Rex Stout: The Cop Killer

There were several reasons why I had no complaints as I walked along West Thirty-fifth Street that morning, approaching the stoop of Nero Wolfe’s old brownstone house. The day was sunny and sparkling, my new shoes felt fine after the two-mile walk, a complicated infringement case had been polished off for a big client, and I had just deposited a check in five figures to Wolfe’s account in the bank.

Five paces short of the stoop I became aware that two people, a man and a woman, were standing on the sidewalk across the street, staring either at the stoop or at me, or maybe both. That lifted me a notch higher, with the thought that while two rubbernecks might not put us in a class with the White House still it was nothing to sneeze at, until a second glance made me realize that I had seen them before. But where? Instead of turning up the steps I faced them, just as they stepped off the curb and started to me.

“Mr. Goodwin,” the woman said in a sort of gasping whisper that barely reached me.

She was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, young enough, kind of nice-looking and neat in a dark blue assembly-line coat. He was as dark as she was fair, not much bigger than her, with his nose slanting slightly to the left and a full wide mouth. My delay in recognizing him was because I had never seen him with a hat on before. He was the hat-and-coat-and-tie custodian at the barber shop I went to.

“Oh, it’s you, Carl—”

“Can we go in with you?” the woman asked in the same gasping whisper, and then I knew her too. She was also from the barber shop, a manicure. I had never hired her, since I do my own nails, but had seen her around and had heard her called Tina.

I looked down at her smooth white little face with its pointed chin and didn’t care for the expression on it. I glanced at Carl, and he looked even worse.

“What’s the matter?” I guess I was gruff. “Trouble?”

“Please not out here,” Tina pleaded. Her eyes darted left and right and back up at me. “We just got enough brave to go to the door when you came. We were thinking which door, the one down below or up the steps. Please let us in?”

It did not suit my plans. I had counted on getting a few little chores done before Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at eleven o’clock. There could be no profit in this.

“You told me once,” Carl practically whined, “that people in danger only have to mention your name.”

“Nuts. A pleasantry. I talk too much.” But I was stuck. “Okay, come in and tell me about it.”

I led the way up the steps and let us in with my key. Inside, the first door on the left of the long wide hall was to what we called the front room, not much used, and I opened it, thinking to get it over with in there, but Fritz was there, dusting, so I took them along to the next door and on into the office. After moving a couple of chairs so they would be facing me I sat at my desk and nodded at them impatiently. Tina had looked around swiftly before she sat.

“Such a nice safe room,” she said, “for you and Mr. Wolfe, two such great men.”

“He’s the great one,” I corrected her. “I just caddy. What’s this about danger?”

“We love this country,” Carl said emphatically. All of a sudden he started trembling, first his hands, then his arms and shoulders, then all over. Tina darted to him and grabbed his elbows and shook him, not gently, and said things to him in some language I wasn’t up on. He mumbled back at her and then got more vocal, and after a little the trembling stopped, and she returned to her chair.

“We do love this country,” she declared.

I nodded. “Wait till you see Chillicothe, Ohio, where I was born. Then you will love it. How far west have you been, Tenth Avenue?”

“I don’t think so.” Tina was doubtful. “I think Eighth Avenue. But that’s what we want to do, go west.” She decided it would help to let me have a smile, but it didn’t work too well. “We can’t go east, can we, into the ocean?” She opened her blue leather handbag and, with no fingering or digging, took something from it. “But you see, we don’t know where to go. This Ohio, maybe? I have fifty dollars here.”

“That would get you there,” I allowed.

She shook her head. “Oh, no. The fifty dollars is for you. You know our name, Vardas? You know we are married? So there is no question of morals, we are very high in morals, only all we want is to do our work and live in private, Carl and me, and we think—”

Having heard the clatter of Wolfe’s elevator descending from the plant rooms on the roof, I had known an interruption was coming but had let her proceed. Now she stopped as Wolfe’s steps sounded and he appeared at the door. Carl and Tina both bounced to their feet. Two paces in, after a quick glance at them, Wolfe stopped short and glowered at me.

“I didn’t tell you we had callers,” I said cheerfully, “because I knew you would be down soon. You know Carl, at the barber shop? And Tina, you’ve seen her there too. It’s all right, they’re married. They just dropped in to buy fifty bucks’ worth of—”

Without a word or even a nod, Wolfe turned all of his seventh of a ton and beat it out and toward the door to the kitchen at the rear. The Vardas family stared at the doorway a moment and then turned to me.

“Sit down,” I invited them. “As you said, he’s a great man. He’s sore because I didn’t notify him we had company, and he was expecting to sit there behind his desk” — I waved a hand — “and ring for beer and enjoy himself. He wouldn’t wiggle a finger for fifty dollars. Maybe I won’t either, but let’s see.” I looked at Tina, who was back on the edge of her chair. “You were saying …”

“We don’t want Mr. Wolfe mad at us,” she said in distress.

“Forget it. He’s only mad at me, which is chronic. What do you want to go to Ohio for?”

“Maybe not Ohio.” She tried to smile again. “It’s what I said, we love this country and we want to go more into it — far in. We would like to be in the middle of it. We want you to tell us where to go, to help us—”

“No, no.” I was brusque. “Start from here. Look at you, you’re both scared stiff. What’s the danger Carl mentioned?”

“I don’t think,” she protested, “it makes any difference—”

“That’s no good,” Carl said harshly. His hands started trembling again, but he gripped the sides of his chair seat, and they stopped. His dark eyes fastened on me. “I met Tina,” he said in a low level voice, trying to keep feeling out of it, “three years ago in a concentration camp in Russia. If you want me to I will tell you why it was that they would never have let us get out of there alive, not in one hundred years, but I would rather not talk so much about it. It makes me start to tremble, and I am trying to learn to act and talk of a manner so I can quit trembling.”

I concurred. “Save it for some day after you stop trembling. But you did get out alive?”

“Plainly. We are here.” There was an edge of triumph to the level voice. “I will not tell you about that either. But they think we are dead. Of course Vardas was not our name then, neither of us. We took that name later, when we got married in Istanbul. Then we so managed—”

“You shouldn’t tell any places,” Tina scolded him. “No places at all and no people at all.”

“You are most right,” Carl admitted. He informed me, “It was not Istanbul.”

I nodded. “Istanbul is out. You would have had to swim. You got married, that’s the point.”

“Yes. Then, later, we nearly got caught again. We did get caught, but—”

“No!” Tina said positively.