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 him, 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?
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 that the old man had bought it only to make sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands by chance. The other photo showed an SS officer named Kurt Dussander, swagger-stick cocked jauntily (arrogantly, some might have said) under one arm, his cap cocked to one side.
If they had the photograph the hippie had taken, they had been in his house.
Todd skimmed the article, his mind whizzing frantically. No mention of the winos. But the bodies would be found, and when they were, it would be a worldwide story. PATIN COMMANDANT NEVER LOST HIS TOUCH, HORROR IN NAZI’S BASEMENT. HE NEVER STOPPED KILLING.
Todd Bowden swayed on his feet Far away, echoing, he heard his mother cry sharply: ‘Catch him, Dick! He’s fainting!’
The word (fatntingfaintingfainttng) repeated itself over and over. He dimly felt his father’s arm grab him, and then for a little while Todd felt nothing, heard nothing at all.
27
Ed French was eating a Danish when he unfolded the paper. He coughed, made a strange gagging sound, and spat dismembered pastry all over the table.
‘Eddie!’ Sondra French said with some alarm. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Daddy’s chokin’, daddy’s chokin’,’ little Norma proclaimed with nervous good humour, and then happily joined her mother in slamming Ed on the back. Ed barely felt the blows. He was still goggling down at the newspaper.
‘What’s wrong, Eddie?’ Sondra asked again.
‘Him! Him!’ Ed shouted, stabbing his finger down at the paper so hard that his fingernail tore all the way through the A section. That man! Lord Peter!’
‘What in God’s name are you t—’
"That’s Todd Bowden’s grandfatherf ‘What? That war criminal? Eddie, that’s crazy!’
‘But it’s him,’ Ed almost moaned. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty, that’s him!’
Sondra French looked at the picture long and fixedly.
‘He doesn’t look like Peter Wimsey at all,’ she said finally.
28
Todd, pale as window-glass, sat on a couch between his mother and father.
Opposite them was a greying, polite police detective named Richler. Todd’s father had offered to call the police, but Todd had done it himself, his voice cracking through the registers as it had done when he was fourteen.
He finished his recital. It hadn’t taken long. He spoke with a mechanical colourlessness that scared the hell out of Monica. He was almost eighteen, true enough, but he was still a boy in so many ways. This was going to scar him forever.
‘I read him… oh, I don’t know. Tom Jones. The Mill on the Floss. That was a boring one. I didn’t think we’d ever get through it Some stories by Hawthorne — I remember he especially liked "The Great Stone Face" and "Young Goodman Brown". We started The Pickwick Papers, but he didn’t like it. He said Dickens could only be funny when he was being serious, and Pickwick was only kittenish. That was his word, kittenish. We got along the best with Tom Jones. We both liked that one.’