Boy's Life (83 page)

     “Secondly.” He folded his arms across his chest, and I saw his tongue probe the inside of his cheek. “There is the matter of Miss Sonia Glass.”

     “Sir?” My heart, which had settled down some, now speeded up again.

     “Miss Sonia Glass,” he repeated. “She brought her parrot to me. It died of a brain fever. Right here.” He touched the wire-mesh cage. “Poor, poor creature. Now, it happens that Veronica and Miss Glass are in the same Sunday school class. Miss Glass, it seems, was terribly upset and puzzled by questions you asked her, Cory. She said you were very curious about a particular song, and why her parrot had… reacted strangely to that song.” He smiled thinly. “Miss Glass told Veronica she thought you knew a secret, and might either Veronica or I know what it was? And there was some odd little thing as well, about you being in the possession of a green feather from Miss Katharina Glass’s dead parrot. Miss Sonia said she couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw it.” He began working the knuckles of his right hand as he stared at the floor. “Are these things true, Cory?”

     I swallowed hard. If I said they weren’t, he’d know I was lying anyway. “Yes sir.”

     He closed his eyes. A pained expression stole over his face, there and then gone. “And where did you find that green feather, Cory?”

     “I… found it…” Here was the moment of truth. I sensed something in that room coiled up like a snake and ready to strike. Though the overhead light was bright and harsh, the tile-floored room seemed to seethe with shadows. Dr. Lezander, I suddenly realized, had positioned himself between me and the stairs. He waited, his eyes closed. If I made a run for it, Mrs. Lezander would snare me even if I got past the doctor. Again, the choice was stolen from me. “I found it at Saxon’s Lake,” I said, braving the fates. “At the edge of the woods. Before the sun, when that car went down with a dead man handcuffed to the wheel.”

     With his eyes closed, Dr. Lezander smiled. It was a terrible sight. The flesh on his face looked tight and damp, his bald head shining under the light. Then he began to laugh: a slow leak of a laugh, bubbling from his silver-toothed mouth. His eyes opened, and they speared me. For a few seconds he had two faces: the lower one wore a silver-glinting smile; the upper one was pure fury. “Well, well,” he said, and he shook his head as if he’d just heard the most amazing joke. “What are we going to do about
this?
”

     “Have you ever seen this man before, Mr. Mackenson?”

     Mr. Steiner had removed his wallet. He had taken a laminated card from it, and now he slid the card before my father as they sat at the back booth in the Bright Star Cafe.

     It was a grainy black and white photograph. It showed a man wearing a white knee-length coat, waving and smiling to someone off the frame. He had dark hair that swept back like a skullcap, and he had a square jaw and a cleft in his chin. Behind him was the hood of a gleaming car that looked like an antique, like from the thirties or forties. Dad studied the face for a moment; he paid close attention to the eyes and the white scar of a smile. For all his studying, however, it remained the face of a stranger.

     “No,” he said as he slid the picture back across the wood. “Never.”

     “He’ll probably look different now.” Mr. Steiner studied the picture, too, as if looking into the face of an old enemy. “He might have had some plastic surgery. The easiest way to change appearance is to grow a beard and shave your head. That way even your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”
Mudder
, he’d said.

     “I don’t know that face. Sorry. Who is he?”

     “His name is Gunther Down in the Dark.”

     “
What?
” Dad almost chewed on his heart.

     “Gunther Down in the Dark,” Mr. Steiner repeated. He spelled the last name, and then he pronounced it again: “Dahninaderke.”

     Dad sat back in the booth, his mouth open. He gripped the table’s edge to keep from being spun off the entire world. “My God,” he whispered. “My God. ‘Come with me… Dahninaderke.’”

     “Excuse me?” Mr. Steiner asked.

     “Who is he?” Dad’s voice was thick.

