Different Seasons - Stephen King [59]
Dussander dragged heavily on his unfiltered Kool. The tip trembled slightly. As he feathered smoke out of his nostrils, he coughed an old man's dank, hollow cough. 'I can hardly believe this conversation is taking place,' he said. He leaned forward and peered closely at Todd. 'Boy, do you know the word "existentialism"?'
Todd ignored the question. 'Did you ever meet Use Koch?'
'Use Koch?' Almost inaudibly, Dussander said: 'Yes. I met her.'
'Was she beautiful?' Todd asked eagerly. 'I mean ' His hands described an hourglass in the air.
'Surely you have seen her photograph?' Dussander asked. 'An aficionado such as yourself?'
'What's an af aff '
'An aficionado,' Dussander said, 'is one who grooves. One who gets off on something.'
'Yeah? Cool.' Todd's grin, puzzled and weak for a moment, shone out triumphantly again.
'Sure, I've seen her picture. But you know how they are in those books.' He spoke as if Dussander had them all. 'Black and white, fuzzy just snapshots. None of those guys knew they were taking pictures for, you know, history. Was she really stacked?'
'She was fat and dumpy and she had bad skin,' Dussander said shortly. He crushed his cigarette out half-smoked in a Table Talk pie dish filled with dead butts.
'Oh. Golly.' Todd's face fell.
'Just luck,' Dussander mused, looking at Todd. 'You saw my picture in a war-adventures magazine and happened to ride next to me on the bus. Tcha!' He brought a fist down on the arm of his easy chair, but without much force.
'No sir, Mr Dussander. There was more to it than that. A lot.' Todd added earnestly, leaning forward.
'Oh? Really?' The bushy eyebrows rose, signalling polite disbelief.
'Sure. I mean, the pictures of you in my scrapbook were all thirty years old, at least. I mean, it is 1974.'
'You keep a a scrapbook?'
'Oh, yes, sir! It's a good one. Hundreds of pictures. I'll show it to you sometime. You'll go ape.'
Dussander's face pulled into a revolted grimace, but he said nothing.
The first couple of times I saw you, I wasn't sure at all. And then you got on the bus one day when it was raining, and you had this shiny black slicker on -'
'That,' Dussander breathed.
'Sure. There was a picture of you in a coat like that in one of the magazines out in Foxy's garage. Also, a photo of you in your SS greatcoat in one of the library books. And when I saw you that day, I just said to myself, "It's for sure. That's Kurt Dussander." So I started to shadow you -'
'You did what?'
'Shadow you. Follow you. My ambition is to be a private detective like Sam Spade in the books, or Mannix on TV. Anyway, I was super careful. I didn't want you to get wise.
Want to look at some pictures?'
Todd took a folded-over manilla envelope from his back pocket. Sweat had stuck the flap down. He peeled it back carefully. His eyes were sparkling like a boy thinking about his birthday, or Christmas, or the firecrackers he will shoot off on the Fourth of July.
'You took pictures of me?"
'Oh, you bet I got this little camera. A Kodak. It's thin and flat and fits right into your hand. Once you get the hang of it, you can take pictures of the subject just by holding the camera in your hand and spreading your fingers enough to let the lens peek through. Then you hit the button with your thumb.' Todd laughed modestly. 'I got the hang of it but I took a lot of pictures of my fingers while I did. I hung right in there, though. I think a person can do anything if they try hard enough, you know it? It's corny but true.'
Kurt Dussander had begun to look white and ill, shrunken inside his robe. 'Did you have these pictures