Apt Pupil – King, Stephen

Taken from the title “Different Seasons”.

 

APT PUPIL

 

He looked like the total all-American kid as he pedalled his twenty-six-inch Schwinn with the ape-hanger handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that’s just what he was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy one hundred and forty pounds, hair the colour of ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne.

He was smiling a summer vacation smile as he pedalled through the sun and shade three blocks from his own house. He looked like the kind of kid who might have a paper route, and as a matter of fact, he did – he delivered the Santa Donato Clarion. He also looked like the kind of kid who might sell greeting cards for premiums, and he had done that, too. They were the kind that come with your name printed inside – JACK AND MARY BURKE, or DON AND SALLY, or THE MURCHISONS. He looked like the sort of boy who might whistle while he worked, and he often did so. He whistled quite prettily, in fact. His dad was an architectural engineer who made $40,000 a year. His mom was a housewife and a secretarial school graduate (she had met Todd’s father one day when he needed a secretary from the pool) who typed manuscripts in her spare time. She had kept all of Todd’s old school report cards in a folder. Her favourite was his final fourth-grade card, on which Mrs Upshaw had scratched: ‘Todd is an extremely apt pupil.’ He was, too. Straight As and Bs all the way up the line. If he’d done any better – straight As, for example – his friends might have begun to think he was weird.

Now he brought his bike to a halt in front of 963 Claremont Street and stepped off it. The house was a small bungalow set discreetly back on its lot. It was white with green shutters and green trim. A hedge ran around the front The hedge was well-watered and well-clipped.

Todd brushed his blond hair out of his eyes and walked the Schwinn up the cement path to the steps. He was still smiling, and his smile was open and expectant and beautiful, a marvel of modern dentistry and fluoridated water. He pushed down the bike’s kickstand with the toe of one Nike running-shoe and then picked the folded newspaper off the bottom step. It wasn’t the Clarion; it was the LA Times. He put it under his arm and mounted the steps. At the top was a heavy wooden door with no window inside of a latched screen door. There was a doorbell on the right-hand doorframe, and below the bell were two small signs, each neatly screwed into the wood and covered with protective plastic so they wouldn’t yellow or waterspot. German efficiency, Todd thought, and his smile widened a little. It was an adult thought, and he always mentally congratulated himself when he had one of those.

The top sign said ARTHUR DENKER.

The bottom one said NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN.

Smiling still, Todd rang the bell.

He could barely hear its muted burring, somewhere far off inside the small house. He took his finger off the bell and cocked his head a little, listening for footsteps. There were none. He looked at his Timex watch (one of the premiums he had gotten for selling personalized greeting cards) and saw that it was twelve past ten. The guy should be up by now. Todd himself was always up by seven-thirty at the latest, even during summer vacation. The early bird catches the worm.

He listened for another thirty seconds and when the house remained silent he leaned on the bell, watching the sweep second hand on his Timex as he did so. He had been pressing the doorbell for exactly seventy-one seconds when he finally heard shuffling footsteps. Slippers, he deduced from the soft wish-wish sound. Todd was into deductions. His current ambition was to become a private detective when he grew up.

‘All right! All right!’ the man who was pretending to be Arthur Denker called querulously. ‘I’m coming! Let it go! I’m coming!’

Todd stopped pushing the doorbell button. He looked at the tip of his forefinger. There was a small red circle there.

A chain and bolt rattled on the far side of the windowless inner door. Then it was pulled open.

An old man, hunched inside a bathrobe, stood looking out through the screen. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers. Todd thought the man looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Boris Karloff. His hair was long and white but beginning to yellow in an unpleasant way that was ‘ more nicotine than ivory. His face was wrinkled and pouched and puffy with sleep, and Todd saw with some distaste that he hadn’t bothered shaving for the last couple of days. Todd’s father was fond of saying, ‘A shave puts a shine on the morning.’ Todd’s father shaved every day, whether he had to work or not.

The eyes looking out at Todd were watchful but deeply sunken, laced with snaps of red. Todd felt an instant of deep disappointment. The guy did look a little bit like Albert Einstein, and he did look a little bit like Boris Karloff, but what he looked like more than anything else was one of the seedy old winos that hung around down by the railroad yard.

But of course, Todd reminded himself, the man had just gotten up. Todd had seen Denker many times before today (although he had been very careful to make sure that Denker hadn’t seen him, no way, Jose), and on his public occasions, Denker looked very natty, every inch an officer in retirement, you might say, even though he was seventy-six if the articles Todd had read at the library had his birth-date right. On the days when Todd had shadowed him to the Shoprite where Denker did his shopping or to one of the three movie theatres on the bus line – Denker had no car – he was always dressed in one of four neatly kept suits, no matter how warm the weather. If the weather looked threatening he carried a furled umbrella under one arm like a swagger stick. He sometimes wore a trilby hat. And on -the occasions when Denker went out, he was always neatly shaved and his white moustache (worn to conceal an imperfectly corrected harelip) was carefully trimmed.

‘A boy,’ he said now. His voice was thick and sleepy. Todd saw with hew disappointment that his robe was faded and tacky. One rounded collar point stood up at a drunken angle to poke at his wattled neck. There was a splotch of something that might have been chili or possibly A-l Steak Sauce on the left lapel, and he smelled of cigarettes and stale booze.

‘A boy,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t need anything, boy. Read the sign. You can read, can’t you? Of course you can. All American boys can read. Don’t be a nuisance, boy. Good day.’

The door began to close.

He might have dropped it right there, Todd thought much later on one of the nights when sleep was hard to find. His disappointment at seeing the man for the first time at close range, seeing him with his street-face put away – hanging in the closet, you might say, along with his umbrella and his trilby — might have done it. It could have ended in that moment, the tiny, unimportant snicking sound of the latch cutting off everything that happened later as neatly as a pair of shears. But, as the man himself had observed, he was an American boy, and he had been taught that persistence is a virtue.

‘Don’t forget your paper, Mr Dussander,’ Todd said, holding the Times out politely.

The door stopped dead in its swing still inches from the jamb. A tight and watchful expression flitted across Kurt Dussander’s face and was gone at once. There might have been fear in that expression. It was good, the way he had made that expression disappear, but Todd was disappointed for the third time. He hadn’t expected Dussander to be good; he had expected Dussander to be great.

Boy, Todd thought with real disgust Boy oh boy.

He pulled the door open again. One hand, bunched with arthritis, unlatched the screen door. The hand pushed the screen door open just enough to wriggle through like a spider and close over the edge of the paper Todd was holding out. The boy saw with distaste that the old man’s fingernails were long and yellow and horny. It was a hand that had spent most of its waking hours holding one cigarette after another. Todd thought smoking was a filthy dangerous habit, one he himself would never take up. It really was a wonder that Dussander had lived as long as he had.

The old man tugged. ‘Give me my paper.’

‘Sure thing, Mr Dussander.’ Todd released his hold on the paper. The spider-hand yanked it inside. The screen closed.

‘My name is Denker,’ the old man said. ‘Not this Doo-Zander. Apparently you cannot read. What a pity. Good day.’

The door started to close again. Todd spoke rapidly into ‘ the narrowing gap. ‘Bergen-Belsen, January 1943 to June 1943, Auschwitz, June 1943 to June of 1944, Unterkommandant. Patin -‘

The door stopped again. The old man’s pouched and pallid face hung in the gap like a wrinkled, half-deflated balloon. Todd smiled.

‘You left Patin just ahead of the Russians. You got to Buenos Aires. Some people say you got rich there, investing the gold you took out of Germany in the drug trade. Whatever, you were in Mexico City from 1950 to 1952. Then -‘

‘Boy, you are crazy like a cuckoo bird.’ One of the arthritic fingers twirled circles around a misshapen ear. But the toothless mouth was quivering in an infirm, panicky way..

‘From 1952 until 1958,I don’t know,’ Todd said, smiling more widely still. ‘No one does, I guess, or at least they’re not telling. But an Israeli agent spotted you in Cuba, working as the concierge in a big hotel just before Castro took over. They lost you when the rebels came into Havana. You popped up in West Berlin in 1965. They almost got you.’ He pronounced the last two words as one: gotcha. At the same time he squeezed all of his fingers together into one large, wriggling fist. Dussander’s eyes dropped to those well-made and well-nourished American hands, hands that were made for building soapbox racers and Aurora models. Todd had done both. In fact, the year before, he and his dad had built a model of the Titanic. It had taken almost four months, and Todd’s father kept it in his office.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ Dussander said.

Without his false teeth, his words had a mushy sound Todd didn’t like. It didn’t sound … well, authentic. Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes sounded more like a Nazi than Dussander did. But in his time he must have been a real whiz. In an article on the death-camps in Men’s Action, the writer had called him The Blood-Fiend of Patin. ‘Get out of here, boy. Before I call the police.’

‘Gee, I guess you better call them, Mr Dussander. Or Heir Dussander, if you like that better.’ He continued to smile, showing perfect teeth that had been fluoridated since the beginning of his life and bathed thrice a day in Crest toothpaste for almost as long. ‘After 1965, no one saw you again … until I did, two months ago, on the downtown bus.’ ‘You’re insane.’

‘So if you want to call the police,’ Todd said, smiling, ‘you go right ahead. I’ll wait on the stoop. But if you don’t want to call them right away, why don’t I come in? We’ll talk.’

There was a long moment while the old man looked at the smiling boy. Birds twitted in the trees. On the next block a power mower was running, and far off, on busier streets, horns honked out their own rhythm of life and commerce.

In spite of everything, Todd felt the onset of doubt He couldn’t be wrong, could he? Was there some mistake on his part? He didn’t think so, but this was no schoolroom exercise. It was real life. So he felt a surge of relief (mild relief, he assured himself later) when Dussander said: ‘You may come in for a moment, if you like. But only because I do not wish to make trouble for you, you understand?’

‘Sure, Mr Dussander,’ Todd said. He opened the screen and came into the hall. Dussander closed the door behind them, shutting off the morning.

The house smelted stale and slightly malty. It smelted the way Todd’s own house smelted sometimes the morning after his folks had thrown a party and before his mother had had a chance to air it out. But this smell was worse. It was lived-in and ground-in. It was liquor, fried food, sweat, old clothes, and some stinky medicinal smell like Vicks or Mentholatum. It was dark in the hallway, and Dussander was standing too close, his head hunched into the collar of his robe like the head of a vulture waiting for some hurt animal to give up the ghost. In that instant, despite the stubble and the loosely hanging flesh, Todd could see the man who had stood inside the black SS uniform more clearly than he had ever seen him on the street. And he felt a sudden lancet of fear slide into his belly. Mild fear, he amended later.

‘I should tell you “that if anything happens to me -‘ he began, and then Dussander shuffled past him and into the living room, his slippers wish-wishing on the floor. He flapped a contemptuous hand at Todd, and Todd felt a flush of hot blood mount into his throat and cheeks.

Todd followed him, his smile wavering for the first time. He had not pictured it happening quite like this. But it would work out. Things would come into focus. Of course they would. Things always did. He began to smile again as he stepped into the living room.

It was another disappointment – and how! – but one he supposed he should have been prepared for. There was of course no oil portrait of Hitler with his forelock dangling and eyes that followed you. No medals in cases, no ceremonial sword mounted on the wall, no Luger or PPK Walther on the mantle (there was, in fact, no mantle). Of course, Todd told himself, the guy would have to be crazy to put any of those things out where people could see them. Still, it was hard to put everything you saw in the movies or on TV out of your head. It looked like the living room of any old man living alone on a slightly frayed pension. The fake fireplace was faced with fake bricks. A Westclox hung over it. There was a black and white Motorola TV on a stand; the tips of the rabbit ears had been wrapped in aluminium foil to improve reception. The floor was covered with a grey rug; its nap was balding. The magazine rack by the sofa held copies of National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and the LA Times. Instead of Hitler or a ceremonial sword hung on the wall, there was a framed certificate of citizenship and a picture of a woman in a funny hat. Dussander later told him that sort of hat was called a cloche, and they had been popular in the twenties and thirties.

‘My wife,’ Dussander said sentimentally. ‘She died in 1955 of a lung disease. At that time I was a draughtsman at the Menschler Motor Works in Essen. I was heartbroken.’

Todd continued to smile. He crossed the room as if to get a better look at the woman in the picture. Instead of looking at the picture, he fingered the shade on a small table-lamp.

‘Stop that? Dussander barked harshly. Todd jumped back a little.

That was good,’ he said sincerely. ‘Really commanding. It was Use Koch who had the lampshades made out of human skin, wasn’t it? And she was the one who had the trick with the little glass tubes.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Dussander said. There was a package of Kools, the kind with no filter, on top of the TV. He offered them to Todd. ‘Cigarette?’ he asked, and grinned. His grin was hideous.

‘No. They give you lung cancer. My dad used to smoke, but he gave it up. He went to SmokeEnders.’

‘Did he?’ Dussander produced a wooden match from the pocket of his robe and scratched it indifferently on the plastic case of the Motorola. Puffing, he said: ‘Can you give me one reason why I shouldn’t call the police and tell them of the monstrous accusations you’ve just made? One reason? Speak quickly, boy. The telephone is just down the hall. Your father would spank you, I think. You would sit for dinner on a cushion for a week or so, eh?’

‘My parents don’t believe in spanking. Corporal punishment causes more problems than it cures.’ Todd’s eyes suddenly gleamed. ‘Did you spank any of them? The women? Did you take off their clothes and -‘

With a muffled exclamation, Dussander started for the phone.

Todd said coldly: ‘You better not do that.’

Dussander turned. In measured tones that were spoiled only slightly by the fact that his false teeth were not in, he said: ‘I tell you this once, boy, and once only. My name is Arthur Denker. It has never been anything else; it has not even been Americanized. I was in fact named Arthur by my father, who greatly admired the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, It has never been Doo-Zander, nor Himmler, nor Father Christmas. I was a reserve lieutenant in the war. I never joined the Nazi party. In the battle of Berlin I fought for three years. I will admit that in the late thirties, when I was first married, I supported Hitler. He ended the depression and returned some of the pride we had lost in the aftermath of the sickening and unfair Treaty of Versailles. I suppose I supported him mostly because I got a job and there was tobacco again, and I didn’t need to hunt through the gutters when I needed to smoke. I thought, in the late thirties, that he was a great man. In his own way, perhaps he was. But at the end he was mad, directing phantom armies at the whim of an astrologer. He even gave Blondi, his dog, a death-capsule. The act of a madman; by the end they were all madmen, singing the Horst Wessel Song as they fed poison to their children. On 2 May 1945, my regiment gave up to the Americans. I remember that a private soldier named Hackermeyer gave me a chocolate bar. I wept. There was no reason to fight on; the war was over, and really had been since February. I was interned at Essen and was treated very well. We listened to the Nuremberg trials on the radio and when Goering committed suicide, I traded fourteen American cigarettes for half a bottle of schnapps and got drunk. I was released in January of 1946. At the Essen Motor Works I put wheels on cars until 1963, when I retired and emigrated to the United States. To come here was a lifelong ambition. In 1967 I became a citizen. I am an American. I vote. No Buenos Aires. No drug dealing. No Berlin. No Cuba.’ He pronounced it Koo-ba. ‘And now, unless you leave, I make my telephone call.’

He watched Todd do nothing. Then he went down the hall and picked up the telephone. Still Todd stood in the living room, beside the table with the small lamp on it.

Dussander began to dial. Todd watched him, his heart speeding up until it was drumming in his chest. After the fourth number, Dussander turned and looked at him. His shoulders sagged. He put the phone down.

‘A boy,’ he breathed. ‘A boy:

Todd smiled widely but rather modestly.

‘How did you find out?’

‘One piece of luck and a lot of hard work,’ Todd said There’s this friend of mine, Harold Pegler his name is, only all the kids call him Foxy. He plays second base for our team. And his dad’s got all these magazines out in his garage. Great big stacks of them. War magazines. They’re old. I looked for some new ones, but the guy who runs the newsstand across from the school says most of them went out of business. In most of them there’s pictures of Krauts – German soldiers, I mean – and Japs torturing these women. And articles about the concentration camps. I really groove on all that concentration camp stuff.’

‘You … groove on it.’ Dussander was staring at him, one hand rubbing up and down on his cheek, producing a very small sandpapery sound.

‘Groove. You know. I get off on it. I’m interested.’

He remembered that day in Foxy’s garage as clearly as anything in his life – more clearly, he suspected. He remembered in the fourth grade, before Careers Day, how Mrs Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of her big front teeth) had talked to them about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST.

‘It comes all at once,’ Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. ‘You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That’s why Careers Day is so important, children – it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.’ And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out not to be teaching the fourth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards.

Todd had thought Mrs Anderson was full of bullspit at the time, but that day in Foxy’s garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if maybe she hadn’t been right after all.

The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were brush-fires. He remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. He remembered Foxy’s crewcut, and the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the front of it He remembered everything.

‘I know there’s comics here someplace,’ Foxy had said. His mother had a hangover and had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise. ‘Neat ones. They’re Westerns, mostly, but there’s some Turok, Son of Stones and_’

‘What are those?’ Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons under the stairs.

‘Ah, they’re no good,’ Foxy said. ‘True war stories, mostly. Boring.’

‘Can I look at some?’

‘Sure. I’ll find the comics.’

But by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to read comics. He was lost. Utterly lost.

It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.

It had been like that. He had known about the war, of course – not the stupid one going on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks in black pyjamas – but World War II. He knew that the Americans wore round helmets with net on them and the Krauts wore sort of square ones. He knew that the Americans won most of the battles and that the Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot them from Germany onto London. He had even known something about the concentration camps.

The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines under the stairs in Foxy’s garage was like the difference between being told about germs and then actually seeing them in a microscope, squirming around and alive.

Here was Use Koch. Here were crematoriums with their doors standing open on their soot-clotted hinges. Here were officers in SS uniforms and prisoners in striped uniforms. The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires burning out of control on the east of Santo Donate, and he could feel the old paper crumbling against the pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no longer in Foxy’s garage but caught somewhere crosswise in time, trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those things, that somebody had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those things, and his head began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and his eyes were hot and strained, but he read on, and from a column of print beneath a picture of tangled bodies at a place called Dachau, this figure jumped out at him:

6,000,000

And he thought: Somebody goofed there, somebody added a zero or two, that’s three times as many people as there are in LA! But then, in another magazine (the cover of this one showed a woman chained to a wall while a guy in a Nazi uniform approached her with a poker in his hand and a grin on his face), he saw it again:

6,000,000

His headache got worse. His mouth went dry. Dimly, from some distance, he heard Foxy saying he had to go in for supper. Todd asked Foxy if he could stay out here in the garage and read while Foxy ate. Foxy gave him a look of mild puzzlement, shrugged, and said sure. And Todd read, hunched over the boxes of the old true war magazines, until his mother called and asked if he was ever going to go home.

Like a key turning in a lock.

All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were continued at the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and helmets as well as Magic Trusses and Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German flags emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as well as correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes to short men. They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.

Like falling in love.

Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything about it — a yellowing pin-up calendar for a defunct year on the back wall, the oil-stain on the cement floor, the way the magazines had been tied together with orange twine. He remembered how his headache had gotten a little worse each time he thought of that incredible number,

6,000,000

He remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in those places. Everything. And I want to know which is more true – the words, or the ads they put beside the words.

He remembered Bugs Anderson as he at last pushed the boxes back under the stairs and thought: She was right. I’ve found my GREA T INTEREST.

Dussander looked at Todd for a long time. Then he crossed the living room and sat down heavily in a rocking chair. He looked at Todd again, unable to analyze the slightly dreamy, slightly nostalgic expression on the boy’s face.

‘Yeah. It was the magazines that got me interested, but I figured a lot of what they said was just, you know, bullspit. So I went to the library and found out a lot more stuff. Some of it was even neater. At first the crummy librarian didn’t want me to look at any of it because it was in the adult section of the library, but I told her it was for school. If it’s for school they have to let you have it. She called my dad, though.’ Todd’s eyes turned up scornfully. ‘Like she thought dad didn’t know what I was doing, if you can dig that.’

‘He did know?’

‘Sure. My dad thinks kids should find out about life as soon as they can – the bad as well as the good. Then they’ll be ready for it. He says life is a tiger you have to grab by the tail, and if you don’t know the nature of the beast it will eat you up.’

‘Mmmmm,’ Dussander said.

‘My mom thinks the same way.’

‘Mmmmm.’ Dussander looked dazed, not quite sure where he was.

‘Anyhow,’ Todd said, ‘the library stuff was real good.

They must have had a hundred books with stuff in them about the Nazi concentration camps, just here in the Santa Donate library. A lot of people must like to read about that stuff. There weren’t as many pictures as in Foxy’s dad’s magazines, but the other stuff was real gooshy. Chairs with spikes sticking up through the seats. Pulling out gold teeth with pliers. Poison gas that came out of the showers.’ Todd shook his head. ‘You guys just went overboard, you know that? You really did.’

‘Gooshy,’ Dussander said heavily.

