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I opened the small black case. There were six bright crystal monocles in six neat red velvet cups nested there.
“My luggage,” said Fritz. “All that I saved and took to bring to America when I got the hell out with my ravenous groin and my talent.”
“Which was huge.”
“Stop.” Fritz dutch-rubbed my skull. “Give only insults, bastard child. I show you these—” he nudged the monocles—“to prove all is not lost. All cats, and Roy, land on their feet. What else is in the glove compartment?”
I found a thick mimeographed script.
“Read that without throwing up and you’ll be a man, my son. Kipling. Go. Come back, tomorrow, two-thirty, the commissary. We talk. Then, later, we show you the rough cut of Jesus on the Dole or Father, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me. Ja? ”
I got out of his car in front of my house.
“Sieg Heil,” I said.
“That’s more like it!” Fritz drove away, leaving me to a house so empty and quiet I thought: Crumley.
Soon after sunset, I rode out to Venice on my bike.
23
I hate bikes at night, but I wanted to be sure no one followed.
Besides, I wanted time to think just what I would say to my detective friend. Something like: Help! Save Roy! Get him rehired. Solve the riddle of the Beast.
That made me almost turn back.
I could hear Crumley now, heaving great sighs as I spun my impossible tale, throwing up his hands, slugging back the beer to drown his contempt for my lack of real hammered-out Swedish-steel-spiked facts.
I parked my bike out in front of his small thornbush-hidden safari bungalow a mile from the ocean and walked up through a grove of African lilacs, along a path dusted, you felt, by okapi beasts just yesterday.
As I raised my hand to knock, the door blew open.
A fist came out of the darkness with a foaming beer can in it. I could not see the man who held it. I snatched it away. The hand vanished. I heard footsteps fade through the house.
I took three sips to get strength to enter.
The house was empty.
The garden was not.
Elmo Crumley sat under a thornbush tree, wearing his banana trader’s hat, eying the beer that he held in his sunburnt hand, and drinking silently.
There was an extension telephone on a rattan table at his elbow. Looking steadily, wearily at me from under his white hunter’s topee, Crumley dialed a number.
Someone answered. Crumley said: “One more migraine. Putting in for sick leave. See you in three days, okay? Okay.” And hung up.
“I guess,” I said, “that headache is me.”
“Any time you show up … seventy-two hours’ leave.”
He nodded. I sat. He went to stand at the rim of his own private jungle, where the elephants trumpeted and unseen flights of giant bumblebees, hummingbirds, and flamingos died long before any future ecologists declared them dead.
“Where,” said Crumley, “the hell have you been?”
“Married,” I said.
Crumley thought it over, snorted, strolled over, put his arm around my shoulder, and kissed me on the top of my head.
