by Stephen King
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--thewords, 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 GREAT 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."
"Mmmm," 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 Santo Donato 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 Ilse Koch?"
"Ilse 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 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. I'll 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 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.
"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 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 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 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. "Gruss 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.