‘I really did do a research paper, and you know what I got on it? An A Plus. Of course I had to be careful. You have to write that stuff in a certain way. You got to be careful.’

‘Do you?’ Dussander asked. He took another cigarette with a hand that trembled.

‘Oh yeah. All those library books, they read a certain way. Like the guys who wrote them got puking sick over what they were writing about’ Todd was frowning, wrestling with the thought, trying to bring it out The fact that tone, as that word is applied to writing, wasn’t yet in his vocabulary, made it more difficult ‘They all write like they lost a lot of sleep over it How we’ve got to be careful so nothing like that ever happens again. I made my paper like that, and I guess the teacher gave me an A just ’cause I read the source material without losing my lunch.’ Once more, Todd smiled winningly.

Dussander dragged heavily on his unfiltered Kool. The tip trembled slightly. As he feathered smoke out of his nostrils, he coughed an old man’s dank, hollow cough. ‘I can hardly believe this conversation is taking place,’ he said. He leaned forward and peered closely at Todd. ‘Boy, do you know the word “existentialism”?’

Todd ignored the question. ‘Did you ever meet Use Koch?’

‘Use Koch?’ Almost inaudibly, Dussander said: ‘Yes. I met her.’

‘Was she beautiful?’ Todd asked eagerly. ‘I mean …’ His hands described an hourglass in the air.

‘Surely you have seen her photograph?’ Dussander asked. ‘An aficionado such as yourself?’

‘What’s an af…aff…’

‘An aficionado,’ Dussander said, ‘is one who grooves. One who … gets off on something.’

‘Yeah? Cool.’ Todd’s grin, puzzled and weak for a moment, shone out triumphantly again. ‘Sure, I’ve seen her picture. But you know how they are in those books.’ He spoke as if Dussander had them all. ‘Black and white, fuzzy … just snapshots. None of those guys knew they were taking pictures for, you know, history. Was she really stacked?’

‘She was fat and dumpy and she had bad skin,’ Dussander said shortly. He crushed his cigarette out half-smoked in a Table Talk pie dish filled with dead butts.

‘Oh. Golly.’ Todd’s face fell.

‘Just luck,’ Dussander mused, looking at Todd. ‘You saw my picture in a war-adventures magazine and happened to ride next to me on the bus. Tcha!’ He brought a fist down on the arm of his easy chair, but without much force.

‘No sir, Mr Dussander. There was more to it than that. A lot’ Todd added earnestly, leaning forward.

‘Oh? Really?’ The bushy eyebrows rose, signalling polite disbelief.

‘Sure. I mean, the pictures of you in my scrapbook were all thirty years old, at least. I mean, it is 1974.’

‘You keep a … a scrapbook?’

‘Oh, yes, sir! It’s a good one. Hundreds of pictures. Ill show it to you sometime. You’ll go ape.’

Dussander’s face pulled into a revolted grimace, but he said nothing.

The first couple of times I saw you, I wasn’t sure at all. And then you got on the bus one day when it was raining, and you had this shiny black slicker on -‘

‘That,’ Dussander breathed.

‘Sure. There was a picture of you in a coat like that in one of the magazines out in Foxy’s garage. Also, a photo of you in your SS greatcoat in one of the library books. And when I saw you that day, I just said to myself, “It’s for sure. That’s Kurt Dussander.” So I started to shadow you -‘

‘You did what?’

‘Shadow you. Follow you. My ambition is to be a private detective like Sam Spade in the books, or Mannix on TV. Anyway, I was super careful. I didn’t want you to get wise. Want to look at some pictures?’

Todd took a folded-over manilla envelope from his back pocket. Sweat had stuck the flap down. He peeled it back carefully. His eyes were sparkling like a boy thinking about his birthday, or Christmas, or the firecrackers he will shoot off on the Fourth of July.

‘You took pictures of me?”

‘Oh, you bet I got this little camera. A Kodak. It’s thin and flat and fits right into your hand. Once you get the hang of it, you can take pictures of the subject just by holding the camera in your hand and spreading your fingers enough to let the lens peek through. Then you hit the button with your thumb.’ Todd laughed modestly. ‘I got the hang of it but I took a lot of pictures of my fingers while I did. I hung right in there, though. I think a person can do anything if they try hard enough, you know it? It’s corny but true.’

Kurt Dussander had begun to look white and ill, shrunken inside his robe. ‘Did you have these pictures finished by a commercial developer, boy?’

‘Huh?’ Todd looked shocked and startled, then contemptuous. ‘No! What do you think I am, stupid? My dad’s got a darkroom. I’ve been developing my own pictures since I was nine.’

Dussander said nothing, but he relaxed a little and some colour came back into his face.

Todd handed him several glossy prints, the rough edges confirming that they had been home-developed. Dussander went through them, silently grim. Here he was sitting erect in a window-seat of the downtown bus, with a copy of the latest James Michener, Centennial, in his hands. Here he was at the Devon Avenue bus stop, his umbrella cocked under his arm and his head cocked back at an angle which suggested De Gaulle at his most imperial. Here he was standing on line just under the marquee of the Majestic Theatre, erect and silent, conspicuous among the leaning teenagers and blank-faced housewives in curlers by his height and his bearing. Finally, here he was peering into his own mailbox.

‘I was scared you might see me on that one,’ Todd said. ‘It was a calculated risk. I was right across the street Boy oh boy, I wish I could afford a Minolta with a telephoto lens. Someday …’ Todd looked wistful.

‘No doubt you had a story ready, just in case.’

‘I was going to ask you if you’d seen my dog. Anyway, after I developed the pix, I compared them to these.’

He handed Dussander three Xeroxed photographs. He had seen them all before, many times. The first showed him in his office at the Eatin resettlement camp; it had been cropped so nothing showed but him and the Nazi flag on its stand by his desk. The second was a picture that had been taken on the day of his enlistment The last showed him shaking hands with Heinrich Clucks, who had been subordinate only to Himmler himself.

‘I was pretty sure then, but I couldn’t see if you had the harelip because of your goshdamn moustache. But I had to be sure, so I got this.’

He handed over the last sheet from his envelope. It had been folded over many times. Dirt was grimed into the creases. The corners were lopped and milled – the way papers get when they spend a long time in the pockets of young boys who have no shortage of things to do and places to go. It was a copy of the Israeli want-sheet on Kurt Dussander. Holding it in his hands, Dussander reflected on corpses that were unquiet and refused to stay buried.

‘I took your fingerprints,’ Todd said, smiling. ‘And then I did the compares to the one on the sheet.’

Dussander gaped at him and then uttered the German word for shit ‘You did not!’

‘Sure I did. My mom and dad gave me a fingerprint set for Christmas last year. A real one, not just a toy. It had the powder and three brushes for three different surfaces and special paper for lifting them. My folks know I want to be a PI when I grow up. Of course, they think I’ll grow out of it’ He dismissed this idea with a disinterested lift and drop of his shoulders. ‘The book explained all about whorls and lands and points of similarity. They’re called compares. You need eight compares for a fingerprint to get accepted in court

‘So anyway, one day when you were at the movies, I came here and dusted your mailbox and doorknob and lifted all the prints I could. Pretty smart, huh?’

Dussander said nothing. He was clutching the arms of his chair, and his toothless, deflated mouth was trembling. Todd didn’t like that. It made him look like he was on the verge of tears. That, of course, was ridiculous. The Blood Fiend of Patin in tears? You might as well expect Chevrolet to go bankrupt or McDonald’s to give up burgers and start selling caviar and truffles.

‘I got two sets of prints,’ Todd said. ‘One of them didn’t look anything like the ones on the wanted poster. I figured those were the postman’s. The rest were yours. I found more than eight compares. I found fourteen good ones.’ He grinned. ‘And that’s how I did it.’

‘You are a little bastard,’ Dussander said, and for a moment his eyes shone dangerously. Todd felt a tingling little thrill, as he had in the hall. Then Dussander slumped back again.

‘Who have you told?’

‘No one.’

‘Not even this friend? This Cony Pegler?’

‘Foxy. Foxy Pegler. Nah, he’s a blabbermouth. I haven’t told anybody. There’s nobody I trust that much.’

‘What do you want? Money? There is none, I’m afraid. In South America there was, although it was nothing as romantic or dangerous as the drug trade. There is – there was – a kind of “old boy network” in Brazil and Paraguay and Santo Domingo. Fugitives from the war. I became part of their circle and made a fortune in minerals and ores – tin, copper, bauxite. Then the changes came. Nationalism, anti-Americanism. I might have ridden out the changes, but then Weisenthal’s men caught my scent. Bad luck follows bad luck, boy, like dogs after a bitch in heat. Twice they almost had me; once I heard the Jew-bastards in the next room.

‘They hung Eichmann,’ he whispered. One hand went to his neck, and his eyes had become as round as the eyes of a child listening to the darkest passage of a scary tale – Hansel and Gretel, perhaps, or Bluebeard. ‘He was an old man, of no danger to anyone. He was apolitical. Still, they hung him.’

Todd nodded.

‘At last, I went to the only people who could help me. They had helped others, and I could run no more.’

‘You went to the Odessa?’ Todd asked eagerly.

‘To the Sicilians,’ Dussander said dryly, and Todd’s face fell again. ‘It was arranged. False papers, false past. Would you care for a drink, boy?’

‘Sure. You got a Coke?’

‘No Coke.’ He pronounced it Kok.

‘Milk?’

‘Milk.’ Dussander went through the archway and into the kitchen. A fluorescent bar buzzed into life. ‘I live now on stock dividends,’ his voice came back. ‘Stocks I picked up after the war under yet another name. Through a bank in the State of Maine, if you please. The banker who bought them for me went to jail for murdering his wife a year after I bought them … life is sometimes strange, boy, hein?’

A refrigerator door opened and closed.

“The Sicilian jackals didn’t know about those stocks,’ he said. Today they are everywhere, but in those days, Boston was as far north as they could be found. If they had known, they would have had those as well. They would have picked me clean and sent me to America to starve on welfare and food stamps.’

Todd heard a cupboard door open; he heard liquid poured into a glass.

‘A little General Motors, a little American Telephone and Telegraph, a hundred and fifty shares of Revion. All this banker’s choices. Dufresne, his name was – I remember, because it sounds a little like mine. It seems he was not so smart at wife-killing as he was at picking growth stocks. The crime passionnel, boy. It only proves that all men are donkeys who can read.’

He came back into the room, slippers whispering. He held two green plastic glasses that looked like the premiums they sometimes give out at gas station openings. When you filled your tank, you got a free glass. Dussander thrust a glass at Todd.

‘I lived adequately on the stock portfolio this Dufresne had set up for me for the first five years. But then I sold my Diamond Match stock in order to buy this house and a small cottage not far from Big Sur. Then, inflation. Recession. I sold the cottage and one by one I sold the stocks, many of them at fantastic profits. I wish to God I had bought more. But I thought I was well-protected in other directions; the stocks were, as you Americans say, a “flier”…’ He made a toothless hissing sound and snapped his fingers.

Todd was bored. He had not come here to listen to Dussander whine about his money or mutter about his stocks. The thought of blackmailing Dussander had never crossed Todd’s mind. Money? What would he do with it? He had his allowance; he had his paper route. If his monetary needs went higher than what these could provide during any given week, there was always someone who needed his lawn mowed.

Todd lifted his milk to his lips and then hesitated. His smile shone out again … an admiring smile. He extended the gas-station premium glass to Dussander.

‘ You have some of it,’ he said slyly.

Dussander stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending, and then rolled his bloodshot eyes. ‘Gruss Gott!’ He took the glass, swallowed twice, and handed it back. ‘No gasping for breath. No clawing at the throat. No smell of bitter almonds. It is milk, boy. Milk. From the Dairylea Farms. On the carton is a picture of a smiling cow.’

Todd watched him warily for a moment, then took a small sip. Yes, it tasted like milk, sure did, but somehow he didn’t feel very thirsty anymore. He put the glass down. Dussander shrugged, raised his own glass – it contained a large knock of whiskey – and took a swallow. He smacked his lips over it.

‘Schnapps?’ Todd asked.

‘Bourbon. Ancient Age. Very nice. And cheap.’

Todd fiddled his fingers along the seams of his jeans.

‘So,’ Dussander said, ‘if you have decided to have a “flier” of your own, you should be aware that you have picked a worthless stock.’

‘Huh?’

‘Blackmail,’ Dussander said. ‘Isn’t that what they call it on Mannix and Hawaii Five-O and Barnaby Jones? Extortion. If that was what-‘

But Todd was laughing – hearty, boyish laughter. He shook his head, tried to speak, could not, and went on laughing.

‘No,’ Dussander said, and suddenly he looked grey and more frightened than he had since he and Todd had begun to speak. He took another large swallow of his drink, grimaced, and shuddered ‘I see that is not it … at least, not the extortion of money. But, though you laugh, I smell extortion in it somewhere. What is it? Why do you come here and disturb an old man! Perhaps, as you say, I was once a Nazi. Gestapo, even. Now I am only old, and to have a bowel movement I have to use a suppository. So what do you want?’

Todd had sobered again. He stared at Dussander with an open and appealing frankness. ‘Why … I want to hear about it. That’s all. That’s all I want. Really.’

‘Hear about it?’ Dussander echoed. He looked utterly perplexed.

Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. ‘Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall into them. The …’ His tongue came out and wetted his lips. ‘The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.’

Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. ‘You are a monster,’ he said softly.

Todd sniffed. ‘According to the books I read for my report, you’re the monster, Mr Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five-hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh boy.’

‘All of that is a filthy American lie,’ Dussander said, stung. He set his glass down with a bang, slopping bourbon onto his hands and the table. The problem was not of my making, nor was the solution. I was given orders and directives, which I followed.’

Todd’s smile widened; it was now almost a smirk.

‘Oh, I know how the Americans have distorted that,’ Dussander muttered. ‘But your own politicians make our Dr Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and “peaceniks”. For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country’s unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.’ He toasted his glass in Todd’s direction. ‘Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.’ He drank and then had a coughing fit that brought thin colour to his cheeks.

Through most of this Todd fidgeted the way he did when his parents discussed whatever had been on the news that night – good old Walter Klondike, his dad called him. He didn’t care about Dussander’s politics any more than he cared about Dussander’s stocks. His idea was that people made up politics so they could do things. Like when he wanted to feel around under Sharon Ackerman’s dress last year. Sharon said it was bad for him to want to do that, even though he could tell from her tone of voice that the idea sort of excited her. So he told her he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up and then she let him. That was politics. He wanted to hear about German doctors trying to mate women with dogs, putting identical twins into refrigerators to see whether they would die at the same time or if one of them would last longer, and electroshock therapy, and operations without anaesthetic, and German soldiers raping all the women they wanted. The rest was just so much tired bullshit to cover up the gooshy stuff after someone came along and put a stop to it

‘If I hadn’t followed orders, I would have been dead.’ Dussander was breathing hard, his upper body rocking back and forth in the chair, making the springs squeak. A little cloud of liquor-smell hung around him. “There was always the Russian front, nicht wahr! Our leaders were madmen, granted, but does one argue with madmen … especially when the maddest of them all has the luck of Satan? He escaped a brilliant assassination attempt by inches. Those who conspired were strangled with piano-wire, strangled slowly. Their death-agonies were filmed for the edification of the elite-‘

‘Yeah! Neat!’ Todd cried impulsively. ‘Did you see that movie?’

‘Yes. I saw. We all saw what happened to those unwilling or unable to run before the wind and wait for the storm to end. What we did then was the right thing. For that time and that place, it was the right thing. I would do it again. But…’

His eyes dropped to his glass. It was empty.

‘… but I don’t wish to speak of it, or even think of it. What we did was motivated only by survival, and nothing about survival is pretty. I had dreams …’He slowly took a cigarette from the box on the TV. ‘Yes. For years I had them. Blackness, and sounds in the blackness. Tractor engines. Bulldozer engines. Gunbutts thudding against what might have been frozen earth, or human skulls. Whistles, sirens, pistol-shots, screams. The doors of cattle-cars rumbling open on cold winter afternoons.

Then, in my dreams, all sounds would stop – and eyes would open in the dark, gleaming like the eyes of animals in a rainforest For many years I lived on the edge of the jungle, and I suppose that is why it is always the jungle I smelled and felt in those dreams. When I woke from them I would be drenched with sweat, my heart thundering in my chest, my hand stuffed into my mouth to stifle the screams. And I would think: the dream is the truth. Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba … those places are the dream. In the reality I am still at Patin. The Russians are closer today than yesterday. Some of them are remembering that in 1943 they had to eat frozen German corpses to stay alive. Now they long to drink hot German blood. There were rumours, boy, that some of them did just that when they crossed into Germany: cut the throats of some prisoners and drank their blood out of a boot. I would wake up and think: The work must go on, if only so there is no evidence of what we did here, or so little that the world, which doesn’t want to believe it, won’t have to. I would think: The work must go on if we are to survive.’

Unlike what had gone before, Todd listened to this with close attention and great interest This was pretty good, but he was sure there would be better stuff in the days ahead. All Dussander needed was a little prodding. Heck, he was lucky. Lots of men his age were senile.

Dussander dragged deeply on his cigarette. ‘Later, after the dreams went away, there were days when I would think I had seen someone from Patin. Never guards or fellow officers, always inmates. I remember one afternoon in West Germany, ten years ago. There was an accident on the autobahn. Traffic was frozen in every lane. I sat in my Morris, listening to the radio, waiting for the traffic to move. I looked to my right. There was a very old Simca in the next lane, and the man behind the wheel was looking at me. He was perhaps fifty, and he looked ill. There was a scar on his cheek. His hair was white, short, cut badly. I looked away. The minutes passed and still the traffic didn’t move. I began snatching glances at the man in the Simca. Every time I did, he was looking at me, his face as still as death, his eyes sunken in their sockets. I became convinced he had been at Patin. He had been there and he had recognized me.’

Dussander wiped a hand across his eyes.

‘It was winter. The man was wearing an overcoat. But I was convinced that if I got out of my car and went to him, made him take off his coat and push up his shirtsleeves, I would see the number on his arm.

. ‘At last the traffic began to move again. I pulled away from the Simca. If the jam had lasted another ten minutes, I believe I would have gotten out of my car and pulled the old man out of his. I would have beaten him, number or no number. I would have beaten him for looking at me that way.

‘Shortly after that, I left Germany forever.’

‘Lucky for you,’ Todd said.

Dussander shrugged. ‘It was the same everywhere. Havana, Mexico City, Rome. I was in Rome for three years, you know. I would see a man looking at me over his capuccino in a cafe … a woman in a hotel lobby who seemed more interested in me than in her magazine … a waiter in a restaurant who would keep glancing at me no matter who he was serving. I would become convinced that these people were studying me, and that night the dream would come – the sounds, the jungle, the eyes.

‘But when I came to America I put it out of my mind. I go to movies. I eat out once a week, always at one of those fast-food places that are so clean and so well-lighted by fluorescent bars. Here at my house I do jigsaw puzzles and I read novels – most of them bad ones – and watch TV. At night I drink until I’m sleepy. The dreams don’t come anymore. When I see someone looking at me in the supermarket or the library or the tobacconist’s, I think it must be because I look like their grandfather … or an old teacher … or a neighbour in a town they left some years ago.’ He shook his head at Todd. ‘Whatever happened at Patin, it happened to another man. Not to me.’

‘Great!’ Todd said. ‘I want to hear all about it.’

Dussander’s eyes squeezed closed, and then opened slowly. ‘You don’t understand. I do not wish to speak of it.’

‘You will, though. If you don’t, I’l1 tell everyone who you are.’

Dussander stared at him, grey-faced. ‘I knew,’ he said, ‘that I would find the extortion sooner or later.’

Today I want to hear about the gas ovens,’ Todd said. ‘How you baked the Jews.’ His smile beamed out, rich and radiant. ‘But put your teeth in before you start You look better with your teeth in.’

Dussander did as he was told. He talked to Todd about the gas ovens until Todd had to go home for lunch. Every time he tried to slip over into generalities, Todd would frown severely and ask him specific questions to get him back on the track. Dussander drank a great deal as he talked. He didn’t smite.

Todd smiled. Todd smiled enough for both of them.

2

August, 1974.

They sat on Dussander’s back porch under a cloudless, smiling sky. Todd was wearing jeans, Keds, and his Little League shirt Dussander was wearing a baggy grey shirt and shapeless khaki pants held up with suspenders – wino-pants, Todd thought with private contempt; they looked like they had come straight from a box in the back of the Salvation Army store downtown. He was really going to have to do something about the way Dussander dressed when he was at home. It spoiled some of the fun.

The two of them were eating Big Macs that Todd had brought in his bike basket, pedalling fast so they wouldn’t get cold. Todd was sipping a Coke through a plastic straw. Dussander had a glass of bourbon.

His old man’s voice rose and fell, papery, hesitant, sometimes nearly inaudible. His faded blue eyes, threaded with the usual snaps of red, were never still. An observer might have thought them grandfather and grandson, the latter perhaps attending some rite of passage, a handing down.

