Max

by Peter Berczeller

  You wait a long time for something to happen, and when it finally does, you’re still surprised. Research has a way of biting you in the ass, so it’s only beginners who make the mistake of getting excited too soon. The first thing I did was remove the rat’s brain. No need for a big pizza sack. This time, a little Bloomies shopping bag was all I needed.

  Murray came in for a lot of kidding from his staff when he scheduled an emergency MRI on the rat brain. Without waiting for the reading, as soon as Murray had finished, I rushed it over to the ME. Peter Bishop pretended it was a human brain I was bringing him; couldn’t understand why it was so small. “Maybe the owner of this,” his gloved right index finger pointing at the tiny brain lying before him, “visited a shrink just before dying?”

  While Peter was dissecting and cutting the slices for the microscopic, I gave Murray a call to get the results of the MRI. He couldn’t come to the phone, but the message he sent through the secretary, “you’re right on the button,” said it all. That meant the rat’s right locus ceruleus must have had that peculiar mottled and gray look on the MRI, just like the amateur suicides. Much could still go wrong, but the message from Murray gave me a big lift. The MRI and the microscopics had gone hand-in-hand 100% of the time in the human suicides. So it stood to reason that it wouldn’t be any different in the rat. Sure enough, when the slides came back, the rat’s right locus showed the same destruction we’d seen in the ME cases. No question about it, that day’s results brought me a lot closer to proving what I’d figured to begin with: that an electrical fire in the right locus ceruleus set up a chain of events which ended up as an inside job. No forced entry. The victim knew his killer. Himself.

  I knew what I had to do next. Shoot the laser beam, four hundred volts and wavelength 3904 Angstroms, at the right locus of another fifty rats. Just to double-check what we found in the first one.

  Now that I was so close to figuring out what makes the suicide center tick, I had to do something about Louie’s laser. It was way too big, the size and weight of a sixteen-inch TV. Also, the probe, the business end that sends off the beam, was hard to maneuver. It had the heft of a Polish sausage. Wrestling with this cumbersome equipment and a squirming rat took up a lot of time. What I needed was a hand-held laser gun, like the ones they use to zap people in those intergalactic soap operas. I wanted the probe in place of the barrel, and the ultraviolet energy generated in what would be the handle of a conventional pistol. That way, I could hit whatever spot I was aiming at on the head of the rat from outside the cage, while it was sitting inside minding its own business.

  Louie didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. He just said he’d get back to me. In the meantime, I continued the experiment with the fifty rats. No time off, except for some late-night sessions with my latest kinky-haired social worker, Eileen II, who always carried a camera around wherever she went. An old Rolleiflex, really small. It had to be, considering some of the nooks and crannies she got into before she shot off the flash. She took pictures before, during, and after. She picked out what she called “the best” and made a little album for me. Not the kind of collection you’d leave lying around on your coffee table…

  I kept going to the weekly conferences, but didn’t have much to say. Just about getting some data together, and that I’d be making a progress report soon. Meanwhile, my landlord kept threatening me, the jerk. He’d found a crack in the outside wall of the building, next to my windows. Claimed the weight of my books was making the place tilt. He was already after me on account of the bookworm misunderstanding. So now he had two reasons to kvetch about me at Housing Court.

  Forty-eight of my rats did what I expected. They threw themselves against the bars, anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks after getting hit with the laser. Also their MRIs and microscopics were exactly the same as the ones from the first rat and the amateur suicides from the ME; meaning I was right on the money in making the suicide center do its number. There were just two brains I couldn’t use for my statistics. They were too damaged from the strength the rats used in throwing their heads against the bars. But you gotta admit, a 96% success rate is not exactly chopped liver.

  But the experiment wasn’t over yet. Now I had to make sure large animals did the same as my rats. Someday, I was going to make use of what I found out for the sake of people like Eva, innocent bystanders killed by a fire that went out of control. Learn to screen who’s at risk and check out the genetics. Medicines against seizures, tailored to hit just this one center? Gene transfer therapy? As soon as I found the time, I was going to get back to the pure science.

