Nearly Nero

by Loren D. Estleman

  “We should examine the contents first,” he said. “The man has enemies, and there is such a thing as—”

  “Professional courtesy?”

  His cheeks, normally as red as an organically grown tomato, lost a little color over the adjective. He is half-convinced that Captain Stoddard of Brooklyn Bunco has the place bugged, hoping to catch just such a slip. Before licensing a private eye, the State of New York requires proof of police experience or tenure with a legitimate detective agency. Lyon has neither. The moment he starts calling himself a pro, which means he’s charging for his services, a flying squad will pounce on the building with a warrant for his arrest. Then Stoddard will have it condemned and the site sown with nonkosher salt so nothing will grow in its place.

  “Good Samaritanship,” Lyon corrected me. “It is the season, after all. Where do you think you’re going?”

  I was at the door with my hand on the knob. “If you’re sold on blowing yourself up on Wolfe’s behalf, don’t you think there ought to be a survivor to tell him about it?”

  “Don’t be an ass. Find Sherm David.”

  Sherm’s place in his orbit is an example of Lyon’s contortionist brain at its most active. When Goodwin isn’t enough, Nero Wolfe always turns to Saul Panzer, the best street snoop on the East Coast. The day Sherm came to the kitchen door asking for a handout, Gus had been set to shove the door in his face, but Lyon happened to be present, supervising a brisket. Curiosity being his only strong trait I consider normal, he’d asked the beggar his name. The Biblical David being Solomon’s father, Sherman being the name of an armored vehicle, and Panzer being German for “tank”; do I need to beat everything to death?

  If I come any closer to understanding the way the man’s mind works, mine will cease to work at all.

  The Lord looks after lugs and loons. He must, or how could a household made up of a first-class sneak thief, confidence man, and forger, a cook who doctors the accounts as often as he seasons the soup, and a certifiable schizo keep operating with a high-ranking cop circling overhead day and night, watching for a single misstep? Sherm and I don’t get along. He smells like Gus’s spoiled lox, for one thing, and like any good scoundrel he knows another when he sees one and is always wangling for a scheme to expose me and worm his way into my cozy indoor job; but he’ll do almost anything for a buck—anything for a twenty, which is rarer than you might think, cynical as you are.

  Anything. Even open a package that might blow him all over Jersey and clear up to Buffalo.

  “Find him how?” I had to ask Lyon, as much as the picture of Sherm David being buried in smithereens appealed to me. “His refrigerator box isn’t listed.”

  “Surely the years you’ve spent in my proximity have had some effect. What’s the metaphorical phrase reporters admire so much? ‘Police are scouring the city.’ Scour.”

  I boiled at that. Not just because he has it in his curdled mind he’s a genius, but also because he is more of a hothouse product than all his tomatoes combined and couldn’t find his way to the end of the block, let alone peek under every moth-eaten knitted cap in the borough looking for Sherm’s scabby face and hit-and-miss whiskers. I went upstairs, changed into my grubs, and steeled myself for the Cook’s tour.

  The shelters came up craps, but I caught a break at the second flophouse I tried. A fiver to an androgynous heap of rags camped out on the linoleum in the foyer, waiting for a vacancy, got me directions to a gas station on Flatbush, whose owner rented squatting space in a van parked behind the building for a buck a day: Sherm had left the address with the heap of laundry, who owed him money and had given him an unscratched lottery ticket as collateral. I drove there in the boss’s München two-door, a hybrid, snatched open the van’s rear doors without knocking, and stepped back, as much to let eau de Sherm out into the air as to avoid any self-defensive maneuvers from inside. On his best day he smelled like the alley between a Vietnamese restaurant and a shelter for homeless cats.

  The tenant was hors de combat, snoring gin fumes into the headliner on a blanket of bedbugs. I’d lugged along a pint of Old Organ Donor from Lyon’s cellar (it was Bombay Sapphire in the account book), and brought him around by holding his nose and pouring a dram down his throat when he opened his mouth to breathe.

