Rex Stout - In the Best Families

There was no law against looking at my watch. I had been playing hide and seek, with me it, a little more than sixteen minutes, with the car going now slower and now faster, now straight and now turning left and now right, when finally it slowed down to a full stop. I heard a strange voice and then Christy's, and the sound of a heavy door closing. I shifted my weight.

“Hold it, Christy snapped at me. He was still right above me. “We're a little early.

“I'm tired of breathing dust, I complained.

“It's better than not breathing at all, the strange voice said and laughed, not attractively.

“He's got a gun, Christy stated. “Left armpit.

“Why not? He's a licensed eye. We'll take care of it.

I looked at my watch, but it was too dark to see the hands, so of course we were in out of the sun. The driver had got out, shut the car door, and walked away, if I was any good at reading sounds. I heard voices indistinctly, not near me, and didn't get the words. My left leg from the knee down, got bored and decided to go to sleep. I moved it.

“Hold it, Christy commanded.

“Nuts. Tape my eyes and let me get up and stretch.

“I said hold it.

I held it, for what I would put at another seven minutes. Then there were noises-a door opening, not loud, footsteps and voices, a door closing, again not loud, still steps and voices, a car's doors opening and shutting, an engine starting, a car moving, and in a minute the closing of the heavy door that had closed after we had stopped. Then the door which my head was touching opened.

“All right, a voice said. “Come on out.

It took acrobatics, but I made it. I was standing, slightly wobbly, on concrete, near a concrete wall of a room sixty feet square with no windows and not too many lights. My darting glance caught cars scattered around, seven or eight of them. It also caught four men: Christy, coming around the rear end of the Olds, and three serious-looking strangers, older than our driver, who wasn't there.

Without a word two of them put their hands on me. First they took the gun from my armpit and then went over me. The circumstances didn't seem favourable for an argument, so I simply stood at attention. It was a fast and expert job, with no waste motion and no intent to offend.

“It's all a matter of practice, I said courteously.

“Yeah, the taller one agreed, in a tenor that was almost a falsetto. “Follow me.

He moved to the wall, with me behind. The cars had been stopped short of the wall to leave an alley, and we went down it a few paces to a door where a man was standing. He opened the door for us-it was the one that made little noise-and we passed through into a small vestibule, also with no windows in its concrete walls. Across it, only three paces, steps down began, and we descended-fourteen shallow steps to a wide metal door. My conductor pushed a button in the metal jamb. I heard no sound within, but in a moment the door opened and a pasty-faced bird with a pointed chin was looking at us.

“Archie Goodwin, my conductor said.

“Step in.

I waited politely to be preceded, but my conductor moved aside, and the other one said impatiently, “Step in, Goodwin.

I stepped, and the sentinel closed the door. I was in a room bigger than the vestibule above: bare concrete walls, well-lighted, with a table, three chairs, a water-cooler, and a rack of magazines and newspapers. A second sentinel, seated at the table, writing in a book like a ledger, sent me a sharp glance and then forgot me. The first one crossed to another big metal door directly opposite to the one I had entered by, and when he pulled it open I saw that it was a good five inches thick. He jerked his head and told me, “On in.

I stepped across and passed through, with him at my heels.

This was quite a chamber. The walls were panelled in a light grey wood with pink in it, from the tiled floor to the ceiling, and the rugs were the same light grey with pink borders. Light came from a concealed trough continuous around the ceiling. The six or seven chairs and the couch were covered in pinkish-grey leather, and the same leather had been used for the frames of the pictures, a couple of big ones on each wall. All that, collected in my first swift survey, made a real impression.

“Archie Goodwin, the sentinel said.

The man at the desk said, “Sit down, Goodwin. All right, Schwartz, and the sentinel left us and closed the door.

I would have been surprised to find that Pete Roeder rated all this splash so soon after hitting this territory, and he didn't. The man at the desk was not

Roeder. I had never seen this bozo, but no introduction was needed. Much as he disliked publicity, his picture had been in the paper a few times, as for instance the occasion of his presenting his yacht to the United States Coast

Guard during the war. Also I had heard him described.

I had a good view of him at ten feet when I sat in one of the pinkish-grey leather chairs near his desk. Actually there was nothing to him but his forehead and eyes. It wasn't a forehead, it was a dome, sloping up and up to the line of his faded thin hair. The eyes were the result of an error on the assembly line.

They had been intended for a shark and someone got careless. They did not now look the same as shark eyes because Arnold Zeck's brain had been using them to see with for fifty years, and that had had an effect.

“I've spoken with you on the phone, he said.

I nodded. “When I was with Nero Wolfe. Three times altogether-no, I guess it was four.

“Four. Where is he? What has happened to him?

“I'm not sure, but I suspect he's in Florida, training with an air hose, preparing to lay for you in your swimming pool and get you when you dive.

There was no flicker of response, of any kind, in the shark eyes. “I have been told of your habits of speech, Goodwin, he said. “I make no objection. I take men for what they are or not at all. It pleases me that, impressed as you must be by this meeting, you insist on being yourself. But it does waste time and words. Do you know where Wolfe is?

“No.

“Have you a surmise?

“Yeah, I just told you. I got irritated. “Say I tell you he's in Egypt, where he owns a house. I don't, but say I do. Then what? You send a punk to Cairo to drill him? Why? Why can't you let him alone? I know he had his faults-God knows how I stood them as long as I did-but he taught me a lot, and wherever he is he's my favourite fatty. Just because he happened to queer your deal with

Rackham, you want to track him down. What will that get you, now that he's faded out?5

“I don't wish or intend to track him down.

“No? Then what made me so interesting? Your Max Christy and your bearded wonder offering me schoolboy jobs at triple pay. Get me sucked in, get me branded, and when the time comes use me to get at Wolfe so you can pay him. No. I shook my head. “I draw the line somewhere, and all of you together won't get me across that one.

I'm not up enough on fish to know whether sharks blink, but Zeck was showing me.

He blinked perhaps one-tenth his share. He asked, “Why did you take the job?