APT PUPIL

He looked like the total all-American kid as he pedalled his twenty-six-inch Schwinn

with the ape-hanger handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that's just what he

was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy one hundred and

forty pounds, hair the colour of ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin

marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne.

He was smiling a summer vacation smile as he pedalled through the sun and shade three

blocks from his own house. He looked like the kind of kid who might have a paper route,

and as a matter of fact, he did - he delivered the Santa Donato Clarion. He also looked

like the kind of kid who might sell greeting cards for premiums, and he had done that,

too. They were the kind that come with your name printed inside - JACK AND MARY

BURKE, or DON AND SALLY, or THE MURCHISONS. He looked like the sort of boy

who might whistle while he worked, and he often did so. He whistled quite 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 does, I

guess, or at least they're not telling. But an Israeli agent spotted you in Cuba, working as

the concierge in a big hotel just before Castro took over. They lost you when the rebels

came into Havana. You popped up in West Berlin in 1965. They almost got you.' He

pronounced the last two words as one: gotcha. At the same time he squeezed all of his

fingers together into one large, wriggling fist. Dussander's eyes dropped to those wellmade

and well-nourished American hands, hands that were made for building soapbox

racers and Aurora models. Todd had done both. In fact, the year before, he and his dad

had built a model of the Titanic. It had taken almost four months, and Todd's father kept

it in his office.

'I don't know what you are talking about,' Dussander said.

Without his false teeth, his words had a mushy sound Todd didn't like. It didn't sound ...

well, authentic. Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes sounded more like a Nazi than

Dussander did. But in his time he must have been a real whiz. In an article on the deathcamps

in Men's Action, the writer had called him The Blood-Fiend of Patin. 'Get out of

here, boy. Before I call the police.'

'Gee, I guess you better call them, Mr Dussander. Or Heir Dussander, if you like that

better.' He continued to smile, showing perfect teeth that had been fluoridated since the

beginning of his life and bathed thrice a day in Crest toothpaste for almost as long. 'After

1965, no one saw you again ... until I did, two months ago, on the downtown bus.' 'You're

insane.'

'So if you want to call the police,' Todd said, smiling, 'you go right ahead. I'll wait on the

stoop. But if you don't want to call them right away, why don't I come in? We'll talk.'

There was a long moment while the old man looked at the smiling boy. Birds twitted in

the trees. On the next block a power mower was running, and far off, on busier streets,

horns honked out their own rhythm of life and commerce.

In spite of everything, Todd felt the onset of doubt He couldn't be wrong, could he? Was

there some mistake on his part? He didn't think so, but this was no schoolroom exercise.

It was real life. So he felt a surge of relief (mild relief, he assured himself later) when

Dussander said: 'You may come in for a moment, if you like. But only because I do not

wish to make trouble for you, you understand?'

'Sure, Mr Dussander,' Todd said. He opened the screen and came into the hall. Dussander

closed the door behind them, shutting off the morning.

The house smelted stale and slightly malty. It smelted the way Todd's own house smelted

sometimes the morning after his folks had thrown a party and before his mother had had a

chance to air it out. But this smell was worse. It was lived-in and ground-in. It was liquor,

fried food, sweat, old clothes, and some stinky medicinal smell like Vicks or

Mentholatum. It was dark in the hallway, and Dussander was standing too close, his head

hunched into the collar of his robe like the head of a vulture waiting for some hurt animal

to give up the ghost. In that instant, despite the stubble and the loosely hanging flesh,

Todd could see the man who had stood inside the black SS uniform more clearly than he

had ever seen him on the street. And he felt a sudden lancet of fear slide into his belly.

Mild fear, he amended later.

'I should tell you "that if anything happens to me -' he began, and then Dussander

shuffled past him and into the living room, his slippers wish-wishing on the floor. He

flapped a contemptuous hand at Todd, and Todd felt a flush of hot blood mount into his

throat and cheeks.

Todd followed him, his smile wavering for the first time. He had not pictured it

happening quite like this. But it would work out. Things would come into focus. Of

course they would. Things always did. He began to smile again as he stepped into the

living room.

