‘Was it always Zyklon-B?’
‘No, from time to time we would be sent something else. Experimental gases. The
High Command was always interested in improving efficiency. Once they sent us a gas
code-named PEGASUS. A nerve-gas. Thank God they never sent it again. It -‘ Dussander
saw Todd lean forward, saw those eyes sharpen, and he suddenly stopped and gestured
casually with his gas-station-premium glass. ‘It didn’t work very well,’ he said. ‘It was …
quite boring.’
But Todd was not fooled, not in the least. ‘What did it do?’
‘It killed them – what do you think it did, made them walk on water? It killed them,
that’s all.’
Tell me.’
‘No,’ Dussander said, now unable to hide the horror he felt. He hadn’t thought of
PEGASUS in … how long? Ten years? Twenty? ‘I won’t tell you! I refuse!’
Tell me,’ Todd repeated, licking chocolate icing from his fingers. Tell me or you know
what’
Yes, Dussander thought I know what. Indeed I do, you putrid little monster.
‘It made them dance,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Dance?’
‘Like the Zyklon-B, it came in through the shower-heads. And they … they began to
vomit, and to … to defecate helplessly.’
‘Wow,’ Todd said. ‘Shit themselves, huh?’ He pointed at the Ring-Ding on Dussander’s plate. He had finished his own. ‘You going to eat that?’
Dussander didn’t reply. His eyes were hazed with memory. His face was far away and
cold, like the dark side of a planet which does not rotate. Inside his mind he felt the
queerest combination of revulsion and – could it be? – nostalgia!
‘They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My
men … they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay
there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete,
screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them,
either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long
enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally
I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record
if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that -it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at
a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five
men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they
made. The yodeling sound. The laughing.’
‘Yeah, I bet,’ Todd said. He finished Dussander’s Ring-Ding in two bites. Waste not,
want not, Todd’s mother said on the rare occasions when Todd complained about left-
overs. ‘That was a good story, Mr Dussander. You always tell them good. Once I get you
going.’
Todd smiled at him. And incredibly – certainly not because he wanted to – Dussander
found himself smiling back.
5
November, 1974.
Dick Bowden, Todd’s father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV actor named
Lloyd Bochner. He – Bowden, not Bochner – was thirty-eight. He was a thin, narrow man
who liked to dress in Ivy League style shirts and solid-colour suits, usually dark. When
he was on a construction site, he wore khakis and a hard-hat that was a souvenir of his
Peace Corps days, when he had helped to design and build two dams in Africa. When he
was working in his study at home, he wore half-glasses that had a way of slipping down
to the end of his nose and making him look like a college dean. He was wearing these
glasses now as he tapped his son’s first-quarter report card against his desk’s gleaming
glass top.
‘One B. Four Cs. One D. A D, for Christ’s sake! Todd,’ your mother’s not showing it,
but she’s really upset.’
Todd dropped his eyes. He didn’t smile. When his dad swore, that wasn’t exactly the
best of news.
‘My God, you’ve never gotten a report like this. A D in Beginning Algebra? What is this?’ ‘I don’t know, Dad.’ He looked humbly at his knees. ‘Your mother and I think that
maybe you’ve been spending a little too much time with Mr Denker. Not hitting the
books enough. We think you ought to cut it down to weekends, slugger. At least
until we see where you’re going academically…’
Todd looked up, and for a single second Bowden thought he saw a wild, pallid anger in
his son’s eyes. His own eyes widened, his fingers clenched on Todd’s buff-coloured report card … and then it was just Todd, looking at him openly if rather unhappily. Had that
anger really been there? Surely not. But the moment had unsettled him, made it hard for
him to know exactly how to proceed. Todd hadn’t been mad, and Dick Bowden didn’t
want to make him mad. He and his son were friends, always had been friends, and Dick
wanted things to stay that way. They had no secrets from each other, none at all (except
for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful with his secretary, but that wasn’t
exactly the sort of thing you told your thirteen-year-old son, ‘was it? … and besides, that
had absolutely no bearing on his home life, his , family life). That was the way it was
supposed to be, the way it had to be in a cockamamie world where murderers went
unpunished, high-school kids skin-popped heroin, and junior high schoolers – kids Todd’s
age – turned up with VD.
‘No, Dad, please don’t do that. I mean, don’t punish Mr Denker for something that’s my
fault. I mean, he’d be lost without me. I’ll do better. Really. That algebra … it just threw
me to start with. But I went over to Ben Tremaine’s, and after we studied together for a
few days, I started to get it. It just… I dunno, I sorta choked at first.’
‘I think you’re spending too much time with him,’ Bowden said, but he was weakening.
It was hard to refuse Todd, hard to disappoint him, and what he said about punishing the
old man for Todd’s falling-off… goddammit, it made sense. The old man looked forward
to his visits so much.
That Mr Storrman, the algebra teacher, is really hard,’ Todd said. ‘Lots of kids got Ds.
Three or four got Fs.’
Bowden nodded thoughtfully.
‘I won’t go Wednesdays anymore. Not until I bring my grades up.’ He had read his
father’s eyes. ‘And instead of going out for anything at school, I’ll stay after every day and
study. I promise.’
‘You really like the old guy that much?’
‘He’s really neat,’ Todd said sincerely.
‘Well… okay. We’ll try it your way, slugger. But I want to see a big improvement in
your marks come January, you understand me? I’m thinking of your future. You may
think junior high’s too soon to start thinking about that, but it’s not. Not by a long chalk.’
As his mother liked to say Waste not, want not, so Dick Bowden liked to say Not by a long chalk.
‘I understand, dad,’ Todd said gravely. Man to man stuff.
‘Get out of here and give those books a workout then.’ He pushed his half-glasses up
on his nose and clapped Todd on the shoulder.
Todd’s smile, broad and bright, broke across his face. ‘Right on, dad!’
Bowden watched Todd go with a prideful smile of his own. One in a million. And that
hadn’t been anger on Todd’s face. For sure. Pique, maybe … but not that high-voltage
emotion he had at first thought he’d seen there. If Todd was that mad, he would have
known; he could read his son like a book. It had always been that way.
Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a blueprint and bent
over it
6
December, 1974.
The face that came in answer to Todd’s insistent finger on the bell was haggard and
yellowed. The hair, which had been lush in July, had now begun to recede from the bony
brow; it looked lustreless and brittle. Dussander’s body, thin to begin with, was now
gaunt … although, Todd thought, he was nowhere near as gaunt as the inmates who had
once been delivered into his hands.
Todd’s left hand had been behind his back when Dussander came to the door. Now he
brought it out and handed a wrapped package to Dussander. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he yelled.
Dussander had cringed from the box; now he took it with no expression of pleasure or
surprise. He handled it gingerly, as if it might contain explosive. Beyond the porch, it was
raining. It had been raining off and on for almost a week, and Todd had carried the box
inside his coat. It was wrapped in gay foil and ribbon.
‘What is it?’ Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the kitchen.