Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 02 (20 page)

Wright, smiling, sipped his vermouth. “I hesitate chiefly because you had me mark the junk for identification. I would do about anything for Nero Wolfe, but I would dislike getting in a mess and having the club dragged in too, perhaps. I suppose you couldn’t offer any guarantees on that score?”

I shook my head. “No guarantees, but knowing how Mr. Wolfe is arranging this charade I’d take you on a thousand to one.”

Wright sat a minute and looked at me, and then smiled again. “Well, I have to get back to the office. Go on with your lark. I’ll wait here.”

There was nothing to it. I picked up the Underwood and walked into the alcove with it and set it down on the desk. The public stenographer was there only ten feet away, brushing up his machine, but I merely got too nonchalant even to glance at him. I pulled the junk aside and transferred the shiny cover to it, put the new one in its place, and picked up the junk and walked out. Wright got up from his chair and walked beside me to the elevator.

On the sidewalk, at the street entrance, Wright shook hands with me. He wasn’t smiling; I guessed from the look on his face that his mind had gone back four years to another time we shook hands. He said, “Give Nero Wolfe my warmest regards, and tell him they will still be warm even if I get kicked out of the Harvard Club for helping to steal a typewriter.”

I grinned. “Steal my eye, it nearly broke my heart to leave that new Underwood there.”

I carried my loot to where I had parked the roadster on Forty-fifth Street, put it on the seat
beside me, and headed downtown. Having it there made me feel like we were getting somewhere. Not that I knew where, but Wolfe either did or thought he did. I didn’t very often get really squeamish about Wolfe’s calculations; I worried, all right, and worked myself into a stew when it seemed to me that he was overlooking a point that was apt to trip us up, but down in my heart I nearly always knew that anything he was missing would turn out in the end to be something we didn’t need. In this case I wasn’t so sure, and what made me not so sure was that damn cripple. There was something in the way the others spoke about him, in the way he looked and acted that Monday night, in the way those warnings sounded, that gave me an uneasy idea that for once Wolfe might be underrating a guy. That wasn’t like him, for he usually had a pretty high opinion of the people whose fate he was interfering with. I was thinking that maybe the mistake he had made in this case was in reading Chapin’s books. He had definite opinions about literary merit, and possibly having rated the books pretty low, he had done the same for the man who wrote them. If he was rating Chapin low, I was all ready to fall in on the other side. For instance, here beside me was the typewriter on which the warnings had been written, all three of them, no doubt about it, and it was a typewriter to which Paul Chapin had had easy and constant access, but there was no way in the world of proving that he had done it. Not only that, it was a typewriter to which most of the other persons connected with the business had had access too. No, I thought, as far as writing those warnings went, nearly anything you might say about Chapin would be underrating him.

When I got to the house it wasn’t eleven o’clock
yet. I carried the typewriter to the hall and put it down on the stand while I removed my hat and coat. There was another hat and coat there; I looked at them; they weren’t Farrell’s; I didn’t recognize them. I went to the kitchen to ask Fritz who the visitor was, but he wasn’t there, upstairs probably, so I went back and got the typewriter and took it to the office. But I didn’t get more than six feet inside the door before I stopped. Sitting there turning over the pages of a book, with his stick leaning against the arm of his chair, was Paul Chapin.

Something I don’t often do, I went tongue-tied. I suppose it was because I had under my arm the typewriter he had written his poems on, though certainly he couldn’t recognize it under the cover. But he could tell it was a typewriter. I stood and stared at him. He glanced up and informed me politely:

“I’m waiting for Mr. Wolfe.”

He turned another page in the book, and I saw it was
Devil Take the Hindmost
, the one Wolfe had marked things in. I said:

“Does he know you’re here?”

“Oh yes. His man told him some time ago. I’ve been here,” he glanced at his wrist, “half an hour.”

There hadn’t been any sign of his noticing what I was carrying. I went over and put it down on my desk and shoved it to the back edge. I went to Wolfe’s desk and glanced through the envelopes of the morning mail, the corner of my eye telling me that Chapin was enjoying his book. I brushed off Wolfe’s blotter and twisted his fountain pen around. Then I got sore, because I realized that I wasn’t inclined to go and sit at my desk, and the reason was that it would put me with my back to Paul Chapin. So I went there and got into my chair and got some plant records from the
drawer and began looking at them. It was a damn funny experience; I don’t know what it was about that cripple that got under my skin so. Maybe he was magnetic. I actually had to clamp my jaw to keep from turning around to look at him, and while I was trying to laugh it off ideas kept flashing through my mind such as whether he had a gun and if so was it the one with the hammer nose filed down. I had a good deal stronger feeling of Paul Chapin, behind me, than I’ve had of lots of people under my eyes and sometimes under my hands too.

