Apt Pupil (Scribner Edition) Read online

  “They hanged 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 hanged 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 Kök.

  “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 the Sicilians 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 opened; he heard liquid poured into a glass.

  “A little General Motors, a little American Telephone and Telegraph, a hundred and fifty shares of Revlon. 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 passionel, 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 gave 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 I was here. 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 even 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.

  Todd lifted his milk to his lips and then hesitated. His smile shone out again . . . an admiring smile. He extended the gas station premium glass to Dussander.

  “You have some of it,” he said slyly.

  Dussander stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending, and then rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Grüss Gott!” He took the glass, swallowed twice, and handed it back. “No gasping for breath. No clawing at the t’roat. No smell of bitter almonds. It is milk, boy. Milk. From the Dairylea Farms. On the carton is a picture of a smiling cow.”

  Todd watched him warily for a moment, then took a small sip. Yes, it tasted like milk, sure did, but somehow he didn’t feel very thirsty anymore. He put the glass down. Dussander shrugged, raised his own glass, and took a swallow. He smacked his lips over it.

  “Schnaps?” Todd asked.

  “Bourbon. Ancient Age. Very nice. And cheap.”

  Todd fiddled his fingers along the seams of his jeans.

  “So,” Dussander said, “if you have decided to have a ‘flier’ of your own, you should be aware that you have picked a worthless stock.”

  “Huh?”

  “Blackmail,” Dussander said. “Isn’t that what they call it on Mannix and Hawaii Five-0 and Barnaby Jones? Extortion. If that was what—”

  But Todd was laughing—hearty, boyish laughter. He shook his head, tried to speak, could not, and went on laughing.

  “No,” Dussander said, and suddenly he looked gray and more frightened than he had since he and Todd had begun to speak. He took another large swallow of his drink, grimaced, and shuddered. “I see that is not it . . . at least, not the extortion of money. But, though you laugh, I smell extortion in it somewhere. What is it? Why do you come here and disturb an old man? Perhaps, as you say, I was once a Nazi. SS, even. Now I am only old, and to have a bowel movement I have to use a suppository. So what do you want?”

  Todd had sobered again. He stared at Dussander with an open and appealing frankness. “Why . . . I want to hear about it. That’s all. That’s all I want. Really.”

  “Hear about it?” Dussander echoed. He looked utterly perplexed.

  Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. “Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall into them. The . . .” His tongue came out and wetted his lips. “The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.”

  Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. “You are a monster,” he said softly.

  Todd sniffed. “According to the books I read for my report, you’re the monster, Mr. Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh boy.”

  “All of that is a filthy American lie,” Dussander said, stung. He set his glass down with a bang, slopping bourbon onto his hand and the table. “The problem was not of my making, nor was the solution. I was given orders and directives, which I followed.”

  Todd’s smile widened; it was now almost a smirk.

  “Oh, I know how the Americans have distorted that,” Dussander muttered. “But your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country’s unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd’s direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.” He drank and then had a coughing fit that brought thin color to his cheeks.

  Through most of this Todd fidgeted the way he did when his parents discussed whatever had been on the news that night—good old Walter Klondike, his dad called him. He didn’t care about Dussander’s politics any more than he cared about Dussander’s stocks. His idea was that people made up politics so they could do things. Like when he wanted to feel around under Sharon Ackerman’s dress last year. Sharon said it was bad for him to want to do that, even though he could tell from her tone of voice that the idea sort of excited her. So he told her he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up and then she let him. That was politics. He wanted to hear about German doctors trying to mate women with dogs, putting identical twins into refrigerators to see whether they woul
d die at the same time or if one of them would last longer, and electroshock therapy, and operations without anesthetic, and German soldiers raping all the women they wanted. The rest was just so much tired bullspit to cover up the gooshy stuff after someone came along and put a stop to it.

  “If I hadn’t followed orders, I would have been dead.” Dussander was breathing hard, his upper body rocking back and forth in the chair, making the springs squeak. A little cloud of liquor-smell hung around him. “There was always the Russian front, nicht wahr? Our leaders were madmen, granted, but does one argue with madmen . . . especially when the maddest of them all has the luck of Satan. He escaped a brilliant assassination attempt by inches. Those who conspired were strangled with piano-wire, strangled slowly. Their death-agonies were filmed for the edification of the elite—”

  “Yeah! Neat!” Todd cried impulsively. “Did you see that movie?”

