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avanneman · 6 years ago

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A Social Call

(Another short story in the manner of Rex Stout, featuring Nero Wolfe.)

“I’m afraid that would be impossible.”

“I agree entirely. And it’s been my experience that when things are impossible, they don’t happen. Which means that we should just forget about this.”

She laughed.

“But that would be impossible as well.”

“I assure you it wouldn’t, Ms. Harris—nor, in fact, is it. If you understood what you are asking of me, you’d understand.”

I couldn’t help laughing myself. The notion of me getting Wolfe’s 4,000 ounces on an airplane—a device that actually left the ground and flew through the air like a bird—well, the idea was unimaginable and irresistible at the same time.

“You think well of yourself, don’t you, Mr. Goodwin?”

I laughed again. I was a riot, and so was she.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Harris. I’m enjoying this conversation for many reasons. But I couldn’t get my boss to hear Mr. Zauberberg out if he came to this office himself. Mr. Wolfe made so much money last year he’s taking this one off to translate Montaigne’s Essays into Serbian and Hungarian. As a result, he’s even less interested in running errands for twenty-something billionaires than usual.”

“Mr. Zauberberg is 32, and he is not requesting an errand. He is seeking the assistance of a man known for his devotion to the cause of freedom of speech.”

“Those are kind words, and Mr. Wolfe will appreciate them when I convey them to him. But the deal is still off. Mr. Wolfe is not working for Mr. Zauberberg or any one else, and he is certainly not getting on a plane. Now, I’m sure your boss isn’t used to taking ‘no’ for an answer. If you like, tell him that you found me irascible and unpleasant.”

There was silence for a beat. Then she came back at me.

“Mr. Zauberberg only speaks with principals.”

“Of course he does. I’m sorry, Ms. Harris, I don’t like to be rude, but sometimes that’s my job. I think you can understand that pretty well.”

There was another pause.

“I’ll get back to you, Mr. Goodwin,” she said. “Thank you for your time.”

“Thank you as well.”

I wished I could have done more for Ms. Harris—or Joan, as I could have called her—because I was looking at her FacetoFace page. She was three years out of Stanford, and, judging from her picture as the co-captain of the varsity tennis team, she had the best legs of any applied statistician I’d ever seen. The entire time we had been talking I’d been trying to figure out a way to suggest to her that if she and Mark could make their way to the brownstone and confront Wolfe in person things might go better, but there was just no way I could square that circle, because Wolfe really wasn’t working any more

Eight years ago, back in 2009, the SEC sued half the banks on Wall Street on charges of money laundering for the Russian mob. That’s not what the SEC called it, but that’s how the Gazette reported it. After three years, the government brought a proposed settlement before the judge with no criminal charges and no admission of wrong doing. She threw it back in their faces and said they’d been wasting her time and that of the people of the United States. A week later, a couple of government lawyers showed up at Wolfe’s door at one in the morning with 10,000 pages of transcripts and documents. Wolfe spent two months reading them and two weeks dictating a list of 250 questions for the SEC to ask. Once the SEC started asking those questions the banks put together a new settlement proposal, acknowledging what they called “serious errors in judgment and a pattern of culpable behavior,” and coughing up a billion each to prove they were sorry. Naturally, the award in the case was batted up to the Supreme Court and down again, twice, but when the dust finally cleared Wolfe’s share of the take was on the upside of $17 million. Wolfe threw a little party to celebrate, to which the SEC was not invited. Fritz hired three assistants and gave us a meal that he said duplicated the coronation dinner for Edward VII in 1901, which I appreciated, since I’d missed the first one.

At the dinner Wolfe told us that he’d be taking a leave of absence from the detecting business.

“I have profited from the excesses of Mammon, and now I must address the madness it has provoked. I may not prove more efficacious than Diogenes, but I shall be more industrious. And Montaigne shall be my barrel.”

It took me a week to unravel that one, but fortunately a professor I met at one of Lily Rowan’s parties explained it all to me. Diogenes was a philosopher living in ancient Athens, who it appears took an even dimmer view of society than Wolfe. But when Athens was threatened with invasion, Diogenes felt he had to do something, so he rolled around the streets in a barrel. As it turned out, Wolfe wanted to discourage what he called “feral recrudescence” by translating Montaigne into as many languages as he could. Serbian and Hungarian he could handle himself, and he wanted to hire someone to handle Arabic and Farsi.

“You would have been proud of me,” I told him, when he arrived at six on the dot, waiting until he had settled in the one chair that suits him and rung for beer.

“Indeed.”

“Yes. I informed Mark Zauberberg’s personal assistant that you would not be flying to San Francisco tomorrow morning to promote the cause of freedom of speech.”

Wolfe chuckled.

“If his billions cannot save him then no one can. Have you prepared my revisions?”

I handed him the pages and watched him open one of the half dozen dictionaries he had on his desk. I wanted to needle him, as I had in the old days, but there was nothing doing. In his own mind, he was working harder than he ever had, and who was I to disagree with him? I turned back to my computer—I could catch the second half of a double header between the Yanks and the Red Sox with my headphones until dinner.