‘And that’s all I remember,’ Dussander finished presently, and took a large bite of his sandwich. McDonald’s Secret Sauce dribbled down his chin.

‘You can do better than that,’ Todd said softly.

Dussander took a large swallow from his glass. “The uniforms were made of paper,’ he said finally, almost snarling. ‘When one inmate died, the uniform was passed on if it could still be worn. Sometimes one paper uniform could . dress as many as forty inmates. I received high marks for my frugality.’

‘From Glucks?’

‘From Himmler.’

‘But there was a clothing factory in Patin. You told me that just last week. Why didn’t you have the uniforms made there? The inmates themselves could have made them.’

“The job of the factory in Patin was to make uniforms for German soldiers. And as for us…’ Dussander’s voice faltered for a moment, and then he forced himself to go on. ‘We were not in the business of rehabilitation,’ he finished.

Todd smiled his broad smile.

‘Enough for today? Please? My throat is sore.’

‘You shouldn’t smoke so much, then,’ Todd said, continuing to smile. ‘Tell me some more about the uniforms.’

‘Which? Inmate or SS?’ Dussander’s voice was resigned.

Smiling, Todd said: ‘Both.’

 

3

September, 1974.

Todd was in the kitchen of his house, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You got to the kitchen by going up half a dozen redwood steps to a raised area that gleamed with chrome and Formica. His mother’s electric typewriter had been going steadily ever since Todd had gotten home from school. She was typing a master’s thesis for a grad student. The grad student had short hair, wore thick glasses, and looked like a creature from outer space, in Todd’s humble opinion. The thesis was on the effect of fruitflies in the Salinas Valley after World War II, or some good shit like that. Now her typewriter stopped and she came out of her office.

Todd-baby,’ she greeted him.

‘Monica-baby,’ he hailed back, amiably enough.

His mother wasn’t a bad-looking chick for thirty-six, Todd thought; blonde hair that was streaked ash in a couple of places, tall, shapely, now dressed in dark red shorts and a sheer blouse of a warm whiskey colour – the blouse was casually knotted below her breasts, putting her flat, unlined midriff on show. A typewriter eraser was tucked into her hair, which had been pinned carelessly back with a turquoise clip.

‘So how’s school?’ she asked him, coming up the steps into the kitchen. She brushed his lips casually with hers and then slid onto one of the stools in front of the breakfast counter.

‘School’s cool.’

‘Going to be on the honour roll again?’

‘Sure.’ Actually, he thought his grades might slip a notch this first quarter. He had been spending a lot of time with Dussander, and when he wasn’t actually with the old Kraut, he was thinking about the things Dussander had told him. Once or twice he had dreamed about the things Dussander had told him. But it was nothing he couldn’t handle.

‘Apt pupil,’ she said, ruffling his shaggy blond hair. ‘How’s that sandwich?’

‘Good,’ he said.

‘Would you make me one and bring it into my office?”

‘Can’t,’ he said, getting up. ‘I promised Mr Denker I’d come over and read to him for an hour or so.’

‘Are you still on Robinson Crusoe?’

‘Nope.’ He showed her the spine of a thick book he had bought in a junk shop for twenty cents. ‘Tom Jones.’

‘Ye gods and little fishes! It’ll take you the whole school-year to get through that, Todd-baby. Couldn’t you at least find an abridged edition, like with Crusoe?’

‘Probably, but he wanted to hear all of this one. He said so.’

‘Oh.’ She looked at him for a moment, then hugged him. It was rare for her to be so demonstrative, and it made Todd a little uneasy. ‘You’re a peach to be taking so much of your spare time to read to him. Your father and I think it’s just… just exceptional.’

Todd cast his eyes down modestly.

‘And to not want to tell anybody,’ she said. ‘Hiding your light under a bushel.’

‘Oh, the kids I hang around with – they’d probably think I was some kind of weirdo,’ Todd said, smiling modestly down at the floor. ‘All that good shit.’

‘Don’t say that,’ she admonished absently. Then: ‘Do you think Mr Denker would like to come over and have dinner with us some night?’

‘Maybe,’ Todd said vaguely. ‘Listen, I gotta put an egg in my shoe and beat it.’

‘Okay. Supper at six-thirty. Don’t forget.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Your father’s got to work late so it’ll just be me and thee again, okay?’

‘Crazy, baby.’

She watched him go with a fond smile, hoping there was nothing in Tom Jones he shouldn’t be reading; he was only thirteen. She didn’t suppose there was. He was growing up in a society where magazines like Penthouse were available to anyone with a dollar and a quarter, or to any kid who could reach up to the top shelf of the magazine rack and grab a quick peek before the clerk could shout for him to put that up and get lost. In a society that seemed to believe most of all in the creed of hump thy neighbour, she didn’t think there could be much in a book two hundred years old to screw up Todd’s head — although she supposed the old man might get off on it a little. And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world’s a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, hell be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.

And there went the healthiest kid she knew, pedalling up the street on his Schwinn. We did okay by the lad, she thought, turning to make her sandwich. Damned if we didn’t do okay.

4

October, 1974.

Dussander had lost weight. They sat in the kitchen, the shopworn copy of Tom Jones between them on the oilcloth-covered table (Todd, who tried never to miss a trick, had purchased the Cliffs Notes on the book with part of his allowance and had carefully read the entire summary against the possibility that his mother or father might ask him questions about the plot). Todd was eating a Ring-Ding he had bought at the market. He had bought one for Dussander. but Dussander hadn’t touched it He only looked at it morosely from time to time as he drank his bourbon. Todd hated to see anything as tasty as Ring-Dings go to waste. If he didn’t eat it pretty quick, Todd was going to ask him if he could have it

‘So how did the stuff get to Patin?’ he asked Dussander.

‘In railroad cars,’ Dussander said. ‘In railroad cars labelled MEDICAL SUPPLIES. It came in long crates that looked like coffins. Fitting, I suppose. The inmates off-loaded the crates and stacked them in the infirmary. Later, our own men stacked them in the storage sheds. They did it at night. The storage sheds were behind the showers.’

‘Was it always Zyklon-B?’

‘No, from time to time we would be sent something else. Experimental gases. The High Command was always interested in improving efficiency. Once they sent us a gas code-named PEGASUS. A nerve-gas. Thank God they never sent it again. It -‘ Dussander saw Todd lean forward, saw those eyes sharpen, and he suddenly stopped and gestured casually with his gas-station-premium glass. ‘It didn’t work very well,’ he said. ‘It was … quite boring.’

But Todd was not fooled, not in the least. ‘What did it do?’

‘It killed them – what do you think it did, made them walk on water? It killed them, that’s all.’

Tell me.’

‘No,’ Dussander said, now unable to hide the horror he felt. He hadn’t thought of PEGASUS in … how long? Ten years? Twenty? ‘I won’t tell you! I refuse!’

Tell me,’ Todd repeated, licking chocolate icing from his fingers. Tell me or you know what’

Yes, Dussander thought I know what. Indeed I do, you putrid little monster.

‘It made them dance,’ he said reluctantly.

‘Dance?’

‘Like the Zyklon-B, it came in through the shower-heads. And they … they began to vomit, and to … to defecate helplessly.’

‘Wow,’ Todd said. ‘Shit themselves, huh?’ He pointed at the Ring-Ding on Dussander’s plate. He had finished his own. ‘You going to eat that?’

Dussander didn’t reply. His eyes were hazed with memory. His face was far away and cold, like the dark side of a planet which does not rotate. Inside his mind he felt the queerest combination of revulsion and – could it be? – nostalgia!

‘They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My men … they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them, either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that -it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling sound. The laughing.’

‘Yeah, I bet,’ Todd said. He finished Dussander’s Ring-Ding in two bites. Waste not, want not, Todd’s mother said on the rare occasions when Todd complained about left-overs. ‘That was a good story, Mr Dussander. You always tell them good. Once I get you going.’

Todd smiled at him. And incredibly – certainly not because he wanted to – Dussander found himself smiling back.

5

November, 1974.

Dick Bowden, Todd’s father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV actor named Lloyd Bochner. He – Bowden, not Bochner – was thirty-eight. He was a thin, narrow man who liked to dress in Ivy League style shirts and solid-colour suits, usually dark. When he was on a construction site, he wore khakis and a hard-hat that was a souvenir of his Peace Corps days, when he had helped to design and build two dams in Africa. When he was working in his study at home, he wore half-glasses that had a way of slipping down to the end of his nose and making him look like a college dean. He was wearing these glasses now as he tapped his son’s first-quarter report card against his desk’s gleaming glass top.

‘One B. Four Cs. One D. A D, for Christ’s sake! Todd,’ your mother’s not showing it, but she’s really upset.’

Todd dropped his eyes. He didn’t smile. When his dad swore, that wasn’t exactly the best of news.

‘My God, you’ve never gotten a report like this. A D in Beginning Algebra? What is this?’ ‘I don’t know, Dad.’ He looked humbly at his knees. ‘Your mother and I think that maybe you’ve been spending a little too much time with Mr Denker. Not hitting the books enough. We think you ought to cut it down to weekends, slugger. At least until we see where you’re going academically…’

Todd looked up, and for a single second Bowden thought he saw a wild, pallid anger in his son’s eyes. His own eyes widened, his fingers clenched on Todd’s buff-coloured report card … and then it was just Todd, looking at him openly if rather unhappily. Had that anger really been there? Surely not. But the moment had unsettled him, made it hard for him to know exactly how to proceed. Todd hadn’t been mad, and Dick Bowden didn’t want to make him mad. He and his son were friends, always had been friends, and Dick wanted things to stay that way. They had no secrets from each other, none at all (except for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful with his secretary, but that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you told your thirteen-year-old son, ‘was it? … and besides, that had absolutely no bearing on his home life, his, family life). That was the way it was supposed to be, the way it had to be in a cockamamie world where murderers went unpunished, high-school kids skin-popped heroin, and junior high schoolers – kids Todd’s age – turned up with VD.

‘No, Dad, please don’t do that. I mean, don’t punish Mr Denker for something that’s my fault. I mean, he’d be lost without me. I’ll do better. Really. That algebra … it just threw me to start with. But I went over to Ben Tremaine’s, and after we studied together for a few days, I started to get it. It just… I dunno, I sorta choked at first.’

‘I think you’re spending too much time with him,’ Bowden said, but he was weakening. It was hard to refuse Todd, hard to disappoint him, and what he said about punishing the old man for Todd’s falling-off… goddammit, it made sense. The old man looked forward to his visits so much.

That Mr Storrman, the algebra teacher, is really hard,’ Todd said. ‘Lots of kids got Ds. Three or four got Fs.’

Bowden nodded thoughtfully.

‘I won’t go Wednesdays anymore. Not until I bring my grades up.’ He had read his father’s eyes. ‘And instead of going out for anything at school, I’ll stay after every day and study. I promise.’

‘You really like the old guy that much?’

‘He’s really neat,’ Todd said sincerely.

‘Well… okay. We’ll try it your way, slugger. But I want to see a big improvement in your marks come January, you understand me? I’m thinking of your future. You may think junior high’s too soon to start thinking about that, but it’s not. Not by a long chalk.’ As his mother liked to say Waste not, want not, so Dick Bowden liked to say Not by a long chalk.

‘I understand, dad,’ Todd said gravely. Man to man stuff.

‘Get out of here and give those books a workout then.’ He pushed his half-glasses up on his nose and clapped Todd on the shoulder.

Todd’s smile, broad and bright, broke across his face. ‘Right on, dad!’

Bowden watched Todd go with a prideful smile of his own. One in a million. And that hadn’t been anger on Todd’s face. For sure. Pique, maybe … but not that high-voltage emotion he had at first thought he’d seen there. If Todd was that mad, he would have known; he could read his son like a book. It had always been that way.

Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a blueprint and bent over it

6

December, 1974.

The face that came in answer to Todd’s insistent finger on the bell was haggard and yellowed. The hair, which had been lush in July, had now begun to recede from the bony brow; it looked lustreless and brittle. Dussander’s body, thin to begin with, was now gaunt … although, Todd thought, he was nowhere near as gaunt as the inmates who had once been delivered into his hands.

Todd’s left hand had been behind his back when Dussander came to the door. Now he brought it out and handed a wrapped package to Dussander. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he yelled.

Dussander had cringed from the box; now he took it with no expression of pleasure or surprise. He handled it gingerly, as if it might contain explosive. Beyond the porch, it was raining. It had been raining off and on for almost a week, and Todd had carried the box inside his coat. It was wrapped in gay foil and ribbon.

‘What is it?’ Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the kitchen.

‘Open it and see.’

Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. ‘Better pull down the shades,’ he said confidentially.

Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander’s face. ‘Oh? Why?’

‘Well … you can never tell who’s looking,’ Todd said, smiling. ‘Isn’t that how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be looking before they saw you?’

Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a glass of bourbon. Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way boys so often wrap Christmas packages – boys who have more important things on their minds, things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature Feature you’ll watch with a friend who’s sleeping over, the two of you wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch, laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.

Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself. And later, when the horror had receded a little, he thought: / should have known,

It was a uniform. An SS uniform. Complete with jackboots.

He looked numbly from the contents of, the box to its cardboard cover: PETER’S QUALITY COSTUME CLOTHIERS – AT THE SAME LOCATION SINCE 1951!

‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I won’t put it on. This is where it ends, boy. I’ll die before I put it on.’

‘Remember what they did to Eichmann,’ Todd said solemnly. ‘He was an old man and he had no politics. Isn’t that what you said? Besides, I saved the whole fall for it. It cost over eighty bucks, with the boots thrown in. You didn’t mind wearing it in 1944, either. Not at all.’

‘You little bastard? Dussander raised one fist over his head. Todd didn’t flinch at all. He stood his ground, eyes shining.

‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘Go ahead and touch me. You just

touch me once.’

Dussander lowered the hand. His lips were quivering. ‘You are a fiend from hell,’ he muttered.

‘Put it on,’ Todd invited.

Dussander’s hands went to the tie of his robe and paused there. His eyes, sheeplike and begging, looked into Todd’s. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I am an old man. No more.’

Todd shook his head slowly but firmly. His eyes were still shining. He liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once. The inmates at Patin.

Dussander let the robe fall to the floor and stood naked except for his slippers and his boxer shorts. His chest was sunken, his belly slightly bloated. His arms were scrawny old man’s arms. But the uniform, Todd thought The uniform will make a difference.

Slowly, Dussander took the tunic out of the box and began to put it on.

Ten minutes later he stood fully dressed in the SS uniform. The cap was slightly askew, the shoulders slumped, but still the death’s-head insignia stood out clearly. Dussander had a dark dignity – at least in Todd’s eyes – that he had not possessed earlier. In spite of his slump, in spite of the cockeyed angle of his feet, Todd was pleased. For the first time Dussander looked to Todd as Todd believed he should look. Older, yes. Defeated, certainly. But in uniform again. Not an old man spinning away his sunset years watching Lawrence Welk on a cruddy black and white TV with tinfoil on the rabbit-ears, but Kurt Dussander, the Blood Fond of Patin.

As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort … and a mild, sneaking sense of relief. He partly despised this latter emotion, recognizing it as the truest indicator yet of the psychological domination the boy had established over him. He was the boy’s prisoner, and every time he found he could live through yet another indignity, every time he felt that mild relief, the boy’s power grew. And yet he was relieved. It was only cloth and buttons and snaps … and it was a sham at that. The fly was a zipper; it should have been buttons. The insignia was wrong, the tailoring sloppy, the boots a cheap grade of imitation leather. It was only a trumpery uniform after ail, and it wasn’t exactly killing him, was it? No. It –

‘Straighten your cap!’ Todd said loudly.

Dussander blinked at him, startled.

‘Straighten your cap, soldierf

Dussander did so, unconsciously giving it that final small insolent twist that had been the trademark of his Oberleutnants – and, sadly wrong as it was, this was a Oberleutnant’s uniform.

‘Get those feet together!’

He did so, bringing the heels together with a smart rap, doing the correct thing with hardly a thought, doing it as if the intervening years had slipped off along with his bathrobe.

‘Achtung?

He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared – really scared. He felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough skill to stop them once they got started. The old man living on his pension was gone. Dussander was here.

Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.

‘Aboutface!’

Dussander pivoted neatly, the bourbon forgotten, the torment of the last three months forgotten. He heard his heels click together again as he faced the grease-splattered stove. Beyond it, he could see the dusty parade ground of the military academy where he had learned his soldier’s trade.

‘About face!’

He whirled again, this time not executing the order as well, losing his balance a little. Once it would have been ten demerits and the butt of a swagger-stick in his belly, sending his breath out in a hot and agonized gust. Inwardly he smiled a little. The boy didn’t know all the tricks. No indeed.

‘Now march? Todd cried. His eyes were hot, glowing.

The iron went out of Dussander’s shoulders; he slumped forward again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please -‘

‘March! March! March, I said!’

With a strangled sound, Dussander began to goose-step across the faded linoleum of his kitchen floor. He right-faced to avoid the table; right-faced again as he approached the wall. His face was uptilted slightly, expressionless. His legs rammed out before him, then crashed down, making the cheap china rattle in the cabinet over the sink. His arms moved in short arcs.

The image of the walking brooms recurred to Todd, and his fright recurred with it. It suddenly struck him that he didn’t want Dussander to be enjoying any part of this, and that perhaps – just perhaps – he had wanted to make Dussander appear ludicrous even more than he had wanted to make him appear authentic. But somehow, despite the man’s age and the cheap dime-store furnishings of the kitchen, he didn’t look ludicrous in the least. He looked frightening. For the first time the corpses in the ditches and the crematoriums seemed to take on their own reality for Todd. The photographs of the tangled arms and legs and torsos, fishbelly white in the cold spring rains of Germany, were not something staged like a scene in a horror film – a pile of bodies created from department store dummies, say, to be picked up by the grips and propmen when the scene was done – but simply a real fact, stupendous and inexplicable and evil. For a moment it seemed to him that he could smell the bland and slightly smoky odour of decomposition.

Terror gathered him in.

‘Stop!’ he shouted.

Dussander continued to goose-step, his eyes blank and far away. His head had come up even more, pulling the scrawny chicken-tendons of his throat tight, tilting his chin at an arrogant angle. His nose, blade-thin, jutted obscenely.

Todd felt sweat in his armpits. ‘Halt!’ he cried out.

Dussander halted, right foot forward, left coming up and then down beside the right with a single pistonlike stamp. For a moment the cold lack of expression held on his face -robotic, mindless – and then it was replaced by confusion. Confusion was followed by defeat. He slumped.

Todd let out a silent breath of relief and for a moment he was furious with himself. Who’s in charge here, anyway’: Then his self-confidence flooded back in. / am, that’s who. And he better not forget it.

He began to smile again. ‘Pretty good. But with a little practice, I think you’ll be a lot better.’

Dussander stood mute, his head hanging.

‘You can take it off now,’ Todd added generously … and couldn’t help wondering if he really wanted Dussander to put it on again. For a few seconds there –

7

January, 1975.

Todd left school by himself after the last bell, got his bike, and pedalled down to the park. He found a deserted bench, set his Schwinn up on its kickstand, and took his report card out of his hip pocket. He took a look around to see if there was anyone in the area he knew, but the only other people in sight were two high school kids making out by the pond and a pair of gross-looking winos passing a paper bag back and forth. Dirty fucking winos, he thought, but it wasn’t the winos that had upset him. He opened his card.

English: C. American History: C. Earth Science: D. Your Community and You: B. Primary French: F. Beginning Algebra: F.

He stared at the grades, unbelieving. He had known it was going to be bad, but this was disaster.

Maybe that’s best, an inner voice spoke up suddenly. Maybe you even did it on purpose, because a part of you wants it to end. Needs for it to end. Before something bad happens.

He shoved the thought roughly aside. Nothing bad was going to happen. Dussander was under his thumb. Totally under his thumb. The old man thought one of Todd’s friends had a letter, but he didn’t know which friend. If anything happened to Todd – anything – that letter would go to the police. Once he supposed Dussander might have tried it anyway. Now he was too old to run, even with a head start.

‘He’s under control, dammit,’ Todd whispered, and then pounded his thigh hard enough to make the muscle knot. Talking to yourself was bad shit — crazy people talked to themselves. He had picked up the habit over the last six weeks or so, and didn’t seem to be able to break it. He’d caught several people looking at him strangely because of it. A couple of them had been teachers. And that asshole Bernie Everson had come right out and asked him if he was going fruitcrackers. Todd had come very, very close to punching the little pansy in the mouth, and that sort of stuff – brawls, scuffles, punch-outs – was no good. That sort of stuff got you noticed in all the wrong ways. Talking to yourself was bad, right, okay, but –

‘The dreams are bad, too,’ he whispered. He didn’t catch himself that time.

