Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 41 (5 page)

“A hundred people know that. What else?”

“Apparently the reason for the cancelation is that the security check on your senior vice-president uncovered certain facts about his personal life. That raises two questions: how accurate are the so-called facts, and do they actually make him or your company a security risk? Is he, and are you, getting a raw deal?”

“What else?”

“That’s it. I should think that’s enough, Mr. Evers. If you don’t want to discuss it with me, discuss it with Mr. Wolfe himself. If you don’t know about his standing and reputation, check on it. He told me to make it clear that if you get any benefit from anything he does he would expect no payment of any kind. He isn’t looking for a client; he has one.”

He was frowning at me. “I don’t get it. The client—is it a newspaper?”

“No.”

“A magazine?
Time
?”

“No.” I decided to stretch my instructions a little. “I can only tell you it’s a private citizen who thinks the FBI is getting too big for its britches.”

“I don’t believe it. And I damn well don’t like it.” He pushed a button on a slab. “Are
you
FBI?”

I said no and was going on, but the door opened and a woman was there, the one who had led me in, and Evers snapped at her, “See this man out, Miss Bailey. Into the elevator.”

I objected. I said that if he discussed it with Nero Wolfe the worst that could happen would be losing his contract, and evidently it was lost anyway, and if there was any chance of saving it—But the look on his face showed me it was no good, as he reached for the slab to push another button. No sale and no hope for one. I got up and walked out, with the woman tagging, and found, out in the ante-room, that it just wasn’t my day. As I entered, the elevator door opened and a man came out, and it wasn’t a stranger. Working on a case about a year ago I had had dealings with a G-man named Morrison, and there he was. Our eyes met, and then we met. As he offered a hand he spoke. “Well, well. Is Nero Wolfe using electronics now?”

I gave him a friendly grip and a grin. “Oh,” I said, “we try to keep up. We’re going to bug a certain building on Sixty-ninth Street.” I stepped to the elevator and pushed the button. “I’m getting the latest angles.”

He laughed to be polite and said he guessed they’d have to do all their talking in code. The elevator door opened, and I entered and the door slid shut. It certainly wasn’t my day. Not that it mattered much, since I had got nowhere with Evers, but it’s always bad to have the breaks going wrong, and God knows if we ever needed the breaks we did then. I was walking on hard pavement, not air, as I emerged to the sidewalk and turned uptown.

It had been more than twenty minutes, and Al had gone. There are plenty of taxis on First Avenue at that hour, and I flagged one and gave the hackie an address.

A
t a quarter to eleven that Wednesday night, pessimistic and pooped, I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone and pushed the button. With the chain bolt on I had to be let in. When Fritz came he asked if I wanted some warmed-up curried duck, and I growled the no. I shed my hat and coat and went to the office, and there was the oversized genius at his desk, in the chair made to order for his seventh of a ton, with a bottle of beer and a glass on the tray, comfortably reading his current book,
The Treasure of Our Tongue
, by Lincoln Barnett. I went to my desk and whirled my chair and sat. He would look up when he finished a paragraph.

He did. He even inserted his bookmark, a thin strip of gold given him years before by a client who couldn’t afford it, and put the book down. “You have dined, of course,” he said.

“Dined, no.” I crossed my legs. “Excuse me for waving my legs around. I ate something greasy, I forget what, in a dump in the Bronx. It has been—”

“Fritz will warm the duck, and—”

“No he won’t. I told him not to. It has been by far the lousiest day I have ever had and I’ll finish it up right. I’ll
report in full and go to bed tasting grease. First, the—”

“Confound it, you must eat!”

“I say no. First, the client.”

I gave it to him verbatim, and the action, including the two men in the parked car of which I had the license number. At the end I added some opinions: that (a) it would be wasting a dime to bother to check the license number, (b) Sarah Dacos could probably be crossed off, or at least filed for future reference, and (c) whatever dirt there might be under cover in the Bruner family, the lid was still on as far as the client knew. When I got up to hand him the paper Mrs. Bruner had signed he merely glanced at it and said to put it in the safe.