Fritz started us off with celery consommé while Wolfe filled me in on the what he called the radical incongruities of spoken and written Hungarian. I tried to change the subject to Zauberberg, and the congressional hearing he was facing in two weeks, but Wolfe refused to be goaded. When Fritz brought in the shad roe with cream sauce and roasted vegetables, he slowed down a little until he had finished his third helping, but then he started in again and didn’t slow down much at all through the broiled grapefruit halves basted with wild thyme honey and cognac that Fritz gave us for dessert.

When we finished our grapefruit we adjourned to the office for some brandy and coffee, Wolfe still lecturing me on Hungarian lingo—the more he talked the further back in time he went—when the doorbell rang. I got erect and walked down the hall. I squinted through the peephole and walked back to the office.

“It’s him,” I said. “Shall I let him in?”

“Confound it,” he said. “Yes. A man without curiosity is no longer alive. I desire to look on his billions.”

The way Zauberberg bounded inside when I opened the door, if I hadn’t known he was in his early thirties, I would have guessed seventeen. He seemed that much of a kid. Fortunately for me, Joan was along for a ride as well, looking tall and fresh and outdoorsy and making me wish I had been working on my tan.

“I thought you were in San Francisco,” I said.

“I was,” she said.

Zauberberg made a bee-line for the big red chair in front of Wolfe’s desk like an Irish setter heading for a beefsteak, although naturally he went first to Wolfe’s desk to shake Wolfe’s hand.

“Nero Wolfe! You’re not easy to get a hold of!”

“You certainly have had no difficulty,” snapped Wolfe. “Please have a seat. I prefer eyes at a level. And your assistant as well, although I see Mr. Goodwin is attending to her.”

It was a cheap shot, of course, but I had to take it. I positioned one of the yellow chairs for Joan, so I could keep an eye on all three of them at once.

“Thank you,” Wolfe said, once Zauberberg had taken his seat. “Mr. Zauberberg, I bow before your wealth, but I warn you in advance that I am not available for hire, under any circumstances.”

I could gauge just how much Zauberberg wanted Wolfe’s services that he let Wolfe get the first word, sitting there in the big red chair and gripping the armrests like a little kid trying to wait for Christmas.

“But it’s crazy!” he exploded at last. “Congress! They make IBM look good! Those questions would have been dumb five years ago!”

“I am sure,” said Wolfe. “I pity anyone who must face a congressional committee. A pack of ululating jackals would display more courtesy, and more intelligence.”

“Yeah, well, jackals don’t really hunt in packs,” Zauberberg said. “I mean, opportunistic predation is an optimal strategy in a lot of cases.”

“If you view the world in Darwinist terms, then perhaps you should neither be surprised nor offended when these creatures seek to feed on you.”

“Okay, fine, I have a problem. And you make problems go away.”

“Indeed, I do not. I deal exclusively with those problems that do not go away. And, as I believe you have already been informed, my services are unavailable for at least one year.”

“Yeah. About that.”

As he spoke, Joan opened the leather briefcase she had with her and took out a sheaf of paper, which she passed to Zauberberg.

“Montaigne’s last two essays,” he said, handing them to Wolfe, “in damned good Hungarian.”

“I shall be the judge of that, of course,” said Wolfe.

Wolfe held open the old, leather-bound volume of Montaigne that he consulted and I watched his eyes jump back and forth between the French and the pages Zauberberg had given him.

“This is passable,” he allowed, “even competent. But it lacks élan.”

“Which you can supply,” said Joan, speaking for the first time.

“Ah, you are in charge of manners, I see. And your name, Miss?”

“Harris. Joan Harris.”

“Very good. And now, Mr. Zauberberg, explain your gift. There is no translation program that works at this level.”

Zauberberg was starting to get excited.

“Those assholes!” he exclaimed. ”Ogle is so full of shit. I mean, it’s Bayes meets Chomsky and you’re home. Well, pretty much. And you need a 250 K array.”

“Mr. Zauberberg is referring to an array of 250,000 linked high-speed parallel processors,” Joan explained, something I gather she did a lot. “We’ve been developing that array to replace our current system.”

“And we need to break it in,” Zauberberg interrupted. “I chose Hungarian because it’s tough, but we can do anything. We’ve got the data.”

“Really?” said Wolfe, raising his eyebrows. “How about Arabic and Farsi?”

“Sure. I mean, Arabic’s easier, except you have all those dialects. But sure. Sure. You help me, I help you. And this could be ongoing. We’ll always have downtime. Make a list. The sky’s the limit.”

Wolfe’s eyebrows stayed up. He was ready to bring Montaigne to the whole planet.

“So you say. Until you have a crisis, which you undoubtedly will. With all your billions, your soul is not your own, but rather your shareholders.”

“I believe,” said Joan, with surprising authority, “that when you are in full understanding of the matter, you will see that Mr. Zauberberg will have every reason to maintain his end of the bargain for the foreseeable future.”

Wolfe allowed himself a slight smile.

“Then are you going to apprise me of them without insisting on my prior commitment?” he asked.

