Rex Stout: Too Many Cooks

Constanza said, “I’m so sorry it’s night. I could be looking out and seeing America. Is it rocky-I mean, is it the Rocky Mountains?”

Tolman didn’t laugh. I didn’t bother to glance to see if he was looking at the purple eyes; I knew that must be it. He told her no, the Rocky Mountains were 1500 miles away, but that it was nice country we were going through. He said he had been in Europe three times, but that on the whole there was nothing there, except of course the historical things, that could compare with the United States. Right where he lived, in West Virginia, there were mountains that he would be willing to put alongside Switzerland and let anyone take their pick. He had never seen anything anywhere as beautiful as is native valley, especially the spot in it where they had built Kanawha Spa, the famous resort. That was in his county.

Constanza exclaimed, “But that’s where I’m going! Of course it is! Kanawha Spa!”

“I… I hope so.” His cheek showed red. “I mean, three of these pullmans are Kanawha Spa cars, and I thought it likely… I thought it possible I might have a chance of meeting you, though of course I’m not in the social life there…”

“And then we met on the train. Of course, I won’t be there very long. But since you think it’s nicer than Europe, I can hardly wait to see it, but I warn you I love San Remo and the sea. I suppose on your trips to Europe you take your wife and children along?”

“Oh, now!” He was groggy. “Now, really! Do I look old enough to have a wife and children?”

I thought, you darned nut, cover up that chin! My milk was finished. I stood up.

“If you folks will excuse me, I’ll go and make sure my boss hasn’t fallen off the train. I’ll come back soon, Miss Berin, and take you to your father. You can’t be expected to learn the knack of acting like the American girls the first day out.”

Neither of them broke into tears to see me go.

In the first car ahead I met Jerome Berin striding down the passage. He stopped and of course I had to.

He roared, “My daughter? Vukcic left her!”

“She’s perfectly all right.” I thumbed to the rear. “She’s back in the club car talking with a friend of mine I introduced to her. Is Mr. Wolfe okay?”

“Okay? I don’t know. I just left him.”

He brushed past me and I went on.

Wolfe was alone in the room, still on the seat, the picture of despair, gripping with his hands, his eyes wide open. I stood and surveyed him.

I said, “See America first. Come and play with us in vacationland! Not a draft on the train and sailing like a gull!”

He said, “Shut up!”

He couldn’t sit there all night. The time had come when it must be done. I rang the bell for the porter to do the bed. Then I went up to him-but no. I remember in an old novel I picked up somewhere it described a lovely young maiden going into her bedroom at night and putting her lovely fingers on the top button of her dress and then it said, “But now we must leave her. There are some intimacies which you and I, dear reader, must not venture to violate; some girlish secrets which we must not betray to the vulgar gaze. Night has drawn its protecting veil; let us draw ours!”

Okay by me.

2

I SAID, “I wouldn’t have thought this was a job for a house dick, watching for a kid to throw stones. Especially a ritzy house dick like you.”

Gershom Odell spit through his teeth at a big fern ten feet away from where we sat on a patch of grass. “It isn’t. But I told you. These birds pay from fifteen to fifty bucks a day to stay at this caravansary and to write letters on Kanawha Spa stationery, and they don’t like to have niggers throwing stones at them when they go horseback riding. I didn’t say a kid, I said a nigger. They suspect it was one that got fired from the garage about a month ago.”

The warm sun was on me through a hole in the trees, and I yawned. I asked, to show I wasn’t bored, “You say it happened about here?”

He pointed. “Over yonder, from the other side of the path. It was old Crisler that got it both times, you know, the fountain pen Crisler, his daughter married Ambassador Willetts.”

There were sounds from down the way. Soon the hoofbeats were plainer, and in a minute a couple of genteel but good-looking horses came down the path from around a curve, and trotted by, close enough so that I could have tripped them with a fishing pole. On one of them was a dashing chap in a loud-checked jacket, and on the other a dame plenty old and fat enough to start on service to others any time the spirit moved her.

Odell said, “That was Mrs. James Frank Osborn, the Baltimore Osborn, ships and steel, and Dale Chatwin, a good bridge player on the make. See him worry his horse? He can’t ride worth a damn.”

“Yeah? I didn’t notice. You sure are right there on the social list.”

“Got to be, on this job.” He spit at the fern again, scratched the back of his head, and plucked a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth. “I guess nine out of ten that come to this joint, I know ’em without being told. Of course sometimes there’s strangers. For instance, take your crowd. Who the hell are they? I understand they’re a bunch of good cooks that the chef invited. Looks funny to me. Since when was Kanawha Spa a domestic science school?”

I shook my head. “Not my crowd, mister.”

“You’re with ’em.”

“I’m with Nero Wolfe.”

“He’s with ’em.”

I grinned. “Not this minute, he ain’t. He’s in Suite 60, on the bed fast asleep. I think I’ll have to chloroform him Thursday to get him on the train home.” I stretched in the sun. “At that, there’s worse things than cooks.”

“I suppose so,” he admitted. “Where do they all come from, anyway?”

I pulled a paper from my pocket-a page I had clipped from the magazine section of the Times -and unfolded it and glanced at the list again before passing it across to him:

LES QUINZE MAITRES

Jerome Berin, the Corridona, San Remo.

Leon Blanc, the Willow Club, Boston.

Ramsey Keith, Hotel Hastings, Calcutta.

Phillip Laszio, Hotel Churchill, New York.

Domenico Rossi, Empire Cafe, London.

Pierre Mondor, Mondor’s, Paris.

Marko Vukcic, Rusterman’s Restaurant, New York.

Sergei Vallenko, Chateau Montcalm, Quebec.

Lawrence Coyne, The Rattan, San Francisco.

Louis Servan, Kanawha Spa, West Virginia.

Ferid Khaldah, Cafe de l’Europe, Istanbul.

Henri Tassone, Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo.

DECEASED:

Armand Fleury, Fleury’s, Paris.

Pasquale Donofrio, the Eldorado, Madrid.

Jacques Raleine, Emerald Hotel, Dublin.

Odell took a look at the extent of the article, made no offer to read it, and then went over the names and addresses with his head moving slowly back and forth. He grunted. “Some bunch of names. You might think it was a Notre Dame football team. How’d they get all the press? What does that mean at the top, less quinzy something?”