Which as I could have predicted bought him the stink eye worse than when I’d suggested the heresy of actually eating his damn fruit.
“You’re that Wolfe fellow, aren’t you?”
“Claudius Lyon. He and I are in the same profession.”
“Well, Mr. Lyon, if you’re half the detective they say Wolfe is, perhaps you can figure it out yourself.”
“Phooey!” spat Lyon, when the admiral boated off toward a refreshment table laid out with cold cuts, finger treats, and sliced cheese and garnished with tomatoes in every color but blue. “I have half a mind to take him up on the challenge! Thirty years indeed! What did he do with the rest of the time, put ships in bottles?”
“I’d start by looking for that half a mind,” I said into my glass.
“What?”
I pointed at the table. “I said, ‘Look! Pickled watermelon rind!’ ”
We had adjoining rooms. Before retiring to mine, I reported to his for instructions. At his invitation I entered to find him in bed, propped up with pillows and with the spread drawn up over his belly, which looked as if he’d smuggled a watermelon from the kitchen; the bilious green pajama jacket only added to the illusion. “First thing in the morning, Arnie, call the concierge and have a large floral display delivered to Admiral Rumple’s room. Spare no expense. This on the card: ‘Congratulations again upon your momentous discovery, and thank you for listening to my proposition. Meanwhile, please consider me if you should ever have need for an investigator. I’m sure we can come to an agreement that pleases us both. Yours most sincerely, etc.’ ”
I typed this treacle into my iPad, nearly punching my fingers through the other side. “You’re wasting your time, not to mention the florist’s, and making more of a fool of yourself than usual, if that’s possible. He’s taking that recipe with him to his grave, and welcome to it. Personally I’d rather eat green eggs and ham than something that should be hanging on a Christmas tree.”
“It’s a process, not a recipe. Is that clock right? Check your watch against it. Have you your whistle?”
“I left it in my room. Our train doesn’t leave till day after tomorrow.”
“Keep it on you at all times. Nothing short of carrying away a cutting from Lycopersicum rumplicus under my arm would compensate me for missing it.”
I wished to heaven I’d had it. Maybe blasting it in his ear would shock him back into his normal state of lunacy.
The next day we skipped the program and paid another visit to Rumple’s blue tomato. Most of the attendees were packed in to the main auditorium listening to a lecture on the threat posed by the Asian hornworm, so we had the exhibit all to ourselves. Lyon studied the specimen in the glass case from all sides, finally raising himself on tiptoe to peer down through the top.
“Note the time, Arnie.”
“We’ve still got till tomorrow; and yes, I’m wearing the damn whistle.”
“I don’t mean that.”
I looked at my watch. “Eight ten a.m.”
“Do you recall what time it was when we first laid eyes on this remarkable hybrid?”
As a matter of fact I did. One of the few good qualities I share with Wolfe’s Goodwin is a good memory; it came from studying undercover cops’ faces so one doesn’t take the same fall at the same hands twice. “Seven p.m., give or take a minute.”
A row of windows looked out on the sun shining down on the Mahoning River. He squinted that way, shielding his eyes with a hand. “Interesting.”
“Not really.”
A convention volunteer moved among the displays, covering them with yards of blue cloth. When he got to ours, he excused himself and said the room was closing until after the morning sessions. We left him draping the miraculous tomato plant and went to breakfast in the restaurant, where for one morning in my life I got the taste of Gus’s lox and bagels out of my mouth. We’d finished eating and I was browsing the race results on my iPad over coffee when he said, “What kind of information can you look up on that gadget?”
Lyon has raised Luddism to the level of art. He’d given up limiting me to a manual typewriter—any technology not mentioned in the Wolfe canon was moonshine—only because I’d worn out two dictionaries trying to spell his favorite words. I said, “Sure. Can you say the same thing for an Underwood?”
“Never mind that. Instructions.”
