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floor.
    “Gala gave me the money,” he said, pulling out a handful of bills and handing them to me. He put his hand back in his pocket and came out with more. I stopped at the door and counted while he played with his mustache and looked at a blank wall. He was two bucks short but what the hell.
    “You’ll hear from me,” I said.
    “You must find those paintings,” Dali whispered. “I’ve painted what I see within me, without censorship. The world knows that Dali fears no offense, but this painting … it will end the career of Salvador Dali. Find them all, but find that one and Dali owes you his art.”
    He took my hand in both of his after pocketing the piece of wood he had been playing with.
    “I’ll settle for twenty a day, expenses, and that painting,” I said, opening the door. “One more thing.”
    “One more thing,” Dali repeated.
    “When we started talking, you said you had three things to tell me. You only told me two of them.”
    Dali smiled as I stepped outside.
    “The third thing is that no one knows who I really am. On Tuesday there is a party in Carmel. On Tuesday, I will be both a rabbit and Sherlock Holmes.”
    With that, he closed the door.
    Zeman was working under the hood of the Hup. He stopped and moved over to my car as I crawled over the passenger side to the driver’s seat. There was no way to do it gracefully. I rolled down the window to hear what he had to say.
    “How’d it go?” he asked.
    “Not much to go on,” I said.
    “How’d you like them?” He nodded toward his own front door as if they might come out for a curtain call. I shrugged.
    “I can see where they might be a little tough to come home to every night.”
    “Make it a thousand-dollar bonus if you find them in three days, Peters,” he said as I turned the key and prayed for the Crosley to start. It didn’t. I was left filled with incentive and no idea of what the hell to do to find the missing paintings.
    “What about the clocks?” I asked.
    “Good pieces,” he said. “Might be worth a few thousand each. More if they work.”
    “They don’t work?”
    “No one has ever wound them,” he said. “Gala says they were gifts to the Russian royal family, but the tsar never got to use them. Revolution came before they could be wound … or something. She and her family got them out and haven’t allowed anyone to wind them.”
    “Why would anyone take clocks and paintings and then write crazy messages?” I asked.
    “I’m an investor, not a detective,” Zeman said with a shrug as he moved away from the door. “Ask me about Dusenbergs or Brazilian bonds.”
    I started the engine, heard it ping to life. I put it in gear as the front door to Zeman’s house opened and Gala Dali stepped out holding a glass of bubbling dark liquid. My Pepsi. I put the car into gear and headed for what passed for sanity in Los Angeles.
    It was about seven when I hit Main Street looking for a place to buy a Pepsi and get a sandwich. Not much was open on New Year’s Day, not even Manny’s taco stand on Hoover. Usually I left the car at No-Neck Arnie’s, but everything was closed and there were plenty of parking spaces, including one right in front of the Farraday.
    The streets weren’t deserted. They hadn’t been deserted in downtown Los Angeles since the war had started. Nightfall and the blackout did put a damper on the town but didn’t close it down—it just went undercover. The outer door to the Farraday was open but the one inside was locked. Jeremy Butler had started locking it when even he was forced to acknowledge that he was losing the battle against bums looking for a corner of cool tile. It wasn’t actually a battle; Jeremy never complained about the bums. He never complained about anything. He went about his business, Lysol in great hairy hand and a poem forming in the mind under the bullet-smooth cranium.
    I listened to my footsteps echo across the inner lobby. There were a few lights on, enough to find