‘I thought you had them ready to handle rifles and grenades by the time they were eighteen. In Israel.’
‘Yes. But he was fourteen when all of this started. Why should a fourteen-year-old-boy mix himself up with such a man as Dussander? I have tried and tried to understand that and still I can’t.’
‘I’d settle for how,’ Richler said, and flicked the cigarette out the window. It was giving him a headache.
‘Perhaps, if it did happen, it was just luck. A coincidence. There is a word I like very much, Lieutenant Richler -serendipity. I think there is black serendipity as well as white.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Richler said gloomily. ‘All I know is the kid is creepier than a bug under a rock.’
‘What I’m saying is simple. Any other boy would have been more than happy to tell his parents, or the police. To say, 'I have recognized a wanted man. He is living at this address. Yes, I am sure.' And then let the authorities take over. Or do you feel I am wrong?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say so. The kid would be in the limelight for a few days. Most kids would dig that. Picture in the paper, an interview on the evening news, probably a school assembly award for good citizenship.’ Richler laughed. ‘Hell, the kid would probably get a shot on Real People?
‘What’s that?’
‘Never mind,’ Richler said. He had to raise his voice slightly because a ten-wheeler was passing the Nova on either side. Weiskopf looked nervously from one to the other. ‘You don’t want to know. But you’re right about most kids. Most kids.’
‘But not this kid,’ Weiskopf said. ‘This boy, probably by dumb luck alone, penetrates Dussander’s cover. Yet instead of going to his parents or the authorities… he goes to Dussander. Why? You say you don’t care, but I think you do. I think it haunts you just as it does me.’
‘Not blackmail,’ Richler said. ‘That’s for sure. That kid’s got everything a kid could want There was even a dune-buggy in the garage, not to mention an elephant gun on the wall. And even if he wanted to squeeze Dussander just for the thrill of it, Dussander was practically unsqueezable. Except for those few stocks, he didn’t have a pot to piss in.’
‘How sure are you that the boy doesn’t know you’ve found the bodies?’
‘I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go back this afternoon and hit him with that. Right now it looks like our best shot.’ Richler struck the steering wheel lightly. ‘If all of this had come out even one day sooner, I think I would have tried for a search warrant.’
‘The clothes the boy was wearing that night?’
‘Yeah. If we could have found soil samples on his clothes that matched the dirt in Dussander’s cellar, I almost think we could break him. But the clothes he was wearing that night have probably been washed six times since them.’
‘What about the other dead winos? The ones your police department has been finding around the city?’
'Those belong to Dan Bozeman. I don’t think there’s any connection anyhow. Dussander just wasn’t that strong… and more to the point, he had such a neat little racket already worked out. Promise them a drink and a meal, take them home on the city bus — the fucking city bus! — and waste them right in his kitchen.’
Weiskopf said quietly: ‘It wasn’t Dussander I was thinking of.’
‘What do you mean by th -’ Richler began, and then his mouth snapped suddenly closed. There was a long, unbelieving moment of silence, broken only by the drone of the traffic all around them. Then Richler said softly: ‘Hey. Hey, come on now. Give me a fucking br—’
‘As an agent of my government, I am only interested in Bowden because of what, if anything, he may know about Dussander’s remaining contacts with the Nazi underground. But as a human being, I am becoming more and more interested in the boy himself. I’d like to know what makes him tick. I want to know why. And as I try to answer that question to my own satisfaction, I find that more and more I am asking myself What else.’
‘But—’
‘Do you suppose, I ask myself, that the very atrocities in which Dussander took part formed the basis of some attraction between them? That’s an unholy idea, I tell myself. The things that happened in those camps still have power enough to make the stomach flutter with nausea. I fed that way myself, although the only close relative I ever had in the camps was my grandfather, and he died when I was three. But maybe for all of us there is something about what the Germans did that pleases and excites us — something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right — or wrong — set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out And what do you think they would look like? Like mad fuehrers with forelocks and shoe-polish moustaches, heiling all over the place? Like red devils, or demons, or the dragon that floats on its stinking reptile wings?’
‘I don’t know,’ Richler said.
‘I think most of them would look like ordinary accountants,’ Weiskopf said. ‘Little mind-men with graphs and flow-charts and electronic calculators, all ready to start maximizing the kill ratios so that next time we could perhaps kill twenty or thirty millions instead of only seven or eight or twelve. And some of them might look like Todd Bowden.’
‘You’re damn near as creepy as he is,’ Richler said.
Weiskopf nodded. ‘It’s a creepy subject Finding those dead men and animals in Dussander’s cellar… that was creepy, nu? Have you ever thought that maybe this boy began with a simple interest in the camps? An interest not much different from the interests of boys who collect coins or stamps or who like to read about wild West desperados? And that he went to Dussander to get his information straight from the horse’s head?’
‘Mouth,’ Weiskopf muttered. It was almost lost in the roar of another ten-wheeler passing them. BUDWEISER was printed on the side in letters six feet tall. What an amazing country, Weiskopf thought and lit a fresh cigarette. They don’t understand how we can live surrounded by half-mad Arabs, but if I lived here for two years I would have a nervous breakdown. ‘Maybe. And maybe it isn’t possible to stand close to murder piled on murder and not be touched by it.’
29
The short guy who entered the squadroom brought stench after him like a wake. He smelted like rotten bananas and Wildroot Cream Oil and cockroach shit and the inside of a city garbage truck at the end of a busy morning. He was dressed in a pair of ageing herringbone pants, a ripped grey institutional shirt, and a faded blue warmup jacket from which most of the zipper hung loose like a string of pygmy teeth. The uppers of his shoes were bound to the lowers with Krazy Glue. A pestiferous hat sat on his head. He looked like death with a hangover.
‘Oh Christ, get out of here!’ The duty sergeant cried. ‘You’re not under arrest, Hap! I swear to God! I swear it on my mother’s name! Get out of here! I want to breathe again.’
‘I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman.’
‘He died, Hap. It happened yesterday. We’re all really fucked up over it. So get out and let us mourn in peace.’
‘I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman!’ Hap said more loudly. His breath drifted fragrantly from his mouth: a juicy, fermenting mixture of pizza, Hall’s Mentholyptus lozenges, and sweet red wine.
‘He had to go to Siam on a case, Hap. So why don’t you just get out of here? Go someplace and eat a lightbulb.’
‘I want to talk to Lieutenant Bozeman and I ain’t leaving until I do!’
The duty sergeant fled the room. He returned about five minutes later with Bozeman, a thin, slightly stooped man of fifty.
‘Take him into your office, okay, Dan?’ The duty sergeant begged. ‘Won’t that be all right?’
‘Come on, Hap,’ Bozeman said, and a minute later they were in the three-sided stall that was Bozeman’s office. Bozeman prudently opened his only window and turned on his fan before sitting down. ‘Do something for you, Hap?’
‘You still on those murders, Lieutenant Bozeman?’
‘The derelicts? Yeah, I guess that’s still mine.’