I also gave him the Evers thing verbatim, of course including Morrison. My only opinion on that was that I hadn’t handled it right, that I should have told him we had secret information he didn’t have and couldn’t get, and we might be able to put on pressure that would save his contract, and if we did we would expect to be paid. Of course it would have been risky, but it might have opened him up. Wolfe shook his head and said it would have made us too vulnerable. I rose and circled around his desk to the stand that held the dictionary, opened it and found what I wanted, and returned to my chair.

“Capable of being wounded,” I said. “Liable to attack or injury. That’s what ‘vulnerable’ means. It should be quite a trick to get any more vulnerable than we are now. But to finish the day. It took me all afternoon to run down Ernst Muller, who is charged with conspiring to transport stolen property across state lines and is out on bail, and he was even worse than Evers. He had the idea of slugging me, and he wasn’t alone, so I had to react, and I may have broken his arm. Then—”

“Were you hurt?”

“Only my feelings. Then, after eating the grease, I set out for Julia Fenster, who was or wasn’t framed for espionage and was tried and acquitted, and that’s how I spent the evening, all of it, trying to find her. I finally found her brother, but not her, and he’s a fish. No man ever got less out of a day. It’s a record. And those were the three we picked as the best prospects. I can’t wait to see the program you’ve planned for tomorrow. I’ll put it under my pillow.”

“It’s partly your stomach,” he said. “If not the duck, then an omelet.”

“No.”

“Caviar. There’s a fresh pound.”

“You know damn well I love caviar. I wouldn’t insult it.”

He poured beer, waited until the foam was down to half an inch, drank, licked his lips, and regarded me. “Archie. Are you trying to pester me into returning that retainer?”

“No. I know I couldn’t.”

“Then you’re twaddling. You’re quite aware that we have undertaken a job which, considered logically, is preposterous. We have both said so. It’s extremely unlikely that any of the suggestions Mr. Cohen gave us will give us a start, but it’s conceivable that one might. There’s some hit-or-miss in every operation, but this one is all hit-or-miss. We are at the mercy of the vicissitudes of fortune; we can only invite, not command. I have no program for tomorrow; it depended on today. You don’t know that today was bootless. Some prick may have stirred someone to action. Or tomorrow it may, or next week. You’re tired and hungry. Confound it, eat something!”

I shook my head. “What about tomorrow?”

“We’ll consider that in the morning. Not tonight.” He picked up his book.

I left my chair, gave it a kick, got the paper from my desk and put it in the safe, and went to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. Fritz had gone down to bed. Realizing that what would be an insult to caviar would also be an insult to milk, I poured it back in the carton, got another glass and the bottle of Old Sandy bourbon, poured three fingers, and took a healthy swig. That took care of the grease all right, and after going to see that the back door was bolted I finished the bourbon, rinsed the glasses, went and mounted the two flights to my room, and changed into pajamas and slippers.

I considered taking my electric blanket but vetoed it. In a pinch a man must expect hardship. From my bed I took only the pillow, and got sheets and blankets from the closet in the hall. With my arms loaded I descended, went to the office, removed the cushions from the couch, and spread the sheets. As I was unfolding a blanket Wolfe’s voice came.

“I question the need for that.”

“I don’t.” I spread the blanket, and the other one, and turned. “You’ve read that book. They can move fast if and when. With some of the stuff in the files they could have a picnic—and the safe.”

“Bah. You’re stretching it. Blow open a safe in an occupied house?”

“They wouldn’t have to, that antique. You ought to get some books on electronics.” I tucked the blankets in at the foot.

He pushed his chair back, levered himself up, said good night, and went, taking
The Treasure of Our Tongue.

Thursday morning there was an off chance that when Fritz came down from delivering the breakfast
tray he would bring word for me to go up for a briefing, but he didn’t. So, since Wolfe wouldn’t be down from the plant rooms until eleven, I took my time with the routine, and it was going on ten when everything was under control—the bedding back upstairs, breakfast inside me, the
Times
looked at, the mail opened and under a paperweight on Wolfe’s desk, and Fritz explained to. Explained to, but not at ease. He had a vivid memory, as we all did, of the night that machine guns on a roof across the street had strafed the plant rooms, shattering hundreds of panes of glass and ruining thousands of orchids, and his idea was that I was sleeping in the office because my room faced Thirty-fifth Street and there was going to be a repeat performance. I explained that I was a guard, not a refugee, but he didn’t believe it and said so.