In the past, using my laptop back home, I’d extracted information for him on everything from Revelation to root rot, all without raising an eyebrow; but this time it seemed like make-work. I didn’t get to ask what it was about, though, because just when I finished reporting, Admiral Rumple came galloping up to our table. “Mr. Lyon! I tried calling your room. I’m so glad I caught you.”
Lyon beamed, snatched his napkin from under his collar, and wiped his hands. “I take it the flowers came. Think nothing—”
“Oh, blast the flowers! Did you mean what you said in the note?”
“Certainly! About our coming to an agreement? Certainly!”
His excited squeak belonged to Minnie Mouse.
Rumple said, “Yes, yes! You may have the secret to Lycopersicum rumplicus, if only you can restore it to me. I can’t duplicate it without a cutting from the existing plant.”
Lyon asked no questions, but hopped down from his seat and we accompanied the admiral to the display room. We were hard-pressed to keep up with him, Lyon on his plump little legs and me wondering how fast an old wheeze can run without blowing an artery.
We found the place even more abuzz than the evening before, and the crowd around the admiral’s glass case even denser. With the military man forcing his way through, we came up to stare at the empty case.
“I got here right after the attendant lifted the cover for the afternoon viewing,” Rumple said. “It was as you see it now. Someone managed to get in and steal the plant while the rest of us were absent! Lyon, if you’re a patch on your idol in the detecting game—”
“Nothing is to be gained from panic. I assume the plant is insured?”
“For five hundred thousand dollars; but it’s worth far more than that to me. It represents the culmination of my life’s work outside the navy.”
“You agree to my terms?”
“Yes, yes! I will deliver to you all the records on the Lycopersicum rumplicus breeding process the moment the plant is restored to me unharmed.”
“Satisfactory.”
I’d expected the little toad to turn a cartwheel, but instead he stuck a finger in his left ear and started rotating it. When Lyon’s brain gets into gear, the wax in that appendage doesn’t stand a chance.
This time he was at it less than ten seconds. His gaze sought the attendant we’d spoken to that morning. “Who had access to this room while the exhibit was closed?”
“Just the hotel staff, myself included. But we were under Admiral Rumple’s strict orders not to attempt to open the case or even move it. He installed it himself.”
“Installed; I approve of your vocabulary, young man. Was the admiral present when you uncovered the case this afternoon?”
“No, sir. No one but staff was admitted until the room was reopened to the public. That was when I saw the case was empty.”
“You called security, of course.”
“I insisted,” Rumple broke in. “I came in as soon as the doors opened, and when I found out what had happened, I made the call myself from the house phone.”
“I responded to the call.”
The man who spoke wasn’t in uniform, but he might as well have had rent-a-cop tattooed on his forehead. I’d cased enough places to spot that institutional blue suit and matching tie-and-handkerchief set across a department store. His face was another clue: straight from the mail-order catalog and as expressionless as a Parker House roll. The walkie-talkie on his belt only confirmed it.
“Officer, I want you to detain this man for the police.” Lyon inclined his head toward Rumple, whose face turned as red as the brightest fruit on disp
lay. But before he could speak: “Spare yourself, Admiral, the ordeal of accusing me of a jest, a show of outrage, and the threat of a lawsuit. I came here without a specimen worthy of an exhibit, but I rather think I can participate.”
Suddenly he grasped the glass case between his palms and snatched it up from the table. Hugging it under one arm, he found a catch on the black metal base and manipulated it. A drawer slid out containing something that looked like a miniature crystal ball mounted on a circuit board.
“Mr. Woodbine will attest that I live unencumbered by contemporary technology,” he said; “but I read; and what I’ve read emboldens me to theorize that this equipment is intended to project the holographic image of, say, a blue tomato, inside a glass case, on a battery charge designed to last at least three days; long enough, in any event, to satisfy those attending this convention that what they regarded as a living exhibit was genuine.”
“Holograph?” asked the guard.