“We rely on your discretion, of course,” said Joan, which amazed me. Zauberberg not only trusted her to do the talking, he could actually make himself shut up. So he must have really wanted it.

“I suppose with this bait I could offer it,” Wolfe said. “I try to value other’s privacy as I value my own. Whether you, Mr. Zauberberg are similarly generous I can reserve my opinion. But please give me no reason to regret my generosity.”

“Yeah, well,” Zauberberg began, “this isn’t really that big a deal,” though the way he said it didn’t convince me.

He hesitated again, and looked at Joan, but she kept a straight face, so he had to begin all on his own.

“Again, as I say, it’s not a big deal, but it’s the sort of thing that people would make into a big deal. Well, I’m married now, but I wasn’t, ten years ago, so I was in San Francisco. Well, I met this chick who did porno. I guess, anyway, well, I guess people are going to say that was wrong.”

“This is not confession, Mr. Zauberberg. Unless this youthful interlude can have real world consequences I desire to hear nothing more, and regret the little I have.”

“There’s no video,” said Zauberberg, “well, not of me. Just some photographs. You know, we were on a boat. People like to take pictures on a boat. It’s an interesting thing. People get out on the water and they lose all sense ….”

He pulled himself in.

“Anyway, what’s important is the Russian connection. See, that’s the big deal with Congress, the whole Russian thing, and that’s got the Democrats breathing down my neck. And the thing is, I’ve never had any dealing with the Russians, ever! I mean, there was that thing five years ago, some Canadian outfit was fronting for them, and there was real money involved, I admit that, but as soon as the link was publicized, nothing! It vanished like that!”

He snapped his fingers.

“And after that, nothing again. And I’ve always had great relations with the Democrats. But now, you know, they need a target, and they think I’m it. And now she’s, she’s resurfaced.”

“You never heard from her until now?”

“No.”

“And what does she want? I assume that mere money could be no object.”

“That’s the thing. I’m not sure what she wants. I’m not sure she’s sure what she wants. She says she wants what’s coming to her, but she goes back and forth. Sometimes it’s cash, sometimes she says she just wants to tell her story, that she doesn’t need me, that if she tells her story she’ll have all the cash she needs.”

“And what is her story? That you two had an affair ten years ago? Embarrassing, to be sure, but did you fly across the country to be here merely on this issue?”

“No. No. The thing is, like I said, the Russian connection. She had an affair, another affair, a longer affair, with this guy Dimitry Voroshilov, the one who set up most of the fake sites that ran on FacetoFace. So it’s going to look like, like I knew what was going on, that I was partying with the Russians, that I was taking money from them, like a lot of things.”

“And do you know him? Did you know him? Or anyone connected to him?”

“No! I’ve never met him! That’s solid!”

“What about this Canadian affair you alluded to. Some one was attempting to take control of FacetoFace?”

“Well, they were juicing the Van Winkles like nobody’s business. They never had a handle on that kind of cash. I mean, they were spending more than they were suing me for. So you explain that one. It was well coordinated, I’ll say that much. But there was no Dimitry involved. Really, it was very well hidden, in Cyprus, the Caymans, that sort of thing. And, of course, it just vanished overnight. Nothing, and nothing since.”

“Were there any Russians on this boat?”

“No! She—well, anyway, there is nothing, nothing that can connect me with this Dimitry guy. Except her. Well, the deal is, she wants to meet me. She wants to have it out, that’s what she keeps saying. What does that even mean?”

“Indeed. Perhaps she intends to assess your vulnerability.”

“Well, I’m plenty vulnerable. I can write a check bigger than she could cash, but she’s so vague. I’ve talked to her twice, and she just goes back and forth, like she says she could go on all the talk shows and then have her own talk show. She seems to like that idea.”

“Indeed.”

“But she says she has to see me. Which I think would be a terrible idea.”

“It is a terrible idea,” said Joan.

“No doubt,” said Wolfe. “So you wish me to intercede, to determine her price.”

“Determine it and pay it! I give you carte blanche.”

“The real thing is, Mr. Wolfe,” Joan interjected, “is to reach an agreement that will ensure she’ll stick to it.”

“That is the rub. She is in San Francisco?”

“No. New York. That was one reason why I wanted you to come to me.”

“A reasonable precaution. Mr. Zauberberg. Is there anything in particular I need to know about Miss, Miss …?

“She goes by the name of Sexy Caboose.”

“Of course she does. As if my digestion had not already endured sufficient distress. What is her real name?”

“That is her legal name, unfortunately,” said Joan.

“I see.”

“Her given name was Mary Hopkins.”

“That is helpful to know. Very well. It would be possible, no doubt, Mr. Goodwin will contact this woman and, if at all feasible, I shall determine her true motivation and contrive an arrangement to gratify it on terms congruent with your interests.”

“Terrific!” exclaimed Zauberberg, leaping out of his chair as though the whole thing were settled.

Wolfe raised a hand.

“I say it would be possible, not that it will happen. Even if the issues and circumstances at hand were vastly different, Mr. Zauberberg, I would be reluctant to enter into a contractual relation with you. Many men sell their souls. You have contrived to sell those of others.”

