The Eighth Dwarf (2 page)

Later, Jackson wrote his father a postcard. Two weeks went by before a letter arrived from his father congratulating Jackson on having survived the war (which seemed to have surprised his father, although not unpleasantly) and urging him to get out of the Army and settle down to something “productive and sensible.” Sensible had been underlined. A few days later he received a telegram from his mother in Newport, Rhode Island, welcoming him home and hoping that they could get together sometime soon because she had “oodles” to tell him. Jackson translated oodles into meaning a new husband (her fourth) and didn't bother to answer.

Instead, when the Army asked where his hometown was so that he could be transferred to a hospital nearby to recuperate from his jaundice, Jackson had lied and said San Francisco. When he arrived at the Army's Letterman General there, Jackson weighed one hundred twelve pounds, which the doctors felt was a bit light for his six-foot-two frame. It took them more than six months to fatten him up and get his icterus index back down to normal, but when they did, Jackson was discharged on February 19, 1946, from both the Army and the hospital as well as from the OSS—which, anyway, had gone out of business on September 20, 1945.

Jackson's accumulated back pay, separation allowances, and not inconsiderable poker winnings amounted to nearly $4,000. He promptly spent $1,750 of it to purchase an overpriced but snappy 1941 yellow Plymouth convertible. He also managed to find and buy six white shirts (still scarce in early 1946), a rather good tweed jacket, some slacks, and a gray worsted suit.

Thus mounted and attired, Jackson had lingered on in San Francisco for nearly six months, largely because of the charms of a redheaded Army nurse. But then the nurse, convinced that Jackson was no marriage prospect, had accepted a posting to an Army hospital in Rome. So Jackson, his plans still purposely vague, had driven south in early September, heading for Los Angeles, the first stop on his roundabout return to Europe.

Three principal reasons took Jackson to Los Angeles. The first was that he had never been there. The second was a woman who lived in Pacific Palisades and who had once gone to bed with him in Washington years before and who might again, provided she remembered him. The third reason was that during the war Jackson had made friends with a more or less famous actor who had also served in the OSS. For a while Jackson and the actor, who also was something of a sailor, had run guns and supplies across the Adriatic from Bari in Italy to Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia. The actor had made Jackson swear to look him up should Jackson ever be in Los Angeles or, more precisely, in Beverly Hills.

As it turned out, the woman Jackson had known in Washington had just got married and didn't think it would be too smart if they started seeing each other again—at least, not yet. “Give me a couple of months,” she had said.

The actor, however, had seemed delighted when Jackson called. He even urged Jackson to stay with him, but when Jackson politely demurred, the actor gave him some halfway-useful advice about where to find a room or apartment in the midst of the housing shortage that still gripped Los Angeles. He then insisted that Jackson come to a cocktail party that same evening. It was at the actor's party, by the pool, that Jackson met the dwarf.

A quartet of drunks—two writers, a director, and an agent—had just thrown the dwarf into the pool and were making bets about how long it would take him to drown. The writers were giving odds that it would take at least fifteen minutes. The dwarf had never learned to swim, and it was only the violent splashing of his immensely powerful arms that kept him afloat. Jackson might not have interfered had not the two writers tried to sweeten the odds by stamping on the dwarf's hands whenever he managed to gasp and splash his way to the edge of the pool.

Jackson went up to one of the writers and tapped him on the shoulder. “I think you ought to let him out,” Jackson said.

The writer turned. “Who're you?”

“Nobody.”

“Go away, nobody,” the writer said; he placed a large, curiously hairless hand against Jackson's chest, and shoved him backward.

The writer was a big man, almost huge, and it was a hard shove. Jackson stumbled back for a step or two. Then he sighed, shifted his drink to his right hand, went in fast, and slammed a left fist into the writer's stomach. The writer doubled over, gagging, and Jackson, amazed at his own temerity but enjoying it, gave the writer a slight push which toppled him over into the pool.

The other three drunks skirted nervously around Jackson and hurried to their friend's aid, although before fishing him out, the director and the agent tried to get bets down on how long it would take the writer to drown.

