She managed to sit up, the pain nearly blinding her. Although the initial agony subsided after a moment, the assault on her vision continued without any let up. The room was nothing but white surfaces lit by intensely bright overhead lights. Across the room, she saw a pair of seated figures on what appeared to be examination tables—not like the padded and papered kind used in doctor’s offices, but the hard stainless steel kind used for autopsies. She shuddered at the thought, and the two people across the room shuddered, too.
A mirror, she realized. And I’ve got double-vision. Probably a concussion. Great.
She blinked several times until her focus returned and her eyes adjusted to the harsh light. The full length wall mirror created the illusion of a larger space, but in reality, the rectangular room was barely large enough to accommodate the table on which she sat. She surveyed the room in the mirror, noting that there were no doors, then she stared at her own reflection. The mirror had to be one-way glass, an observation window, which meant someone was probably watching her from the other side. She stared hard, squinting a little, as if by doing so, she might be able to see through the reflective surface and look her tormentor in the eyes. After clearing her throat to make sure her voice wouldn’t crack, she said. “Can I have my old room?” She managed her sweetest smile and added, “Please?”
The lights in the room dimmed, and the reflected Fiona vanished as the glass became transparent, revealing a room of similar dimensions on the other side. There was no examination table in the observation room, just an old man sitting in a wheelchair.
Not just old, Fiona thought. Ancient.
His wispy white hair could not hide a map of veins and liver spots on the papery-thin skin that clung to the skull. His eyes were sagging with age, but were still sharp enough that she could tell they were different shades of blue. One almost slate gray, the other a pale cornflower shade, like the eye described in Poe’s classic The Tell Tale Heart—the eye that had driven the narrator to madness. Yet, despite the man’s age and those weird, disconcerting eyes, Fiona saw something familiar in the face. It was the same man that had appeared in the pictures in the trophy case.
The thought sent a shiver down her spine, but as she stared back at him, she resolved that she would never beg for her life. Not from this man.
“Hey. I recognize you,” she said, pointing at him like he was the one on display behind the glass and not her. “You’re Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, right?”
The cadaverous face split in what she could only assume was meant to be a smile, and then an electronically amplified voice—the same wheezy voice that had taunted her earlier in her room—filled her little cell. “What are you, child?”
She stared at him in consternation. “What am I? What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Your appearance is somewhat mongoloid, but the facial structure is all wrong. Are you an American aboriginal? A red Indian? Yes, that must be it. But not pure-blooded. You’re what my friends in Sao Paulo would call a mestizo.”
The halting manner of his speech—he could only get a few syllables out between gasping breaths—and the almost clinical detachment in his voice did not make the obsolete terminology any less offensive. “What I am,” she countered, mustering all the bravado she could, “is a human being. And an American citizen, I might add, with some very powerful and dangerous relatives. You really don’t want them to show up on your doorstep, but if you don’t let me go, that’s what’s going to happen.”
The death’s head grin did not slip. “Aside from your diabetes, and of course that little bump on your head, are you in good health? I understand that red Indians are often drunkards. How is your liver function?”
Fiona was tempted to make an obscene reply but restrained herself. It seemed unlikely that she would be able to talk her way out of this fix, but insults would definitely not improve her chances.
“Listen, I’m sorry about the Mr. Burns crack. Would you prefer me to call you by your real name?” She paused a beat and then added, “Dr. Mengele?”
Although her studies were focused mainly in Antiquity, Fiona was not unaware of modern history. She had studied World War II and the Holocaust; she knew who the major players were in that terrible chapter of history. And while his role in the rise of the Third Reich had been incidental, Josef Mengele had come to symbolize the worst sort of perversion of science and medicine. Viewing the Nazis’ intention to exterminate the Jews, Romani and other so-called inferior races as an opportunity to conduct research on living human subjects, he had requested an assignment at the Auschwitz death camp, where he subjected thousands of people to unspeakable experiments, earning the nickname Todesengel—the Angel of Death.
After the war, Mengele had escaped to South America, and despite the best efforts of Nazi hunters, he had eluded capture until his death in 1979. That was the official version at least, but by all accounts, Mengele’s remains had been positively identified through DNA testing.