by Dion Baia
“Your fate, Herr Strozek, was sealed the moment you tried to barter with the OSS,” Von Stroheim barked. “Do you think your location exonerates you from your duty to the Fatherland and to the cause?”
Laszlo persisted, keeping his tone non-confrontational. “But Herr Von Strohei—”
“What did you think, that they would just hide you away with no questions asked? No, Herr Strozek! You would have to give them something that’s as valuable as your freedom.” He exaggerated his movements as he raised his arms in front of Laszlo. “And what is the only thing you could possibly offer them?”
“I never thought they wou—”
“Why, nothing but the locations of our fleeing brothers from the Fatherland, of course. The ones they don’t possess in their Operation Overcast dossier. It’s so popular even our Negro brother here knows about it.”
“But—”
Von Stroheim’s voice started to become much louder, a volume that didn’t seem possible was coming from within the slender man, a noise level perfected from the many years of screaming over gunfire and artillery out on the battlefield, or more recently from speaking over loud and agitated crowds.
“You are filth, Herr Strozek! And because of your sins against the Reich, you shall die.”
Laszlo shook his head and began weeping uncontrollably, mucus and spittle running down his face. “No no no no no no nonono—pleeease, Herr Von Stroheim. Please, no. Herr Oberscharführer…”
Von Stroheim curled his lip and sneered at Laszlo, scrutinizing him for the last time with a look of pure disgust. He turned to Walter. “It is time to bid you farewell, Herr—ah, excuse me, Mister Morris. I feel like I should pity you for what will be your last few moments of life.”
Walter looked up at Stroheim. “Herr Oberscharführer, is it?”
Their eyes locked momentarily and Walter did the only thing an American could do in the situation.
“Screw.”
Von Stroheim responded with a smile but the grin dropped, and he viciously backslapped Walter hard in the face. “You will not speak unless you are spoken to, American.” He paused, looking for a reaction. “You are a nobody, Mister Morris. Just one of the masses. You won’t be remembered after your death by anyone but the local barman who will miss your coin. You are nothing! Just an ant. An ant who picked the wrong boot to walk under.”
Von Stroheim took few deep breaths to calm down, his face now visibly relaxing. “Herr Doctor, please get as much information as you can from him before he dies. We have appointments to keep.”
Doctor Mengele nodded.
“Give no quarter. We have a schedule to keep with the outside talent; they will get Maximillian and Hans down into the room.”
“You are still going through with it, tonight? Are you sure?”
“Of course, there is no reason not to. It will help us get away. We must stick to the plan.” Stroheim pointed to Walter. “He will tell you if our operation is compromised. If we do not hear from you, tonight is still a go.”
It looked as though Mengele was going to speak, but instead he gave a polite nod.
“You have your work cut out for you, Herr Doctor. Heil Hitler,” Von Stroheim said proudly.
“Heil Hitler.”
Von Stroheim took his eyes off Walter and turned his attention to the doctor. He changed his footing and, in complete willingness to the cause, he replied back, a little more forcefully, “Heil Hitler.”
Mengele straightened, expanded his chest and saluted. “Heil Hitler.”
Von Stroheim smiled and quickly barked out an order to the men in the trench coats before leaving the room with Maximillian and the sentry who had been standing on the far side of the room.
The large, wooden double doors locked behind them.
Chapter 25
DOCTOR JOSEF MENGELE
“First I stripped him naked. How he did kick, bite, and scratch.” Albert Fish grinned at that remark, as if he were embarrassed. “I choked him to death, then cut him in small pieces so I could take my meat to my room.”
The room grew quiet after Von Stroheim’s departure. The doctor’s assistants busied themselves with prepping their equipment, and the only thing audible aside from the downpour outside was Laszlo’s sniffling. Walter heard the faint sound of car doors shutting and vehicles speeding off into the night.
Doctor Mengele stood with his arms crossed, looking down at the two captives, deep in thought, observing. His pleasant and friendly demeanor never left him, nor either the polite smile on his face.
