Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

What finally got my grandparents caught was a scam. They got word from a man in Kraków named Władysław Budek that my grandmother’s brother, who had been working in Kraków as a spy for the Bishop of Berlin, [9] This was Konrad Preysing, aka “The One Good German.” Preysing made thirteen separate presentations of Holocaust evidence to Pope Pius XII, who in 1941 announced that Nazi policies did not conflict with Catholic teachings. When Pius gets sanctified, I hope they cite that as his miracle. had been captured and sent to the Podgorze “Ghetto,” which was a holding pen on the rails to the Camps. Budek claimed he could get my mother’s brother out for 18,000 zlotys, or whatever the fuck money they were using then. Since my grandparents had no money, and were suspicious anyway, they went to Kraków themselves to check things out. Budek called the police and sold them into Auschwitz.

It was typical of my grandparents that they later described being sent to Auschwitz as a stroke of luck, since not only was it better than being shot by Polish crackers in some forest, it was better than being sent to a death camp. [10] Auschwitz a death camp—Birkenau—but it also had Monowitz, which was a slave labor camp. That made odds of survival at Auschwitz 1 in 500, which is why you’ve even heard of Auschwitz. Odds of survival in the death camps were 1 in 75,000. At Auschwitz they were able to contact each other twice through smuggled notes—which, to hear them tell it, made surviving until liberation easy.

Their funeral was near my Uncle Barry’s place. This was my mother’s brother, who had freaked out and become an Orthodox Jew. My grandparents had certainly considered themselves Jewish—they had visited and supported Israel, for example, and were dismayed by the world’s quick demonization of it—but to them being Jewish meant they had certain moral and intellectual responsibilities, not that religion was anything other than a bloodstained hoax. My mother had burned through every traditional form of rebellion before Barry could even get started, though, so dressing like a shtetl dweller in 1840s Poland was probably his only recourse.

My mother attended the funeral and asked me if I needed her to stay in the U.S., and whether I wanted to move to Rome. My father did me the favor of not pretending: he just sent me a rambling, slightly touching letter about his relationship with his own grandparents and how as you go through life you never really feel any older. [11] My parents had long since gotten divorced. My mother had become a real estate agent, and my father, who was Italian—but not, I should say, Sicilian—had moved to Riverside, Florida. Last I heard he ran an upscale franchise restaurant I won’t name. They both have different names now, and I am not in contact with either of them.

Barry adopted me to keep Child Protective Services off my back, but it was easy to convince him to let me stay in my grandparents’ house. At fourteen I was physically enormous and had the mannerisms of an elderly Polish Jewish doctor. I liked to play bridge. Plus, Barry and his wife weren’t crazy about exposing their own four kids to someone who’d been abandoned at birth and then come home one day to find his foster parents dead by violence. What if I became dangerous?

What indeed. Smart move, Barry and Mrs. Barry!

I sought out the dangerousness and refined it. As any other American child would, I picked Batman and Charles Bronson in Death Wish as role models. I didn’t have their resources, but I didn’t have much in the way of expenses, either. I hadn’t even had the carpets changed.

I felt I had no choice but to take on the case myself. I still feel that way, really.

I know from experience, for instance, that if you go into the woods and shoot a handful of survivalist pedophile pimps—men who have destroyed the lives of literally hundreds of children—then the police will go apeshit trying to find you. They will check the drains in case you washed your hands after running them through your hair. They will cast for tire tracks.

But if the two people you care about most get brutally murdered by some scumbag who rifles a couple of cabinets and takes the VCR, it will all be a fucking mystery.

Did they have any enemies?

Any enemies who needed a VCR?

It was probably a crackhead.

A crackhead with transportation, and gloves, and a fuck of a lot of luck not to be seen by anybody.

We’ll ask around.

We’ll let you know.

And it will be obvious to you just how justice will get served: by you or by nobody.

What kind of choice is that?

The different martial arts all share an interesting gimmick. (I went from tae kwon do to sho ryu karate to kempo , one foot-smelling dojo much like another, as I followed the traditional Japanese directive to spend more time training than sleeping.) You’re supposed to act like an animal. I don’t mean in the abstract: you’re supposed to model your strategies on those of real, specific creatures. Using “crane style” for precise, fast, distance attacks, for instance, or “tiger style” for aggressive, in-close slashing. The underlying idea is that the last animal you’d want to emulate in a violent situation is a human being.

This turns out to be true, by the way. Most humans are instinctively terrible fighters. They flinch, they flail, they turn away. Most of us are so bad at fighting that it has actually been an evolutionary advantage, since before the mass production of weapons people had to think to truly hurt each other, so the smart had a fighting chance. A Neanderthal would kick your ass and then eat it, but try finding one to test this.

Alternately, consider the shark. Most species of shark hatch live inside their mothers and start killing each other right then and there. The result is that their brains have stayed the same for 60 million years, while ours kept increasing in complexity until 150,000 years ago, at which point we became able to speak, and therefore human, and our evolution became technological instead of biological.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that sharks are vastly evolutionarily superior to humans, since if you think we’ll last 60 million years, you’re insane. The other is that we’re superior to sharks, because they’ll almost certainly be extinct before we will, and their demise, like ours, will be thanks to us. These days a human’s a lot more likely to eat a shark than vice versa.

On the tiebreaker, though, sharks win. Because while we humans have our minds and our ability to transmit the contents of them down through the generations, and sharks have their big ol’ teeth and the means to use them, sharks don’t appear to agonize about the situation. And humans sure as hell do.

Humans hate being mentally strong and physically weak. The fact that we get to take this planet down with us when we go brings us no joy whatsoever. Instead we admire athletes and the physically violent, and we loathe intellectuals. A bunch of nerds build a rocket to the fucking moon, and who do they send? A blond man named Arm strong, who can’t even say the line right when he lands.

It’s a weird curse, when you think about it. We’re built for thought, and civilization, more than any other creature we’ve found. And all we really want to be is killers.

Meanwhile, around Thanksgiving of ’91 I started fucking Officer Mary-Beth Brennan of the West Orange Police Department. In her Crown Victoria, since she was married and cops don’t like to leave their “cruisers” when they’re on duty. Hers was infested with not just roaches but rats, because the fuckheads on the other shifts kept shoving the bones from their fried chicken down between the hard leather seats. The thing was a fucking habitrail.