“We’re not selling! We’re, we’re bringing people together!”

At this point he was half out of his chair, waving his arms.

“Indeed,” said Wolfe. “Please restrain yourself. You did not garner your billions through altruism. My point is, if you will allow me to make it, that in order for us to reach an agreement you must first convince me that you will honor that agreement with exceptional fidelity. I often do business with men of limited virtue, as long as I have assurance that the balance is largely in my favor.”

“We need this,” said Zauberberg earnestly, gesturing with his hand. “I can’t let this, this, this …”

He gave up, in mid speech and mid gesture, not daring to put a label on whatever “this” was, as if that would make it too real.

“Your apprehension of your plight is real enough,” grunted Wolfe.

“We can license the software,” said Zauberberg abruptly, almost shouting. “We can make a contract for the availability of the hardware. Isn’t that enough?”

“You do business quickly. We must allow lawyers into the matter, and I must warn you I cannot guarantee the future beyond a certain point.”

“A year, certainly,” said Joan. “That’s at a minimum. In any event, you’ll be paid by then.”

“True,” said Wolfe. “If I am skeptical of your bona fides, you should surely return the favor. Very well. Do we need this in writing?”

“No,” said Joan, immediately. “I mean, regarding what we have discussed here. The contractual arrangements will of course make no mention of any of this.”

“Of course. Mr. Goodwin will supply you with the name of my attorney and perhaps you shall do the same.”

Joan and I swapped lawyers’ business cards. Zauberberg looked like he missed his keyboard while Wolfe was clearly thinking of beer, and Archie was wondering if Joan liked to dance.

“I’ll have Mr. Parker give them a call,” I said, once I had entered the information into my computer. “He doesn’t object to late hours when there’s money on the table. I guess we want this done quickly?”

I might have been jumping the gun with Wolfe on this, but I hadn’t gotten any sign that he wanted to stall, and I was right. A machine that could speak Hungarian had hit his sweet spot.

“Lawyers enjoy late hours, or at least enjoy talking about them,” Wolfe said. “I believe Mr. Parker will find the task engaging.”

“Then it’s done?” exclaimed Zauberberg, jumping entirely out of his chair this time.

“Indeed it is, Mr. Zauberberg. Congratulate yourself on a coup.”

Joan rose as well, and took a folder from her briefcase.

“This is everything we have on our common problem,” she said, handing it to me. “You should be able to reach her, one way or another. We haven’t told her anything.”

I was expecting Zauberberg to make a try for shaking Wolfe’s hand, but he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t seem to be thinking about anything but getting off the East Coast and get back to the real world. I’ve never even been to Silicon Valley, but you could tell that these two belonged there.

I accompanied them to the door, of course. You never know what people might do when left alone. Even a multi-billionaire might want to take a souvenir, just because he was paying the bills. When I got back to the office. I expected to see Wolfe flipping through what Joan had left but instead he was writing something down on a pad.

“Montaigne alone will not suffice,” he said, looking up at me. “There is a price to be paid even for the possibility of sitting in the same room as a woman named Sexy Caboose.”

“You think it will come to that.”

“You shall handle this matter exclusively if at all possible, but so often the worst eventuality is the most likely. I shall be prepared.”

“This may be a first for me, but do you really want to be working for this guy?”

“You mean why should I choose between Mr. Zauberberg and the jackals who pursue him? I confess I cannot establish a precedency between the blind greed of billionaires and the blind opportunism of politicians. But to give the world Montaigne is no small matter. And there will be additions.”

“Of course.”

“The Federalist Papers, certainly. The Wealth of Nations. Orwell’s essays. Often, the prettiest of truths are the most provincial. Furet’s Passing of an Illusion. And Camus, of course. The Rebel, certainly. And the essays. That shall do for a beginning. Inform Mr. Parker that I want the contract for this matter to be stringent and heavily in my favor.”

“You expect Zauberberg to be generous.”

“If I tame Miss Caboose he shall have every reason to be. You will contact her in the morning.”

I got on the phone to Nate who, though he sounded a little sleepy, perked up considerably when he learned the identity of Wolfe’s new client. While I was talking Wolfe went back to his dictionaries. However, when I hung up he caught my eye.

“Your skepticism provokes me, Archie,” he said. “Your thoughts on Mr. Zauberberg.”

“He is cute. But you don’t get that rich that fast by being cute.”

“Indeed. Gibbon remarked that it was two metals, iron and gold, that chiefly allow men to increase their desires beyond their mere bodily wants. To these two our age has added the silicon wafer. These young men see the entire world as their oyster and would swallow it whole.”

I was about to speak when the telephone rang. I answered it.

“Hello Mr. Goodwin,” a voice said, before I could speak.

I looked at Wolfe.

“To whom am I speaking?” I asked.

“Well, you know very well, don’t you, Mr. Goodwin? Can I call you Archie?”

“No.”

I cupped the phone.

“It’s her.”

“Confound it. This shall cost Mr. Zauberberg the Decline and Fall, in toto.”

“Archie, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Archie, I know you’ve been talking with a friend of mine. I know all sorts of things. Would you like to hear about some of them? Say at twelve o’clock?”