Karl was standing in the center of the room as if it had been temporarily “turned off” and was waiting for instructions.
Walter still couldn’t get his eyes to focus properly and didn’t want it known that he was having a hard time deciphering his dream from reality. He felt like a freight train had derailed in his head.
He looked over at the dance floor and saw Albert Fish as clear as day, sitting in handcuffs at that same prison table from 1930. Fish had been caught and convicted of murder, but he wasn’t sentenced for all the victims he admitted to killing, or for the crimes he’d implicated himself in. One of those crimes was for the murder of Walter’s younger brother Stevland, who was deaf and dumb and under Walt’s care the day he went missing. And because his body was never found, Walter was allowed to speak to the man himself before he was executed, and Fish was more than happy to tell all about his past exploits to anyone who would listen.
The problem now, though, was that he could see Fish sitting across the room on the dance floor and he seemed as real as Laszlo or the crazy doctor. Walter couldn’t actually tell the difference. It was only after studying everyone else in the room that he came to the conclusion he was the only one seeing the “Brooklyn Vampire.” Fish had gone to the chair at Sing Sing back in ’36. So this had to all be in his head, of course. It was probably from the concussion, or maybe it was a side effect from Gray Matter’s pills. But it was like someone had started a movie reel and Walter couldn’t get the projectionist to shut it off.
Fish started talking again, but only Walter could hear.
“On the pretense of taking your brother to a party, I took him to an empty house in Westchester that I had already picked out. When we got there, I told him to remain outside. He picked wildflowers. So sweet. I went upstairs and removed all of my clothes. I knew if I didn’t, I would get his blood all over them.”
“What do you think?”
Startled, Walter turned, and Mengele was looking down at them.
“Gott mit uns, ja?” He stared at them both for a moment, deep in thought. “So it was you who almost destroyed one of my prototypes? We nearly had to thaw another in his place. Our Uber-soldiers. They are the future of warfare.”
Mengele caught sight of a phonograph player on the other side of the room and walked over to it. He turned it on and put the needle to wax. The Pied Pipers’ version of “A Journey to a Star” began to play.
Walter shook his head in an attempt to focus, then spit out a little more blood.
“Herr Doctor,” Laszlo said in a soft and respectful tone, “Pleeease…I will pay you whatever price you ask. Please.”
The doctor didn’t respond. He listened to the angelic and dreamy melody of the Pied Pipers with his back turned to his guests.
Walter perked up. “Is that guy one of those totten core fellas?”
Mengele strolled over to Karl. The ghoul had not moved since he entered the room. He unbuttoned Karl’s shirt and exposed its oversized bare chest. Numerous fresh .22 caliber wounds decorated its cadaver-like frame where Walter had emptied into it. They were filled with dark, coagulated blood and covered up multiple older injuries. Its chest had large, aging medical incisions, the kind commonly seen on a body after a postmortem had been performed. There was something rectangular implanted underneath the gray skin, stretching the length of the to
rso, with smooth and metallic steel corners that penetrated the skin from underneath, breaking through areas of its chest and creating an unnatural purple at the edges. The swelling appeared to have healed long ago.
“See, Herr Morris…there’s a plate of steel behind the flesh for added protection. The whole chassis is reinforced to take up to a .50 caliber round in the chest. And the binary pistons I fused to the muscles with electrodes, they give them the strength of ten men.”
Mengele stepped back and held his arms out wide.
“Behold… The most bloodthirsty SS division there is.” He turned to face Walter and Laszlo. “Even surpassing the Occultists and the Fanatics.” He paused for effect. “I have perfected the ultimate soldier. One who wouldn’t need to be fed, who wouldn’t complain or be bogged down with human emotion, especially fear. One who could endure the brutally cold winters of the Russian Front and just as easily traverse the scolding hot dunes of North Africa. or the wetlands in the Pacific.”
