Different Seasons (25 page)

“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 he’ll 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
I
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 favor over there, you know, especially when the man in the dock is a Nazi war criminal associated with the camps.”

“You’re a U.S. 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 U.S. 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 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’ll 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 judgment was right—with so much at stake, he might indeed be able to convince his father. After all, 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 safes on wheels. On the side of each box was a manila 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. You don’t have to fill that line out, but my folks always do. We don’t go much, but he’d know that’s what we are. 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! Gott im Himmel!”
Dussander cried, getting to his feet, crossing the kitchen (a bit unsteadily), opening the cellar door, and pulling out a fresh bottle of Ancient Age. He spun off the cap and poured liberally. “For a smart boy, you are such a
Dummkopf.
When do grandfathers ever look like their grandsons? Huh? I got white hair. Do you have white hair?”

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

“Cut it out!” Todd snapped, but he smiled a little.

“Besides,” Dussander said, settling back into his rocker,

“you have yellow hair and blue eyes. My eyes are blue, and before my hair turned white, it was yellow. 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.

“No—
surely!”
Dussander cried.

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.