Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families

by Rex Stout

  “Why not? He’s a licensed eye. We’ll take care of it.”

  I looked at my watch, but it was too dark to see the hands, so of course we were in out of the sun. The driver had got out, shut the car door, and walked away, if I was any good at reading sounds. I heard voices indistinctly, not near me, and didn’t get the words. My left leg, from the knee down, got bored and decided to go to sleep. I moved it.

  “Hold it,” Christy commanded.

  “Nuts. Tape my eyes and let me get up and stretch.”

  “I said hold it.”

  I held it, for what I would put at another seven minutes. Then there were noises—a door opening, not loud, footsteps and voices, a door closing, again not loud, still steps and voices, a car’s doors opening and shutting, an engine starting, a car moving; and in a minute the closing of the heavy door that had closed after we had stopped. Then the door which my head was touching opened.

  “All right,” a voice said. “Come on out.”

  It took acrobatics, but I made it. I was standing, slightly wobbly, on concrete, near a concrete wall of a room sixty feet square with no windows and not too many lights. My darting glance caught cars scattered around, seven or eight of them. It also caught four men: Christy, coming around the rear end of the Olds, and three serious-looking strangers, older than our driver, who wasn’t there.

  Without a word two of them put their hands on me. First they took the gun from my armpit and then went over me. The circumstances didn’t seem favorable for an argument, so I simply stood at attention. It was a fast and expert job, with no waste motion and no intent to offend.

  “It’s all a matter of practice,” I said courteously.

  “Yeah,” the taller one agreed, in a tenor that was almost a falsetto. “Follow me.”

  He moved to the wall, with me behind. The cars had been stopped short of the wall to leave an alley, and we went down it a few paces to a door where a man was standing. He opened the door for us—it was the one that made little noise—and we passed through into a small vestibule, also with no windows in its concrete walls. Across it, only three paces, steps down began, and we descended—fourteen shallow steps to a wide metal door. My conductor pushed a button in the metal jamb. I heard no sound within, but in a moment the door opened and a pasty-faced bird with a pointed chin was looking at us.

  “Archie Goodwin,” my conductor said.

  “Step in.”

  I waited politely to be preceded, but my conductor moved aside, and the other one said impatiently, “Step in, Goodwin.”

  I crossed the sill, and the sentinel closed the door. I was in a room bigger than the vestibule above: bare concrete walls, well-lighted, with a table, three chairs, a water-cooler, and a rack of magazines and newspapers. A second sentinel, seated at the table, writing in a book like a ledger, sent me a sharp glance and then forgot me. The first one crossed to another big metal door directly opposite to the one I had entered by, and when he pulled it open I saw that it was a good five inches thick. He jerked his head and told me, “On in.”

  I stepped across and passed through with him at my heels.

  This was quite a chamber. The walls were paneled in a light gray wood with pink in it, from the tiled floor to the ceiling, and the rugs were the same light gray with pink borders. Light came from a concealed trough continuous around the ceiling. The six or seven chairs and the couch were covered in pinkish gray leather, and the same leather had been used for the frames of the pictures, a couple of big ones on each wall. All that, collected in my first swift survey, made a real impression.

  “Archie Goodwin,” the sentinel said.

  The man at the desk said, “Sit down, Goodwin. All right, Schwartz,” and the sentinel left us and closed the door.

  I would have been surprised to find that Pete Roeder rated all this splash so soon after hitting this territory, and he didn’t. The man at the desk was not Roeder. I had never seen this bozo, but no introduction was needed. Much as he disliked publicity, his picture had been in the paper a few times, as for instance the occasion of his presenting his yacht to the United States Coast Guard during the war. Also I had heard him described.

  I had a good view of him at ten feet when I sat in one of the pinkish gray leather chairs near his desk. Actually there was nothing to him but his forehead and eyes. It wasn’t a forehead, it was a dome, sloping up and up to the line of his faded thin hair. The eyes were the result of an error on the assembly line. They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless. They did not now look the same as shark eyes because Arnold Zeck’s brain had been using them to see with for fifty years, and that had had an effect.