He turned back to Karl. “This is the future of warfare.” Exuding pride in his words, he began to take a victory walk around his creation. “The most infamous brigade in the Third Reich, a name you already seem to know. The Totten core…the dead core.” He casually regarded Walter. “You may be the first American to have the name cross your lips.”
Laszlo stole a quick glance at Walter while Mengele smiled up at Karl with satisfaction. “Made from the remains of dead soldiers, murderers, sadists, and even the insane. These prototypes were bodies donated by the most pristine specimens in the entire Reich. True full-blooded Aryans with the willingness to sacrifice their bodies, themselves, to the movement. Now they have been brought back, not dead but not alive. Horrific beings actually.”
He walked over and picked up a long, sleek scalpel from his set of instruments on the tray. Laszlo gasped, but Mengele headed back toward Karl and buried it deep into one of its gunshot wounds.
“They were transported to the battlefields and let loose.” While a metal scratching was audible as he dug deep into Karl’s flesh, it remained lifeless, the expression unchanged. A .22 projectile fragment fell out of its wound and hit the hardwood floor, rolling in a small circle.
He cleaned his scalpel on a cloth and turned back to Walter and Laszlo. “But then unforeseeable issues arose. They couldn’t be controlled by the commanding officers on the frontlines. They started behaving unpredictably, and there were a few instances where they even attacked their own comrades. It was the pure bloodlust you see.” Mengele regarded Karl thoughtfully. “German troops did not like sharing the battlefields with them and their commanders agreed. So they were withdrawn for further study. We were all then sent out on submarines into the North Atlantic before our ports were closed and lost, to await orders that never came. Berlin by then had fallen. We have maybe a half dozen or more of these submarines navigating the dark depths of the Atlantic, perhaps as deep as two thousand fathoms, waiting for instructions that will never come. They only have coding equipment set to receive, not transmit. Once the humans perish waiting for those orders, the totten core can man the U-boats until the subs run out of fuel. But they will still be alive down there…waiting, always waiting. Luckily Herr Oberscharführer Stroheim managed to secure us sanctuary here, in New York City. The last place anyone would think to look.” Mengele chuckled. “And here we are, in your Westchester. It’s very lovely.”
A thought began to form in Walter’s mind.
“The only shortfall?” Mengele continued. “Their source of power. Blood. They need blood transfusions for optimum performance, much like cleaning the oil in your motor car. That is why humans were sent along in the U-boats. And where would one come by such vast amounts of blood here in New York City?”
Walter’s eyes were wide as he put the pieces together. “You’re the New York Ripper.”
Mengele smiled at the moniker. “No one that will be missed. Though Oberscharführer Stroheim kept the blood as pure as he could in honor of the Fatherland.” The doctor laughed a little. “Personally, I wouldn’t care if he ran on pure Aryan blood or the blood of a Jew or a Negro like yourself. On the battlefield, blood is blood. It is all for the bigger cause, don’t you see? There are sacrifices for this,” he gestured to Karl. “Years and years of study and medical research.”
He moved over to his bags and laid out a sterile cloth. He started to carefully remove unpleasant-looking medical tools, placing them delicately onto the fabric.
Laszlo took the lull in conversation to again plead his case. “Herr Doctor. Please, I am begging you. I will pay you whatever amount you desire. Anything…. Please, I’ll leave the city, this country even! Please, Herr Hauptsturmführer.”
Mengele went into another bag. “You should be proud, Herr Strozek. You are dying for the Reich,” he said almost mockingly. “For our cause.” He pulled a needle and a small bottle out of the bag.
Laszlo’s eyes focused on the needle. “I don’t give a damn about the Reich. Hitler is dead! The beautiful Fatherland has been forever disgraced. Jesus Christ, I beg you. Please…”
Mengele drew a small amount of liquid from the bottle up into the needle, knocking out any air that was left inside. Despite Laszlo thrashing his head from side to side, he managed to plunge the needle into the left side of Laszlo’s throat, between his jugular and larynx, then methodically did the same to the right side.
Laszlo screamed and howled, not only at the pain caused by the needle, but because of the hopeless situation he knew he was in.