  I’d been leaving him messages, off and on, for a couple of weeks. No answer. But he finally showed up at my lab one afternoon, carrying a shoebox. He apologized for not coming up with the gun I asked him for. The batteries he needed to power the laser wouldn’t fit into the grip. So he removed the guts of an old 35mm Nikon SLR – that’s how he found room for the ultra-high intensity rechargeable batteries, and the machinery which translated their energy into a laser beam. He fitted the laser beam generator into where the telescopic lens usually sits, but kept the viewfinder and the inner lens. That way I could focus where I wanted the beam to hit. Now I was getting ready to do my final testing. On primates.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MY LINK WITH LYNX

  May 1984

  New York is full of bests. Best clowns for Upper East Side children’s birthday parties. Best diners off the Long Island Expressway when you’re coming home from the Hamptons. Best laundries that don’t fade the monogram on your Turnbull and Asser custom-made shirts. So, doesn’t it make sense that there’s a best place right here for checking out the latest news of your favorite Nazi war criminals? What the Chalfin Family Documentation Center has to offer is something like those “Where Are They Now?” features on TV or in the papers. You get to see an old-time child actor turned Buddhist monk, or a 1968 campus revolutionary transformed into a stockbroker living on Park Avenue. Were the Nazis in question still around? And if so, were they comfortable and happy? If the answer to the first question is “no,” case closed. They got what they deserved. OK, but what if we come up with a double “yes?” That’s when it’s fantasy time. “If I could only get my hands on…” You’d do what? Throw them – live of course – into their own ovens? Listen to them howl as the fire gives them the third degree? Or how about this: chop off their limbs one by one, and their dicks too (if they own one) for good measure? Then hang them head down, so whatever blood they have left keeps their brains supplied with the knowledge of the terrible thing that is happening to them? The very thought of it enough to trigger – again – the longing for revenge by the people who barely survived the camps. Also by the children they had afterwards; the ones who grew up in safety here, but keep on inhaling the secondary smoke from those far-away chimneys.

  Imagine you’re having one of those complicated, unpleasant dreams. As soon as you wake up, you try to remember who the actors were, figure out what it meant, wishing there was a way to record what you saw. That’s what the CFDC does in real time. It’s in the business of recording dreams, but with a twist: collecting all there is to know about mass waking nightmares in the years 1941 to 1945. Who lived, who died. Where and how. All those stories, attached for good to the ones who wrote, produced, and directed the torment.

  Personally, I don’t go for sanitized titles attached to grim affairs. For example: the sign they had over the main entrance to Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free). “Death Makes You Free” would have been more to the point. But still, in all fairness, what more appropriate name could they have given to this best registry of the worst? Sure, they might have hit you in the eye with something like “Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka Inc.” Couldn’t have told it apart from one of those legal firms. “Mr Sobibor’s line is busy. But Mr Treblinka’s available. Can you hold?” Or how about “Nazi War Crimes Ltd.”? No good either. In the US there are support groups for anything from form
er serial killers to individuals who fantasize about sex with birds. That would have drawn calls from Holocaust deniers, itching to join up.

  My real beef is with cleaning up the camps and putting up monuments. Making sense out of events; the cheaper version of trying to explain them. So, what should they have done after the war? Simple. Leave the camps there as they found them. The slippery floors stained red by the bloody dysentery. In all the hurry of the last days, the half-burnt carcasses, the piled up skeletons. You can depend on the stink coming out of the shit and the decaying bodies for a good long time. Like a tornado that won’t go away. Bring everybody there, all the ones on the losing side. Maybe even some of the winners. They’re not blameless either for what happened here. Stick their noses in it. Bad dreams guaranteed for a long time to come. No sanitizing. Use it as vaccination.

  The CFDC has its home in the Chalfin Building, a forty-story office tower located at Madison Avenue and 39th Street. It’s the crown jewel of the Chalfin real estate empire.

