Write me a Letter

how long it takes to get to that airport by bus?”
    ”Also in the mail,” I said.
    ”Sure, sure,” she said. ”Now if there’s nothing else, so long.”
    ”Wait a minute, grumpy,” I said. ”There is something else. If I don’t call you by, say, ten o’clock tomorrow morning, give me a call up here in the sticks, or chopsticks is more like it.” I read her off the phone number from the dial.
    ”Why?”
    ”Oh, I dunno,” I said vaguely. ”Just in case. Who knows what dangers lurk in the back room of Charlie Chan’s tattoo parlor.”
    ”OK,” she muttered. She hung up, or slammed down is more like it. Ah, young love, I thought. I remember it well.
    ”Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” I said to the empty line.
    I went back to the man at the front desk for another handful of silver. He was scribbling away in an exercise book.
    ”Studying?” I asked him.
    ”Studying.”
    ”What, may I ask, just to pass the time?”
    ”For a belated Ph.D. in Paleontology.”
    ”Oh,” I said. ”I never was much good with languages myself.” He unlocked the cash drawer and converted a five-dollar bill into change for me.
    ”I thought you might be taking a course in hotel management or something like that.”
    ”I’m just helping out Pop,” he said. ”He owns this mausoleum. I keep telling him it would be cheaper to close it up, but not my pop. He’s kept the old registers that go back to when his father bought it in 1917, he remembers when it was full, all four floors. I’ve closed up two of them already and I’m shutting down another someday when he’s out fishing.”
    ”Ah well,” I said. ”Tempis does fugit.”
    ”Not for my pop,” he said, returning to his studies. I returned to the phone and called up Precious. Precious was out. I could leave a message after the pip. I left a rude noise after the pip and went to rejoin Theo on the battered old sofa in front of the TV I couldn’t swear to it, but I suspected Theo had already developed a crush on Victoria Principal. Hell, join the club.
    So we sat through the ” Dallas ” rerun, then watched Columbo get his man again, only this time it was a woman, then we switched the TV off and went upstairs to our rooms. Uncle Theo started leafing through his phrase book outside his door to find some suitable words of parting. I sighed, and said ”Come on, Uncle, give over, you probably speak English as well as I do. Maybe even better.”
    He looked up at me for a long moment.
    ”When did you find out?” he said finally in accented but otherwise correct American.
    ”Shit, I’ve known it for years,” I said.

15

    Now that we had a language in common, wouldn’t you know Uncle Theo clammed up; we communicated more with those useless phrase books. And what he did tell me was more likely another pack of fibs, misrepresentations, and evasions, to say naught of the complete and utter falsehoods.
    It was a few minutes later. We were sitting on the bed in my room and I was trying to get a few answers out of the polylingual ex-Estonian, if he was even that. I’d answered his questions frankly, openly, and with almost complete candor. I told him that what gave him away wasn’t so much what he did but what he hadn’t done, aside from the basic fact that whatever Miss Ruth Aphrodite Braukis told me I had learnt the hard way to disbelieve. Therefore, as she told me that Uncle Theo could only speak Estonian and Russian, I immediately assumed he was not only fluent in every major tongue but most of the minor dialects as well. Why the pretense in the first place, Uncle Theo refused to say.
    ”I don’t speak languages, like some I could name,” I said with an admirable lack of jealousy, ”so I know what it’s like. But I can always pick up a word here and there if I try, lots of words are the same or almost the same in Spanish or French or Canadian even; you couldn’t pick up one word, not even easy ones like San Francisco , over the loudspeaker. Hell, even I know a few words of Russian, I go to the movies, I read a lot of spy books; who hasn’t picked up a few words of English? You protestedeth too much, Tovarich. Also, it’s hard, what you were trying to do, like pretending to be deaf, or blind. Next time leave it to us experts.”
    ”There won’t be a next time, I hope,” he said, looking slightly crestfallen.
    ”Me too,” I said. ”But if there is, may I suggest once in a while try to go through a door that is marked ‘Do Not