The Economy of Light by Jack Dann Page B

spirits or demons or perhaps another brujo has shot invisible darts into his patient. Those darts made her ill and will kill her...or so Báquiro believes.”
    “And you?” I asked.
    “Are you asking if I believe in Báquiro’s invisible dart etiology?”
    Mengele just smiled at me.
    “I go back into her now,” Báquiro said, and he leaned close to her, looking into her dead eyes, as if to brush his lips against hers, a quiet foreplay. The image of a snake about to strike formed in my mind.
    “Her mother brought her here to me,” Mengele said. He chuckled. “The trek almost killed both of them.”
    “Why did you bring me here?” I asked.
    “To rest, of course, and to show you miracles.”
    “I thought you believed yourself to be a man of science.”
    “I have always been a man of science, Stephen. Then as now I believed in transformation.”
    “No, you believed in murder.”
    “I believed in healing,” Mengele said, “but I was an agent of the state, the community...the volk.”
    “Curing by killing, is that it?”
    Mengele gazed at the brujo and his dying, blond patient.
    “I was a physician-biologist. I believed in National Socialism, which, in essence, was applied biology. I believed the volk was the vessel of God; I was nothing but one of its instruments.”
    “And now? Now that there is no volk to give you an excuse to murder?”
    Mengele smiled and shook his head, a slight, subtle movement. “You are right, Stephen, the volk is now history, and so I have moved on. I came here, to this place of ignorance, to do what I can. To cure whom I can.”
    “Just as you cured the Jews, just as you cured my brother and my mother?” The mephitic closeness of the hut seemed to dampen voice and emotion; I spoke to Mengele as if I was separated by a great distance, yet we could hear each other’s every whisper...every breath and heartbeat.
    “Much that happened was unfortunate,” Mengele said as he watched Báquiro, who was leaning over the sick woman as if giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “I was indeed trying to cure. Our mission was nothing less than the remaking of the German people and, in time, the people of the world. That was the mission of all doctors who were adherents of National Socialism. Our focus was revitalization and purification. But you were our misfortune. Our disease. The camps tested us all. Every killing went against the grain, but it had to be done; and we had to be hard. There was no choice. It was a war of racial hygiene. We were trying to save humanity.”
    “From me,” I said, goading him.
    “Yes, from all of you.”
    “You can’t still believe that.”
    “No,” Mengele said. “Of course not. It was a long time ago. The world has changed, we have changed.”
    “No, we haven’t changed.”
    “Ah, but yes we have, Stephen. I can still believe in my unfortunate past and live in the present. I cured you, after all.”
    “Why?”
    He smiled. “I suppose old habits die hard. I still believe in saving humanity.”
    “But I am still a Jew.” That meant to incite.
    Mengele looked over at me, then back at Báquiro. “It is only a slight shift in definition, Stephen. You have what we used to call hardness. You have always been a good soldier, or have you forgotten what you did to my old comrade Rudolf Heninger?”
    I took a deep breath. Yes, I remembered. I had bludgeoned the executioner of Riga to death.
    “You did what you did, and now he lives within you, doesn’t he? Just as those poor unfortunates I have killed live within me.” He smiled. “And just as I live within you.”
    “ Doutor ,” Báquiro said, and his voice seemed to shatter the atmosphere; I felt as if someone had awakened me from painful dream-blasted sleep. “Do you and your aprendiz wish to help me, or to leave?”
    Mengele glanced at me, and I nodded.
    “What do you wish us to do,” he asked Báquiro.
    “You must help her to sit up,” Báquiro said, “and you”—he pointed to me by