The Black Mountain

XVI

At noon the next day, Friday, we sat in our cabin on B deck on the Basilia. She was to sail at one. Everything was under control except one thing. At the Forelli Hotel in Genoa we had eleven hours sleep on good mattresses, and a good breakfast. Wolfe could walk without shuffling or staggering, and my bruises weren’t quite as raw. We were listed as Carl Gunther and Alex Gunther, had paid for the tickets, and had a little over six hundred bucks in our jeans. It was an outside cabin, twice as big as our cell in the Bari can, with two beds and two chairs, and one of the chairs was upholstered and Wolfe could squeeze into it.

But what about Peter Zov?

All Wolfe had been told was that he would enter Italy at Gorizia Wednesday night, cross to Genoa by way of Padua and Milan, and be on the Basilia as a cabin steward by Thursday night. Wolfe had wanted to know what his name would be, but Stritar had said that would be decided after he got to Genoa. Of course we knew nothing about where Zov would get his name or his papers, or from whom, or how the fix was set up for him to replace a steward. We didn’t know how good the fix was, or whether it always worked or only sometimes. As we sat there in the cabin, we didn’t give a damn about any of that; all that was eating us was, was he on board or not? If he wasn’t, did we want to sail anyhow and hope he would come later? Didn’t we have to? If we abandoned ship just because Zov didn’t show up, wouldn’t that be a giveaway?

“There’s an hour left,” I said. “I’ll go and look around some more. Stewards are popping in and out everywhere.”

“Confound it.” Wolfe hit the chair arm with his fist. “We should have kept him with us.”

“Stritar would have smelled a rat if you had insisted on it, and anyway he wouldn’t buy it.”

“Pfui. What is ingenuity for? I should have managed it. I’m a dunce. I should have foreseen this and prevented it. By heaven, I won’t start back without him!”

There was a knock at the door, I said, “Come in,” it opened, and Peter Zov entered with our bags.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said in Serbo-Croat. He put the bags down and turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” Wolfe said. “There is something to say.”

“You can say it later. This is a busy time.”

“Just one word, then. Don’t go to any pains to keep us from hearing you speak English. Of course you do — some, at least — or you couldn’t be a cabin steward on this boat.”

“You’re smart,” he said in Serbo-Croat. “Okay,” he said in American, and went.

Wolfe told me to shut the door, and I did. When I turned back he had his eyes closed and was sighing, deep, and then again, deeper. He opened his eyes, looked at the bags and then at me, and told me what had been said.

“We ought to know his name,” I suggested.

“We will. Go on deck and watch the gangway. He might take it into his head to skedaddle.”

“Why should he?”

“He shouldn’t. But a man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable. Go.”

So I was on deck, at the rail, when we shoved off, and had a good look at the city stretching along the strip at the edge of the water and climbing the hills. The hills might have impressed me more if I hadn’t just returned from a jaunt in Montenegro. By the time we had cleared the outer harbor and were in open water most of my fellow passengers had gone below for lunch, and I decided that now was as good a time as any for getting a certain point settled.

I went back down to the cabin and told Wolfe, “It’s lunchtime. You’ve decided to stay put in this cabin all the way across, and you may be right. It’s not likely that there’s anyone on board who would recognize you, but it’s possible, and if it happened and it got around, as it would, the best that could result would be that you’d have to write another script. But we’re going to see a lot of each other in the next twelve days, not to mention the last six, and I think it would be bad policy for us to eat all our meals together in this nook.”

“So do I.”

“I’ll eat in the dining room.”

“By all means. I’ve already given Peter Zov my order for lunch.”

“What?” I stared. “Zov?”

“Certainly. He’s our steward.”

“Good God. He’ll bring all your meals and you’ll eat them?”

“Yes. It will be trying, and it won’t help my digestion, but it will have its advantages. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to discuss our plans.”

“And if he gets ideas and mixes in some arsenic?”

“Nonsense. Why should he?”

“He shouldn’t. But a man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable.”

“Go get your lunch.”

I went, and found that though eating in the dining room would provide a change, it would offer nothing spectacular in companionship. Table Seventeen seated six. One chair was empty and would be all the way, and the other four were occupied by a German who thought he could speak English but was mistaken, a woman from Maryland who spoke it too much, and a mother and daughter, Italian or something, who didn’t even know “dollar” and “okay” and “cigarette.” The daughter was seventeen, attractive, and almost certainly a smoldering volcano of Latin passion, but even if I had been in the humor to try stirring up a young volcano, which I wasn’t, mamma stayed glued to her all the way over.

During the twelve days there was plenty of time, of course, to mosey around and make acquaintances and chin at random, but by the third day I had learned that the only three likely prospects, not counting the volcano, were out. One, a black-eyed damsel with a lisp, was on her way to Pittsburgh to get married. Another, a tall slender Nordic who needed no makeup and used none, loved to play chess, and that was all. The third, a neat little blonde, started drinking Gibsons an hour before lunch and didn’t stop. One morning I decided to do some research in physiology and keep up with her, but late in the afternoon I saw that she was cheating. There were two of her, and they could both float around in the air. So I called it off, fought my way down to the cabin, and flopped on the bed. Wolfe shot me a glance but had no comment. In Genoa he had bought a few dozen books, all in Italian, and apparently had bet himself he would clean them up by the time we sighted Sandy Hook.