“She’ll be here in two hours,” I told Wolfe.

He gave a wave of his hand, as futile a gesture as I’ve ever seen him make. Then he rang for beer.

“Confound it!” he said again.

When Fritz arrived Wolfe opened the bottle with the gold-plated opener and poured the beer until there was a quarter-inch of foam at the top of the glass. He drank from the glass and licked the foam from his upper lip. Then he looked at me.

‘We shall address this woman as Miss Hopkins,” he said, glaring hard enough so that I knew he meant it.

“Of course.”

Then he picked up, not the dossier that Joan had given me but the translation of Montaigne that Zauberberg had brought. He read through it, making notes as he went, but not a lot, which surprised me. Since he wasn’t bothering to prepare for Sexy, I thought I should, so I took the dossier from his desk and started looking through it. FacetoFace had hired some outfit in San Francisco that I knew of only by reputation to run a background check on Miss Caboose, and for a porn star she was pretty sedate—only two busts for possession and a D and D she picked up two years ago when she got in a shouting match with some guy in the lobby of the St. Francis in San Francisco at three in the morning, which at least showed some class. Anyway, how do you blackmail a porn star? She had been working in Vegas in some sort of porn star review for the past year. A month ago she took a leave of absence, which is exactly when she started pestering Zauberberg, so it was obvious the two were connected.

There was also a thumb drive in the folder so I loaded it into the computer and had a look. There were dozens of photographs from the little boat trip, with Zauberberg looking like he was about twelve. As for “Miss Hopkins”, well, she was definitely a porn star, but, very fortunately for Zauberberg, she managed to keep her top on the whole time, at least when people were taking pictures. There were five men and five women on the boat, and Zauberberg’s people had identified them all, and run a background check on all of them as well, and even interviews. None of them seemed very happy about reliving that little party, but with Zauberberg leaning on them, they’d all talked.

Once Sexy had started putting the bite on Zauberberg, his people had hired Bill Henderson’s outfit to keep an eye on her in New York. Henderson has fifty people working for him, so it wasn’t likely that they’d lose track of her. Sexy was holed up in a small, expensive hotel on the Upper East Side and walked her poodle in Central Park when the weather was nice. She hadn’t met anyone or gone anywhere since she arrived from Vegas.

At quarter after eleven Wolfe looked up from his manuscript.

“What have you learned?” he asked.

“Zauberberg’s story seems pretty straight, unless they’re hiding something from us.”

“If they are they deserve their fate. Tell me what struck you as in the least bit piquant.”

I gave him all the piquancies I had on hand until the doorbell rang, at five to eleven.

“I guess she couldn’t wait,” I said to Wolfe.

He grunted in reply and picked up his manuscript for one last look at Montaigne while I walked down the hallway to open the door.

I checked Sexy out through the peephole, just to be sure she didn’t have any company, but she was clean.

“I can call you Archie, can’t I?” she asked as she stepped inside.

“Not around my boss, Miss Hopkins,” I said.

She laughed.

“I haven’t heard that in a while.”

I wouldn’t say that Sexy was subdued, but, again, for a porn star I wouldn’t call her flashy. Wolfe wasn’t going to like the look of her hair, which was ash-blonde and swept well over her eyes, but her skirt wasn’t—well, it wasn’t the shortest skirt I’d seen in that hallway—and she was wearing a mink jacket that was almost respectable. Glamourous, yes, but she didn’t look like she was selling it. On the other hand, if she’d unbuttoned the one button on that jacket she’d be giving it away, because she had a lot to hide upstairs, and the little black dress she was wearing wasn’t even trying. I was tempted to tell her to keep that jacket buttoned if she wanted Wolfe to like her, but I didn’t want to be giving her ideas in case she didn’t want Wolfe to like her, so I kept my mouth shut.

“Well, Nero Wolfe!” she laughed as we came in the office. “I guess you’re not too happy to see me.”

“Whether I am or not is irrelevant,” said Wolfe. “I have a job to do and to do it I must suffer your presence.”

“Suffer my presence. Well, well. Such a pretty room! I’d like to live here!”

She took the big red chair. Wolfe hadn’t brought up the subject of refreshments, so I wasn’t sure what to say, but he saved me the trouble.

“The hour is late, Miss Hopkins, by my standards if not yours. However, if you desire or require alcohol my assistant Mr. Goodwin will be glad to oblige.”

She laughed again, a good way to get on Wolfe’s nerves.

“Well, yes, I will have a little something—white wine. Just a small glass. Nothing sweet.”

I joined her, to be polite. Wolfe had finished his beer long before and wasn’t in the mood for anything more.

“Now, Miss Hopkins,” Wolfe began, after I’d poured the wine, “what precisely is your purpose, and indeed your price, in this matter?”

“I don’t believe I have a price, Mr. Wolfe,” she replied. “I think I need a career change, I guess that’s my purpose. I think I’d make a good talk show host, Mr. Wolfe. I like to talk, and I like to hear other people talk. It would be a lot of fun to be on one of those shows, you know, like Conan O’Brien. They don’t let women do those shows, have you noticed that? And they should! They definitely should!”

