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Рекс Стаут: In the Best Families

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Рекс Стаут In the Best Families

In the Best Families: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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In both And Be a Villain and The Second Confession, Nero Wolfe had sharp but long-distance encounters with a certain powerful mystery man of crime named Zeck. That Zeck was a blackmailer was obvious. That he was perhaps the most potent and utterly ruthless of all underworld characters seemed more than possible. These episodes hinted that in some future book Zeck would play a leading role — and now he does, in this new full-length novel. It all begins when a woman whose homeliness is exceeded only by her wealth brings to Nero the problem of discovering where her handsome husband has been getting the money she refused him. Next, Nero answers his phone and Zeck, on the other end, says, “Lay off this case.” Nero once told Archie that it he ever had to come to grips with Zeck, he would disappear first so as not to endanger Archie, his orchid plants, or his house in lower Manhattan, and Nero is a man of his word. Where Nero went, what happened in his absence, how he came back, and the manner of his coming are as fine a combination of outright drama and downright hilarity as was ever put together in a novel of crime. One of the corollary mysteries of this book is: how the devil is even Rex Stout ever going to top it?

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I arose, returned to the office on my feet, and told them, “Gas. Tear gas, I think. The hissing has stopped.”

Wolfe snorted.

“No sausage,” Fritz said grimly.

“If it had been a trigger job on a grenade,” I told him, “there would have been plenty of sausage. Not for us, of us. Now it’s merely a damn nuisance. You’d better sit here and chat a while.”

I marched to the hall and shut the door behind me, went and opened the front door wide, came back and stood at the kitchen door and took a full breath, opened the door, raced through and opened the back door into the courtyard, ran back again to the front. Even there the air current was too gassy for comfort, so I moved out to the stoop. I had been there only a moment when I heard my name called.

“Archie!”

I turned. Wolfe’s head with its big oblong face was protruding from a window of the front room.

“Yes, sir,” I said brightly.

“Who brought that package?”

I told him Fleet Messenger Service.

When the breeze through the hall had cleared the air I returned to the kitchen and Fritz joined me. We gave the package a look and found it was quite simple: a metal cylinder with a valve, with a brass rod that had been adjusted so that when the package was opened so was the valve. There was still a strong smell, close up, and Fritz took it to the basement. I went to the office and found Wolfe behind his desk, busy at the phone.

I dropped into my chair and dabbed at my runny eyes with my handkerchief. When he hung up I asked, “Any luck?”

“I didn’t expect any,” he growled.

“Right. Shall I call a cop?”

“No.”

I nodded. “The question was rhetorical.” I dabbed at my eyes some more, and blew my nose. “Nero Wolfe does not call cops. Nero Wolfe opens his own packages of sausage and makes his own enemies bite the dust.” I blew my nose again. “Nero Wolfe is a man who will go far if he opens one package too many. Nero Wolfe has never—”

“The question was not rhetorical,” Wolfe said rudely. “That is not what rhetorical means.”

“No? I asked it. I meant it to be rhetorical. Can you prove that I don’t know what rhetorical means?” I blew my nose. “When you ask me a question, which God knows is often, do I assume—”

The phone rang. One of the million things I do to earn my salary is to answer it, so I did. And then a funny thing happened. There is absolutely no question that it was a shock to me to hear that voice, I know that, because I felt it in my stomach. But partly what makes a shock a shock is that it is unexpected, and I do not think the sound of that voice in my ear was unexpected. I think that Wolfe and I had been sitting there talking just to hear ourselves because we both expected, after what had happened, to hear that voice sooner or later — and probably sooner.

What it said was only, “May I speak to Mr. Wolfe, please?”

I felt it in my stomach, sharp and strong, but damned if I was going to let him know it. I said, but not cordially, “Oh, hello there, if I get you. Was your name Duncan once?”

“Yes. Mr. Wolfe, please.”

“Hold the wire.” I covered the transmitter and told Wolfe, “Whosis.”

“Who?” he demanded.

“You know who from my face. Mr. X. Mr. Z. Him.”

With his lips pressed tight, Wolfe reached for his phone. “This is Nero Wolfe.”

“How do you do, Mr. Wolfe.” I was staying on, and the hard, cold, precise voice sounded exactly as it had the four previous times I had heard it, over a period of three years. It pronounced all its syllables clearly and smoothly. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes.” Wolfe was curt. “What do you want?”

“I want to call your attention to my forbearance. That little package could have been something really destructive, but I preferred only to give you notice. As I told you about a year ago, it’s a more interesting world with you in it.”

“I find it so,” Wolfe said dryly.

“No doubt. Besides, I haven’t forgotten your brilliant exposure of the murderer of Louis Rony. It happened then that your interest ran with mine. But it doesn’t now, with Mrs. Barry Rackham, and that won’t do. Because of my regard for you, I don’t want you to lose a fee. Return her money and withdraw, and two months from today I shall send you ten thousand dollars in cash. Twice previously you have disregarded similar requests from me, and circumstances saved you. I advise strongly against a repetition. You will have to understand—”

Wolfe took the phone from his ear and placed it on the cradle. Since the effect of that would be lost if my line stayed open, I did likewise, practically simultaneously.

“By God, we’re off again,” I began. “Of all the rotten—”

“Shut up,” Wolfe growled.

I obeyed. He rested his elbows on his chair arms, interlaced his fingers in front of where he was roundest, and gazed at a corner of his desk blotter. I did not, as a matter of fact, have anything to say except that it was a lousy break, and that didn’t need saying. Wolfe had once ordered me to forget that I had ever heard the name Arnold Zeck, but whether I called him Zeck or Whosis or X, he was still the man who, some ten months ago, had arranged for two guys with an SM and a tommy gun to open up on Wolfe’s plant rooms from a roof across the street, thereby ruining ten thousand dollars’ worth of glass and equipment and turning eight thousand valuable orchid plants into a good start on a compost heap. That had been intended just for a warning.

Now he was telling us to lay off of Barry Rackham. That probably meant that without turning a finger we had found the answer to Mrs. Rackham’s question — where was her husband getting his pocket money? He had got inside the circle of Arnold Zeck’s operations, about which Wolfe had once remarked that all of them were illegal and some of them were morally repulsive. And Zeck didn’t want any snooping around one of his men. That was almost certainly the sketch, but whether it was or not, the fact remained that we had run smack into Zeck again, which was fully as bad as having a gob of Darst sausage turn into a cylinder of tear gas.

“He likes to time things right, damn him,” I complained. “He likes to make things dramatic. He had someone within range of this house to see the package being delivered, and when I left the front door open and then went and stood on the stoop that showed that the package had been opened, and as soon as he got the word he phoned. Hell, he might even—”

I stopped because I saw that I was talking to myself. Wolfe wasn’t hearing me. He still sat gazing at the corner of the blotter. I shut my trap and sat and gazed at him. It was a good five minutes before he spoke.

“Archie,” he said, looking at me.

“Yes, sir.”

“How many cases have we handled since last July?”

“All kinds? Everything? Oh, forty.”

“I would have thought more. Very well, say forty. We crossed this man’s path inadvertently two years ago, and again last year. He and I both deal with crime, and his net is spread wide, so that may be taken as a reasonable expectation for the future: once a year, or in one out of forty cases that come to us, we will run into him. This episode will be repeated.” He aimed a thumb at the phone. “That thing will ring, and that confounded voice will presume to dictate to us. If we obey the dictate we will be maintaining this office and our means of livelihood only by his sufferance. If we defy it we shall be constantly in a state of trepidant vigilance, and one or both of us will probably get killed. Well?”

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