Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 01

by Fer-De-Lance

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  FER-DE-LANCE

  A Bantam Crime Line Book / published by arrangement with

  the author’s estate

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Farrar & Reinhart edition published 1934

  Bantam edition / March 1983

  Bantam Crime Line edition / February 1992.

  CRIME LINE and the portrayal of a boxed “cl” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright 1934, © 1962 by Rex Stout.

  Introduction copyright © 1992 by Loren D. Estleman.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

  form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75592-6

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1_r2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The World of Rex Stout

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Series are seldom read in order. By the time the average reader discovers a continuing character the chronicle is usually well advanced, and except in the case of those dreary series whose titles are numbered prominently on the covers, he has no way of knowing at what point in the saga the book he has just acquired takes place. This can cause confusion, particularly if the next book he reads is an earlier entry in which the hero he knows as widowed appears with his wife, or having quit smoking and drinking is seen puffing and guzzling happily away with no explanation for his relapse.

  Rex Stout avoided this situation through the simple expedient of never changing his characters. The Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin of A Family Affair, the 46th (and last) book in the epoch of West 35th Street, are essentially the same thought-and-action team we meet for the first time in Fer-de-Lance. And therein lies the secret of the magic.

  Under the present technocracy, when even the nine-to-five ethic is threatened, we can find peace in the almost Edwardian order of life in the old brownstone: Plant-rooms, nine to eleven A.M. and four to six P.M., office, eleven A.M. to 1:15 P.M., six P.M. to dinnertime and after dinner if necessary, day in and day out (except Sunday). Like Sherlock Holmes’s corpulent brother Mycroft—an uncle, perhaps? Stout is coy on this point—Wolfe “has his rails and he runs on them.” Nothing short of a major catastrophe, such as a submachine gun assault on the plant-rooms (The Second Confession), can persuade him to alter that comfortable routine or, worse, leave home on business. Barring extreme circumstances, he will be found in those places at those hours in 1975 and 1934 and all the years between with all his virtues and vices intact.

  The reader new to Wolfe and Goodwin may be surprised upon reading Fer-de-Lance to learn that it represents their debut. So many references are made to earlier adventures in such an offhand, familiar way by narrator Archie, and his abrasive relationship with his eccentric employer fits them so much like a beloved and well-worn suit of clothes, that the newcomer may be excused the assumption that he has encountered the canon in mid-stride. Throughout the book, and indeed throughout the series, the sense is acute that these two fixed planets and their satellites—laconic Theodore Horstmann of the orchids; Fritz Brenner the unflappable cook and major domo; loyal and efficient bloodhounds Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather; and the volcanic Inspector L. T. Cramer—exist beyond the margins of the pages and that their lives do not start and stop with the first and last chapters. Has any other saga begun with a statement as casual as “There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day …”?

  When Fer-de-Lance appeared, popular crime literature was divided between the manorial “English School” of puzzle mysteries and the two-fisted American urban variety that took its inspiration from the headlines of Prohibition and Depression. Now, nearly six decades later, that division still exists, but there is evidence that the two camps are drifting closer together as both the grim butler and the sadistic bootlegger pass into history. From the start, Stout wedded the two forms. Nero Wolfe, the eccentric genius swathed in his one-seventh of a ton, is a combination of Sherlock Holmes in his more comtemplative moments and Baroness Orczy’s sedentary Old Man in the Corner. Archie Goodwin exemplifies the hardboiled, wisecracking “private dick” prevalent in pulp fiction. Consider this exchange:

  WOLFE: “Your errand at White Plains was in essence a primitive business enterprise: an offer to exchange something for something else. If Mr. Anderson had only been there he would probably have seen it so. It may yet materialize; it is still worth some small effort. I believe though it is getting ready to rain.”

  GOODWIN: “It was clouding up as I came in. Is it going to rain all over your clues?”

  WOLFE: “Some day, Archie, when I decide you are no longer worth tolerating, you will have to marry a woman of very modest mental capacity to get an appropriate audience for your wretched sarcasms.”

  Not exactly the Holmes-Watson relationship, but a symbiotic one. Without Goodwin’s badgering, Wolfe would certainly starve, collapsing under the weight of his own sloth. Without Wolfe—well, learn from In the Best Families that Goodwin can get along only too well without any oddball geniuses around the coddle, but we may assume by how readily he takes up his old post when Wolfe returns from his enforced sabbatical that for all Archie’s grousing he prefers the status quo, as do we.

  We read Nero Wolfe because we like a good mystery. We reread him not for the plots, which have neither the human complexity of Raymond Chandler’s nor the ingenuity of Agatha Christie’s, but for the chemistry between the orchid-fancying enfant terrible and his optimistic-cynical amaneuensis and all-around dogsbody, and for the insular complacency of life in the old townhouse where world-class meals are served three times daily; the Cattleyas Laelias continue to get on splendidly with the Laeliocattleya Lustre; a peek through the tricked-up waterfall picture in Wolfe’s office may provide a glimpse of the Great Man relaxing in his custom-built chair with some arcane volume or pushing his lips in and out with his eyes closed over some dense pattern of facts while his legman sits by the telephone, waiting for his cue to gather all the suspects and other interested parties for the denouement.