“No doubt. Miss Hopkins, when did you make the acquaintance of Dimitry Voroshilov?”

“Dear Dimitry! He was so sweet! Well, he was on the boat, of course.”

“He was not,” snapped Wolfe. “There is no evidence to connect him with that boat, and much to deny his presence. To tell palpable lies in this matter is dangerous, no matter how many secrets you believe you possess. I assume to you intend to charge Mr. Zauberberg with more than just sexual intercourse, which is indeed your stock in trade.”

I could tell Sexy had been snapped at before, probably by one of Zauberberg’s lawyers, because it didn’t slow her down much, though it did make her more cautious.

“Well, maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

“Indeed. When did you make Mr. Voroshilov’s acquaintance?”

“Well, a long time ago.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Sexy, or, as I guess I should call her, Mary, seemed to be feeling Wolfe out. The direct lie hadn’t gotten her anywhere. She bit her lip and paused.

“Some Russian mafia guys,” she said suddenly. “You know, I was at a party.”

“With members of the Russian mafia? Did they identify themselves as such?”

“No. They had, you know, Russian accents. Like on TV. And this guy, he came up to me and said, ‘I know you! I know you!’”

She laughed.

“They talk like little kids, like they get really excited. ‘You big porno star! You big porno star!’ I had just made my big picture, Back Door Brides. I was the only girl in the picture, you know, and it was the top-grossing porno of the year. I won best actress. So, you know, that was like in 2007 or 2008. 2008, probably. I guess that’s right.”

She counted on her fingers to come up with the date. Wolfe just grunted, as though getting into a conversation about a film titled Back Door Brides didn’t appeal to him.

Sexy drank from her wine, and swirled it a little in her glass, as if thinking about the good old days.

“Anyway,” she said, “Dimitry really took a liking to me. He didn’t give me his name back then. He called himself Mr. Smith.”

She laughed again.

“I meet a lot of guys named Smith. Also Jones. I met this guy Mr. Jones once who took me on a nice boat.”

“Another Russian mobster?”

“Well, you don’t have to say mobster. He was pretty shy, really. Dimitry told me to be nice to him. Shy guys, you know, they’re the easiest! And sweet! I only saw him once, though. He had a nice boat. Big! But Dimitry was really connected. The way he talked, the way other people treated him, you could tell. And he was rich. I mean, super rich. He used to fly me to his yacht in a helicopter! And a nice helicopter—leather seats, soundproofing, everything. You didn’t have to wear a helmet. I hate that! You can imagine.”

She stroked her hair.

“A lot of men say I have the best hair in the biz. What do you think? Archie, I’ll bet you’re an expert.”

I could tell Wolfe wasn’t liking the way the conversation was going, so I tried to keep it complimentary but brief.

“Your hair is terrific.”

She beamed. Sexy was a pro, in more ways than one, but she took a compliment like a teenager.

“I bet you’ve never ridden on a helicopter at all, have you, Mr. Wolfe?”

“Indeed not. What was his yacht like? I mean Mr. Voroshilov’s.”

“Incredible. Incredible. Some guys, they say it’s their yacht, but you know it isn’t. This was Dimitry’s, the way that crew treated him. He’d say it, and they’d do it. Bang!”

“And when did you first tell him that you knew Mr. Zauberberg?”

“Well, that’s a good question,” said Sexy, stretching it out. “I guess, well, we were in bed and the TV was on, and there was this big shot of Mark’s head and I said ‘Hey, I used to fuck that guy.’ I guess it’s okay to say ‘fuck’, isn’t it?”

“It’s acceptable in reported conversations, but not as expletive or a verb. Or an adjective,” said Wolfe, crisply. He has pretty clear rules about what you can say in his presence, and in his office.

“Did Mr. Voroshilov express an interest in this statement?” he asked.

“Yeah. He said ‘you did!’ and I’m like ‘Fuck yeah, I did!’ That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“It’s acceptable. How did your conversation continue?”

“Well, I told him about the boat. See, I didn’t know who Mark was back then. He was just some guy I had fucked.”

She laughed.

“Sorry. Guess I screwed up. See, I can be good. Anyway, well, after that was the first time he took me to his yacht.”

“Do you recall what film you had completed around this time?”

“Well, Inglorious Butt-Fuckers. It was just two years after Back Door Brides, but wow. I didn’t even have my own dressing room. Things change so fast. That’s why I was so glad to have Dimitry. These guys will tell you how generous they are, but Dimitry was generous. I mean, the best of everything, caviar for breakfast. Good caviar too! The best! And then he disappeared too. Goodbye Mr. Smith, right? I thought I’d never hear from him again, until about six months ago. No helicopter this time, but one of those fancy little hotels. That’s when he told me his real name. He was so sweet. He said he wanted to hear me call him Dimitry.”

She laughed.

“And have you seen him since?”

“Well, no, because of all this publicity. I just talked to him on the phone. He told me how he was a wanted man in the U.S. now, because Mark was so afraid that everything would come out.”