  “Yes. I saw. We all saw what happened to those unwilling or unable to run before the wind and wait for the storm to end. What we did then was the right thing. For that time and that place, it was the right thing. I would do it again. But . . .”

  His eyes dropped to his glass. It was empty.

  “. . . but I don’t wish to speak of it, or even think of it. What we did was motivated only by survival, and nothing about survival is pretty. I had dreams . . .” He slowly took a cigarette from the box on the TV. “Yes. For years I had them. Blackness, and sounds in the blackness. Tractor engines. Bulldozer engines. Gunbutts thudding against what might have been frozen earth, or human skulls. Whistles, sirens, pistol-shots, screams. The doors of cattle-cars rumbling open on cold winter afternoons.

  “Then, in my dreams, all sounds would stop—and eyes would open in the dark, gleaming like the eyes of animals in a rainforest. For many years I lived on the edge of the jungle, and I suppose that is why it is always the jungle I smelled and felt in those dreams. When I woke from them I would be drenched with sweat, my heart thundering in my chest, my hand stuffed into my mouth to stifle the screams. And I would think: The dream is the truth. Brazil, Paraguay, Cuba . . . those places are the dream. In the reality I am still at Patin. The Russians are closer today than yesterday. Some of them are remembering that in 1943 they had to eat frozen German corpses to stay alive. Now they long to drink hot German blood. There were rumors, boy, that some of them did just that when they crossed into Germany: cut the t’roats of some prisoners and drank their blood out of a boot. I would wake up and think: The work must go on, if only so there is no evidence of what we did here, or so little that the world, which doesn’t want to believe it, won’t have to. I would think: The work must go on if we are to survive.”

  Todd listened to this with close attention and great interest. This was pretty good, but he was sure there would be better stuff in the days ahead. All Dussander needed was a little prodding. Heck, he was lucky. Lots of men his age were senile.

  Dussander dragged deeply on his cigarette. “Later, after the dreams went away, there were days when I would think I had seen someone from Patin. Never guards or fellow officers, always inmates. I remember one afternoon in West Germany, ten years ago. There was an accident on the Autobahn. Traffic was frozen in every lane. I sat in my Morris, listening to the radio, waiting for the traffic to move. I looked to my right. There was a very old Simca in the next lane, and the man behind the wheel was looking at me. He was perhaps fifty, and he looked ill. There was a scar on his cheek. His hair was white, short, cut badly. I looked away. The minutes passed and still the traffic didn’t move. I began snatching glances at the man in the Simca. Every time I did, he was looking at me, his face as still as death, his eyes sunken in their sockets. I became convinced he had been at Patin. He had been there and he had recognized me.”

  Dussander wiped a hand across his eyes.

  “It was winter. The man was wearing an overcoat. But I was convinced that if I got out of my car and went to him, made him take off his coat and push up his shirtsleeves, I would see the number on his arm.

  “At last the traffic began to move again. I pulled away from the Simca. If the jam had lasted another ten minutes, I believe I would have gotten out of my car and pulled the old man out of his. I would have beaten him, number or no number. I would have beaten him for looking at me that way.

  “Shortly after that, I left Germany forever.”

  “Lucky for you,” Todd said.

  Dussander shrugged. “It was the same everywhere. Havana, Mexico City, Rome. I was in Rome for three years, you know. I would see a man looking at me over his cappucino in a café . . . a woman in a hotel lobby who seemed more interested in me than in her magazine . . . a waiter in a restaurant who would keep glancing at me no matter whom he was serving. I would become convinced that these people were studying me, and that night the dream would come—the sounds, the jungle, the eyes.

  “But when I came to America I put it out of my mind. I go to movies. I eat out once a week, always at one of those fast-food places that are so clean and so well-lighted by fluorescent bars. Here at my house I do jigsaw puzzles and I read novels—most of them bad ones—and watch TV. At night I drink until I’m sleepy. The dreams don’t come anymore. When I see someone looking at me in the supermarket or the library or the tobacconist’s, I think it must be because I look like their grandfather . . . or an old teacher . . . or a neighbor in a town they left some years ago.” He shook his head at Todd. “Whatever happened at Patin, it happened to another man. Not to me.”

