Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 10 (2 page)

“I couldn’t say. It all depends.” I stood up with my heels together. “An hour, a day, a week, two weeks. I’ll have to live in his house with him as I always did. The best time to work on him is late at night.”

“Very well. On your arrival, report to Colonel Ryder at Governor’s Island by telephone, report progress to him, and tell him when you are ready for him to see Mr. Wolfe.” He got up and offered me a hand, and I took it. “And don’t waste any time.”

In another room downstairs I found they had got me a priority for a seat on the three o’clock plane for New York, and a taxi got me to the airport just in time to weigh my luggage through and make a run for it.

A
ll the seats were taken but one, the outside of a double near the front, and I nodded down at the occupant of the seat next to the window, a man with spectacles and a tired face, stuffed my hat and coat on the shelf, and lowered myself. In another minute we were taxiing down the runway, turning, vibrating, rolling, picking it up, and in the air. Just as I unfastened my seat belt, dainty female fingers gripped the seat arm, a female figure stopped, and the profile of a female head with fine blond hair was there in front of me, speaking across to the man with spectacles:

“Would you mind changing seats with me? Please?”

Not wanting to make a scene, there was nothing for me to do but scramble out of the way to permit the transfer. The man got out, the female got in and settled herself, and I sat down again just as the plane tilted for a bank.

She patted my arm and said, “Escamillo darling. Don’t kiss me here. Good heavens, you’re handsome in uniform.”

“I haven’t,” I said coolly, “any intention of kissing you anywhere.”

Her blue eyes were not quite wide open and a corner
of her mouth was turned up a little. Viewed objectively, there was nothing at all wrong with the scenery, but I was in no frame of mind to view Lily Rowan objectively. I have told elsewhere how I met her just outside the fence of an upstate pasture. The episode started with me in the pasture along with a bull, and the situation was such that when I reached the fence considerations of form and dignity were minor matters. Anyhow, I got over, rolled maybe ten yards and scrambled to my feet, and a girl in a yellow shirt and slacks clapped her hands sarcastically and drawled at me. “Beautiful, Escamillo! Do it again!”

That was Lily. One thing had led to another. Several others. Until finally …

But now—

She squeezed my arm and said, “Escamillo darling.”

I gazed straight at her and said, “Lookit. The only reason I don’t get up and ask one of our fellow passengers to change seats with me is that I am in uniform and the service has notions about dignity in public places, and I know quite well that you are capable of acting like a lunatic. I am going to read the paper.”

I unfolded the
Times
. She was laughing in her throat, which I had once thought was an attractive sound, and she arranged herself in her seat so that her arm was against mine.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I wish that bull had got you that day three years ago. I never dreamed, when I saw you tumbling over that fence, that it would ever come to this. You haven’t answered my letters or telegrams. So I came to Washington to find out where you were, intending to go there—and here I am. Me, Lily Rowan! Escamillo, look at me!”

“I’m reading the paper.”

“Good heavens, you’re wonderful in uniform. Very
rugged. Doesn’t it impress you that I found out you were taking this plane and got on before you did? Am I a smart girl or not?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Answer me,” she said with an edge to her voice.

She was capable of anything. “Yeah,” I said, “you’re smart.”

“Thank you. I’m also smart enough to know that your being mad at me because I said that Ireland shouldn’t give up any naval or air bases is phony. My father came here from Ireland and made eight million dollars building sewers—and I’m Irish and you know it, so your going sour on me on account of that is the bunk. I think you think you’re tired of me. I have palled on you. Well?”

I kept my eyes on the paper. “I’m in the Army now, pet.”

“So you are. Haven’t I sent you forty telegrams offering to go and be near you and read aloud to you? Thinking you might be sick or something, haven’t I been three times to see Nero Wolfe to find out if he was hearing from you? Which reminds me, what the dickens is the matter with him? He refuses to see me. And he likes me.”

“He does not like you. He likes no woman.”

“Well, he likes my being interested in his orchids. And besides, I wrote him that I had a case for him and would pay him myself. He wouldn’t even talk to me on the phone.”

I looked at her. “What kind of a case?”

A corner of her mouth went up. “Like to know?”

“Go to the devil.”

