A Few Minutes Past Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

least, I thought so.
    “I have,” he said moving to his closet. “She is giving serious consideration to accepting a position with the Boston Symphony.”
    “Is that good news or bad news?”
    “For her, good. For me, bad,” he said. “I have been giving serious consideration to moving to Boston.”
    He looked through his neat row of suits hanging on the low bar in his closet. I didn’t want Gunther to move, but I wanted him to be happy.
    “I do not think, however, that I will move to Boston,” he said, selecting a suit that didn’t look particularly different from the one he was wearing. “I will give the situation much thought. Now, if you will excuse me.”
    He held the hanger with his clean suit in his hand. I nodded, left, and went to my room next door.
    Dash, the cat who sometimes hung out with me, had come in through the window I always left open for him. He was blinking up at me from the flowery ancient sofa against the wall, his paws in front of him on the purple pillow on which Mrs. Plaut had stitched, “God Bless Us, Every One.” There had been a bed in the room, but I had persuaded Mrs. Plaut to let me store it in her vast garage at the back of the house. The garage smelled of long-ago livestock and so did everything stored in it, but I never planned to use the bed again.
    I have a bad back. Actually, it is an evil back that chooses to rebel when I most need it. I could live with the other injuries I had gathered in almost half a century, but I was a slave to my back. I kept a thin, hard mattress rolled up behind the sofa. At night I spread the mattress on the floor and slept on my back. Sometimes Dash joined me.
    If Dash didn’t wake me in the morning, I could always count on Mrs. Plaut at the stroke of eight. There are no locks in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse. She doesn’t believe in privacy. There wasn’t even an inside lock on the bathroom at the end of the hall. You were expected to listen for signs of humanity—running water, singing, gargling, toilet flushing—and then you were supposed to knock and enter after a decent pause.
    There was a small table near the window to my right. The two wooden chairs at the table matched, sort of. There was also a small refrigerator, toward which I moved in search of something for Dash.
    I glanced back at my Beech-Nut wall clock. I had almost four minutes.
    There was a leftover burger. I took it out, put it on a plate, and set it on the floor. Dash looked at me from the sofa, then looked at the burger, and turned to stare at something that didn’t exist in the corner.
    There was no stove in the room. There wasn’t enough room even had Mrs. Plaut allowed one, which she didn’t. I could have had a hot plate, but I never remembered to pick one up. I took off my jacket, felt my face to see if I needed a shave. I probably did, but I didn’t feel up to it.
    I thought of Ann and Preston Stewart. As I said, he seemed like a decent guy for an actor though I heard he had a small drinking problem. That meant nothing much. It went with the job.
    Gunther knocked at my door. The knock animated Dash who ambled over to the burger I had put out for him, smelled it, and leapt out of the window in search of his own dinner.
    Emma Simcox and Ben Bidwell were already at the table when we said hello and sat down to wait for Mrs. Plaut’s arrival. Two pitchers of ice water sat in the center of the table on a white doily.
    “He’s off again,” said Bidwell.
    “Who?” I asked.
    “F.D.R., war conferences. Twenty thousand miles. You know the total miles traveled since he came aboard as skipper in 1933?”
    None of us answered.
    “More than 233,400 miles,” Bidwell supplied. “And they say the man is sick. Ba-loney.”
    “No,” said Mrs. Plaut, entering with a heavy platter. “Cabbage leaves stuffed with meat-and-vegetable hash.”
    She placed the platter of fat, rolled-up cabbage leaves in the center of the table and tucked her pink pot holders under her