Rex Stout - The Silent Speaker (Crime Line)

Saturday noon the blow fell-the one I had been expecting ever since the charade started, and the one Vollmer was leery about. It landed via the telephone, a call from Rowcliffe at twenty past twelve. I was alone in the office when the bell rang, and I was even more alone when it was over and I hung up. I took the stairs two at a time, unlocked Wolfe’s door, entered and announced:

“Okay, Pagliaccio, luck is with us at last. You are booked for the big time. An eminent neurologist named Green, hired by the City of New York and equipped with a court order, will arrive to give you an audition at a quarter to six.” I glared down at him and demanded, “Now what? If you try to bull it through I resign as of sixteen minutes to six.”

“So.” Wolfe closed his book with a finger in it. “This is what we’ve been fearing.” He made the book do the split on the black coverlet. “Why must it be today? Why the devil did you agree on an hour?”

“Because I had to! Who do you think I am, Joshua? They wanted to make it right now, and I did the best I could. I told them your doctor had to be present and he couldn’t make it until after dinner this evening, nine o’clock. They said it had to be before six o’clock and they wouldn’t take no. Damn it, I got an extra five hours and I had to fight for it!”

“Quit yelling at me.” His head went back to the pillow. “Go back downstairs. I’m going to have to think.”

I stood my ground. “Do you actually mean you haven’t got it figured out what to do? When I’ve warned you it would come any minute ever since Thursday morning?”

“Archie. Get out of here. How can I put my mind on it with you standing there bellowing?”

“Very well. I’ll be in the office. Call me when you get around to it.”

I went out, shut the door and locked it, and descended. In the office the phone was ringing. It was only Winterhoff, inquiring after my employer’s health.

Chapter 33

I TRY, AS I go along, not to leave anything essential out of this record, and, since I’m telling it, I regard my own state of mind at various stages as one of the essentials. But for that two hours on Saturday, from twelve-thirty to two-thirty, my state of mind was really not fit to be recorded for family reading. I have a vague recollection that I ate lunch twice, though Fritz politely insists that he doesn’t remember it that way. He says that Wolfe’s lunch was completely normal as far as he knows-tray taken upstairs full at one o’clock and brought down empty an hour later-and that nothing struck him as abnormal except that Wolfe was too preoccupied to compliment him on the omelet. What made me use up a month’s supply of profanity in a measly two hours was not that all I could see ahead was ignominious surrender. That was a hard dose but by no means fatal. The hell of it was, as I saw it, that we were being bombed out of a position that no one but a maniac would ever have occupied in the first place. I had a right to assume, now that I was reading the reports from Bill Gore and Bascom’s men, that I knew exactly what was going on in every sector except the one that was occupied by Saul Panzer, and it was impossible to imagine what Saul could be doing that could justify, let alone necessitate, the gaudy and spectacular stunt Wolfe was indulging in. When Saul phoned in at two o’clock I had a notion to tackle him and try to open him up, but I knew it would be hopeless and put him through to the bedroom. On any list of temptations I have resisted, that one goes first. I was tingling from head to foot with the desire to listen in. But a part of the understanding between Wolfe and me is that I never violate instructions except when circumstances unknown to him, as interpreted by my best judgment, require it, and I couldn’t kid myself that that applied here. My instructions were that Saul Panzer was out of bounds for me until further notice, and I put the thing on the cradle and walked up and down with my hands in my pockets.

Other phone calls came, it doesn’t matter what, and I did violate another instruction, the one to receive any and all callers. Circumstances certainly justified that. I was in the kitchen helping Fritz sharpen knives, I suppose on the principle that in times of crisis we instinctively seek the companionship of fellow creatures, when the bell rang and I went to the front door, fingered the curtain aside for a peek, and saw Breslow. I opened the door a crack and barked through at him:

“No admittance this is a house of mourning beat it!”

I banged the door and started back to the kitchen, but didn’t make it. Passing the foot of the stairs I became aware of sound and movement, and stopping to look up I saw what was making it. Wolfe, covered with nothing but the eight yards of yellow silk it took to make him a suit of pajamas, was descending. I goggled at him. If nothing else, it was unprecedented for him to move vertically except with the elevator.

“How did you get out?” I demanded.

“Fritz gave me a key.” He came on down, and I noted that at least he had put his slippers on. He commanded me, “Get Fritz and Theodore in the office at once.”

I had never before seen him outside his room in deshabille. It was obviously an extreme emergency. I swung the kitchen door open and spoke to Fritz and then went to the office, buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone, and told Theodore to make it snappy. By the time Theodore trotted down and in, Wolfe was seated behind his desk and Fritz and I were standing by.

“How are you, Theodore? I haven’t seen you for three days.”

“I’m all right, thank you, sir. I’ve missed you.”

“No doubt.” Wolfe’s glance went from him to Fritz, then to me, and he said slowly and clearly, “I am a brainless booby.”

“Yes, sir,” I said cordially.

He frowned. “So are you, Archie. Neither of us has any right, henceforth, to pretend possession of the mental processes of an anthropoid. I include you because you heard what I said to Mr. Hombert and Mr. Skinner. You have read the reports from Mr. Bascom’s men. You know what’s going on. And by heaven, it hasn’t occurred to you that Miss Gunther was alone in this office for a good three minutes, nearer four or five, when you brought her here that evening! And it occurred to me only just now! Pfui! And I have dared for nearly thirty years to exercise my right to vote!” He snorted. “I have the brain of a mollusk!”

“Yeah.” I was staring at him. I remembered, of course, that when I had brought Phoebe that Friday night I had left her in the office and gone to the kitchen to get him. “So you think-”

“No. I am through pretending to think. This makes it untenable. – Fritz and Theodore, a young woman was in here alone four minutes. She had, in her pocket or her bag, an object she wanted to hide-a black cylinder three inches in diameter and six inches long. She didn’t know how much time she would have; someone might enter any moment. On the assumption that she hid it in this room, find it. Knowing the quality of her mind, I think it likely that she hid it in my desk. I’ll look there myself.”

He shoved his chair back and dived to pull open a bottom drawer. I was at my own desk, also opening drawers. Fritz asked me, “What do we do, divide it in sections?”

“Divide hell,” I told him over my shoulder. “Just start looking.”