  “Great!” Todd said. “I want to hear all about it.”

  Dussander’s eyes squeezed closed, and then opened slowly. “You don’t understand. I do not wish to speak of it.”

  “You will, though. If you don’t, I’ll tell everyone who you are.”

  Dussander stared at him, gray-faced. “I knew,” he said, “that I would find the extortion sooner or later.”

  “Today I want to hear about the gas ovens,” Todd said. “How you baked them after they were dead.” His smile beamed out, rich and radiant. “But put your teeth in before you start. You look better with your teeth in.”

  Dussander did as he was told. He talked to Todd about the gas ovens until Todd had to go home for lunch. Every time he tried to slip over into generalities, Todd would frown severely and ask him specific questions to get him back on the track. Dussander drank a great deal as he talked. He didn’t smile. Todd smiled. Todd smiled enough for both of them.

  2

  August, 1974.

  They sat on Dussander’s back porch under a cloudless, smiling sky. Todd was wearing jeans, Keds, and his Little League shirt. Dussander was wearing a baggy gray shirt and shapeless khaki pants held up with suspenders—wino-pants, Todd thought with private contempt; they looked like they had come straight from a box in the back of the Salvation Army store downtown. He was really going to have to do something about the way Dussander dressed when he was at home. It spoiled some of the fun.

  The two of them were eating Big Macs that Todd had brought in his bike-basket, pedaling fast so they wouldn’t get cold. Todd was sipping a Coke through a plastic straw. Dussander had a glass of bourbon.

  His old man’s voice rose and fell, papery, hesitant, sometimes nearly inaudible. His faded blue eyes, threaded with the usual snaps of red, were never still. An observer might have thought them grandfather and grandson, the latter perhaps attending some rite of passage, a handing down.

  “And that’s all I remember,” Dussander finished presently, and took a large bite of his sandwich. McDonald’s Secret Sauce dribbled down his chin.

  “You can do better than that,” Todd said softly.

  Dussander took a large swallow from his glass. “The uniforms were made of paper,” he said finally, almost snarling. “When one inmate died, the uniform was passed on if it could still be worn. Sometimes one paper uniform could dress as many as forty inmates. I received high marks for my frugality.”

  “From Gluecks?”

  “From Himmler.”

&
nbsp; “But there was a clothing factory in Patin. You told me that just last week. Why didn’t you have the uniforms made there? The inmates themselves could have made them.”

  “The job of the factory in Patin was to make uniforms for German soldiers. And as for us . . .” Dussander’s voice faltered for a moment, and then he forced himself to go on. “We were not in the business of rehabilitation,” he finished.

  Todd smiled his broad smile.

  “Enough for today? Please? My throat is sore.”

  “You shouldn’t smoke so much, then,” Todd said, continuing to smile. “Tell me some more about the uniforms.”

  “Which? Inmate or SS?” Dussander’s voice was resigned.

  Smiling, Todd said: “Both.”

  3

  September, 1974.

  Todd was in the kitchen of his house, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You got to the kitchen by going up half a dozen redwood steps to a raised area that gleamed with chrome and stainless steel. His mother’s electric typewriter had been going steadily ever since Todd had gotten home from school. She was typing a master’s thesis for a grad student. The grad student had short hair, wore thick glasses, and looked like a creature from outer space, in Todd’s humble opinion. The thesis was on the effect of fruit-flies in the Salinas Valley after World War II, or some good shit like that. Now her typewriter stopped and she came out of her office.

  “Todd-baby,” she greeted him.

  “Monica-baby,” he hailed back, amiably enough.

  His mother wasn’t a bad-looking chick for thirty-six, Todd thought; blonde hair that was streaked ash in a couple of places, tall, shapely, now dressed in dark red shorts and a sheer blouse of a warm whiskey color—the blouse was casually knotted below her breasts, putting her flat, unlined midriff on show. A typewriter eraser was tucked into her hair, which had been pinned carelessly back with a turquoise clip.

  “So how’s school?” she asked him, coming up the steps into the kitchen. She brushed his lips casually with hers and then slid onto one of the stools in front of the breakfast counter.