Just lately the dreams had been very bad. In the dreams he was always in uniform and he was standing in line with hundreds of gaunt men; the smell of burning was in the air and he could hear the choppy roar of bulldozer engines. Then Dussander would come up the line, pointing out this one or that one. They were left. The others were marched away towards the crematoriums. Some of them kicked and struggled, but most were too undernourished, too exhausted. Then Dussander was standing in front of Todd. Their eyes met for a long, paralyzing moment, and then Dussander levelled a faded umbrella at Todd.

‘Take this one to the laboratories,’ Dussander said in the dream. His lip curled back to reveal his false teeth. ‘Take this American boy’

In another dream he wore an SS uniform. His jackboots were shined to a mirror-reflecting surface. The death’s head insignia and the lightning bolts glittered. But he was standing in the middle of Santa Donate Boulevard and everyone was looking at him. They began to point. Some of them began to laugh. Others looked shocked, angry, or revolted. In this dream an old car came to a squealing, creaky halt and Dussander peered out at him, a Dussander who looked two hundred years old and nearly mummified, his skin a yellowed scroll.

‘I know you!’ The dream-Dussander proclaimed shrilly. He looked around at the spectators and then back to Todd. ‘You were in charge at Patin! Look, everybody! This is the Blood-Fiend of Patin! Himmler’s “Efficiency Expert”! I denounce you, murderer! I denounce you, butcher! I denounce you, killer of infants! I denounce you!’

In yet another dream, he wore a striped convict’s uniform and was being led down a stone-walled corridor by two guards who looked like his parents. Both wore conspicuous yellow armbands with the Star of David on them. Walking behind them was a minister, reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Todd looked back over his shoulder and saw that the minister was Dussander, and he was wearing the black cloak of an SS officer.

At the end of the stone corridor, double doors opened on an octagonal room with glass walls. There was a scaffold in the centre of it. Behind the glass walls stood ranks of emaciated men and women, all naked, all watching with the same dark, flat expression. On each arm was a blue number.

‘It’s all right,’ Todd whispered to himself. ‘It’s okay, really, everything’s under control.’

The couple that had been making out glanced over at him. Todd stared at them fiercely, daring them to say anything. At last they looked back the other way. Had the boy been grinning?

Todd got up, jammed his report card into his hip pocket, and mounted his bike. He pedalled down to a drugstore two blocks away. There he bought a bottle of ink eradicator and a fine-point pen that dispensed blue ink. He went back to the park (the make-out couple was gone, but the winos were still there, stinking the place up) and changed his English grade to a B, American History to A, Earth Science to B, Primary French to C, and Beginning Algebra to B. Your Community and You he eradicated and then simply wrote in again, so the card would have a uniform look.

Uniforms, right.

‘Never mind,’ he whispered to himself. ‘That’ll hold them. That’ll hold them, all right.’

One night late in the month, sometime after two o’clock, Kurt Dussander awoke struggling with the bedclothes, gasping and moaning, into a darkness that seemed close and terrifying. He felt half-suffocated, paralyzed with fear. It was as if a heavy stone lay on his chest, and he wondered if he could be having a heart attack. He clawed in the darkness for the bedside lamp and almost knocked it off the nightstand turning it on.

I’m in my own room, he thought, my own bedroom, here in Santa Donate, here in California, here in America. See, the same brown drapes pulled across the same window, the same bookshelves filled with dime paperbacks from the bookshop on Soren Street, same grey rug, same blue wallpaper. No heart attack. No jungle. No eyes.

But the terror still clung to him like a stinking pelt, and his heart went on racing. The dream had come back. He had known that it would, sooner or later, if the boy kept on. The cursed boy. He thought the boy’s letter of protection was only a bluff, and not a very good one at that; something he had picked up from the TV detective programmes. What friend would the boy trust not to open such a momentous letter? No friend, that was who. Or so he thought If he could be sure-

His hands closed with an arthritic, painful snap and then opened slowly.

He took the packet of cigarettes from the table and lit one, scratching the wooden match indifferently on the bedpost. The clock’s hands stood at 2.41. There would be no more sleep for him this night He inhaled smoke and then coughed it out in a series of wracking spasms. No more sleep unless he wanted to go downstairs and have a drink or two. Or three. And there had been altogether too much drinking over the last six weeks or so. He was no longer a young man who could toss them off one after the other, the way he had when he had been an officer on leave in Berlin in ’39, when the scent of victory had been in the air and everywhere you heard the Fuehrer’s voice, saw his blazing, commanding eyes —

The boy …the cursed boy!

‘Be honest,’ he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice in the quiet room made him jump a little. He was not in the habit of talking to himself, but neither was it the first time he had ever done so. He remembered doing it off and on during the last few weeks at Patin, when everything had come down around their ears and in the east the sound of Russian thunder grew louder first every day and then every hour. It had been natural enough to talk to himself then. He had been under stress, and people under stress often do strange things – cup their testicles through the pockets of their pants, click

their teeth together … Wolff had been a great teeth-clicker.

He grinned as he did it. Huffman had been a finger-snapper

and a thigh-patter, creating fast, intricate rhythms that he

seemed utterly unaware of. He, Kurt Dussander, had

sometimes talked to himself. But now-

‘You are under stress again,’ he said aloud. He was aware that he had spoken in German this time. He hadn’t spoken German in many years, but the language now seemed warm and comfortable. It lulled him, eased him. It was sweet and dark.

‘Yes. You are under stress. Because of the boy. But be honest with yourself. It is too early in the morning to tell lies. You have not entirely regretted talking. At first you were terrified that the boy could not or would not keep his secret. He would have to tell a friend, who would tell another friend, and that friend would tell two. But if he has kept it this long, he will keep it longer. If I am taken away, he loses his … his talking book. Is that what I am to him? I think so.’

He fell silent, but his thoughts went on. He had been lonely -no one would ever know just how lonely. There had been times when he thought almost seriously of suicide. He made a bad hermit. The voices he heard came from the radio. The only people who visited were on the other side of a dirty glass square. He was an old man, and although he was afraid of death, he was more afraid of being an old man who is alone.

His bladder sometimes tricked him. He would be halfway to the bathroom when a dark stain spread on his pants. In wet weather his joints would first throb and then begin to cry out, and there had been days when he had chewed an entire tin of Arthritis Pain Formula between sunrise and sunset… and still the aspirin only subdued the aches, and even such acts as taking a book from the shelf or switching the TV channel became an essay in pain. His eyes were bad; sometimes he knocked things over, barked his shins, bumped his head. He lived in fear of breaking a bone and not being able to get to the telephone, and he lived in fear of getting there and having some doctor uncover his real past as he became suspicious of Mr Denker’s nonexistent medical history.

The boy had alleviated some of those things. When the boy was here, he could call back the old days. His memory of those days was perversely clear; he spilled out a seemingly endless catalogue of names and events, even the weather of such and such a day. He remembered Private Henreid, who manned a machine-gun in the north-east tower and the wen Private Henreid had had between his eyes. Some of the men called him Three-Eyes, or Old Cyclops. He remembered Kessel, who had a picture of his girlfriend naked, lying on a sofa with her hands behind her head. Kessel charged the men to look at it. He remembered the names of the doctors and their experiments – thresholds of pain, the brainwaves of dying men and women, physiological retardation, effects of different sorts of radiation, dozens more. Hundreds more.

He supposed he talked to the boy as all old men talk, but he guessed he was luckier than most old men, who had impatience, disinterest, or outright rudeness for an audience. His audience was endlessly fascinated.

Were a few bad dreams too high a price to pay?

He crushed out his cigarette, lay looking at the ceiling for a moment, and then swung his feet out onto the floor. He and the boy were loathesome, he supposed, feeding off each other … eating each other. If his own belly was sometimes sour with the dark but rich food they partook of in his afternoon kitchen, what was the boy’s like? Did he sleep well? Perhaps not. Lately Dussander thought the boy looked rather pale, and thinner than when he had first come into Dussander’s life.

He walked across the bedroom and opened the closet door. He brushed hangers to the right, reached into the shadows, and brought out the sham uniform. It hung from his hand like a vulture-skin. He touched it with his other hand. Touched it … and then stroked it.

After a very long time he took it down and put it on, dressing slowly, not looking into the mirror until the uniform was completely buttoned and belted (and the sham fly zipped).

He looked at himself in the mirror, then, and nodded.

He went back to bed, lay down, and smoked another cigarette. When it was finished, he felt sleepy again. He turned off the bedlamp, not believing it, that it could be this easy. But he was asleep five minutes later, and this time his sleep was dreamless.

8

February, 1975.

After dinner, Dick Bowden produced a cognac that Dussander privately thought dreadful. But of course he smiled broadly and complimented it extravagantly. Bowden’s wife served the boy a chocolate malted. The boy had been unusually quiet all through the meal. Uneasy? Yes. For some reason the boy seemed very uneasy.

Dussander had charmed Dick and Monica Bowden from the moment he and the boy had arrived. The boy had told his parents that Mr Denker’s vision was much worse than it actually was (which made poor old Mr Denker in need of a seeing-eye dog, Dussander thought dryly), because that explained all the reading the boy had supposedly been doing. Dussander had been very careful about that, and he thought there had been no slips.

He was dressed in his best suit, and although the evening was damp, his arthritis had been remarkably mellow -nothing but an occasional twinge. For some absurd reason the boy had wanted him to leave his umbrella home, but Dussander had insisted. All in all, he had had a pleasant and rather exciting evening. Dreadful cognac or no, he had not been out to dinner in nine years.

During the meal he had discussed the Essen Motor Works, the rebuilding of postwar Germany – Bowden had asked several intelligent questions about that, and had seemed impressed by Dussander’s answers – and German writers. Monica Bowden had asked him how he had happened to come to America so late in life and Dussander, adopting the proper expression of myopic sorrow, had explained about the death of his fictitious wife. Monica Bowden was meltingly sympathetic.

And now, over the absurd cognac, Dick Bowden said: ‘If this is too personal, Mr Denker, please don’t answer … but I couldn’t help wondering what you did in the war.’

The boy stiffened ever so slightly.

Dussander smiled and felt for his cigarettes. He could see them perfectly well, but it was important to make not the tiniest slip. Monica put them in his hand.

Thank you, dear lady. The meal was superb. You are a fine cook. My own wife never did better.’

Monica thanked him and looked flustered. Todd gave her an irritated look.

‘Not personal at all,’ Dussander said, lighting his cigarette and turning to Bowden. ‘I was in the reserves from 1943 on, as were all able-bodied men too old to be in the active services. By then the handwriting was on the wall for the Third Reich, and for the madmen who created it. One madman in particular, of course.’

He blew out his match and looked solemn.

‘There was great relief when the tide turned against Hitler. Great relief. Of course,’ and here he looked at Bowden disarmingly, as man to man, ‘one was careful not to express such a sentiment. Not aloud.’

‘I suppose not,’ Dick Bowden said respectfully.

‘No,’ Dussander said gravely. ‘Not aloud. I remember one evening when four or five of us, all friends, stopped at a local ratskeller after work for a drink – by then there was not always schnapps, or even beer, but it so happened that night there were both. We had all known each other for upwards of twenty years. One of our number, Hans Hassler, mentioned in passing that perhaps the Fuehrer had been ill-advised to open a second front against the Russians. I said, “Hans, God in Heaven, watch what you say!” Poor Hans went pale and changed the subject entirely. Yet three days later he was gone. I never saw him again, nor, as far as I know, did anyone else who was sitting at our table that night.’

‘How awful!’ Monica said breathlessly. ‘More cognac, Mr Denker?’

‘No thank you,’ he smiled at her. ‘My wife had a saying from her mother: “One must never overdo the sublime.”‘

Todd’s small, troubled frown deepened slightly.

‘Do you think he was sent to one of the camps?’ Dick asked. ‘Your friend Hessler?’

‘Hassler,’ Dussander corrected gently. He grew grave. ‘Many were. The camps … they will be the shame of the German people for a thousand years to come. They are Hitler’s real legacy.’

‘Oh, I think that’s too harsh,’ Bowden said, lighting his pipe and puffing out a choking cloud of Cherry Blend. ‘According to what I’ve read, the majority of the German people had no idea of what was going on. The locals around Auschwitz thought it was a sausage plant.’

‘Ugh, how terrible,’ Monica said, and pulled a grimacing that’s-enough-of-that expression at her husband. Then she turned to Dussander and smiled. ‘I just love the smell of a pipe, Mr Denker, don’t you?’

‘Indeed I do, madam,’ Dussander said. He had just gotten an almost insurmountable urge to sneeze under control.

Bowden suddenly reached across the table and clapped his son on the shoulder. Todd jumped. ‘You’re awfully quiet tonight, son. Feeling all right?’

Todd offered a peculiar smile that seemed divided between his father and Dussander. ‘I feel okay. I’ve heard most of these stories before, remember.’

‘Todd!’ Monica said. That’s hardly -‘

The boy is only being honest,’ Dussander said. ‘A privilege of boys which men often have to give up. Yes, Mr Bowden?’

Dick laughed and nodded.

‘Perhaps I could get Todd to walk back to my house with me now,’ Dussander said. ‘I’m sure he has his studies.’

Todd is a very apt pupil,’ Monica said, but she spoke almost automatically, looking at Todd in a puzzled sort of way. ‘All As and Bs, usually. He got a C in this last quarter, but he’s promised to bring his French up to snuff on his March report. Right, Todd-baby?’

Todd offered the peculiar smile again and nodded.:

‘No need for you to walk,’ Dick said. ‘Ill be glad to run you back to your place.’

‘I walk for the air and the exercise,’ Dussander said. ‘Really, I must insist… unless Todd prefers not to.’

‘Oh, no, I’d like a walk,’ Todd said, and his mother and father beamed at him.

They were almost to Dussander’s corner when Dussander broke the silence. It was drizzling, and he hoisted his umbrella over both of them. And yet still his arthritis lay quiet, dozing. It was amazing.

‘You are like my arthritis,’ he said.

Todd’s head came up. ‘Huh?’

‘Neither of you have had much to say tonight. What’s got your tongue, boy? Cat or cormorant?’

‘Nothing,’ Todd muttered. They turned down Dussander’s street.

‘Perhaps I could guess,’ Dussander said, not without a touch of malice. ‘When you came to get me, you were afraid I might make a slip … “let the cat out of the bag,” you say here. Yet you were determined to. go through with the dinner because you had run out of excuses to put your parents off. Now you are disconcerted that all went well. Is that not the truth?’

‘Who cares?’ Todd said, and shrugged sullenly.

‘Why shouldn’t it go well?’ Dussander demanded. ‘I was dissembling before you were born. You keep a secret well enough, I give you that. I give it to you most graciously. But did you see me tonight? I charmed them. Charmed them!’

Todd suddenly burst out: ‘You didn’t have to do that!’

Dussander came to a complete stop, staring at Todd.

‘Not do it? Not? I thought that was what you wanted, boy! Certainly they will offer no objections if you continue to come over and “read” to me.’

‘You’re sure taking a lot for granted!’ Todd said hotly. ‘Maybe I’ve got all I want from you. Do you think there’s anybody forcing me to come over to your scuzzy house and watch you slop up booze like those old wino pushbags that hang around the old trainyards? Is that what you think?’ His voice had risen and taken on a thin, wavering, hysterical note. ‘Because there’s nobody forcing me. If I want to come, I’ll come, and if I don’t, I won’t.’

‘Lower your voice. People will hear.’

‘Who cares?’ Todd said, but he began to walk again. This time he deliberately walked outside the umbrella’s span.

‘No, nobody forces you to come,’ Dussander said. And then he took a calculated shot in the dark: ‘In fact, you are welcome to stay away. Believe me, boy, I have no scruples about drinking alone. None at all.’

Todd looked at him scornfully. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

Dussander only smiled noncommitally.

‘Well, don’t count on it.’ They had reached the concrete walk leading up to Dussander’s stoop. Dussander fumbled in his pocket for his latchkey. The arthritis flared a dim red in the joints of his fingers and then subsided, waiting. Now Dussander thought he understood what it was waiting for: for him to be alone again. Then it could come out.

I’ll tell you something,’ Todd said. He sounded oddly breathless. ‘If they knew what you were, if I ever told them, they’d spit on you and then kick you out on your skinny old ass. My mom might even take a butcher’s knife to you. Her mother was part Jewish, she told me once.’

Dussander looked at Todd closely in the drizzling dark. The boy’s face was turned defiantly up to his, but the skin was pallid, the sockets under the eyes dark and slightly hollowed – the skin-tones of someone who has brooded long while others are asleep.

‘I am sure they would have nothing but revulsion for me,’ Dussander said, although he privately thought that the elder Bowden might stay his revulsion to ask many of the questions his son had asked already. ‘Nothing but revulsion. But what would they feel for you, boy, when I told them you had known about me for eight months … and said nothing?’

Todd stared at him wordlessly in the dark. ‘Come and see me if you please,’ Dussander said indifferently, ‘and stay home if you don’t Goodnight, boy.’

He went up the walk to his front door, leaving Todd standing in the drizzle and looking after him with his mouth slightly ajar.

The next morning at breakfast, Monica said: ‘Your dad liked Mr Denker a lot, Todd. He said he reminded him of your grandfather.’

Todd muttered something unintelligible around his toast. Monica looked at her son and wondered if he had been sleeping well. He looked pale. And his grades had taken that inexplicable dip. Todd never got Cs.

‘You feeling okay these days, Todd?’

He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then that radiant smile spread over his face, charming her … comforting her. There was a dab of strawberry preserve on his chin. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Four-oh.’

‘Todd-baby,’ she said.

‘Monica-baby,’ he responded, and they both started to laugh.

9

March, 1975.

‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander said. ‘Heeere, kitty-kitty. Puss-puss? Puss-puss?’

He was sitting on his back stoop, a pink plastic bowl by his right foot. The bowl was full of milk. It was 1.30 in the afternoon; the day was hazy and hot. Brush-fires far to the west tinged the air with an autumnal smell that jagged oddly against the calendar. If the boy was coming, he would be here in another hour. But the boy didn’t always come now. Instead of seven days a week he came sometimes only four times, or five. An intuition had grown in him, little by little, and his intuition told him that the boy was having troubles of his own.

‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander coaxed. The stray cat was at the far end of the yard, sitting in the ragged verge of weeds by Dussander’s fence. It was a torn, and every bit as ragged as the weeds it sat in. Every time he spoke, the cat’s ears cocked forward. Its eyes never left the pink bowl filled with milk.

Perhaps, Dussander thought, the boy was having troubles with his studies. Or bad dreams. Or both.

The last made him smile.

‘Kitty-kitty,’ he called softly. The cat’s ears cocked forward again. It didn’t move, not yet, but it continued to study the milk.

Dussander had certainly been afflicted with problems of his own. For three weeks or so he had worn the SS uniform to bed like grotesque pyjamas, and the uniform had warded off the insomnia and the bad dreams. His sleep had been – at first – as sound as a lumberjack’s. Then the dreams had returned, not little by little, but all at once, and worse than ever before. Dreams of running as well as the dreams of the eyes. Running through a wet, unseen jungle where heavy leaves and damp fronds struck his face, leaving trickles that felt like sap … or blood. Running and running, the luminous eyes always around him, peering soullessly at him, until he broke into a clearing. In the darkness he sensed rather than saw the steep rise that began on the clearing’s far side. At the top of that rise was Patin, its low cement buildings and yards surrounded by barbed wire and electrified wire, its sentry towers standing like Martian dreadnoughts straight out of War of the Worlds. And in the middle, huge stacks billowed smoke against the sky, and below these brick columns were the furnaces, stoked and ready to go, glowing in the night like th» eyes of fierce demons. They had told the inhabitants of the area that the Patin inmates made clothes and candles, and of course the locals had believed that no more than the locals around Auschwitz had believed that the camp was a sausage factory. It didn’t matter.

Looking back over his shoulder in the dream, he would at last see them coming out of hiding, the restless dead, the Juden, shambling towards him with blue numbers glaring from the livid flesh of their outstretched arms, their hands hooked into talons, their faces no longer expressionless but animated with hate, lively with vengeance, vivacious with murder. Toddlers ran beside their mothers and grandfathers were borne up by their middle-aged children. And the dominant expression on all their faces was desperation.

Desperation? Yes. Because in the dreams he knew (and so did they) that if he could climb the hill, he would be safe. Down here in these wet and swampy lowlands, in this jungle where the night-flowering plants extruded blood instead of sap, he was a hunted animal… prey. But up there, he was in command. If this was a jungle, then the camp at the top of the hill was a zoo, all the wild animals safely in cages, he the head keeper whose job it was to decide which would be fed, which would live, which would be handed over to the vivisectionists, which would be taken to the knacker’s in the remover’s van.

He would begin to run up the hill, running in all the slowness of nightmare. He would feel the first skeletal hands close about his neck, feel their cold and stinking breath, smell their decay, hear their birdlike cries of triumph as they pulled him down with salvation not only in sight but almost at hand-

‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander called. ‘Milk. Nice milk.’

The cat came at last. It crossed half of the back yard and then sat again, but lightly, its tail twitching with worry. It didn’t trust him; no. But Dussander knew the cat could smell the milk and so he was sanguine. Sooner or later it would come.