  “I’ve spoken with you on the phone,” he said.

  I nodded. “When I was with Nero Wolfe. Three times altogether—no, I guess it was four.”

  “Four. Where is he? What has happened to him?”

  “I’m not sure, but I suspect he’s in Florida, training with an air hose, preparing to lay for you in your swimming pool and get you when you dive.”

  There was no flicker of response, of any kind, in the shark eyes. “I have been told of your habits of speech, Goodwin,” he said. “I make no objection. I take men for what they are or not at all. It pleases me that, impressed as you must be by this meeting, you insist on being yourself. But it does waste time and words. Do you know where Wolfe is?”

  “No.”

  “Have you a surmise?”

  “Yeah, I just told you.” I got irritated. “Say I tell you he’s in Egypt, where he owns a house. I don’t but say I do. Then what? You send a punk to Cairo to drill him? Why? Why can’t you let him alone? I know he had his faults—God knows how I stood them as long as I did—but he taught me a lot, and wherever he is he’s my favorite fatty. Just because he happened to queer your deal with Rackham, you want to track him down. What will that get you, now that he’s faded out?”

  “I don’t wish or intend to track him down.”

  “No? Then what made me so interesting? Your Max Christy and your bearded wonder offering me schoolboy jobs at triple pay. Get me sucked in, get me branded, and when the time comes use me to get at Wolfe so you can pay him. No.” I shook my head. “I draw the line somewhere, and all of you together won’t get me across that one.”

  I’m not up enough on fish to know whether sharks blink, but Zeck was showing me. He blinked perhaps one-tenth his share. He asked, “Why did you take the job?”

  “Because it was Rackham. I’m interested in him. I was glad to know someone else was. I would like to have a hand in his future.”

  No blink. “You think you know, I suppose, the nature of my own interests and activities.”

  “I know what is said around. I know that a New York police inspector told me that you’re out of reach.”

  “Name him.”

  “Cramer. Manhattan Homicide.”

  “Oh, him.” Zeck made his first gesture: a forefinger straightened and curved again. “What was the occasion?”

  “He wouldn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know where Wolfe was. He thought Wolfe and I were fixing to try to bring you down, and he was just telling me. I told him that maybe he would like to pull us off because he was personally interested, but that since Wolfe had scooted he was wasting it.”

  “That was injudicious, wasn’t it?”

  “All of that. I was in a bad humor.”

  Zeck blinked; I saw him. “I wanted to meet you, Goodwin. I’ve allowed some time for this because I want to look at you and hear you talk. Your idea of my interests and activities probably has some relation to the facts, and if so you may know that my chief problem is men. I could use ten times as many good men as I can find. I judge men partly by their record and partly by report, but mainly by my firsthand appraisal. You have disappointed me in one respect. Your conclusion that I want to use you to find Nero Wolfe is not intelligent. I do not pursue an opponent who has fled the field; it would not be profitable. If he reappears and gets in my path again, I’ll crush
him. I do want to suck you in, as you put it. I need good men now more than ever. Many, people get money from me, indirectly, whom I never see and have no wish to see; but there must be some whom I do see and work through. You might be one. I would like to try. You must know one thing: if you once say yes it becomes impractical to change your mind. It can’t be done.”

  “You said,” I objected, “you would like to try. How about my liking to try?”

  “I’ve answered that. It can’t be done.”

  “It’s already being done. I’m tailing Rackham for you. When he approached me I took it on myself to chat with him and report it. Did you like that or not? If not, I’m not your type. If so, let’s go on with that until you know me better. Hell, we never saw each other before. You can let me know a day in advance when I’m to lose the right to change my mind, and we’ll see. Regarding my notion that you want to use me to find Nero Wolfe, skip it. You couldn’t anyway, since I don’t know whether he went north, east, south, or west.”

  I had once remarked to Wolfe, when X (our name then for Zeck) had brought a phone call to a sudden end, that he was an abrupt bastard. He now abruptly turned the shark eyes from me, which was a relief, to reach for the switch on an intercom box on his desk, flip it, and speak to it. “Send Roeder in.”

