Melting Clock Read Online Free PDF Page A

sculpture. You’ll see it inside. Know what it’ll be worth in twenty years?”
    “As much as a Hupmobile,” I guessed.
    “Much more,” he said with a grin. “I’ve got an investment in the man, an investment for me, my kids, my grandchildren. I’ll be nice to him. That’s business, but I tell you, Toby, between the two of them, they drive me and the wife crazy nuts. Wife’s taken off for Palm Springs till they go. I’m a prisoner of my investments.”
    “I’ll do my best to wrap this up in two days,” I said, “but …”
    He pulled a business card from the pocket in the bib of his overalls and handed it to me. It had a little thumb print on it and an address and phone number on Sunset Boulevard. Mr. Zeman’s line of business was printed under his name: Investments. I unzipped my wind-breaker pocket, tucked the card away, and zipped up again as Zeman opened the door and let me in.
    The living room into which we walked was bright and big, white walls to a skylight in the ceiling. The furniture was all modern, whites and blacks with hardwood floors and colorful patterned rugs.
    “Decorated by Dali himself to show off the paintings,” said Zeman, folding his hands behind him as I looked around at the walls and the seven pictures hung there. They were all different sizes. The smallest was a black-and-white study of an egg on a seashore. Something had pecked through the egg and was trying to get out, something with a beak and a human arm. The painting was about the size of the cover of an atlas.
    There were bigger ones, some of them filled with little objects, all of them colorful. Seashores or deserts with long pianos on the beach and old men with huge behinds hovering over girls. Seashells and limp things that shouldn’t be limp, books, shells, pianos, radios, watches. They looked like they were melting from the heat. A grasshopper sat on the shoulder of a woman who was kissing a tall man. From the angle you couldn’t be sure whether he was, in fact, kissing her or the grasshopper.
    “Response?” asked Zeman, beside me.
    “I don’t know. Strong. Hard to look away from. Sad, maybe.”
    “Dali’s paintings are not sad,” came a woman’s accented voice, the voice I had heard an hour earlier on the phone. “Dali’s paintings are a celebration of the inner voice. He doesn’t not paint what other people see. He paints what no one sees.”
    “I’ll go with that,” I said, looking at her.
    She was small and clearly the boss wherever she went. She moved past Zeman into the middle of the room and looked around at the paintings.
    “That,” she said, pointing at the largest one above a white sofa, “is me.”
    She was right. It was Gala Dali painted like an angel with wings, floating in the air about as high as a basketball net while below a quartet of men, one with a cockeyed grin, looked up under her dress. She was dressed in black—the real Gala, not the one in the painting. I figured her for thirty-five, her face pale and not quite pretty but clear, her dark hair brushed back. She was a woman who took the world seriously, which was probably quite a problem, since not many people in the world were prepared to take her husband seriously.
    “Dali will be down in a minute,” she said. “He just awakened from his dreams and is dressing. Please sit.”
    I sat in a wooden chair painted black.
    “I’ll be out working on the Hup if you need me,” Zeman said to both Gala and me. Though it was his house, the information didn’t seem to be of much interest to her. She looked at me with dark, dark eyes, trying to see something that would tell if I was worthy of an audience with the great man.
    Zeman went back outside and Gala was alone with me, her hands clasped together in front of her like a concerned Mexican chaperone.
    “The clocks,” she said. “I want the clocks returned, but Dali’s paintings are more important.”
    “What do they look like? The clocks and the paintings?”
    “Only Dali can