“Now, Escamillo. Am I your bauble?”

“No.”

“I am too. I like the way your nose twitches when
you smell a case. This is about a friend of mine, or anyway a girl I know, named Ann Amory. I was worried about her.”

“I can’t see you being worried about a girl named Ann Amory, or any girl except one named Lily Rowan.”

Lily patted my arm. “That sounds more like you. Anyway, I wanted an excuse to see Nero Wolfe, and Ann was in trouble. All she really wanted was advice. She had found out something about somebody and wanted to know what to do about it.”

“What had she found out about who?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. Her father used to work for my father, and I helped her out when he died. She works at the National Bird League and gets thirty dollars a week.” Lily shivered. “Good lord, think of it, thirty dollars a week! Of course that’s no worse than thirty dollars a day; you couldn’t possibly live anyhow. She came and asked me to send her to a lawyer and she certainly was upset. All she would tell me was that she had learned something terrible about someone, but from several things she let slip I think it’s her fiancé. I thought Nero Wolfe would be better for her than any lawyer.”

“And he wouldn’t see you?”

“No.”

“Ann didn’t mention any names at all?”

“No.”

“Where does she live?”

“Downtown, not far from you—316 Barnum Street.”

“Who is her fiancé?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Lily patted my arm. “Listen, you big rugged hero. Where shall we have dinner tonight? My place?”

I shook my head. “I’m on duty. Your attitude on
bases in Ireland is subversive. For all I know, you’re an Irish spy. I regard you as irresistible, but I’ve got my honor to think of. I warned you that day in the Methodist tent that my spiritual side—”

She cut me off and so it went. So it went for another hour, until we touched ground again at LaGuardia Airport. I wasn’t able to duck her there. For the sake of decorum I split a taxi with her to Manhattan, but in front of the Ritz, where she had her own tower, and where I knew she would be disinclined to tear up sidewalks. I got myself transferred to another taxi with my bags and gave the driver the address of Wolfe’s house on 35th Street.

In spite of the encounter with Lily, as I rolled downtown and then turned west, I’m here to tell you it was okay with me. I don’t know why it seemed as if I’d been away a lot longer than two months, but it did. I recognized stores and buildings, as if I owned them, that I didn’t remember ever bothering to look at before. I hadn’t sent a wire because I thought it would be fun to surprise them, and naturally I was looking forward to seeing Theodore up in the plant rooms with the orchids, and Fritz in the kitchen stirring things in bowls and sniffing and tasting, and Nero Wolfe himself seated at his desk, frowning at a page of the atlas or maybe growling at a book he was reading—No, he wouldn’t be in the office. He didn’t come down from the plant rooms until six o’clock, so he would be up there with Theodore. I would say hello to Fritz in the kitchen and then sneak up to my room and wait until after I heard the elevator descending, bringing Wolfe down to the office.

T
hat was the worst shock I ever got in my life, bar none.

I let myself in with my key, which was still on my ring, dropped my bags in the hall, entered the office, and didn’t believe my eyes. Stacks of unopened mail were on Wolfe’s desk. I walked over to it and saw that it hadn’t been dusted for ten years, and neither had mine. I turned around to face the door and felt myself swallowing. Either Wolfe or Fritz was dead, the only question was which. Next thing I knew I was in the kitchen, and what I saw there convinced me that they both were dead. They must be. The rows of pots and pans were dusty too, and the spice jars.

I swallowed again. I opened a cupboard door and saw not a damn thing but a dish of oranges and six cartons of prunes. I opened the refrigerator, and that finished it. There was nothing there but four heads of lettuce, four tomatoes, and a dish of applesauce. I dashed out and made for the stairs.

One flight up, both Wolfe’s room and the spare were uninhabited, but the furniture looked normal. Same for the two rooms on the floor above, one of which was mine. I kept going, on up to the plant rooms. In the four
growing-rooms there was nothing under the glass but orchids, hundreds of them in bloom, but in the potting-room I finally found a sign of human life, namely a man. It was Theodore Horstmann, on a stool at the bench, making entries in a propagation record book which I had formerly kept.

I demanded, “Where’s Wolfe? Where’s Fritz? What the hell’s going on here?”

