She was biting her lip. “I thought you were afraid of nobody and nothing.”
“Afraid?” I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”
“I said no other man alive could do it.”
“Then you’re in a box.”
She got her bag and opened it, took out the checkfold and pen, wrote again, the stub first as before, stepped to his desk and picked up the first check and replaced it with the new one, and returned to the chair.
“That hundred thousand dollars,” she said, “is merely a retainer. I will pay all expenses. If you succeed, your fee, determined by you, will be in addition to the retainer. If you fail, you will have the hundred thousand.”
He leaned forward to reach for the check, gave it a good look, put it down, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Knowing him, I knew what he was considering. Not the job; as he had said, it was preposterous; he was looking at the beautiful fact that with a hundred grand in the till on January fifth he would need, and would accept, no jobs at all for the rest of the winter, and the spring, and even into the summer. He could read a hundred books and propagate a thousand orchids. Paradise. A corner of his mouth twisted up; for him that was a broad grin. He was wallowing. That was okay for half a minute, a man has a right to dream, but when it got to a full minute I coughed, loud.
He opened his eyes and straightened up. “Archie? Have you a suggestion?”
So it had bit him good. It was conceivable that he might even commit himself, partially at least, and of course that wouldn’t do. The best way to prevent it was to get her out of there quick.
“Not offhand,” I said. “No suggestion. I have a comment. You said that if she’s being tailed she was followed here, but if her phone’s tapped they didn’t have to bother to tail her because they heard her secretary making the appointment.”
He frowned. “And this house is under surveillance.”
“Possibly. It could be that it isn’t as bad as she thinks it is. Of course she wouldn’t stretch it deliberately, but—”
“I don’t ‘stretch’ things,” she cut in.
“Of course not,” I told her. “But,” I told Wolfe, “people who aren’t used to being annoyed annoy easy. We can check the tailing part right now.” I turned. “Did you come in a taxi, Mrs. Bruner?”
“No. My car and chauffeur are outside.”
“Fine. I’ll take you out and wait there while you leave and see what happens.” I stood up. “Mr. Wolfe can let you know tomorrow what he decides.” I went to the couch for the sable.
It worked. She didn’t like it. She had come to hire Nero Wolfe, and she hung on for five minutes trying to clinch it, but she soon saw that she was only riling him and got up and invited her coat. She was up on Wolfe all right. Aware that he didn’t like to shake hands, she didn’t offer, but when I followed her out to the stoop she gave my hand a firm warm clasp, having gathered that I was going to be in on the decision. There were a couple of icy spots on the seven steps of the stoop, and I took her elbow down to the sidewalk, and the chauffeur was there at the open car door to hand her in. Before she went to it she slanted the brown-black eyes up at me and said, “Thank you, Mr. Goodwin. Of course there will be a check for you, personally.”
The chauffeur didn’t touch her; apparently she preferred to do it herself, so she wasn’t the kind of middle-aged widow who likes to feel a grip on her arm from a big strong male. When she was in he shut the door, got in front behind the wheel, and rolled; and thirty yards to the east, toward Ninth Avenue, a car whose lights had gone on and whose engine had started slid out and forward and came on by. Two men in the front seat. I stood there in the cold January wind long enough to see it take the turn into Tenth Avenue. It was laughable, so I laughed as I mounted the stoop, but I shut it off before I entered the hall.
Wolfe was leaning back with his eyes closed, but his mouth was tight, no curl at the corner. As I crossed to his desk he opened the eyes to slits. I picked up the check and inspected it. I had never seen one for an even, round, plain hundred grand, though I had seen bigger ones. I dropped it, went to my desk, sat, scribbled the license number of the tail car on the scratch pad, swung the phone around, dialed a number and got a man, a city employee for whom I had once done a king-size favor. When I gave him the license number he said it might take an hour, and I said I would hold my breath.
As I hung up Wolfe’s voice came. “Is that flummery?”
I swiveled. “No, sir. She is in real danger. A pair of them were in a car down the block. They switched on their lights as she got in, and as her Rolls turned into Tenth Avenue they were so close behind they nearly bumped it. An open tail, but they’re overdoing it. If the Rolls stops short they’ll bang it. She’s in danger.”
“Grrrhh,” he said.
“Yes, sir. I agree. The point is, who are they? If it’s something private, that hundred grand could be earned maybe. Of course if it’s really G-men she’ll just have to endure her afflictions, as you said. We’ll know in an hour or so.”
He glanced at the clock on the wall. Twelve minutes to seven. He focused on me. “Is Mr. Cohen at his office?”
“Probably. He usually quits around seven.”
“Ask him to dine with us.”
That was very foxy. If I said there was no point in it since the thing was preposterous, he would say that I was certainly aware of the importance of maintaining good relations with Mr. Cohen, which I was, and that he personally had not seen him for more than a year, which was true.
I swiveled and got the phone and dialed.
Chapter 2
At nine o’clock we were back in the office, Lon in the red leather chair and Wolfe and I at our desks, and Fritz was serving coffee and brandy. The hour and a half in the dining room across the hall had been quite sociable, what with the clam cakes with chili sauce, the beef braised in red wine, the squash with sour cream and chopped dill, the avocado with watercress and black walnut kernels, and the Liederkranz. The talk had covered the state of the Union, the state of the feminine mind, whether any cooked oyster can be fit to eat, structural linguistics, and the prices of books. It had got hot only on the feminine mind, and Lon had done that purposely to see how sharp Wolfe could get.
Lon took a sip of brandy and looked at his wristwatch. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “let’s get at it. I have to be somewhere at ten o’clock. I know you don’t expect me to pay for my dinner, but I also know that ordinarily, when there’s something you want to get or give, Archie just phones or drops in, so this must be something special. It will have to be fantastic to be as special as this cognac.”
Wolfe picked up a slip of paper that was there on his desk, frowned at it, and put it down. I had put it there half an hour before. My dinner had been interrupted by a phone call from the city employee with the information I had wanted, and before returning to the dining room I had written “FBI” on a sheet from the scratch pad and put it on Wolfe’s desk. It hadn’t improved my appetite any. If she had been wrong about the tail it could have had great possibilities, including a fat raise for me in the form of a check for me, personally.
Wolfe sipped coffee, put the cup down, and said, “I have fourteen bottles left.”
“My God,” Lon said, and sniffed the brandy. It was funny about him. With his slicked-back hair and his neat little tight-skinned face he looked like nobody in particular, but somehow he always seemed to fit, whatever he was doing — in his room on the twentieth floor in the Gazette building, two doors down from the publisher’s corner room, or dancing with a doll at the Flamingo, or at the table with us in Saul Panzer’s apartment where we played poker. Or sniffing a fifty-year-old cognac.