Stuart Kaminsky - Dancing in the Dark

“But Arthur Forbes doesn’t think so.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Then I’ll have a talk with Arthur Forbes,” said Astaire. “I don’t want you or your friends getting hurt because you work for me.”

“I don’t think it’ll do any good and it might be dangerous. Why don’t I try to see him? Talk to him.”

“A very good idea,” came a deep accented voice behind me.

I turned and found myself looking up into the face of Kudlap Singh.

The big Indian didn’t say another word. He walked slightly in front of me, certain that I wouldn’t run and I wouldn’t try to make my own impression on his behind. The man had confidence, good posture, and a poor choice in bosses.

He led me down the corridor to a door that brought us into the hotel kitchen. Two male cooks in white and a bell-boy sat in one corner at a white metal table, talking and smoking. They looked up, saw Kudlap Singh, and went back to their conversation.

The smell of fried eggs, bacon, grilled sausage, and bananas accompanied us past the reasonably clean wooden cutting and serving tables and the metal sinks. We went through another door and into a small service area where an elevator stood open, waiting for us. Singh stepped aside so I could get on and then he followed, facing forward, and pressed a button. We jerked upward.

“Read any good books lately?” I asked.

“ They Were Expendable, ” he answered, without turning.

He was not only bigger than I was, he was funnier. I shut up and we went up. A jerk-stop on eight and the Indian stepped out and waited for me. I followed him down a carpeted hotel corridor to room 813. Singh knocked and waited for Forbes’s “Come in.”

We entered, Singh behind me. It was a normal hotel sitting room with a closed door to the left, which I assumed was the bedroom. The dark, flower-patterned sofa had its back to the sunny floor-to-ceiling draped window and there were two matching chairs facing the sofa. There was an old, highly polished wooden table and two chairs in a corner. On top of the polished table sat a cake-box sized chrome metal box with a cord running out of it. On one wall hung a painting of a guy in one of those white colonial wigs.

“Admiring the painting?” Forbes said from where he sat, knees crossed and arms spread over the back of the sofa.

With the sun at his back, Forbes was a black cutout, which was probably what he wanted.

“Yes,” I said, standing about six feet in front of him. “Washington.”

“Thomas Jefferson,” he corrected. “Jefferson and Washington didn’t look anything alike, for chrissake. Painting of Jefferson in every guest room. I’d change the name of the hotel to the Thomas Jefferson if there wasn’t already a Jefferson in Los Angeles. So I renamed it for his home, Monticello. You know he planned every brick in Monticello?”

“No,” I said, preferring the history lesson to what he might have planned after it.

“Do you know it took him thirty-five years to build Monticello?”

“No,” I said again.

“Do you know he started the University of Virginia? Not only did he found it, he designed the buildings.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, looking at Kudlap Singh, who showed no sign of whether or not he knew the accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson.

“In my home I’ve got furniture from Monticello, books,” Forbes went on. “I tell you, I was born too late. In my heart I know I should have been around for the Revolution.”

“Maybe you could buy the Jefferson Hotel,” I suggested.

“Too high profile,” he said. “I like to do things without drawing attention to myself. You want a drink?”

“Pepsi,” I said.

“Fridge over behind the table. Help yourself. Kudlap Singh doesn’t serve. He gets paid for only one thing. To keep me alive and well and in a good safe mood.”

I went to the fridge, crouched, got a Pepsi out from a rack of wine and pop bottles. I stood up, looking for an opener. Kudlap Singh took the bottle from my hand and flipped the cap off with a thumb that looked like calloused leather.

“Jefferson was nothing like Washington,” Forbes continued as I sat in one of the chairs facing him and gulping at my Pepsi. “Never went to battle. Jefferson was a blue blood, class. Grew up without a father, like me. When he was twenty-six, he was elected to the Colonial legislature of Virginia. When I was twenty-six, I was invited to join a well-known Detroit organization. Jefferson came up with the best ideas for the Declaration of Independence. I came up with a nonwritten agreement with all the organizations in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Jefferson was governor of Virginia twice, and I was head of the organization for two years.”

“Similarities are uncanny,” I said.

Forbes nodded and Kudlap Singh slapped me in the head. The right side of my head rang cold and metallic. I looked at Forbes, who hadn’t moved.

“You make wise with me and you make pain for yourself. Got me?”

“Got you,” I said.

“Pepsi cold enough? Need a glass, some ice, anything?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to force my eyes back into coordinated operation.

“One time,” he went on, “Jefferson missed by five minutes being captured by Tarleton’s raiders. Same thing happened to me.”

“Tarleton’s raiders missed you by five minutes, too?” I asked, gripping the cool glass of the half-full Pepsi bottle, ready to take a swing at Kudlap Singh if he took another slap at me. I was sure the bottle would boink off of his head with no effect, but I was ready to try it. I watched Forbes for a nod. It didn’t come.

“You know what your problem is, Peters? You’ve got guts and no brains,” he said. “I’m talking history and I’m coming to a point, if you’ll just shut up and listen and sit down.”

“I’m listening,” I said, sensing Kudlap Singh right over my shoulder.

I eased myself into one of the chairs in front of Forbes. The pain on my rear wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been. I’d describe it now as the searing horror of a branding iron.

“I built my own place back in Royal Oak, exact duplicate of Monticello. I like to garden, read. What color are my eyes?” Forbes asked.

“Your eyes?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I can’t see them,” I said, squinting into the sun.

“Hazel,” he said. “Like Jefferson. And when I was a kid I had sandy red hair like him. Can you believe that?”

“I’ll take your word,” I said.

“Nobody much knows this, but Jefferson had some lady friends,” Forbes went on a little more softly. “Mostly Negro women. Slaves. Even had kids by them. A lot of the black Jeffersons you see cleaning your house, dancing in the movies, are descendants of the third president of the United States.”

“I thought that was because their families and slave owners had admired Jefferson,” I said.

“Some of that, too,” Forbes said, waving off this line of thinking with an impatient hand. “This was Luna’s room. Look around.”

I looked around and my eyes met those of Kudlap Singh, who wasn’t looking around. He was looking straight at me.

“Doesn’t look lived in, does it?” he said. “Looks a little more like it in the bedroom, but. .”

A long moment of silence while Forbes’s head turned to look at the portrait of Jefferson before he went on.

“My wife is two stories up in the presidential suite. That’s where we stay when we’re in town. Right now I figure your brother the cop is talking to her, and she’s finding out for sure that Luna Martin died in this hotel. Some point soon I’m gonna have to talk to the cops and talk to Carlotta. I’d rather face Bataglia or one of the boys from Chicago than talk to Carlotta about this. Carlotta’s a pack rat. She never lets go of anything-a grudge, an old dress.”