Holding it under his broad and oft-broken nose, he inhaled deeply,
lavishly, as if savoring the incomparable aroma of the bone-shaped
treat.
Raising his head, Orson sniffed, too.
Roosevelt smiled slyly, winked at the dog-and then popped the biscuit
into his mouth. He crunched it with enormous delight, rinsed it down
with a swig of coffee, and let out a sigh of pleasure.
I was impressed. I had never seen him do this before. “What did that
taste like?”
“Not bad. Sort of like shredded wheat. Want one?”
“No, sir. No, thank You,” I said, content to sip my coffee.
Orson’s ears were pricked; Roosevelt now had his undivided attention.
If this towering, gentle-voiced, giant black human truly enjoyed the
biscuits, there might be fewer for any canine who played too hard to
get.
From the windbreaker draped on the back of his chair, Roosevelt
withdrew another biscuit. He held this one under his nose, too, and
inhaled so expansively that he was putting me in danger of oxygen
deprivation. His eyelids drooped sensuously. A shiver of pretended
pleasure swept him, almost swelled into a swoon, and he seemed about to
fall into a biscuit-devouring frenzy.
Orson’s anxiety was palpable. He sprang off the floor, into the chair
across the table from mine, where Roosevelt wanted him, sat on his
hindquarters, and craned his neck forward until his snout was only two
inches from Roosevelt’s nose. Together, they sniffed the endangered
biscuit.
Instead of popping this one into his mouth, Roosevelt carefully placed
it on the table beside the two that were already arranged in front of
Orson’s seat. “Good old pup.”
I wasn’t sure that I believed in Roosevelt Frost’s supposed ability to
communicate with animals, but in my opinion, he was indisputably a
first-rate dog psychologist.
Orson sniffed the biscuits on the table.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Roosevelt warned.
The dog looked up at his host.
“You mustn’t eat them until I say You may,” Roosevelt told him.
The dog licked his chops.
“So help me, pup, if You eat them without my permission,” said
Roosevelt, “there will never, ever, ever again be biscuits for You.”
Orson issued a thin, pleading whine.
“I mean it, dog,” Roosevelt said quietly but firmly. “I can’t make You
talk to me if You don’t want to. But I can insist that You display a
minimum of manners aboard my boat. You can’t just come in here and
wolf down the canapes as if You were some wild beast.”
Orson gazed into Roosevelt’s eyes as though trying to judge his
commitment to this no-wolfing rule.
Roosevelt didn’t blink.
Apparently convinced that this was no empty threat, the dog lowered his
attention to the three biscuits. He gazed at them with such desperate
longing that I thought I ought to try one of the damn things, after
all.
“Good pup,” said Roosevelt.
He picked up a remote-control device from the table and jabbed one of
the buttons on it, although the tip of his finger seemed too large to
press fewer than three buttons at once. Behind Orson, motorized
tambour doors rolled up and out of sight on the top half of a built-in
hutch, revealing two stacks of tightly packed electronic gear gleaming
with light-emitting diodes.
Orson was interested enough to turn his head for a moment before
resuming worship of the forbidden biscuits.
In the hutch, a large video monitor clicked on. The quartered screen
showed murky views of the fog-shrouded marina and the bay on all four
sides of the Nos-tromo.
“What’s this?” I wondered.
“Security.” Roosevelt put down the remote control. “Motion detectors
and infrared sensors will pick up anyone approaching the boat and alert
us at once. Then a telescopic lens automatically isolates and zooms in
on the intruder before he gets here, so we’ll know what we’re dealing
with.”
“What are we dealing with” The man mountain took two slow, dainty sips
of his coffee before he said, “You might already know too much about
that.”
“What do You mean? Who are You?”
“I’m nobody but who I am,” he said. “Just old Rosie Frost. If You’re
thinking that maybe I’m one of the people behind all this, You’re