  “Tell him to shave first,” I suggested, thinking that if I had a reputation for a habit of speech I might as well live up to it. Zeck did not react. I was beginning to believe that he never had reacted to anything and never would. I turned my head enough for the newcomer to have my profile when he entered, not to postpone his pleasure at seeing me.

  It was a short wait till the door opened and Roeder appeared. The sentinel did not come in. Roeder crossed to us, stepping flat on the rugs so as not to slide. His glance at me was fleeting and casual.

  “Sit down,” Zeck said. “You know Goodwin.”

  Roeder nodded and favored me with a look. Sitting, he told me, “Your reports haven’t been worth what they cost.”

  It gave me a slight shock, but I don’t think I let it show. I had forgotten that Roeder talked through his nose.

  “Sorry,” I said condescendingly. “I’ve been sticking to facts. If you want them dressed up, let me know what color you like.”

  “You’ve been losing him.”

  I flared up quietly. “I used to think,” I said, “that Nero Wolfe expected too much. But even he had brains enough to know that hotels have more than one exit.”

  “You’re being paid enough to cover the exits to the Yankee Stadium.”

  Zeck said, in his hard, cold, precise voice that never went up or down, “These are trivialities. I’ve had a talk with Goodwin, Roeder, and I sent for you because we got to Rackham. We have to decide how it is to be handled and what part Goodwin is to play. I want your opinion on the effect of Goodwin’s telling Rackham that he is working for Mrs. Frey.”

  Roeder shrugged. “I think it’s unimportant. Goodwin’s main purpose now is to get Rackham scared. We’ve got to have him scared good before we can expect him to go along with us. If he killed his wife—”

  “He did, of course. Unquestionably.”

  “Then he might be more afraid of Mrs. Frey than of you. We can see. If not, it will be simple for Goodwin to give him a new line.” Roeder looked at me. “It’s all open for you to Rackham now?”

  “I guess so. He told me he wanted to see me every day, but that was day before yesterday. What are we scaring him for? To see him throw glasses?”

  Zeck and Roeder exchanged glances. Zeck spoke to me. “I believe Roeder told you that he came here recently from the West Coast. He had a very successful operation there, a brilliant and profitable operation which he devised. It has some novel features and requires precise timing and expert handling. With one improvement it could be enormously profitable here in New York, and that one improvement is the cooperation of a wealthy and well-placed man. Rackham is ideal for it. We intend to use him. If you help materially in lining him up, as I think you can, your share of the net will be five per cent. The net is expected to exceed half a million, and should be double that.”

  I was frowning skeptically. “You mean if I help scare him into it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And help with the operation too?”

  “No.”

  “What have I got to scare him with?”

  “His sense of guilt first. He escaped arrest and trial for the murder of his wife only because the police couldn’t get enough evidence for a case. He is under the constant threat of the discovery of additional evidence, which for a murderer is a severe strain. If he believes we have such evidence he will be open to persuasion.”

  “Have we got it?”

  Zeck damn near smiled. “I shouldn’t think it will be needed. If it is needed we’ll have it.”

  “Then why drag him in on a complicated operation? He’s worth what, three million? Ask him for half of it, or even a third.”

  “No. You have much to learn, Goodwin. People must not be deprived of hope. If we take a large share of Rackham’s fortune he will be convinced that we intend to wring him dry. People must be allowed to feel that if our demands are met the outlook is not intolerable. A basic requirement for continued success in illicit enterprises is a sympathetic understanding of the limitations of the human nervous system. Getting Rackham’s help in Roeder’s operation will leave plenty of room for future requests.”

  I was keeping my frown. “Which I may or may not have a hand in. Don’t think I’m playing hard to get, but this is quite a step to take. Using a threat of a murder rap to put the screws on a millionaire is a little too drastic without pretty good assurance that I get more than peanuts. You said five per cent of a probable half a million, but you’re used to talking big figures. Could I have that filled in a little?”

