Melting Clock Read Free Page B

and bring it down to me.”
    “Who …?” I began, but she was gone.
    I put on my blue robe and went out to the phone on the landing. “Hello,” I said.
    “Dali is distraught,” came a high-pitched woman’s voice with a distinct accent that might have been Russian.
    “Sorry to hear that,” I said.
    “When Dali is distraught, he cannot work,” she went on. “He can think only brown. Brown is not a good color for Dali to think in.”
    “I see,” I said. Downstairs, Mrs. Plaut carried a bowl of apples out onto the front porch.
    “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 cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why champagne is always chilled, and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and so disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them. Please try to locate a telephone which does not offend you and call me at the number below. I am in need of your services.
    “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