Stuart Kaminsky - Melting Clock

Gala took over the phone, her voice shaking. “Dali does not like to be the ass of jokes.”

“The butt of jokes,” I corrected.

“No, he says ‘ass’ of jokes. In the world of Salvador Dali, all jokes are made by Salvador Dali.”

She hung up.

There is nothing like an appreciative client.

I went in search of Jeremy Butler. He’d solved the riddle of the first message for me. Maybe he could solve the second one in time for me to save a painting and maybe a life. Besides, I needed to hear a reasonably sane voice.

Most women would have been wary about answering a door to an apartment in a nearly empty downtown L.A. office building, but Alice Pallis did not hesitate. Alice feared neither man nor beast … nor robot Alice was a formidable creature of no mean proportions who, less than a year ago, when she was still in the porno business, had hoisted a two-hundred-pound printing press and carried it four flights down the fire escape when the cops came calling.

When I stepped in, Natasha was lying on a blanket on the floor of the huge open room, which only a few months earlier had been brown, leather, musty, and filled with books. Since Alice and Jeremy had married, the room had brightened considerably. Alice had replaced all of the furniture with flowered sofas and a huge pink and purple rug covered the floor.

Natasha lay gurgling and playing with the pages of a thick blue-covered book.

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

Alice smiled beautifully at her infant daughter. Natasha nibbled gently at the corner of the book.

“She absorbs,” said Alice.

“What’s she reading?” I asked.

“Fairy tales. Andersen. Jeremy believes that she should be surrounded by the proper books; that the words, the stories, come alive in the hands of one who is prepared to learn.”

“You believe that?” I asked.

“I’m learning,” she said.

“I need Jeremy.”

“It’s his meditation time,” said Alice. “He’s at Pershing Square. When he comes back he’s going to read a fairy tale to Natasha.”

Natasha stopped gnawing and looked up at me. She smiled. I left feeling a little better than when I had walked in.

Finding Jeremy was no great problem. I walked over to Pershing Square, which wasn’t quite deserted, but it wasn’t as crowded as it usually was, possibly because it looked like rain. A little guy who was shivering in spite of the eighty-degree temperature was standing on a box, a Chiquita Banana box, pounding his left fist into his right palm and shouting.

Jeremy and about five other men stood listening. Jeremy towered over the others and seemed to pay the most attention to the little guy. I started to say something to Jeremy; he put a finger to his lips to quiet me. I noticed a magazine under his arm. We turned to listen to the little man who was saying:

“… and the first step will be a temporary prohibition of alcoholic beverages based on wartime need. That’s the way the Eighteenth Amendment came last time, after the war, and they’re talking about it again. Temporary will become permanent and the bootleggers, gangsters, and politicians will lobby to keep it that way, and the country will agree to keep it that way because it will add to the underground economy, and who will suffer?”

He looked around for an answer. The six of us didn’t have an answer. Jeremy didn’t drink and I was good for a Rainier beer about once a month. So the little guy answered for us.

“I’ll suffer and people like you and me will suffer. The alcoholics, the winos. Drinking will go back to the middle classes. It’ll be a game. For us it’s a damn necessity and we’re the ones who’ll suffer. Now isn’t some straight citizen out there going to tell me I’ll be better off?”

He looked around for a straight citizen to do battle with him. Jeremy and I were the closest thing to it in the small group. No one wanted to mess with Jeremy.

“Not me,” I said.

“Then amen to you, brother,” said the little man, clutching himself as the first drops of rain came. One man in the small group shuffled off.

“It’s not the government’s job to save my life or tell me what’s good for me,” he said. “Why not ban smoking? Coffee? As long as I don’t hurt you, you’ve got no right to hurt me.”

Two more in the dwindling crowd went for shelter as the rain got a little more serious. The little man was shivering seriously now but he didn’t plan to give up, though there were only three of us left.

“The brewers, the distilleries, they’re going to fight it, but they lost before and they’ll lose again. I’m going to run for Congress and in Congress I’m going to fight, scream, and filibuster for the right of every man to have a drink when he wants or to goddammit commit suicide with dignity if he wants.”

The rain was serious now. The man next to Jeremy moved forward and helped the shivering little man from the box. He picked up the banana crate and led the little man toward the shelter of a store awning nearby. Jeremy and I moved the other way under the protection of a wind-blown tree.

“That man used to be a senator,” he said, rubbing the sheen of water from his smooth head. “Not a state senator, a United States senator. Without conviction and cause he would be dead in a few months. Every man needs a joy of life or a sense of meaning.”

“No quarrel with that,” I said, and then as the rain imprisoned us in darkness against the trunk of the tree, I told him what had happened since I had last seen him.

“The streets in Santa Monica are numbered,” I said. “But there is no Thirteenth there either. Thirteenth Euclid.”

“Spectator,” Jeremy said pensively.

“You’ve got an idea,” I said hopefully.

He took the magazine from under his arm and showed it to me. It was the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly. He flipped it open, found what he was looking for, and read to me:

“Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the silent films of yore.”

He closed the magazine and looked at me.

“That’s nice, Jeremy.” I felt a chill creeping through my soaked windbreaker.

“It’s in a short story by a young man named Vladimir Nabokov,” he explained. “You have forgotten a house, Toby Peters.”

“Can you help me remember, Jeremy?”

“It is never so meaningful as when one remembers oneself,” he admonished.

“Then I’ll regret my loss,” I said. “While you’re trying to improve my mind …”

“Your soul,” he corrected.

“My soul,” I accepted. “Another person could be murdered.”

“Why does the note say ‘Senor’?” asked Jeremy.

“The note’s to Dali. He’s Spanish,” I said.

Jeremy shook his head sadly, patiently.

“The first note had ‘Place’ in capital letters,” he said. “And this one has ‘Street.’”

“So,” I said, watching a woman dash across the street with a sheet of cardboard over her head. “Street is someone’s name. Where? There aren’t thirteen people named Street in the L.A. phone book.”

“Senor,” said Jeremy, “it is in the Town of the Spectator.”

“Hollywood,” I said.

“In Spanish, spectator is mirador,” Jeremy explained.

“Holy shit. Jeremy, remember when we were in Mirador about a year ago on the Hughes case, the sheriff was …”

“Mark Nelson,” said Jeremy.

A shot of thunder.

“I don’t like things like this,” I said. “I like it straight and simple. I don’t like puzzles, and I sure as hell don’t want to risk running into Nelson. What am I going to do?”

Jeremy looked down at me and said nothing.

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to Mirador.”