Boys Life

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