  The late Sol Chalfin, who started it all, was a Treblinka survivor who worked as a diamond cutter. He arrived here in 1945 and started small. Bought run-down tenements in Brooklyn and mortgaged them to the bone. Used the money to buy more, and, by 1960, he had enough to acquire his first Manhattan office building. The rest, everybody knows. More office buildings, and a few hotels. Also, a couple of high-rise condos on Madison that appear – if you’re standing in the middle of Central Park – like wistful giraffes, peering over the old-time Fifth Avenue apartment houses in front of them.

  Sol was pushed to found the CFDC by his Treblinka bunkmate, the writer and Nobel Prize winner Mordechai Lynx. The deal was, Sol would donate the space and put up the money, and Lynx would be in charge. Plenty of graduate students and PhDs in Modern European History to do the heavy lifting. Lynx’s real job was to be Lynx; add his moral weight to the project. Also to keep Chalfin company at their daily Konzentrationslager memorial lunches in his penthouse office. Broth, with a few potato peelings swimming in it, served in dented cups.

  I knew already you couldn’t just walk into the CFDC like it’s your neighborhood lending library. You’d think the place was Masada or something. All requests for information by appointment only. Responses by mail a few weeks later. No looking up the files (they still used index cards then) on your own. That’s where my old pal Frank Lieberman came in. Best Upper East Side dermatologist in Between Fifth&Park magazine six years running. He spent the rest of his time drawing pictures of concentration camp scenes, featuring variations on emaciated figures wearing crowns of barbed wire around their skulls. Making his work a natural addition to the books that overflowed punctually, every year around the Jewish holidays, from Lynx’s reservoir of KZ lore.

  I explained to Frank that I was doing historical research on neurosurgeons involved in the Nazi doctor experiments. Could he fix that up with the CFDC for me? He did even better. Got me an appointment with Lynx himself, who was going to make the arrangements personally. Why was I seeing Lynx? Because he’s a big hypochondriac. Any doctor he does a favor for, automatically gets a spot in his address book, in the remote case of an emergency.

  The CFDC is located on the thirtieth floor of the Chalfin Building. The large anteroom is separated from the receptionist by shatterproof glass. I announced myself via a telephone on the wall, like in those old prison movies when it’s visiting time. After my name was checked, a door clicked open, and I found myself in a large room filled with floor-to-ceiling cabinets and ladies wearing yellow name tags in the shape of five-pointed stars. That threw me. Why not tattoo their forearms too, while you’re at it?

  At the far end there was a door marked “M. Lynx. Private.” Another click, and I was on the stairs to the upper floor. Lynx wasn’t there yet, so I had a chance to look around.

  Low ceiling, not much light coming from the narrow little windows facing in every direction; like in those German blockhouses on the Normandy landing beaches. Plaques and pictures taking up all the wall space. Lynx used to be Lynksz. He changed his name because the engravers of the testimonials and prizes he kept collecting misspelled it every time. In a prominent spot, the Mr Holocaust award of the Long Beach, NY Council of Jewish Women. No year mentioned, so maybe the title was for life? A low bookcase nearby, with first editions of every one of his books. On top of it – propped up on a little ebony stand as if it was the Gutenberg Bible – his latest, All Mountains Look Down on Valleys. A sequel to the previous year’s All Valleys Look Up at Mountains. They perished, Lynx publish.

  In the middle of the room, there was a Parisian café table under a little umbrella with “Cinzano” plastered all over it. Several of those uncomfortable little green metal chairs surrounding it. In the corner, a dull brown double-decker bunk bed. No mattresses – just straw coming out every which way. A little plaque on one end, lettering faded. “Guaranteed Genuine WWII Concentration Camp bunk. Dedicated to Mr Mordechai Lynx. THE FRANKLIN MINT. 1964.” Looked like what Architectural Digest would call an accent piece. Who knows? One of these days, “concentration camp” may be in as a design strategy. I can see the logo now: “The KZ Collection by Ralph Lauren.” Naked light bulbs, custom-stained and tattered blankets. Couch fabrics made to look and feel like mildewed straw.

