Max

by Peter Berczeller

  By now, the pearls were really digging into my back. Even just considering the pain, I knew the jig was up. Something had to be done -- pronto. I flipped right over on my back. No use fighting history. Many men over the years must have faced similar choices. Here, the decision was taken out of my hands. I’ve already told you: my penis leans to the Left; politically, that is. But in Aunt Florence’s case, it switched parties, voted Republican. Result: the grassroots revolution inside my scrub pants.

  But the moment I turned around, I thought of what I was going to call her, now that our relationship had taken this sudden U-turn? Let’s say we’re in some transport of passion. What do I say? “Aunt Florence, could you shift around so I can slip…?” Or the other extreme, “Hey bitch, turn over so I can…?” There’s always the respect factor to consider. Just because the give and take between the two of you has moved its place of business a couple of feet down from where it used to be, and the status is never going to be quo again, doesn’t mean there’s any excuse for bad behavior. I quickly made up my mind. From now on, I was going to call her “Flo.”

  She was all business from the very beginning. My way or the highway. That was the start of my career as a Vienna Toyboy. “Toyman” would have been more to the point, since I was already in my early forties, and an academic neurosurgeon with a professorship in my future. Sounds kind of stuffy though, so “Toyboy” it had to be. “Do this, do that,” “turn your head a little bit,” or “open your mouth wider.” Anybody would think they’d stumbled into a dentist’s office.

  My career as a sex object had officially begun, and there was no let-up as long as I stayed in her house. A fixed routine. I always found it painful to meet up with Uncle Emil in the mornings. That he thought I was my stepfather, and a Hungarian speaker at that, only added to my guilt. As soon as I heard the door slam, I got out of the scrub pants, because working the string made her cranky. First, breakfast. You’d be amazed at the sensual effect of poppy seeds in free fall, raining down on an unprotected crotch. Then sixty minutes, exact, reading the papers, learning the language of my ancestors.

  I don’t want to give you the impression I was some kind of a victim, forced into things against my will. It’s true she was in charge all the way, but I sure as hell loved what my captor was doing to me. I can’t even say we got a lot closer, that all that sex ended up as a full-scale affair. No romantic dinners on the banks of the Danube, the gypsy orchestra playing for just the two of us, as we danced one last waltz, with the sun starting to peep around the edge of the Iron Curtain. Wild thoughts about a future together, come what may. None of that stuff. She never once asked me about what I do, what my life is all about. Never opened up about herself. So that’s the way it stayed between us. I was her sex object. Every day, right on schedule, she accidentally on purpose dropped one of the newspapers. That was the signal for my decentralized penis to rise and shine. Pure reflex. Under the table, with carpet burns developing on my knees and elbows, I once asked whether we couldn’t move to a more skin-friendly environment. No answer. All she did was dig in harder. She had the home-field advantage.

  Still, there’s no denying it, Aunt Florence turned out to be a handful. She let me know right away that her button system was my responsibility. That if things didn’t work out under the piano, it was my fault.

  I’d already learned about the button setup, courtesy of my frizzy-haired social workers. It’s located in the area just south of the pubic bone, on both sides at the top of a woman’s velvet underground. Something like what’s on the instrument panel of an airplane for starting the motors, switching fuel tanks, techno details like that. Just as with different makes of planes, no two women are wired the same way. You push what looks like the identical button, but there’s no predicting what effect it’s going to have. You have to keep experimenting until you get the connection straight in your mind. That can take a good long while, with everybody exhausted at the end. And it’s not even as if she can make it much easier for you. Having never been there – made eye contact – she can only point in the general direction. After that, it’s still hit or miss.

  More often than not, the right side is a booby trap. Three buttons, going from bad to worse. Once, I accidentally hit the one that brought on Aunt Florence’s pubocranial reflex. Right away she got a splitting headache, which put her out of commission for a while.

