Rex Stout - The Black Mountain

Cramer rasped at Wolfe, “You said you intend to see that the murderer is caught and brought to account with the least possible delay. I don’t want to butt in, but I’ll just mention that the Police Department will be glad to help.”

Wolfe ignored the sarcasm, thanked him politely, and headed for the door.

On the way downtown in the cab I remarked that I had been pleased to note that no one had pronounced the name of Sue Dondero. Wolfe, on the edge of the seat, gripping the strap, set to jump for his life, made no reply.

“Though I must say,” I added, “there were enough of them without her. They’re not going to like it much. By noon tomorrow there’ll be thirty-five dicks, five to a candidate, working on that list. I mention it merely for your consideration, in case you are thinking of telling me to have all seven of them in the office at eleven in the morning.”

“Shut up,” he muttered.

Usually I react to that command vocally, but that time I thought it just as well to obey. When we rolled to the curb in front of the old brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street I paid the driver, got out and held the door for Wolfe, mounted the seven steps to the stoop, and opened the door with my key. After Wolfe had crossed the threshold I closed the door and put the chain bolt on, and when I turned Fritz was there and was telling Wolfe, “There’s a lady to see you, sir.”

It popped into my mind that it would save me a lot of trouble if they were going to drop in without being invited, but Fritz was adding, “It’s your daughter, Mrs. Britton.”

There was a faint suggestion of reproach in Fritz’s tone. For years he had disapproved of Wolfe’s attitude toward his adopted daughter. A dark-haired Balkan girl with an accent, she had appeared out of the blue one day long ago and proceeded to get Wolfe involved in an operation that had been no help to the bank account. When it was all over she had announced that she didn’t intend to return to her native land, but neither did she intend to take any advantage of the fact that she had in her possession a paper, dated in Zagreb years before, establishing her as the adopted daughter of Nero Wolfe. She had made good on both intentions, having got a job with a Fifth Avenue travel agency, and having, within a year, married its owner, one William R. Britton. No friction had developed between Mr. and Mrs. Britton and Mr. Wolfe, because for friction you must have contact, and there had been none. Twice a year, on her birthday and on New Year’s Day, Wolfe sent her a bushel of orchids from his choicest plants, but that was all, except that he had gone to the funeral when Britton died of a heart attack in 1950.

That was what Fritz disapproved of. He thought any man, even Nero Wolfe, should invite his daughter, even an adopted one, to dinner once in a while. When he expressed that opinion to me, as he did occasionally, I told him that he knew damn well that Carla found Wolfe as irritating as he found her, so what was the use?

I followed Wolfe into the office. Carla was in the red leather chair. As we entered she got up to face us and said indignantly, “I’ve been waiting here over two hours!”

Wolfe went and took her hand and bowed over it. “At least you had a comfortable chair,” he said courteously, and went to the one behind his desk, the only one in the world he thoroughly approved of, and sat. Carla offered me a hand with her mind elsewhere, and I took it without bowing.

“Fritz didn’t know where you were,” she told Wolfe.

“No,” he agreed.

“But he said you knew about Marko.”

“Yes.”

“I heard it on the radio. I was going to go to the restaurant to see Leo, then I thought I would go to the police, and then I decided to come here. I suppose you were surprised, but I wasn’t.”

She sounded bitter. She looked bitter too, but I had to admit it didn’t make her any less attractive. With her dark eyes flashing, she might still have been the young Balkan damsel who had bounded in on me years before.

Wolfe’s eyes had narrowed at her. “If you are saying that you came here and waited two hours for me on account of Marko’s death, I must ask why. Were you attached to him?”

“Yes.”

Wolfe shut his eyes.

“If I know,” she said, “what that word means — attached. If you mean attached as a woman to a man, no, of course not. Not like that.”

Wolfe opened his eyes. “Then how?”

“We were attached in our devotion to a great and noble cause! The freedom of our people! And your people! And there you sit making faces! Marko has told me — he has asked you to help us with your brains and your money, and you refused!”

“He didn’t tell me you were in it. He didn’t mention you.”

“I suppose not.” She was scornful. “He knew that would make you sneer even more. Here you are, rich and fat and happy with your fine home and fine food and your glass rooms on the roof with ten thousand orchids for you to smirk at, and with this Archie Goodwin for a slave to do all the work and take all the danger! What do you care if the people of the land you came from are groaning under the heel of the oppressor, with the light of their liberty smothered and the fruits of their labor snatched from them and their children at the point of the sword? Stop making faces! ”

Wolfe leaned back and sighed deeply. “Apparently,” he said dryly, “I must give you a lecture. I grimaced neither at your impudence nor at your sentiment, but at your diction and style. I condemn clichés, especially those that have been corrupted by fascists and communists. Such phrases as ‘great and noble cause’ and ‘fruits of their labor’ have been given an ineradicable stink by Hitler and Stalin and all their vermin brood. Besides, in this century of the overwhelming triumph of science, the appeal of the cause of human freedom is no longer that it is great and noble; it is more or less than that; it is essential. It is no greater or nobler than the cause of edible food or the cause of effective shelter. Man must have freedom or he will cease to exist as man. The despot, whether fascist or communist, is no longer restricted to such puny tools as the heel or the sword or even the machine gun; science has provided weapons that can give him the planet; and only men who are willing to die for freedom have any chance of living for it.”

“Like you?” She was disdainful. “No. Like Marko. He died.”

Wolfe flapped a hand. “I’ll get to Marko. As for me, no one has ordained you as my monitor. I make my contributions to the cause of freedom — they are mostly financial — through those channels and agencies that seem to me most efficient. I shall not submit a list of them for your inspection and judgment. I refused to contribute to Marko’s project because I distrusted it. Marko was himself headstrong, gullible, oversanguine, and naïve. He had—”

“For shame! He’s dead, and you insult—”

“That will do!” he roared. It stopped her. He went down a few decibels. “You share the common fallacy, but I don’t. I do not insult Marko. I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death. He had no understanding of the forces he was trying to direct from a great distance, no control of them, and no effective check on their honor or fidelity. For all he knew, some of them may be agents of Tito, or even of Moscow—”

“That isn’t true! He knew all about them — anyway, the leaders. He wasn’t an idiot, and neither am I. We do check on them, all the time, and I — Where are you going?”

Wolfe had shoved his chair back and was on his feet. “You may not be an idiot,” he told her, “but I am. I was letting this become a pointless brawl when I should have known better. I’m hungry. I was in the middle of dinner when the news came of Marko’s death. It took my appetite. I tried to finish anyway, but I couldn’t swallow. With an empty stomach, I’m a dunce, and I’m going to the kitchen and eat something.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “It’s nearly two o’clock. Will you join me?”