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-color 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 C's. 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-colored 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. I 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 D's. Three or four got F's."
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 lusterless 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.
"Open it and see."
Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. "Better pull down the shades," he said confidentially.
Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander's face. "Oh? Why?"
"Well . . . you can never tell who's lookin," Todd said, smiling. "Isn't that how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be lookin before they saw you?"
Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a glass of bourbon. Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way boys so often wrap Christmas packages--boys who have more important things on their minds, things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature Feature you'll watch with a friend who's sleeping over, the two of you wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch, laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.
Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself. And later, when the horror had receded a little, he thought: I should have known.
It was a uniform. An SS uniform. Complete with jackboots. He looked numbly from the contents of the box to its cardboard cover: PETER'S QUALITY COSTUME CLOTHIERS--AT THE SAME LOCATION SINCE 1951!
"No," he said softly. "I won't put it on. This is where it ends, boy. I'll die before I put it on."
"Remember what they did to Eichmann," Todd said solemnly. "He was an old man and he had no politics. Isn't that what you said? Besides, I saved the whole fall for it. It cost over eighty bucks, with the boots thrown in. You didn't mind wearing it in 1944, either. Not at all."
"You little bastard!" Dussander raised one fist over his head. Todd didn't flinch at all. He stood his ground, eyes shining.
"Yeah," he said softly. "Go ahead and touch me. You just touch me once."
Dussander lowered the hand. His lips were quivering. "You are a fiend from hell," he muttered.
"Put it on," Todd invited.
Dussander's hands went to the tie of his robe and paused there. His eyes, sheeplike and begging, looked into Todd's. "Please," he said. "I am an old man. No more."
Todd shook his head slowly but firmly. His eyes were still shining. He liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once. The inmates at Patin.
Dussander let the robe fall to the floor and stood naked except for his slippers and his boxer shorts. His chest was sunken, his belly slightly bloated. His arms were scrawny old man's arms. But the uniform, Todd thought. The uniform will make a difference.
Slowly, Dussander took the tunic out of the box and began to pu
t it on.
Ten minutes later he stood fully dressed in the SS uniform. The Cap was slightly askew, the shoulders slumped, but still the death's-head insignia stood out clearly. Dussander had a dark dignity--at least in Todd's eyes--that he had not possessed earlier. In spite of his slump, in spite of the cockeyed angle of his feet, Todd was pleased. For the first time Dussander looked to Todd as Todd believed he should look. Older, yes. Defeated, certainly. But in uniform again. Not an old man spinning away his sunset years watching Lawrence Welk on a cruddy black and white TV with tinfoil on the rabbit ears, but Kurt Dussander, The Blood-Fiend of Patin.
As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort... and a mild, sneaking sense of relief. He partly despised this latter emotion, recognizing it as the truest indicator yet of the psychological domination the boy had established over him. He was the boy's prisoner, and every time he found he could live through yet another indignity, every time he felt that mild relief, the boy's power grew. And yet he was relieved. It was only cloth and buttons and snaps . . . and it was a sham at that. The fly was a zipper; it should have been buttons. The marks of rank were wrong, the tailoring sloppy, the boots a cheap grade of imitation leather. It was only a trumpery uniform after all, and it wasn't exactly killing him, was it? No. It--
"Straighten your cap!" Todd said loudly.
Dussander blinked at him, startled.
"Straighten your cap, soldier!"
Dussander did so, unconsciously giving it that final small insolent twist that had been the trademark of his Oberleutnants --and, sadly wrong as it was, this was an Oberleutnant's uniform.
"Get those feet together!"
He did so, bringing the heels together with a smart rap, doing the correct thing with hardly a thought, doing it as if the intervening years had slipped off along with his bathrobe.
"Achtung!"
He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared--really scared. He felt like the sorcerer's apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough wit to stop them once they got started. The old man living in genteel poverty was gone. Dussander was here.
Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.
"About face!"
Dussander pivoted neatly, the bourbon forgotten, the torment of the last four months forgotten. He heard his heels click together again as he faced the grease-splattered stove. Beyond it, he could see the dusty parade ground of the military academy where he had learned his soldier's trade.
"About face!"
He whirled again, this time not executing the order as well, losing his balance a little. Once it would have been ten demerits and the butt of a swagger stick in his belly, sending his breath out in a hot and agonized gust. Inwardly he smiled a little. The boy didn't know all the tricks. No indeed.
"Now march!" Todd cried. His eyes were hot, glowing.
The iron went out of Dussander's shoulders; he slumped forward again. "No," he said. "Please--"
"March! March! March, I said!"
With a strangled sound, Dussander began to goose-step across the faded linoleum of his kitchen floor. He right-faced to avoid the table, right-faced again as he approached the wall. His face was uptilted slightly, expressionless. His legs rammed out before him, then crashed down, making the cheap china rattle in the cabinet over the sink. His arms moved in short arcs.
The image of the walking brooms recurred to Todd, and his fright recurred with it. It suddenly struck him that he didn't want Dussander to be enjoying any part of this, and that perhaps--just perhaps--he had wanted to make Dussander appear ludicrous even more than he had wanted to make him appear authentic. But somehow, despite the man's age and the cheap dime-store furnishings of the kitchen, he didn't look ludicrous in the least. He looked frightening. For the first time the corpses in the ditches and the crematoriums seemed to take on their own reality for Todd. The photographs of the tangled arms and legs and torsos, fishbelly white in the cold spring rains of Germany, were not something staged like a scene in a horror film--a pile of bodies created from department-store dummies, say, to be picked up by the grips and propmen when the scene was done--but simply a real fact, stupendous and inexplicable and evil. For a moment it seemed to him that he could smell the bland and slightly smoky odor of decomposition.