  After that, I stayed away from that side altogether. For good reason. The other two buttons had been a lot of trouble for me in the past. With Eileen I, to be exact. When I pushed on one, all of a sudden she wasn’t sure she wanted to do it with a man anymore. Got all philosophical about how she’d be better off having her mind penetrated, instead of her body, by somebody with basic equipment similar to her own. Just idly brushing by the last one on the right, I was in instant deep shit. She couldn’t stop vomiting, supposedly because she couldn’t stand the smell of my deodorant. At the same time, there was a short circuit, which made the whole button system go dead. It took a while for the lights to go back on again.

  I had much better results with Aunt Florence when I stuck to the left side. Here, three of the buttons are spread out every which way, but – and here’s the hitch – only one works. The other two are dummies, not connected to anything. Push on them all night, all you get is a cramp in your hand. The Real McCoy, I call the O Button. Not easy to find, hidden behind a little curtain most of the time. But draw the curtain aside, watch out! At least, that’s what I was given to understand by Aunt Florence’s pearls clacking away, even though their owner was lying perfectly still.

  I know the postcoital (just a generic term; no use going into specifics) cigarette has its own niche in the history of love. Personally, I prefer the postcoital lunch. Relaxed. Civilized. Good table manners making all the other manners good too. Every day, after we got out from under the table, I took a shower, got dressed in regular clothes and shared a lunch of ham, sausages, sauerkraut, and a couple of bottles of beer with Aunt Florence. By then, she was all spiffed up, looking more like her old self. None of the I’m-about-to-climb-a-mountain outfit she’d worn on my arrival. Silk pants, a tailored blouse, and those pearls. No peignoir this time, but she had a look about her which suggested she was ready to start all over again. No go. I only had a week to do in the St Marton Five. The afternoons were reserved for beaming my laser.

  Besides, even when I was in my twenties, one session a day was plenty for me. Maybe not even that often, considering I’m in an irregular line of work. Doing what I do is not like being a writer or a painter. They can discharge whatever they’ve got left after they write maybe a hundred words, or draw a couple of lines. Also, they can do it as often as they want, since they’re self-employed. It’s supposed to give them inspiration, from what I hear. I could just see myself taking a break between operations, in some unisex locker room. There, I could spritz my creative juices all over my girlfriend, with the result that I could approach my next case – let’s say an about-to-pop blood vessel – with a purer artistic vision.

  At the beginning, I figured the morning session under the table would do the job for the whole day. I always got a kick out of it, but I also found it stressful. Same as assisting The Chief in the OR. You always find yourself working out in advance what he expects you to do. I’ve had my hand spanked too many times, always with the heaviest instrument handy. Takes something out of you, trying to stay out of trouble.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EXPERIMENTING WITH PRIMATES

  Late June, 1984

  I was going to do the four local boys first, keep Weissensteiner for dessert. The decoy SLR was ready to roll, all charged, courtesy of the transformer I brought along to convert the current to two hundred twenty volts, which is what they use in Austria. Louie Rosenkrantz, my unsuspecting accomplice, left the viewfinder in the camera when he took out the part that takes the pictures. That way, I could focus exactly where I wanted to shoot the laser beam. On the rats, I’d found out the best place to hit was a spo
t behind the right ear. That was where my human subjects were going to get it too. No reason why I shouldn’t hit the right locus ceruleus straight on, like I always did; I’d had a lot of practice by then. Tickle the spot in the suicide center where it likes to be tickled. The rats did it. So could a few Nazi primates.

  The first day, I was just getting oriented when I spotted him. Hochberger, the butcher turned cook for the Luftwaffe, sitting on a bench outside his old store. He didn’t look all that changed from the picture I was carrying around with me. Narrow little eyes, round, reddish face. Short-brimmed hat, a feather sticking out of it, on top of his head; a cane propped up next to him. I could see a woman behind the counter, serving customers. Figured it was his daughter Anny, according to the CFDC info.

  He looked like he was just starting to doze off. That meant he wasn’t going to be moving much, which would make my job easy. There was a fresco, two angels juggling another one – or vice-versa – over the entrance to the building. I made a big show of focusing on the fresco, and only at the last second moved the focus down and over a little bit, until I had old Hochberger in the picture. From about twenty feet out, I shot the laser at the right side of his head, just behind the ear. No muss, no fuss. Just the usual little clicking and hissing sound. Different, but not too different, from what you hear when somebody takes a picture with a fancy camera. I detected a faint smell of something burning. But on the street, who was going to notice?