  When he’d finished gagging and throwing windmill punches that didn’t connect, I saw recognition in the yellow-orange eyes straddling the potato nose and gave him the lay.

  “Twenty-five,” he said. The nature of the job didn’t seem to faze him. “My rates go up after six.”

  “It’s only half-past noon.”

  “Which noon?”

  “December.”

  “Meal in it?”

  “The condemned always gets one.”

  “Is it herring? I like Gus’s herring.”

  “Tonight it’s blood soup.”

  “Make it thirty.”

  “Scratch the lottery ticket. Maybe you lucked out.”

  “I scratched it. Does this look like the Ritz?”

  I nailed a roach with the heel of my hand and rubbed it off on orange shag. “Maybe some curtains, posies in a vase—”

  “Thirty.”

  “Nuts. It’s Christmas. You know how much you can clear in that neighborhood in a day with your hat out? And you don’t even have to leg it. I got a blanket in the trunk.”

  “I ain’t riding in no trunk.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to, in respect to the trunk.”

  “Think it’s a bomb?”

  “Your troubles are over if it is. Turn down the job, there might not be another. Where you going to find another touch like Claudius Lyon in this life?”

  “Where’re you?”

  I grinned. “That’s the spirit. Who knows? This could be the day you crowd me out.”

  “If this was that day, that ticket would’ve been good. Gimme that bottle. Explosions aren’t always final. I should anesthetize myself, in case I lose an arm or an ear.”

  Gus, with his chef’s smeller, never lets Sherm inside, so I brought the package out to him on the stoop, carrying it left-handed in case it wasn’t powerful enough to leave a crater where I’d been standing. He took it down the block while I waited in the foyer with my fingers in my ears. Five minutes later the doorbell rang and the bum, still in one piece, traded something in loose wrapping for the double sawbuck I’d promised.

  I’d been right to compare its weight to suet. When Lyon laid it on his desk and spread the paper, he wrinkled his bulbous baby’s forehead over some kind of sausage in a slick white casing, big enough to last him three squares. He leaned down and sniffed.

  “Schweidnitzenschnitzel.”

  “Gesundheit. What’s in the package?”

  He repeated the word. I had to look up the spelling in his big dictionary before I could Google it; Webster and the Net had nothing to add to his definition: “It’s a wurst, made originally in eastern Germany. Extremely pungent and extremely expensive. Gus served it just once, before your time. We haven’t been able to find it since.” He looked at the return address. “Why, the market’s just upstate. Perhaps he ordered it as a surprise.”

  Summoned, Gus looked at the item and shrugged. Lyon rubbed his hands.

  “A mystery. We may as well dine while I work on it. Thick slices.” He gave it to Gus. I let him carry it as far as the door before I opened my mouth.

  “Hold the salt.”

  Lyon paused, turned his head as far as it would go my way on what he called a nick. “And why should I do that?”

  “It doesn’t go with arsenic.”

  He frowned, but he didn’t puzzle long. “Of course. I forgot for a moment to whom it was addressed.”

  I didn’t bother telling him his memory had been fine until he found out the package was edible. I’m supposed to needle him, Goodwin fashion, but I’ve learned the best way to do that is to refrain from putting it into speech. He was preoccupied, however, and didn’t notice. “Arnie. Have it analyzed. Just one slice, in ca
se it turns out to be benign.”

  Grogan’s Pharmacy was the place. Grogan rings up Lyon’s Tums and hemorrhoid ointment at three times the price and we split the difference. This one would be the jackpot. Business was slow, and he called after just an hour to report the whatchamacallit had tested negative for toxins. Once again a pair of pudgy hands got rubbed. “Satisfactory. Just in time for supper.”

  When he finished telling Gus the good news over the house phone, I asked him what all that guff was about sending the package to Wolfe.

  “We can’t very well do that with a slice missing.” He looked at the clock and hopped down from his oversize chair. “Call the market in the morning and order a fresh Schweidnitzenschnitzel to be delivered to him.”

