Lugosi listened with a patient smile to the war gossip and the background jukebox playing Tommy Dorsey’s version of “This Love of Mine.”

I thought my client was far away from thoughts of bloody messages, but he looked into the last drops of amber scotch at the bottom of his beer mug and said softly,

“But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,

Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And such the blood of all thy race…”

His words trailed off and then came back as the record stopped. Lugosi’s voice rose slightly and the half-dozen guys in the bar and the barkeeper went silent. “Thy gnashing tooth, and haggard lip;

Then stalking to thy sullen grave

Go-and with Ghouls and Afrits rave,

Till these in horror shrink away

From spectre more accursed than they.”

That pretty well killed the party. I got Lugosi home without any further conversation, promised to follow up on the Dark Knights, and left him in front of his door. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for another day’s pay in advance.

CHAPTER TWO

Gunther Wherthman was a little over three feet tall, a genuine midget. At eight in the morning on January 3, 1942 he sat across from me slowly eating a poached egg. I could tell the time not from my watch, which was always an hour or two off, but from the Beech-Nut gum clock on my wall. I had received the clock in payment for returning a runaway grandmother to a guy who owned a pawn shop on Main Street. The job took ten minutes. Grandma was hiding in her closet.

Gunther wore a dark blue suit with not a wrinkle showing and a dark blue tie with some discreet light blue stripes running at a slight angle. He smelled of toilet water and looked ready to go to work, which he was. Work, however, was in the boardinghouse room he lived in next to mine. There was little chance that Gunther, who made a modest living as a translator of German, French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, and Basque, would meet anyone during the day except for me and our landlady, who would neither care nor notice what he wore.