Seven chuckled. “I catch them and Miles builds the jails that hold them. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“You’re being evasive, David. Just as always. Just as you are when I try to tie apron strings around you.”
“It’s a wise bachelor who knows when to run,” Seven said with deep wisdom.
“And Miss Follet,” Cathy murmured. “A woman with all she has. Why she ought to be in the movies — or way uptown like Joan Crawford with Pepsi-Cola.”
“Why, Miss Darrow. You shock me. Suppose Sam heard you talking like that? Are you trying to say that we at International are not all we seem to be? Tsk, tsk. That won’t do, my girl.”
“Don’t call her Sam. She’d skin you alive if she ever heard you call her that and you know it.”
“Sad but true. All right, Miss Darrow, we are all spies. We work for the government and we are out to keep the bad guys from over-running the world. Okay?”
“David, be serious!”
“I am serious.”
“Oh — you. Forget it. I’ll mind my own business.” She changed the subject, looking at the menu again. “What are you having for dessert? The pineapple pudding is a specialty here—”
“Pineapple pudding sounds scrumptious,” he laughed, staring into her eyes across the blaze of the candles. “And you look the same way too.”
So, once again, Cathy Darrow’s suspicions were allayed and David Seven’s cover was preserved.
After all, INTREX needed him even more than Cathy Darrow did.
Dedicated men are not that easy to come by.
Black Orchids
by Rex Stout
Copyright 1942
Reprinted by permission of the author
Rex Stout, author of THE DOORBELL RANG and more than thirty-five other novels about Nero Wolfe and Archie (he started writing about in 1934), has been President of the Author’s League since 1951, and one of the leaders in the long fight to reform the copyright law. A and member of the Board of Directors of Freedom House, Mr. Stout has long been considered one of this country’s most distinguished writers.
1
Monday at the Flower Show, Tuesday at the Flower Show, Wednesday at the Flower Show. Me, Archie Goodwin. How’s that?
I do not deny that flowers are pretty, but a million flowers are not a million times prettier than one flower. Oysters are good to eat, but who wants to eat a carload?
I didn’t particularly resent it when Nero Wolfe sent me up there Monday afternoon and anyway, I had been expecting it. After all the ballyhoo in the special Flower Show sections of the Sunday papers, it was a cinch that some member of our household would have to go take a look at those orchids, and as Fritz Brenner couldn’t be spared from the kitchen that long, and Theodore Horstmann was too busy in the plant rooms on the roof, and Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out, it looked as if I would be elected. I was.
When Wolfe came down from the plant rooms at six P.M. Monday and entered the office, I reported:
“I saw them. It was impossible to snitch a sample.”
He grunted, lowering himself into his chair. “I didn’t ask you to.”
“Who said you did, but you expected me to. There are three of them in a glass case and the guard has his feet glued.”
“What color are they?”
“They’re not black.”
“Black flowers are never black. What color are they?”
“Well.” I considered. “Say you take a piece of coal. Not anthracite. Cannel coal.”
“That’s black.”
“Wait a minute. Spread on it a thin coating of open kettle molasses. That’s it.”
“Pfui. You haven’t the faintest notion what it would look like. Neither have I.”
“I’ll go buy a piece of coal and we’ll try it.”
“No. Is the labellum uniform?”
I nodded. “Molasses on coal. The labellum is large, not as large as aurea, about like truffautiana. Cepals lanceolate. Throat tinged with orange—”
“Any sign of wilting?”
“No.”
“Go back tomorrow and look for wilting on the edges of the petals. You know it, the typical wilting after pollination. I want to know if they’ve been pollinated.”
So I went up there again Tuesday after lunch. That evening at six I added a few details to my description and reported no sign of wilting.
I sat at my desk, in front of his against the wall, and aimed a chilly stare at him.
“Will you kindly tell me,” I requested, “why the females you see at a flower show are the kind of females who go to a flower show? Ninety per cent of them? Especially their legs? Does it have to be like that? Is it because, never having any flowers sent to them, they have to go there in order to see any? Or is it because—”
“Shut up. I don’t know. Go back tomorrow and look for wilting.”
I might have known, with his mood getting blacker every hour, all on account of three measly orchid plants, that he was working up to a climax. But I went again Wednesday, and didn’t get home until nearly seven o’clock. When I entered the office he was there at his desk with two empty beer bottles on the tray and pouring a third one into the glass.
“Did you get lost?” he inquired politely.
I didn’t resent that because I knew he half meant it. He has got to the point where he can’t quite understand how a man can drive from 35th Street and Tenth Avenue to 44th and Lexington and back again with nobody to lead the way. I reported no wilting, and sat at my desk and ran through the stuff he had put there, and then swiveled to face him and said:
“I’m thinking of getting married.”
His half-open lids didn’t move, but his eyes did, and I saw them.
“We might as well be frank,” I said. “I’ve been living in this house with you for over ten years, writing your letters, protecting you from bodily harm, keeping you awake, and wearing out your tires and my shoes. Sooner or later one of my threats to get married will turn out not to be a gag. How are you going to know? How do you know this isn’t it?”
He made a noise of derision and picked up his glass.
“Okay,” I said. “But you’re enough of a psychologist to know what it means when a man is irresistibly impelled to talk about a girl to someone. Preferably, of course, to someone who is sympathetic. You can imagine what it means when I want to talk about her to you. What is uppermost in my mind is that this afternoon I saw her washing her feet.”
He put the glass down. “So you went to a movie. In the afternoon. Did it occur—”
“No, sir, not a movie. Flesh and bone and skin. Have you ever been to a flower show?”!
Wolfe closed his eyes and sighed.
“Anyway,” I went on, “you’ve seen pictures of the exhibits, so you know that the millionaires and big firms do things up brown. Like Japanese gardens and rock gardens and roses in Picardy. This year Rucker and Dill, the seed and nursery company, have stolen the show. They’ve got a woodland glade. Bushes and dead leaves and green stuff and a lot of little flowers and junk, and some trees with white flowers, and a little brook with a pool and rocks; and it’s inhabited. There’s a man and a girl having a picnic. They’ve there all day from eleven to six thirty and from eight to ten in the evening. They pick flowers. They eat a picnic lunch. They sit on the grass and read. They play mumblety-peg. At four o’clock the man lies down and covers his face with a newspaper and takes a nap, and the girl takes off her shoes and stockings and dabbles her feet in the pool. That’s when they crowd the ropes. Her face and figure are plenty good enough, but her legs are absolutely artistic. Naturally she has to be careful not get her skirt wet, and the stream comes tumbling from the rocks into the pool. Speaking as a painter—”