I was tired. Back in my room across the hall, Dash looked up at me from the sofa. He blinked once and closed his eyes.
"Hungry?" I said.
He opened his eyes again and considered purring. He was orange, fat, independent, and well fed. He closed his eyes again. I took that for a no. Besides, Dash knew better than to count on me. The window was open and he could do his own shopping. I owed him for saving my life a year earlier, but I didn't owe him enough to take away his independence, turn him into a pet, and make him pretend he liked me.
I took off my clothes, forced myself to hang my jacket and pants in the closet, dropped my socks and underwear on the small pile growing in a corner, and, envelope from Gable in hand, plopped back on the mattress on the floor. I have a bad back. I can't sleep on a bed. I can't sleep on my stomach. In addition to the watch, I inherited a championship snore from my father. I can't sleep in civilized company, but alone and unobserved I can forget murdered baritones and May Company salesmen, Clark Gable and poems written by a killer who may or may not be a Mexican or Rumanian.
I took one last look at the notes from Ramone's killer. They made no more sense to me now than the photograph. I put everything back in the envelope and shoved it under the edge of the mattress. I had forgotten to turn off the lights. I looked around the small room at the ancient overstuffed sofa with the embroidered pillow that read, "God Bless Us Every One," at the Beech-Nut Gum wall clock that told me it was almost three, at the small table near the window with the refrigerator behind it and the tiny sink nearby. It wasn't much, but it was paid for till the end of April. The shelves over the sink were filled with cereal boxes, cans of Spam, tuna, and sardines. The refrigerator contained bread, milk, a rusting twelve-ounce-size V-8 (with the suggestion on the label that V-8 would be delicious if poured over my breakfast eggs), a brick of Durkee's Vegetable Oleomargarine, and an assortment of ground A amp; P coffee. What more could I want?
The lights out.
I forced myself up, careful not to throw my back out, and reached for the switch. The door opened an instant after I hit the switch, and a soft high voice with a German-Swiss accent whispered, "Toby, are you here?"
I turned the light back on and in my boxer shorts greeted Gunther Wherthman.
"Come in," I said.
"No," said Gunther, who wore a blue-velvet robe over pajamas whiter than good vanilla ice cream. "I only wanted to reassure myself that you had returned and were safely ensconced."
"I'm safely ensconced."
Gunther, about a decade younger than me and a foot and a half shorter, plunged his hands into his pockets. His face was as clean shaven and smooth at three in the morning as it was at 8:00 A.M., noon, or midnight. His clear blue-green eyes looked at me and then away. Dash opened his eyes again, looked at Gunther, yawned, and went back to sleep.
"I don't wish to…" he began, but I stepped in with, "What's up, Gunther?"
He closed the door and looked up at me.
"Gwen," he said. "She has returned to San Francisco. Sudden. Emergency. She had a call. An old… someone she knew before."
It wasn't easy for Gunther, who must have been waiting in his room for hours till I tiptoed in. He had met the young, enthusiastic graduate music-history student when I was on a case in San Francisco. It had been love at second thought, and it had been hard on her. I'd seen them looked at, stared at. Gwen was no giant, but she wasn't a little person either and she was still a kid.
"She coming back?"
"I do not know," he said. "She will call in a day, perhaps two."
"I'm sorry," I said. I seemed to be saying that a lot tonight, but it had been a long night.
"I appreciate that," he said. "I have been unable to work since she left this morning."
Gunther was a contract translator. He had been many things. A circus performer. An actor in The Wizard ofOz. One of my clients. We had become best friends and he had gotten me into Mrs. Plant's three years earlier. Business had been booming for Gunther since the war. Most of his work came on subcontracts from universities on government contracts to translate documents, newspapers, and magazines from Europe into English for analysis. The universities could handle German, Spanish, French, and Italian, but for Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian, Gunther was their little man. He worked in his room, which was right next door to mine and about the same size. He woke up every morning, had breakfast in a three-piece suit, and then went back upstairs where he climbed up on the chair in front of his desk to translate.
"I've disturbed you. I can see you are tired."
"A little," I agreed, knowing I couldn't hide it any more than the stomach I was scratching. I would have to hit the Y.M.C.A. over on Hope with more regularity.
He turned and opened the door.
"Breakfast?" I asked. "I've got coffee and Little Colonel's. We can talk then."
"My concerns can wait, but I fear that Mrs. Plaut is expecting us downstairs for something she has prepared," he said solemnly. "I am concerned that she has an agenda."
"Wait," I said, getting the envelope from under my mattress. I took out the poem and handed it, the clipping, the crumpled photograph of Al Ramone as a dead Confederate soldier, and the bloodstained piece of paper about spelling cage-e to Gunther, who took them solemnly. The four fifties and the card I shoved in the pocket of my Wind-breaker in the closet.
"If you can't sleep, see what you can make of them," I said and then followed up with a thirty-second wrap-up of what had happened in the last seven hours.
When I finished, Gunther simply nodded.
"Good night, Toby," he said.
"Good night, Gunther," I answered.
He backed into the hall, closing the door, and I hit the light switch. Covered by darkness I crawled back onto my mattress on the floor, climbed under my blanket, put my head on the pillow, and went to sleep in no more than the time it took Joe Louis to put Schmeling away in the rematch.
I dreamt of my father holding his wrist up to his ear to listen to the ticking of his watch before he checked the time. My father, dressed in his grocer's apron, smiled, took off the watch, and handed it to me.
I dreamt of Gunther watching Gwen and Clark Gable through a window. Gunther was on my shoulders. Gable and Gwen were on a bed. Then I was on Gunther's shoulders, watching my ex-wife Anne in bed with Clark Gable. With neither Gwen nor Anne did Gable look happy. Then his eyes turned toward Gunther and me watching at the window and he looked disgusted, betrayed.
Dream Three. There are always three with me. Dream Three found Koko the Clown holding one of my hands and Bozo the Dog the other. We were flying through the air over water and Koko kept repeating, "Pretty cagey. Pretty cagey." I thought the dog and the clown were going to drop me. I felt the rush of air under my boxer shorts. I couldn't catch my breath and then I woke up and found daylight flushing the room and Mrs. Plaut standing at the foot of my mattress wearing a blue dress, a white apron, and a very serious look. She was carrying a big yellow bowl in her arms. There is not much of Mrs. Emma Plaut, but what there is is feisty and nearly deaf.
"It's nine," she said.
I tried to sit up. Dash, who had huddled next to my left leg during one of my nightmares, mewed in annoyance and stretched.
"Late breakfast will be at nine-twelve," said Mrs. Plaut.
I grunted something.
"Mr. Gunther is downstairs waiting. Mr. Hill also. And Miss Reynel."
"I know it's pointless," I said. "I know, but something I can't control inside me keeps making me say this. Mrs. Plaut, will you please knock before you enter my room. Please knock and wait till I say 'come in?' "
"Smell this," she said, thrusting the bowl down in front of my nose.
I smelled. It smelled sweet. It smelled comforting.