Butcher

31

Bayou City

Aaron Kamen was rather tired, somewhat confused, and acutely headachey. His face felt pouchy and swollen as if he were coming down with something. Ordinarily he'd never have stopped. But fate chose the moment to intervene.

He wanted to take something, perhaps find a nice glass of orange juice and ingest some vitamin C, but his immediate concern was street signs. He was looking at streets with the names of trees, looking for the road the nursing home was on, and the street a Dr. Troutt lived on as well. Was it a tree or a flower? He'd forgotten the address.

Carefully pulling over onto a side street he looked for the list, which he'd temporarily misplaced, cursing himself for possibly leaving it in the voluble Dr. Fletcher's office in New Madrid.

Rubbing his eyes, yawning, and stretching, he flipped through the Bayou City phone directory that he'd brought with him from the motel. It was a massive thing of some thirty or forty pages, and he flipped through it looking for a street map, such as directories often include in the front or back sections. He learned that when it was ten degrees Celsius it was a warm winter day, that you should hang up if you get an obscene phone call, and that B.C. Auto Is Your Collision Doctor. No map. He found the Troutt address on Cypress, looked up at a street sign, marked West Vine, and put his foot back on the gas pedal, eyes in the rearview mirror.

Cypress was the name he was looking for, he repeated to himself, as he drove by a building with a large sign out front that said Royal Clinic, and instinctively he wheeled into the parking lot, pulling behind the building. Might as well go in and talk to them as long as he was here.

Kamen put the loose papers and phone book in his briefcase, glanced back in the back seat to make sure his umbrella handle was where he could reach it, pulled his raincoat collar up and forced himself out of the vehicle and into action.

The rain was really coming down again and it felt cold. He hurried in under the protective archway and was glad for the warmth of the anteroom, even if it wasn't all that cool outside.

He felt chilled to the bone suddenly, and he realized he was on the verge of succumbing to a flu bug or some other dastardly virus.

The waiting area was full of people waiting to see the doctors. He went over to a window where a busy woman finally was able to ask him what he wanted.

“I would like to see Dr. Royal if I may."

“And your name?"

“Aaron Kamen from Kansas City."

“Okay. One moment please.” She took another phone call and then began looking through an appointment book.

“How would nine-thirty be?"

“You mean in the morning?"

“Mm hm.” She nodded expectantly.

“I'm not a patient. I just need to see him for a second."

“May I ask what it's in regard to?” He didn't took like a drug salesman but you could never tell anymore.

“It's a personal matter.” He leaned forward, suddenly conscious that the people there in the waiting room were listening with all ears. “I'm looking for an individual and was told he might be able to give me some information."

“Let me see if he's in, sir,” the busy nurse told Aaron Kamen, touching a control on the call director and speaking to someone. He heard her say, “A gentleman is here to see him,” and, “No, he doesn't.” She turned to face him across the counter that separated the lobby from the rest of the clinic's interior. “Who did you say you were with?"

He told her again who he was and, satisfied that he was neither a prospective patient nor a drug salesman, she told him to take a seat and Dr. Royal would be with him in a moment. The moment was about twelve minutes. A nurse came and told him to follow her please, and escorted him through the length of the building to a corner office, depositing him in the presence of his quarry.

“Mr. Kamen, how can we help you?” He was not the man Kamen had expected to find. It's conceivably a fallacy that we wear the face we've earned, the face we've come to deserve in our years of living. This was the face of a benevolent, kindly man. More Jean Hersholt than Erich Von Stroheim, to be sure. Yet without a hint of any sinister elements, without the infamous Tear-of-Satan birthmark, still Kamen chilled with the sure knowledge of the evil confronting him. Maybe it was in the eyes. He'd have been unable to articulate how he knew, but this was his quarry.

It was Dr. Solomon Royal, to be sure. Not Shtolz of the forties’ passport or fifties’ driver's license photographs, but on a visceral, intuitive wavelength Kamen knew the kindly, questioning face studying him through bifocals was the elderly Butcher of Lebensborn a lifetime later. Unexpectedly, though his feelings were a puzzle, he knew he'd found Emil Shtolz.

He made up his mind instantly not to play games. “I'm here about Alma Purdy,” he said, putting all his contempt into the words, letting this human monster know that his freedom had finally run its course.

“Pardon?” A saintly smile. Inside the genius mind of Dr. Royal a shadow moved from under a corner of the brain and the other one who lived inside slithered out of the darkness.

“You know her, Alma Purdy. I fear for her safety. She did a foolishly brave thing.” He watched the man pretending innocence, playacting, raising white eyebrows in feigned ignorance. Smooth, this one was. “Don't pretend you don't know what this is about, Herr Doktor Shtolz!" He spat the words out with the authority of a death camp survivor.

