and echoing train station minutes before a passenger train departs. The walking
wounded paraded slowly up and down, some dressed in robes as he was, others holding
the backs of their johnnies together. Disconnected music came from half a dozen different
transistor radios in half a dozen different rooms. Visitors came and went A man laughed
in one room and another man seemed to be weeping across the hall. A doctor walked by
with his nose in a paperback novel.
Dussander went to the fountain, got a drink, wiped his mouth with his cupped hand,
and looked at the closed door across the hall. This door was always locked … at least,
that was the theory. In practice he had observed that it was sometimes both unlocked and
unattended. Most often during the chaotic half hour when the shifts were changing and
the nurses were gathered around the corner. Dussander had observed all of this with the
trained and wary eye of a man who has been on the jump for a long, long time. He only
wished he could observe the unmarked door for another week or so, looking for
dangerous breaks in the pattern – he would only have the one chance. But he didn’t have another week. His status as Werewolf in Residence might not become known for another
two or three days, but it might happen tomorrow. He did not dare wait When it came out,
he would be watched constantly.
He took another small drink, wiped his mouth again, and looked both ways. Then,
casually, with no effort of concealment, he stepped across the hall, turned the knob, and
walked into the drug closet. If the woman in charge had happened to already be behind
her desk, he was only nearsighted Mr Denker. So sorry, dear lady, I thought it was the
WC. Stupid of me.
But the drug closet was empty.
He ran his eye over the top shelf at his left. Nothing but eyedrops and eardrops.
Second shelf: laxatives, suppositories. On the third shelf he saw Seconal and Veronal. He
slipped a bottle of Seconals into the pocket of his robe. Then he went back to the door
and stepped out without looking around, a puzzled smile on his face – that certainly
wasn’t the WC, was it? There it was, right next to the drinking fountain. Stupid me!
He crossed to the door labelled MEN, went inside, and washed his hands. Then he
went back down the hall to the semi-private room that was now completely private since
the departure of the illustrious Mr Heisel. On the table between the beds was a glass and
a plastic pitcher filled with water. Pity there was no bourbon; really, it was a shame. But
the pills would float him off just as nicely no matter how they were washed down.
‘Morris Heisel, salud,’ he said with a faint smile, and poured himself a glass of water.
After all those years of jumping at shadows, of seeing faces that looked familiar on park
benches or in restaurants or bus terminals, he had finally been recognized and turned in
by a man he wouldn’t have known from Adam. It was almost funny. He had barely spared
Heisel two glances, Heisei and his broken back from God. On second thoughts, it wasn’t
almost funny; it was very funny.
He put three pills in his mouth, swallowed them with water, took three more, then
three more. In the room across the hall he could see two old men hunched over a night-
table, playing a grumpy game of cribbage. One of them had a hernia, Dussander knew.
What was the other? Gallstones? Kidney stones? Tumour? Prostate? The horrors of
old age. They were legion.
He refilled his water glass but didn’t take any more pills right away. Too many could
defeat his purpose. He might throw them up and they would pump the residue out of his
stomach, saving him for whatever indignities the Americans and the Israelis could devise.
He had no intention of trying to take his life stupidly, like a hausfrau on a crying jag.
When he began to get drowsy, he would take a few more. That would be fine.
The quavering voice of one of the cribbage players came to him, thin and triumphant:
‘A double run of four for ten … fifteens for eighteen … and the right jack for nineteen.
How do you like those apples?’
‘Don’t worry,’ the old man with the hernia said confidently. ‘I got first count. I’ll peg
out.’
Peg out, Dussander thought, sleepy now. An apt enough phrase – but the Americans
had a turn for idiom. / don’t give a tin shit, get hip or get out, stick it where the sun don’t shine, money talks, nobody walks. Wonderful idiom.
They thought they had him, but he was going to peg out before their very eyes.
He found himself wishing, of all absurd things, that he could leave a note for the boy.
Wishing he could tell him to be very careful. To listen to an old man who had finally
overstepped himself. He wished he could tell the boy that in the end he, Dussander, had
come to respect him, even if he could never like him, and that talking to him had been
better than listening to the run of his own thoughts. But any note, no matter how
innocent, might cast suspicion on the boy, and Dussander did not want that. Oh, he
would have a bad month or two, waiting for some government agent to show up and
question him about a certain document that had been found in a safety deposit box rented
to Kurt Dussander, aka Arthur Denker … but after a time, the boy would come to believe he had been telling the truth. There was no need for the boy to be touched by any of this,
as long as he kept his head.
Dussander reached out with a hand that seemed to stretch for miles, got the glass of
water, and took another three pills. He put the glass back, closed his eyes, and settled
deeper into his soft, soft pillow. He had never felt so much like sleeping, and his sleep
would be long. It would be restful.
Unless there were dreams.
The thought shocked him. Dreams? Please God, no. Not those dreams. Not for eternity, not with all possibility of awakening gone. Not –
In sudden terror, he tried to struggle awake. It seemed that hands were reaching
eagerly up out of the bed to grab htm, thin hands with hungry fingers.
(!NO!)
His thoughts broke up in a steepening spiral of darkness, and he rode down that spiral
as if down a greased slide, down and down, to whatever dreams there are.
His overdose was discovered at 1.35 a.m., and he was pronounced dead fifteen
minutes later. The nurse on duty was young and had been susceptible to elderly Mr
Denker’s slightly ironic courtliness. She burst into tears. She was a Catholic, and she
could not understand why such a sweet old man, who had been getting better, would
want to do such a thing and damn his immortal soul to hell
26
On Saturday morning in the Bowden household, nobody got up until at least nine. This
morning at 9.30, Todd and his father were reading at the table and Monica, who was a slow waker, served them scrambled eggs, juice, and coffee without speaking, still half in
her dreams. Todd was reading a paperback science fiction novel and Dick was absorbed
in Architectural Digest when the paper slapped against the door.
‘Want me to get it, dad?’
‘I will.’
Dick brought it in, started to sip his coffee, and then choked on it as he got a look at
the front page.
‘Dick, what’s wrong?’ Monica asked, hurrying towards him.
Dick coughed out coffee that had gone down the wrong pipe, and while Todd looked
at him over the top of his paperback in mild wonder, Monica started to pound him on the
back. On the third stroke, her eyes fell to the paper’s headline and she stopped in mid-
stroke, as if playing statues. Her eyes widened until it seemed they might actually fail
onto the table.
‘Holy God up in heaven!’ Dick Bowden managed in a choked voice.
‘Isn’t that … I can’t believe …’ Monica began, and then stopped. She looked at Todd.
‘Oh, honey -‘
His father was looking at him, too.
Alarmed now, Todd came around the table. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Mr Denker,’ Dick said – it was all he could manage.
Todd read the headline and understood everything. In dark letters it read: FUGITIVE
NAZI COMMITS SUICIDE IN SANTA DONATO HOSPITAL. Below were two photos,
side by side. Todd had seen both of them before. One showed Arthur Denker, six years
younger and spryer. Todd knew it had been taken by a hippie street photographer, and