Stuart Kaminsky - The Fala Factor

“Got you,” I said. “What about him?”

Jeremy shrugged and unzipped his gray windbreaker to give his massive chest some room to breathe.

“Very dense,” said Jeremy sadly. “Very little sense of the moral. Never having truly suffered, he has no sense of what suffering means. A dangerous man, Toby. One to stay away from. I fought him three times. He beat me but one of them, the last one at the Stadium in, let me see, 1935 or ‘36. He was removed from the sport that same year. No control, no sense of the game, the art of enactment. He did not know how to act. He could only fight. Consequently, no one but me wanted to enter the ring with him, though he did end his career against the Strangler, and Pepe the Giant.”

“So you think he could kill?” I said.

“With little excuse and no remorse,” Jeremy said.

“Where does he hang out?”

Jeremy shrugged and said, “We have not kept in touch, though I have heard less than kind things said about him, particularly from Pepe with whom I still play chess from time to time. It would be best to stay away from Bass. You know what his nickname for himself was? Le Mort , Death. Pepe called him Badass Bass. If you must encounter him, I strongly suggest that I accompany you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind Jeremy, thanks.”

“Alice and I,” he said seriously, changing the subject, “have a new enterprise. She has agreed, at least for the time, to put aside the pornography, and publish a series of books of children’s poetry that I am writing. While I have no great quarrel with pornography, I think it tends to simply reproduce itself and make the pornographer carry guilt instead of pride. Would you like to hear one of the poems I have written for our initial book?”

“Sure,” I said, noticing that a scrawny man in a sweater and jacket was listening to our conversation. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and the skin on his neck hung down like that of a forgotten turkey.

“Ah,” Jeremy said, suddenly remembering, “Academy Dolmitz. Academy hired Bass for debt collecting a few years ago. I thought I heard that he still did some part-time work for Academy.”

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said. Academy Dolmitz had a used bookstore on Broadway. The bookstore was a front for a bookie operation.

“The poem,” Jeremy reminded me, a gentle but massive hand on my arm. I stood politely with the turkey man and others as Jeremy recited his poem to a growing crowd, which numbered about ten by the time he finished.

“ The wife of the king

continued to sing

though his majesty said

he would render her dead

if the queen did not cease

and give him some peace.

‘If my song was too loud,’

said the queen to the crowd

which had gathered to see

a monarch hang from a tree

‘then a strong admonition

might have changed my position,

but the king would not dream

of a choice less extreme

than to tie off, garrotte,

my tender white throat.

And so the next time

a tune leaps to your mind

cut it off in mid-note

and commit this to rote:

If the queen can hang

for a song she sang,

then might not the noose, come

for a tune that you hum?’

Brought on by hysteria,

the queen then sang an aria

but a black-hooded fella

cut short her a capella,

as a voice from the crowd

shouted angry and loud.

‘Not a moment too soon,

she can’t carry a tune .’”

The turkey neck looked puzzled while another guy in the crowd applauded and a voice from the back said critically, “It got no goddam onomatopoeia for chrissake. A poem gotta have onomatopoeia.”

I backed away from the coming debate, wondering what a kid would make of Jeremy’s creation and if he and Alice were planning to illustrate their book. I also filed in the back of my mind the possibility of bringing Mrs. Plaut and publisher Alice Palice together. Object: publication, and my own curiosity.

On the way back to Burbank for another try at Jane Poslik, I turned on the news and found that it was Saturday, which I already knew. What I didn’t know was that the sugar shortage had gotten worse. Hoarding syrup was now a crime and ice-cream manufacturers were being limited to twenty flavors of ice cream and two of sherbet. Beyond that, Laraine Day was engaged to army aviator Ray Hendricks, who used to sing with Ted Fio Rito. Shut Out had won the Kentucky Derby, and a Japanese transport and six fighter planes had been destroyed in an attack on enemy bases in New Guinea.

I had time for about ten minutes of Scattergood Baines before I pulled up in front of Jane Poslik’s apartment in Burbank. My workday had begun in earnest.

Jane Poslik was home. She didn’t want to open the door at first, but I dropped some names like Olson, Roosevelt, and Fala, and she let me in. Her apartment was small and neat and so was she. There were sketches on the wall in cheap, simple frames, more than a dozen sketches of women in a variety of costumes. My favorite was a pencil sketch of someone who looked like Lucille Ball in a fancy French dress all puffed out, white and soft.

“Looks like Lucille Ball,” I said, nodding at the drawing.

“It is,” she said, watching me carefully with puckered lips.

Jane Poslik was somewhere in her late thirties, hair cut short. She wore a brown dress with a faint pattern. She was not pretty and not ugly. If her nose had been less chiseled, her chin a little stronger, she might have come out all right, but if she was one of the Pekin, Illinois, beauty pageant runners-up or an actress who had played the second female lead in a Dayton theater company production of Street Scene , she wasn’t going to be any competition for the hundreds who tripped over each other coming to Los Angeles every week.

“You an actress?” I said, taking the scat in the small kitchen she pointed to.

“Designer,” she answered, filling a pot with water. “Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee,” I said. “You work for a studio?”

“No,” she said, hugging herself as if she were cold and turning to look at me. “Not yet. So far I’ve managed to design for a theater company in Santa Monica. I’ve had to take a variety of jobs.”

“Like working for Dr. Olson,” I said.

“Like working for Dr. Olson,” she agreed, fishing a package of Nabisco graham crackers out of a cabinet and placing them on the small table in front of me. “Right now I’m doing part-time work for Gladding, McBean, and Company in Glendale. I’m designing some mosaic tiles. If it goes well, I’ll be put on full time.”

“Sounus good,” I said.

“It’s good,” she agreed, standing near the coffee pot. “But, it’s not designing.”

“Olson,” I said.

“Olson,” she sighed. “You work for …”

“A private party close to someone quite high in the government,” I said, nibbling a graham.

She looked at me for a long time trying to decide whether to trust me or not.

“I know about the letters you wrote to the White House,” I said. “I know that the FBI talked to you.”

“All right, Mr. Peters,” she said, deciding to take a chance. “What do you want to know?”

“What made you think something was going on with Dr. Olson and the president’s dog?”

The coffee was perking now. She checked the pot, made another decision, and said, “I’ll answer your question when you answer one for me.”

“Go ahead.”