He and I did converse now and then during the voyage, but not too cordially, because of a basic difference of opinion. I completely disapproved of the plan which he wanted opportunity to discuss with Peter Zov. The argument had started in the hotel at Genoa and had continued, off and on, ever since. My first position had been that the way to handle it was to wait until we were well at sea, the second or third day, and then see the captain and tell him Zov had committed a murder in New York and had the weapon with him, and ask him to lock Zov up, and find his gun and take it, and radio Inspector Cramer of the New York Police Department to meet the boat at Quarantine. Wolfe had rejected it on the ground that the New York police had never heard of Zov and would probably radio the captain to that effect, and with nothing but our word, unsupported by evidence, the captain would refuse to act; and not only that, but also the captain, or someone he told about it, might warn Zov and even arrange somehow to get him off the ship before we reached American waters. On the high seas there was no jurisdiction but the captain’s. If not the captain himself, someone on board with some authority must be a Communist, or at least a friend of the Tito regime, or how could it be arranged to get Zov on as a steward whenever they wanted to?

So I took a new position. As soon as we entered the North River everyone on board, including the captain, would be under the jurisdiction of the New York police, and Wolfe could call Cramer on the ship-to-shore phone, give him the picture, and tell him to meet the boat at the pier. That way there couldn’t possibly be any slip. Even if the whole damn crew and half the officers were Commies, there was nothing they could do if Sergeant Stebbins once got his paws on Zov and the Luger.

Wolfe didn’t try to talk me out of that one; he just vetoed it, and that was the argument. It wasn’t only that he was pigheaded. It was his bloated conceit. He wanted to sit in his own chair at his desk in his office, with a bottle of beer and a glass in front of him, tell me to get Cramer on the phone, pick up his instrument, and say in a casual tone, “Mr. Cramer? I’ve just got home from a little trip. I have the murderer of Marko Vukcic here, and the weapon, and I can tell you where to get witnesses to testify that he was in New York on March eighteenth. Will you please send someone to get him? Oh, you’ll come yourself? At your convenience. Mr. Goodwin, who was with me on the trip, has him safely in charge.”

That was his plan. The Basilia was scheduled to dock at noon on Wednesday. We would disembark and go home. That evening after dark Zov would come ashore and meet me at a waterfront bar, to go with me to the house of a friend of ours who would lend us his car to drive to Philadelphia. The house would be on West Thirty-fifth Street. I would take Zov in and introduce him to Nero Wolfe, taking adequate precautions that he didn’t execute his mission then and there. Possibly Wolfe would have to get Cramer on the phone himself instead of telling me to.

Wolfe wouldn’t budge. That was the plan, no matter what I said, or how often I said it, about the risks involved or the defects in Wolfe’s character that made him hatch it. I admit that my remarks about the defects got fairly pointed by the twelfth day, and that morning as we packed, him with his bag on his bed and me with mine on mine, our relations were so strained that when he had prolonged trouble with his zipper he didn’t call for help and I didn’t offer any. When I had my bag closed and labeled I told him, “See you in the dining room with the immigration officers,” and left him. Out in the passage there was Zov, coming along. He asked, “Okay?” and I told him, “Yep, okay.” He entered our cabin. Being good and sore, I told my legs to go on to the dining room, but they said no. They kept me standing there until Zov came out again with our bags, and headed for the stairs. I wanted to stop him and make sure he knew where we were going to meet that evening, but Wolfe had said it was all arranged in Serbo-Croat, and the few times I had tried exchanging English with Zov it hadn’t worked too well, so I skipped it.

When we had finished immigrating, Wolfe went back to the cabin and I went on deck to take in the harbor and the Statue of Liberty and the skyline. The neat little blonde came and joined me at the rail, and if you had guessed her Gibson intake from the way she looked you would have been away off. She was just a happy and healthy little doll with nice clear eyes and a clear, smooth skin, so much so that a news photographer, who had taken a dozen shots of the only notable on board, an orchestra conductor, and was looking around for something that might appeal to his public, came and asked her to pose. She said all right, but refused to sit on the rail with her skirt up, and I thought it might have been worth the trouble to try to reform her. There was nothing wrong with her legs, so it wasn’t that.

It was a bright, sunny day. As we passed the Battery and slid up the river I was thinking that now would be the time to telephone Cramer if that big baboon had listened to reason. It would be a crime if something happened now to spoil it — as, for instance, Zov deciding he liked some other contact in New York better than us. I had a notion to go down to the cabin and have one more try at talking sense into Wolfe, and was debating it as we were being nosed into the slip, when his voice sounded behind me and I turned. He was looking placid and pleased. He glanced left and right at the line of waving passengers and then down at the group of waving welcomers on the pier. He nodded at somebody, and I stretched my neck to see who it was, and there was Zov with three or four other stewards, back against the bulkhead.

“Satisfactory,” Wolfe said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “So far.”

Somebody yelled, “Nero Wolfe!”

I jerked around. It was the news photographer. He was headed for us down the deck, beaming, jostling passengers. “Mr. Wolfe! Look this way! Just a second!” He advanced and got set to focus.

It may have been partly me. If I hadn’t looked at Zov and started my hand inside my jacket he might have hesitated long enough for Wolfe to get behind something or somebody. He was fast. I never saw a faster hand. Mine had just touched the butt of the Marley when he pulled the trigger. Wolfe took one step toward him and went down. I had the Marley out but couldn’t shoot because the other stewards were all over Zov. I jumped over Wolfe’s body and was there to help, but they had Zov flat on the deck, and one of them had his gun. I went back to Wolfe, who was on his side, propping himself with an elbow. People were crowding in and jabbering.

“Lie down,” I commanded him. “Where did he get you?”

“Leg. Left leg.”

I squatted and looked. The hole was in the left leg of his pants, ten inches above the knee. I wanted to laugh, and I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe I was afraid the photographer would shoot it and it would look silly.

“Probably in the bone,” I said. “What did I tell you?”

“Have they got him?”

“Yes.”

“The gun?”

“Yes.”

“Was it the Luger?”

“Yes.”

“Satisfactory. Find a phone and get Mr. Cramer.”

He flattened out and closed his eyes. The ham.