Jackson knelt by the edge of the pool, grasped the dwarf's thick wrist, and hauled him up onto the cement. Ploscaru sat wet and gasping, his stubby, bowed legs stuck out in front of him, his big head down on his chest as he leaned back on his powerful arms and hands. Finally, he looked up at Jackson, who, for the first time, saw the almost hot glitter in the dwarf's green eyes.

“Who're you?” Ploscaru said.

“As I told the man, nobody.”

“You have a name.”

“Jackson. Minor Jackson.”

“Thank you, Minor Jackson,” the dwarf said gravely. “I am in your debt.”

“Not really.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

“You are rich, then?”

“No.”

“But you would like to be?”

“Maybe.”

“You were in the war, of course.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do—in the war?”

“I was sort of a spy.”

Still staring up at Jackson, the dwarf nodded slowly several times. “I can make you rich.”

“Sure.”

“You don't believe me.”

“I didn't say that.”

The dwarf rose and thoughtfully dusted off his still-damp palms. It was a gesture that he often used whenever he was trying to decide about something. It was also a gesture that Jackson would come to know well.

“Drowning is thirsty business,” Ploscaru said. “Let's go get some drink and talk about making you rich.”

“Why not?” Jackson said.

They didn't have their drink at the actor's. Instead, they left without saying goodbye to their host, got into Jackson's Plymouth, and drove to the dwarf's place.

On the way, Jackson learned for a fact that the dwarf's name was Nicolae Ploscaru. He also learned, although these facts were totally uncheckable, that Ploscaru was the youngest son of a minor Romanian nobleman (possibly a count); that there were vast but, of course, long-lost estates in both Bessarabia and Transylvania; that until the war, Bucharest had boasted the most beautiful women in Europe, most of whom the dwarf had slept with; and finally, that before escaping to Turkey, the dwarf, when not spying for the British, had slain four, or possibly five, SS officers with his own hands.

“I strangled them with these,” the dwarf said holding up the twin instruments of death for possible inspection. “The last one, a colonel—rather a nice chap, actually—I finished off in a Turkish bath not too far from the Palace Athénée. You know the Palace Athénée, of course.”

“No.”

“It's a hotel; quite a fine one. When you get to Bucharest, you should make it a point to stay there.”

“Okay,” Jackson said, “I will.”

“And be sure to mention my name.”

“Yes,” said Jackson, not quite smiling, “I'll do that too.”

The dwarf's place was a house with a view high up in the Hollywood hills. It was built of redwood and glass and stone, and it obviously didn't belong to the dwarf. For one thing, the furnishings were too feminine, and for another, nearly everything that could take it had a large, elaborate intertwined double W either engraved or woven or branded into its surface.

Jackson stood in the living room and looked around. “Nice place,” he said. “Who's WW?”

“Winona Wilson,” the dwarf said, trying very hard to keep his w's from sounding like v's and almost succeeding. “She's a friend of mine.”

“And what does Winona do?”

“Mostly, she tries to get money from her rich mother up in Santa Barbara.”

“I wish her luck.”

“I want to get some dry clothes on,” the dwarf said. “Can you make a martini?”

“Sure.”

Ploscaru gestured toward a long barlike affair that separated the living room from the kitchen. “It's all over there,” he said, turned, and was gone.

By the time the dwarf came back, the drinks were mixed and Jackson was sitting on one of the high stools at the bar looking down across the slightly sunken living room and through the glass to the faraway lights of Hollywood and Los Angeles which were just beginning to come on in the early-September evening.

Ploscaru was wearing a long (long on him, anyway) green silk dressing gown that obviously had been tailored. Peeping out from underneath the skirt of the dressing gown were a pair of red Turkish slippers whose toes turned up and back and ended in small silver bells that jingled not unpleasantly when he moved.

Jackson handed the dwarf his drink and said, “What do you do, friend—I mean, really?”

Ploscaru smiled, revealing large white teeth that seemed almost square. He then took the first swallow of his martini, shuddered as he nearly always did, and lit one of his Old Golds. “I live off women,” he said.

“Sounds pleasant.”