“Surely everyone today is familiar with three-dimensional imagery.” Lyon swept his gaze across the sea of goggle-eyed faces. “Fellow horticulturists, it grieves me to inform you that the Lycopersicum rumplicus does not exist. It never did. If Rumple hasn’t destroyed it, you will likely find its original, counterfeited through a computerized process from the lowly beefsteak, to represent the unique blue variety he subjected to enhancement.
“What is the old term for similar chicanery?” he asked. “ ‘Smoke and mirrors’?”
Rumple’s face had passed through its own computerized process, changing colors several times. Now it was as dark as the loam that Lyon had imported semiannually from the Brazilian rainforest at a cost of twice what I’d nicked from him all year, all to grow his damn love apples. “You’re on thin ice, you fat fraud. You can’t prove any of this.”
“When the police search you, I feel certain they’ll find a remote control that operates the miniature projector installed in the bottom of this case. If not, it will turn up in your room. All you had to do in order to make it appear that your plant had been stolen was switch it off, then collect half a million dollars from your insurance company.”
He looked at me. “My associate is in a position to expedite the investigation. His marvelous electronic pocket device has supplied us both with the admiral’s biography, which by reason of his taxpayer-paid salary is in the public domain, barring certain details labeled secret in the interest of national security; I trust Mr. Woodbine has saved the data. Rumple spent most of his career at the Pentagon, researching weapons development. His department spent a great deal of time studying holographic photography. Is it too much to suppose that its intention was to project a nonexistent armada upon any harbor in the world, diverting enemy attention from where our real naval forces are actually gathering?”
An experienced military officer knows when he’s beaten. When the police came to search him, he made no resistance, and showed no reaction when a cigar-shaped object was taken from his inside breast pocket. It had one button only, marked power. When it was pressed, the blue tomato returned, looking as real as ever. One of the cops read him his rights.
“Boss,” I said as they took him away in handcuffs, “I have to hand it—”
“Phooey!” Lyon spun on his heel and waddled out, plowing a path through his fellow tomato-fanciers.
I followed him, wanting to tell him to look at the bright side: If the dingus was genuine and he’d collected on Rumple’s promise to show him how to grow one of his own, Captain Stoddard back in Brooklyn would’ve called it payment for investigative services and clinked him for operating without a license, which he’d been trying to do for years. But I knew it wouldn’t help, so I clammed up. I don’t feel sorry for the little garden gnome very often, but I did then. He was like a puppy someone had abandoned on the median.
He brightened up the next morning, when on the tails of his triumph he was invited by the chairman of the North American Chapter of the International Tomato-Growers Association to deliver the keynote speech at the farewell breakfast. It was a chance for him to emulate one of Nero Wolfe’s soliloquys to the suspects in a big-ticket murder case, and if there was one place where his self-appointed protégé surpassed his mentor, it was pomposity.
He spoke forty-five minutes nonstop. Just as he turned away from the podium, a delegate from the Wisconsin branch of the Esteemed Vine (I don’t make up this drivel) rose from the audience to ask how Lyon had come to suspect the blue tomato was a fake.
“Admiral Rumple scorned our revered Herbert Lydecker as nothing more than a rough carpenter,” Lyon said, “but for all his twenty-first-century expertise, he’d have benefited from a lesson in elementary photography. Lighting is every bit as important as composition. When I first made the acquaintance of Lycopersicum rumplicus, it was early evening, and the shadows on the fruit were commensurate with the time of day: They were opposite the source of light, which was right and proper. Yesterday morning, however, when the rays of the sun were shining through the east windows, the shadows had not moved. Had the object in the case been solid, they would then have been on the side opposite the windows; but they were not. In twelve hours they had not moved an iota.”
The occupants of the packed gallery rose to their feet, pounding their palms. It would have been a good moment to sit down, but the sawed-off ham was warming up all over again. He raised his hands and pushed his palms toward the crowd, waving them back into their seats.
