by Stephen King
“Oh yes, the Schwarzen,” Dussander said, idly watching a fly as it trundled across the red and white check of the oilcloth. “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 in his stomach. Terror, hate, and a desire to do something so awful it 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.”
Dussander uttered a long, windy, rueful sigh. “My boy,” he said. “Still you do not understand the situation. You never have, right from the beginning. Partly because you are only a boy, but not entirely . . . even in the beginning, you were a very old boy. No, the real villain was and is your absurd American self-confidence that never allowed you to consider the possible consequences of what you were doing . . . which does not allow it even now.”
Todd began to speak and Dussander raised his hand adamantly, suddenly the world’s oldest traffic cop.
“No, don’t contradict me. It’s true. Go on if you like. Leave the house, get out of here, never come back. Can I stop you? No. Of course I can’t. Enjoy yourself in Hawaii while I sit in this hot, grease-smelling kitchen and wait to see if the Schwarzen in Watts will decide to start killing policemen and burning their shitty tenements again this year. I can’t stop you any more than I can stop getting older a day at a time.”
He looked at Todd fixedly, so fixedly that Todd looked away.
“Down deep inside, I don’t like you. Nothing could make me like you. You forced yourself on me. You are an unbidden guest in my house. You have made me open crypts perhaps better left shut, because I have discovered that some of the corpses were buried alive, and that a few of those still have some wind left in them.
“You yourself have become enmeshed, but do I pity you because of that? Gott im Himmel! You have made your bed; should I pity you if you sleep badly in it? No . . . I don’t pity you, and I don’t like you, but I have come to respect you a little bit. So don’t try my patience by asking me to explain this twice. We could obtain our documents and destroy them here in my kitchen. And still it would not be over. We would, in fact, be no better off than we are at this minute.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“No, because you have never studied the consequences of what you have set in motion. But attend me, boy. If we burned our letters here, in this jar cover, how would I know you hadn’t made a copy? Or two? Or three? Down at the library they have a Xerox machine, for a nickle anyone can make a photocopy. For a dollar, you could post a copy of my death-warrant on every streetcorner for twenty blocks. Two miles of death-warrants, boy! Think of it! Can you tell me how I would know you hadn’t done such a thing?”
“I . . . well, I . . . I . . .” Todd realized he was floundering and forced himself to shut his mouth. All of a sudden his skin felt too warm, and for no reason at all he found himself remembering something that had happened when he was seven or eight. He and a friend of his had been crawling through a culvert which ran beneath the old Freight Bypass Road just out of town. The friend, skinnier than Todd, had had no problem . . . but Todd had gotten stuck. He had become suddenly aware of the feet of rock and earth over his head, all that dark weight, and when an L.A.-bound semi passed above, shaking the earth and making the corrugated pipe vibrate with a low, tuneless, and somehow sinister note, he had begun to cry and to struggle witlessly, throwing himself forward, pistoning with his legs, yelling for help. At last he had gotten moving again, and when he finally struggled out of the pipe, he had fainted.
Dussander had just outlined a piece of duplicity so fundamental that it had never even crossed his mind. He could feel his skin getting hotter, and he thought: I won’t cry.
“And how would you know I hadn’t made two copies for my safety deposit box . . . that I had burned one and left the other there?”
Trapped. I’m trapped just like in the pipe that time and who are you going to yell for now?
His heart speeded up in his chest. He felt sweat break on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. He remembered how it had been in that pipe, the smell of old water, the feel of the cool, ribbed metal, the way everything shook when the truck passed overhead. He remembered how hot and desperate the tears had been.
“Even if there were some impartial third party we could go to, always there would be doubts. The problem is insoluble, boy. Believe it.”
Trapped. Trapped in the pipe. No way out of this one.
He felt the world go gray. Won’t cry. Won’t faint. He forced himself to come back.
Dussander took a deep drink from his cup and looked at Todd over the rim.
“Now I tell you two more things. First, that if your part in this matter came out, your punishment would be quite small. It is even possible—no, more than that, likely—that it would never come out in the papers at all. I frightened you with reform school once, when I was badly afraid you might crack and tell everything. But do I believe that? No—I used it the way a father will use the ‘boogerman’ to frighten a child into coming home before dark. I don’t believe that they would send you there, not in this country where they spank killers on the wrist and send them out onto the streets to kill again after two years of watching color TV in a penitentiary.
“But it might well ruin your life all the same. There are records . . . and people talk. Always, they talk. Such a juicy scandal is not allowed to wither; it is bottled, like wine. And, of course, as the years pass, your culpability will grow with you. Your silence will grow more damning. If the truth came out today, people would say, ‘But he is just a child!’ . . . not knowing, as I do, what an old child you are. But what would they say, boy, if the truth about me, coupled with the fact that you knew about me as early as 1974 but kept silent, came out while you are in high school? That would be bad. For it to come out while you are in college would be disaster. As a young man just starting out in business . . . Armageddon. You understand this first thing?”