At Patin there had never been a contraband problem. Some of the prisoners came in with their valuables poked far up their asses in small chamois bags (and how often their valuables turned out not to be valuable at all – photographs, locks of hair, fake jewellery), often pushed up with sticks until they were past the point where even the long fingers of the trusty they had called Stinky-Thumbs could reach. One woman, he remembered, had had a small diamond, flawed, it turned out, really not valuable at all – but it had been in her family for six generations, passed from mother to eldest daughter (or so she said, but of course she was a Jew and all of them lied). She swallowed it before entering Patin. When it came out in her waste, she swallowed it again. She kept doing this, although eventually the diamond began to cut her insides and she bled.

There had been other ruses, although most only involved petty items such as a hoard of tobacco or a hair-ribbon or two. It didn’t matter. In the room Dussander used for prisoner interrogations there was a hotplate and a homely kitchen table covered with a red checked cloth much like the one in his own kitchen. There was always a pot of lamb stew bubbling mellowly away on that hotplate. When contraband was suspected (and when was it not …) a member of the suspected clique would be brought to that room. Dussander would stand them by the hotplate, where the rich fumes from the stew wafted. Gently, he would ask them Who. Who is hiding gold? Who is hiding jewellery? Who has tobacco? Who gave the Givenet woman the pill for her baby? Who? The stew was never specifically promised; but always the aroma eventually loosened their tongues. Of course, a truncheon would have done the same, or a gun-barrel jammed into their filthy crotches, but the stew was … was elegant. Yes.

‘Kitty-kitty,’ Dussander called. The cat’s ears cocked forward. It half-rose, than half-remembered some long-ago kick, or perhaps a match that had burned its whiskers, and it settled back on its haunches. But soon it would move.

He had found a way of propitiating his nightmare. It was, in a way, no more than wearing the SS uniform … but raised to a greater power. Dussander was pleased with himself, only sorry that he had never thought of it before. He supposed he had the boy to thank for this new method of quieting himself, for showing him that the key to the past’s terrors was not in rejection but in contemplation and even something like a friend’s embrace. It was true that before the boy’s unexpected arrival last summer he hadn’t had any bad dreams for a long time, but he believed now that he had come to a coward’s terms with his past. He had been forced to give up a part of himself. Now he had reclaimed it.

‘Kitty-kitty,’ called Dussander, and a smile broke on his face, a kindly smile, a reassuring smile, the smile of all old men who have somehow come through the cruel courses of life to a safe place, still relatively intact, and with at least some wisdom.

The torn rose from its haunches, hesitated only a moment, longer, and then trotted across the remainder of the back yard with lithe grace. It mounted the steps, gave Dussander a final mistrustful look, laving back its chewed and scabby ears; then it began to drink the milk.

‘Nice milk,’ Dussander said, pulling on the Playtex rubber gloves that had lain in his lap all the while. ‘Nice milk for a nice kitty.’ He had bought these gloves in the supermarket. He had stood in the express lane, and older women had looked at him approvingly, even speculatively. The gloves were advertised on TV. They had cuffs. They were so flexible you could pick up a dime while you were wearing them.

He stroked the cat’s back with one green finger and talked to it soothingly. Its back began to arch with the rhythm of his strokes.

Just before the bowl was empty, he seized the cat

It came electrically alive in his clenching hands, twisting and jerking, clawing at the rubber. Its body lashed limberly back and forth, and Dussander had no doubt that if its teeth or claws got into him, it would come off the winner. It was an old campaigner. It takes one to know one, Dussander thought, grinning.

Holding the cat prudently away from his body, the painful grin stamped on his face, Dussander pushed the back door open with his foot and went into the kitchen. The cat yowled and twisted and ripped at the rubber gloves. Its feral, triangular head flashed down and fastened on one green thumb.

‘Nasty kitty,’ Dussander said reproachfully.

The oven door stood open. Dussander threw the cat inside. Its claws made a ripping, prickly sound as they disengaged from the gloves. Dussander slammed the oven door shut with one knee, provoking a painful twinge from his arthritis. Yet he continued to grin. Breathing hard, nearly panting, he propped himself against the stove for a moment, his head hanging down. It was a gas stove. He rarely used it for anything fancier than TV dinners, and now, killing stray cats.

Faintly, rising up through the gas burners, he could hear the cat scratching and yowling to be let out.

Dussander twisted the oven dial over to 500°. There was an audible pop! as the oven pilot light lit two double rows of hissing gas. The cat stopped yowling and began to scream. It sounded … yes … almost like a young boy. A young boy in terrible pain. The thought made Dussander smile even more broadly. His heart thundered in his chest. The cat scratched and whirled madly in the oven, still screaming. Soon, a hot, furry, burning smell began to seep out of the oven and into the room.

He scraped the remains of the cat out of the oven half an hour later, using a barbecue fork he had acquired for two dollars and ninety-eight cents at the Grant’s in the shopping centre a mile away.

The cat’s roasted carcass went into an empty flour sack. He took the sack down to the cellar. The cellar floor had never been cemented. Shortly, Dussander came back up. He sprayed the kitchen with Glade until it reeked of artificial pine scent. He opened all the windows. He washed the barbecue fork and hung it up on the pegboard. Then he sat down to wait and see if the boy would come. He smiled and smiled.

Todd did come, about five minutes after Dussander had given up on him for the afternoon. He was wearing a warmup jacket with his school colours on it; he was also wearing a San Diego Padres baseball cap. He carried his schoolbooks under his arm.

‘Yucka-ducka,’ he said, coming into the kitchen and wrinkling his nose. ‘What’s that smell? It’s awful.’

‘I tried the oven,’ Dussander said, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’m afraid I burned my supper. I had to throw it out.’

One day late in the month the boy came much earlier than usual, long before school usually let out. Dussander was sitting in the kitchen, drinking Ancient Age bourbon from a chipped and discoloured cup that had the words HERE’S YER CAWFEE MAW, HAW! HAW! HAW! written around the rim. He had his rocker out in the kitchen now and he was just drinking and rocking, rocking and drinking, bumping his slippers on the faded linoleum. He was pleasantly high. There had been no more bad dreams at all until just last night. Not since the tomcat with the chewed ears. Last night’s had been particularly horrible, though. That could not be denied. They had dragged him down after he had gotten halfway up the hill, and they had begun to do unspeakable things to him before he was able to wake himself up. Yet, after his initial thrashing return to the world of real things, he had been confident. He could end the dreams whenever he wished. Perhaps a cat would not be enough this time. But there was always the dog pound. Yes. Always the pound.

Todd came abruptly into the kitchen, his face pale and shiny and strained. He had lost weight, all right, Dussander thought And there was a queer white look in his eyes that Dussander did not like at all.

‘You’re going to help me,’ Todd said suddenly and defiantly.

‘Really?’ Dussander said mildly, but sudden apprehension leaped inside of him. He didn’t let his face change as Todd slammed his books down on the table with a sudden, vicious overhand stroke. One of them spun-skated across the oilcloth and landed in a tent on the floor by Dussander’s foot.

‘Yes, you’re fucking-A right!’ Todd said shrilly. ‘You better believe it! Because this is your fault! All your fault!’ Hectic spots of red mounted into his cheeks. ‘But you’re going to have to help me get out of it, because I’ve got the goods on you! I’ve got you right where I want your

I’ll help you in any way I can,’ Dussander said quietly. He saw that he had folded his hands neatly in front of himself without even thinking about it – just as he had once done. He leaned forward in the rocker until his chin was directly over his folded hands – as he had once done. His face was calm and friendly and inquiring; none of his growing apprehension showed. Sitting just so, he could almost imagine a pot of lamb stew simmering on the stove behind him. ‘Tell me what the trouble is.’

‘This is the fucking trouble,’ Todd said viciously, and threw a folder at Dussander. It bounced off his chest and landed in his lap, and he was momentarily surprised by the heat of the anger which leaped up in him; the urge to rise and backhand the boy smartly. Instead, he kept the mild expression on his face. It was the boy’s school-card, he saw, although the school seemed to be at ridiculous pains to hide the fact. Instead of a school-card, or a Grade Report, it was called a ‘Quarterly Progess Report’. He grunted at that, and opened the card.

A typed half-sheet of paper fell out. Dussander put it aside for later examination and turned his attention to the boy’s grades first.

‘You seem to have fallen on the rocks, my boy,’ Dussander said, not without some pleasure. The boy had passed only English and American History. Every other grade was an F.

‘It’s not my fault,’ Todd hissed venomously. ‘It’s your fault. All those stories. I have nightmares about them, do you know that? I sit down and open my books and I start thinking about whatever you told me that day and the next thing I know, my mother’s telling me it’s time to go to bed. Well, that’s not my fault! It isn’t! You hear me? It isn’t!’

‘I hear you very well,’ Dussander said, and read the typed note that had been tucked into Todd’s card.

Dear Mr and Mrs Bowden,

This note is to suggest that we have a group conference concerning Todd’s second- and third-quarter grades. In light of Todd’s previous good work in this school, his current grades suggest a specific problem which may be affecting his academic performance in a deleterious way. Such a problem can often be solved by a frank and open discussion.

I should point out that although Todd has passed the half-year, his final grades may be failing in some cases unless his work improves radically in the fourth quarter. Failing grades would entail summer school to avoid being kept back and causing a major scheduling problem.

I must also note that Toad is in the college division, and that his work so far this year is far below college acceptance levels. It is also below the level of academic ability assumed by the SA T tests.

Please be assured that I am ready to work out a mutually convenient time for us to meet. In a case such as this, earlier is usually better.

Sincerely yours, Edward French

‘Who is this Edward French?’ Dussander asked, slipping the note back inside the card (part of him still marvelled at the American love of jargon; such a rolling missive to inform the parents that their son was flunking out!) and then refolding his hands. His premonition of disaster was stronger than ever, but he refused to give in to it. A year before, he would have done; a year ago he had been ready for disaster. Now he was not, but it seemed that the cursed boy had brought it to him anyway. ‘Is he your headmaster?’

‘Rubber Ed? Hell, no. He’s the guidance counsellor.’

‘Guidance counsellor? What is that?’

‘You can figure it out,’ Todd said. He was nearly hysterical. ‘You read the goddam note!’ He walked rapidly around the room, shooting sharp, quick glances at Dussander. ‘Well, I’m not going to let any of this shit go down. I’m just not. I’m not going to any summer school. My dad and mom are going to Hawaii this summer and I’m going with them.’ He pointed at the card on the table. ‘Do you know what my dad will do if he sees that?’

Dussander shook his head.

‘He’ll get everything out of me. Everything. He’ll know it was you. It couldn’t be anything else, because nothing else has changed. He’ll poke and pry and hell get it all out of me. And then … then I’ll… I’ll be in Dutch.’

He stared at Dussander resentfully.

‘They’ll watch me. Hell, they might make me see a doctor, I don’t know. How should / know? But I’m not getting in Dutch. And I’m not going to any fucking summer school.’

‘Or to the reformatory,’ Dussander said. He said it very quietly.

Todd stopped circling the room. His face became very still. His cheeks and forehead, already pale, became even whiter. He stared at Dussander, and had to try twice before he could speak. ‘What? What did you just say?’

‘My dear boy,’ Dussander said, assuming an air of great patience, ‘for the last five minutes I have listened to you pule and whine, and what all your puling and whining comes down to is this. You are in trouble. You might be found out. You might find yourself in adverse circumstances.’ Seeing that he had the boy’s complete attention – at last -Dussander sipped reflectively from his cup.

‘My boy,’ he went on, ‘that is a very dangerous attitude for you to have. And dangerous for me. The potential harm is much greater for me. You worry about your school-card. Pah! This for your school-card.’

He flicked it off the table and onto the floor with one yellow finger.

‘I am worried about my life!’

Todd did not reply; he simply went on looking at Dussander with that white-eyed, slightly crazed stare.

The Israelis will not scruple at the fact that I am seventy -six. The death penalty is still very much in favour over there, you know, especially when the man in the dock is a Nazi war criminal associated with the camps.’

‘You’re a US citizen,’ Todd said. ‘America wouldn’t let them take you. I read up on that. I -‘

‘You read, but you don’t listen! I am not a US citizen! My papers came from la cosa nostra. I would be deported, and Mossad agents would be waiting for me wherever I deplaned.’

‘I wish they would hang you,! Todd muttered, curling his hands into his fists and staring down at them. ‘I was crazy to get mixed up with you in the first place.’

‘No doubt,’ Dussander said, and smiled thinly. ‘But you are mixed up with me. We must live in the present, boy, not in the past of “I-should-have-nevers”. You must realize that your fate and my own are now inextricably entwined. If you “blow the horn on me”, as your saying goes, do you think I will hesitate to blow the horn on you? Seven hundred thousand died at Patin. To the world at large I am a criminal, a monster, even the butcher your scandal-rags would have me. You are an accessory to all of that, my boy. You have criminal knowledge of an illegal alien, but you have not reported it. And if I am caught, I will tell the world all about you. When the reporters put their microphones in my face, it will be your name I’l1 repeat over and over again. “Todd Bowden, yes, that is his name… how long? Almost a year. He wanted to know everything … all the gooshy parts. That’s how he put it, yes: ‘All the gooshy parts’.”‘

Todd’s breath had stopped. His skin appeared transparent. Dussander smiled at him. He sipped bourbon.

‘I think they will put you in jail. They may call it a reformatory, or a correctional facility – there may be a fancy name for it, like this “Quarterly Progress Report” -‘ his lip curled’- but no matter what they call it, there will be bars on the windows.’

Todd wet his lips. ‘I’d call you a liar. I’d tell them I just found out. They’d believe me, not you. You just better remember that.’

Dussander’s thin smile remained. ‘I thought you told me your father would get it all out of you.’

Todd spoke slowly, as a person speaks when realization and verbalization occur simultaneously. ‘Maybe not. Maybe not this time. This isn’t just breaking a window with a rock.’

Dussander winced inwardly. He suspected that the boy’s judgement was right – with so much at stake, he might indeed be able to convince his father. After ail, when faced with such an unpleasant truth, what parent would not want to be convinced?

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. But how are you going to explain all those books you had to read to me because poor Mr Denker is half blind? My eyes are not what they were, but I can still read fine print with my spectacles. I can prove it.’

‘I’d say you fooled me!’

‘Will you? And what reason will you be able to give for my fooling?’

‘For … for friendship. Because you were lonely.’

That, Dussander reflected, was just close enough to the truth to be believable. And once, in the beginning, the boy might have been able to bring it off. But now he was ragged; now he was coming apart in strings like a coat that has reached the end of its useful service. If a child shot off his cap pistol across the street, this boy would jump into the air and scream like a girl.

‘Your school-card will also support my side of it,’ Dussander said. ‘It was not Robinson Crusoe that caused your grades to fall down so badly, my boy, was it?’

‘Shut up, why don’t you? Just shut up about it!’

‘No,’ Dussander said. ‘I won’t shut up about it.’ He lit a cigarette, scratching the wooden match alight on the gas oven door. ‘Not until I make you see the simple truth. We are in this together, sink or swim.’ He looked at Todd through the raftering smoke, not smiling, his old, lined face reptilian. ‘I will drag you down, boy. I promise you that. If anything comes out, everything will come out. That is my promise to you.’

Todd stared at him sullenly and didn’t reply.

‘Now,’ Dussander said briskly, with the air of a man who has put a necessary unpleasantness behind him, ‘the question is, what are we going to do about this situation? Have you any ideas?’

“This will fix the report card,’ Todd said, and took a new bottle of ink eradicator from his jacket pocket. ‘About that fucking letter, I don’t know.’

Dussander looked at the ink eradicator approvingly. He had falsified a few reports of his own in his time. When the quotas had gone up to the point of fantasy … and far, far beyond. And – more like the situation they were now in -there had been the matter of the invoices … those which enumerated the spoils of war. Each week he would check the boxes of valuables, all of them to be sent back to Berlin in special train-cars that were like big Padd safes on wheels. On the side of each box was a manilla envelope, and inside the envelope there had been a verified invoice of that box’s contents. So many rings, necklaces, chokers, so many grams of gold. Dussander, however, had had his own box of valuables – not very valuable valuables, but not insignificant, either. Jades. Tourmalines. Opals. A few flawed pearls. Industrial diamonds. And when he saw an item invoiced for Berlin that caught his eye or seemed a good investment, he would remove it, replace it with an item from his own box, and use ink eradicator on the invoice, changing their item for his. He had developed into a fairly expert forger … a talent that had come in handy more than once after the war was over.

‘Good,’ he told Todd. ‘As for this other matter …’

Dussander began to rock again, sipping from his cup. Todd pulled a chair up to the table and began to go to work on his report-card, which he had picked up from the floor without a word. Dussander’s outward calm had had its effect on him and now he worked silently, his head bent studiously over the card, like any American boy who has set out to do the best by God job he can, whether that job be planting corn, pitching a no-hitter in the Little League World Series, or forging grades on his report-card.

Dussander looked at the nape of his neck, lightly tanned and cleanly exposed between the fall of his hair and the round neck of his tee-shirt. His eyes drifted from there to the top counter drawer where he kept the butcher knives. One quick thrust – he knew where to put it – and the boy’s spinal cord would be severed. His lips would be sealed forever. Dussander smiled regretfully. There would be questions asked if the boy disappeared. Too many of them. Some directed at him. Even if there was no letter with a friend, close scrutiny was something he could not afford. Too bad.

This man French,’ he said, tapping the letter. ‘Does he know your parents in a social way?’

‘Him?’ Todd edged the word with contempt. ‘My mom and dad don’t go anywhere that he could even get in.’

‘Has he ever met them in his professional capacity? Has he ever had conferences with them before?’

‘No. I’ve always been near the top of my classes. Until now.’

‘So what does he know about them?’ Dussander said, looking dreamily into his cup, which was now nearly empty. ‘Oh, he knows about you. He no doubt has all the records on you that he can use. Back to the fights you had in the kindergarten play yard. But what does he know about them?’

Todd put his pen and the small bottle of ink eradicator away. ‘Well, he knows their names. Of course. And their ages. He knows we’re all Methodists. We don’t go much, but he’d know that’s what we are, because it’s on the forms. He must know what my dad does for a living; that’s on the forms, too. All that stuff they have to fill out every year. And I’m pretty sure that’s all.’

‘Would he know if your parents were having troubles at home?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Dussander tossed off the last of the bourbon in his cup. ‘Squabbles. Fights. Your father sleeping on the couch. Your mother drinking too much.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘A divorce brewing.’

Indignantly, Todd said: “There’s nothing like that going on! No way!’

‘I never said there was. But just think, boy. Suppose that things at your house were “going to hell in a streetcar”, as the saying is.’

Todd only looked at him, frowning.

‘You would be worried about them,’ Dussander said. ‘Very worried. You would lose your appetite. You would sleep poorly. Saddest of all, your schoolwork would suffer. True? Very sad for the children, when there are troubles in the home.’

Understanding dawned in the boy’s eyes – understanding and something like dumb gratitude. Dussander was gratified.

‘Yes, it is an unhappy situation when a family totters on the edge of destruction,’ Dussander said grandly, pouring more bourbon. He was getting quite drunk. ‘The daytime television dramas, they make this absolutely clear. There is acrimony. Backbiting and lies. Most of all, there is pain. Pain, my boy. You have no idea of the hell your parents are going through. They are so swallowed up by their own troubles that they have little time for the problems of their own son. His problems seem minor compared to theirs, hein? Someday, when the scars have begun to heal, they will no doubt take a fuller interest in him once again. But now the only concession they can make is to send the boy’s kindly grandfather to Mr French.’

Todd’s eyes had been gradually brightening to a glow that was nearly fervid. ‘Might work,’ he was muttering. ‘Might, yeah, might work, might -‘ He broke off suddenly. His eyes darkened again. ‘No, it won’t You don’t look like me, not even a little bit Rubber Ed will never believe it.’

‘Himmel! Got im Himmel! Dussander cried, getting to his feet, crossing the kitchen (a bit unsteadily), opening one of the cupboards, and pulling down his bottle of Ancient Age. He spun off the cap and poured liberally. ‘For a smart boy, you are such a Dummkop. When do grandfathers ever look like their grandsons? Huh? I am bald.’ He pronounced it bait. ‘Are you bald?’

Approaching the table again, he reached out with surprising quickness, snatched an abundant handful of Todd’s blond hair, and pulled briskly.

‘Cut it out!’ Todd snapped, but he smiled a little.

‘Besides,’ Dussander said, settling back into his rocker, ‘you have blond hair and blue eyes. My eyes are blue, and before my hair turned white and fell out, it was blond. You can tell me your whole family history. Your aunts and uncles. The people your father works with. Your mother’s little hobbies. I will remember. I will study and remember. Two days later it will all be forgotten again – these days my memory is like a cloth bag filled with water – but I will remember for long enough.’ He smiled grimly. ‘In my time I have stayed ahead of Wiesenthal and pulled the wool over the eyes of Himmler himself. If I cannot fool one American public school teacher, I will pull my winding shroud around me and crawl down into my grave.’

