The Butcher of Sausalito
#9 column from my 1-per-day write-a-thon/27-days of 1-page fictions. This story probably spilled off a news story I read about Kurt Waldheim's uncovered Nazi past. Or Dustin Hoffman's Marathon Man!
THE BUTCHER OF SAUSALITO
In the beautiful seashore town of Sausalito, directly across the bay from San Francisco, there hung a well-painted sign that read QUALITY MEATS. The store was known by the locals for its highest quality cuts of poultry, steaks, seafood, all the freshest (and, of course, most expensive) that the town had to offer. And in a town where the property values were more than double that of San Francisco, which was one of the most inflated real estate markets in the U.S., that was saying a lot. Mr. Appleton was the heart and soul of the meat market, always there with a smile and nice "hello" which he spoke in his deep foreign accent. As it turned out, Mr. Appleton alias Mr. Ottinger had a lot more experience being a butcher than anyone could have guessed.
In 1945 a Nazi officer named Georg Ottinger had been captured by allied forces and given passage to Washington in exchange for his promised information on Russian codes and other top secret information that his bureau had accumulated during the war. He was a handsome man, in his middle twenties, well educated, fluent in several languages including English, and indirectly the murderer of hundreds of people in small villages and towns in Yugoslavia. He had personally worked with Kurt Waldheim (unbelievably, the former President of Austria, 1986-1992) as one of his young and energetic "information officers." And Georg had relished his job, excelled in patriotic fervor, as he personally typed up the orders, handed them to Waldheim for signature. It was ironic that much of his business was now that of serving Jews he had worked so hard to eradicate. He never expected that one of them would be Mrs. Weiss, the Jewish prisoner who wore rags while mopping up the floors beneath his feet, cleaning the offices of Information Central in Berlin.
When Freuda Weiss first laid eyes on the butcher she felt a tingling sensation start just below her kneecaps. A strange feeling came over her that she was in another time and place. Mr. Appleton, "Appey" as he was fondly called by his loyal customers, seemed so familiar. Her brain, the damaged human computer that had been struck repeatedly by guards clubs at the camps, honed in on his particular German accent. Slowly her memory began to reconstruct the face of a young officer she had seen daily during her cleaning duties. He was chopping the legs and thighs off a "health-food" chicken ($7.80 a pound) when he heard the screams.