Рекс Стаут - Gambit

Answering services are often a damned nuisance. If you ring a number and get no answer you can keep trying, but when you get an answering service all you can do is wait, and you don’t know if your message will be relayed; and if you keep ringing back, say every ten minutes, she gets sore and you can give odds that it won’t be relayed. That time, though, I had no kick coming. I had decided to start fidgeting at a quarter to twelve and to get the number again at midnight, so I was at ease in a chair with the Gazette when the phone rang at 11:20. I went and got it and told it hello.

“Who is this?” a voice demanded.

A question in that tone doesn’t deserve an answer, so I said, “Who wants to know?”

“I’m Victor Avery. Are you Archie Goodwin?”

“Right. I need to be sure it’s you, doctor, as much for your protection as for mine. You may remember that Tuesday evening you told Nero Wolfe the name of the gambit you used against Paul Jerin. What was it — the gambit?”

Brief silence. “The Albin Counter Gambit.”

“Okay. Is there any chance that anyone is on an extension at your end?”

“No.”

“I want to see you. It’s a long story, and I’ll just sketch it. I am no longer with Nero Wolfe. He fired me this afternoon. At six o’clock yesterday afternoon he sent me to put my eye on the entrance to Daniel Kalmus’s house and keep it there. When I reported to him this morning, after spending the night with the cops, I told him that I had seen no one enter or leave that I recognized. This afternoon he tore into me and made me admit that I had been away from my post for about an hour. So he gave me the boot.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Yeah. But the point is, I lied to him. I wasn’t away from my post. I was right there all evening, and I did see someone I recognized, entering and leaving. That’s what I want to discuss with you.”

“Why with me?”

“Well, you’ve had a lot of experience giving people advice. Doctors get asked about all sorts of things. I think I can get my job back if I go to Mr. Wolfe and tell him the truth, and I want to know if you would advise me to do that. I can’t put it off; if I do it at all I’ll have to do it tomorrow. So I’ll have to see you — say around noon? One o’clock?”

A longer silence. Then, and he managed his voice darned well: “I don’t believe a word of this. It’s some kind of clumsy trick. I’ll have nothing to do with it.”

“Okay. I’m sorry, but of course you’ll be sorrier than I am. Good night and pleasant dreams.”

I hung up, glanced at my watch, and went back to the chair and the paper. The only question was how long it would be. Half an hour? No. In exactly eighteen minutes the phone rang, and when I went and told it hello his voice came: “Goodwin?”

“Speaking. Who is this?”

“Victor Avery. On second thought I have decided I may be able to give you some good advice. Not at noon or one o’clock because I have appointments. The fact is, it would be difficult for me to make it before evening, around seven o’clock. The best place for a private conversation is in a car, and we can use mine. I’ll pick you up at some convenient—”

“Save it,” I cut in. It was time to get tough. “Do you think you’re dealing with a cluck? Listen, and get it. There’s a little restaurant, Piotti’s, P-i-o-t-t-i, on Thirteenth Street just east of Second Avenue, downtown side. I’ll be there, inside, expecting you, at one o’clock tomorrow. If you’re not there by one-fifteen I’ll go straight to Nero Wolfe. And I’ll go anyway if you don’t have with you one hundred thousand dollars in cash. Good night again.”

“Wait! That’s fantastic! I couldn’t possibly get any such amount. And why should I?”

“Forget the rhetoric. Bring as much as you can, and don’t make it peanuts, and maybe we can arrange about the rest. Now I’m going to bed and I don’t like to be disturbed. You have it? Piotti, Thirteenth Street east of Second Avenue?”

“Yes.”

“Better write it down.”

I hung up, straightened, and had a good stretch and yawn. On the whole I thought I had done about as well as Sally, but of course my part wasn’t finished. After another stretch I returned to the phone and asked the switchboard to get a number, and in a minute a voice came: “Nero Wolfe’s residence, Saul Panzer speaking.”

I falsettoed. “This is Liz Taylor. May I please speak to Archie?”

“Archie is out streetwalking, Miss Taylor. I’m just as good, in fact better.”

I normalized. “You are like hell. All set. One o’clock at Piotti’s. We’ll have a busy morning. Meet me for breakfast at eight o’clock in the Talbott restaurant.”

“No snags?”

“Not a snag. Like falling off a log. As I said to the subject, pleasant dreams.”

Getting ready for bed, as I buttoned my pajama jacket it occurred to me that the character who had done such a neat job with Kalmus might be capable of something really fancy, so after bolting the door I put the table against it and a chair on top. The windows were absolutely inaccessible without a rope down from the roof, and if he could manage that between midnight and seven A.M. he was welcome to me.

At ten minutes to one Friday afternoon I was seated at one of the small tables along the right wall of Piotti’s little restaurant, eating spaghetti with anchovy sauce and sipping red wine — and not the wine you’ll get if you go there. Wolfe had once got John Piotti out of a difficulty and hadn’t soaked him, and one result was that whenever I dropped in for a plate of the best spaghetti in New York I got, for sixty cents, a pint of the wine which John reserved for himself and three or four favorite customers, and which was somewhat better than what you paid eight bucks for at the Flamingo. Another result had been that back in 1958 John had let us use his premises for a setup for a trap, including running some wires through the cellar, coming up through the floor in the kitchen at one end, and up to one of the tables in the restaurant at the other end. That was the table I was sitting at.

The morning hadn’t been as busy as I had expected, chiefly because the wires running through the cellar were still there, intact, and when we tested them they were as good as new. We didn’t have to call in a technician at all. For the kitchen end Saul brought the tape recorder from the cupboard in Wolfe’s kitchen, and for the restaurant end I bought the latest model midget mike. That was the main cash outlay, $112.50 for the mike, a lot of lettuce for a mike, but it had to be good and it had to fit into the bowl of artificial flowers on the table. Of course the bowl had to be the same as those on the other tables, and we had a devil of a time making a hole in the bottom for the wires to come through. Against the risk that my table companion would take it into his head to move the bowl and find himself pulling wires up through a hole in the table, which would have stopped the show, we made two smaller holes in the bottom of the bowl and screwed it to the table. So if he tried to move it and it wouldn’t budge I could say, “By golly, Piotti doesn’t let the customers walk out with anything, does he?”

Everything was in order by half past eleven, well before the lunch hour, which is early in that neighborhood. Saul went to the kitchen, to stick there, since it was just possible that the subject might come for a look around in advance, and it wouldn’t do for him to catch sight of the man who had taken my job. I went to the Talbott, to learn if there were any messages for me. There weren’t. I phoned Wolfe that we were ready, and returned to Piotti’s at twelve-thirty. John had kept the table free, and I took it and began on the spaghetti and wine. At ten minutes to one the tables were pretty well filled with customers, and two of them were known to me. At the next table in front of me, seated facing me, was Fred Durkin, and at the next table but one back of me was Orrie Cather. I was facing the door. Very neat.