  As soon as I’d pulled the trigger, and closed the camera, I felt let down. Post coitum omne animal triste. No big surprise. I’d been working my way towards this moment most of my life. If I had killed Hochberger outright, for sure I would have felt an instant sense of catharsis, of release. But here it was more like I swallowed a cathartic. Your insides take their own sweet time when you ask them to do a job for you. I’d just have to wait it out.

  After moping around for a while, I started looking at the bright side, thinking about what I’d already pulled off. And there was more to come. This was just the beginning.

  That night, I kept shuffling their pictures in front of me, the ones I’d filched from the CFDC. Hochberger had been unexpectedly easy. Snoring away, presenting his best profile to me. No way I could have missed. Still, twenty feet was the outermost range of the laser beam. That’s why I needed to get close enough, without getting a lot of attention from my target or anybody else nearby. Louie Rosenkrantz had looked at me funny when I asked him to give me as much distance as he could. Was I getting lazy, he wanted to know, maybe thinking of shooting the rats from home? Ha-ha. He never did give me a long distance lens.

  Each of the perps was going to be a different kind of photo opportunity. They didn’t need to be napping, they didn’t need to hold still and look at the birdie. The release time of the laser was extra short, like a very fast shutter speed on a real camera. Once I focused, all it took was a few milliseconds to hit the mark. IF I got close enough.

  I had the pictures laid out on a fancy-looking table in my room in Aunt Florence’s apartment. Biedermeier, as she had instantly informed me, from the nineteenth century. I wasn’t sure if it was to keep me from scratching it up, or she was just putting on airs. You know, that special look Jewish girls get – the end of the nose turned up and leaning slightly sideways, eyes narrowed – when they’re discussing antiques. Conveniently forgetting the closest they ever came to those while they were growing up, was what, Bronx Renaissance? I’d like to try to pull that in my apartment. “Ikea, you know, late twentieth century.”

  As I was laying out the pictures, I began seeing red. Four out of the five, including Hochberger, had a windburned look. Everybody but Weissensteiner, the only paleface among them. Looking like he’d spent his entire life in a dungeon as his primary residence.

  Ever see the History Channel catch-ups with retired generals, chatting away about WWII, as if it was some long-ago World Cup? Funny thing is, the ones on our side all look like they’re ready to kick the bucket any minute. White hairs sticking out of noses and ears, mismatched clothes, chins resting on their canes to keep from tipping over. The makeup is no help, only gives them an embalmed look. The ones from the other side? About the same vintage. They look like they could still be bellowing out orders in their fortified bunkers. Losing the war must be some kind of elixir of youth. Sitting straight up, with those little pins (what the hell are they anyway, to me they always look like born-again swastikas) stuck in their well-cut lapels. How they love to talk shop with their old-time opposite numbers. Pincers this, reserve divisions and pullbacks that. But what always gets me is their faces. Ruddy; like after skiing, with a couple of glasses of Glühwein thrown in. Looking not so different from my four out of five. That led me to wonder about the color coordination. If it was just from spending a lot of time outdoors, then the concentration campers who were kept at attention in the freezing cold for ten hours at a time should have died with rosy cheeks. Not the life-faking-death look the few that were left sported when the gates finally opened up – outwards. Then again, maybe it’s heredity – my perps and their Wehrmacht officer soulmates sharing some innocent genetic fancy for a flushed kisser?