It was another disappointment - and how! - but one he supposed he should have been

prepared for. There was of course no oil portrait of Hitler with his forelock dangling and

eyes that followed you. No medals in cases, no ceremonial sword mounted on the wall,

no Luger or PPK Walther on the mantle (there was, in fact, no mantle). Of course, Todd

told himself, the guy would have to be crazy to put any of those things out where people

could see them. Still, it was hard to put everything you saw in the movies or on TV out of

your head. It looked like the living room of any old man living alone on a slightly frayed

pension. The fake fireplace was faced with fake bricks. A Westclox hung over it. There

was a black and white Motorola TV on a stand; the tips of the rabbit ears had been

wrapped in aluminium foil to improve reception. The floor was covered with a grey rug;

its nap was balding. The magazine rack by the sofa held copies of National Geographic,

Reader's Digest, and the LA Times. Instead of Hitler or a ceremonial sword hung on the

wall, there was a framed certificate of citizenship and a picture of a woman in a funny

hat. Dussander later told him that sort of hat was called a cloche, and they had been

popular in the twenties and thirties.

'My wife,' Dussander said sentimentally. 'She died in 1955 of a lung disease. At that time

I was a draughtsman at the Menschler Motor Works in Essen. I was heartbroken.'

Todd continued to smile. He crossed the room as if to get a better look at the woman in

the picture. Instead of looking at the picture, he fingered the shade on a small table-lamp.

'Stop that? Dussander barked harshly. Todd jumped back a little.

That was good,' he said sincerely. 'Really commanding. It was Use Koch who had the

lampshades made out of human skin, wasn't it? And she was the one who had the trick

with the little glass tubes.'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Dussander said. There was a package of Kools,

the kind with no filter, on top of the TV. He offered them to Todd. 'Cigarette?' he asked,

and grinned. His grin was hideous.

'No. They give you lung cancer. My dad used to smoke, but he gave it up. He went to

SmokeEnders.'

'Did he?' Dussander produced a wooden match from the pocket of his robe and scratched

it indifferently on the plastic case of the Motorola. Puffing, he said: 'Can you give me one

reason why I shouldn't call the police and tell them of the monstrous accusations you've

just made? One reason? Speak quickly, boy. The telephone is just down the hall. Your

father would spank you, I think. You would sit for dinner on a cushion for a week or so,

eh?'

'My parents don't believe in spanking. Corporal punishment causes more problems than it

cures.' Todd's eyes suddenly gleamed. 'Did you spank any of them? The women? Did you

take off their clothes and -'

With a muffled exclamation, Dussander started for the phone.

Todd said coldly: 'You better not do that.'

Dussander turned. In measured tones that were spoiled only slightly by the fact that his

false teeth were not in, he said: 'I tell you this once, boy, and once only. My name is

Arthur Denker. It has never been anything else; it has not even been Americanized. I was

in fact named Arthur by my father, who greatly admired the stories of Arthur Conan

Doyle, It has never been Doo-Zander, nor Himmler, nor Father Christmas. I was a reserve

lieutenant in the war. I never joined the Nazi party. In the battle of Berlin I fought for

three years. I will admit that in the late thirties, when I was first married, I supported

Hitler. He ended the depression and returned some of the pride we had lost in the

aftermath of the sickening and unfair Treaty of Versailles. I suppose I supported him

mostly because I got a job and there was tobacco again, and I didn't need to hunt through

the gutters when I needed to smoke. I thought, in the late thirties, that he was a great man.

In his own way, perhaps he was. But at the end he was mad, directing phantom armies at

the whim of an astrologer. He even gave Blondi, his dog, a death-capsule. The act of a

madman; by the end they were all madmen, singing the Horst Wessel Song as they fed

poison to their children. On 2 May 1945, my regiment gave up to the Americans. I

remember that a private soldier named Hackermeyer gave me a chocolate bar. I wept.

There was no reason to fight on; the war was over, and really had been since February. I

was interned at Essen and was treated very well. We listened to the Nuremberg trials on

the radio and when Goering committed suicide, I traded fourteen American cigarettes for

half a bottle of schnapps and got drunk. I was released in January of 1946. At the Essen

Motor Works I put wheels on cars until 1963, when I retired and emigrated to the United

States. To come here was a lifelong ambition. In 1967 I became a citizen. I am an

American. I vote. No Buenos Aires. No drug dealing. No Berlin. No Cuba.' He

pronounced it Koo-ba. 'And now, unless you leave, I make my telephone call.'

He watched Todd do nothing. Then he went down the hall and picked up the telephone.

Still Todd stood in the living room, beside the table with the small lamp on it.

Dussander began to dial. Todd watched him, his heart speeding up until it was drumming

in his chest. After the fourth number, Dussander turned and looked at him. His shoulders

sagged. He put the phone down.

'A boy,' he breathed. 'A boy:

Todd smiled widely but rather modestly.

'How did you find out?'

'One piece of luck and a lot of hard work,' Todd said There's this friend of mine, Harold

Pegler his name is, only all the kids call him Foxy. He plays second base for our team.

