prettily, in fact. His dad was an architectural engineer who made $40,000 a year. His
mom was a housewife and a secretarial school graduate (she had met Todd’s father one
day when he needed a secretary from the pool) who typed manuscripts in her spare time.
She had kept all of Todd’s old school report cards in a folder. Her favourite was his final
fourth-grade card, on which Mrs Upshaw had scratched: ‘Todd is an extremely apt pupil.’
He was, too. Straight As and Bs all the way up the line. If he’d done any better – straight
As, for example – his friends might have begun to think he was weird.
Now he brought his bike to a halt in front of 963 Claremont Street and stepped off it.
The house was a small bungalow set discreetly back on its lot. It was white with green
shutters and green trim. A hedge ran around the front The hedge was well-watered and
well-clipped.
Todd brushed his blond hair out of his eyes and walked the Schwinn up the cement
path to the steps. He was still smiling, and his smile was open and expectant and
beautiful, a marvel of modern dentistry and fluoridated water. He pushed down the bike’s
kickstand with the toe of one Nike running-shoe and then picked the folded newspaper
off the bottom step. It wasn’t the Clarion; it was the LA Times. He put it under his arm and mounted the steps. At the top was a heavy wooden door with no window inside of a
latched screen door. There was a doorbell on the right-hand doorframe, and below the
bell were two small signs, each neatly screwed into the wood and covered with protective
plastic so they wouldn’t yellow or waterspot. German efficiency, Todd thought, and his
smile widened a little. It was an adult thought, and he always mentally congratulated
himself when he had one of those.
The top sign said ARTHUR DENKER.
The bottom one said NO SOLICITORS, NO PEDDLERS, NO SALESMEN.
Smiling still, Todd rang the bell.
He could barely hear its muted burring, somewhere far off inside the small house. He
took his finger off the bell and cocked his head a little, listening for footsteps. There were
none. He looked at his Timex watch (one of the premiums he had gotten for selling
personalized greeting cards) and saw that it was twelve past ten. The guy should be up by
now. Todd himself was always up by seven-thirty at the latest, even during summer
vacation. The early bird catches the worm.
He listened for another thirty seconds and when the house remained silent he leaned on
the bell, watching the sweep second hand on his Timex as he did so. He had been
pressing the doorbell for exactly seventy-one seconds when he finally heard shuffling
footsteps. Slippers, he deduced from the soft wish-wish sound. Todd was into deductions.
His current ambition was to become a private detective when he grew up.
‘All right! All right!’ the man who was pretending to be Arthur Denker called
querulously. ‘I’m coming! Let it go! I’m coming!’
Todd stopped pushing the doorbell button. He looked at the tip of his forefinger.
There was a small red circle there.
A chain and bolt rattled on the far side of the windowless inner door. Then it was
pulled open.
An old man, hunched inside a bathrobe, stood looking out through the screen. A
cigarette smouldered between his fingers. Todd thought the man looked like a cross
between Albert Einstein and Boris Karloff. His hair was long and white but beginning to
yellow in an unpleasant way that was ‘ more nicotine than ivory. His face was wrinkled
and pouched and puffy with sleep, and Todd saw with some distaste that he hadn’t
bothered shaving for the last couple of days. Todd’s father was fond of saying, ‘A shave
puts a shine on the morning.’ Todd’s father shaved every day, whether he had to work or
not.
The eyes looking out at Todd were watchful but deeply sunken, laced with snaps of
red. Todd felt an instant of deep disappointment. The guy did look a little bit like Albert Einstein, and he did look a little bit like Boris Karloff, but what he looked like more than anything else was one of the seedy old winos that hung around down by the railroad
yard.
But of course, Todd reminded himself, the man had just gotten up. Todd had seen
Denker many times before today (although he had been very careful to make sure that
Denker hadn’t seen him, no way, Jose), and on his public occasions, Denker looked very natty, every inch an officer in retirement, you might say, even though he was seventy-six
if the articles Todd had read at the library had his birth-date right. On the days when
Todd had shadowed him to the Shoprite where Denker did his shopping or to one of the
three movie theatres on the bus line – Denker had no car – he was always dressed in one
of four neatly kept suits, no matter how warm the weather. If the weather looked
threatening he carried a furled umbrella under one arm like a swagger stick. He
sometimes wore a trilby hat. And on -the occasions when Denker went out, he was
always neatly shaved and his white moustache (worn to conceal an imperfectly corrected
harelip) was carefully trimmed.
‘A boy,’ he said now. His voice was thick and sleepy. Todd saw with hew
disappointment that his robe was faded and tacky. One rounded collar point stood up at a
drunken angle to poke at his wattled neck. There was a splotch of something that might
have been chili or possibly A-l Steak Sauce on the left lapel, and he smelled of cigarettes
and stale booze.
‘A boy,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t need anything, boy. Read the sign. You can read, can’t
you? Of course you can. All American boys can read. Don’t be a nuisance, boy. Good
day.’
The door began to close.
He might have dropped it right there, Todd thought much later on one of the nights
when sleep was hard to find. His disappointment at seeing the man for the first time at
close range, seeing him with his street-face put away – hanging in the closet, you might
say, along with his umbrella and his trilby — might have done it. It could have ended in
that moment, the tiny, unimportant snicking sound of the latch cutting off everything that
happened later as neatly as a pair of shears. But, as the man himself had observed, he was
an American boy, and he had been taught that persistence is a virtue.
‘Don’t forget your paper, Mr Dussander,’ Todd said, holding the Times out politely.
The door stopped dead in its swing still inches from the jamb. A tight and watchful
expression flitted across Kurt Dussander’s face and was gone at once. There might have
been fear in that expression. It was good, the way he had made that expression disappear,
but Todd was disappointed for the third time. He hadn’t expected Dussander to be good;
he had expected Dussander to be great.
Boy, Todd thought with real disgust Boy oh boy.
He pulled the door open again. One hand, bunched with arthritis, unlatched the screen
door. The hand pushed the screen door open just enough to wriggle through like a spider
and close over the edge of the paper Todd was holding out. The boy saw with distaste that
the old man’s fingernails were long and yellow and horny. It was a hand that had spent
most of its waking hours holding one cigarette after another. Todd thought smoking was a filthy dangerous habit, one he himself would never take up. It really was a wonder that
Dussander had lived as long as he had.
The old man tugged. ‘Give me my paper.’
‘Sure thing, Mr Dussander.’ Todd released his hold on the paper. The spider-hand
yanked it inside. The screen closed.
‘My name is Denker,’ the old man said. ‘Not this Doo-Zander. Apparently you cannot
read. What a pity. Good day.’
The door started to close again. Todd spoke rapidly into ‘ the narrowing gap. ‘Bergen-
Belsen, January 1943 to June 1943, Auschwitz, June 1943 to June of 1944,
Unterkommandant. Patin -‘
The door stopped again. The old man’s pouched and pallid face hung in the gap like a
wrinkled, half-deflated balloon. Todd smiled.
‘You left Patin just ahead of the Russians. You got to Buenos Aires. Some people say
you got rich there, investing the gold you took out of Germany in the drug trade.
Whatever, you were in Mexico City from 1950 to 1952. Then -‘
‘Boy, you are crazy like a cuckoo bird.’ One of the arthritic fingers twirled circles
around a misshapen ear. But the toothless mouth was quivering in an infirm, panicky
way..
‘From 1952 until 1958,I don’t know,’ Todd said, smiling more widely still. ‘No one