“I share some of your sentiments, Herr Strozek,” Mengele said. “And though you ask me to grant you liberty, I am afraid I cannot.”
Laszlo’s voice began to break, his vocal cords becoming unconsciously relaxed. He tried to scream, but it came out as a whisper, and in a matter of seconds he was no longer able to talk, the only noise being the panicked sound of him exhaling and inhaling.
Ignoring Laszlo, Mengele turned to Walter. “Did you know, Mister Morris, we were able to advance medical research by twenty years at the KZ in just a mere twenty-six-month period? We made unprecedented progress in the medical field.”
“The KZ?” Walter asked, feeling like the doctor was prompting him to do so.
Laszlo began to shake in his chair, a panicked and frantic response to not being able to deal with the paralysis of his own throat.
Mengele removed a large surgical knife from one of the trays. Walter’s eyes bulged at the blade in the doctor’s hand. Meanwhile, the nurse casually unbuttoned Laszlo’s shirt, exposing the piano player’s bare chest before stepping back.
“I guess you wouldn’t know what the KZ is over here? So some truth does exist in the Oberscharführer’s statements, then?”
Mengele stepped in, and while still speaking to Walter in a kind and pleasant manner, he carefully made a deep lateral incision into Laszlo’s chest.
Walter’s head shot back. “Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!”
The piano player started to violently shake but was held down by his restraints. Mengele ignored him and continued on. Walter couldn’t believe what he was seeing; he started to feel dizzy. On the dance floor, Albert Fish continued his story from more than a decade ago.
“When I was ready, I called him from the window. Then I hid in a closet until he was in the room. When he saw me naked, he began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I held him by his little throat….”
Laszlo was in agony. Saliva flowed from his mouth as he tried to scream, but the only thing that would come out was either wheezing or heavy breathing.
“Stop, stop, stop! Please stop this…stop!” Walter tried to break out of his restraints, utilizing all the reserve strength he could muster, but it was to no avail.
Mengele calmly carried on, as though he were simply having a conversation while making dinner. “Work sets you free…I think the term is. That probably describes your entire life, your entire being, eh? A detective
for hire?”
He retraced his incision three times, the blade going deeper with every cut. “As you may know, after the great war, Germany was beaten. The Treaty of Versailles destroyed us as a country. We fell into great poverty, and the German people began to see a common enemy who were surviving through it all, thriving off it. It was the Jew. We developed an enormous amount of hatred toward them because of what they helped do to us and how they continued to profit from our people’s plight. And don’t think this view that developed is strange or alien; it’s not isolated to Germany alone. Look at your country. Need I point out how the Negro is treated in society, especially the laws regarding your people in the Southern states, that’s eighty years after your kind was freed?”
Mengele handed his knife to the nurse. His bald assistant held the doctor’s next tool, a separator which was connected to a scissor-type device. Walter continued to scream at him to stop, but it was as though his pleading was going completely unnoticed. Mengele positioned the separator in the twelve-inch-long incision and began to open up the area, then using another small scalpel in his other hand, he cut away the inner-lining subcutaneous tissue that connected to the fat, muscle, and bone. Laszlo entered into a state of deep shock, his whole body convulsed, and he soon passed out.
Mengele carried on talking to Walter as if he were giving him a college lecture on his favorite subject, even getting passionate.
“The sub-humans were our enemy, you see. We told them to leave our cities and society behind, but they refused. So, we attempted forced migration.” He shrugged casually. “But they still wouldn’t go. They obsessed over their material possessions and were too stubborn to leave their land. They were too arrogant, too proud…. They just wouldn’t leave. Couldn’t. As a culture, it wasn’t in their nature. And no one wanted them.” Mengele pointed at Walter and counted on his fingers. “Europe, South America, this country of yours…yes, your great land of the free, no one would take them. Hell, before Hitler invaded France, they were openly giving us their Jews as a sign of good faith, hoping that the Reich would leave them alone.”