“Before we adjourn,” he said, “I should like to share with you an amusing anecdote from our nation’s infancy, when a traitor in President Washington’s domestic staff sought to poison him by feeding him tomatoes, which as of course we all know were thought at the time to be poisonous. It seems—”
I stood up and blasted my whistle in his ear. “Train!”
SNAKES AND THE FAT MAN: THE CASE OF NERO WOLFE
The following—with some late emendations—is the introduction I wrote for the 1992 Bantam Books reissue of Fer-de-Lance, Nero Wolfe’s inaugural adventure, as it was written and submitted before editorial excisions were made. This is its first appearance in the form in which it was composed.
Series are seldom read in order. By the time the average reader discovers a continuing character the chronicle is usually well advanced, and except in the case of those dreary series whose titles are numbered prominently on the covers (to avoid confusion among the interchangeable plots), he has no way of knowing at what point in the saga the book he has just acquired takes place. This can cause distress, particularly if the next book he reads is an earlier entry in which the hero he knows as widowed appears with his wife, or having quit smoking and drinking, is seen puffing and guzzling happily away with no explanation for his relapse.
Rex Stout avoided this situation through the simple expedient of never changing his characters.
The Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin of A Family Affair, the forty-sixth (and last) book in the epoch of West Thirty-Fifth Street, are essentially the same thought-and-action team we met forty-two years earlier in Fer-de-Lance. And therein lies the secret of the magic.
Under the present technocracy, when even the nine-to-five ethic has come to seem medieval, we can find peace in the almost Edwardian order of life in the old brownstone: Plant rooms, nine to eleven a.m. and four to six p.m.; office, eleven a.m. to one fifteen p.m.; six p.m. to dinnertime (and after dinner if necessary), day in and day out, except Sunday. Like Holmes’s corpulent brother Mycroft—an uncle, perhaps? Stout is coy on this point—Wolfe “has his rails and he runs on them.” Nothing short of a major catastrophe, such as a submachine gun assault on the plant rooms (The Second Confession), can persuade him to alter that comfortable routine or, worse, leave home on business. Barring extreme circumstances, he will be found in those places at those hours in 1976 and 1934 and all the years between with all his virtues and vices intact. One wishes that family values and the U.S. dollar were to remain as stable.
The reader new to Wolfe and Goodwin may be surprised upon r
eading Fer-de-Lance to learn that it represents their debut. So many references are made to earlier adventures in such an offhand, familiar way by narrator Archie, and his abrasive relationship with his eccentric employer fits them so much like a beloved and well-worn suit of clothes, that the newcomer may be excused the assumption that he has encountered the canon in midstride. Throughout the book, and indeed throughout the series, the sense is acute that these two fixed planets and their satellites—laconic Theodore Horstmann, keeper of the orchids and protector of the faith, Fritz Brenner, the unflappable cook and major-domo, loyal and efficient bloodhounds Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and (sometimes) Orrie Cather, and the volcanic Inspector LT Cramer—exist beyond the margins of the page and that their lives do not start and stop with the first and last chapters. Has any other saga begun with a statement as casual as “There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day …”?
When Fer-de-Lance appeared, popular crime literature was divided between the manorial “English School” of puzzle mysteries and the two-fisted American urban variety that took its inspiration from the headlines of Prohibition and Depression. Now, more than eight decades later, that division still exists, but there is evidence that the two camps are drifting closer together as both the grim butler and the sadistic bootlegger fade further into history. From the start, Stout wedded the forms. Nero Wolfe, the eccentric genius swathed in his one-seventh of a ton, is a combination Sherlock Holmes in his more contemplative moments and Baroness Orczy’s sedentary Old Man in the Corner, while Archie Goodwin exemplifies the hardboiled, wisecracking “private dick” prevalent in pulp fiction. Consider this exchange:
WOLFE: “Your errand at White Plains was in essence a
primitive business enterprise: an offer to exchange
something for something else. If Mr. Anderson had
Nearly Nero Page 15
