‘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.
That night they both dreamed of murder, and both of them awoke in mingled terror and exhilaration.
Todd awoke with the now familiar stickiness on his lower belly. Dussander, too old for such things, put on the Gestapo 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 -. 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.