Trouble at the Brownstone

Chapter 28

By the time I got home that night, Wolfe had gone upstairs, but he had left a handwritten note on my desk:

It isn’t often Wolfe allows his morning meal to be interrupted, so I figured he was stirring himself to action. The next day after finishing my own breakfast in the kitchen, I went upstairs at seven-thirty, knocked on his bedroom door, and stepped in after hearing a muttered “enter.”

As often as I have seen my boss at this early hour, I still marvel at the spectacle of him, clad in yellow pajamas in a bed covered by a black silk coverlet, and eating off a tray with folding legs. His meal was the same as mine had been: orange juice, eggs au beurre noir, bacon, hashed brown potatoes, and blueberry muffins. One difference: Where my morning beverage of choice is coffee, his taste runs to hot chocolate.

“Reporting as requested,” I told him.

“Sit,” he ordered, pointing to a bedside chair. I sat.

“I gather from your recent behavior that you do not feel I have been vigorous enough in pursuing this enigma,” he said as he polished off a muffin.

“I’m frustrated that we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

“Frustration often leads to impulsive and unwise actions,” Wolfe replied. “Do you have any suggestions?”

“Not right now,” I said. “I was hoping you had some sort of plan.”

He drew in air and let it out slowly. “It has been nearly a year since Mr. Cohen has eaten with us,” he said.

“That’s correct — last August, to be exact.”

“Invite him to dine here tonight. Tell him we are having vitello tonnato along with broccoli and herb-stuffed potatoes.”

“Shall I also mention an after-dinner snifter of Remisier is included in the menu?”

“Not necessary. Mr. Cohen knows that the elixir is always available on his visits.”

I wasn’t sure having Lon Cohen over for dinner was a sign Wolfe was going back to work, but I was all for it. When I phoned him, Lon sounded harried, as usual, but he had time to say, “Nice to hear from you, of all people. Have you called with something I can use on page one tomorrow?”

“No, I—”

“Then I’m not interested. You have not exactly been forthcoming lately, so—”

“Now it’s my turn to do the interrupting, dammit. Nero Wolfe would like you to join us for dinner tonight.”

That brought him up short. “Dinner at the brownstone? I never say no to that invitation. Although I suppose I am expected to sing for my supper.”

“My boss didn’t say. You can always claim you have another engagement.”

“Not a chance. I will be there, with shoes shined and wearing a fresh shirt.”

“What more can we ask for?”

At six thirty, I answered the doorbell and admitted Lon Cohen, who was indeed presentable. Wolfe had not yet come down from his room, so I mixed drinks for Lon and me and we sat in the office. “I hope your boss isn’t expecting a lot from me,” he said. “By the way, you look kind of funny, with some of your hair shaved off. You never have told me what happened to you, and all I have to go by is police gossip from one of our reporters.”

“It’s a long story,” I told him, “and it will probably come out later tonight.”

When Wolfe did make his appearance, we went into the dining room, where we were served the vitello tonnato, which, for those of you like me not conversant with Italian, is a dish consisting of veal and tuna. In Fritz’s hands, it was delicious.

Lon knew our protocol enough to realize business is not discussed during meals, and he also knew Wolfe invariably selected the subject for dinner table discussion. This night it was the Marshall Plan, which had been instituted in 1948 by the United States to give financial aid to Western European countries that had been devastated by World War II. Lon was enthusiastic over the success of the plan, Wolfe less so, feeling certain countries were favored over others in the doling out of the dollars — millions of them. As usual, I took a neutral position.

In the office with coffee after dinner and dessert, Lon settled into the red leather chair, savoring that snifter of Remisier he knew would be coming his way, as was always the case on his visits. “As pleasant as this evening has been, I have a feeling I was invited for a reason,” he said to Wolfe, running a hand over his dark, slicked-back hair.

“Mr. Cohen, this is a question I have often posed: Would you say that on balance, are we more or less even, involving favors we have bestowed upon each other?”

“I would agree. I feed you information, and you feed me what turn out to be scoops. Overall, it has worked out on both sides.”

“Very well. You have of course noticed that Archie shows signs of physical strife, and we will go into that in the course of the evening. First, a question. Have your reporters encountered many cases of smuggling, particularly involving displaced persons who are in this country either legally or otherwise?”

