Rex Stout: The Black Mountain

When I returned to the office after letting him out I told Wolfe, “There are times when I wish I hadn’t been taught manners. It would have been a pleasure to kick his ass down the stoop.”

“Get them in here,” he growled. “We must find her.”

But we didn’t. We certainly tried. It is true that Stahl and Cramer had it on us in prerogatives and resources, but Fred Durkin knows how to dig, Orrie Cather is no slouch, Saul Panzer is the best operative north of the equator, and I have a good sense of smell. For the next six days we concentrated on picking up a trace of her, but we might as well have stayed up in my room and played pinochle. Not a glimmer. It was during that period that Wolfe made most of his long-distance calls to London and Paris and Bari. At the time I thought he was just expanding the bog to flounder in, and I still think he was merely making some wild stabs, but I have to admit it was Hitchcock in London and Bodin in Paris who finally put him onto Telesio in Bari; and if he hadn’t found Telesio we might still be looking for Carla and for the murderer of Marko. I also admit that I regard myself as the one for hunches around this joint, and I resent anyone horning in, even Wolfe. His part is supposed to be brainwork. However, what matters is that if he hadn’t got in touch with Telesio and talked with him forty bucks’ worth, in Italian, the Tuesday after Stahl’s visit, he would never have got the calls from Telesio.

There were three of them. The first one came Thursday afternoon while I was out tracking down a lead that Fred thought might get somewhere. When I got back to the office just before dinner Wolfe snapped at me, “Get them here this evening for new instructions.”

“Yes, sir.” I went to my desk, sat, and swiveled to face him. “Any for me?”

“We’ll see.” He was glowering. “I suppose you have to know. I had a call from Bari. It is now past midnight in Italy. Mrs. Britton arrived in Bari at noon and left a few hours later in a small boat to cross the Adriatic.”

I goggled. “How the hell did she get to Italy?”

“I don’t know. My informant may, but he thinks it necessary to use discretion on the phone. I am taking it that she’s there. For the present we shall keep it to ourselves. The new instructions for Saul and Fred and Orrie will be on the ground that it is more urgent to disclose the murderer than to find Mrs. Britton. As for—”

“Saul will smell it. He’ll know.”

“Let him. He won’t know where she is, and even if he did, no matter. Who is more trustworthy, Saul or you?”

“I would say Saul. I have to watch myself pretty close.”

“Yes. As for Mr. Cramer and Mr. Stahl, we owe them nothing. If they’re still looking for her they may find someone else.” He sighed way down, leaned back, and shut his eyes, presumably to try to devise a program for the hired help.

So the first call from Telesio didn’t stop operations, it merely changed the strategy. With the second one it was different. It came four days later, at two-thirty a.m. Monday. Of course it was half-past eight in the morning at Bari, but I was in no shape to manage that calculation as I yanked myself enough awake to realize that I hadn’t dreamed it — the phone was ringing. I rolled over and reached for it. When I heard that it was a call from Bari, Italy, for Mr. Nero Wolfe I told the operator to hold it, turned on the light, went and flipped the switch controlling the gong that splits the air if anyone steps within ten feet of the door of Wolfe’s room at night, and then descended one flight and knocked. His voice came, and I opened the door and entered and pushed the wall switch.

He made a magnificent mound under the electric blanket, lying there blinking at me. “Well?” he demanded.

“Phone call from Italy. Collect.”

He refuses to concede the possibility that he will ever be willing to talk on the phone while in bed, so the only instrument in his room is on a table over by a window. I went and switched it on. He pushed the blanket back, maneuvered his bulk around and up, made it over to the table in his bare feet, and took the phone. Even in those circumstances I was impressed by the expanse of his yellow pajamas.

I stood and listened to a lingo that I didn’t have in stock, but not for long. He didn’t even get his money’s worth, for it had been less than three minutes when he cradled the thing, gave me a dirty look, padded back to the bed, lowered himself onto its edge, and pronounced some word that I wouldn’t know how to spell.

He went on. “That was Signor Telesio. His discretion has been aggravated into obscurity. He said he had news for me, that was clear enough, but he insisted on coding it. His words, translated: ‘The man you seek is within sight of the mountain.’ He would not elucidate, and it would have been imprudent to press him.”

I said, “I’ve never known you to seek a man harder or longer than the guy who killed Marko. Does he know that?”

“Yes.”

“Then the only question is, which mountain?”

“It may safely be presumed that it is Lovchen — the Black Mountain, from which Montenegro got its name.”

“Is this Telesio reliable?”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s no problem. The guy that killed Marko is in Montenegro.”

“Thank you.” He twisted around, got his legs onto the bed and under the blanket, and flattened out, if that term may be used about an object with such a contour. Folding the end of the yellow sheet over the edge of the blanket, he pulled it up to his chin, turned on his side, said, “Put the light out,” and closed his eyes.

He was probably asleep before I got back upstairs.

That leaves four days of the three weeks to account for, and they were by far the worst of the whole stretch. It was nothing new that Wolfe was pigheaded, but that time he left all previous records way behind. He knew damn well the subject had got beyond his reach and he was absolutely licked, and the only intelligent thing to do was to hand it over to Cramer and Stahl, with a fair chance that it would get to the CIA, and, if they happened to have a tourist taking in the scenery in those parts, they might think it worth the trouble to give him an errand. Not only that, there were at least two VIPs in Washington, one of them in the State Department, whose ears were accessible to Wolfe on request.

But no. Not for that mule. When — on Wednesday evening, I think it was — I submitted suggestions as outlined above, he rejected them and gave three reasons. One, Cramer and Stahl would think he had invented it unless he named his informant in Bari, and he couldn’t do that. Two, they would merely nab Mrs. Britton if and when she returned to New York, and charge her with something and make it stick. Three, neither the New York police nor the FBI could reach to Yugoslavia, and the CIA wouldn’t be interested unless it tied in with their own plans and projects, and that was extremely unlikely.

Meanwhile — and this was really pathetic — he kept Saul and Fred and Orrie on the payroll and went through the motions of giving them instructions and reading their reports, and I had to go through with my end of the charade. I don’t think Fred and Orrie suspected they were just stringing beads, but Saul did, and Wolfe knew it. Thursday morning Wolfe told me it wouldn’t be necessary for Saul to report direct to him, that I could take it and relay it.

“No, sir,” I said firmly. “I’ll quit first. I’ll play my own part in the goddam farce if you insist on it, but I’m not going to try to convince Saul Panzer that I’m a halfwit. He knows better.”

I have no idea how long it might have gone on. Sooner or later Wolfe would have had to snap out of it, and I prefer to believe it would have been sooner. There were signs that he was beginning to give under the strain — for instance, the scene in the office the next morning, Friday, which I have described. As for me, I was no longer trying to needle him. I was merely offering him a chance to shake loose when I told him the memo from Cartright of Consolidated Products needed immediate attention and reminded him that Cartright had once paid a bill for twelve grand without a squeak, and it looked hopeful when he shoved the paperweight off the desk and dumped the mail in the wastebasket. I was deciding how to follow through and keep him going when the phone rang, and I would have liked to treat it as Wolfe had treated the mail. I turned and got it. A female voice asked me if I would accept a collect call from Bari, Italy, for Mr. Nero Wolfe, and I said yes and told Wolfe. He lifted his instrument.