The dwarf shrugged. “Not altogether. But some women find me attractive—despite everything.” He made a curiously sad gesture that was almost an apology for his three-foot-seven-inch height. It was to be one of only two times that Jackson would ever hear the dwarf make any reference to it

Ploscaru glanced about for some place to sit and decided on the long cream-colored couch with its many bright pillows, all with WW woven into them. He settled back into it like a child, with much wriggling. Then he began his questions.

He wanted to know how long Jackson had been in Los Angeles. Two days. Where had he been before that? In San Francisco. When had he got out of the service? In February. What had he done since then? Very little. Where had he gone to school? The University of Virginia. What had he studied? Liberal Arts. Was that a subject? Not really. What had Jackson done before the war?

For a time Jackson was silent. “I'm trying to remember,” he said finally. “I got out of school in '36. Then I went to Europe for a year, bumming around. After that I was with an advertising agency in New York, but that only lasted six months. Then I went to work for a yacht dealer on commission, but I didn't sell any, so that didn't last either. After that I wrote a very bad play, which nobody would produce, and then—well, then there was one winter that I skied, and a summer that I sailed, and a fall that I played polo. And finally, in '40, I went into the Army. I was twenty-six.”

“Have you ever been poor?” Ploscaru said.

“I've been broke.”

“There's a difference.”

“Yes,” Jackson said. “There is.”

“Your family is wealthy.” It wasn't a question.

“My old man is still trying to get that way, which is probably why he married my mother, who always was rich and probably always will be as long as she keeps marrying rich husbands. The rich tend to do that, don't they?—marry each other.”

“To preserve the species,” Ploscaru said with a shrug as though the answer were as obvious as preordination. He then frowned, which made his thick black hair move down toward his eyes. “Most Americans don't, but do you speak any languages?”

“French and German and enough Italian to get by.”

“Where did you learn your languages?”

“At a school in Switzerland. When I was thirteen my parents got divorced and I turned rotten. They packed me off to this school for three years, which was really more like a boys' prison. Rich boys, of course. You either learned or else.”

Ploscaru examined his cigarette and then crushed it out in a soapstone ashtray. “So now you would like to make money?”

“It would be a change.”

“When a war ends,” the dwarf said slowly, “there are a number of ways for the enterprising to make money. The most obvious, of course, is to deal in scarce goods—the black market. Another is to provide certain services for the rich who managed to remain rich even though they themselves were, in effect, casualties of the war. This I propose to do. Does it interest you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“No, I really didn't expect you to.”

“But it's a way to make money?”

“Yes.”

“Is it legal?”

“Almost.”

“Then I'm interested,” Jackson said.

3

There was a gas war going on in Long Beach, and Jackson pulled the Plymouth into a station with a big sign out front that boasted of gasoline for 21.9 cents a gallon. Catty-corner across the street, the man at the Texaco station, a grim look on his face, was taking down his own sign and putting up a new one that would match his competitor's price.

The top was lowered on the convertible, and music was coming from its radio. The music was Jimmy Dorsey's version of “Green Eyes,” and the dwarf sang along while the attendant filled up the tank. The dwarf liked to sing.

That was one of the several things Jackson had learned about Ploscaru since their meeting at the actor's pool three weeks before. A week after that, Jackson had accepted the dwarf's invitation to move in and share the house in the Hollywood hills that belonged to Winona Wilson—who, it seemed, would be staying on in Santa Barbara indefinitely as she struggled to get money out of her rich mother.

It was during those same three weeks that Ploscaru had carried on his often mysterious negotiations with the people in Mexico—negotiations that Jackson would be concluding later that day in Ensenada. And it was also during those same three weeks that Jackson had discovered that the dwarf knew an incredible number of people—incredible, at least, in Jackson's estimation. Most of them, it turned out, were women who ran the dwarf's errands, chauffeured him around, and took him—and Jackson—to parties. At the parties Ploscaru would often sing and play the piano, if there was one. Sometimes the songs would be sad Romanian ones, and if the dwarf had had enough to drink, he would sing with tears streaming down his face. Then the women would cuddle and try to console him, and while all that was going on the dwarf would sometimes wink at Jackson.