“What was there to come out? You can offer no testimony that the two men were ever together. You surely do not intend to testify that they were. You are, I may say, Miss Hopkins, an engaging personality, but you lack the self possession of an effective liar. Your weapon is your innocence. You cannot keep a secret.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I like to talk, which is why I would be good on a talk show. And now I will be, because I will be famous. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“It doesn’t occur to you that you might be in danger?”

That got a real laugh out of her.

“Danger! Nice try, Mr. Wolfe. Dimitry would never let anything happen to me. Is Mr. Zauberberg going to have me killed? How would that look?”

“I was not suggesting that Mr. Zauberberg would resort to violence, but the Russians are not so squeamish. Describe Mr. Voroshilov to me.”

“Bald. Really bald. He told me Putin doesn’t like guys with hair.” She laughed. “He says stuff like that. He’s cute. Kinda short, but, you know, not where it counts.”

She laughed again.

“You said there were pictures from your encounter with Mr. Zauberberg. You have these pictures?”

“Yes. I like to keep things. People at parties can get kind of confused. There were no drugs, you know. Mark was really a boy scout like that. They all were. Men can be so funny, you know.”

“I agree with you entirely. My sex has always struck me as surpassingly ludicrous, far more so than yours. But these photographs, no doubt in digital format, you passed copies on to Mr. Voroshilov?”

“Well, I’m afraid I did, Mr. Wolfe. They were mine anyway, and I wasn’t even naked, so there. Anyway, that’s how I got this jacket. Do you like it?”

“I admire it exceedingly. Mr. Voroshilov possesses a fine eye. Do you possess photographs of yourself with him?”

“You are nosy, aren’t you? No, I don’t, but Dimitry has them. He does.”

She added that last part for emphasis.

“No doubt,” said Wolfe. “Miss Hopkins, you will no doubt reject my conclusions as to this matter, but nonetheless I offer them to you in good faith. You are in danger. Mr. Voroshilov has no interest in furthering your career. I suggest that there is a real possibility that he could have you killed, as a way of creating a scandal that would both blacken Mr. Zauberberg’s name and this colossus he has created, further damaging as well the state of political discourse in this country.”

Sexy just laughed at this one.

“Now, Mr. Wolfe, I’m afraid you’ve been watching too much TV. Anyway, I bet Mark just paid you to say that. I bet he did.”

“Very well. I will not waste my time, and yours, on this matter. The hour was late when you arrived, and now the morning approaches. Mr. Goodwin will show you the way out.”

As I rose, Sexy took my arm, as I knew she would, to get a rise out of Wolfe. It was the first time I’d touched a porn star, and I hope it’ll be the last, but it was also rather fun.

“You’re cute, Archie,” she said, as I walked her down the hall. “When I’m rich, you can come work for me. I can fix you up with a lot of girls.”

“I’m already fixed up.”

“You’ll see, Archie. You’ll see.”

There was a car and driver waiting for her, so Dimitry was really taking care of her. Around the corner I could see a sedan that didn’t belong there, so it looked like Henderson’s people had it covered.

“Henderson had a car out,” I told Wolfe when I came back to the office.

“Excellent. Call them and tell them to double their watch. Mr. Zauberberg will bear the expense. And then provide me with a chronology of Miss Hopkins’ films.”

I called Henderson’s office, which was naturally closed, so I had to get the emergency number and ended up waking Bill himself. While all this was going on I did a search for Sexy’s career and printed it out and handed to Wolfe. When I got everything straight with Henderson, convincing him that Wolfe was on the level, I ended the call and turned around to ask Wolfe why he was so sure Dimitry was out for blood, but the lips were already moving in and out, in and out. I just sat there for a good ten minutes. When he was done Wolfe closed his eyes and then opened them again.

“It’s late, Archie,” he said. “You should go to bed.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

Why he was so sure he had this one, and why he had to cut me out of it completely, well, that was just Wolfe being Wolfe. I left the office and closed the door and went half way up the stairs and then came back down and crept down the hallway. I wasn’t listening at the door. I was just standing near it.

For about five minutes I got nothing for my pains, and then I heard Wolfe talking on the phone, not in English. When Wolfe dials a number on his own, it’s something. It’s my guess that he didn’t want me to know that number. There was a long silence, and then I heard him speaking again, this time in what was probably another language, and probably Russian. That went on for almost twenty minutes, Wolfe being pretty harsh sometimes, but also sometimes listening. Then I heard his chair creak, and I headed up the stairs. When he leaves the office he almost always fusses over something before turning off the lights, and by the time I heard his elevator I was already in my room.

I like to get my eight hours, but since it was already past two in the morning, I set the alarm for nine. I came down to the kitchen around nine-thirty, still a little sore from whatever game Wolfe was playing. Fritz greeted me with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Drinking it made me realize that I could forget about Wolfe’s little game, whatever it was, for an hour or so and just eat the best breakfast in New York.

Fritz waited until I finished my juice before asking questions.

“Why are you so late, Archie?”

“It’s a long story, and I don’t know the end of it,” I told him. “We have a case, so that Mr. Wolfe can translate Montaigne into Persian.”

