“Only Dali truly sees,” she said.
“What are we talking about?” I asked.
“You did not answer Dali’s letter.”
Then it hit me. A few weeks ago when I was lying on the mattress in broken-legged pain, Mrs. Plaut had handed me a pink envelope with an eye painted on it. She told me that the letter had been delivered by a woman in a funny hat.
“You’re the woman in the funny hat,” I said.
“I am Gala, the wife of Dali, formerly Gala Eluard, born Elena Deluvina Diakonoff.”
I considered asking her what the next race she was running in was, now that I knew her lineage, but I sometimes remember what side my bread is margarined on.
“What can I do for you?” I asked amiably, smelling insanity or a client or both. I have taken money from both the guilty and the insane. With the price of milk going up and margarine as hard to get as gas coupons, a man in my business took what he could get. Shoplifter patrol at the neighborhood Ralph’s Grocery was the only work I’d done for the past two weeks.
“You read Dali’s letter?”
I had read it. I still had it in the second drawer of my dresser. It said:
“I called the number in the letter,” I said. “It was a Greek bakery.”
“Impossible,” she said. “Dali does not like Greek pastry. The dough is like gritty paper covered in honey.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said, “but it was a Greek bakery.”
“There are no Greek bakeries in Carmel,” Gala Dali said triumphantly.
“Well, you got me there. Yes, ma’am. But I called a Los Angeles number.”
“We are in Carmel,” she said.
“The letter didn’t say that.”
“Everyone knows Dali is in Carmel,” she admonished.
Although I was living proof that this was not so, I had no desire to prolong the discussion or provoke a possible client. I said nothing and after about five seconds she seemed to accept that as an apology.
“Are you available?” she said. “We must-”
Someone interrupted her in a foreign language and she answered. They went back and forth for a few seconds while I waited, wondering if I could still catch the Abbott and Costello movie or give up and listen to the Philco special, “Our Secret Weapon.” Rex Stout was going to expose Axis lies. Dash and I could curl up with some bran flakes and give our moral support to the Allies.
Gala came back on the line.
“Dali wants to know if you have blue eyes.”
“Brown,” I said.
More discussion in a foreign language.
“That is acceptable. Are you a Surrealist?”
“I’m a private detective,” I said patiently.
Then a man’s voice came on the phone, excited, so accented that I could barely understand what was being said.
“I do not deal with Breton and his Surrealists. Do you know why?”
“They don’t shower regularly.”
“No, I do not know if they shower regularly. The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a surrealist.”
“I’ll remember that.”
The woman was back on the line now.
“Dali is upset.”
“I could tell. I’m a detective.”
“We must see you. We have lost weeks.”
“Why me?”
“Poldi,” she said.
“Poldi?”
“Stokowski, Leopold Stokowski,” she explained impatiently. “You worked for him. He told us you could help. Someone has stolen three of Dali’s paintings and three clocks, clocks my mother gave to me, the only things I have from Russia, from Dr. Lazovert in St. Petersburg when we-”
“I’m sure you considered this, but how about the police?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” she said and Dali took the phone from her to add, “No, no, no, no, no.”
And then she was back.
“There are things … there is something in one of the paintings that must never be seen by the public. The paintings were taken from our house. They were not meant to be seen. The shock would … it would be …”
She couldn’t imagine what it would be and neither could I. I didn’t know much about Dali. I knew he was Spanish, read that he was a bit nuts or putting on a show that he was nuts to sell his paintings. This was the Salvador Dali who painted men with shit on their pants, painted old men with erections that looked like melting pianos, and designed hats with figures of dead babies on them. This was the guy who said his plan was to shock the world every twenty-four hours. What the hell could he have painted that he thought the world couldn’t handle?
“… shocking,” I said.
“Shocking, yes. We have had a message from the thief,” she said. “I must read it to you.”
“Let’s talk business first,” I said.
“They have not indicated what they want,” she replied.
“No, let’s talk about my business. Twenty dollars a day, plus expenses, plus one original painting by Dali if I get any of the paintings back.”
“The money is nothing,” she said, “but you are asking for a Dali painting, a piece of his soul.”
“A small piece will be okay. And he turns them out fast,” I said.
She passed the terms on to Dali and came back on the line to say, “Yes.”
“One hundred dollars in advance when I get to Carmel,” I prompted.
“We are not in Carmel now,” she said. “The thief said he was in Los Angeles. We came in a limousine. We are in the Beverly Hills, the home of a friend. You must come now.”
She gave me an address on Lomitas; I told her I’d change and be there in about an hour.
“One hundred dollars when I get there,” I reminded her.
“Yes, yes,” she agreed and hung up.
I went back to my room, wrote the address in my battered spiral notebook, and got dressed, pleased with myself that I’d added the painting into my fee. I’d never seen one of Dali’s paintings. Didn’t think I’d like them from the descriptions I’d read, but it would be something Jeremy Butler might want. Jeremy was the landlord at the Farraday Building, where I had an office inside the office of Sheldon Minck, D.D.S. Jeremy, large, bald, somewhere in his sixties, had made a few dollars as a pro wrestler and invested the dollars in a downtown office building on Hoover, as well as various other properties around town. His specialty was taking buildings on the way down and using his muscle and will power to embarrass them and make them respectable and profitable. I had the feeling he hadn’t been particularly successful. But Jeremy was a poet, a poet who had recently married and fathered a remarkably beautiful round baby named Natasha. The Dali would be a gift for Natasha, if I got the paintings back.
I put on the best of what I had left in the closet. I didn’t have a clean suit or a sports jacket. I didn’t really have dirty ones either. A suitable addition to my wardrobe was high on the list of purchases planned for Dali’s
