now.’
Todd began to speak and Dussander raised his hands 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 anymore 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 nickel anyone can make a photocopy. For a dollar, you could post a copy of my death-warrant on every streetcorner for twenty blocks. Four 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. Dussander had just outlined a piece of duplicity so fundamental that it had simply never crossed his mind. He opened his mouth to say so, realized Dussander would not believe him… and that, in fact, was the problem.
He shut his mouth again, this time with a snap.
‘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?’
Todd was silent and dismayed.
‘Even if there were some impartial third party we could go to, always there would be doubts. The problem is insoluble, boy. Believe it.’
‘Shit,’ Todd said in a very small voice.
Dussander took a deep drink from his cup and looked at Todd over the rim.
‘Now I tell you two more things, boy. 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 'boogeyman' 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 into the streets to kill again after two years of watching colour 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 who you would trust so much. Who are your friends… who do you run with? Who 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 who 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 Speer go?’
‘If the Americans had him — the Americans who let killers out with a spank on the wrists — they would have let him go,’ Dussander said. ‘Are the Americans going to allow the Israelis to extradite a ninety-year-old man so they can hang him as they hung 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, and that would not be the end; by the time he collected his BA, Dussander would be eighty-four 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-six… 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.
