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"Don't try it; I don't like hurting people."
"There's one of the great laughs of our generation."
"Come on, Rohrer, get your ass in gear; somebody's waiting for you."
"I said: get away from me."
"We aren't goons, Rohrer, don't make us belt you around a little."
"It would take two of you?"
"If it had to."
"That isn't very sportsmanlike."
"Somewhichway, friend, you don't make us feel very sporty. Move it, or s'help
me I'll lay this alongside your head."
"Are you from one of those street gangs?"
"No, we're just a coupla patriots doing a good deed."
"I'm tired'a talking. Get it going, Rohrer."
"You ... you're Jewish, aren't you?"
"I said get going, you bastard! Now!"
And they brought him to Lilian Goldbosch.
Wonder danced in her eyes. A dance of the dead in a bombed-out graveyard; a
useless weed growing in a bog. She stared across the room at him. He stood
just inside the door, legs close together, arms at his sides, his face as
featureless as an expanse of tundra. Only the gray eyes moved in the face, and
they did so liquidly, flowing from corner to corner, seeing what was there to
be seen.
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Lilian Goldbosch walked across the room toward him. Victor Rohrer did not
move. Behind him, Arch and Frank closed the door softly. They stood like
paladins, one on either side of the door. They watched--with intense
fascination--what was happening in this silently humming room. As different
worlds paused for an eternal moment.
They did not fully comprehend what it was, but so completely had the blond boy
and the old woman absorbed each other's presence, that for now they--the ones
who had effected the meeting--were gone, invisible, out of phase, no more a
part of the life generated in the room than the mad little bird that dipped
its beak in water, agonizingly straightened, rocked and dipped again,
endlessly.
She walked up, very close to him. Where she had scratched him, his face was
still marked. She reached up, involuntarily fascinated, and made as if to
touch him. He moved back an inch, and she caught herself.
"You are very young."
It was said in appraisal, with a tinge of amazement, not a hue of poetry
anywhere in it; an attempt to codify the reality of this creature, Victor
Rohrer.
He said nothing, but a faint softness came to his mouth, as if he knew another
truth. On another face, it might have been a sneer.
"Do you know me?" she asked. "Who I am?"
He was extremely polite, as if she were a supplicant and it had fallen to him
to maintain decorum and form with her. "You're the woman who attacked me."
Her lips tightened. The memory was still fresh, an eroded fall on a volcanic
hillside she had thought incapable of being ravaged again. "I'm sorry about
that."
"I've come to expect it. From you people."
"My people ..."
"Jews."
"Oh. Yes. I'm Jewish."
He smiled knowledgeably. "Yes, I know. It says everything, doesn't it?"
"Why do you do this thing? Why do you walk around and tell people to hate one
another?"
"I don't hate you."
She stared at him warily; there had to be more. There was.
"How can one hate a plague of locusts, or a packrat that lives in the walls? I
don't hate, I'm merely an exterminator."
"Where did you get these ideas? Why does a boy your age fool around with this
kind of thing, do you know what went on in the world twenty-five years ago, do
you know all the sorrow and death this kind of thinking brought?"
"Not enough. He was a madman, but he had the right idea about the Juden. He
had the final solution, but he made mistakes."
His face was perfectly calm. He was not reciting cant, he was delivering a
theory he had worked out, logically, completely, finally.
"How did you get so much sickness in you?"
"It is a matter of opinion which of us is diseased. I choose to believe you
are the cancer."
"What do your parents think of this?"
A hot little spot of red appeared high on his cheeks. "Their opinions are of
very little concern to me."
"Do they know about what you do?"
"I'm getting tired of this. Are you going to tell these two punks to let me
go, or will I have to put up with more abuse from you and your kind?" His face
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