by Rex Stout
PRAISE FOR NERO WOLFE
“It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore.… Like Sherlock Holmes … he looms larger than life and, in some ways, is much more satisfactory.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Nero Wolfe towers over his rivals … he is an exceptional character creation.”
—New Yorker
“The most interesting great detective of them all.”
—Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim
“Nero Wolfe is one of the master creations.”
—James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice
AND FOR REX STOUT
“Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American detective novel.”
—Ross Macdonald
“I’ve found Rex Stout’s books about Nero Wolfe endlessly readable.… I sometimes have to remind myself that Wolfe and Goodwin are the creations of a writer’s mind, that no matter how many doorbells I ring in the West Thirties, I’ll never find the right house.”
—Lawrence Block
“Fair warning: It is safe to read one Nero Wolfe novel, because you will surely like it. It is extremely unsafe to read three, because you will forever be hooked on the delightful characters who populate these perfect books.”
—Otto Penzler
AND FOR ARCHIE GOODWIN
“Archie is a splendid character.”
—Dame Agatha Christie
“Stout’s supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin.”
—P. G. Wodehouse
“If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature.… Archie is the lineal descendant of Huck Finn.”
—Jacques Barzun
PRAISE FOR THE RUBBER BAND AND THE RED BOX
“[The Rubber Band] is among the best Wolfe—Archie Goodwin tales; the whole gang makes an appearance—Inspector Cramer, Saul Panzer, etc.—and the writing crackles.”
—Washington Post
“[The Red Box] has practically everything the seasoned addict demands in the way of characters and action; you may guess the motive, but the mechanism is properly obscure.”
—New Yorker
THE RUBBER BAND/THE RED BOX
A Bantam Book / March 2009
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
The Rubber Band copyright © 1936 by Rex Stout
The Rubber Band copyright renewed © 1963 by Rex Stout
The Red Box copyright © 1936, 1937 by Rex Stout
The Red Box introduction copyright © 1992 by Carolyn G. Hart
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76217-7
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Rubber Band 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
Chapter 20
The Red Box 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
Chapter 20
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
The
Rubber Band
I threw down the magazine section of the Sunday Times and yawned. I looked at Nero Wolfe and yawned again. “Is this bird, S. J. Woolf, any relation of yours?”
Wolfe, letting fly with a dart and getting a king of clubs, paid no attention to me. I went on:
“I suppose not, since he spells it different. The reason I ask, an idea just raced madly into my bean. Why wouldn’t it be good for business if this S. J. Woolf did a picture of you and an article for the Times? God knows you’re full of material.” I took time out to grin, considering Wolfe’s size in the gross or physical aspect, and left the grin on as Wolfe grunted, stooping to pick up a dart he had dropped.
I resumed. “You couldn’t beat it for publicity, and as for class it’s Mount Everest. This guy Woolf only hits the high spots. I’ve been reading his pieces for years, and there’s been Einstein and the Prince of Wales and Babe Ruth and three Presidents of the United States (O say, can you see very little in the White House) and the King of Siam and similar grandeur. His idea seems to be, champions only. That seems to let you in, and strange as it may appear, I’m not kidding, I really mean it. Among our extended circle there must be a couple of eminent gazabos that know him and would slip him the notion.”
Wolfe still paid no attention to me. As a matter of fact, I didn’t expect him to, since he was busy taking exercise. He had recently got the impression that he weighed too much—which was about the same as if the Atlantic Ocean formed the opinion that it was too wet—and so had added a new item to his daily routine. Since he only went outdoors for things like earthquakes and holocausts, he was rarely guilty of movement except when he was up on the roof with Horstmann and the orchids, from nine to eleven in the morning and four to six in the afternoon, and there was no provision there for pole vaulting. Hence the new apparatus for a daily workout, which was a beaut. It was scheduled from 3:45 to 4:00 P. M. There was a board about two feet square, faced with cork, with a large circle marked on it, and 26 radii and a smaller inner circle, outlined with fine wire, divided the circle’s area into 52 sections. Each section had its symbol painted on it, and together they made up a deck of cards; the bull’s-eye, a small disk in the corner, was the Joker. There was also a supply of darts, cute little things about four inches long and weighing a couple of ounces, made of wood and feathers with a metal needle-point. The idea was to hang the board up on the wall, stand off 10 or 15 feet, hurl five darts at it and make a poker hand, with the Joker wild. Then you went and pulled the darts out, and hurled them over again. Then you went and pulled …
Obviously, it was pretty darned exciting. What I mean to convey is, it would have been a swell game for a little girls’ kindergarten class; no self-respecting boy over six months of age would have wasted much time with it. Since my only excuse for writing this is to relate the facts of one of Nero Wolfe’s cases, and since I take that trouble only where murder was involved, it may be supposed that I tell about that poker-dart game because later on one of the darts was dipped in poison and used to pink a guy with. Nothing doing. No one ever suffered any injury from those darts that I
know of, except me. Over a period of two months Nero Wolfe nicked me for a little worse than eighty-five bucks, playing draw with the Joker and deuces wild, at two bits a go. There was no chance of getting any real accuracy with it, it was mostly luck.
