Different Seasons(50)

“What is it?” Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the kitchen.

“Open it and see.”

Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. “Better pull down the shades,” he said confidentially.

Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander’s face. “Oh? Why?”

“Well . . . you can never tell who’s lookin,” Todd said, smiling. “Isn’t that how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be lookin before they saw you?”

Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a glass of bourbon. Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way boys so often wrap Christmas packages—boys who have more important things on their minds, things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature Feature you’ll watch with a friend who’s sleeping over, the two of you wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch, laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.

Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself. And later, when the horror had receded a little, he thought: I should have known.

It was a uniform. An SS uniform. Complete with jackboots. He looked numbly from the contents of the box to its cardboard cover: PETER’S QUALITY COSTUME CLOTHIERS—AT THE SAME LOCATION SINCE 1951!

“No,” he said softly. “I won’t put it on. This is where it ends, boy. I’ll die before I put it on.”

“Remember what they did to Eichmann,” Todd said solemnly. “He was an old man and he had no politics. Isn’t that what you said? Besides, I saved the whole fall for it. It cost over eighty bucks, with the boots thrown in. You didn’t mind wearing it in 1944, either. Not at all.”

“You little bastard!” Dussander raised one fist over his head. Todd didn’t flinch at all. He stood his ground, eyes shining.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Go ahead and touch me. You just touch me once.”

Dussander lowered the hand. His lips were quivering. “You are a fiend from hell,” he muttered.

“Put it on,” Todd invited.

Dussander’s hands went to the tie of his robe and paused there. His eyes, sheeplike and begging, looked into Todd’s. “Please,” he said. “I am an old man. No more.”

Todd shook his head slowly but firmly. His eyes were still shining. He liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once. The inmates at Patin.

Dussander let the robe fall to the floor and stood naked except for his slippers and his boxer shorts. His chest was sunken, his belly slightly bloated. His arms were scrawny old man’s arms. But the uniform, Todd thought. The uniform will make a difference.

Slowly, Dussander took the tunic out of the box and began to put it on.

Ten minutes later he stood fully dressed in the SS uniform. The Cap was slightly askew, the shoulders slumped, but still the death’s-head insignia stood out clearly. Dussander had a dark dignity—at least in Todd’s eyes—that he had not possessed earlier. In spite of his slump, in spite of the cockeyed angle of his feet, Todd was pleased. For the first time Dussander looked to Todd as Todd believed he should look. Older, yes. Defeated, certainly. But in uniform again. Not an old man spinning away his sunset years watching Lawrence Welk on a cruddy black and white TV with tinfoil on the rabbit ears, but Kurt Dussander, The Blood-Fiend of Patin.

As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort... and a mild, sneaking sense of relief. He partly despised this latter emotion, recognizing it as the truest indicator yet of the psychological domination the boy had established over him. He was the boy’s prisoner, and every time he found he could live through yet another indignity, every time he felt that mild relief, the boy’s power grew. And yet he was relieved. It was only cloth and buttons and snaps . . . and it was a sham at that. The fly was a zipper; it should have been buttons. The marks of rank were wrong, the tailoring sloppy, the boots a cheap grade of imitation leather. It was only a trumpery uniform after all, and it wasn’t exactly killing him, was it? No. It—

“Straighten your cap!” Todd said loudly.

Dussander blinked at him, startled.

“Straighten your cap, soldier!”

Dussander did so, unconsciously giving it that final small insolent twist that had been the trademark of his Oberleutnants —and, sadly wrong as it was, this was an Oberleutnant’s uniform.

“Get those feet together!”

He did so, bringing the heels together with a smart rap, doing the correct thing with hardly a thought, doing it as if the intervening years had slipped off along with his bathrobe.

“Achtung!”

He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared—really scared. He felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough wit to stop them once they got started. The old man living in genteel poverty was gone. Dussander was here.

Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.

“About face!”

Dussander pivoted neatly, the bourbon forgotten, the torment of the last four months forgotten. He heard his heels click together again as he faced the grease-splattered stove. Beyond it, he could see the dusty parade ground of the military academy where he had learned his soldier’s trade.