Getting away with murder

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

Because the embassy wasn't interested in my suspicion that I had a major Nazi war criminal staying in my hotel, I decided to be his judge and jurors myself. Their opinion may have been influenced by the general consensus that the man in question had died in South America years before. Or I may have sounded insincere or crazy since I wouldn't give my name. Either way, I had spent my last coins to call them about his whereabouts, and if they didn’t care, I’d be damned if I let this opportunity slip away.

I am a masseur; some say one of the best in Spain. This is mostly due to me having studied for five years with a gitano with magical hands, but also to my own hands having turned out to have an exceptional touch. My father was a highly respected doctor, and as he sired 11 children, of which I was the eighth, he needed the income. Disciplined as he was, having reached this pinnacle from the humble beginnings of an impoverished peasant family in Galicia, he expected nothing less from his brood. But as I had almost died from measles at the age of five, I had become my mother's favourite and could get away with murder. Whilst she always intervened when my father wanted to punish me for something, my six brothers and four sisters had to endure his chastisement and the odd clip around the ear. Not surprisingly, they all found gainful employment early on whilst I roamed the streets and became a junkie.

Exasperated after having given me numerous warnings, my father threw me out when I was 18. I resorted to moving in with another woman with whom I enjoyed much favour, my widowed grandmother. She instilled in me a hatred for the fascists that ruled our country, and by extension anyone who had come to their support during the civil war. My grandfather, a trade unionist and anarchist, had died in solitude of TB in 1938, having been confined to a safe house for months during the war, as he knew Franco's henchmen were out to kill him. The butchers eventually tracked him down, but after having kicked the door down they found the old man dead in his chair. I would like to think he had prepared a welcome akin to a raised middle finger, as he had cheated them out of a torture session by dying on his own account, but my grandmother always got carried away in floods of tears or a torrent of abuse whenever she reiterated this story, so I don’t know for sure.

My father hadn’t completely disowned me; he had put in a good word for me with the old gitano. The gypsy offered me an apprenticeship and taught me the fine art of massage with heated oils infused with herbs, a skill which in due course landed me a job at one of the most prestigious five-star hotels on the Costa del Sol. It was perhaps an odd choice of employment, considering that the hotel had been bought with laundered money obtained as booty at the end of the second world war when thousands of Nazis fled to southern Spain with the blessing of El Generalissimo. But it gave me a good living, and I steered clear of the owners, so I was never baited into heated political discussions, to which I am prone.

As a masseur I have taught myself a few tricks to safeguard my job. I have for example disciplined myself to not get turned on by a naked body, no matter how sexy a female I may have before me. This has shaped my sex life in the sense that I prefer sex when we’re both partly clothed. I have also learnt to subdue my contempt for my haughtiest clients, who rank any hotel staff on par with the dirt under their shoes. From childhood I’ve had a fierce temper, but I have learnt to control it. I have given massage to anyone from Joni Mitchell to Kofi Annan, and I can assure you that when someone is face down on my slab, they are all as vulnerable as a newborn baby.

I had noticed the old man as soon as I read his booking form. He had filled it in under the name of Josef Medgele, and my initial reaction was disbelief. Surely, if it really was the Angel of Death living out his twilight years in Spain whilst being officially dead, he would have taken on a completely new identity. Equally, if my customer had just suffered the misfortune of having a near identical name to Mengele, he would also have changed it. As I glanced at him, I thought I could recognize him, but 40 years had passed since the last known photos of the sadistic butcher, so I couldn't be sure.

Whoever the man was, he had come to see me a few times, which had given me time to build up a rapport with him as well as calling the Israeli embassy to turn him in. Their reply was the oft repeated claim that Mengele had died in Brazil in 1979 and was buried under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard.

But now, three years hence his supposed death, I was convinced this was the very man I had before me, and I had gained his trust. Like so many people spending their remaining years in solitude under the Spanish sun, he had an irrepressible urge to talk about himself. It was the fifth time I saw him. No sooner was he lying there than he moaned through the hole in the massage bench: “I am a dying man; I haven’t got long left.” Then he added: “I've got something to show you.” He gestured at the shoulder bag he always carried: “Open it and take out the little black book.“

Now, much like a hairdresser or a bartender, a masseur becomes a soundboard for a lot of confessions. Over the years I had become skilled at reading personalities and in his case, I was already biased by the inflammatory name. To make him open up to me, I had pretended to have political leanings to the far right, diametrically opposed to my true convictions, and he had bought it. As soon as I fished the black book out of his bag, I realised that through my charade I had hit pay dirt, so to speak.