Anyhow, when Wolfe decided he weighed too much, that was what he got. He called the darts javelins. When I found my losses were approaching the century point I decided to stop humoring him, and quit the thing cold, telling him that my doctor had warned me against athlete’s heart. Wolfe kept on with his exercise, and by now, this Sunday I’m telling about, he had got so he could stick the Joker twice out of five shots.
I said, “It would be a good number. You rate it. You admit yourself that you’re a genius. It would get us a lot of new clients. We could take on a permanent staff—”
One of the darts slipped out of Wolfe’s handful, dropped to the floor, and rolled to my feet. Wolfe stood and looked at me. I knew what he wanted, I knew he hated to stoop, but stooping was the only really violent part of that game and I figured he needed the exercise. I sat tight. Wolfe opened his eyes at me:
“I have noticed Mr. Woolf’s drawings. They are technically excellent.”
The son of a gun was trying to bribe me to pick up his dart by pretending to be interested in what I had said. I thought to myself, all right, but you’ll pay for it, let’s just see how long you’ll stand there and stay interested. I picked up the magazine section and opened it to the article, and observed briskly:
“This is one of his best. Have you seen it? It’s about some Englishman that’s over here on a government mission—wait—it tells here—”
I found it and read aloud: “It is not known whether the Marquis of Clivers is empowered to discuss military and naval arrangements in the Far East; all that has been disclosed is his intention to make a final disposition of the question of spheres of economic influence. That is why, after a week of conferences in Washington with the Departments of State and Commerce, he has come to New York for an indefinite stay to consult with financial and industrial leaders. More and more clearly it is being realized in government circles that the only satisfactory and permanent basis for peace in the Orient is the removal of the present causes of economic friction.”
I nodded at Wolfe. “You get it? Spheres of economic influence. The same thing that bothered Al Capone and Dutch Schultz. Look where economic friction landed them.”
Wolfe nodded back. “Thank you, Archie. Thank you very much for explaining it to me. Now if you—”
I hurried in: “Wait, it gets lots more interesting than that.” I glanced down the page. “In the picture he looks like a ruler of men—you know, like a master barber or a head waiter, you know the type. It goes on to tell how much he knows about spheres and influences, and his record in the war—he commanded a brigade and he got decorated four times—a noble lord and all prettied up with decorations like a store front—I say three cheers and let us drink to the King, gentlemen! You understand, sir, I’m just summarizing.”
“Yes, Archie. Thank you.”
Wolfe sounded grim. I took a breath. “Don’t mention it. But the really interesting part is where it tells about his character and his private life. He’s a great gardener. He prunes his own roses! At least it says so, but it’s almost too much to swallow. Then it goes on, new paragraph: While it would be an exaggeration to call the marquis an eccentric, in many ways he fails to conform to the conventional conception of a British peer, probably due in some measure to the fact that in his younger days—he is now 64—he spent many years, in various activities, in Australia, South America, and the western part of the United States. He is a nephew of the ninth marquis, and succeeded to the title in 1905, when his uncle and two cousins perished in the sinking of the Rotania off the African coast. But under any circumstances he would be an extraordinary person, and his idiosyncrasies, as he is pleased to call them, are definitely his own.
“He never shoots animals or birds, though he owns some of the best shooting in Scotland—yet he is a famous expert with a pistol and always carries one. Owning a fine stable, he has not been on a horse for fifteen years. He never eats anything between luncheon and dinner, which in England barely misses the aspect of treason. He has never seen a cricket match. Possessing more than a dozen automobiles, he does not know how to drive one. He is an excellent poker player and has popularized the game among a circle of his friends. He is passionately fond of croquet, derides golf as a ‘corrupter of social decency,’ and keeps an American cook at the manor of Pokendam for the purpose of making pumpkin pie. On his frequent trips to the Continent he never fails to take with him—”
There was no point in going on, so I stopped. I had lost my audience. As he stood facing me Wolfe’s eyes had gradually narrowed into slits; and of a sudden he opened his hand and turned it palm down to let the remaining darts fall to the floor, where they rolled in all directions; and Wolfe walked from the room without a word. I heard him in the hall, in the elevator, getting in and banging the door to. Of course he had the excuse that it was four o’clock, his regular time for going to the plant-rooms.