In the office, after opening the mail, all I had to pass was time. There was a phone call for Fritz from a fish man, and I listened in, but got no sign that the line was tapped, though of course it was. Hooray for the technicians. Modern science was fixing it so that anybody can do anything but nobody can know what the hell is going on. I got my notebook from a drawer and went through the dope Lon Cohen had given us, considering the possibilities. There were fourteen items altogether, and at least five of them were obviously hopeless. Of the other nine we had made a stab at three and got nothing. That left six, and I sized them up, one by one. I decided that the most promising one, or anyway the least unpromising, concerned a woman who had been fired from a job in the State Department and got it back, and was reaching for the Washington phone book to see if she was listed when the doorbell rang.

Going to the hall for a look through the one-way glass in the front door, I was expecting to see a stranger,
and maybe two. The direct approach. Or possibly Morrison. But there was a well-known face and figure on the stoop—Dr. Vollmer, whose office is in a house he owns down the block. I went and opened the door and greeted him, and he entered, along with a lot of fresh icy air. Turning from shutting the door, I told him if he was drumming up trade he’d have to try next door, and put out a hand for his hat.

He kept it on. “I’ve got too much trade as it is, Archie. Everybody’s sick. But I’ve got a message for you, just now on the phone. A man, no name. He said to give it to you personally. You’re to be at the Westside Hotel, Room Two-fourteen, on Twenty-third Street, at eleven-thirty or as soon thereafter as you can make it, and you must be sure you’re loose.”

My brows were up. “Quite a message.”

“That’s what I thought. He said you would tell me to keep it under my hat.”

“Okay, I tell you. That’s why you’re keeping it on.” I looked at my wrist: 10:47. “What else did he say?”

“That’s all, just the message, after he asked if I would come and tell you personally.”

“Room Two-fourteen, Westside Hotel.”

“That’s right.”

“What kind of a voice?”

“No particular kind, nothing distinctive, neither high nor low. Just a normal man’s voice.”

“All right, Doc, many thanks. We need another favor if you can spare it. We’re on an operation that’s a little tricky, and you were probably seen. It’s possible that someone will want to know why you called. If anybody asks, you might—”

“I’ll say you phoned and asked me to come and look at your throat.”

“No. Wrong twice. He’ll know there’s nothing
wrong with my throat, and he’ll know I didn’t phone. Our line is tapped. The trouble is that if someone gets the notion that we get confidential messages through you, your line will be tapped.”

“My God. But that’s illegal!”

“That makes it more fun. If anybody asks, you might be indignant and say it’s none of his damned business, or you might be obliging and say you came to take Fritz’s blood pressure—no, you haven’t got the gadget. You came—”

“I came to get his recipe for
escargots bourguignonne.
I like that better, nonprofessional.” He moved to the door. “My word, Archie, it certainly
is
tricky.”

I agreed and thanked him again, and he said to give his regards to Wolfe. When I closed the door after him I didn’t bother to slide the bolt since I would soon be leaving. I went to the kitchen and told Fritz he had just given the recipe for
escargots bourguignonne
to Dr. Vollmer, and then to the office and buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone. I refused to believe they could tap a house phone. Wolfe answered, and I told him. He grunted and asked, “Have you any notion?”

“Not the vaguest. Not the FBI. Why would they? It could be that quote some prick may have stirred someone end of quote. Evers or Miss Fenster or even Muller. Any instructions?”

He said pfui and hung up, and I admit I had asked for it.

There would be the problem of spotting a tail and shaking it, and that can take time, so I would have to get help if I wanted to be punctual for the appointment. Also I should be prepared for the remote possibility that Ernst Muller was sensitive about having his arm twisted and was intending to return the compliment, so I got the shoulder holster from the drawer and put it on,
and the Marley .38, and loaded it. But another kind of ammunition might be needed, and I opened the safe and got a grand in used tens and twenties from the cash reserve. Of course there were other conceivables, such as that I was going to have my picture taken in a room with a naked female or a corpse or God knew what, but I would have to dive off of that bridge when I came to it.