Ross Thomas - The Eighth Dwarf

“No,” Jackson said, “I couldn’t.”

“Well, I certainly could. Didn’t you notice how close together her eyes were? That’s the sure sign of a deadbeat — well, almost, anyway. You want another beer?”

“And a martini for my friend here.”

“Extra dry?” the waiter said to Ploscaru.

“Extra dry,” the dwarf said.

After the drinks were served, Jackson waited while Ploscaru took the first swallow of his martini, shuddered, and lit one of the Old Gold cigarettes he favored.

“Well?” Jackson said.

Before replying, Ploscaru took another swallow of his drink, a larger one. This time there was no shudder. Instead, he sighed and, not quite looking at Jackson, said, “The call came through at eleven this morning. A little after eleven.”

“From where?”

“Tijuana.”

“They both came up?”

“The daughter did. The old man stayed in Ensenada. He doesn’t speak English, you know. The daughter does, after a fashion. They would like a meeting.”

“Did you talk about money?”

The dwarf looked at Jackson then. He had green eyes which seemed clever, or perhaps it was just their glitter.

“We talked about money,” Ploscaru said, “and she seemed to think that our price was too high; but then, she’s a Jew.” The dwarf shrugged, expressing his mild contempt for any Jew who would be foolish enough to believe that she could out-haggle a full-blooded son of Romania.

“So we negotiated,” Ploscaru continued. “In English, of course, although German would have been preferable, but the war hasn’t been over quite that long. It’s very difficult to negotiate over the phone, especially with someone who’s speaking an unfamiliar language and speaking it badly. One misses the — uh — nuances.”

“So what did you come up with?” Jackson said.

“A thousand for you; five hundred for me.”

“That’s slicing it a bit thin, isn’t it?”

Ploscaru pursed his lips in disagreement. “My dear chap, to strike any bargain that requires two separate payments, you should appear to resist with your last breath all attempts to reduce the initial payment. But then, when your arguments are exhausted, you should give in grudgingly and then hurry on to the second payment. This one you can inflate, if you are clever and persistent, because your fellow negotiator knows that if you fail in your task, he will never have to pay.” The dwarf took another swallow of his martini, licked his lips, and said, “I really should have been a diplomat.”

“How much?” Jackson said. “The second payment?”

“Ten thousand for you and five for me. To be paid in Switzerland.”

“If we find him.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Jackson thought it over. It was more than he had expected, almost two thousand dollars more. The dwarf had done well, far better than Jackson himself could have done. He decided to pay the dwarf a small compliment — a tiny one, really, because anything larger would have gone to Ploscaru’s head and made him insufferable for the rest of the afternoon.

“Not bad,” Jackson said.

“Quite brilliant actually.” Whenever the dwarf paid himself a compliment his British overtones deepened, possibly because the two spies he had worked for in Bucharest had seldom given him a decent word and he now liked his praise, even that which came from his own lips, to be wrapped in a British accent.

“I’ll still have to sell my car, though,” Jackson said.

“What a pity,” Ploscaru said, not bothering to disguise his sarcasm.

“The meeting,” Jackson said. “When do they want it?”

“The day after tomorrow at their hotel in Ensenada. They’ve insisted on a couple of code phrases for identification — really dreadfully silly stuff; but I’ll give you all that tomorrow.”

“What do you want to do this afternoon?”

“Let’s drive down to the beach and drink beer and look at women.”

“All right,” Jackson said.

They had shipped Captain Minor Jackson back to the States aboard a hospital ship in mid-1945 because of an acute case of infectious hepatitis he had caught in the jungles of Burma where he, along with a couple of enlisted hard cases and a dozen or so even tougher Kachin tribesmen, had harassed the Japanese behind their own lines. Jackson’s small unit had been part of a freewheeling OSS outfit called Detachment 101. The reason it was called Detachment 101 was that the OSS felt the name would make it sound as if there might be a few other similar detachments around, although, of course, there weren’t.

Jackson had spent the day and night of the Japanese surrender aboard the hospital ship in Seattle harbor watching the fireworks and listening to the sounds of the celebration. The next day in the hospital at Fort Lewis the Red Cross had told him that he could make a free long-distance call home.

This posed a small problem, because Jackson’s parents had been divorced for nearly twenty years and he wasn’t at all sure where either of them might be. However, he was quite positive that his mother wouldn’t be in Palm Beach — not in August, anyway.

He finally had placed a call to his father’s law firm in New York, only to be told by a secretary, who might have been new in her job, that Mr. Jackson was in an important conference and was taking absolutely no calls.

Later, Jackson wrote his father a postcard. Two weeks went by before a letter arrived from his father congratulating Jackson on having survived the war (which seemed to have surprised his father, although not unpleasantly) and urging him to get out of the Army and settle down to something “productive and sensible.” Sensible had been underlined. A few days later he received a telegram from his mother in Newport, Rhode Island, welcoming him home and hoping that they could get together sometime soon because she had “oodles” to tell him. Jackson translated oodles into meaning a new husband (her fourth) and didn’t bother to answer.

Instead, when the Army asked where his hometown was so that he could be transferred to a hospital nearby to recuperate from his jaundice, Jackson had lied and said San Francisco. When he arrived at the Army’s Letterman General there, Jackson weighed one hundred twelve pounds, which the doctors felt was a bit light for his six-foot-two frame. It took them more than six months to fatten him up and get his icterus index back down to normal, but when they did, Jackson was discharged on February 19, 1946, from both the Army and the hospital as well as from the OSS — which, anyway, had gone out of business on September 20, 1945.

Jackson’s accumulated back pay, separation allowances, and not inconsiderable poker winnings amounted to nearly $4,000. He promptly spent $1,750 of it to purchase an overpriced but snappy 1941 yellow Plymouth convertible. He also managed to find and buy six white shirts (still scarce in early 1946), a rather good tweed jacket, some slacks, and a gray worsted suit.

Thus mounted and attired, Jackson had lingered on in San Francisco for nearly six months, largely because of the charms of a redheaded Army nurse. But then the nurse, convinced that Jackson was no marriage prospect, had accepted a posting to an Army hospital in Rome. So Jackson, his plans still purposely vague, had driven south in early September, heading for Los Angeles, the first stop on his roundabout return to Europe.

Three principal reasons took Jackson to Los Angeles. The first was that he had never been there. The second was a woman who lived in Pacific Palisades and who had once gone to bed with him in Washington years before and who might again, provided she remembered him. The third reason was that during the war Jackson had made friends with a more or less famous actor who had also served in the OSS. For a while Jackson and the actor, who also was something of a sailor, had run guns and supplies across the Adriatic from Bari in Italy to Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. The actor had made Jackson swear to look him up should Jackson ever be in Los Angeles or, more precisely, in Beverly Hills.