Todd was silent, but Dussander seemed satisfied. He nodded.
Still nodding, he said: “Second, I don’t believe you have a letter.”
Todd strove to keep a poker face, but he was terribly afraid his eyes had widened in shock. Dussander was studying him avidly, and Todd was suddenly, nakedly aware that this old man had interrogated hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. He was an expert. Todd felt that his skull had turned to window-glass and all things were flashing inside in large letters.
“I asked myself whom you would trust so much. Who are your friends . . . whom do you run with? Whom does this boy, this self-sufficient, coldly controlled little boy, go to with his loyalty? The answer is, nobody.”
Dussander’s eyes gleamed yellowly.
“Many times I have studied you and calculated the odds. I know you, and I know much of your character—no, not all, because one human being can never know everything that is in another human being’s heart—but I know so little about what you do and whom you see outside of this house. So I think, ‘Dussander, there is a chance that you are wrong. After all these years, do you want to be captured and maybe killed because you misjudged a boy?’ Maybe when I was younger I would have taken the chance—the odds are good odds, and the chance is a small chance. It is very strange to me, you know—the older one
becomes, the less one has to lose in matters of life and death . . . and yet, one becomes more and more conservative.”
He looked hard into Todd’s face.
“I have one more thing to say, and then you can go when you want. What I have to say is that, while I doubt the existence of your letter, never doubt the existence of mine. The document I have described to you exists. If I die today . . . tomorrow . . . everything will come out. Everything.”
“Then there’s nothing for me,” Todd said. He uttered a dazed little laugh. “Don’t you see that?”
“But there is. Years will go by. As they pass, your hold on me will become worth less and less, because no matter how important my life and liberty remain to me, the Americans and—yes, even the Israelis—will have less and less interest in taking them away.”
“Yeah? Then why don’t they let that guy Hess go?”
“If the Americans had sole custody of him—the Americans who let killers out with a spank on the wrist—they would have let him go,” Dussander said. “Are the Americans going to allow the Israelis to extradite an eighty-year-old man so they can hang him as they hanged Eichmann? I think not. Not in a country where they put photographs of firemen rescuing kittens from trees on the front pages of city newspapers.
“No, your hold over me will weaken even as mine over you grows stronger. No situation is static. And there will come a time—if I live long enough—when I will decide what you know no longer matters. Then I will destroy the document.”
“But so many things could happen to you in between! Accidents, sickness, disease—”
Dussander shrugged. “ ‘There will be water if God wills it, and we will find it if God wills it, and we will drink it if God wills it.’ What happens is not up to us.”
Todd looked at the old man for a long time—for a very long time. There were flaws in Dussander’s arguments—there had to be. A way out, an escape hatch either for both of them or for Todd alone. A way to cry it off—times, guys, I hurt my foot, allee-allee-in-free. A black knowledge of the years ahead trembled somewhere behind his eyes; he could feel it there, waiting to be born as conscious thought. Everywhere he went, everything he did—
He thought of a cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head. By the time he graduated from high school, Dussander would be eighty-one, and that would not be the end; by the time he collected his B.A., Dussander would be eighty-five and he would still feel that he wasn’t old enough, he would finish his master’s thesis and graduate school the year Dussander turned eighty-seven . . . and Dussander still might not feel safe.
“No,” Todd said thickly. “What you’re saying . . . I can’t face that.”
“My boy,” Dussander said gently, and Todd heard for the first time and with dawning horror the slight accent the old man had put on the first word. “My boy . . . you must.”
Todd stared at him, his tongue swelling and thickening in his mouth until it seemed it must fill his throat and choke him. Then he wheeled and blundered out of the house.
Dussander watched all of this with no expression at all, and when the door had slammed shut and the boy’s running footsteps stopped, meaning that he had mounted his bike, he lit a cigarette. There was, of course, no safe deposit box, no document. But the boy believed those things existed; he had believed utterly. He was safe. It was ended.
• • •
But it was not ended.
• • •
That night they both dreamed of murder, and both of them awoke in mingled terror and exhilaration.
Todd awoke with the now familiar stickiness of his lower belly. Dussander, too old for such things, put on the SS uniform and then lay down again, waiting for his racing heart to slow. The uniform was cheaply made and already beginning to fray.
In Dussander’s dream he had finally reached the camp at the top of the hill. The wide gate slid open for him and then rumbled shut on its steel track once he was inside. Both the gate and the fence surrounding the camp were electrified. His scrawny, naked pursuers threw themselves against the fence in wave after wave; Dussander had laughed at them and he had strutted back and forth, his chest thrown out, his cap cocked at exactly the right angle. The high, winey smell of burning flesh filled the black air, and he had awakened in southern California thinking of jack-o’-lanterns and the night when vampires seek the blue flame.
• • •
Two days before the Bowdens were scheduled to fly to Hawaii, Todd went back to the abandoned trainyard where folks had once boarded trains for San Francisco, Seattle, and Las Vegas; where other, older folks had once boarded the trolley for Los Angeles.
