Rex Stout - Too Many Cooks

“I beg you, sir. Don’t. I won’t listen. If I offend by being curt, very well. Anyone has the privilege of offending who is willing to bear the odium. I will consider no engagement that might detain me in this parasitic outpost beyond to-morrow night. You said ‘jobs.’ Is there anything else you wish to discuss?”

“There was.” Liggett looked as if he would prefer to continue the discussion with shrapnel or a machine gun. He sat and stared at Wolfe a while, then finally shrugged it off. He said, “The fact is, the main job is something quite different. The main thing I came down here for. Laszio is dead, and the way he died was terrible, and as a man I have, I hope, the proper feelings about it, but in addition to being a man I’m a business man, and the Hotel Churchill is left without a chef de cuisine. You know the Churchill’s worldwide reputation, and it has to be maintained. I want to get Jerome Berin.”

Wolfe’s brows went up. “I don’t blame you.”

“Of course you don’t. There are a few others as good as Berin, but they’re out. Mondor wouldn’t leave his Paris restaurant. Servan and Tassone are too old. I wouldn’t mind having Leon Blanc back, but he is also too old. Vukcic is tied up at Rusterman’s, and so on. I happen to know that Berin has received five offers from this country, two of them from New York, in the past two years, and has turned them all down. I’d like to have him. In fact, he’s the only one that I consider both available and desirable. If I can’t get him, Malfi can put a blue ribbon on his cap.” He turned to his companion. “Is that in accord with our agreement, Albert? When you got that offer from Chicago a year ago, I told you that if you would stick, and the position of chef de cuisine at the Churchill should become vacant, I would first try to get Berin, and if I couldn’t, you could have it. Right?”

Malfi nodded. “That was the understanding.”

Wolfe murmured, “This is all very interesting. But you were speaking of a job-”

“Yes. I want you to approach Berin for me. He’s one of the best seven chefs in the world, but he’s hard to handle. Last Saturday he deliberately spilled two plates of sausage in the middle of the carpet in my Resort Room. Williamson says you have remarkable ability as a negotiator, and you are the guest of honor here and Berin will listen to you with respect, and I believe unquestionably you can swing him. I would offer him forty thousand, but I tell you frankly I am willing to go to sixty, and your commission-”

Wolfe was showing him a palm. “Please, Mr. Liggett. It’s no go. Absolutely out of the question.”

“You mean you won’t do it?”

“I mean I wouldn’t undertake to persuade Mr. Berin to do anything whatever. I would as soon try to persuade a giraffe. I could elaborate-but I can’t see that I owe you that.”

“You won’t even attempt it?”

“I will not. The truth is, you have come to me at the most inauspicious moment in the past twenty years, and with proposals much more likely to vex me than to interest me. I don’t care a hang who your new chef will be, and while I always like to make money, that can wait until I am back in my office. There are others here better qualified to approach Mr. Berin for you than I am-Mr. Servan or Mr. Coyne, for instance, old friends of his.”

“They’re chefs themselves. I don’t want that. You’re the man to do it for me…”

He was a persistent cuss, but it didn’t get him anywhere. When he tried to insist Wolfe merely got curter, as he naturally would, and finally Liggett realized he was calling the wrong dog and gave it up. He popped up out of his chair, snapped at Malfi to come along, and without any ceremony showed Wolfe his back. Malfi trotted behind, and I followed them to the hall to see that the door was locked after them.

When I got back to the room, Wolfe was already behind his paper again. I felt muscle-bound and not inclined to settle down, so I said to him, “You know, Werowance, that’s not a bad idea-”

A word he didn’t know invariably got him. The paper went down to the level of his nose. “What the devil is that? Did you make it up?”

“I did not. I got it from a piece in the Charleston Journal . Werowance is a term that was used for an Indian Chief in Virginia and Maryland. I’m going to call you Werowance instead of Boss as long as we’re in this part of the country. As I was saying, Werowance, it might be a good idea to start an employment bureau for chefs and waiters, maybe later branch out into domestic help generally. You are aware, I suppose, that you have just turned down a darned good offer for a case. That Liggett has really got it in quantities. I suspect he may be half bright too; for instance, do you imagine he might have come to see you in order to let Alberto know indirectly that if he tried sticking something into Berin in order to make Berin ineligible for the Churchill job, it would have deplorable consequences? Which opens up a train of thought that might solve the unemployment question. If a job becomes vacant and you want it, first you kill all the other candidates and then-”

The paper was up again, so I knew I had made myself sufficiently obnoxious. I said, “I’m going out and wade in the brook, and maybe go to the hotel and ruin a few girls. See you later.”

I got my hat, hung up the DO NOT DISTURB, and wandered out, noting that there was a greenjacket at the door of the main hall but no cop. Apparently vigilance was relaxed. I turned my nose to the hotel, just to see what there was to see, and it wasn’t long before I regretted that, for if I hadn’t gone to the hotel first I would have got to see the whole show that my friend Tolman was putting on, instead of arriving barely in time for the final curtain. As it was, I found various sights around the hotel entrance and lobby that served for mild diversion, including an intelligent-looking horse stepping on a fat dowager’s foot so hard they had to carry her away, and it was around 3:30 when I decided to make an excursion to Pocahontas Pavilion and thank Vukcic, my host, for the good time I was having. In a secluded part of the path a guy with his necktie over his shoulder and needing a shave jumped out from behind a bush and grabbed my elbow, talking as he came: “Hey, you’re Archie Goodwin, aren’t you, Nero Wolfe’s man? Listen, brother-”

I shook him off and told him, “Damn it, quit scaring people. I’ll hold a press conference tomorrow morning in my study. I don’t know a thing, and if I did and told you I’d get killed by my werowance. Do you know what a werowance is?”

He told me to go to hell and started looking for another bush.

The tableau at Pocahontas Pavilion was in two sections when I got there. The first section, not counting the pair of troopers standing outside the entrance, was in the main hall. The greenjacket who opened the door for me was looking popeyed in another direction as he pulled it open. The door to the large parlor was closed. Standing with her back against the right wall, with her arms folded tight against her and her chin up, and her dark purple eyes flashing at the guys who hemmed her in, was Constanza Berin. The hemmers were two state cops in uniform and a hefty bird in cits with a badge on his vest, and while they weren’t actually touching her at the moment I entered, it looked as though they probably had been. She didn’t appear to see me. A glance showed me that the door to the small parlor was open, and a voice was coming through. As I started for it one of the cops called a sharp command to me, but it seemed likely he was too occupied to interfere in person, so I ignored it and went on.