I flipped the pages of the record book, and I didn’t turn around until Wolfe came in.

I had many times seen Wolfe enter the office when a visitor was there waiting for him, and I watched him to see if he would vary his common habit for the sake of any effect on the cripple. He didn’t. He stopped inside the door and said, “Good morning, Archie.” Then he turned to Chapin and his trunk and head went forward an inch and a half from the perpendicular, in a sort of mammoth elegance. “Good morning, sir.” He proceeded to his desk, fixed the orchids in the vase, sat down, and looked through the mail. He rang for Fritz, took out his pen and tried it on the scratch pad, and when Fritz came nodded for beer. He looked at me:

“You saw Mr. Wright? Your errand was successful?”

“Yes, sir. In the bag.”

“Good. If you would please move a chair up for Mr. Chapin.—If you would be so good, sir? For either amenities or hostilities, the distance is too great. Come closer.” He opened a bottle of beer.

Chapin got up, grasped his stick, and hobbled over to the desk. He paid no attention to the chair I placed
for him, nor to me, but stood there leaning on his stick, his flat cheeks pale, his lips showing a faint movement like a race horse not quite steady at the barrier, his light-colored eyes betraying neither life nor death—neither the quickness of the one nor the glassy stare of the other. I got at my desk and shuffled my pad in among a pile of papers, ready to take my notes while pretending to do something else, but Wolfe shook his head at me. “Thank you, Archie, it will not be necessary.

The cripple said, “There need be neither amenities nor hostilities. I’ve come for my box.”

“Ah! Of course. I might have known.” Wolfe had turned on his gracious tone. “If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Chapin, may I ask how you knew I had it?”

“You may ask.” Chapin smiled. “Any man’s vanity will stand a pat on the back, won’t it, Mr. Wolfe? I inquired for my package where I had left it, and was told it was not there, and learned of the ruse by which it had been stolen. I reflected, and it was obvious that the likeliest thief was you. You must believe me, this is not flattery, I really did come to you first.”

“Thank you. I do thank you.” Wolfe, having emptied a glass, leaned back and got comfortable. “I am considering—this shouldn’t bore you, since words are the tools of your trade—I am considering the comical and tragical scantiness of all vocabularies. Take, for example, the procedure by which you acquired the contents of that box, and I got the box and all; both our actions were, by definition, stealing, and both of us are thieves; words implying condemnation and contempt, and yet neither of us would concede that he has earned them. So much for words—but of course you know that, since you are a professional.”

“You said contents. You haven’t opened the box.”

“My dear sir! Could Pandora herself have resisted such a temptation?”

“You broke the lock.”

“No. It is intact. It is simple, and surrendered easily.”

“And … you opened it. You probably …” He stopped and stood silent. His voice had gone thin on him, but I couldn’t see that his face displayed any feeling at all, not even resentment. He continued, “In that case … I don’t want it. I don’t want to see it.—But that’s preposterous. Of course I want it. I must have it.”

Wolfe, looking at him with half-closed eyes, motionless, said nothing. That lasted for seconds. All of a sudden Chapin demanded, suddenly hoarse:

“Damn you, where is it?”

Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. “Mr. Chapin. Sit down.”

“No.”

“Very well. You can’t have the box. I intend to keep it.”

Still there was no change on the cripple’s face. I didn’t like him, but I was admiring him. His light-colored eyes had kept straight into Wolfe’s, but now they moved; he glanced aside at the chair I had placed for him, firmed his hand on the crook of his stick, and limped three steps and sat down. He looked at Wolfe again and said:

“For twenty years I lived on pity. I don’t know if you are a sensitive man, I don’t know if you can guess what a diet like that would do. I despised it, but I lived on it, because a hungry man takes what he can get. Then I found something else to sustain me. I got a measure of pride in achievement, I ate bread that I earned, I threw away the stick that I needed to walk
with, one that had been given me, and bought one of my own. Mr. Wolfe, I was done with pity. I had swallowed it to the extreme of toleration. I was sure that, whatever gestures I might be brought, foolishly or desperately, to accept from my fellow creatures, it would never again be pity.”

