Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families (21 page)

I had done my arguing, double-quick, while he was speaking. To balk was out of the question. To stall and try to get an idea what the program really was would have been sappy. I got my keys out again, unlocked the bottom drawer, took off my jacket, got out the shoulder holster, slipped it on, and twisted my torso to reach for the buckle.

“What’s that for, woodchucks?” Christy asked.

“Just force of habit. Once I forgot to wear it and a guy in an elevator stepped on my toe. I had to cut his throat. If we’re in a hurry, come on.”

We went. Down at the curb, as I had noticed on my way in, force of habit again, was a dark blue Olds sedan, a fifty, with a cheerful-looking young man with a wide mouth, no hat, behind the wheel. He gave me an interested look as Christy and I got in
the back seat, but no words passed. The second the door slammed the engine started and the car went forward.

The Olds fifty is the only stock car that will top a hundred and ten, but we never reached half of that—up the West Side Highway, Saw Mill River, and Taconic State. The young man was a careful, competent, and considerate driver. There was not much conversation. When Christy took the report from his pocket and started reading it my first reaction was mild relief, on the ground that if I were about to die they wouldn’t give a damn what my last words were, but on second thought it seemed reasonable that he might be looking for more evidence for the prosecution, and I left the matter open.

It was a fine sunny day, not too hot, and everything looked very attractive. I hoped I would see many more days like it, in either town or country, I didn’t care which, though ordinarily I much prefer the city. But that day the country looked swell, and therefore I resented it when, as we were rolling along the Taconic State Parkway a few miles north of Hawthorne Circle, Christy suddenly commanded me, “Get down on the floor, face down.”

“Have a heart,” I protested. “I’m enjoying the scenery.”

“I’ll describe it to you. Shall we park for a talk?”

“How much time have we?”

“None to waste.”

“Okay, pull your feet back.”

The truth was, I was glad to oblige. Logic had stepped in. If that was intended for my last ride I wouldn’t ever be traveling that road again, and in that case what difference did it make if I saw where we turned off and which direction we went? There
must have been some chance that I would ride another day, and without a chaperon, or this stunt was pointless. So as I got myself into position, wriggling and adjusting to keep my face downward without an elbow or knee taking my weight, the worst I felt was undignified. I heard the driver saying something, in a soft quiet voice, and Christy answering him, but I didn’t catch the words.

There was no law against looking at my watch. I had been playing hide and seek, with me it, a little more than sixteen minutes, with the car going now slower and now faster, now straight and now turning left and now right, when finally it slowed down to a full stop. I heard a strange voice and then Christy’s, and the sound of a heavy door closing. I shifted my weight.

“Hold it,” Christy snapped at me. He was still right above me. “We’re a little early.”

“I’m tired of breathing dust,” I complained.

“It’s better than not breathing at all,” the strange voice said and laughed, not attractively.

“He’s got a gun,” Christy stated. “Left armpit.”

“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.”