  Hochberger I’d already taken care of, so that left Strobl, Kleinert, and Baumgartner in the immediate neighborhood. Figured I’d drop the Candid Camera bit for a day in St Marton, and move up the road a few miles, to Forchtenstein. That’s where the ancient Esterhazy fortress sits on top of a low-rising mountain. The ideal place to zap Strobl, ex-game warden and wartime attackdog professor. I’d known about the place since I was little. Erich, my number two father, would tell me stories about the well in the main courtyard. A certain Duke had a lot of wives, one after another. He traded them in on a regular basis, like last year’s Cadillac. A guy with commitment phobia, it sounds like. What he did was throw these ladies down that deep well, whenever he felt the need for a change of scenery in his bedroom. Serial monogamy, Austrian style. Scared the shit out of me. Every time I heard about those amphibious wives, I thought that it could easily happen to a kid like me, if I didn’t toe the line. That the well was a few thousand miles away from Fort Lee, New Jersey reassured me during waking hours. But go tell that to your dreams. I’d been toilet-trained for years (Austrian parents frown on the walking wet) by the time Erich began to tell me this bedtime story. Every time he did, I had a nightmare as soon as I fell asleep. I was floating in water, at the end of a long, dark tube. The walls around me smooth, covered in wet moss, no way to get out. When I woke up, sure as hell I’d pissed in the bed. My parents couldn’t understand why. Nice people. Cause and effect? Not their strong point.

  So I showed up at Forchtenstein around midday; the two cameras like bookends, with me in between. There was a little guardhouse just in front of the drawbridge over the moat. That’s where I signed up for a tour of the fortress, with Herr Strobl listed as the guide. No trouble recognizing him when he showed up; red face, short and stocky. He had this snarly dog on a leash. A descendant of one of his war veterans? Strobl was decked out in a Tracht, one of those paramilitary uniforms Austrians love to parade around in. Come to think of it, not all that different from Uncle Emil’s favorite outfit. Green, with epaulets and wood buttons, breeches leading down to long, red stockings. The whole ensemble topped off by a visored cap like you see on a chauffeur. A sign saying “Führer” stuck in the headband. (Easy there – that’s just German for “guide.”) A cheerful “Grüss Gott” to the eight of us on the tour. We trailed after him and the dog as they walked us through one room after another; chock-full of shields, lances, and standards, from the battles they fought there with the Turks in medieval times. He translated his patter into not-bad English when he found out I didn’t understand German. How he kvetched about those cruel Turks! Looked all indignant when he talked about what they’d done to their prisoners. Many in the group looked stricken. Like what kind of barbarians could those invaders have been, not to stick to the Geneva Convention?

  The well came last. When I saw it, don’
t think it didn’t scare the shit out of me all over again. Didn’t even dare to walk too near it. But when Strobl threw a burning piece of newspaper down the shaft, I edged closer. It took a long time for it to get to the bottom, the flickering light outlining the greenish-black walls. It must have been terrifying for the brides given the heave-ho.

  When guides get that bashful look about them, you know it’s the end of the session. Tipping time. Half expected the dog to get up on his hind legs, holding out a tin cup. The others in the group went up to shake hands with Strobl, one by one; dropping a coin into the palm they’d just squeezed. A couple of them even peeled off a bill or two. The bit about the bad Turks maltreating prisoners must have hit them in the wallet.

  When it was my turn, I omitted the handshake and enlisted gravity to drop some change into his palm. No way I was going to touch this murderer. My laser was about to do the job for me. “Danke, danke” he beamed, as he and the dog were about to walk away. “Bitte, bitte,” I smiled back, “may I take your picture?”

  After giving Strobl’s head my best shot, it was my turn to say “Danke.” He was a cooked goose.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MORE PRIMATES

  Early July, 1984

  On the way back from Forchtenstein, I did a precautionary, no appointment necessary checkup on my psyche. Was I upset about what I was doing? If the answer was yes, I could always say to myself: “Sweetheart, are you OK? Anytime you want, you can pull out and go home. It’s not worth getting yourself sick over it.” Along the lines of the old adage, “A Jew belongs in a coffee house.” But as far as I could see, I was doing fine. No regrets so far. You’d prefer a little more soul-searching from a man who makes other people bite the dust before they become dust themselves? Perhaps along the lines of maybe I should have given Strobl a reprieve, so he could live happily ever after with his dog? “Let healing (what a bullshit word, except if you’re talking about a wound) take place”? No! I was just starting to enjoy myself. Thrilled about what these guys were going to be doing to themselves in a couple of weeks. Plus the kick of knowing something nobody else is in on, which makes serial murdering such an alluring hobby.