  Roeder reached for a battered old leather brief case which he had brought in with him and deposited on the floor. Getting it on his lap, he had it opened when Zeck asked him, “What are you after, the estimates?”

  “Yes, if you want them.”

  “You may show them to him, but no names.” Zeck turned to me. “I think you may do, Goodwin. You’re brash, but that is a quality that may be made use of. You used it when you talked with Rackham. He must be led into this with tact or he may lose his head and force our hand, and all we want is his cooperation. His conviction for murder wouldn’t help us any; quite the contrary. Properly handled, he should be of value to us for years.”

  The shark eyes left me. “What’s your opinion of Goodwin, Roeder? Can you work with him?”

  Roeder had closed the brief case and kept it on his lap. “I can try,” he said, not enthusiastically. “The general level here is no higher than on the coast. But we can’t get started until we know whether we have Rackham or not, and the approach through Goodwin does seem the best way. He’s so damned cocky I don’t know whether he’ll take direction.”

  “Would you care to have my opinion of Roeder?” I inquired.

  Zeck ignored it. “Goodwin,” he said, “this is the most invulnerable organization on earth. There are good men in it, but it all comes to me. I am the organization. I have no prejudices and no emotions. You will get what you deserve. If you deserve well, there is no limit to the support you will get, and none to the reward. If you deserve ill, there is no limit to that either. You understand that?”

  “Sure.” His eyes were the hardest to meet in my memory. “Provided you understand that I don’t like you.”

  “No one likes me. No one likes the authority of superior intellect. There was one man who matched me in intellect—the man you worked for, Nero Wolfe—but his will failed him. His vanity wouldn’t let him yield, and he cleared out.”

  “He was a little handicapped,” I protested, “by his respect for law.”

  “Every man is handicapped by his own weaknesses. If you communicate with him give him my regards. I have great admiration for him.”

  Zeck glanced at a clock on the wall
and then at Roeder. “I’m keeping a caller waiting. Goodwin is under your direction, but he is on trial. Consult me as necessary within the routine.”

  He must have had floor buttons for foot-signaling, for he touched nothing with his hands, but the door opened and the sentinel appeared.

  Zeck said, “Put Goodwin on the B list, Schwartz.”

  Roeder and I arose and headed for the door, him with his brief case under his arm.

  Remembering how he had told me, tapping his chest, “I am a D, Archie,” I would have given a lot if I could have tapped my own bosom and announced, “I am a B, Mr. Wolfe.”

  Chapter 17

  There was one chore Wolfe had given me which I haven’t mentioned, because I didn’t care to reveal the details—and still don’t. But the time will come when you will want to know where the gun at the bottom of the brief case came from, so I may as well say now that you aren’t going to know.

  Since filing the number from a gun has been made obsolete by the progress of science, the process of getting one that can’t be traced has got more complicated and requires a little specialized knowledge. One has to be acquainted with the right people. I am. But there is no reason why you should be, so I won’t give their names and addresses. I couldn’t quite meet Wolfe’s specifications—the size and weight of a .22 and the punch of a .45—but I did pretty well: a Carson Snub Thirty, an ugly little devil, but straight and powerful. I tried it out one evening in the basement at Thirty-fifth Street. When I was through I collected the bullets and dumped them in the river. We were taking enough chances without adding another, however slim.

  The next evening after our conference with Zeck, a Monday, Wolfe and I collaborated on the false bottom for the brief case. We did the job at 1019. Since I was now a B and Roeder’s lieutenant on his big operation, and he was supposed to keep in touch with me, there was no reason why he shouldn’t come to Thirty-fifth Street for an evening visit, but when I suggested it he compressed his lips and scowled at me with such ferocity that I quickly changed the subject. We made the false bottom out of an old piece of leather that I picked up at a shoe hospital, and it wasn’t bad at all. Even if a sentinel removed all the papers for a close inspection, which wasn’t likely with the status Roeder had reached, there was little chance of his suspecting the bottom; yet if you knew just where and how to pry you could have the Carson out before you could say Jackie Robinson.