Ross Thomas - The Eighth Dwarf

For a time Jackson was silent. “I’m trying to remember,” he said finally. “I got out of school in ’36. Then I went to Europe for a year, bumming around. After that I was with an advertising agency in New York, but that only lasted six months. Then I went to work for a yacht dealer on commission, but I didn’t sell any, so that didn’t last either. After that I wrote a very bad play, which nobody would produce, and then — well, then there was one winter that I skied, and a summer that I sailed, and a fall that I played polo. And finally, in ’40, I went into the Army. I was twenty-six.”

“Have you ever been poor?” Ploscaru said.

“I’ve been broke.”

“There’s a difference.”

“Yes,” Jackson said. “There is.”

“Your family is wealthy.” It wasn’t a question.

“My old man is still trying to get that way, which is probably why he married my mother, who always was rich and probably always will be as long as she keeps marrying rich husbands. The rich tend to do that, don’t they? — marry each other.”

“To preserve the species,” Ploscaru said with a shrug as though the answer were as obvious as preordination. He then frowned, which made his thick black hair move down toward his eyes. “Most Americans don’t, but do you speak any languages?”

“French and German and enough Italian to get by.”

“Where did you learn your languages?”

“At a school in Switzerland. When I was thirteen my parents got divorced and I turned rotten. They packed me off to this school for three years, which was really more like a boys’ prison. Rich boys, of course. You either learned or else.”

Ploscaru examined his cigarette and then crushed it out in a soapstone ashtray. “So now you would like to make money?”

“It would be a change.”

“When a war ends,” the dwarf said slowly, “there are a number of ways for the enterprising to make money. The most obvious, of course, is to deal in scarce goods — the black market. Another is to provide certain services for the rich who managed to remain rich even though they themselves were, in effect, casualties of the war. This I propose to do. Does it interest you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, I really didn’t expect you to.”

“But it’s a way to make money?”

“Yes.”

“Is it legal?”

“Almost.”

“Then I’m interested,” Jackson said.

There was a gas war going on in Long Beach, and Jackson pulled the Plymouth into a station with a big sign out front that boasted of gasoline for 21.9 cents a gallon. Catty-corner across the street, the man at the Texaco station, a grim look on his face, was taking down his own sign and putting up a new one that would match his competitor’s price.

The top was lowered on the convertible, and music was coming from its radio. The music was Jimmy Dorsey’s version of “Green Eyes,” and the dwarf sang along while the attendant filled up the tank. The dwarf liked to sing.

That was one of the several things Jackson had learned about Ploscaru since their meeting at the actor’s pool three weeks before. A week after that, Jackson had accepted the dwarf’s invitation to move in and share the house in the Hollywood hills that belonged to Winona Wilson — who, it seemed, would be staying on in Santa Barbara indefinitely as she struggled to get money out of her rich mother.

It was during those same three weeks that Ploscaru had carried on his often mysterious negotiations with the people in Mexico — negotiations that Jackson would be concluding later that day in Ensenada. And it was also during those same three weeks that Jackson had discovered that the dwarf knew an incredible number of people — incredible, at least, in Jackson’s estimation. Most of them, it turned out, were women who ran the dwarf’s errands, chauffeured him around, and took him — and Jackson — to parties. At the parties Ploscaru would often sing and play the piano, if there was one. Sometimes the songs would be sad Romanian ones, and if the dwarf had had enough to drink, he would sing with tears streaming down his face. Then the women would cuddle and try to console him, and while all that was going on the dwarf would sometimes wink at Jackson.

But more often than not, the dwarf would sing popular American songs. He seemed to know the words to all of them, and he sang in a true, deep baritone. His piano playing, while enthusiastic, wasn’t really very good.

Jackson came to realize that most men resented the dwarf. They resented his singing, his size, his charm — and most of all, they resented his success with women, which small knots of them would often discuss in prurient whispers at the endless succession of parties. Ploscaru seemed to enjoy the resentment; but then, the dwarf, Jackson had learned, doted on almost any kind of attention.

With the tank now full, Jackson followed the coast highway south toward San Diego. It was still early morning, and the dwarf sang most of the way to Laguna Beach, where they stopped at a hotel for coffee.

After the waitress had poured him a refill, Ploscaru said, “Are you sure you remember the code phrases?”

“I’m sure.”

“What are they?”

“Well, for one thing, they’re silly.”

“In spite of that, what are they?”

“I’m supposed to call her on the house phone and tell her my name and then, like a fool, I say, ‘ Wenn der Schwan singt lu, lu, lu, lu.’ Jesus.”

“And what does she reply?”

“Well, if she can stop giggling, she’s supposed to come back with, ‘Mach ich meine Augen zu, Augen zu, Augen zu.’”

The dwarf had smiled.

After the coffee they continued down the coast, stopped for lunch at La Jolla, and then drove on into San Diego, where Jackson dropped Ploscaru off at the zoo.

“Why don’t you go to a picture instead of hanging around here all afternoon?”

The dwarf shook his head. “There’ll be children here. Children and animals and I get along famously, you know.”

“I didn’t, but I do now. I’m going to try to get back here before midnight. Maybe when you get through with the kids and the animals you can locate us some bourbon. Not gin. Bourbon. I can’t take any more gin.”

“Very well,” the dwarf said, “bourbon.”

A half hour later, Jackson was across the border checkpoint, through Tijuana, and driving south along the narrow, much-patched coastal road into Baja California. There was a lot of scenery and not much else to look at between Tijuana and Ensenada. Occasionally there would be a cluster of fishing shacks, a substantial house or two, and the odd tourist court, but mostly it was blue sea, steep bluffs, fine beaches, and on the left, dry, mulberry-colored mountains.

Jackson made the sixty-five-mile trip in a little less than two hours and pulled up at the entrance of the sprawling, mission-inspired Hotel Riviera del Pacífico, which had been built facing the bay back in the twenties by a gambling syndicate that Jack Dempsey had fronted for.

It was a little after five when Jackson entered the spacious lobby, found the house phones, picked one up, and asked the operator for Suite 232. The call was answered by a woman with a low voice who said only “Hello,” but even from that Jackson could detect the pronounced German accent.

“This is Minor Jackson.”

The woman said nothing. Jackson sighed and recited the prearranged phrase in German about the swan singing lu, lu, lu, lu. Very seriously the woman replied in German that it made her eyes close. Then in English she said, “Please come up, Mr. Jackson.”

Jackson went up the stairs to the second floor, found 232, and knocked. The woman who opened the door was younger than the dwarf had led him to expect. Ploscaru had said that she was a spinster, and to Jackson that meant a maiden lady in her late thirties or forties. But Ploscaru’s English, sifted as it was through several languages, occasionally lost some of its exactness.