“Really? Would you like your omelet with speck or prosciutto?”

“Speck.”

Speck is a smoked prosciutto ham, which Fritz gets from a little town in the Italian Alps that he used to visit when he was a boy. It’s drier than fresh prosciutto but with more flavor. Fritz makes his omelets with speck and fresh-grated parmesan, and cooks them golden brown on the outside, and creamy and melting on the inside, accompanied by home fries and roasted tomatoes with bread crumbs, seasoned with fresh garlic, tarragon and chives. “A man who treats good food with less than the respect it deserves is less than a man,” Wolfe once told me when he thought I was eating too fast, and Fritz’s omelets deserve all the respect I can give them.

When I was finished, I took my coffee out into the office and switched on my computer. The Gazette’s home page popped up on the big 30-inch monitor I use. There was a lot of talk about Zauberberg’s impending testimony, but nothing hot. I had a half a mind to call Lon Cohen to ask him if he’d heard anything, but Russia wasn’t exactly Lon’s beat, and if I gave Lon any hint at all that Wolfe was working for Zauberberg I didn’t think I could quite trust him to keep it to himself.

I was about to head out to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee when I heard Wolfe’s elevator. It was almost eleven-thirty, so he’d been sleeping in too.

“Good morning, Archie,” he said, as he always does. “Did you sleep well?”

“Fine,” I said, wanting to ride him about last night, but not wanting to let him know that I’d been listening to his phone conversations. “Any orders?”

“No,” he said, removing the spray of Anacamptis lacteal from the day before and replacing it with a single Cypripedium reginae.

I waited to speak until he got himself settled in the one chair in the world that fits him and rang for beer. He knew I wanted answers and for once wasn’t going to be coy.

“Yes, Archie?”

I was about to say something—exactly what I’ve forgotten—when the “Breaking News” legend broke across the screen. “Top Russian Security Chiefs Killed in Accident”. Two pictures appeared, labeled Dimitry Voroshilov and Yury Sobchak. I stared for a moment as the crawl identified them as the chief and deputy chief of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to Putin’s old outfit, the KGB. I stared for a moment and then swung the monitor around so that he could see it.

“Do you know anything about this?” I demanded.

For once I saw him surprised.

“Good lord,” he said. “I thought to start a hare and instead dislodged an avalanche. This is extraordinary. Extraordinary.”

I was staring at the screen and noticed something.

“They’ve got the pictures wrong,” I said. “Dimitry’s the bald one.”

“No,” he said, “it was poor Miss Hopkins who was diddled. She was a pawn and is fortunate indeed that the fate Mr. Sobchak intended for her has been visited on him.”

“What? Sobchak was setting up his boss?”

“Precisely. During that SEC investigation that proved so profitable it was surmised but never publicly discussed that people linked with Sobchak were behind the mysterious bid for control of FacetoFace that Mr. Zauberberg alluded to, and that Voroshilov was the moving force behind its cancellation, though clearly Mr. Zauberberg had not himself learned of the matter. Mr. Putin has a history with both Voroshilov and Sobchak and seems to have placed them together as sort of a balancing act, favoring first the one and then the other. Mr. Sobchak apparently felt the humiliation dealt him by his superior keenly and contrived this extravagant stunt.”

Fritz arrived with Wolfe’s beer. I waited as he poured the glass and drank.

“Voroshilov was the hapless Mr. Jones. I have no doubt that Mr. Sobchak arranged for their tryst to be photographed. His original plan, I believe, was to lure Mr. Zauberberg into a meeting with Mlss Hopkins, after which she would die under mysterious circumstances. The photographs would surface. Mr. Zauberberg would be implicated, his creation defiled, and our entire political process brought into question.”

“Yeah, but suppose Zauberberg didn’t bite? Suppose he played it the way he played it.”

“Then Miss Hopkins would have been unleashed on the world. You can imagine what a stir she could generate. Both Zauberberg and Voroshilov would be exposed as fools and possible confederates. I suppose Sobchak imagined that his superior would be eased into retirement while he assumed command. I presume Mr. Zauberberg will be pleased with this outcome.”

“Which you didn’t expect.”

Wolfe raised his shoulders slightly and then lowered them.

“No, Archie, I did not. I informed certain people of Mr. Sobchak’s duplicity, with the intention of alerting Mr. Voroshilov to his subordinate’s intentions. I certainly did not intend for this information to reach Mr. Putin, but he obviously has resources that surpassed my expectations. Apparently, the machinations of both Voroshilov and Sobchak had exhausted his patience, and he resolved to make a clean sweep of the matter. Returning to Miss Hopkins, I believe these developments will make her more amenable to a private resolution of this affair. Most important of all, I am now free to concentrate on Montaigne.”

The look on his face when he had first seen the news about Dimitry and Yury was almost enough to convince me that he was on the level, that he hadn’t somehow planned the whole thing from the beginning, but I couldn’t let it go.

“So you had no idea it would go down like this?”

“Of course not, Archie. As Montaigne would have it ‘Que sçais-je?’ What do I know?”

#Rex Stout #Nero Wolfe

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