The man was very good, he'd give the devil his due. Not a flicker of recognition found its way into the sympathetic face. One shoulder went up slightly. The aging, handsome head shook again, but the eyes remained flat and unchanged. “I'm sorry, but I just don't ... Oh! Yes!” He reacted convincingly, smiling. “The woman with the prosthesis. I'm sorry. It just didn't register for a moment. I couldn't place who you meant.” Kamen listened for Munich in the consonants. Just a touch of something, a guttural quality. His own accent was thicker than this man's.

“Shtolz, what have you done with Mrs. Purdy?” In his right pocket he felt the weight of the hammerless revolver that he carried as a precaution. He was strong. More powerful than this old Nazi. He would fear nothing. Nonetheless, he wished he hadn't stopped. Wished the local law-enforcement people had found him. He wished Randall or Pritchett were here now. “The police know about you, by the way; they're on the way here.” He sensed his tactical mistake as the words came out.

Shtolz turned and reached for the telephone, his face hardening into a question mark. This was what Kamen expected. He'd call a lawyer, or perhaps the cops. Try to have Kamen thrown out of his clinic. But instead, the doctor surprised him.

“Would you pull a file for me, please? I need the file on Alma Purdy. P-U-R-D-Y. She was a referral from Dr. Levin. The lady with the prosthetic hand, remember? ... Okay.” He hung up. “She'll have it in a moment."

A few seconds passed. “What did you do with her?” Aaron Kamen's voice was loud in the room. “Answer me, you smiling Nazi bastard!"

“I didn't do a thing,” he said, smiling, but with that look people get when they're trying to humor an unruly person. “Mrs. Purdy came to see us for the first time a few weeks back. She was referred to the clinic because of some complications she'd been having. May I ask what your relationship is to Mrs. Purdy?” He was infuriatingly unruffled.

“I'm her friend. And I want to know where she is."

“That part isn't any big mystery. Unless she's been released she is a patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis."

“You mean I can pick up the phone and speak to her in St. Louis right now?” Kamen's tone was razor edged.

“I don't see why not.” The eyebrows shot up again. “She has no—” A nurse came in with a folder. “Oh, good. Thanks.” He got up, taking the folder, opening it up right there in front of Kamen.

“See, she has acute rheumatoid arthritis in the arm and the prosthesis was causing a great deal of pain.” Kamen was beginning to wonder if perhaps this was all paranoia. What if he called the hospital and Mrs. Purdy was all right after all? He'd feel like a total imbecile. Hospitalization would explain why she hadn't called back. He'd just called the man a Nazi bastard.

“This is as I thought,” Royal continued. “She was admitted to Barnes about three weeks ago. Here's the report based on our X rays. There's the note about our admission and, you see, there's her present room number.

The Nazi hunter was an experienced, tough, resolute fighter, and he was not a stupid man. In theory, he could never be so easily deceived. But theory and real life are often far different birds, and who better to convince and lull and mislead and persuade than the ultimate method actor, the man or woman with more than one personality? Shtolz, long subjugated and submerged, was a genius as well as a murderer, and Aaron Kamen alone was no match for him. Shtolz, the real inner being, came snaking out of Solomon Royal's twisted mind and killed the man in a few heartbeats.

There were calming, reassuring words. Cleverly manufactured facts detailing the seriousness of the absent Mrs. Purdy's arthritic pain, a smokescreen of doctors and nurses and medical initialspeak, a convenience of contrived history swirled in front of Kamen's tired eyes. It might be argued that had he felt better he would have proved to be a more worthy adversary. But Emil Shtolz, brilliant butcher of the secret Himmler breeding farms, was fighting for his life.

He kept the thing under his desk in the office. There was one in his car, one in the bedroom, another here. Over the years he'd become proficient with them. He thought of them as his brass knuckles, but they were far more than that. Protrusions came between the fingers, a heavy tube was clenched in the palm, and the hard, sharpened striking surfaces protruded from top and bottom. Shtolz no longer remembered the name of the weapons, which he also used as grip strengtheners.

It was the simplest move to slide his right hand into the one beneath the desk, pulling the file off with two hands as he stood, speaking as he moved, the right thumb visible on the file folder, the left hand with the papers now crossing over the right as he handed the folder to Kamen, right hand curling around the powerful knuckles, focusing on a spot a foot in space beyond the man's head—hands moving, right hand at the left shoulder, weight into the blow, expert knowledge of anatomy targeting the hard striking surface as the extended fist smashed into Kamen's temple.