He stopped. Wolfe murmured. “Not sure. Not sure unless you carried death ready at hand.”

“Right. I learn that today. I seem to have acquired a new and active antipathy to death.”

“And as regards pity …”

I need it. I ask for it. I discovered an hour ago that you had got my box, and I have been considering ways and means. I can see no other way to get it than to plead with you. Force”—he smiled the smile that his eyes ignored—“is not feasible. The force of law is of course, under the circumstances, out of the question. Cunning—I have no cunning, except with words. There is no way but to call upon your pity. I do so, I plead with you. The box is mine by purchase. The contents are mine by … by sacrifice. By purchase I can say, though not with money. I ask you to give it back to me.”

“Well. What plea have you to offer?”

“The plea of my need, my very real need, and your indifference.”

“You are wrong there, Mr. Chapin. I need it too.”

“No. It is you who are wrong. It is valueless to you.”

“But, my dear sir.” Wolfe wiggled a finger. “If I permit you to be the judge of your own needs you must grant me the same privilege. What other plea?”

“None. I tell you, I will take it in pity.”

“Not from me. Mr. Chapin. Let us not keep from our tongues what is in our minds. There is one plea
you could make that would be effective.—Wait, hear me. I know that you are not prepared to make it, not yet, and I am not prepared to ask for it. Your box is being kept in a safe place, intact. I need it here in order to be sure that you will come to see me whenever I am ready for you. I am not yet ready. When the time comes, it will not be merely my possession of your box that will persuade you to give me what I want and intend to get. I am preparing for you. You said you have acquired a new and active antipathy to death. Then you should prepare for me: for the best I shall be able to offer you, the day you come for your box, will be your choice between two deaths. I shall leave that, for the moment, as cryptic as it sounds; you may understand me, but you certainly will not try to anticipate me.—Archie. In order that Mr. Chapin may not suspect us of gullery, bring the box please.”

I went and unlocked the cabinet and got the box from the shelf, and took it and put it down on Wolfe’s desk. I hadn’t looked at it since Wednesday and had forgotten how swell it was; it certainly was a pip. I put it down with care. The cripple’s eyes were on me, I thought, rather than on the box, and I had a notion of how pleased he probably was to see me handling it. For nothing but pure damn meanness I rubbed my hand back and forth along the top of it. Wolfe told me to sit down.

Chapin’s hands were grasping the arms of his chair, as if to lift himself up. He said, “May I open it?”

“No.”

He got to his feet, disregarding his stick, leaning on a hand on the desk. “I’ll just … lift it.”

“No. I’m sorry, Mr. Chapin. You won’t touch it.”

The cripple leaned there, bending forward, looking Wolfe in the eyes. His chin was stuck out. All of a
sudden he began to laugh. It was a hell of a laugh, I thought it was going to choke him. He went on with it. Then it petered out and he turned around and got hold of his stick. He seemed to me about half hysterical, and I was ready to jump him if he tried any child’s play like bouncing the stick on Wolfe’s bean, but I had him wrong again. He got into his regular posture, leaning to the right side with his head a little to the left to even up, and from his light-colored eyes steady on Wolfe again you would never have guessed he had any sentiments at all.

Wolfe said, “The next time you come here, Mr. Chapin, you may take the box with you.”

Chapin shook his head. His tone was new, sharper: “I think not. You’re making a mistake. You’re forgetting that I’ve had twenty years’ practice at renunciation.”

Wolfe shook his head. “Oh no. On the contrary, that’s what I’m counting on. The only question will be, which of two sacrifices you will select. If I know you, and I think I do, I know where your choice will lie.”

“I’ll make it now.” I stared at the cripple’s incredible smile; I thought to myself that in order to break him Wolfe would have to wipe that smile off, and it didn’t look practical by any means I’d ever heard of. With the smile still working, fixed, Chapin put his left hand on the desk to steady himself, and with his right hand he lifted his stick up, pointing it in front of him like a rapier, and gently let its tip come to rest on the surface of the desk. He slid the tip along until it was against the side of the box, and then pushed, not in a hurry, just a steady push. The box moved, approached the edge, kept going, and tumbled to the floor. It bounced a little and rolled towards my feet.