Todd’s breath had stopped. His skin appeared transparent. Dussander smiled at him. He sipped bourbon.
‘I think they will put you in jail. They may call it a reformatory, or a correctional facility — there may be a fancy name for it, like this "Quarterly Progress Report" -’ his lip curled’- but no matter what they call it, there will be bars on the windows.’
Todd wet his lips. ‘I’d call you a liar. I’d tell them I just found out. They’d believe me, not you. You just better remember that.’
Dussander’s thin smile remained. ‘I thought you told me your father would get it all out of you.’
Todd spoke slowly, as a person speaks when realization and verbalization occur simultaneously. ‘Maybe not. Maybe not this time. This isn’t just breaking a window with a rock.’
Dussander winced inwardly. He suspected that the boy’s judgement was right — with so much at stake, he might indeed be able to convince his father. After ail, when faced with such an unpleasant truth, what parent would not want to be convinced?
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. But how are you going to explain all those books you had to read to me because poor Mr Denker is half blind? My eyes are not what they were, but I can still read fine print with my spectacles. I can prove it.’
‘I’d say you fooled me!’
‘Will you? And what reason will you be able to give for my fooling?’
‘For… for friendship. Because you were lonely.’
That, Dussander reflected, was just close enough to the truth to be believable. And once, in the beginning, the boy might have been able to bring it off. But now he was ragged; now he was coming apart in strings like a coat that has reached the end of its useful service. If a child shot off his cap pistol across the street, this boy would jump into the air and scream like a girl.
‘Your school-card will also support my side of it,’ Dussander said. ‘It was not Robinson Crusoe that caused your grades to fall down so badly, my boy, was it?’
‘Shut up, why don’t you? Just shut up about it!’
‘No,’ Dussander said. ‘I won’t shut up about it.’ He lit a cigarette, scratching the wooden match alight on the gas oven door. ‘Not until I make you see the simple truth. We are in this together, sink or swim.’ He looked at Todd through the raftering smoke, not smiling, his old, lined face reptilian. ‘I will drag you down, boy. I promise you that. If anything comes out, everything will come out. That is my promise to you.’
Todd stared at him sullenly and didn’t reply.
‘Now,’ Dussander said briskly, with the air of a man who has put a necessary unpleasantness behind him, ‘the question is, what are we going to do about this situation? Have you any ideas?’
"This will fix the report card,’ Todd said, and took a new bottle of ink eradicator from his jacket pocket. ‘About that fucking letter, I don’t know.’
Dussander looked at the ink eradicator approvingly. He had falsified a few reports of his own in his time. When the quotas had gone up to the point of fantasy… and far, far beyond. And — more like the situation they were now in -there had been the matter of the invoices… those which enumerated the spoils of war. Each week he would check the boxes of valuables, all of them to be sent back to Berlin in special train-cars that were like big Padd safes on wheels. On the side of each box was a manilla envelope, and inside the envelope there had been a verified invoice of that box’s contents. So many rings, necklaces, chokers, so many grams of gold. Dussander, however, had had his own box of valuables — not very valuable valuables, but not insignificant, either. Jades. Tourmalines. Opals. A few flawed pearls. Industrial diamonds. And when he saw an item invoiced for Berlin that caught his eye or seemed a good investment, he would remove it, replace it with an item from his own box, and use ink eradicator on the invoice, changing their item for his. He had developed into a fairly expert forger… a talent that had come in handy more than once after the war was over.
‘Good,’ he told Todd. ‘As for this other matter…’
Dussander began to rock again, sipping from his cup. Todd pulled a chair up to the table and began to go to work on his report-card, which he had picked up from the floor without a word. Dussander’s outward calm had had its effect on him and now he worked silently, his head bent studiously over the card, like any American boy who has set out to do the best by God job he can, whether that job be planting corn, pitching a no-hitter in the Little League World Series, or forging grades on his report-card.
Dussander looked at the nape of his neck, lightly tanned and cleanly exposed between the fall of his hair and the round neck of his tee-shirt. His eyes drifted from there to the top counter drawer where he kept the butcher knives. One quick thrust — he knew where to put it — and the boy’s spinal cord would be severed. His lips would be sealed forever. Dussander smiled regretfully. There would be questions asked if the boy disappeared. Too many of them. Some directed at him. Even if there was no letter with a friend, close scrutiny was something he could not afford. Too bad.
This man French,’ he said, tapping the letter. ‘Does he know your parents in a social way?’
‘Him?’ Todd edged the word with contempt. ‘My mom and dad don’t go anywhere that he could even get in.’
‘Has he ever met them in his professional capacity? Has he ever had conferences with them before?’
‘No. I’ve always been near the top of my classes. Until now.’
‘So what does he know about them?’ Dussander said, looking dreamily into his cup, which was now nearly empty. ‘Oh, he knows about you. He no doubt has all the records on you that he can use. Back to the fights you had in the kindergarten play yard. But what does he know about them?’
Todd put his pen and the small bottle of ink eradicator away. ‘Well, he knows their names. Of course. And their ages. He knows we’re all Methodists. We don’t go much, but he’d know that’s what we are, because it’s on the forms. He must know what my dad does for a living; that’s on the forms, too. All that stuff they have to fill out every year. And I’m pretty sure that’s all.’
‘Would he know if your parents were having troubles at home?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Dussander tossed off the last of the bourbon in his cup. ‘Squabbles. Fights. Your father sleeping on the couch. Your mother drinking too much.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘A divorce brewing.’
Indignantly, Todd said: "There’s nothing like that going on! No way!’
‘I never said there was. But just think, boy. Suppose that things at your house were "going to hell in a streetcar", as the saying is.’
Todd only looked at him, frowning.
‘You would be worried about them,’ Dussander said. ‘Very worried. You would lose your appetite. You would sleep poorly. Saddest of all, your schoolwork would suffer. True? Very sad for the children, when there are troubles in the home.’
Understanding dawned in the boy’s eyes — understanding and something like dumb gratitude. Dussander was gratified.
‘Yes, it is an unhappy situation when a family totters on the edge of destruction,’ Dussander said grandly, pouring more bourbon. He was getting quite drunk. ‘The daytime television dramas, they make this absolutely clear. There is acrimony. Backbiting and lies. Most of all, there is pain. Pain, my boy. You have no idea of the hell your parents are going through. They are so swallowed up by their own troubles that they have little time for the problems of their own son. His problems seem minor compared to theirs, hein? Someday, when the scars have begun to heal, they will no doubt take a fuller interest in him once again. But now the only concession they can make is to send the boy’s kindly grandfather to Mr French.’