Different Seasons(75)

His heart speeded up in his chest. He felt sweat break on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. He remembered how it had been in that pipe, the smell of old water, the feel of the cool, ribbed metal, the way everything shook when the truck passed overhead. He remembered how hot and desperate the tears had been.

“Even if there were some impartial third party we could go to, always there would be doubts. The problem is insoluble, boy. Believe it.”

Trapped. Trapped in the pipe. No way out of this one.

He felt the world go gray. Won’t cry. Won’t faint. He forced himself to come back.

Dussander took a deep drink from his cup and looked at Todd over the rim.

“Now I tell you two more things. First, that if your part in this matter came out, your punishment would be quite small. It is even possible—no, more than that, likely—that it would never come out in the papers at all. I frightened you with reform school once, when I was badly afraid you might crack and tell everything. But do I believe that? No—I used it the way a father will use the ‘boogerman’ to frighten a child into coming home before dark. I don’t believe that they would send you there, not in this country where they spank killers on the wrist and send them out onto the streets to kill again after two years of watching color TV in a penitentiary.

“But it might well ruin your life all the same. There are records . . . and people talk. Always, they talk. Such a juicy scandal is not allowed to wither; it is bottled, like wine. And, of course, as the years pass, your culpability will grow with you. Your silence will grow more damning. If the truth came out today, people would say, ‘But he is just a child!’ ... not knowing, as I do, what an old child you are. But what would they say, boy, if the truth about me, coupled with the fact that you knew about me as early as 1974 but kept silent, came out while you are in high school? That would be bad. For it to come out while you are in college would be disaster. As a young man just starting out in business... Armageddon. You understand this first thing?”

Todd was silent, but Dussander seemed satisfied. He nodded.

Still nodding, he said: “Second, I don’t believe you have a letter.”

Todd strove to keep a poker face, but he was terribly afraid his eyes had widened in shock. Dussander was studying him avidly, and Todd was suddenly, nakedly aware that this old man had interrogated hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. He was an expert. Todd felt that his skull had turned to window-glass and all things were flashing inside in large letters.

“I asked myself whom you would trust so much. Who are your friends... whom do you run with? Whom does this boy, this self-sufficient, coldly controlled little boy, go to with his loyalty? The answer is, nobody.”

Dussander’s eyes gleamed yellowly.

“Many times I have studied you and calculated the odds. I know you, and I know much of your character—no, not all, because one human being can never know everything that is in another human being’s heart—but I know so little about what you do and whom you see outside of this house. So I think, ‘Dussander, there is a chance that you are wrong. After all these years, do you want to be captured and maybe killed because you misjudged a boy?’ Maybe when I was younger I would have taken the chance—the odds are good odds, and the chance is a small chance. It is very strange to me, you know—the older one becomes, the less one has to lose in matters of life and death... and yet, one becomes more and more conservative.”

He looked hard into Todd’s face.

“I have one more thing to say, and then you can go when you want. What I have to say is that, while I doubt the existence of your letter, never doubt the existence of mine. The document I have described to you exists. If I die today ... tomorrow... everything will come out. Everything.”

“Then there’s nothing for me,” Todd said. He uttered a dazed little laugh. “Don’t you see that?”

“But there is. Years will go by. As they pass, your hold on me will become worth less and less, because no matter how important my life and liberty remain to me, the Americans and—yes, even the Israelis—will have less and less interest in taking them away.”

“Yeah? Then why don’t they let that guy Hess go?”

“If the Americans had sole custody of him—the Americans who let killers out with a spank on the wrist—they would have let him go,” Dussander said. “Are the Americans going to allow the Israelis to extradite an eighty-year-old man so they can hang him as they hanged Eichmann? I think not. Not in a country where they put photographs of firemen rescuing kittens from trees on the front pages of city newspapers.

“No, your hold over me will weaken even as mine over you grows stronger. No situation is static. And there will come a time—if I live long enough—when I will decide what you know no longer matters. Then I will destroy the document.”

“But so many things could happen to you in between! Accidents, sickness, disease—”

Dussander shrugged. “ ‘There will be water if God wills it, and we will find it if God wills it, and we will drink it if God wills it.’ What happens is not up to us.”

Todd looked at the old man for a long time—for a very long time. There were flaws in Dussander’s arguments—there had to be. A way out, an escape hatch either for both of them or for Todd alone. A way to cry it off—times, guys, I hurt my foot, allee-allee-in-free. A black knowledge of the years ahead trembled somewhere behind his eyes; he could feel it there, waiting to be born as conscious thought. Everywhere he went, everything he did—