Write me a Letter

said. ”Baby-sitter, watchdog, bodyguard, stooge...”
    ”Lastly,” she said, ”you, Mr. Daniel, are a licensed investigator and a U.S. citizen, he is an alien here on a temporary work permit, with no official status in the United States .”
    ”Implying he’s got official status somewhere else,” I said. ”I don’t even want to know what it is.”
    She shrugged.
    ”One other little thing you neglected to mention,” I said. ”I can legally possess firearms and carry them in certain situations, unlike Solomon.”
    ”Why, Mr. Daniel,” she said, widening her amazing eyes innocently. ”That never even occurred to me.”
    ”Perish the thought, ” I said. She uncrossed her legs and then got to her feet.
    ”Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. ”Hold on. Where does Uncle Teddy come in?”
    ”He doesn’t,” she said, smoothing down the front of her jacket, which looked smooth enough already to my untrained eyes.
    ”He doesn’t. But Uncle Theo is due in tomorrow afternoon from New York ?”
    She nodded.
    ”Then what do I do with him?”
    ”You take him to the same place as before, to a hotel in a town called Locke, which is somewhere east of Lafayette .”
    ”Right near where Uncle Teddy used to live,” I said. ”That letter from him in Russian, which is in my safe out back, where did it come from if it didn’t come from Uncle Teddy?”
    ”A friend of Shlomo’s,” she said.
    ”Why invent an Uncle Teddy in the first place?” I said. ”To say nothing of poor Mummy.”
    She put her sunglasses on carefully. ”It was decided the less you knew the better, as I said. We didn’t know how you felt about us or where your sympathies might lie.” She came around the desk and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘And there are people who might be frightened of running into one of those ‘old shits,’ even after all this time.”
    ”Maybe sissy types,” I said. She laid one cool palm briefly against my cheek. I looked up at her. ”So I take him to the hotel, then what?”
    ”Then nothing, Mr. Daniel,” she said, moving away. ”You book in for one night. The following morning Theo will be gone.”
    ”He will, eh? Well, well.” I got up and followed her to the door. Before I opened it for her, I said, ‘And the rest of my modest fee plus my even more modest expenses?”
    ”Will be sent to you,” she said. ”Or, who knows, delivered to you personally.”
    ”You personally or Solomon personally?”
    ”We’ll see,” she said. ”We will see.” I opened the door for her.
    ”If it’s not a silly question,” I said, ”why didn’t Solomon personally approach me in the first place and put it to me man to man, so to speak?”
    She turned her fabulous face up to mine, smiled and said, ”He’s not called Solomon for nothing.” And then she was gone.

13

    And so it came to pass that at 3:44 the following afternoon, there I was back at dear old LAX, waiting outside the appropriate exit and holding aloft a large cardboard sign, just one more tour guide awaiting his flock. And it is totally unfair to suggest that I was in that ludicrous position merely because of certain physical attractions Miss Ruth Venus Braukis might have had for me, there are such things as the call of the wild and the lure of the unknown; danger is my business, after all.
    Uncle Theo’s flight was on time; so was Uncle Theo. I recognized him immediately from the photo Ruth had given me of him, so I probably hadn’t needed that silly sign with his name on it after all. He was a small, elderly, worried-looking man in a rumpled brown suit and brown fedora, toting one small, cheap suitcase. He saw my sign at about the same time as I spotted him and raised one hand straight up in the air like he was asking teacher if he could please leave the room.
    We approached each other and shook hands. From under his hat he had curly white wisps of hair sticking out, something like Ben-Gurion.
    ” Zdrastvouiti, Tovarich,” I said as best I could.
    He looked surprised.
    ”Vy gavariti parouski ?” he said, doffing his lid to reveal a heavily tanned and well-creased forehead.
    I figured that meant ”You speak Russian?” so I hastened to tell him, ”Nyet, nyet.” (”Forget it, babe.”) I handed over ”Uncle Teddy’s” letter; he opened it and began reading it eagerly. When he was done, he tucked it away and said something else to me in Russian. I shook my head and gave him one of the two Russian—English phrase books I’d