  He was overlooking something, but I didn’t say anything for fear he might say “Schweidnitzenschnitzel” again. I knew he’d get to the something after he’d attended to the important detail of stuffing his face. Like I said, he’s as smart as he is screwy.

  We’d been sitting in the dining room a couple of minutes when Gus came in carrying a covered tray and wearing a bewildered look. When he set it in front of Lyon and lifted the lid, I saw why. The overgrown wurst was cut into slices less than halfway, and something was poking out the end where he’d stopped. “My knife hit something, I think maybe bone? But no.”

  Lyon used his own knife and fork to clear the meat away from the foreign object. When he had it free he wiped it off with his napkin and held it up. It was a statuette of a bearded man in a robe and holding a staff with a curved end. It was about seven inches tall and made of something yellow.

  “Carved by hand,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “No markings. Get me a needle and matches.”

  I didn’t ask, only acted. I figured it would take me long enough to find a needle in an all-male household without the extra delay. Finally I came down from my room and handed him something. “No needles. Will this do? I took it from a new shirt.”

  “Actually it’s better. I won’t burn my fingers.” He took the pin by its round plastic head, struck a match from a box Gus had brought from the kitchen, and held the flame under the pointed end until the metal glowed red. Shaking out the match, he stuck the point into the statuette’s flat base, then got rid of the pin and sniffed at the tiny hole he’d made. “Ivory, as I suspected. Subjected to intense heat it smells like burnt hair.”

  I filed that tidbit away in case I ever had to go back to second-story work. It might save me from embarrassing myself in front of a fence. “Looks old.”

  “It is. The workmanship is Byzantine. The image is a shepherd, I’m fairly certain.”

  “Nativity figure,” Gus said. We stared at him. He spread his hands. “What, I can’t know this?”

  Corned beef, I thought; the old fraud. To Lyon: “Why pick a Christmas knickknack in a salami and ship it to Nero Wolfe?”

  “Subterfuge suggests crime. Have you been maintaining the newspaper archive?”

  His god keeps back numbers for reference, so of course we must also. “As I keep telling you,” I said, “there’s a little invention called the computer that does all that for you. I’ll check to see if anyone’s copped a holiday display this yuletide.”

  “Do so. And when you call the market, ask who placed the order and who had access to the sausage. Also find the messenger who brought it. That was no error. Someone might confuse me for Wolfe, but no one would mistake Brooklyn for Manhattan.”

  There it was, the thing I’d thought of before but he hadn’t. Told you he’d get around to it. Now that he had, I beat back the urge to laugh in his face for thinking anyone would take him for Wolfe. The doodad he was holding had a better chance of passing itself off as the Statue of Liberty.

  I swiveled from the computer. He looked up from Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective. “St. Cecily’s here in town, last week,” I said. “When a novitiate came in to sweep up, he was almost trampled by the thief making his getaway. Said thief was interrupted before he could swipe more than one figure from the manger on display. Shepherd, part of a set made in Byzantium in the third century, artist unknown. Where’d you learn about Byzantine craftwork?”

  “It featured in Sherlock Holmes. I looked it up.”

  “Which story?”

  “It was a graphic novel.”

  “You mean a comic book?”

  He changed subjects. “Did the novitiate see the culprit?”

  He actually uses words like that. “Happened too fast. The whole shebang’s estimated upwards of fifty thousand. Nine pieces. Almost five grand for a hunk of elephant molar.”

  “Less. The infant Jesus would be worth the most, followed in descending order by Mary, then Joseph, then the Wise Men, then the shepherds. Were there camels?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “I like camels,” he said wistfully.

  He does. An ugly Day-Glo-on-velvet painting of a desert caravan hangs directly opposite his desk, over the peephole one or the other of us is supposed to spy on so-called confidential conferences in the office—a la you-guessed it—but there haven’t been any so far. At a guess I’d say his interest in camels is a case of sympathizing with a fellow mammalian oddity.

