Camouflage

one of them found a Japanese coin. He held it up and started screaming at a man.
    “That ain’t mine,” he said. “They told us to get rid of all that shit.” A soldier behind him clubbed him with his rifle butt at the base of the skull, and he went down like a tree. The soldier clubbed him twice more, but stopped at a sharp command.
    The one who seemed to be in charge screamed at the captives, repeatedly gesturing at their fallen comrade, who was bleeding from both ears and twitching. Then they left, as suddenly as they’d appeared.
    A man kneeled by his friend and gently turned him over. Only the whites of his eyes showed. He drooled saliva and blood and something like water. “Cerebrospinal fluid,” the changeling said.
    “He gonna die?”
    “It’s very serious.” The changeling sorted through the pile and found its fatigues and put them on. “Better get dressed,” it said to the man holding his friend. “We want to all look the same to them.”
    “Jimmy’s right,” Hugh said, finding his own clothes. “They prob’ly gonna kill us all, but I ain’t gonna go first.”
    While they were dressing, a new Japanese soldier stepped into the doorway. He had a clean uniform and no rifle. He pointed at the naked man on the floor. “Bury him,” he said in English.
    “He ain’t dead,” his friend protested.
    “Oh.” The officer unsnapped a holster and pulled out a Nambu pistol. He bent over and put the muzzle in the man’s mouth and fired. The noise was loud in the small room. Blood and brains and chips of bone scattered across the concrete floor. “Bury him now.” He holstered the pistol and walked out.
    The man who had been holding his friend started after the officer. Two others tried to restrain him, but he broke free. At the door, though, he sagged and just stared out. “Bastards,” he said. “Fucking Jap bastards.”

- 18 -
o´swie cim, poland, 7 december 1941
    W hile the changeling was enjoying the hospitality of the Japanese, the chameleon was helping to oversee the construction of Birkenau, a new extermination camp four kilometers from Auschwitz. He was about to meet his soulmate, Josef Mengele, for the second time.
    The chameleon had a good instinct for the winds of war, and so had moved to Germany in 1937, and took the identity of a young right-wing doctor in Frankfurt. He was a perfect Aryan, blond and blue-eyed and athletic.
    In 1938, he enlisted in the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the SS “Blackshirts,” where he first met Mengele, also a young doctor. The randomness of war separated them, though; Mengele served as a medical officer in France and Russia, where he was wounded and decorated. The chameleon wanted to be in on the invasion of Poland, where he operated on a lot of people but saw no action to speak of.
    In 1939 the chameleon found a position more amenable to his talents. He was deployed to Brandenburg for “AktionT4,” the Nazi euthanasia project. People who had physical deformities, mental retardation, epilepsy, senile disorders, and a host of other conditions that made them inferior to the Aryan ideal were allowed “mercy killing.” In other places, this was done by more or less painless injections. In Brandenburg, they pioneered the use of the gas chamber disguised as a shower room.
    Hitler terminated Aktion T4 in August of 1941, because of public outcry after an influential bishop disclosed the truth of the project in a broadcast sermon. The chameleon was transferred to Auschwitz, where his expertise with gas chambers was valued, as well as his prior service in Poland.
    He didn’t like Poland at all. Brandenburg was a civilized university town, with sophisticated food and drink and vice. Auschwitz had nothing but subhumans destined for rightful extermination. Granted, the difference between human and subhuman was moot to him.
    The chameleon was pleased when, in May 1943, his old acquaintance from Frankfurt was assigned—by Himmler, no less—to be chief women’s doctor, and then was appointed chief doctor for both Auschwitz and Birkenau. The chameleon became one of Mengele’s assistant surgeons.
    By this time the Final Solution was in full swing, boxcars arriving regularly, crowded with miserable castouts: gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and, mostly, Jews. Himmler had ordered Birkenau built with a capacity for 100,000 prisoners, more than three times the size of Auschwitz proper; its gas chambers and crematoria could destroy 1,500 people in one day. It was all