I could have left the darts for Fritz to pick up later, but there was no sense in me getting childish just because Wolfe did. So I tore off the sheet of the magazine section I had been reading from, with the picture of the Marquis of Clivers in the center, fastened it to the corkboard with a couple of thumbtacks, gathered up the darts, stood off 15 feet and let fly. One of the darts got the marquis in the nose, another in his left eye, two of them in his neck, and the last one missed him by an inch. He was well pinned. Pretty good shooting, I thought, as I went for my hat to venture out to a movie, not knowing then that before he left our city the marquis would treat us to an exhibition of much better shooting with a quite different weapon, nor that on that sheet of newspaper which I had pinned to the corkboard was a bit of information that would prove to be fairly useful in Nero Wolfe’s professional consideration of a sudden and violent death.
For the next day, Monday, October 7th, my memo pad showed two appointments. Neither displayed any promise of being either lucrative or exciting. The first one, down for 3:30 in the afternoon, was with a guy named Anthony D. Perry. He was a tycoon, a director of the Metropolitan Trust Company, the bank we did business with, and president of the Seaboard Products Corporation—one of those vague firms occupying six floors of a big skyscraper and selling annually a billion dollars’ worth of something nobody ever actually saw, like soy beans or powdered cocoanut shells or dried llama’s hoofs. As I say, Perry was a tycoon; he presided at meetings and was appointed on Mayor’s Committees and that kind of hooey. Wolfe had handled a couple of investigations for him in previous years—nothing of any importance. We didn’t know what was on his mind this time; he had telephoned for an appointment.
The second appointment was for 6:00 P. M. It was a funny one, but we often had funny ones. Saturday morning, October 5th, a female voice had phoned that she wanted to see Nero Wolfe. I said okay. She said, yes, but she wanted to bring someone with her who would not arrive in New York until Monday morning, and she would be busy all day, so could they come at 5:30. I said, no, but they could come at six, picking up a pencil to put down her name. But she wasn’t divulging it; she said she would bring her name along with her, and they would arrive at six sharp, and it was very important. It wasn’t much of a date, but I put it on the memo pad and hoped she would turn up, for she had the kind of voice that makes you want to observe it in the flesh.
Anthony D. Perry was there on the dot at three-thirty. Fritz answered the door and brought him to the office. Wolfe was at his desk drinking beer. I sat in my corner and scowled at the probability that Perry was going to ask us to follow the scent of some competitor suspected of unfair trade practices, as he had before, and I did not regard that as a treat. But this time he had a different kind of difficulty, though it was nothing to make your blood run cold. He asked after our health, including me because he was democratic, inquired politely regarding
the orchids, and then hitched his chair up and smiled at Wolfe as one man of affairs to another.
“I came to see you, Mr. Wolfe, instead of asking you to call on me, for two reasons. First, because I know you refuse to leave your home to call on anyone whatever, and, second, because the errand I want you to undertake is private and confidential.”
Wolfe nodded. “Either would have sufficed, sir. And the errand?”
“Is, as I say, confidential.” Perry cleared his throat, glancing at me as I opened up my notebook. “I suppose Mr.…”
“Goodwin.” Wolfe poured a glass of beer. “Mr. Goodwin’s discretion reaches to infinity. Anything too confidential for him would find me deaf.”
“Very well. I want to engage you for a delicate investigation, one that will require most careful handling. It is in connection with an unfortunate situation that has arisen in our executive offices.” Perry cleared his throat again. “I fear that a young woman, one of our employees, is going to suffer an injustice—a victim of circumstances—unless something is done about it.”
He paused. Wolfe said, “But, Mr. Perry. Surely, as the directing head of your corporation, you are its fount of justice—or its opposite?”
Perry smiled. “Not absolutely. At best, a constitutional monarch. Let me explain. Our executive offices are on the thirty-second floor of our building—the Seaboard Building. We have some thirty private offices on that floor, officers of the corporation, department heads and so on. Last Friday one of the officers had in his desk a sum of money in currency, a fairly large sum, which disappeared under circumstances which led him to suspect that it had been taken by—by the employee I spoke of. It was not reported to me until Saturday morning. The officer requested immediate action, but I could not bring myself to believe the employee guilty. She has been—that is, she has always seemed to merit the most complete confidence. In spite of appearances …”