A Dog among Diplomats

THE YOUNG MAN AND HIS PARACHUTE A PHOTOGRAPH OPENS OLD WOUNDS It's not every day that a young man clad only in boxer shorts embossed with red hearts dies beneath an opened parachute in a small third-floor room in one of New York's last boardinghouses. It's even rarer that a visual artist, the owner of a Labrador retriever equipped with a generous belly, a fine mind and an admirable temperament, is called to the scene by the police department before the body is even cold. Yet this is exactly what happened just after ten p.m. on a recent mild March night. I was sitting on my haunches in our cozy apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, looking into the middle distance and allowing a mother lode of Chinese spareribs to settle pleasantly in my gullet. I felt a postdinner nap coming on and was not planning to resist (in this hectic world it is often a struggle to get my twelve-hour sleep quota). Harry, my twenty-something owner, was beginning the third hour of a documentary on the life of Vincent van Gogh, narrated, it seemed, by a narcoleptic whose voice rose at all the wrong moments, as if he had just been poked awake again in the sound booth. Then the phone rang. My owner had already taken me for my evening Numbers 1 and 2 (shortchanging himself van Gogh's contentious roommateship with Gauguin at Arles) and was loath to be roused from Grandfather Oswald's La-Z-Boy for anything short of an evacuation of Manhattan for the apocalypse. He let the machine pick up, and Imogen's voice filled our living room. "Leave a message after the beep," she said before trailing off into an uncertain whisper. "Harry, is it a beep?" The mild but decisive voice of the caller came next. "Harry, it's Detective Davis. If you're there, pick up. It's important. It involves . . . her." Harry flew out of his La-Z-Boy recliner and grabbed the phone. My nose could detect the strong waves of hope, excitement and possibility that my owner shed. I wondered if Detective Peter Davis, the lead investigator in Imogen's case, had a breakthrough to report. Our lovely Imogen, who had rescued me from the pet-store clods and then included Harry in our domestic arrangements, had disappeared over a year before without a word or leadfoul play suspected. I had not yet informed Harry, but I had spotted her once again disappearing into a subway tunnel after the successfulif brutalconclusion to our last mystery. That investigation had pushed both Harry and me to great extremes of endurance and ingenuity, and the end found us on the verge of an even larger mystery, which promised to span the globe in a conspiratorial and high-stakes web before it brought some resolution to our loss of Imogen. Detective Davis's phone call was the beginning of what would prove to be Act II. "I'm here," Harry said into the receiver, then listened without a word. He found a pen amid a pile of paintbrushes on the side table and scribbled down an address. "Okay, Peter. I'll be there in twenty minutes." My owner hung up the phone, grabbed a light jacket and disappeared through the door and down the stairs without a word to his dog. The peace was shatteredwhat is peace if it can be broken so easily?and all prospects of an after-dinner nap seemed to vanish in the face of this fresh anxiety. But fortunately I am built to endure, and soon the soporific magic of the spareribs began to affect me and I closed my eyes for a dreamless snooze. Let me now share with you the particular facts that mark my existence. I am a Labrador retriever who lives in Manhattan, the isle of my birth, to which I am deeply attached. I am also sentient. Other dogs might be as well, to a greater or lesser degree, but few take pleasure from reading the important works of your human literature or make expansive journeys of imagination as YoursEnglert, J. F. is the author of 'A Dog among Diplomats' with ISBN 9780440243649 and ISBN 0440243645.