The old, battered leather-bound book contained all kinds of strange formulas and scribbles, some almost illegible, others readable, but indecipherable to me. From what I could gather, Dr Mengele did not feel the slightest remorse for any of his atrocities, on the contrary, he seemed rather proud of his gruesome experiments in Auschwitz. After having fled Germany at the end of the war, he had continued to elaborate on ever more bestial experiments to perform on the prisoners he no longer had.

“I was regarded as a genius in my youth,” he lamented. “Then my research was stopped and now it will be lost when I go to my grave. As my legacy I want my research to be made available to other physicians, who may use it as a foundation for their work. With your political contacts you seem to be ideally positioned to see to this.”

He paused. “I will offer you 20,000 dollars for ensuring that my work gets the accolade it truly deserves. You will find the cash in the safe in my hotel suite. But you mustn’t give away my whereabouts.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Here I had before me one of the most wanted war criminals in history, and he was all but setting up his own gallows. But who would believe me or care? If the Israelis didn't then no one would.

The gitano hadn't only taught me how to use my hands to heal. He was also a skilled assassin, having learnt self-defence out of necessity as gypsies were persecuted during the civil war and the subsequent world war. There are numerous ways of killing someone without leaving a mark, and to extinguish the life in someone approaching his eighties for a strong 30-year-old like me is a breeze.

The cause of death was recorded as a heart attack. My only regret is that I did it whilst he was on his front, as I would have liked to see the flame go out in his eyes. But then you can't have everything. The 20,000 was some consolation. And it gave me a gratifying leverage. Because not only did I find the money in his safe, I also found the extortion letters from the hotel manager that had let Mengele stay at his hotel for years at a highly inflated rate, in exchange for the manager’s silence. It seems like poetic justice that, of all people, his final secret was entrusted to me, who had lost my grandfather and other relatives to Franco’s murderers. But so had half of Spain, and life is full of ironies. The little black book will always be my own life insurance should the owners of this hotel, the descendants of Franco's henchmen and friends of Josef Mengele, ever threaten to lay me off.

There was a moment of silence before the room erupted in wolf whistles, hollering, applause and shouts of “Cabron! Hijo de puta!” Yet again, the masseur had seen his crew through another evening of candle lights, jams by the hotel orchestra and fine dining courtesy of inventive sourcing of ingredients from fishermen and campesinos sympathetic to their cause. In addition to magical hands, the masseur also had a captivating discourse, albeit one that sometimes blurred the lines between reality and wishful thinking. After a year of the staff having occupied the hotel, boredom had become an issue, but everyone was enlivened by the masseur’s mother-of-invention tricks. The water had been turned off weeks into the occupation, but the masseur had got the water company to turn it back on after he contacted the society for the protection of Japanese carp telling them the fish in the pond in the garden would die without fresh water, following the council’s refusal to do so for the sake of the human occupants.

“You wish you had strangled Mengele!” offered the head chef. “You wish there was a little black book!”

The masseur looked up with a mischievous look in his eyes, saying: “Well, he died anyway, didn’t he? From a heart attack, you know that. And you don’t believe that the black book exists?” He walked into the reception office, opened the safe and retrieved the book, triumphantly.

“How come the director didn’t take that with him when he left?” said the incredulous piano player.

“It wasn’t there then,” offered the masseur. “It was in Mengele’s bag. I put it in the safe. When we go to court to get our back pay we can use this as proof that the management was harbouring wanted war criminals in their hotel.”

“How would that help our cause?” said a chamber maid, despairingly. “Does it say how the previous owners filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying us and sold the hotel to the Russians for 1 euro?”

The masseur looked sad for a moment. “No, it doesn’t,” he conceded. “But I am still convinced that it is the writings of Mengele. Someday I can use it for something.”

“And the 20,000 dollars?” inquired the pool cleaner.

“What do you think we’ve been living on over the last year?” said the masseur, and never wanting to give up the gung-ho spirit: “The coffers are still not empty. Let’s make this the last stand of the Alamo.”

And they toasted their vintage wines and enjoyed their gourmet dinner and jazz, not knowing how it would all end, but it didn’t really matter, as the fat lady hadn’t yet sung.