Rex Stout - The Black Mountain

But what about Peter Zov?

All Wolfe had been told was that he would enter Italy at Gorizia Wednesday night, cross to Genoa by way of Padua and Milan, and be on the Basilia as a cabin steward by Thursday night. Wolfe had wanted to know what his name would be, but Stritar had said that would be decided after he got to Genoa. Of course we knew nothing about where Zov would get his name or his papers, or from whom, or how the fix was set up for him to replace a steward. We didn’t know how good the fix was, or whether it always worked or only sometimes. As we sat there in the cabin, we didn’t give a damn about any of that; all that was eating us was, was he on board or not? If he wasn’t, did we want to sail anyhow and hope he would come later? Didn’t we have to? If we abandoned ship just because Zov didn’t show up, wouldn’t that be a giveaway?

“There’s an hour left,” I said. “I’ll go and look around some more. Stewards are popping in and out everywhere.”

“Confound it.” Wolfe hit the chair arm with his fist. “We should have kept him with us.”

“Stritar would have smelled a rat if you had insisted on it, and anyway he wouldn’t buy it.”

“Pfui. What is ingenuity for? I should have managed it. I’m a dunce. I should have foreseen this and prevented it. By heaven, I won’t start back without him!”

There was a knock at the door, I said, “Come in,” it opened, and Peter Zov entered with our bags.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said in Serbo-Croat. He put the bags down and turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” Wolfe said. “There is something to say.”

“You can say it later. This is a busy time.”

“Just one word, then. Don’t go to any pains to keep us from hearing you speak English. Of course you do — some, at least — or you couldn’t be a cabin steward on this boat.”

“You’re smart,” he said in Serbo-Croat. “Okay,” he said in American, and went.

Wolfe told me to shut the door, and I did. When I turned back he had his eyes closed and was sighing, deep, and then again, deeper. He opened his eyes, looked at the bags and then at me, and told me what had been said.

“We ought to know his name,” I suggested.

“We will. Go on deck and watch the gangway. He might take it into his head to skedaddle.”

“Why should he?”

“He shouldn’t. But a man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable. Go.”

So I was on deck, at the rail, when we shoved off, and had a good look at the city stretching along the strip at the edge of the water and climbing the hills. The hills might have impressed me more if I hadn’t just returned from a jaunt in Montenegro. By the time we had cleared the outer harbor and were in open water most of my fellow passengers had gone below for lunch, and I decided that now was as good a time as any for getting a certain point settled.

I went back down to the cabin and told Wolfe, “It’s lunchtime. You’ve decided to stay put in this cabin all the way across, and you may be right. It’s not likely that there’s anyone on board who would recognize you, but it’s possible, and if it happened and it got around, as it would, the best that could result would be that you’d have to write another script. But we’re going to see a lot of each other in the next twelve days, not to mention the last six, and I think it would be bad policy for us to eat all our meals together in this nook.”

“So do I.”

“I’ll eat in the dining room.”

“By all means. I’ve already given Peter Zov my order for lunch.”

“What?” I stared. “Zov?”

“Certainly. He’s our steward.”

“Good God. He’ll bring all your meals and you’ll eat them?”

“Yes. It will be trying, and it won’t help my digestion, but it will have its advantages. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to discuss our plans.”

“And if he gets ideas and mixes in some arsenic?”

“Nonsense. Why should he?”

“He shouldn’t. But a man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable.”

“Go get your lunch.”

I went, and found that though eating in the dining room would provide a change, it would offer nothing spectacular in companionship. Table Seventeen seated six. One chair was empty and would be all the way, and the other four were occupied by a German who thought he could speak English but was mistaken, a woman from Maryland who spoke it too much, and a mother and daughter, Italian or something, who didn’t even know “dollar” and “okay” and “cigarette.” The daughter was seventeen, attractive, and almost certainly a smoldering volcano of Latin passion, but even if I had been in the humor to try stirring up a young volcano, which I wasn’t, mamma stayed glued to her all the way over.

During the twelve days there was plenty of time, of course, to mosey around and make acquaintances and chin at random, but by the third day I had learned that the only three likely prospects, not counting the volcano, were out. One, a black-eyed damsel with a lisp, was on her way to Pittsburgh to get married. Another, a tall slender Nordic who needed no makeup and used none, loved to play chess, and that was all. The third, a neat little blonde, started drinking Gibsons an hour before lunch and didn’t stop. One morning I decided to do some research in physiology and keep up with her, but late in the afternoon I saw that she was cheating. There were two of her, and they could both float around in the air. So I called it off, fought my way down to the cabin, and flopped on the bed. Wolfe shot me a glance but had no comment. In Genoa he had bought a few dozen books, all in Italian, and apparently had bet himself he would clean them up by the time we sighted Sandy Hook.

He and I did converse now and then during the voyage, but not too cordially, because of a basic difference of opinion. I completely disapproved of the plan which he wanted opportunity to discuss with Peter Zov. The argument had started in the hotel at Genoa and had continued, off and on, ever since. My first position had been that the way to handle it was to wait until we were well at sea, the second or third day, and then see the captain and tell him Zov had committed a murder in New York and had the weapon with him, and ask him to lock Zov up, and find his gun and take it, and radio Inspector Cramer of the New York Police Department to meet the boat at Quarantine. Wolfe had rejected it on the ground that the New York police had never heard of Zov and would probably radio the captain to that effect, and with nothing but our word, unsupported by evidence, the captain would refuse to act; and not only that, but also the captain, or someone he told about it, might warn Zov and even arrange somehow to get him off the ship before we reached American waters. On the high seas there was no jurisdiction but the captain’s. If not the captain himself, someone on board with some authority must be a Communist, or at least a friend of the Tito regime, or how could it be arranged to get Zov on as a steward whenever they wanted to?

So I took a new position. As soon as we entered the North River everyone on board, including the captain, would be under the jurisdiction of the New York police, and Wolfe could call Cramer on the ship-to-shore phone, give him the picture, and tell him to meet the boat at the pier. That way there couldn’t possibly be any slip. Even if the whole damn crew and half the officers were Commies, there was nothing they could do if Sergeant Stebbins once got his paws on Zov and the Luger.

Wolfe didn’t try to talk me out of that one; he just vetoed it, and that was the argument. It wasn’t only that he was pigheaded. It was his bloated conceit. He wanted to sit in his own chair at his desk in his office, with a bottle of beer and a glass in front of him, tell me to get Cramer on the phone, pick up his instrument, and say in a casual tone, “Mr. Cramer? I’ve just got home from a little trip. I have the murderer of Marko Vukcic here, and the weapon, and I can tell you where to get witnesses to testify that he was in New York on March eighteenth. Will you please send someone to get him? Oh, you’ll come yourself? At your convenience. Mr. Goodwin, who was with me on the trip, has him safely in charge.”