A Family Affair

Chapter 8

At a quarter past ten Thursday morning I left the South Room and closed the door, which was no longer honored with the seal of the NYPD. Ralph Kerner, of Town House Services Incorporated, closed his imitation-leather-bound book and said, “I’ll try to get the estimate to you by Monday. Tell Mr. Wolfe to expect the worst. That’s all we get nowadays, the worst, from all directions.”

“Yeah, we expect it and we get it. Isn’t there a discount for a room where a man has just been murdered?”

He laughed. Always laugh at a customer’s joke, even a bum one. “There certainly ought to be. I’ll tell Mr. Ohrbach. So you took him up and left him.” He laughed. “Good thing you left.”

“It sure was. I may be dumb, but not that dumb.”

Following him down the two flights, I would have liked to plant a foot on his fanny and push but controlled it.

The office chores were done, but I had been interrupted on a job of research — a phone call to Nathaniel Parker to ask for a report on the lawyers, Judd and Ackerman, one to our bank for a report on Hahn, the banker, and one to Lon Cohen about Roman Vilar, security, and Ernest Urquhart, lobbyist. I had enough on Igoe unless there were developments. Huh. Also one of the bottom shelves had seven directories, not counting the telephone books for the five boroughs and Westchester and Washington, and I had the Directory of Directors open at N to see if any of them were on the NATELEC list when Wolfe came down.

Three days’ mail was on his desk, and he went at it. First, as usual, a quick once-through, dropping about half in the wastebasket. Of course I had chucked most of the circulars and other junk. He answers nearly all real letters, especially handwritten ones, because he once told me, it is a mandate of civility. Also, I said, all he had to do was talk to me and he loved to talk, and he nodded and said that when he had to write them by hand he hadn’t answered any. I said then he wasn’t civilized, and that started him off on one of his hairsplitting speeches. We answered about twenty letters, three or four from orchid collectors and buffs as usual, with a few interruptions, phone calls from Parker and Lon Cohen and Fred Durkin. When I swiveled to my desk I was surprised to see him go to the shelves for a book — Fitzgerald’s translation of the Iliad. In the mail there had been an inscribed copy of Herblock’s new book, Special Report, with about a thousand cartoons of Nixon, but apparently he no longer needed to read or look at pictures about it because he was working on it. So he sat and read about a phony horse instead of a phony statesman.

He tasted his lunch all right. First marrow dumplings, and then sweetbreads poached in white wine, dipped in crumbs and eggs, sautéed, and doused with almonds in brown butter. I had had it at Rusterman’s, where they call it ris de veau amandine, and Fritz’s is always better. I know I haven’t got Wolfe’s palate. I know it because he has told me.

After lunch you might have thought we were back to normal. Theodore brought down a batch of statistics on germination and performance, and I entered them on the file cards. Week in and week out, that routine, about two per cent of which — the few he sells — applies to income and the rest to outgo, takes, on an average, about a third of my time. Wolfe, after listening to my reports on my morning’s research, which contributed absolutely nothing, worked hard at comparing Fitzgerald’s Iliad with the three other translations he brought over from the shelf. That was risky because they were on a high shelf and he had to use the stool. On the dot at four o’clock he left for the plant rooms. You might have thought we hadn’t a care in the world. There hadn’t been a peep from the members of the family. Wolfe hadn’t even glanced at Herblock’s Special Report. The only flaw was that when I finished typing the letters my legs and lungs wanted to go for a walk, and Saul and Fred and Orrie didn’t have walkie-talkies.

At six o’clock the sound came of the elevator complaining as it started down, but it only lasted four seconds. He had stopped off for a look at the South Room, which he hadn’t seen since one-thirty Tuesday morning. It was a good ten minutes before it started again, so he gave the ruins more than a glance. When he came and crossed to his desk and got settled, he said my guess of fifteen hundred dollars was probably too low with the bloated prices of everything from sugar to shingles, and I said I was glad to hear him having fun with words, tossing off an alliteration with two words that weren’t spelled the same. He said it had been casual, which was a lie, and started reading and signing the letters. He always reads them, not to catch errors, because he knows there won’t be any, but to let me know that if I ever make one it will be spotted.

It was ten minutes to seven and I was sealing the envelopes when the phone rang and I got it.

“Nero Wolfe’s residence, Archie Goodwin speaking.” Up to six o’clock it’s “office.” After six, “residence.” I don’t want people to think my nose is on the grindstone. Most offices close at five.

“May I speak to Mr. Wolfe, please? My name is Roman Vilar. V–I-L-A-R.”

I covered the mouthpiece and turned. “Fred has flushed one. Roman Vilar, euphemistic security. He asks permission to speak to Mr. Wolfe, please. Only he makes it Vi-lar.”

“Indeed.” Wolfe reached for his receiver. I kept mine.

“Nero Wolfe speaking.”

“This is Roman Vilar, Mr. Wolfe. You have never heard of me, but of course I have heard of you. But that isn’t correct — you have heard of me, or at least your man Goodwin has. Yesterday, from Benjamin Igoe.”

“Yes. Mr. Goodwin has told me.”

“Of course. And he told you what Mr. Igoe told him. Of course. And Mr. Igoe has told me what he told Goodwin. I have told others, and they are here with me now in my apartment. Mr. Igoe and four others. May I ask a question?”

“Yes. I may answer it.”

“Thank you. Have you told the police or the District Attorney what Mr. Igoe told Goodwin?”

“No.”

“Thank you. Do you intend to? No, I withdraw that. I can’t expect you to tell me what you intend to do. We have been discussing the situation, and one of us was going to go and discuss it with you, but we decided we would all like to be present. Of course not now — it’s your dinnertime, or soon will be. Would nine o’clock be convenient?”

“Here. At my office.”

“Certainly.”

“You know the address.”

“Certainly.”

“You said four others. Who are they?”

“You have their names. Mr. Igoe gave them to Goodwin.”

“Yes. We’ll expect you at nine o’clock.”

Wolfe hung up. So did I.

“I want a raise,” I said. “Beginning yesterday at four o’clock. I admit it will be more inflation, and President Ford expects us to voluntarily lay off, but as somebody said, a man is worth his hire. It took me just ten minutes to get Igoe to spill that.”

“ ‘The laborer is worthy of his hire.’ The Bible. Luke. They offered to work for nothing, all three of them, and you want a raise, and it was you who took him up to bed.”

I nodded. “And you said to me with him there on the floor and plaster all around him and on him, ‘I suppose you had to.’ Someday that will have to be fully discussed, but not now. We’re talking just to show how different we are. If we were just ordinary people we would be shaking hands and beaming at each other or dancing a jig. It’s your turn.”

Fritz entered. To announce a meal he always comes in three steps, never four. But seeing us, when he stopped, what he said was, “Something happened.”

Damn it, we were and are different. But Fritz knows us. He ought to.

Before going to the dining room I rang Saul’s number, got his answering service, and left a message that I couldn’t make it to the weekly poker game and give Lon Cohen my love.