  This is a world where all things make sense in time, a world better than our own. If you are an old hand making a return swing through its orbit, welcome back; pull up the red leather chair and sit down. If this is your first trip, I envy you the surprises that await you behind that unpreposessing front door.

  —Loren D. Estleman

  Chapter 1

&nb
sp; There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day, for the last ends of the Fairmont National Bank case had been gathered in the week before and there was nothing for me to do but errands, and Wolfe never hesitated about running me down to Murray Street for a can of shoe-polish if he happened to need one. But it was Fritz who was sent for the beer. Right after lunch his bell called him up from the kitchen before he could have got the dishes washed, and after getting his orders he went out and took the roadster which we always left parked in front. An hour later he was back, with the rumble seat piled high with baskets filled with bottles. Wolfe was in the office—as he and I called it, Fritz called it the library—and I was in the front room reading a book on gunshot wounds which I couldn’t make head or tail of, when I glanced through the window and saw Fritz pull up at the curb. It was a good excuse to stretch my legs, so I went out and helped him unload and carry the baskets into the kitchen, where we were starting to stow the bottles away in a cupboard when the bell rang. I followed Fritz into the office.

  Wolfe lifted his head. I mention that, because his head was so big that lifting it struck you as being quite a job. It was probably really bigger than it looked, for the rest of him was so huge that any head on top of it but his own would have escaped your notice entirely.

  “Where’s the beer?”

  “In the kitchen, sir. The lower cupboard on the right, I thought.”

  “I want it in here. Is it cold? And an opener and two glasses.”

  “Mostly cold, yes, sir. Very well.”

  I grinned and sat down on a chair to wonder what Wolfe was doing with some pieces of paper he had cut into little discs and was pushing around into different positions on the desk blotter. Fritz began bringing in the beer, six at a time on a tray. After the third trip I had another grin when I saw Wolfe glance up at the array on the table and then around at Fritz’s back going through the door. Two more trays full; whereupon Wolfe halted the parade.

  “Fritz. Would you inform me when this is likely to end?”

  “Very soon, sir. There are nineteen more. Forty-nine in all.”

  “Nonsense. Excuse me, Fritz, but obviously it’s nonsense.”

  “Yes, sir. You said one of every kind procurable. I went to a dozen shops, at least that.”

  “All right. Bring them in. And some plain salt crackers. None shall lack opportunity, Fritz, it wouldn’t be fair.”

  It turned out that the idea was, as Wolfe explained to me after he had invited me to draw my chair up to the desk and begin opening the bottles, that he had decided to give up the bootleg beer, which for years he had bought in barrels and kept in a cooler in the basement, if he could find a brand of the legal 3.2 that was potable. He had also decided, he said, that six quarts a day was unnecessary and took too much time and thereafter he would limit himself to five. I grinned at that, for I didn’t believe it, and I grinned again when I thought how the place would be cluttered up with empty bottles unless Fritz ran his legs off all day long. I said to him something I had said before more than once, that beer slowed up a man’s head and with him running like a brook, six quarts a day, I never would understand how he could make his brain work so fast and deep that no other man in the country could touch him. He replied, also as he had before, that it wasn’t his brain that worked, it was his lower nerve centers; and as I opened the fifth bottle for him to sample he went on to say—not the first time for that either—that he would not insult me by acknowledging my flattery, since if it was sincere I was a fool and if it was calculated I was a knave.

  He smacked his lips, tasting the fifth brand, and holding up the glass looked through the amber at the light. “This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant. So far, none of this is sewage. As you see, Fritz has marked the prices on the labels, and I’ve started with the cheap ones. No, here, take this next.”

  It was at that moment that I heard the faint buzz from the kitchen that meant the front door, and it was that buzz that started the ball rolling. Though at the time it appeared to be nothing interesting, just Durkin asking a favor.

  Durkin was all right up to the neck. When I consider how thick he was in most respects I am surprised how he could tail. I know bull terriers are dumb, but good tailing means a lot more than just hanging on, and Fred Durkin was good. I asked him once how he did it, and he said, “I just go up to the subject and ask him where he’s headed for, and then if I lose him I know where to look.” I suppose he knew how funny that was; I don’t know, I suspect him. When things got so Wolfe had to cut down expenses like everybody else from bankers to bums, Saul Panzer and I got our weekly envelopes sliced, but Durkin’s was stopped altogether. Wolfe called him in when he was needed and paid him by the day, so I still saw him off and on and knew he was having hard sledding. Things had been slow and I hadn’t run across him for a month or more when the buzzer sounded that day and Fritz brought him to the door of the office.

  Wolfe looked up and nodded. “Hello, Fred. Do I owe you something?”

