whatever passes for his mind — is the high disappearance rate over the last few years. Of course, he admits again, these men are not much more than modern-day hobos. They come and go. But some of these left without picking up welfare cheques or day-labour cheques from Spell O’ Work, which only pays on Fridays. Could some of these have been victims of this yellow journalist’s Wino Killer, he asks? Victims who haven’t been found? Pah!’
Dussander waved his hand in the air as if to dismiss such arrant irresponsibility.
‘Only titillation, of course. Give people a comfortable little scare on Sunday morning. He calls up old bogies, threadbare but still useful — the Cleveland Torso Murderer, Zodiac, the mysterious Mr X who killed the Black Dahlia, Springheel Jack. Such drivel. But it makes me think. What does an old man have to do but think when old friends don’t come to visit anymore?’
Todd shrugged.
‘I thought: 'If I wished to help this odious yellow-dog journalist, which I certainly do not, I could explain some of the disappearances. Not the corpses found stabbed or bludgeoned, not them, God rest their besotted souls, but some of the disappearances. Because at least some of the bums who disappeared are in my cellar.'’
‘How many down there?’ Todd asked in a low voice.
‘Five,’ Dussander said calmly. ‘Counting the one you helped me dispose of, just five.’
‘You’re really nutso,’ Todd said. The skin below his eyes had gone white and shiny. ‘At some point you just blew all your fucking wheels.’
‘'Blew my wheels.' What a charming idiom! Perhaps you’re right! But then I said to myself: 'This newspaper jackal would love to pin the murders and the disappearances on the same somebody — his hypothetical Wino Killer. But I think maybe that’s not what happened at all.'
‘Then I say to myself: 'Do I know anybody who might be doing such things? Somebody who has been under as much strain as I have during the last few years? Someone who has also been listening to old ghosts rattle their chains?' And the answer is yes. I know you, boy.’
‘I’ve never killed anyone.’
The image that came was not of the winos; they weren’t people, not really people at all. The image that came was of himself crouched behind the dead tree, peering through the telescopic sight of his .30-.30, the crosshairs fixed on the temple of the man with the scuzzy beard, the man driving the Brat pick-up.
‘Perhaps not,’ Dussander agreed, amicably enough. ‘Yet you took hold so well the other night. Your surprise was mostly anger at having been put in such a dangerous position by an old man’s infirmity, I think. Am I wrong?’
‘No, you’re not wrong,’ Todd said. ‘I was pissed off at you, and I still am. I covered it up for you because you’ve got something in a safety deposit box that could destroy my life.’
‘No. I do not’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘It was as much a bluff as your 'letter left with a friend'. You never wrote such a letter, there never was such a friend, and I have never written a single word about our… association, shall I call it? Now I lay my cards on the table. You saved my life. Never mind that you acted only to protect yourself; that does not change how speedily and efficiently you acted. I cannot hurt you, boy. I tell you that freely. I have looked death in the face and it frightens me, but not as badly as ! thought it would. There is no document. It is as you say: we are quits.’
Todd smiled: a weird upward corkscrewing of the lips. A strange, sardonic light danced and fluttered in his eyes.
‘Herr Dussander,’ he said, ‘if only I could believe that’
In the evening Todd walked down to the slope overlooking the freeway, climbed down to the dead tree, and sat on it. It was just past twilight. The evening was warm. Car headlights cut through the dusk in long yellow daisy chains.
There is no document.
He hadn’t realized how completely irretrievable the entire situation was until the discussion that had followed. Dussander suggested Todd search the house for a safety deposit key, and when he didn’t find one, that would prove there was no safety deposit box and hence no document. But a key could be hidden anywhere — it could be put in. a Crisco can and then buried, it could be put in a Sucrets tin and slid behind a board that had been loosened and then replaced; he might even have ridden the bus to San Diego and put it behind one of the rocks in the decorative stone wall which surrounds the bears’ environmental area. For that matter, Todd went on, Dussander could even have thrown the key away. Why not? He had only needed it once, to put his written document in. If he died, someone else would take it out Dussander nodded reluctantly at this, but after a moment’s thought he made another suggestion. When he got well enough to go home, he would have the boy call every single bank in Santa Donato. He would tell each bank official he was calling for his grandfather. Poor grandfather, he would say, had grown lamentably senile over the last two years, and now he had misplaced the key to his safety deposit box. Even worse, he could no longer remember which bank the box was in. Could they just check their files for an Arthur Denker, no middle initial? And when Todd drew a blank at every bank in townTodd was already shaking his head again. First, a story like that was almost guaranteed to raise suspicions. It was too pat They would probably suspect a con-game and get in touch with the police. Even if every one of them bought the story, it would do no good. If none of the almost nine dozen banks in Santa Donato had a box in the Denker name, it didn’t mean that Dussander hadn’t rented one in San Diego, LA, or any town in between.
At last Dussander gave up.
‘You have all the answers, boy. All, at least, but one. What would I stand to gain by lying to you? I invented this story to protect myself from you — that is a motive. Now I am trying to uninvent it What possible gain do you see in that?’
Dussander got laboriously up on one elbow.
‘For that matter, why would I need a document at all, at this point? I could destroy your life from this hospital bed, if that was what I wanted. I could open my mouth to the first passing doctor, they are all Jews, they would all know who I am, or at least who I was. But why would I do this? You are a fine student You have a fine career ahead of you… unless you get careless with those winos of yours.’
Todd’s face froze. ‘I never told you—’
‘I know. You never heard of them, you never touched so much as a hair on their scaly, tick-ridden heads, all right, good, fine. I say no more about it Only tell me, boy: why should I lie about this? We are quits, you say. But I tell you we can only be quits if we can trust each other.’
Now, sitting behind the dead tree on the slope which ran down to the freeway, looking at all the anonymous headlights disappearing endlessly like slow tracer bullets, he knew well enough what he was afraid of.
Dussander talking about trust That made him afraid.
The idea that Dussander might be tending a small but perfect flame of hatred deep in his heart, that made him afraid, too.
A hatred of Todd Bowden, who was young, clean-featured, unwrinkled; Todd Bowden, who was an apt pupil with a whole bright life stretching ahead of him.
But what he feared most was Dussander’s refusal to use his name.
Todd. What was so hard about that, even for an old Kraut whose teeth were mostly false? Todd. One syllable. Easy to say. Put your tongue against the roof of your mouth, drop your teeth a little, replace your tongue, and it was out. Yet Dussander had always called him ‘boy’. Only that. Contemptuous. Anonymous. Yes, that was it, anonymous. As anonymous as a concentration camp serial number.
Perhaps Dussander was telling the truth. No, not just perhaps; probably. But there were those fears… the worst of them being Dussander’s refusal to use his name.
And at the root of it all was his own inability to make a hard and final decision. At the root of it all was a rueful truth: even after four years of visiting Dussander, he still didn’t know what went on in the old man’s head. Perhaps he wasn’t such an apt pupil after all.
Cars and cars and cars. His fingers itched to hold his rifle. How many could he get? Three? Six? An even baker’s dozen? And how many miles to Babylon?
He stirred restlessly, uneasily.
Only Dussander’s death would tell the final truth, he supposed. Sometime during the next five years, maybe even sooner. Three to five… it sounded like a prison sentence. Todd Bowden, this court hereby sentences you to three to five for associating with a known war criminal. Three to five of bad dreams and cold sweats.