‘Maybe,’ Todd said slowly, and Dussander could see he had already accepted it. His eyes were luminous with relief.

‘There is another resemblance,’ Dussander said.

‘There is?’

‘You said your mother was one-eighth a Jew. My mother was all Jewish. We are both kikes, my boy. We are two mockies sitting in the kitchen, just like in the old joke.’

He suddenly grabbed his nose between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. At the same time he reached over the table and grabbed the boy’s nose with his left hand.

‘And it shows!’ he roared. ‘It shows!’

He began to cackle with laughter, the rocking chair squeaking back and forth. Todd looked at him, puzzled and a little frightened, but after a bit he began to laugh, too. In Dussander’s kitchen they laughed and laughed, Dussander by the open window where the warm California breeze wafted in, and Todd rocked back on the rear legs of his kitchen chair, so that its back rested against the oven door, the white enamel of which was crisscrossed by the dark, charred-looking streaks made by Dussander’s wooden matches as he struck them alight.

Rubber Ed French (his nickname, Todd had explained to Dussander, referred to the rubbers he always wore over his sneakers during wet weather) was a slight man who made an affectation of always wearing Keds to school. It was a touch of informality which he thought would endear him to the one hundred and six children between the ages of twelve and fourteen who made up his counselling load. He had five pairs of Keds, ranging in colour from Fast Track Blue to Screaming Yellow Zonkers, totally unaware that behind his back he was known not only as Rubber Ed but as Sneaker Pete and The Ked Man, as in The Ked Man Cometh. He had been known as Pucker in college, and he would have been most humiliated of all to learn that even that shameful fact had somehow gotten out.

He rarely wore ties, preferring turtle-neck sweaters. He had been wearing these ever since the early sixties, when David McCallum had popularized them in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In his college days his classmates had been known to spy him crossing the quad and remark, ‘Here comes Pucker in his U.N.C.L.E. sweater.’ He had majored in Education Psychology, and he privately considered himself to be the only good guidance counsellor he had ever met. He had real rapport with his kids. He could get right down to it with them; he could rap with them and be silently sympathetic if they had to do some shouting and kick out the jams. He could get into their hangups because he understood what a bummer it was to be thirteen when someone was doing a number on your head and you couldn’t get your shit together.

The thing was, he had a damned hard time remembering what it had been like to be thirteen himself. He supposed that was the ultimate price you had to pay for growing up in the fifties. That, and entering the brave new world of the sixties nicknamed Pucker.

Now, as Todd Bowden’s grandfather came into his office, closing the pebbled-glass door firmly behind him, Rubber Ed stood up respectfully but was careful not to come around his desk to greet the old man. He was aware of his sneakers. Sometimes the old-timers didn’t understand that the sneakers were a psychological aid with kids who had teacher hangups – which was to say that some of the older folks couldn’t get behind a guidance counsellor in Keds.

This is one fine-looking dude, Rubber Ed thought. His white hair was carefully brushed back. His three-piece suit was spotlessly clean. His dove-grey tie was impeccably knotted. In his left hand he held a furled black umbrella (outside, a light drizzle had been falling since the weekend) in a manner that was almost military. A few years ago Rubber Ed and his wife had gone on a Dorothy Sayers jag, reading everything by that estimable lady that they could lay their hands upon. It occurred to him now that this was her brainchild, Lord Peter Wimsey, to the life. It was Wimsey at seventy-five, years after both Hunter and Harriet Vane had passed on to their rewards. He made a mental note to tell Sondra about this when he got home.

‘Mr Bowden,’ he said respectfully, and offered his hand.

‘A pleasure,’ Bowden said, and shook it Rubber Ed was careful not to put on the firm and uncompromising pressure he applied to the hands of the fathers he saw; it was obvious from the gingerly way the old boy offered it that he had arthritis.

‘A pleasure, Mr French,’ Bowden repeated, and took a seat, carefully pulling up the knees of his trousers. He propped the umbrella between his feet and leaned on it, looking like an elderly, extremely urbane vulture that had come in to roost in Rubber Ed French’s office. He had the slightest touch of an accent, Rubber Ed thought, but it wasn’t the clipped intonation of the British upper class, as Wimsey’s would have been; it was broader, more European. Anyway, the resemblance to Todd was quite striking. Especially through the nose and eyes.

I’m glad you could come,’ Rubber Ed told him, resuming his own seat, ‘although in these cases the student’s mother or father-‘

This was the opening gambit, of course. Almost ten years of experience in the counselling business had convinced him that when an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent showed up for a conference, it usually meant trouble at home – the sort of trouble that invariably turned out to be the root of the problem. To Rubber Ed, this came as a relief. Domestic problems were bad, but for a boy of Todd’s intelligence, a heavy drug trip would have been much, much worse.

‘Yes, of course,’ Bowden said, managing to look both sorrowful and angry at the same time. ‘My son and his wife asked me if I could come and talk this sorry business over with you, Mr French. Todd is a good boy, believe me. This trouble with his school marks is only temporary.’

‘Well, we all hope so, don’t we, Mr Bowden? Smoke if you like. It’s supposed to be off-limits on school property, but I’ll never tell.’

Thank you.’

Mr Bowden took a half-crushed package of Camel cigarettes from his inner pocket, put one of the last two zigzagging smokes in his mouth, found a Diamond Blue-Tip match, scratched it on the heel of one black shoe, and lit up. He coughed an old man’s dank cough over the first drag, shook the match out, and put the blackened stump into the ashtray Rubber Ed had produced. Rubber Ed watched this ritual, which seemed almost as formal as the old man’s shoes, with frank fascination.

‘Where to begin,’ Bowden said, his distressed face looking at Rubber Ed through a swirling raft of cigarette smoke.

‘Well,’ Rubber Ed said kindly, ‘the very fact that you’re here instead of Todd’s parents tells me something, you know.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does. Very well.’ He folded his hands. The Camel protruded from between the second and third fingers of his right. He straightened his back and lifted his chin. There was something almost Prussian in his mental coming to terms, Rubber Ed thought, something that made him think of all those war movies he’d seen as a kid.

‘My son and my daughter-in-law are having troubles in their home,’ Bowden said, biting off each word precisely. ‘Rather bad troubles, I should think.’ His eyes, old but amazingly bright, watched as Rubber Ed opened the folder centred in front of him on the desk blotter. There were sheets of paper inside, but not many.

‘And you feel that these troubles are affecting Todd’s academic performance?’

Bowden leaned forward perhaps six inches. His blue eyes never left Rubber Ed’s brown ones. There was a heavily charged pause, and then Bowden said: ‘The mother drinks.’

He resumed his former ramrod-straight position.

‘Oh,’ Rubber Ed said.

‘Yes,’ Bowden replied, nodding grimly. ‘The boy has told me that he has come home on two occasions and has found her sprawled out on the kitchen table. He knows how my son feels about her drinking problem, and so the boy has put dinner in the oven himself on these occasions, and has gotten her to drink enough black coffee so she will at least be awake when Richard comes home.’

That’s bad,’ Rubber Ed said, although he had heard worse – mothers with heroin habits, fathers who had abruptly taken it into their heads to start banging their daughters … or their sons. ‘Has Mrs Bowden thought about getting professional help for her problem?’

The boy has tried to persuade her that would be the best course. She is much ashamed, I think. If she was given a little time…’ He made a gesture with his cigarette that left a dissolving smoke-ring in the air. ‘You understand?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Rubber Ed nodded, privately admiring the gesture that had produced the smoke-ring. ‘Your son … Todd’s father…’

‘He is not without blame,’ Bowden said harshly. The hours he works, the meals he has missed, the nights when he must leave suddenly … I tell you, Mr French, he is more married to his job than he is to Monica. I was raised to believe that a man’s family came before everything. Was it not the same for you?’

‘It sure was,’ Rubber Ed responded heartily. His father had been a night watchman for a large Los Angeles department store and he had really only seen his pop on weekends and vacations.

That is another side of the problem,’ Bowden said.

Rubber Ed nodded and thought for a moment. ‘What about your other son, Mr Bowden? Uh …’ He looked down at the folder. ‘Harold. Todd’s uncle.’

‘Harry and Deborah are in Minnesota now,’ Bowden said, quite truthfully. ‘He has a position there at the University medical school. It would be quite difficult for him to leave, and very unfair to ask him.’ His face took on a righteous cast. ‘Harry and his wife are quite happily married.’

‘I see.’ Rubber Ed looked at the file again for a moment and then closed it. ‘Mr Bowden, I appreciate your frankness. I’ll be just as frank with you.’

Thank you,’ Bowden said stiffly.

‘We can’t do as much for our students in the counselling area as we would like. There are six counsellors here, and we’re each carrying a load of over a hundred students. My newest colleague, Hepburn, has a hundred and fifteen. At this age, in our society, all children need help.’

‘Of course.’ Bowden mashed his cigarette brutally into the ashtray and folded his hands once more.

‘Sometimes bad problems get by us. Home environment and drugs are the two most common. At least Todd isn’t mixed up with speed or mescaline or PCP.’

‘God forbid.’

‘Sometimes,’ Rubber Ed went on, ‘there’s simply nothing we can do. It’s depressing, but it’s a fact of life. Usually the ones that are first to get spit out of the machine we’re running here are the class troublemakers, the sullen, uncommunicative kids, the ones who refuse to even try. They are simply warm bodies waiting for the system to buck them up through the grades or waiting to get old enough so they can quit without their parents’ permission and join the army or get a job at the Speedy-Boy Carwash or marry their boyfriends. You understand? I’m being blunt. Our system is, as they say, not all it’s cracked up to be.’

‘I appreciate your frankness.’

‘But it hurts when you see the machine starting to mash up someone like Todd. He ran out a 92 average for last year’s work, and that puts him in the ninety-fifth percentile. His English averages are even better. He shows a flair for writing, and that’s something special in a generation of kids that thinks culture begins in front of the TV and ends in the neighbourhood movie theatre. I was talking to the woman who had Todd in Comp last year. She said Todd passed in the finest term-paper she’d seen in twenty years of teaching. It was on the German death-camps during World War II. She gave him the only A-plus she’s ever given a composition student.’

‘I have read it,’ Bowden said. ‘It is very fine.’

‘He has also demonstrated above-average ability in the life sciences and social sciences, and while he’s not going to be one of the great math whizzes of the century, all the notes I have indicate that he’s given it the good old college try … until this year. Until this year. That’s the whole story, in a nutshell.’

‘Yes.’

‘I hate like hell to see Todd go down the tubes this way, Mr Bowden. And summer school … well, I said I’d be frank. Summer school often does a boy like Todd more harm than good. Your usual junior high school summer session is a zoo. AH the monkeys and the laughing hyenas are in attendance, plus a full complement of dodo birds. Bad company for a boy like Todd.’

‘Certainly.’

‘So let’s get to the bottom line, shall we? I suggest a series of appointments for Mr and Mrs Bowden at the Counselling Centre downtown. Everything in confidence, of course. The man in charge down there, Harry Ackerman, is a good friend of mine. And I don’t think Todd should go to them with the idea; I think you should.’ Rubber Ed smiled widely. ‘Maybe we can get everybody back on track by June. It’s not impossible.’

But Bowden looked positively alarmed by this idea.

‘I believe they might resent the boy if I took that proposal to them now,’ he said. ‘Things are very delicate. They could go either way. The boy has promised me he will work harder in his studies. He is very alarmed at this drop in his marks.’ He smiled thinly, a smile Ed French could not quite interpret. ‘More alarmed than you know.’

‘But-‘

‘And they would resent me’ Bowden pressed on quickly. ‘God knows they would. Monica already regards me as something of a meddler. I try not to be, but you see the situation. I feel that things are best left alone … for now.’

‘I’ve had a great deal of experience in these matters,’ Rubber Ed told Bowden. He folded his hands on Todd’s file and looked at the old man earnestly. ‘I really think counselling is in order here. You’ll understand that my interest in the marital problems your son and daughter-in-law are having begins and ends with the effect they’re having on Todd … and right now, they’re having quite an effect.’

‘Let me make a counter-proposal,’ Bowden said. ‘You have, I believe, a system of marking halfway through each quarter?’

‘Yes,’ Rubber Ed agreed cautiously. ‘Interpretation of Progress cards – IOP Cards. The kids, of course, call them Flunk Cards. They only get them if their grade in a given course is below 78 halfway through the quarter. In other words, we give out IOP cards to kids who are pulling a D or an F in a given course.’

‘Very good,’ Bowden said. “Then what I suggest is this: If the boy gets one of those cards … even one – He held up one gnarled finger ‘-1 will approach my son and his wife about your counselling. I will go further.’ He pronounced it furdah.

‘If the boy receives one of your Flunk Cards in April -‘

‘We give them out the first week in May, actually.’

‘Yes? If he receives one then, I guarantee that they will accept the counselling proposal. They are worried about their son, Mr French. But now they are so wrapped up in their own problem that…’ He shrugged.

‘I understand.’

‘So let us give them that long to solve their own problems. Pulling one’s self up by one’s own shoelaces … that is the American way, is it not?’

‘Yes, I guess it is,’ Rubber Ed told him after a moment’s thought … and after a quick glance at the clock, which told him he had another appointment in five minutes. ‘Ill accept that.’

He stood, and Bowden stood with him. They shook hands again, Rubber Ed being carefully mindful of the old party’s arthritis.

‘But in all fairness, I ought to tell you that very few students can pull out of an eighteen-week tailspin in just five weeks of classes. There’s a huge amount of ground to be made up – a huge amount. I suspect you’ll have to come through on your guarantee, Mr Bowden.’

Bowden offered his thin, disconcerting smile again. ‘Do you?’ was all he said.

Something had troubled Rubber Ed through the entire interview, and he put his finger on it during lunch in the cafeteria, more than an hour after ‘Lord Peter’ had left, umbrella once again neatly tucked under his arm.

He and Todd’s grandfather had talked for fifteen minutes at least, probably closer to twenty, and Ed didn’t think the old man had once referred to his grandson by name.

Todd pedalled breathlessly up Dussander’s walk and parked his bike on its kickstand. School had let out only fifteen minutes before. He took the front steps at one jump, used his doorkey, and hurried down the hall to the sunlit kitchen. His face was a hopeful landscape of hopeful sunshine and gloomy clouds. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, his stomach and his vocal cords knotted, watching Dussander as he rocked with his cupful of bourbon in his lap. He was still dressed in his best, although he had pulled his tie down two inches and loosened the top button of his shirt He looked at Todd expressionlessly, his lizard-like eyes at halfmast.

‘Well,’ Todd finally managed.

Dussander left him hanging a moment longer, a moment that seemed at least ten years long to Todd. Then, deliberately, Dussander set his cup on the table next to his bottle of Ancient Age and said:

‘The fool believed everything.’

Todd let out his pentup breath in a whooping gust of relief.

Before he could draw another breath in, Dussander added: ‘He wanted your poor, troubled parents to attend counselling sessions downtown with a friend of his. He was really quite insistent’

‘Jesus! Did you … what did you … how did you handle it?’

‘I thought quickly,’ Dussander replied. ‘Like the little girl in the Saki story, invention on short notice is one of my strong points. I promised him your parents would go in for such counselling if you received one Flunk Card when they are given out the first week of May.’

The blood fell out of Todd’s face.

‘You did what?’ he nearly screamed. ‘I’ve already flunked two algebra quizzes and a history test since the marking period started!’ He advanced into the room, his pale face now growing shiny with breaking sweat. ‘There was a French quiz this afternoon and I flunked that too … I know I did. All I could think about was that godamned Rubber Ed and whether or not you were taking care of him. You took care of him, all right,’ he finished bitterly. ‘Not get one Flunk Card? I’ll probably get five or six.’

‘It was the best I could do without arousing suspicions,’ Dussander said. ‘This French, fool that he is, is only doing his job. Now you will do yours.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Todd’s face was ugly and thunderous, his voice truculent

‘You will work. In the next four weeks you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life. Furthermore, on Monday you will go to each of your instructors and apologize to them for your poor showing thus far. You will -‘

‘It’s impossible,’ Todd said. ‘You don’t get it, man. It’s impossible. I’m at least five weeks behind in science and history. In algebra it’s more like ten.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Dussander said. He poured more bourbon.

‘You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?’ Todd shouted at him. ‘Well, I don’t take orders from you. The days when you gave orders are long over. Do you get it? He lowered his voice abruptly. “The most lethal thing you’ve got around the house these days is a Shell No-Pest Strip. You’re nothing but a broken-down old man who farts rotten eggs if he eats a taco. I bet you even pee in your bed.’

‘Listen to me, snotnose,’ Dussander said quietly.

Todd’s head jerked angrily around at that.

‘Before today,’ Dussander said carefully, ‘it was possible, just barely possible, that you could have denounced me and come out clean yourself. I don’t believe you would have been up to the job with your nerves in their present state, but never mind that. It would have been technically possible. But now things have changed. Today I impersonated your grandfather, one Victor Bowden. No one can have the slightest doubt that I did it with … how is the word? … your connivance. If it comes out now, boy, you will look blacker than ever. And you will have no defence. I took care of that today.’

‘I wish-‘

‘You wish! You wish!’ Dussander roared. ‘Never mind your wishes, your wishes make me sick, your wishes are no more than little piles of dogshit in the gutter! All I want from you is to know if you understand the situation we are in?

‘I understand it,’ Todd muttered. His fists had been tightly clenched while Dussander shouted at him – he was not used to being shouted at. Now he opened his hands and dully observed that he had dug bleeding half-moons into his palms. The cuts would have been worse, he supposed, but in the last four months or so he had taken up biting his nails.

‘Good. Then you will make your sweet apologies, and you will study. In your free time at school you will study. During your lunch hours you will study. After school you will come here and study, and on your weekends you will come here and do more of the same.’

‘Not here,’ Todd said quickly. ‘At home.’

‘No. At home you will dawdle and daydream as you have all along. If you are here I can stand over you if I have to and watch you. I can protect my own interests in this matter. I can quiz you. I can listen to your lessons.’

‘If I don’t want to come here, you can’t make me.’

Dussander drank. ‘That is true. Things will then go on as they have. You will fail. This guidance person, French, will expect me to make good on my promise. When I don’t, he will call your parents. They will find out that kindly Mr Denker impersonated your grandfather at your request. They will find out about the altered grades. They -‘

‘Oh, shut up. I’ll come.’

‘You’re already here. Begin with algebra.’

‘No way! It’s Friday afternoon!’

‘You study every afternoon now,’ Dussander said softly. ‘Begin with algebra.’

Todd stared at him — only for a moment before dropping his eyes and fumbling his algebra text out of his bookbag -and Dussander saw murder in the boy’s eyes. Not figurative murder; literal murder. It had been years since he had seen that dark, burning, speculative glance, but one never forgot it. He supposed he would have seen it in his own eyes if there had been a mirror at hand on the day he had looked at the white and defenceless nape of the boy’s neck.

/ must protect mysetf, he thought with some amazement. One underestimates at one’s own risk.

He drank his bourbon and rocked and watched the boy study.

It was nearly five o’clock when Todd biked home. He felt washed out, hot-eyed, drained, impotently angry. Every time his eyes had wandered from the printed page – from the maddening, incomprehensible, fucking stupid world of sets, subsets, ordered pairs, and Cartesian co-ordinates -Dussander’s sharp old man’s voice had spoken. Otherwise he had remained completely silent … except for the maddening bump of his slippers on the floor and the squeak of the rocker. He sat there like a vulture waiting for its prey to expire. Why had he ever gotten into this? How had he gotten into it? This was a mess, a terrible mess. He had picked up some ground this afternoon – some of the set theory that had stumped him so badly just before the Christmas break had fallen into place with an almost audible click – but it was impossible to think he could pick up enough to scrape through next week’s algebra test with even a D.

It was five weeks until the end of the world.

On the corner he saw a bluejay lying on the sidewalk, its beak slowly opening and closing. It was trying vainly to get onto its birdy-feet and hop away. One of its wings had been crushed, and Todd supposed a passing car had hit it and flipped it up onto the sidewalk like a tiddlywink. One of its beady eyes stared up at him.

Todd looked at it for a long time, holding the grips of his bike’s apehanger handlebars lightly. Some of the warmth had gone out of the day and the air felt almost chilly. He supposed his friends had spent the afternoon goofing off down at the Babe Ruth diamond on Walnut Street, maybe playing a little one-on-one, more likely playing pepper or three-flies-six-grounders or roily-bat. It was the time of year when you started working your way up to baseball. There was some talk about getting up their own sandlot team this year to compete in the informal city league; there were dads enough willing to shlepp them around to games. Todd, of course, would pitch. He had been a Little League pitching star until he had grown out of the Senior Little League division last year. Would have pitched.