  Durkin, approaching the desk with his hat in his hand, shook his head. “How are you, Mr. Wolfe. I wish to God you did. If there was anybody owed me anything I’d be with him like a saddle on a horse.”

  “Sit down. Will you sample some beer?”

  “No, thanks.” Fred stayed on his feet. “I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  Wolfe looked up again, and his big thick lips pushed out a little, tight together, just a small movement, and back again, and then out and back again. How I loved to watch him doing that! That was about the only time I ever got excited, when Wolfe’s lips were moving like that. It didn’t matter whether it was some little thing like this with Durkin or when he was on the track of something big and dangerous. I knew what was going on, something was happening so fast inside of him and so much ground was being covered, the whole world in a flash, that no one else could ever really understand it even if he had tried his best to explain, which he never did. Sometimes, when he felt patient, he explained to me and it seemed to make sense, but I realized afterward that that was only because the proof had come and so I could accept it. I said to Saul Panzer once that it was like being with him in a dark room which neither of you has ever seen before, and he describes all of its contents to you, and then when the light is turned on his explanation of how he did it seems sensible because you see everything there before you just as he described it.

  Wolfe said to Durkin, “You know my failing on the financial side. But since you haven’t come to borrow money, your favor is likely granted. What is it?”

  Durkin scowled. Wolfe always upset him. “Nobody needs to borrow money worse than I do. How do you know it’s not that?”

  “No matter. Archie will explain. You’re not embarrassed enough, and you wouldn’t have brought a woman with you. What is it?”

  I leaned forward and broke in, “Damn it, he’s alone! My ears are good anyhow!”

  A little ripple, imperceptible except to eyes like mine that had caught it before, ran over Wolfe’s enormous bulk. “Of course, Archie, splendid ears. But there was nothing to hear; the lady made no sound audible at this distance. And Fritz did not speak to her; but in greeting Fred there was a courtesy in his tone which he saves for softer flesh. If I should hear Fritz using that tone to a lone man I’d send him to a psychoanalyst at once.”

  Durkin said, “It’s a friend of my wife’s. Her best friend, you know my wife’s Italian. Maybe you don’t know, but she is. Anyway, this friend of hers is in trouble, or thinks she is. It sounds to me like a washout. Maria keeps after Fanny and Fanny keeps after me and they both keep after me together, all because I told Fanny once that you’ve got a devil in you that can find out anything in the world. A boob thing to say, Mr. Wolfe, but you know how a man’s tongue will get started.”

  Wolfe only said, “Bring her in.”

  Durkin wen
t out to the hall and came right back with a woman in front of him. She was little but not skinny, with black hair and eyes, and Italian all over though not the shawl kind. She was somewhere around middle age and looked neat and clean in a pink cotton dress and a black rayon jacket. I pulled over a chair and she sat down facing Wolfe and the light.

  Durkin said, “Maria Maffei, Mr. Wolfe.”

  She tossed Fred a smile, showing little white teeth, and then said to Wolfe, “Maria Maffei,” pronouncing it quite different.

  Wolfe said, “Not Mrs. Maffei.”

  She shook her head. “No, sir. I’m not married.”

  “But in trouble anyhow.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Durkin thought you might be good enough—”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s my brother Carlo. He has gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know, sir. That’s why I am afraid. He has been gone two days.”

  Where did he—no, no. These are not phenomena, merely facts.” Wolfe turned to me. “Go on, Archie.”

  By the time he had finished his “no, no” I had my notebook out. I enjoyed this sort of business in front of Wolfe more than at any other time because I knew damn well I was good at it. But this wasn’t much of a job; this woman knew what to get down as well as I did. She told her tale quick and straight. She was housekeeper at a swell apartment on Park Avenue and lived there. Her brother Carlo, two years older than her, lived in a rooming-house on Sullivan Street. He was a metal-worker, first class she said; for years he had made big money working on jewelry for Rathbun & Cross, but because he drank a little and occasionally didn’t turn up at the shop he had been one of the first to go when the depression came. For a while after that he had got odd jobs here and there, then he had used up his small savings, and for the past winter and spring he had been kept going by his sister. Around the middle of April, completely discouraged, he had decided to return to Italy and Maria had agreed to furnish the necessary funds; she had, in fact, advanced the money for the steamship ticket. But a week later he had suddenly announced that the trip was postponed; he wouldn’t say why, but he had declared that he would need no more money, he would soon be able to return all she had lent him, and he might stay in this country after all. He had never been very communicative, but regarding the change in plans he had been stubbornly mysterious. Now he was gone. He had telephoned her on Saturday that he would meet her Monday evening, her evening off, at the Italian restaurant on Prince Street where they often dined together, and had added gaily that he would have enough money with him to pay back everything and lend her some into the bargain if she needed it. Monday evening she had waited for him until ten o’clock, then had gone to his rooming-house and been told that he had left a little after seven and had not returned.