

“No. I don't want Twelve yet. Get that little one you like. What's her name?” Shtolz looked at the physician who'd become a mentor to him. “The little fair-skinned Jewess you're so partial to? Let's use her.'