And his dad's got all these magazines out in his garage. Great big stacks of them. War

magazines. They're old. I looked for some new ones, but the guy who runs the newsstand

across from the school says most of them went out of business. In most of them there's

pictures of Krauts - German soldiers, I mean - and Japs torturing these women. And

articles about the concentration camps. I really groove on all that concentration camp

stuff.'

'You ... groove on it.' Dussander was staring at him, one hand rubbing up and down on

his cheek, producing a very small sandpapery sound.

'Groove. You know. I get off on it. I'm interested.'

He remembered that day in Foxy's garage as clearly as anything in his life - more clearly,

he suspected. He remembered in the fourth grade, before Careers Day, how Mrs

Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of her big front teeth) had talked to them

about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST.

'It comes all at once,' Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. 'You see something for the first

time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It's like a

key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That's why Careers Day is so

important, children - it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.'

And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out

not to be teaching the fourth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards.

Todd had thought Mrs Anderson was full of bullspit at the time, but that day in Foxy's

garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if maybe she hadn't been right

after all.

The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were brush-fires. He

remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. He remembered Foxy's crewcut, and

the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the front of it He remembered everything.

'I know there's comics here someplace,' Foxy had said. His mother had a hangover and

had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise. 'Neat ones. They're

Westerns, mostly, but there's some Turok, Son of Stones and_'

'What are those?' Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons under the stairs.

'Ah, they're no good,' Foxy said. 'True war stories, mostly. Boring.'

'Can I look at some?'

'Sure. I'll find the comics.'

But by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to read comics. He

was lost. Utterly lost.

It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.

It had been like that. He had known about the war, of course - not the stupid one going on

now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks in

black pyjamas - but World War II. He knew that the Americans wore round helmets with

net on them and the Krauts wore sort of square ones. He knew that the Americans won

most of the battles and that the Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot them

from Germany onto London. He had even known something about the concentration

camps.

The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines under the stairs in

Foxy's garage was like the difference between being told about germs and then actually

seeing them in a microscope, squirming around and alive.

Here was Use Koch. Here were crematoriums with their doors standing open on their

soot-clotted hinges. Here were officers in SS uniforms and prisoners in striped uniforms.

The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires burning out of

control on the east of Santo Donate, and he could feel the old paper crumbling against the

pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no longer in Foxy's garage but caught

somewhere crosswise in time, trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those

things, that somebody had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do

those things, and his head began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and

his eyes were hot and strained, but he read on, and from a column of print beneath a

picture of tangled bodies at a place called Dachau, this figure jumped out at him:

6,000,000

And he thought: Somebody goofed there, somebody added a zero or two, that's three

times as many people as there are in LA! But then, in another magazine (the cover of this

one showed a woman chained to a wall while a guy in a Nazi uniform approached her

with a poker in his hand and a grin on his face), he saw it again:

6,000,000

His headache got worse. His mouth went dry. Dimly, from some distance, he heard Foxy

saying he had to go in for supper. Todd asked Foxy if he could stay out here in the garage

and read while Foxy ate. Foxy gave him a look of mild puzzlement, shrugged, and said

sure. And Todd read, hunched over the boxes of the old true war magazines, until his

mother called and asked if he was ever going to go home.

Like a key turning in a lock.

All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were continued

at the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying it was bad

were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and helmets as well

as Magic Trusses and Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German flags

emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as well as

correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes to short men.

They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.

Like falling in love.

Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything about it - a

yellowing pin-up calendar for a defunct year on the back wall, the oil-stain on the cement

floor, the way the magazines had been tied together with orange twine. He remembered

how his headache had gotten a little worse each time he thought of that incredible

number,

6,000,000

He remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in those places.

Everything. And I want to know which is more true - the words, or the ads they put

beside the words.

He remembered Bugs Anderson as he at last pushed the boxes back under the stairs and

thought: She was right. I've found my GREA T INTEREST.

Dussander looked at Todd for a long time. Then he crossed the living room and sat down

heavily in a rocking chair. He looked at Todd again, unable to analyze the slightly

dreamy, slightly nostalgic expression on the boy's face.

'Yeah. It was the magazines that got me interested, but I figured a lot of what they said

was just, you know, bullspit. So I went to the library and found out a lot more stuff. Some

of it was even neater. At first the crummy librarian didn't want me to look at any of it

because it was in the adult section of the library, but I told her it was for school. If it's 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!'

'Sure I did. My mom and dad gave me a fingerprint set for Christmas last year. A real

one, not just a toy. It had the powder and three brushes for three different surfaces and

special paper for lifting them. My folks know I want to be a PI when I grow up. Of

course, they think I'll grow
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