Theodore finished a word, blotted it, turned on the stool, and squeaked at me:

“Why, hello, Archie. They’re out exercising. Only they call it training. They’re out training.”

“Are they well? Alive?”

“Of course they’re alive. They’re training.”

“Training what?”

“Training each other. Or perhaps more accurately, training themselves. They’re going into the Army, to fight. I am going to stay here as caretaker. Mr. Wolfe was going to dispose of the plants, but I persuaded him to leave them with me. Mr. Wolfe doesn’t work with the plants any more; he only comes up here to sweat. He has to sweat all he can in order to reduce his weight, and then he has to get hardened up, so he and Fritz go over by the river and walk fast. Next week they’re going to start to run. He is dieting and he has stopped drinking beer. Last week he caught cold but he’s over it now. He won’t buy any bread or cream or butter or sugar or lots of things and I have to buy my own meat.”

“Where do they train?”

“Over by the river. Mr. Wolfe obtained permission from the authorities to train on a pier because the boys on the street ridiculed him. From seven to nine in the morning and four to six in the afternoon. Mr. Wolfe is
very persistent. He spends the rest of the time up here sweating. He doesn’t talk much, but I heard him telling Fritz that if two million Americans will kill ten Germans apiece—”

I had had enough of Theodore’s squeak. I left him, went back down to the office, got a cloth and dusted my desk and chair, sat down and elevated my dogs, and scowled at the stacks of mail on Wolfe’s desk.

Good God, I thought, what a homecoming this turned out to be. I might have known something like this would happen if I left him to manage himself. It is not only bad, it may be hopeless. The fathead. The big fat goop. And I told that general I know how to handle him. Now what am I going to do?

At 5:50 I heard the front door open and close, and footsteps in the hall, and there was Nero Wolfe looking in at me from the threshold with Fritz back of him.

“What are you doing here?” he boomed.

I’ll never forget that sight as long as I live. I was speechless. He didn’t exactly look smaller, he merely looked deflated. The pants were his own, an old pair of blue serge. The shoes were strangers, rough army style. The sweater was mine, a heavy maroon number that I had bought once for a camping trip, and in spite of his reduction of circumference it was stretched so tight that his yellow shirt showed through the holes.

I found my tongue to say, “Come in! Come on in!”

“I’ve given up the office for the time being,” he said, and he and Fritz both turned and headed for the kitchen.

I sat there awhile, screwing up my lips and scowling, hearing noises they were making, and finally got up and moseyed out to join them. Apparently Wolfe had given up the dining-room too, for he and Fritz were both seated at the little table by the window eating
prunes, with a bowl of lettuce and tomatoes, no dressing in sight, waiting for them. I propped myself against the long table, looking down at them, and managed a grin.

“Trying an experiment?” I asked pleasantly.

With his spoon Wolfe conveyed a prune seed from his mouth to the dish. He was looking at me and pretending not to. “How long,” he demanded, “have you been a major?”

“Three days.” I couldn’t help staring at him. It was unbelievable. “They promoted me on account of my table manners. Theodore tells me you are going to join the Army. May I ask in what capacity?”

Wolfe had another prune in his mouth. When he got rid of the seed he said, “Soldier.”

“You mean forward march and bang? Parachute troops? Commandos? Driving a jeep maybe—”

“That will do, Archie.” His tone was sharp and his glance was too. He put down his spoon. “I am going to kill some Germans. I didn’t kill enough in 1918. Whatever your reason for coming here—I presume it is your furlough before going overseas—I am sorry you came. I am quite aware of the physical difficulties that confront me, and I will tolerate no remarks from you. I am more keenly aware of them than you are. I am sorry you came, because I am undertaking a complicated adjustment in my habits, and your presence will make it more burdensome. I congratulate you on your promotion. If you are staying for dinner—”

“No, thank you,” I said politely. “I’ve got a date for dinner. But I’ll sleep here in my bed if you don’t mind. I’ll try not to annoy you—”

“Fritz and I go to bed at nine sharp.”

“Okay. I’ll take my shoes off downstairs. Much obliged for the fatted calf. I apologize for dusting off my
desk and chair, but I was afraid I’d get my uniform dirty. My furlough is two weeks.”