“Sorry about the place,” I said, stepping back. “But this is how the other two-thirds live.”
She was wearing a thin, black coat and carrying a black oversized purse.
“Mr. Peters,” she said. “I have seen squalor in New York that you can imagine only faintly. You live on a safe street, in a clean home. There is nothing to be ashamed of in that.”
I offered her a cup of coffee, which she accepted. She sat at my little table. Me and the wife of the president of the United States. I should have had Mrs. Plaut come upstairs with her little camera and take my picture to prove it was true.
“I had the dog,” I said, looking down at my coffee cup. “And I lost him.”
“I’m aware of that,” she said, sipping her coffee. “I had a message by phone less than an hour ago. I have been informed that I can have Franklin’s dog back for fifty thousand dollars.”
A knock at the door gave me a second to take in the new information. I wasn’t sure what it meant.
“Come in,” I said, knowing from the light rapping that it was Gunther.
Gunther, his suit gray and well pressed, entered clutching a sheet of paper, glanced at my visitor, and went pale. He said something to himself in German and Mrs. Roosevelt answered him, also in German. They went on, with Gunther regaining some of his usual composure, until I said, “Let’s try it in English.”
“I’m so sorry, Toby,” Gunther said, without removing his eyes from Eleanor Roosevelt, who smiled and drank some more coffee. “I did not mean to interrupt.”
“I’m pleased that you did drop in, Mr …?”
“Wherthman,” Gunther said with a slight bow. “Gunther Wherthman. I’m-”
“Swiss,” Mrs. Roosevelt finished for him. Gunther was beaming.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking me German,” Gunther said. “That inaccuracy can, in these times, be an unnecessary embarrassment.”
“I do not see how anyone with more than a superficial knowledge of language and culture could make such an error,” she said, looking at both of us.
I nodded in complete agreement, trying to forget that I had been sure Gunther was German when I first met him.
Gunther began to say something, but it quickly turned to German and Mrs. Roosevelt answered him in his own language while I put cups away, avoided scratching my stomach, and gave Mrs. Roosevelt some more coffee. After about three or four minutes of this, Gunther was lost in conversation, but he must have caught something in my overly patient attitude and said, in English, “I’m sorry. I’ll leave you to your business. It has been a great, great honor.”
“The honor has been mine,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.
Gunther backed out beaming, having forgotten what his original mission had been, and closed the door.
“That,” she said to me,” is a gentleman.”
9
“By tomorrow evening, as I told you, I must be back in Washington for a state dinner in honor of the president of Peru,” Mrs. Roosevelt explained after offering to clean her own cup-an offer I declined. “It will be the first state dinner since Pearl Harbor, and it is essential that I be there. I must leave by tonight.”
I accompanied her down the stairs and to the front porch, where Mrs. Plaut was standing with her 1918 Kodak Brownie box camera.
“When these first came out,” she said pleasantly to Mrs. Roosevelt, “we used to send the whole box in and they’d make the picture and send the box back loaded.”
“I remember,” said Mrs. Roosevelt politely. “It was much easier then. I sometimes think that everything was easier then.”
Mrs. Plaut smiled and took our picture, and Mrs. Roosevelt walked down the path to the dark-windowed automobile that was waiting for her at the curb.
“I shall tell my niece Chloe,” Mrs. Plaut said, beaming. “Just think, Marie Dressier was in my home and I’ve got a picture of her. You do your best for her, Mr. Peelers. What is her problem, termites?”
“Roaches,” I said, returning to my room.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s message had been clear. The caller, a man, had said that she was to give me the fifty thousand dollars and I was to deliver it to the place where Henry the Eighth died precisely at eleven that night. I was to come alone or else. The problem was, simply, that Mrs. Roosevelt had no intention of paying fifty thousand dollars for the dog.
“This has gone much further than I ever anticipated,” she had said during her second cup of coffee. “The political implications of this intrigue are, while not endless, certainly myriad. To pay ransom for Fala, regardless of Franklin’s affection for the animal, might be ruinous. Imagine the consequences and the questions if the tale were made public. Are the interests of the United States in wartime not sufficient to occupy the time and attention of the president’s wife? Is a pet more important than the tragedies taking place in the world? No, Mr. Peters, though I do not like the idea of deceiving Franklin, even if he has on occasion felt no comparable sentiment, I am quite willing to continue the charade that the dog in the White House is, indeed, his Fala.”
So, my mission was clear. I was to try for another few hours to find the dog. Failing that, I was to do whatever I thought necessary to catch the dognappers. If Fala could be saved while doing it, she would be most grateful.
“The important thing,” she had said, “is that they be caught If, at this point, you wish me to call in the FBI, I shall, but I must, in all honesty, tell you that once that is done, even if there is no leak of information to the press, there will be memos, comments, notes, and at some date in the future this incident will all come out. Franklin and I might be long gone, but there will be others and the Democratic Party to consider.”
“There’s not much chance of my getting the dog back in the next few hours,” I had said. “Los Angeles is a big, dark closet with no clear walls. It’s like searching for a lost cuff link in the Hollywood Bowl at midnight with a candle.”
“A candle in the dark,” she had said with a smile. “An appropriate metaphor, but if that is all we can do then it is better than not lighting the candle.”
All right, Toby, I told myself. Think it through. I sat in my room adjusting my dad’s old watch and nibbling Quaker Puffed Wheat right from the box. Who knew where the parrot had been killed? The fake Mrs. Olson who had killed him, Martin Lyle and Bass, who I had told, and anyone they had told, or anyone who had been in Olson’s clinic since yesterday. But anyone who had been in the clinic wouldn’t know that I had been there when the King Henry parrot lost its head.
Logic was simple. Lyle had the dog, or Bass was trying to be independent with someone’s help. Lyle didn’t need the money. If he was in on this, it was for some other reason.
I took a quick look at the newspaper and discovered that:
German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had begun a politeness campaign. Berliners were being asked to submit the names of the forty most polite people in Berlin. The first-prize winner would get a radio. Second prize would be theater tickets.
Another 2,370 Japanese in the Los Angeles area were being sent to the Los Angeles County Fair Grounds in Pomona for internment.
The R.A.F. had bombed Stuttgart and Le Havre.
But it was an item on the sports page that sent me running to the telephone in the hall. Carmen wasn’t at Levy’s Grill this early, I discovered, so I left a message with Sol, the waiter. Henry Armstrong was making a comeback, the only fighter in history to hold three crowns at the same time. Armstrong was going to do a four-round exhibition against two opponents at the Ocean Park Arena. It was a Red Cross benefit. Would Carmen be willing to go to that instead of the wrestling matches?
“You got that, Sol?”
“I got it,” he said. “Listen, she don’t wanna go, I will.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said and hung up.