Even a person in his sixties, without great strength, striking a lightning-fast blow with such an instrument, can traumatize the brain with four thousand to forty-five hundred foot-pounds of pressure per square inch. It is a devastating blow to the head.

Shtolz had emerged to direct the movements of Solomon Royal the moment he sensed danger. The evil genius soaked the situation in through his pores, every movement geared to that moment when he could lash out at this intruder.

From the second he thought he'd been spotted by the old woman and he first realized that she recognized him, the long-dormant survival instincts had been reawakened. Since then, he'd been constantly prepared for and attuned to the other hunters that he knew would be coming.

He'd known when his girl had closed the door he would be safe. He kept up his soft-shoe routine, speaking to the man even as he moved, talking about the woman's prosthesis as he took the syringe out, deftly seeking and finding a vein and plunging the hypodermic needle in, filling the unconscious Jew's veins with enough morphine to kill three men.

Now the adrenals were activated and he felt the erotic charge surge through his own system, as if he'd shot the dope into his own veins, and the apprehension, excitement, and pleasure of supremacy gave him the power he needed to work the heavy body into his private closet.

He opened the office side door that faced a corner of the rainy parking lot, then, leaving it ajar, quickly opened the door of his office, and, seeing the hallway empty, he faced the parking lot and said in a loud voice, “No problem. I think she'll be fine. Give me a call if she needs anything.” A pause and a glance back at the open office door. “Okay. So long.” He slammed the private door much louder than necessary, immediately going back down the hallway for his next patient, thinking a dozen thoughts as he quickly sorted and compartmentalized his options.

His main regret was not that someone had come for him but that he had felt unwilling to gamble. He regretted that he could not afford the risk of keeping this solitary hunter alive for interrogation later. Aside from the pleasures of the inquiry and what would follow, it would almost have been worth the gamble to know for certain who else knew about his existence.

There would be a vehicle in the parking lot to contend with. Keys in the man's pocket would doubtless fit the ignition. He silently examined these dangerous intrusions and inconveniences, as he assessed the risks of his plan.

In the slimy darkness of his mind he felt the blood and tissue fleck his face as it flew from the bone saw, savoring the climax of the evening ahead.

When he'd spent a few minutes with a woman whose kidney infection could be treated with a simple urine analysis, routine diet, and prescribed antibiotics, he returned to his office and considered the problems at hand.

There was his fictitious Purdy folder there in the clinic files, now conveniently misplaced, but which had been prepared and filed, initialed and charted by a part-time employee who worked only one day a week and would remember nothing. The Medcor computer carried Alma Purdy's fictional record of office visits, diagnostic entries, lab work, and treatment summary. When the chart was found it would show she had known Dr. Royal for over a year, and it would prove adequate unless the woman's records turned up in the files of another doctor.

He'd invented a rather well documented condition of aggravated arthritic pain to explain the spurious history of past visits. The X rays of a prosthesis-wearer's amputated arm, which he'd inserted into her chart, were a particularly nice touch.

That evening, after the clinic was empty but before the nighttime custodial people arrived, he backed Kamen's car up to the office side door and, under cover of his privacy wall in back of the clinic, loaded the body into the trunk. After that it would briefly occupy part of the two-car garage in Royal's empty rental property a few blocks away. From there the late Mr. Kamen would go to dwell in the newly planted “garden” in Royal's basement, perhaps not all at once, but piecemeal.

The contents of the Hebe's briefcase were nothing: ancient, blurry photos, renderings that resembled Dr. Royal not in the least, notes of haphazard conjecture, fumbling guesswork. He could imagine what the regional law agencies had. Little or nothing. The object mailed by Mrs. Talianoff remained a small, loose cannon.

The car itself would also present no problem. Without undue trouble he could drive the vehicle out to the backwater's edge after dark. Leave it at the edge of the incoming river. Plan a nearby house call. Invent some car trouble. His patients wouldn't blink an eye if he requested a lift into town. Nothing major, much less insurmountable.

It was past his bedtime and he was physically exhausted but his keen mind still turned over variables. He knew the woman had alerted this Aaron Kamen, who would have taken his story to the authorities, but so what? This was no spearhead of a search team from the K-group or the Mossad. This was an old crone and an inept amateur. Two moron Jews.

His Royal identity, in concert with cosmetic surgery, his language proficiency, intellect, and background in the community, they amounted to an impenetrable shield. It was best not to plan these things out too painstakingly, he supposed. Weigh the probabilities of course, but let the element of chance factor itself into the mix to some extent. Go with the harmonics.

He decided he'd take a Seconal or two, almost too exhausted to sleep, and within a few minutes was slumbering peacefully.