  “I dislike thieves of religious antiquities,” he said then, without wist. “Leads?”

  “Apparently not, but police are scouring the city.”

  When he scowls he looks like the Gerber kid with gas. “On second thought, don’t call the meat market. Go there in person tomorrow. Our shepherd seems to have taken a trip upstate.”

  The town, near the Connecticut border, had probably been a Mayberry sort of place before gift shops, antique stores, and Ye Olde pubs had moved into its two-block business section, shoving out the hardwares and corner groceries that give a place its pulse. Mike’s Meats stood just off the main drag, a blockhouse relic of earlier times with a cartoon of a fat jolly butcher on the sign, festooned in a string of wieners. The owner turned out to be a skinny Arab with a miserable expression tattooed on his face. I still don’t know who Mike is or was.

  It was a busy morning, with customers loitering over the ribs and chops in the display cases while waiting for their numbers to be called. When mine came up I opened with an order of Schweidnitzenschnitzel to be delivered to Nero Wolfe’s address. The Arab showed no special reaction, so I asked him flat out if any others had been ordered there recently. I put a stubborn look on my face and he left off in mid-sigh to check his records.

  “I have nothing,” he said afterward, “but one of my people quit last week without giving notice. He may have taken the order and forgotten to put it in the book.”

  “Absent-minded type, was he?”

  “Not really. He was a steady worker. I wish I had more.”

  “Did he give any reason for quitting?”

  “He said he was going on a religious retreat to Jerusalem.”

  “Was he pulling your leg?”

  “If he was, it was the first time. He wasn’t a jokester.” He quoted me a figure for the sausage that ought to have included an ivory camel inside. I didn’t think there was any room there to jack it up for the expense account. I left with the name of the employee, his last known address, and a sour mood.

  “Simeon Poldaski,” I reported, when the boss climbed onto his chair, burping wurst. “His landlady said he packed up his things and left the day he quit the market. Told her the same thing about hopping a plane to the Holy Land. I tried all the airlines, but these days they’re clammed up tight; wouldn’t tell me the time by the clock over their left shoulder.”

  “Hypothetically I’m inclined to accept our man’s explanation. His name suggests a Catholic upbringing. If his conscience is troubled by his theft from a church, sending the evidence to a distinguished detective to rid himself of it and embarking on a pilgrimage to atone for his sin makes excellent sense.”

  “Why not return it to the place he took it from?”

  “Penitents are often in a hurry to obtain absolution. Faced
with the alternative of driving to a distant community or drawing the authorities directly to the town from where the package was sent, he settled upon this circuitous plan to give himself time to complete his travel arrangements while avoiding arrest. The airlines are busy this time of year; he might not have gotten a seat right away. Certainly Wolfe would have no trouble making the connection to St. Cecily’s, but he hasn’t a reputation for involving the police until he’s finished his investigation.”

  “He doesn’t work for free.”

  “Incorrect. He sometimes accepts a challenge merely for spite or out of personal pride. It’s not inconceivable that such a profane crime would find him in a seasonal mood. Does Poldaski have a family? He may make contact.”

  “He’s barely on the grid. I dug up a brother, but I know even less about him.”

  “And I thought all human knowledge was on the Internet.”

  “So is all human ignorance. Some folks just don’t register.”

  “I still refuse to submit to the coincidental theory. Someone connived to divert that package here. What do you remember of the messenger?”

  Goodwin has a crack memory. Mine’s just better than average, congenitally speaking, but after I served a stiff stretch for selling hot merchandise to the same undercover cop a second time, I’d trained myself to observe details and hang on to them. “Five-eight, brown eyes, broad face, cold sore on his upper lip.”

  He pointed at the telephone. “Convey that description to the service. I’ll listen on the extension.”

  Listen is all he’d do. His telephone phobia is the only idiosyncrasy he shares with his nonparticipating mentor that he came by honestly. His voice goes up a full octave when he speaks on it, squeaking like a balloon on the higher notes.