for school they have to let you have it. She called my dad, though.’ Todd’s eyes turned up
scornfully. ‘Like she thought dad didn’t know what I was doing, if you can dig that.’
‘He did know?’
‘Sure. My dad thinks kids should find out about life as soon as they can – the bad as
well as the good. Then they’ll be ready for it. He says life is a tiger you have to grab by
the tail, and if you don’t know the nature of the beast it will eat you up.’
‘Mmmmm,’ Dussander said.
‘My mom thinks the same way.’
‘Mmmmm.’ Dussander looked dazed, not quite sure where he was.
‘Anyhow,’ Todd said, ‘the library stuff was real good.
They must have had a hundred books with stuff in them about the Nazi
concentration camps, just here in the Santa Donate library. A lot of people must like to read about that stuff. There weren’t as many pictures as in Foxy’s dad’s magazines, but
the other stuff was real gooshy. Chairs with spikes sticking up through the seats.
Pulling out gold teeth with pliers. Poison gas that came out of the showers.’ Todd
shook his head. ‘You guys just went overboard, you know that? You really did.’
‘Gooshy,’ Dussander said heavily.
‘I really did do a research paper, and you know what I got on it? An A Plus. Of course I had to be careful. You have to write that stuff in a certain way. You got to be careful.’
‘Do you?’ Dussander asked. He took another cigarette with a hand that trembled.
‘Oh yeah. All those library books, they read a certain way. Like the guys who wrote
them got puking sick over what they were writing about’ Todd was frowning, wrestling
with the thought, trying to bring it out The fact that tone, as that word is applied to
writing, wasn’t yet in his vocabulary, made it more difficult ‘They all write like they lost a
lot of sleep over it How we’ve got to be careful so nothing like that ever happens again. I
made my paper like that, and I guess the teacher gave me an A just ’cause I read the
source material without losing my lunch.’ Once more, Todd smiled winningly.
Dussander dragged heavily on his unfiltered Kool. The tip trembled slightly. As he
feathered smoke out of his nostrils, he coughed an old man’s dank, hollow cough. ‘I can
hardly believe this conversation is taking place,’ he said. He leaned forward and peered
closely at Todd. ‘Boy, do you know the word “existentialism”?’
Todd ignored the question. ‘Did you ever meet Use Koch?’
‘Use Koch?’ Almost inaudibly, Dussander said: ‘Yes. I met her.’
‘Was she beautiful?’ Todd asked eagerly. ‘I mean …’ His hands described an hourglass
in the air.
‘Surely you have seen her photograph?’ Dussander asked. ‘An aficionado such as
yourself?’
‘What’s an af…aff…’
‘An aficionado,’ Dussander said, ‘is one who grooves. One who … gets off on
something.’
‘Yeah? Cool.’ Todd’s grin, puzzled and weak for a moment, shone out triumphantly
again. ‘Sure, I’ve seen her picture. But you know how they are in those books.’ He spoke
as if Dussander had them all. ‘Black and white, fuzzy … just snapshots. None of those
guys knew they were taking pictures for, you know, history. Was she really stacked?’
‘She was fat and dumpy and she had bad skin,’ Dussander said shortly. He crushed his
cigarette out half-smoked in a Table Talk pie dish filled with dead butts.
‘Oh. Golly.’ Todd’s face fell.
‘Just luck,’ Dussander mused, looking at Todd. ‘You saw my picture in a war-
adventures magazine and happened to ride next to me on the bus. Tcha!’ He brought a fist down on the arm of his easy chair, but without much force.
‘No sir, Mr Dussander. There was more to it than that. A lot’ Todd added earnestly,
leaning forward.
‘Oh? Really?’ The bushy eyebrows rose, signalling polite disbelief.
‘Sure. I mean, the pictures of you in my scrapbook were all thirty years old, at least. I
mean, it is 1974.’
‘You keep a … a scrapbook?’
‘Oh, yes, sir! It’s a good one. Hundreds of pictures. Ill show it to you sometime. You’ll
go ape.’