  The wooden frame looked lonely, standing there all by itself. For these bunks to make a statement, they ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder with their fellows. Jails within jails. Each prisoner entitled to only the space his body takes up, exactly how much air he displaces.

  I was trying out the bunk when Lynx came in. He motioned for me to sit in one of the café chairs instead. Wiry little guy, big head, grayish cowlick reaching down to his right eyebrow. He had good English, only it sounded Hungarian. Lynx looked straight at me, 100% attention, zero interest; reminded me of The Chief. Then he started on the spiel he must have ready for people who see his office for the first time. He pointed to the café table. “It’s what I wrote my first articles on, when I came to Paris after the camps. A few of my friends from that time got together and bought it from the Café Bébert. You know, on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle.” I didn’t know, but that didn’t stop him. He reached under the table and brought out a wooden rack. The kind cafés in Europe drape their newspapers on, so the customers don’t walk off with them. This one had a long sheet of parchment attached to it. “Read what it says,” urged Lynx, “there’s an English translation if you need one.” It looked – or at least tried to look – like a medieval document, on the order of a marriage contract between Henry VIII and one of his wives. Calligraphy of the kind that invites you to fancy Jewish weddings in Westchester. You know, “the honour of your company.” Dig the British “u.”

  I did need the translation, which said: “To a great man, from his faithful friends.” It probably sounded better in French.

  All I could say was, “Wow, your friends must really love you.” Meanwhile, I sneaked a peek at his shirt: pale blue, obviously custom-made. Something different about it. A big oval cutout of the sleeve over his right forearm, framed in red stitching, revealed his tattoo from Treblinka. He caught my glance right away. “The shirt comes from Hong Kong. The guy who slept in the bunk under Chalfin and me makes them. Sir Vivor, he calls the company.”

  Lynx nodded in the direction of the bunk in the corner. “That’s where I think,” he explained. “Where I write my books. The straw sticking into me. The best place for me to remember the past.”

  “Like Prou…” I began to say, before he interrupted.

  “What did Proust know? That spoiled boy writing in his perfumed bed, with those padded walls around him, like in an insane asylum.” An instance of petulance, in contrast to all the “forbearance” and “tolerance” that twinkled nonstop in the tributes leading up to his Nobel Prize.

  “What everybody forgets is, he’s not the only Jewish bedwriter. There’s Kafka, too.”

  For a moment, I thought I heard “bedwetter.” But then I realized that he wasn’t talki
ng about making pipi under the sheets. “Bedwriter” must have been a direct translation from the Hungarian.

  “Kafka didn’t work in bed,” I replied. “He wrote at the family dining room table, except when his father yelled at him. Which was kind of often, for a guy in his thirties.”

  He was just about to reply – who knew how he was going to get out of this one – when there was a knock at the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALISON

  May 1984

  In walks this tall, medium-blond shikse with an upswept hairdo. Neck strangely arched forward, a few strands of escaped hair falling down over it. Dressed like one of those female lawyers on TV. Dark blue suit, Gucci vs. Hermes scarf at the neck. Skirt dropping straight down like a waterfall, starting point what I estimated to be the northern end of the cleft of her ass. None of that tight half-moon effect favored by the muchachas on the subway. Obviously not part of the filing crew; no yellow star on her chest, the total surface of which I inspected rapidly, but thoroughly. Looking right at home, so I figured she must be some kind of VIP around here. Couldn’t see a cross anywhere on her. Therefore probably not some religious zealot working for the Jews out of self-purification and/or flagellation. Another possibility: she’s the local shabbes goy. That’s a Christian who turns on the lights and puts a match to the oven for the orthodox on the Sabbath; jobs the latter are forbidden to do on their own. Why did that come to mind? Because it would make sense to have a righteous Gentile around, sympathetic as hell to the suffering in the Holocaust, but with a big plus. She wasn’t – couldn’t – be a mourner. We Jews can’t turn off the tears. She could keep the paperwork dry.