Different Seasons (19 page)

“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 manila 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.

“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 color 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 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 Theater, 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 Patin 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 Gluecks, 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.

“Whom 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 did modestly well in minerals and ores—tin, copper, bauxite, Then the changes came. Nationalism, anti-Americanism. I might have ridden out the changes, but then Wiesenthal’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 hanged 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 hanged 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
Kök.

“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 the Sicilians 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 opened; he heard liquid poured into a glass.

“A little General Motors, a little American Telephone and Telegraph, a hundred and fifty shares of Revlon. 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 passionel,
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 gave 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 I was here. 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 even 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.
“Grüss Gott!”
He took the glass, swallowed twice, and handed it back. “No gasping for breath. No clawing at the t’roat. 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, and took a swallow. He smacked his lips over it.

“Schnaps?”
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 gray 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. SS, 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 hand 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 color 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 anesthetic, and German soldiers raping all the women they wanted. The rest was just so much tired bullspit to cover up the gooshy stuff after someone came along and put a stop to it.