Dussander’s face pulled into a revolted grimace, but he said nothing.
The first couple of times I saw you, I wasn’t sure at all. And then you got on the bus
one day when it was raining, and you had this shiny black slicker on -‘
‘That,’ Dussander breathed.
‘Sure. There was a picture of you in a coat like that in one of the magazines out in
Foxy’s garage. Also, a photo of you in your SS greatcoat in one of the library books. And
when I saw you that day, I just said to myself, “It’s for sure. That’s Kurt Dussander.” So I started to shadow you -‘
‘You did what?’
‘Shadow you. Follow you. My ambition is to be a private detective like Sam Spade in
the books, or Mannix on TV. Anyway, I was super careful. I didn’t want you to get wise.
Want to look at some pictures?’
Todd took a folded-over manilla envelope from his back pocket. Sweat had stuck the
flap down. He peeled it back carefully. His eyes were sparkling like a boy thinking about
his birthday, or Christmas, or the firecrackers he will shoot off on the Fourth of July.
‘You took pictures of me?”
‘Oh, you bet I got this little camera. A Kodak. It’s thin and flat and fits right into your
hand. Once you get the hang of it, you can take pictures of the subject just by holding the
camera in your hand and spreading your fingers enough to let the lens peek through. Then
you hit the button with your thumb.’ Todd laughed modestly. ‘I got the hang of it but I
took a lot of pictures of my fingers while I did. I hung right in there, though. I think a
person can do anything if they try hard enough, you know it? It’s corny but true.’
Kurt Dussander had begun to look white and ill, shrunken inside his robe. ‘Did you
have these pictures finished by a commercial developer, boy?’
‘Huh?’ Todd looked shocked and startled, then contemptuous. ‘No! What do you think I
am, stupid? My dad’s got a darkroom. I’ve been developing my own pictures since I was
nine.’
Dussander said nothing, but he relaxed a little and some colour came back into his
face.
Todd handed him several glossy prints, the rough edges confirming that they had been
home-developed. Dussander went through them, silently grim. Here he was sitting erect
in a window-seat of the downtown bus, with a copy of the latest James Michener,
Centennial, in his hands. Here he was at the Devon Avenue bus stop, his umbrella cocked
under his arm and his head cocked back at an angle which suggested De Gaulle at his
most imperial. Here he was standing on line just under the marquee of the Majestic
Theatre, erect and silent, conspicuous among the leaning teenagers and blank-faced
housewives in curlers by his height and his bearing. Finally, here he was peering into his
own mailbox.
‘I was scared you might see me on that one,’ Todd said. ‘It was a calculated risk. I
was right across the street Boy oh boy, I wish I could afford a Minolta with a telephoto
lens. Someday …’ Todd looked wistful.
‘No doubt you had a story ready, just in case.’
‘I was going to ask you if you’d seen my dog. Anyway, after I developed the pix, I
compared them to these.’
He handed Dussander three Xeroxed photographs. He had seen them all before, many
times. The first showed him in his office at the Eatin resettlement camp; it had been
cropped so nothing showed but him and the Nazi flag on its stand by his desk. The second
was a picture that had been taken on the day of his enlistment The last showed him
shaking hands with Heinrich Clucks, who had been subordinate only to Himmler himself.
‘I was pretty sure then, but I couldn’t see if you had the harelip because of your
goshdamn moustache. But I had to be sure, so I got this.’
He handed over the last sheet from his envelope. It had been folded over many times.
Dirt was grimed into the creases. The corners were lopped and milled – the way papers get
when they spend a long time in the pockets of young boys who have no shortage of things
to do and places to go. It was a copy of the Israeli want-sheet on Kurt Dussander. Holding
it in his hands, Dussander reflected on corpses that were unquiet and refused to stay
buried.
‘I took your fingerprints,’ Todd said, smiling. ‘And then I did the compares to the one
on the sheet.’
Dussander gaped at him and then uttered the German word for shit ‘You did not!’