     Lee Hannaford answered. “He’s the man who killed Jeff, if my brother’s body is lyin’ at the bottom of that damned lake.” Dad had told them the story of that morning last March. Mr. Hannaford looked mean enough to snap the head off a cobra. He hadn’t eaten much of his hamburger, but he’d almost swallowed three Luckies. “My brother—my stupid-assed brother—must’ve been blackmailin’ him, by what we can figure out. Jeff left a diary hidden in his apartment, back in Fort Wayne. It was in code, written in German. I found the diary in May, when I quit my job in California and came lookin’ for him. It took us until a couple of weeks ago to figure the code out.”

     “It was based on Wagner’s
Ring of the Nibelung
,” Mr. Steiner said. “Very, very intricate.”

     “Yeah, he always was nuts about that code shit.” Mr. Hannaford stabbed out another cigarette butt in his ketchupy plate. “Even as a kid. He was always doin’ secret writin’ and shit. So we pieced it together from the diary. He was blackmailin’ Gunther Dahninaderke, first five hundred dollars a month, then eight hundred, then a thousand. It was down in the book that Dahninaderke lived in Zephyr, Alabama. Under a false name, I mean. Jeff and those scumbags helped him come up with a new identity, after he got in touch with ’em. But Jeff must’ve decided he wanted a payoff for his trouble. In the diary, he said he was gonna make a big score, get his stuff out of the apartment and move to Florida. He said he was drivin’ down to Zephyr from Fort Wayne on the thirteenth of March. And that was the last entry.” He shook his head. “My brother was fuckin’
crazy
to get involved in this. Well, I was crazy for gettin’ involved in it, too.”

     “Involved in what?” Dad asked. “I don’t understand.”

     “Do you know the term ‘neo-Nazi’?” Mr. Steiner asked.

     “I know what a Nazi is, if that’s what you’re askin’?”

     “Neo-Nazi. A new Nazi. Lee and his brother were members of an American Nazi organization that operated in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. The symbol of that organization is the tattoo on Lee’s arm. Lee and Jeff were initiated at the same time, but Lee left the group after a year and went to California.”

     “Damn straight.” A match flared, and a Lucky burned. “I wanted to get as far away from those bastards as I could. They kill people who decide Hitler didn’t shit roses.”

     “But your brother stayed with ’em?”

     “Hell, yes. He even got to be some kind of storm-trooper leader or somethin’. Jesus, can you believe it? We were all-Americans on our high school football team!”

     “I still don’t know who this Gunther Dahninaderke fella is,” Dad said.

     Mr. Steiner laced his fingers together atop the table. “This is where I come in. Lee took the diary to be deciphered by the Department of Languages at Indiana University. A friend of mine there teaches German. When he got as far as deciphering Dahninaderke’s name from that code, he sent the diary directly to me at Northwestern in Chicago. I took over the project from there in September. Perhaps I should explain that I am the director of the languages department. I am also a professor of history. And last but not least, I am a hunter of Nazi war criminals.”

     “Say again?” Dad asked.

     “Nazi war criminals,” Mr. Steiner repeated. “I have helped track down three of them in the last seven years. Bittrich in Madrid, Savelshagen in Albany, New York, and Geist in Allentown, Pennsylvania. When I saw the name Dahninaderke, I knew I was getting closer to the fourth.”

     “A war criminal? What did he do?”

     “Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke was the directing physician at Esterwegen concentration camp in Holland. He and his wife Kara determined who was fit to work and who was ready to be gassed.” Mr. Steiner flashed a quick and chilling smile. “It was they, you see, who decided on a sunny morning that I was still fit to live but my wife was not.”

     “I’m sorry,” Dad said.

     “That’s all right. I knocked his front tooth out and spent a year at hard labor. But it made me hard, and it kept me alive.”

     “You… knocked his front tooth…”

     “Right out of his head. Oh, those two were quite a pair.” Mr. Steiner’s face crinkled with the memory of pain. “We called his wife the Birdlady, because she had a set of twelve birds made from clay mixed with the ash of human bones. And Dr. Dahninaderke, who was originally a veterinarian from Rotterdam, had a very intriguing habit.”

     Dad couldn’t speak. He forced it out with an effort. “What was it?”