Lon took a sip of the cognac, savored it, and exhaled. “If there has been a lot of smuggling on the part of the incoming DPs, our men haven’t picked up on it. And neither, as far as we are aware, have the police or the immigration authorities. Oh, no doubt some of these people have brought things in on a small scale that they, shall we say... ‘borrowed’ from others in Europe before they left.”

“Do you have any sense of what percentage of the displaced persons who have entered this country since the end of the war are here without documentation?” Wolfe asked.

The newspaperman sighed and turned his palms upward. “I’m not sure anyone has a definitive answer to that. For as much as the government likes to claim how strict we are in allowing people into this country, the truth is that our borders really are a sieve. I am convinced that there are uncounted numbers of aliens on the streets of this city right now. We figure many of them were brought over by family members who paid somebody to get them here using phony or stolen identification papers.”

“It appears to be a furtive and burgeoning industry.”

“That’s a good way to phrase it,” Lon said. “And that so-called industry is damned near impossible to penetrate. At the risk of using a cliché, there’s a conspiracy of silence. And it seems to us at the Gazette that a lot of government officials are looking the other way, maybe because they feel it’s fruitless to try prying information out of the people responsible for bringing their relatives or friends across from Europe.”

“Clans invariably close their ranks,” Wolfe remarked. “Some of what I am about to relate, you already know, but I feel you merit transparency from Archie and me.”

With that, Wolfe launched into a detailed recitation of all that had transpired since the attack of Fritz. He left nothing out, including my run-in with those two men and my subsequent shooting of one of them, William Hartz.

“Oh yeah, we know about Hartz. He’s clammed up, right?”

“As far as we know,” I put in. “He was assigned a public defender who, last we heard, had not been able to get him to open his yap at all.”

“Have there been any further developments in that tavern shooting?” Wolfe asked.

“Nothing we’ve heard of,” Lon said. “The cops are still calling it self-defense on the part of the bar owner.”

“Do you have anything to add to what I have summarized, Mr. Cohen?”

“Not really. We are at a dead end on the whole business. I was hoping you might have some words of wisdom.”

“Wisdom seems to be in short supply at the moment,” Wolfe said. “Has your network of reporters and their sources noticed any spike in smuggling activities involving valuable merchandise?”

“No, and believe me, we have been looking. Our ‘sources,’ as you term them, are well plugged into the world of fences and other intermediaries who trade in that quaint old phrase, ‘ill-gotten goods.’ The only recent example I can think of is when a couple of months back, three pieces of priceless Renaissance artwork were discovered in the back room of a small Greenwich Village gallery, thanks to a tip we received. You may have read our article that ran at the time.”

“I did,” Wolfe said, uncapping a frosted bottle of beer that Fritz had brought in. “But I find it hard to believe that is the only example to have been discovered.”

Lon nodded. “I concur, which may indicate the degree of secrecy with which smugglers operate. I have no doubt that other examples of this kind will eventually come to light. In the meantime, though, the single most prevalent element secretly coming into this country is not riches but people, which can be viewed as both good and bad.”

Wolfe leaned back in his chair and stared straight ahead, apparently oblivious to us. Lon looked at me, his face registering puzzlement, and I rolled my eyes. Our guest drained the last of his Remisier and rose. “Time for me to be off. Thanks for the dinner, the conversation, and this,” he told Wolfe, holding up the empty snifter in a salute. He got no response and sent another puzzled expression in my direction as he rose to leave.

When I walked Lon down the hall to the door, he said, “It seems like your boss is in a trance. Was it something I said?”

“Beats me. I think I’ve told you that when he is in the middle of a case, he often closes his eyes and pushes his lips in and out, which means he’s working on a solution, which in itself is a sort of trance. But this... I’ve never seen it before.”

“Do you think he’s all right?”

“We will know soon enough,” I said as Lon went down the steps of the brownstone, shaking his head and striding off in search of a cab.

When I got back to the office, Wolfe was gone. Thinking he went to consult with Fritz about tomorrow’s meals, I went to the kitchen, but he wasn’t there. “Mr. Wolfe must have gone to bed, Archie,” I was told by our chef. Okay, the resident brain is in some sort of mood that I can’t quite read, but I am not going to worry about it until tomorrow, I told myself, as I headed upstairs to get my requisite 510 minutes of sleep.