Then: "You recall a certain Mr. IY Yunioshi? A gentleman from Japan."
"From California," I said, recalling Mr. Yunioshi perfectly. Hes a photographer onone of the picture magazines, and when I knew him he lived in the studio apartmenton the top floor of the brownstone.
"Dont go mixing me up. All Im asking, you know who I mean? Okay. So lastnight who comes waltzing in here but this selfsame Mr. IY Yunioshi. I havent seenhim, I guess its over two years. And where do you think hes been those two years?"
"Africa."
Joe Bell stopped crunching on his Tums, his eyes narrowed. "So how did youknow?"
"Read it in Winchell." Which I had, as a matter of fact.
He rang open his cash register, and produced a manila envelope. "Well, see didyou read this in Winchell."
In the envelope were three photographs, more or less the same, though takenfrom different angles: a tall delicate Negro man wearing a calico skirt and with a shy,yet vain smile, displaying in his hands an odd wood sculpture, an elongated carvingof a head, a girls, her hair sleek and short as a young mans, her smooth wood eyestoo large and tilted in the tapering face, her mouth wide, overdrawn, not unlikeclown-lips. On a glance it resembled most primitive carving; and then it didnt, forhere was the spit-image of Holly Golightly, at least as much of a likeness as a darkstill thing could be.
"Now what do you make of that?" said Joe Bell, satisfied with my puzzlement.
"It looks like her."
"Listen, boy," and he slapped his hand on the bar, "it is her. Sure as Im a man fitto wear britches. The little Jap knew it was her the minute he saw her."
"He saw her? In Africa?"
"Well. Just the statue there. But it comes to the same thing. Read the facts foryourself," he said, turning over one of the photographs. On the reverse was written:Wood Carving, S Tribe, Tococul, East Anglia, Christmas Day, 1956.
He said, "Heres what the Jap says," and the story was this: On Christmas day Mr.
Yunioshi had passed with his camera through Tococul, a village in the tangles ofnowhere and of no interest, merely a congregation of mud huts with monkeys in theyards and buzzards on the roofs. Hed decided to move on when he saw suddenly aNegro squatting in a doorway carving monkeys on a walking stick. Mr. Yunioshi wasimpressed and asked to see more of his work. Whereupon he was shown the carvingof the girls head: and felt, so he told Joe Bell, as if he were falling in a dream. Butwhen he offered to buy it the Negro cupped his private parts in his hand (apparentlya tender gesture, comparable to tapping ones heart) and said no. A pound of saltand ten dollars, a wristwatch and two pounds of salt and twenty dollars, nothingswayed him. Mr. Yunioshi was in all events determined to learn how the carvingcame to be made. It cost him his salt and his watch, and the incident was conveyedin African and pig-English and finger-talk. But it would seem that in the spring of thatyear a party of three white persons had appeared out of the brush riding horseback.