So what? He’d just have to tell them no. He’d just have to tell them: Guys, I got mixed up with this war criminal. I got him right by the balls, and then – ha-ha, this’ll killya, guys -then I found out he was holding my balls as tight as I was holding his. I started having funny dreams and the cold sweats. My grades went to hell and I changed them on my report card so my folks wouldn’t find out and now I’ve got to hit the books really hard for the first time in my life. I’m not afraid of getting grounded, though. I’m afraid of going to the reformatory. And that’s why I can’t play any sandlot with you guys this year. You see how it is, guys.

A thin smile, much like Dussander’s and not at all like his former broad grin, touched his lips. There was no sunshine in it; it was a shady smile. There was no fun in it; no confidence. It merely said, You see how it is, guys.

He rolled his bike forward over the jay with exquisite slowness, hearing the newspaper crackle of its feathers and the crunch of its small hollow bones as they fractured inside it. He reversed, rolling over it again. It was still twitching. He rolled over it again, a single bloody feather stuck in his front tyre, revolving up and down, up and down. By then the bird had stopped moving, the bird had kicked the bucket, the bird had punched out, the bird had gone to the great aviary in the sky, but Todd kept going forward and backward across its mashed body just the same. He did it for almost five minutes, and that thin smile never left his face. You see how it is, guys.

10

April, 1975.

The old man stood halfway down the compound’s aisle, smiling broadly, as Dave Klingerman walked up to meet him. The frenzied barking that filled the air didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest, nor the smells of fur and urine, nor the hundred different strays yapping and howling in their cages, dashing back and forth, leaping against the mesh. Klingerman pegged the old guy as a dog-lover right off the bat. His smile was sweet and pleasant. He offered Dave a swollen, arthritis-bunched hand carefully, and Klingerman shook it in the same spirit.

‘Hello, sir!’ he said, speaking up. ‘Noisy as hell, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t mind,’ the old man said. ‘Not at all. My name is Arthur Denker.’

‘Klingerman. Dave Klingerman.’

‘I am pleased to meet you, sir. I read in the paper -I could not believe it — that you give dogs away here. Perhaps I misunderstood. In fact I think I must have misunderstood.’

‘No, we give ’em away, all right,’ Dave said. ‘If we can’t we have to destroy ’em. Sixty days, that’s what the state gives us. Shame. Come on in the office here. Quieter. Smells better, too.’

In the office, Dave heard a story that was familiar (but nonetheless affecting): Arthur Denker was in his seventies. He had come to California when his wife died. He was not rich, but he tended what he did have with great care. He was lonely. His only friend was the boy who sometimes came to his house and read to him. In Germany he had owned a beautiful St Bernard. Now, in Santa Donato, he had a house with a good-sized back yard. The yard was fenced. And he had read in the paper … would it be possible that he could …

‘Well, we don’t have any Bernards,’ Dave said. ‘They go fast because they’re so good with kids -‘

‘Oh, I understand. I didn’t mean that-‘

‘— but I do have a half-grown Shepherd pup. How would that be?’

Mr Denker’s eyes grew bright, as if he might be on the verge of tears. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘That would be perfect.’

The dog itself is free, but there are a few other charges. Distemper and rabies shots. A city dog licence. All of it goes about twenty-five bucks for most people, but the state pays half if you’re over sixty-five — part of the California Golden Ager programme.’

‘Golden Ager … is that what I am?’ Mr Denker said, and laughed. For just a moment – it was silly – Dave felt a kind of chill.

‘Uh … I guess so, sir.’

‘It is very reasonable.’

‘Sure, we think so. The same dog would cost you a hundred and twenty-five dollars in a pet shop. But people go to those places instead of here. They are paying for a set of papers, of course, not the dog.’ Dave shook his head. ‘If they only understood how many fine animals are abandonee every year.’

‘And if you can’t find a suitable home for them within sixty days, they are destroyed?’

‘We put them to sleep, yes.’

‘Put them to… ? I’m sorry, my English -‘

‘It’s a city ordinance,’ Dave said. ‘Can’t have dog-packs running the streets.’

‘You shoot them.’

‘No, we give them gas. It’s very humane. They don’t feel a thing.’

‘No,’ Mr Denker said. ‘I am sure they don’t’

Todd’s seat in Introduction to Algebra was four desks down in the second row. He sat there, trying to keep his face expressionless, as Mr Storrman passed back the exams. But his ragged fingernails were digging into his palms again, and his entire body seemed to be running with a slow and caustic sweat.

Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t be such a goddam chump. There’s no way you could have passed. You know you didn’t pass.

Nevertheless, he could not completely squash the foolish hope. It had been the first algebra exam in weeks that looked as if it had been written in something other than Greek. He was sure that in his nervousness (nervousness? no, call it what it had really been: outright terror) he had not done that well, but maybe … well, if it had been anyone else but Storrman, who had a Yale padlock for a heart…

STOP IT! he commanded himself, and for a moment, a coldly horrible moment, he was positive he had screamed those two words aloud in the classroom. You flunked, you know you did, not a thing in the world is going to change it.

Storrman handed him his paper expressionlessly and moved on. Todd laid it face-down on his initial-scarred desk. For a moment he didn’t think he possessed sufficient will to even turn it over and know. At last he flipped it with such convulsive suddenness that the exam sheet tore. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he stared at it. His heart seemed to stop for a moment.

The number 83 was written in a circle at the top of the sheet. Below it was a letter-grade: C Plus. Below the letter grade was a brief notation: Good improvement! I think I’m twice as relieved as you should be. Check errors carefully. At least three of them are arithmetical rather than conceptual.

His heartbeat began again, at triple-time. Relief washed over him, but it was not cool – it was hot and complicated and strange. He closed his eyes, not hearing the class as it buzzed over the exam and began the pre-ordained fight for an extra point here or there. Todd saw redness behind his eyes. It pulsed like flowing blood with the rhythm of his heartbeat. In that instant he hated Dussander more than he ever had before. His hands snapped shut into fists and he only wished, wished, wished, that Dussander’s scrawny chicken neck could have been between them.

Dick and Monica Bowden had twin beds, separated by a nightstand with a pretty imitation Tiffany lamp standing on it. Their room was done in genuine redwood, and the walls were comfortably lined with books. Across the room, nestled between two ivory bookends (bull elephants on their hind legs) was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching Johnny Carson with the earplugs in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that had come from the book club that day.

‘Dick?’ She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said) into the Crichton and closed it.

On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.

‘Dick?’ she said more loudly.

He pulled the earplugs out. ‘What?’

‘Do you think Todd’s all right?’

He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. lJe ne comprends pas, cherie.’ His limping French was a joke between them; he had met her in college when he was flunking his language requirement. His father had sent him an extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor. He had gotten Monica Darrow, picking her name at random from the cards tacked up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his pin … and he had managed a C in French.

‘Well… he’s lost weight.’

‘He looks a little scrawny, sure,’ Dick said. He put the TV earplugs in his lap, where they emitted tiny squawking sounds. ‘He’s growing up, Monica.’

‘So soon?’ she asked uneasily.

He laughed. ‘So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager – from a five-foot-six shrimp at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you see before you today. My mother said that when I was fourteen you could hear me growing in the night’

‘Good thing not all of you grew that much.’

‘It’s all in how you use it.’

‘Want to use it tonight?’

‘The wench grows bold,’ Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplugs across the room.

After, as he was drifting off to sleep:

‘Dick, he’s having bad dreams, too.’

‘Nightmares?’ he muttered.

‘Nightmares. I’ve heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when I’ve gone down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn’t want to wake him up. It’s silly, but my grandmother used to say you could drive a person insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream.’

‘She was the Polack, wasn’t she?’

‘The Polack, yeah, the Polack. The mockie, why don’t you say? Nice talk!’

‘You know what I mean. Why don’t you just use the upstairs John?’ He had put it in himself two years ago.

‘You know the flush always wakes you up,’ she said.

‘So don’t flush it.’

‘Dick, that’s nasty.’

He sighed.

‘Sometimes when I go in, he’s sweating. And the sheets are damp.’

He grinned in the dark. ‘I bet.’

‘What’s that… oh.’ She slapped him lightly. “That’s nasty, too. Besides, he’s only thirteen.’

‘Fourteen next month. He’s not too young. A little precocious, maybe, but not too young.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember exactly. But I remember I woke up thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.’

‘But you were older than Todd is now.’

‘All that stuffs happening younger. It must be the milk … or the fluoride. Do you know they have sanitary napkin dispensers in all the girls’ rooms of the school we built in Jackson Park last year? And that’s a grammar school. Now your average sixth-grader is only ten. How old were you when you started?’

‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘All I know is Todd’s dreams don’t sound like… like he died and went to heaven.’

‘Have you asked him about them?’

‘Once. About six weeks ago. You were off playing golf with that horrible Ernie Jacobs.’

‘That horrible Ernie Jacobs is going to make me a full partner by 1977, if he doesn’t screw himself to death with that high yellow secretary of his before then. Besides, he always pays the greens’ fees. What did Todd say?’

‘That he didn’t remember. But a sort of… shadow crossed his face. I think he did remember.’

‘Monica, I don’t remember everything from my dear dead youth, but one thing I do remember is that wet dreams are not always pleasant In fact, they can be downright unpleasant.’

‘How can that be?’

‘Guilt All kinds of guilt Some of it maybe all the way from babyhood, when it was made very clear to him that wetting the bed was wrong. Then there’s the sex thing. Who knows what brings a wet dream on? Copping a feel on the bus? Looking up a girl’s skirt in study hall? I don’t know. The only one I can really remember was going off the high board at the YMCA pool on co-ed day and losing my trunks when I hit the water.’

‘You got off on that?’ she asked, giggling a little.

‘Yeah. So if the kid doesn’t want to talk to you about his John Thomas problems, don’t force him.’

‘We did our damn best to raise him without all those needless guilts.’

‘You can’t escape them. He brings them home from school like the colds he used to pick up in the first grade. From his friends, or the way his teachers mince around certain subjects. He probably got it from my dad, too. “Don’t touch it in the night, Todd, or your hands’!! grow hair and you’ll go blind and you’ll start to lose your memory, and after a while your thing will turn black and rot off. So be careful, Todd.”‘

‘Dick Bowden! Your dad would never -‘

‘He wouldn’t? Hell, he did. Just like your Jewish-Polack grandmother told you that waking somebody up in the middle of a nightmare might drive them nuts. He also told me to always wipe off the ring of a public toilet before I sat on it so I wouldn’t get “other people’s germs”. I guess that was his way of saying syphilis. I bet your grandmother laid that one on you, too.’

‘No, my mother,’ she said absently. ‘And she told me to always flush. Which is why I go downstairs.’

‘It still wakes me up,’ Dick mumbled.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

This time he had actually drifted halfway over the threshold of sleep when she spoke his name again.

‘ What? he asked, a little impatiently.

‘You don’t suppose … oh, never mind. Go back to sleep.’

‘No, go on, finish. I’m awake again. I don’t suppose what?’

That old man. Mr Denker. You don’t think Todd’s seeing too much of him, do you? Maybe he’s … oh, I don’t know … filling Todd up with a lot of stories.’

‘The real heavy horrors,’ Dick said. ‘The day the Essen Motor Works dropped below quota.’ He snickered.

‘It was just an idea,’ she said, a little stiffly. The covers rustled as she turned over on her side. ‘Sorry I bothered you.’

He put a hand on her bare shoulder. ‘Ill tell you something, babe,’ he said, and stopped for a moment, thinking carefully, choosing his words. ‘I’ve been worried about Todd too, sometimes. Not the same things you’ve been worried about, but worried is worried, right?’

She turned back to him. ‘About what?’

‘Well, I grew up a lot different than he’s growing up. My dad had the store. Vic the Grocer, everyone called him. He had a book where he kept the names of the people who owed him, and how much they owed. You know what he called it?’

‘No.’ Dick rarely talked about his boyhood; she had always thought it was because he hadn’t enjoyed it She listened carefully now.

‘He called it the Left Hand Book. He said the right hand was business, but the right hand should never know what the left hand was doing. He said if the right hand did know, it would probably grab a meat-cleaver and chop the left hand right off.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘Well, I didn’t like the old man very much when we first got married, and the truth is I still spend a lot of time not liking him. I couldn’t understand why I had to wear pants from the Goodwill box while Mrs Mazursky could get a ham on credit with that same old story about how her husband was going back to work next week. The only work that fucking wino Bill Mazursky ever had was holding onto a twelve-cent bottle of musky so it wouldn’t fly away.

‘All I ever wanted in those days was to get out of the neighbourhood and away from my old man’s life. So I made grades and played sports I didn’t really like and got a scholarship at UCLA. And I made damn sure I stayed in the top ten per cent of my classes because the only Left Hand Book the colleges kept in those days was for the GIs that fought in the war. My dad sent me money for my textbooks, but the only other money I ever took from him was the time I wrote home in a panic because I was flunking funnybook French. I met you. And I found out later from Mr Henreid down the block that my dad put a lien on his car to scare up ‘And now I’ve got you, and we’ve got Todd. I’ve always thought he was a damned fine boy, and I’ve tried to make sure he’s always had everything he ever needed … anything that would help him grow into a fine man. I used to laugh at that old wheeze about a man wanting his son to be better than he was, but as I get older it seems less funny and more true. I never want Todd to have to wear pants from a Goodwill box because some wino’s wife got a ham on credit. You understand?’

‘Yes, of course I do,’ she said quietly.

‘Then, about ten years ago, just before my old man finally got tired of fighting off the urban renewal guys and retired, he had a minor stroke. He was in the hospital for ten days. And the people from the neighbourhood, the guineas and the krauts, even some of the jigs that started to move in around 1955 or so – they paid his bill. Every fucking cent. I couldn’t believe it. They kept the store open, too. Fiona Castellano got four or five of her friends who were out of work to come in on shifts. When my old man got back, the books balanced out to the cent.’

‘Wow,’ she said, very softly.

‘You know what he said to me? My old man? That he’d always been afraid of getting old – of being scared and hurting and all by himself. Of having to go into the hospital and not being able to make ends meet anymore. Of dying. He said that after the stroke he wasn’t scared anymore. He said he thought he could die well. “You mean die happy, pop?” I asked him. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anyone dies happy, Dickie.” He always called me Dickie, still does, and that’s another thing I guess I’ll never be able to like. He said he didn’t think anyone died happy, but you could die well. That impressed me.’

He was silent for a long, thoughtful time.

“The last five or six years I’ve been able to get some perspective on my old man. Maybe because he’s down there in Sandoro and out of my hair. I started thinking that maybe the Left Hand Book wasn’t such a bad idea. That was when I started to worry about Todd. I kept wanting to tell him about there was mavbe something more to life than me being able to take all of you to Hawaii for a month or being able to buy Todd pants that don’t smell like the mothballs they used to put in the Goodwill box. I could never figure out how to tell him those things. But I think maybe he knows. And it takes a load off my mind.’

‘Reading to Mr Denker, you mean?’

‘Yes. He’s not getting anything for that. Denker can’t pay him. Here’s this old guy, thousands of miles from any friends or relatives that might still be living, here’s this guy that’s everything my father was afraid of. And there’s Todd.’

‘I never thought of it just like that.’

‘Have you noticed the way Todd gets when you talk to him about that old man?’

‘He gets very quiet.’

‘Sure. He gets tongue-tied and embarrassed, like he was doing something nasty. Just like my pop used to when someone tried to thank him for laying some credit on them. We’re Todd’s right hand, that’s all. You and me and all the rest – the house, the ski-trips to Tahoe, the Thunderbird in the garage, his colour TV. All his right hand. And he doesn’t want us to see what his left hand is up to.’

‘You don’t think he’s seeing too much of Denker, then?’

‘Honey, look at his grades! If they were falling off, I’d be the first one to say hey, enough is enough, already, don’t go overboard. His grades are the first place trouble would show up. And how have they been?’

‘As good as ever, after that first slip.’

‘So what are we talking about? Listen, I’ve got a conference at nine, babe. If I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to be sloppy.’

‘Sure, go to sleep,’ she said indulgently, and as he turned over, she kissed him lightly on one shoulderblade. ‘I love you.’

‘Love you too,’ he said comfortably, and closed his eyes. ‘Everything’s fine, Monica. You worry too much.’ •

‘I know I do. Goodnight.’

They slept.

‘Stop looking out the window,’ Dussander said. ‘There is nothing out there to interest you.’

Todd looked at him sullenly. His history text was open on the table, showing a colour plate of Teddy Roosevelt cresting San Juan Hill. Helpless Cubans were falling away from the hooves of Teddy’s horses. Teddy was grinning a wide American grin, the grin of a man who knew that God was in His heaven and everything was bully. Todd Bowden was not grinning.

‘You like being a slave-driver, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘I like being a free man,’ Dussander said. ‘Study.’

‘Suck my cock.’

‘As a boy,’ Dussander said, ‘I would have had my mouth washed out with lye soap for saying such a thing.’

Times change.’

‘Do they?’ Dussander sipped his bourbon. ‘Study.’

Todd stared at Dussander. ‘You’re nothing but a goddamned rummy. You know that?’

‘Study.’

‘Shut up!’ Todd slammed his book shut It made a riflecrack sound in Dussander’s kitchen. ‘I can never catch up, anyway. Not in time for the test There’s fifty pages of this shit left, all the way up to World War I. I’ll make a crib in Study Hall 2 tomorrow.’

Harshly, Dussander said: ‘You will do no such thing!’

‘Why not? Who’s going to stop me? You?’

‘Boy, you are still having a hard time comprehending the stakes we play for. Do you think I enjoy keeping your snivelling brat nose in your books?’ His voice rose, whipsawing, demanding, commanding. ‘Do you think I enjoy listening to your tantrums, your kindergarten swears? “Suck my cock”,’ Dussander mimicked savagely in a high, falsetto voice that made Todd flush darkly. ‘”Suck my cock, so what, who cares, I’l1 do it tomorrow, suck my cock”!”

‘Well, you like it!’ Todd shouted back. ‘Yeah, you like it! The only time you don’t feel like a zombie is when you’re on my back! So give me a fucking break!’

‘If you are caught with one of these cribbing papers, what do you think will happen? Who will be told first?’

Todd looked at his hands with their ragged, bitten fingernails and said nothing.

‘Who?’

‘Jesus, you know. Rubber Ed. Then my folks, I guess.’

Dussander nodded. ‘Me, I guess that too. Study. Put your cribbing paper in your head, where it belongs.’

‘I hate you,’ Todd said dully. ‘I really do.’ But he opened his book again and Teddy Roosevelt grinned up at him, Teddy galloping into the twentieth century with his sabre in his hand, Cubans falling back in disarray before him -possibly before the force of his fierce American grin.

Dussander began to rock again. He held his teacup of bourbon in his hands. “That’s a good boy,’ he said, almost tenderly.

Todd had his first wet-dream on the last night of April, and awoke to the sound of rain whispering secretly through the leaves and branches of the tree outside his window.

In the dream, he had been in one of the Patin laboratories. He was standing at the end of a long, low table. A lush young girl of amazing beauty had been secured to this table with clamps. Dussander was assisting him. Dussander wore a white butcher’s apron and nothing else. When he pivoted to turn on the monitoring equipment, Todd could see Dussander’s scrawny buttocks grinding at each other like misshapen white stones.

He handed something to Todd, something he recognized immediately, although he had never actually seen one. It was a dildo. The tip of it was polished metal, winking in the light of the overhead fluorescents like heartless chrome. The dildo was hollow. Snaking out of it was a black electrical cord that ended in a red rubber bulb.

‘Go ahead,’ Dussander said. ‘The Fuehrer says it’s all right. He says it’s your reward for studying.’

Todd looked down at himself and saw that he was naked. His small penis was fully erect, jutting plumply up at an angle from the thin peachdown of his pubic hair. He slipped the dildo on. The fit was tight but there was some sort of

lubricant in there. The friction was pleasant. No; it was more than pleasant. It was delightful.

He looked down at the girl and felt a strange shift in his thoughts … as if they had slipped into a perfect groove. Suddenly all things seemed right. Doors had been opened. He would go through them. He took the red bulb in his left hand, put his knees on the table, and paused for just a moment, gauging the angle while his Norseman’s prick made his own angle up and out from his slight boy’s body.

Dimly, far off, he could hear Dussander reciting: Test run eighty-four. Electricity, sexual stimulus, metabolism. Based on the Thyssen theories of negative reinforcement. Subject is a young Jewish girl, approximately sixteen years of age, no scars, no identifying marks, no known disabilities -‘

She cried out when the tip of the dildo touched her. Todd found the cry pleasant, as he did her fruitless struggles to free herself, or, lacking that, to at least bring her legs together.

This is what they can’t show in those magazines about the war, he thought, but it’s there, just the same.

He thrust forward suddenly, parting her with no grace. She shrieked like a firebell.

After her initial thrashing and efforts to expel him, she lay perfectly still, enduring. The lubricated interior of the dildo pulled and slid against Todd’s engorgement. Delightful. Heavenly. His fingers toyed with the rubber bulb in his left hand.

Far away, Dussander recited pulse, blood pressure, respiration, alpha waves, beta waves, stroke count.