     “As the prisoners passed him on their way to the gas chamber, he made up names for them.” Mr. Steiner’s eyes were hooded, lost in visions of a horrible past. “Comical names, they were. I’ll always remember what he called my Veronica, my beautiful Veronica with the long golden hair. He called her ‘Sunbeam.’ He said, ‘Crawl right in, Sunbeam! Crawl right in!’ And she was so sick she had to crawl through her own…” Tears welled up behind his glasses. He took them quickly off with the manner of a man who rigidly controlled his emotions. “Forgive me,” he said. “Sometimes I forget myself.”

     “You okay?” Lee Hannaford asked my father. “You look awful white.”

     “Let me… let me see that picture again.”

     Mr. Steiner slid it in front of him.

     Dad took a long breath. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh please, no.”

     Mr. Steiner had heard it in Dad’s voice: “You know him now.”

     “I do. I know where he lives. It’s not far from here. Not very far at all. But… he’s so
nice
.”

     “I know Dr. Dahninaderke’s true nature,” Mr. Steiner said. “And the true nature of his wife. You saw it when you looked at the face of Jeff Hannaford. Dr. Dahninaderke and Kara probably tortured him to find out who else knew where he was, or maybe they got the information about the diary out of him, and they beat him to death when he wouldn’t tell them where it was or who else knew about it. When you looked at the face of Jeff Hannaford, you saw the twisted soul of Dr. Gunther Dahninaderke. I pray to God you don’t have to look upon such a sight again.”

     Dad stood up and fumbled for his wallet, but Mr. Steiner put money on the table. “I’ll take you to him,” Dad said, and he started for the door.

     “Such a bright young man,” Dr. Lezander said, standing between me and the way out. “There’s that terrier determination, isn’t it? Finding that green feather and then pursuing it to the end? I admire that, Cory, I truly do.”

     “Dr. Lezander?” I felt as if my chest were constricted by iron bands. “I sure would like to go home.”

     He took two steps toward me. I retreated as many.

      He stopped, aware of his power over me. “I want that green feather. Do you know why?”

     I shook my head.

     “Because your having it upsets Miss Sonia. It’s a reminder of the past, and she doesn’t like that. The past should be put behind us, Cory. The world should go on, and leave the things of the past alone, don’t you agree?”

     “I don’t—”

     “But no, just like that green feather, the past has to turn up again and again and again. It has to be plowed up and spread out for everyone to see. The past has to be put on exhibit, and everyone who struggled to keep from drowning in that sludge has to pay the price over and over. It’s not fair, Cory, it’s not right. Do you see?”

     I didn’t. Somewhere along the line, his train had derailed.

     “We were honorable,” Dr. Lezander said, his eyes feverish. “We had
honor
. We had pride. And look at the world now, Cory! Look what it’s become! We knew the destination, but they wouldn’t let us take the world there. And now you see what you see. Chaos and vulgarity on all sides. Gross interbreedings and couplings that even animals wouldn’t abide. You know, I had my chance to be a physician to human beings. I did. Many times. And do you know that I would rather kneel in the mud and attend to a swine than save a human life? Because that’s what I think of the human race! That’s what I think of the liars who turned their backs on us and sullied our honor! That’s what I… that’s what I… what I
think!
” He picked up the collie cup and flung it to the floor, and it hit the tiles near my right foot and shattered to pieces with a noise like a gunshot.

     Silence.

     In another moment, Mrs. Lezander called from upstairs: “Frans? What broke, Frans?”

     His brain, I thought.

     “We’re talking,” Dr. Lezander said to her. “Just talking, only that.”

     I heard her footsteps, heavy on the floor, as she moved away.

     Then a scraping sound above us.

     And a few seconds later, the piano being played.

     The tune was “Beautiful Dreamer.” Mrs. Lezander was actually a very talented pianist. She had the hands for it, I recalled Miss Blue Glass saying. I wondered if she also had the hands that were strong enough to wrap hay-baling wire around a man’s throat and strangle him to death. Or had Dr. Lezander done that as Mrs. Lezander had played that same tune in the den above and the parrots had squawked and screamed with the memory of brutal violence?