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 out of it’ He dismissed this idea with a disinterested lift and drop of his shoulders. ‘The book explained all about whorls and lands and points of similarity. They’re called compares. You need eight compares for a fingerprint to get accepted in court ‘So anyway, one day when you were at the movies, I came here and dusted your mailbox and doorknob and lifted all the prints I could. Pretty smart, huh?’
Dussander said nothing. He was clutching the arms of his chair, and his toothless, deflated mouth was trembling. Todd didn’t like that. It made him look like he was on the verge of tears. That, of course, was ridiculous. The Blood Fiend of Patin in tears? You might as well expect Chevrolet to go bankrupt or McDonald’s to give up burgers and start selling caviar and truffles.
‘I got two sets of prints,’ Todd said. ‘One of them didn’t look anything like the ones on the wanted poster. I figured those were the postman’s. The rest were yours. I found more than eight compares. I found fourteen good ones.’ He grinned. ‘And that’s how I did it.’
‘You are a little bastard,’ Dussander said, and for a moment his eyes shone dangerously. Todd felt a tingling little thrill, as he had in the hall. Then Dussander slumped back again.
‘Who have you told?’
‘No one.’
‘Not even this friend? This Cony Pegler?’
‘Foxy. Foxy Pegler. Nah, he’s a blabbermouth. I haven’t told anybody. There’s nobody I trust that much.’
‘What do you want? Money? There is none, I’m afraid. In South America there was, although it was nothing as romantic or dangerous as the drug trade. There is — there was — a kind of "old boy network" in Brazil and Paraguay and Santo Domingo. Fugitives from the war. I became part of their circle and made a fortune in minerals and ores — tin, copper, bauxite. Then the changes came. Nationalism, anti-Americanism. I might have ridden out the changes, but then Weisenthal’s men caught my scent. Bad luck follows bad luck, boy, like dogs after a bitch in heat. Twice they almost had me; once I heard the Jew-bastards in the next room.
‘They hung Eichmann,’ he whispered. One hand went to his neck, and his eyes had become as round as the eyes of a child listening to the darkest passage of a scary tale — Hansel and Gretel, perhaps, or Bluebeard. ‘He was an old man, of no danger to anyone. He was apolitical. Still, they hung him.’
Todd nodded.
‘At last, I went to the only people who could help me. They had helped others, and I could run no more.’
‘You went to the Odessa?’ Todd asked eagerly.
‘To the Sicilians,’ Dussander said dryly, and Todd’s face fell again. ‘It was arranged. False papers, false past. Would you care for a drink, boy?’
‘Sure. You got a Coke?’
‘No Coke.’ He pronounced it Kok.
‘Milk?’
‘Milk.’ Dussander went through the archway and into the kitchen. A fluorescent bar buzzed into life. ‘I live now on stock dividends,’ his voice came back. ‘Stocks I picked up after the war under yet another name. Through a bank in the State of Maine, if you please. The banker who bought them for me went to jail for murdering his wife a year after I bought them… life is sometimes strange, boy, hein?’
A refrigerator door opened and closed.
"The Sicilian jackals didn’t know about those stocks,’ he said. Today they are everywhere, but in those days, Boston was as far north as they could be found. If they had known, they would have had those as well. They would have picked me clean and sent me to America to starve on welfare and food stamps.’
Todd heard a cupboard door open; he heard liquid poured into a glass.
‘A little General Motors, a little American Telephone and Telegraph, a hundred and fifty shares of Revion. All this banker’s choices. Dufresne, his name was — I remember, because it sounds a little like mine. It seems he was not so smart at wife-killing as he was at picking growth stocks. The crime passionnel, boy. It only proves that all men are donkeys who can read.’
He came back into the room, slippers whispering. He held two green plastic glasses that looked like the premiums they sometimes give out at gas station openings. When you filled your tank, you got a free glass. Dussander thrust a glass at Todd.
‘I lived adequately on the stock portfolio this Dufresne had set up for me for the first five years. But then I sold my Diamond Match stock in order to buy this house and a small cottage not far from Big Sur. Then, inflation. Recession. I sold the cottage and one by one I sold the stocks, many of them at fantastic profits. I wish to God I had bought more. But I thought I was well-protected in other directions; the stocks were, as you Americans say, a "flier"…’ He made a toothless hissing sound and snapped his fingers.
Todd was bored. He had not come here to listen to Dussander whine about his money or mutter about his stocks. The thought of blackmailing Dussander had never crossed Todd’s mind. Money? What would he do with it? He had his allowance; he had his paper route. If his monetary needs went higher than what these could provide during any given week, there was always someone who needed his lawn mowed.