As the climax began to build inside him, Todd became perfectly still and squeezed the bulb. Her eyes, which had been closed, flew open, bulging. Her tongue fluttered in the pink cavity of her mouth. Her arms and legs thrummed. But the real action was in her torso, rising and falling, vibrating, every muscle

(oh every muscle every muscle moves tightens closes

every)

every muscle and the sensation at climax was

(ecstasy)

oh it was, it was

(the end of the world thundering outside)

He woke to that sound and the sound of rain. He was huddled on his side in a dark ball, his heart beating at a sprinter’s pace. His lower belly was covered with a warm, sticky liquid. There was an instant of panicky horror when he feared he might be bleeding to death … and then he realized what it really was, and he felt a fainting, nauseated revulsion. Semen. Come. Jizz. Jungle-juice. Words from fences and locker rooms and the walls of gas station bathrooms. There was nothing here he wanted.

His hands balled helplessly into fists. His dream-climax recurred to him, pallid now, senseless, frightening. But nerve-endings still tingled, retreating slowly from their spike-point That final scene, fading now, was disgusting and yet somehow compulsive, like an unsuspecting bite into a piece of tropical fruit which, you realized (a second too late), had only tasted so amazingly sweet because it was rotten. It came to him then. What he would have to do. There was only one way he could get himself back again. He would have to kill Dussander. It was the only way. Games were done; storytime was over. This was survival.

‘Kill him and it’s all over,’ he whispered in the darkness, with the rain in the tree outside and semen drying on his belly. Whispering it made it seem real.

Dussander always kept three or four fifths of Ancient Age on a shelf over the steep cellar stairs. He would go to the door, open it (half-crocked already, more often than not), and go down two steps. Then he would lean out, put one hand on the shelf, and grip the fresh bottle by the neck with his other hand. The cellar floor was not paved, but the din was hard-packed and Dussander, with a machinelike efficiency that Todd now thought of as Prussian rather than German, oiled it once every two months to keep bugs from breeding in the dirt Cement or no cement, old bones break easily. And old men have accidents. The post-mortem would show that ‘Mr Denker’ had had a skinful of booze when he ‘fell’. What happened, Todd?

He didn’t answer the door so I used the key he made for me. Sometimes he falls asleep. I went Into the kitchen andsaw the cellar door was open. I went down the stairs and he …he…

Then, of course, tears.

It would work.

He would have himself back again.

For a long time Todd lay awake in the dark, listening to the thunder retreat westward, out over the Pacific, listening to the secret sound of the rain. He thought he would stay awake the rest of the night, going over it and over it But he fell asleep only moments later and slept dreamlessly with one fist carted under his chin. He woke on the first of May fully rested for the first time in months.

11

May, 1975.

For Todd, that Friday in the middle of the month was the longest of his life. He sat in class after class, hearing nothing, waiting only for the last five minutes, when the instructor a would take out his or her small pile of Flunk Cards and distribute them. Each time an instructor approached Todd’s desk with that pile of cards, he grew cold. Each time he or she passed him without stopping, he felt waves of dizziness and a semi-hysteria.

Algebra was the worst. Storrman approached … hesitated … and just as Todd became convinced he was going to pass on, he laid a Flunk Card face-down on Todd’s desk. Todd looked at it coldly, with no feelings at all. Now that it had happened, he was only cold. Well, that’s it, he thought. Point, game, set, and match. Unless Dussander can think of something else. And I have my doubts.

Without much interest, he turned the Flunk Card over to see by how much he had missed his C. It must have been dose, but trust old Stony Storrman not to give anyone a He saw that the grade-spaces were utterly blank -the letter-grade space and the numerical-grade space. Written in the COMMENTS section was this message: I’m sure glad I don’t have to give you one of these for real! Chas. Storrman.

The dizziness came again, more savagely this time, roaring through his head, making it feel like a balloon filled with helium. He gripped the sides of his desk as hard as he could, holding one thought with total obsessive tightness: You will not faint, not faint, not faint. Little by little the waves of dizziness passed, and then he had to control an urge to run up the aisle after Storrman, turn him around, and poke his eyes out with the freshly sharpened pencil he held in his hand. And through it all his face remained carefully blank. The only sign that anything at all was going inside was a mild tic in one eyelid.

School let out for the week fifteen minutes later. Todd walked slowly around the building to the bike-racks, his head down, his hands shoved into his pockets, his books tucked into the crook of his right arm, oblivious of the running, shouting students. He tossed the books into his bike-basket, unlocked the Schwinn, and pedalled away. Towards Dussander’s house.

Today, he thought Today is your day, old man.

‘And so,’ Dussander said, pouring bourbon -into his cup as Todd entered the kitchen, ‘the accused returns from the dock. How said they, prisoner?’ He was wearing his bathrobe and a pair of hairy wool socks that climbed halfway up his shins. Socks like that, Todd thought, would be easy to slip in. He glanced at the bottle of Ancient Age Dussander was currently working. It was down to the last three fingers.

‘No Ds, no Fs, no Flunk Cards,’ Todd said. I’ll still have to change some of my grades in June, but maybe just the averages. I’ll be getting all As and Bs this quarter if I keep up my work.’

‘Oh, you’ll keep it up, all right,’ Dussander said. ‘We will see to it.’ He drank and then tipped more bourbon into his cup. This calls for a celebration.’ His speech was slightly blurred – hardly enough to be noticeable, but Todd knew the old fuck was as drunk as he ever got. Yes, today. It would have to be today.

But he was cool.

‘Celebrate pigshit,’ he told Dussander.

‘I’m afraid the delivery boy hasn’t arrived with the beluga and the truffles yet,’ Dussander said, ignoring him. ‘Help is so unreliable these days. What about a few Ritz crackers and some Velveeta while we wait?’

‘Okay,’ Todd said. ‘What the hell.’

Dussander stood up (one knee banged the table, making him wince) and crossed to the refrigerator. He got out the cheese, took a knife from the drawer and a plate from the cupboard, and a box of Ritz crackers from the breadbox.

‘All carefully injected with prussic acid,’ he told Todd as he set the cheese and crackers down on the table. He grinned, and Todd saw that he had left out his false teeth again today. Nevertheless, Todd smiled back.

‘So quiet today!’ Dussander exclaimed. ‘I would have expected you to turn handsprings all the way up the hall.’ He emptied the last of the bourbon into his cup, sipped, smacked his lips.

‘I guess I’m still numb,’ Todd said. He bit into a cracker. He had stopped refusing Dussander’s food a long time ago. Dussander thought there was a letter with one of Todd’s friends – there was not, of course; he had friends, but none he trusted that much. He supposed Dussander had guessed that long ago, but he knew Dussander didn’t quite dare put his guess to such an extreme test as murder.

‘What shall we talk about today?’ Dussander enquired, tossing off the last shot. ‘I give you the day off from studying, how’s that? Uh? Uh?’ When he drank, his accent became thicker. It was an accent Todd had come to hate. Now he felt okay about the accent; he felt okay about everything. He felt very cool all over. He looked at his hands, the hands which would give the push, and they looked just as they always did. They were not trembling; they were cool.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘Anything you want.’

‘Shall I tell you about the special soap we made? Our experiments with enforced homosexuality? Or perhaps you would like to hear how I escaped Berlin after I had been foolish enough to go back. That was a close one, I can tell you.’ He pantomimed shaving one stubbly cheek and. laughed.

‘Anything,’ Todd said. ‘Really.’ He watched Dussander examine the empty bottle and then get up with it in one hand. Dussander took it to the wastebasket and dropped it in.

‘No, none of those, I think,’ Dussander said. ‘You don’t seem to be in the mood.’ He stood reflectively by the wastebasket for a moment and then crossed the kitchen to the cellar door. His wool socks whispered on the hilly linoleum. ‘I think today I will instead tell you the story of an old man who was afraid.’

Dussander opened the cellar door. His back was now to the table. Todd stood up quietly.

‘He was afraid,’ Dussander went on, ‘of a certain young boy who was, in a queer way, his friend. A smart boy. His mother called this boy “apt pupil”, and the old man had already discovered he was an apt pupil … although perhaps not in the way his mother thought’

Dussander fumbled with the old-fashioned electrical switch on the wall, trying to turn it with his bunched and clumsy fingers. Todd walked – almost glided – across the linoleum, not stepping in any of the places where it squeaked or creaked. He knew this kitchen as well as his own, now. Maybe better.

‘At first, the boy was not the old man’s friend,’ Dussander said. He managed to turn the switch at last. He descended the first step with a veteran drunk’s care. ‘At first the old man disliked the boy a great deal. Then he grew to … to enjoy his company, although there was still a strong element of dislike there.’ He was looking at the shelf now but still holding the railing. Todd, cool – no, now he was cold – stepped behind him and calculated the chances of one strong push dislodging Dussander’s hold on the railing. He decided to wait until Dussander leaned forward.

‘Part of the old man’s enjoyment came from a feeling of equality,’ Dussander went on thoughtfully. ‘You see, the boy and the old man had each other in mutual deathgrips. Each knew something the other wanted kept secret. And then … ah, then it became apparent to the old man that things were changing. Yes. He was losing his hold – some of it or all of it, depending on how desperate the boy might be, and how clever. It occurred to this old man on one long and sleepless night that it might be well for him to acquire a new hold on the boy. For his own safety.’

Now Dussander let go of the railing and leaned out over the steep cellar stairs, but Todd remained perfectly still. The bone-deep cold was melting out of him, being replaced by a rosy flush of anger and confusion. As Dussander grasped his fresh bottle, Todd thought viciously that the old man had the stinkiest cellar in town, oil or no oil. It smelled as if something had died down there.

‘So the old man got out of his bed right then. What is sleep to an old man? Very little. And he sat at his small desk, thinking about how cleverly he had enmeshed the boy in the very crimes the boy was holding over his own head. He sat thinking about how hard the boy had worked, how very hard, to bring his school marks back up. And how, when they were back up, he would have no further need for the old man alive. And if the old man were dead, the boy could be free.’

He turned around now, holding the fresh bottle of Ancient Age by the neck.

‘I heard you, you know,’ he said, almost gently. ‘From the moment you pushed your chair back and stood up. You are not as quiet as you imagine, boy. At least not yet.’

Todd said nothing.

‘So!’ Dussander exclaimed, stepping back into the kitchen and closing the cellar door firmly behind him. “The old man wrote everything down, nicht wahr! From first word to last he wrote it down. When he was finally finished it was almost dawn and his hand was singing from the arthritis – the verdammt arthritis – but he felt good for the first time in weeks. He felt safe, He got back into his bed and slept until mid-afternoon. In fact, if he had slept any longer, he would have missed his favourite – General Hospital.’

He had regained his rocker now. He sat down, produced a worn jackknife with a yellow ivory handle, and began to cut painstakingly around the seal covering the top of the bourbon bottle.

‘On the following day the old man dressed in his best suit and went down to the bank where he kept his little checking and savings accounts. He spoke to one of the bank officers, who was able to answer all the old man’s questions most satisfactorily. He rented a safety deposit box. The bank officer explained to the old man that he would have a key and the bank would have a key. To open the box, both keys would be needed. No one but the old man could use the old man’s key without a signed, notarized letter of permission from the old man himself. With one exception.’

Dussander smiled toothlessly into Todd Bowden’s white, set face.

‘That exception is made in event of the box-holder’s death,’ he said. Still looking at Todd, still smiling, Dussander put his jackknife back into the pocket of his robe, unscrewed the cap of the bourbon bottle, and poured a fresh jolt into his cup. ‘What happens then?’ Todd asked hoarsely. ‘Then the box is opened in the presence of a bank official and a representative of the Internal Revenue Service. The contents of the box are inventoried. In this case they will find only a twelve-page document. Non-taxable … but highly interesting.’

The fingers of Todd’s hands crept towards each other and locked tightly. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said in a stunned and unbelieving voice. It was the voice of a person who observes another person walking on the ceiling. ‘You can’t… can’t do that.’

‘My boy,’ Dussander said kindly, ‘I have.’ ‘But … I … you …’ His voice suddenly rose to an agonized howl. ‘You’re old! Don’t you know that you’re old? You could die! You could die anytime!’

Dussander got up. He went to one of the kitchen cabinets and took down a small glass. This glass had once held jelly. Cartoon characters danced around the rim. Todd recognized them all – Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Barney and Betty Rubble, Pebbles and Bam-Bam. He had grown up with them. He watched as Dussander wiped this jelly-glass almost ceremonially with a dishtowel. He watched as Dussander set it in front of him. He watched as Dussander poured a finger of bourbon into it.

‘What’s that for?’ Todd muttered. ‘I don’t drink. Drinking’s for cheap stewbums like you.’

‘Lift your glass, boy. It is a special occasion. Today you drink.’

Todd looked at him for a long moment, then picked up the glass. Dussander clicked his cheap ceramic cup smartly against it.

‘I make a toast, boy – long life! Long life to both of us! Prosit!’ He tossed his bourbon off at a gulp and then began to He rocked back and forth, stockinged feet hitting the and Todd thought he had never looked vulture, a vulture in a bathrobe, a noisome beast of carrion.

‘I hate you,’ he whispered, and then Dussander began to choke on his own laughter. His face turned a dull brick colour; it sounded as if he were coughing, laughing, and strangling, all at the same time. Todd, scared, got up quickly and clapped him on the back until the coughing fit had passed.

‘Danke schon,’ he said. ‘Drink your drink. It will do you good.’

Todd drank it. It tasted like very bad cold-medicine and lit a fire in his gut.

‘I can’t believe you drink this shit all day,’ he said, putting the glass back on the table and shuddering. ‘You ought to quit it. Quit drinking and smoking.’

‘Your concern for my health is touching,’ Dussander said. He produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the same bathrobe pocket into which the jackknife had disappeared. ‘And I am equally solicitous of your own welfare, boy. Almost every day I read in the paper where a cyclist has been killed at a busy intersection. You should give it up. You should walk. Or ride the bus, like me.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ Todd burst out.

‘My boy,” Dussander said, pouring more bourbon and beginning to laugh again, ‘we are fucking each other – didn’t vou know that?’

One day about a week later, Todd was sitting on a disused mail platform down in the old trainyard. He chucked cinders out across the rusty, weed-infested tracks one at a time.

Why shouldn’t I kill him anyway?

Because he was a logical boy, the logical answer came first. No reason at all. Sooner or later Dussander was going to die, and given Dussander’s habits, it would probably be sooner. Whether he killed the old man or whether Dussander died of a heart attack in his bathtub, it was all going to come out. At least he could have the pleasure of wringing the old vulture’s neck.

Sooner or later – that phrase defied logic.

Maybe it’ll be later, Todd thought. Cigarettes or not, booze or not, he’s a tough old bastard. He’s lasted this long, so … so maybe it’ll be later.

From beneath him came a fuzzy snort.

Todd jumped to his feet, dropping the handful of cinders he had been holding. That snorting sound came again.

He paused, on the verge of running, but the snort didn’t recur. Nine hundred yards away, an eight-lane freeway swept across the horizon above this weed- and junk-strewn cul-de-sac with its deserted buildings, rusty cyclone fences, and splintery, warped platforms. The cars up on the freeway glistened in the sun like exotic hard-shelled beetles. Eight lanes of traffic up there, nothing down here but Todd, a few birds … and whatever had snorted.

Cautiously, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered under the mail platform. There was a wino lying up in there among the yellow weeds and empty cans and dusty old bottles. It was impossible to tell his age; Todd put him at somewhere between thirty and four hundred. He was wearing a strappy tee-shirt that was caked with dried vomit, green pants that were far too big for him, and grey leather workshoes cracked in a hundred places. The cracks gaped like agonized mouths. Todd thought he smelled like Dussander’s cellar.

The wino’s red-laced eyes opened slowly and stared at Todd with a bleary lack of wonder. As they did, Todd thought of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket, the Angler model. He had purchased it at a sporting goods store in Redondo Beach almost a year ago. He could hear the clerk that had waited on him in his mind: You couldn’t pick a better knife than that one, son – a knife like that could save your life someday. We sell fifteen hundred Swiss knives every damn year.

Fifteen hundred a year.

He put his hand in his pocket and gripped the knife. In his mind’s eye he saw Dussander’s jackknife working slowly around the neck of the bourbon bottle, slitting the seal. A moment later he became aware that he had an erection.

Cold terror stole into him.

The wino swiped a hand over his cracked lips and then ticked them with a tongue which nicotine had turned a permanent dismal yellow. ‘Got a dime, kid?’

Todd looked at him expressionlessly.

‘Gotta get to LA. Need another dime for the bus. I got a pointment, me. Got a job offertunity. Nice kid like you must have a dime. Maybe you got a quarter.’

Yessir, you could clean out a damn bluegill with a knife tike that… hell, you could clean out a damn marlin with it if you had to. We sell fifteen hundred of those a year. Every sporting goods store and Army-Navy Surplus in America sells them, and (f you decided to use this one to clean out some dirty, shitty old wino, nobody could trace it back to you, absolutely NOBODY.

The wino’s voice dropped; it became a confidential, tenebrous whisper. ‘For a buck I’d do you a blowjob, you never had a better. You’d come your brains out, kid, you’d -‘

Todd pulled his hand out of his pocket. He wasn’t sure hit was in it until he opened it. Two quarters. Two nickels. – dime. Some pennies. He threw them at the wino and fled.

12

June, 1975.

Todd Bowden, now fourteen, came biking up Dussander’s walk and parked his bike on the kickstand. The LA Times was on the bottom step; he picked it up. He looked at the bell, below which the neat legends ARTHUR DENKER and NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN still kept their places. He didn’t bother with the bell now, of course; he had his key.

Somewhere close by was the popping, burping sound of a Lawn Boy. He looked at Dussander’s grass and saw it could use a cutting; he would have to tell the old man to find a boy with a mower. Dussander forgot little things like that more often now. Maybe it was senility; maybe it was just the pickling influence of Ancient Age on his brains. That was an adult thought for a boy of fourteen to have, but such thoughts no longer struck Todd as singular. He had many adult thoughts these days. Most of them were not so great.

He let himself in.

He had his usual instant of cold terror as he entered the kitchen and saw Dussander slumped slightly sideways in his rocker, the cup on the table, a half-empty bottle of bourbon beside it. A cigarette had burned its entire length down to lacy grey ash in a mayonnaise cover where several other butts had been mashed out. Dussander’s mouth hung open. His face was yellow. His big hands dangled limply over the rocker’s arms. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

‘Dussander,’ he said, a little too harshly. ‘Rise and shine, Dussander.’

He felt a wave of relief as the old man twitched, blinked, and finally sat up.

‘Is it you? And so early?’

They let us out early on the last day of school,’ Todd said. He pointed to the remains of the cigarette in the mayonnaise cover. ‘Someday you’ll burn down the house doing that.’

‘Maybe,’ Dussander said indifferently. He fumbled out his cigarettes, shot one from the pack (it almost rolled off the edge of the table before Dussander was able to catch it), and at last got it going. A protracted fit of coughing followed, and Todd winced in disgust. When the old man really got going, Todd half-expected him to start spitting out greyish-black chunks of lung-tissue onto the table … and he’d probably grin as he did it.

At last the coughing eased enough for Dussander to say, ‘What have you got there?’

‘Report-card.’

Dussander took it, opened it, and held it away from him at arm’s length so he could read it. ‘English … A. American History … A. Earth Science … B Plus. Your Community and You … A. Primary French … B Minus. Beginning Algebra … B.’ He put it down. ‘Very good. What is the slang? We have saved your bacon, boy. Will you have to change any of these averages in the last column?’

‘French and Algebra, but no more than eight or nine points in all. I don’t think any of this is ever going to come out. And I guess I owe that to you. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth. So, thanks.’

‘What a touching speech,’ Dussander said, and began to cough again.

‘I guess I won’t be seeing you around too much from now on,’ Todd said, and Dussander abruptly stopped coughing.

‘No?’ he said, politely enough.

‘No,’ Todd said. ‘We’re going to Hawaii for a month starting on 25 June. In September I’ll be going to school across town. It’s this bussing thing.’

‘Oh yes, the Schwarzen,’ Dussander said, idly watching a by as it trundled across the red and white check of the tablecloth. ‘For twenty years this country has worried and whined about the Schwarzen. But we know the solution … don’t we, boy?’ He smiled toothlessly at Todd and Todd looked down, feeling the old sickening lift and drop of his stomach. Terror, hate, and a desire to do something so awful : could only be fully contemplated in his dreams.

‘Look, I plan to go to college, in case you didn’t know,’ Todd said. ‘I know that’s a long time off, but I think about it. I even know what I want to major in. History.’

‘Admirable. He who will not learn from the past is —’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Todd said.

Dussander did so, amiably enough. He knew the boy wasn’t done … not yet. He sat with his hands folded, watching him.

‘I could get my letter back from my friend,’ Todd suddenly blurted. ‘You know that? I could let you read it, and then you could watch me burn it. If-‘

‘- if I would remove a certain document from my safety deposit box.’

‘Well… yeah.’