Terror gathered him in.
"Stop!" he shouted.
Dussander continued to goose-step, his eyes blank and far away. His head had come up even more, pulling the scrawny chicken-tendons of his throat tight, tilting his chin at an arrogant angle. His nose, blade-thin, jutted obscenely.
Todd felt sweat in his armpits. "Halt!" he cried out.
Dussander halted, right foot forward, left coming up and then down beside the right with a single pistonlike stamp. For a moment the cold lack of expression held on his face--robotic, mindless--and then it was replaced by confusion. Confusion was followed by defeat. He slumped.
Todd let out a silent breath of relief and for a moment he was furious with himself. Who's in charge here, anyway? Then his self-confidence flooded back in. I am, that's who. And he better not forget it.
He began to smile again. "Pretty good. But with a little practice, I think you'll be a lot better."
Dussander stood mute, panting, his head hanging.
"You can take it off now," Todd added generously... and couldn't help wondering if he really wanted Dussander to put it on again. For a few seconds there--
7
January, 1975.
Todd left school by himself after the last bell, got his bike, and pedaled down to the park. He found a deserted bench, set his Schwinn up on its kickstand, and took his report card out of his hip pocket. He took a look around to see if there was anyone in the area he knew, but the only other people in sight were two high school kids making out by the pond and a pair of gross-looking winos passing a paper bag back and forth. Dirty fucking winos, he thought, but it wasn't the winos that had upset him. He opened his card.
English: C. American History: C. Earth Science: D. Your Community and You: B. Primary French: F. Beginning Algebra: F.
He stared at the grades, unbelieving. He had known it was going to be bad, but this was disaster.
Maybe that's best, an inner voice spoke up suddenly. Maybe you even did it on purpose, because a part of you wants it to end. Needs for it to end. Before something bad happens.
He shoved the thought roughly aside. Nothing bad was going to happen. Dussander was under his thumb. Totally under his thumb. The old man thought one of Todd's friends had a letter, but he didn't know which friend. If anything happened to Todd--anything--that letter would go to the police. Once he supposed Dussander might have tried it anyway. Now he was too old to run, even with a head start.
"He's under control, dammit," Todd whispered, and then pounded his thigh hard enough to make the muscle knot. Talking to yourself was bad shit--crazy people talked to themselves. He had picked up the habit over the last six weeks or so, and didn't seem able to break it. He'd caught several people looking at him strangely because of it. A couple of them had been teachers. And that asshole Bernie Everson had come right out and asked him if he was going fruitcrackers. Todd had come very, very close to punching the little pansy in the mouth, and that sort of stuff--brawls, scuffles, punch-outs--was no good. That sort of stuff got you noticed in all the wrong ways. Talking to yourself was bad, right, okay, but--
"The dreams are bad, too," he whispered. He didn't catch himself that time.
Just lately the dreams had been very bad. In the dreams he was always in uniform, although the type varied. Sometimes it was a paper uniform and he was standing in line with hundreds of gaunt men; the smell of burning was in the air and he could hear the choppy roar of bulldozer engines. Then Dussander would come up the line, pointing out this one or that one. They were left. The others were marched away toward the crematoriums. Some of them kicked and struggled, but most were too undernourished, too exhausted. Then Dussander was standing in front of
Todd. Their eyes met for a long, paralyzing moment, and then Dussander levelled a faded umbrella at Todd.
"Take this one to the laboratories," Dussander said in the dream. His lip curled back to reveal his false teeth. "Take this American boy."
In another dream he wore an SS uniform. His jackboots were shined to a mirrorlike reflecting surface: The death's-head insignia and the lightning-bolts glittered. But he was standing in the middle of Santo Donato Boulevard and everyone was looking at him. They began to point. Some of them began to laugh. Others looked shocked, angry, or revolted. In this dream an old car came to a squalling, creaky halt and Dussander peered out at him, a Dussander who looked two hundred years old and nearly mummified, his skin a yellowed scroll.
"I know you!" the dream-Dussander proclaimed shrilly. He looked around at the spectators and then back to Todd. "You were in charge at Patin! Look, everybody! This is The Blood-Fiend of Patin! Himmler's 'Efficiency Expert'! I denounce you, murderer! I denounce you, butcher! I denounce you, killer of infants! I denounce you!"
In yet another dream he wore a striped convict's uniform and was being led down a stone-walled corridor by two guards who looked like his parents. Both wore conspicuous yellow armbands with the Star of David on them. Walking behind them was a minister, reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Todd looked back over his shoulder and saw that the minister was Dussander, and he was wearing the black tunic of an SS officer.
At the end of the stone corridor, double doors opened on an octagonal room with glass walls. There was a scaffold in the center of it. Behind the glass walls stood ranks of emaciated men and women, all naked, all watching with the same dark, flat expression. On each arm was a blue number.
"It's all right," Todd whispered to himself. "It's okay, really, everything's under control."
The couple that had been making out glanced over at him. Todd stared at them fiercely, daring them to say anything. At last they looked back the other way. Had the boy been grinning ?
Todd got up, jammed his report card into his hip pocket, and mounted his bike. He pedaled down to a drugstore two blocks away. There he bought a bottle of ink eradicator and a fine-point pen that dispensed blue ink. He went back to the park (the make-out couple was gone, but the winos were still there, stinking the place up) and changed his English grade to a B, American History to A, Earth Science to B, Primary French to C, and Beginning Algebra to B. Your community and You he eradicated and then simply wrote in again, so the card would have a uniform look.