It was nearly dusk when he got there. On the curve of freeway nine hundred yards away, most of the cars were now showing their parking lights. Although it was warm, Todd was wearing a light jacket. Tucked into his belt under it was a butcher knife wrapped in an old hand-towel. He had purchased the knife in a discount department store, one of the big ones surrounded by acres of parking lot.
He looked under the platform where the wino had been the month before. His mind turned and turned, but it turned on nothing; everything inside him at that moment was shades of black on black.
What he found was the same wino or possibly another; they all looked pretty much the same.
“Hey!” Todd said. “Hey! You want some money?”
The wino turned over, blinking. He saw Todd’s wide, sunny grin and began to grin back. A moment later the butcher knife descended, all whicker-snicker and chrome-white, slicker-slicing through the stubbly right cheek. Blood sprayed. Todd could see the blade in the wino’s opening mouth . . . and then its tip caught for a moment in the left corner of the wino’s lips, pulling his mouth into an insanely cockeyed grin. Then it was the knife that was making the grin; he was carving the wino like a Halloween pumpkin.
He stabbed the wino thirty-seven times. He kept count. Thirty-seven, counting the first strike, which went through the wino’s cheek and then turned his tentative smile into a great grisly grin. The wino stopped trying to scream after the fourth stroke. He stopped trying to scramble away from Todd after the sixth. Todd then crawled all the way under the platform and finished the job.
On his way home he threw the knife into the river. His pants were bloodstained. He tossed them into the washing machine and set it to wash cold. There were still faint stains on the pants when they came out, but they didn’t concern Todd. They would fade in time. He found the next day that he could barely lift his right arm to the level of his shoulder. He told his father he must have strained it throwing pepper with some of the guys in the park.
“It’ll get better in Hawaii,” Dick Bowden said, ruffling Todd’s hair, and it did; by the time they came home, it was as good as new.
13
It was July again.
Dussander, carefully dressed in one of his three suits (not his best), was standing at the bus stop and waiting for the last local of the day to take him home. It was 10:45 p.m. He had been to a film, a light and frothy comedy that he had enjoyed a great deal. He had been in a fine mood ever since the morning mail. There had been a postcard from the boy, a glossy color photo of Waikiki Beach with bone-white highrise hotels standing in the background. There was a brief message on the reverse.
Dear Mr. Denker,
Boy this sure is some place. I’ve been swimming every day. My dad caught a big fish and my mom is catching up on her reading (joke). Tomorrow we’re going to a volcano. I’ll try not to fall in! Hope you’re okay.
Stay healthy,
Todd
He was still smiling faintly at the significance of that last when a hand touched his elbow.
“Mister?”
“Yes?”
He turned, on his guard—even in Santo Donato, muggers were not unknown—and then winced at the aroma. It seemed to be a combination of beer, halitosis, dried sweat, and possibly Musterole. It was a bum in baggy pants. He—it—wore a flannel shirt and very old loafers that were currently being hel
d together with dirty bands of adhesive tape. The face looming above this motley costume looked like the death of God.
“You got an extra dime, mister? I gotta get to L.A., me. Got a job offertunity. I need just a dime more for the express bus. I wudn’t ask if it wadn’t a big chance for me.”
Dussander had begun to frown, but now his smile reasserted itself.
“Is it really a bus ride you wish?”
The wino smiled sickly, not understanding.
“Suppose you ride the bus home with me,” Dussander proposed. “I can offer you a drink, a meal, a bath, and a bed. All I ask in return is a little conversation. I am an old man. I live alone. Company is sometimes very welcome.”
The drunk’s smile abruptly grew more healthy as the situation clarified itself. Here was a well-to-do old faggot with a taste for slumming.
“All by yourself! Bitch, innit?”
Dussander answered the broad, insinuating grin with a polite smile. “I only ask that you sit away from me on the bus. You smell rather strongly.”
“Maybe you don’t want me stinking up your place, then,” the drunk said with sudden, tipsy dignity.
“Come, the bus will be here in a minute. Get off one stop after I do and then walk back two blocks. I’ll wait for you on the corner. In the morning I will see what I can spare. Perhaps two dollars.”
“Maybe even five,” the drunk said brightly. His dignity, tipsy or otherwise, had been forgotten.
“Perhaps, perhaps,” Dussander said impatiently. He could now hear the low diesel drone of the approaching bus. He pressed a quarter, the correct bus fare, into the bum’s grimy hand and strolled a few paces away without looking back.
The bum stood undecided as the headlights of the local swept over the rise. He was still standing and frowning down at the quarter when the old faggot got on the bus without looking back. The bum began to walk away and then—at the last second—he reversed direction and boarded the bus just before the doors folded closed. He put the quarter into the fare-box with the expression of a man putting a hundred dollars down on a long shot. He passed Dussander without doing more than glancing at him and sat at the back of the bus. He dozed off a little, and when he woke up, the rich old faggot was gone. He got off at the next stop, not knowing if it was the right one or not, and not really caring.