Wolfe’s face was set in a grimace, showing that he was in the throes of an agitation away beyond his chronic reluctance to bother his mind about business when the bank balance was up in five figures. Displaying a palm at her, he tried to expostulate:
“I tell you I’m too busy –”
She hopped right over it. “I came instead of Neya because she has important lessons this morning, and it is necessary we should keep our jobs. But you will have to see her, of course, so you will have to go there, and anyway Miltan is arranging for everyone to be there together today, this afternoon, to settle it. It’s the biggest nonsense anyone could imagine to suppose that Neya would put her hand in a man’s pocket and steal diamonds, but it will be terrible if it happens the way Miltan says it will happen if the diamonds are not returned – but wait – you must let me tell you –”
My mouth was standing open in astonishment. After two hours on his feet in the plant rooms, when he came to the office at eleven o’clock and got lowered into his chair, with me there to annoy him pleasantly and the beer-tray freshly delivered by Fritz Brenner, Wolfe was ordinarily as immovable as a two-ton boulder. But now he was rising; he was risen. With a mutter that might have been taken either for an excuse or an imprecation, and with no glance at either of us, he stalked out of the room, by the door that led to the hall. We watched him go and then the immigrant turned and let me have her eyes wide open.
“He gets sick!” she demanded.
I shook my head. “Eccentric,” I explained. “I suppose you might call it a form of sickness, but it’s nothing tangible like concussion of the brain or whooping-cough. Once when a respectable lawyer was sitting in that very chair you’re in now – Yes, Fritz?”
The door which Wolfe had closed behind him had opened again and Fritz Brenner stood there with a bewildered look on his face.
“In the kitchen a moment, please, Archie.”
I got up and excused myself and went to the kitchen. Preliminary preparations for lunch were scattered around on the big linoleum-covered table, but it was obvious that Wolfe had not been suddenly seized with a violent curiosity about food. He stood at the far side of the refrigerator, facing me in a determined manner that seemed entirely uncalled for, and told me abruptly as I entered:
“Send her away.”
“My God!” I admit I blew up a little. “She said she’d pay something, didn’t she? It’s enough to freeze the blood of an alligator! If you read it in her eyes that her friend Neya did actually glumb the glass, you might at least –”
“Archie.” It was about as hostile as his voice ever got. “I have skedaddled, physically, once in my life, from one person, and that was a Montenegrin woman. It was many years ago, but my nerves remember it. I neither desire nor intend to explain how I felt when that Montenegrin female voice in there said ‘Hvala Bogu.’ Send her away.”
“But there’s no –”
“Archie!”
I saw it was hopeless, though I had no idea whether he was overcome by terror or was staging a stunt. I gave it up and went back to the office and stood in front of her.
“Mr. Wolfe regrets that he will be unable to help your friend out of her trouble. He’s busy.”
Her head was tilted back to look up at me, and a little gasp left her mouth open. “But he can’t – he must!” She jumped to her feet and I backed up a step as her eyes flashed at me. “We are from Tsernagora! She is – my friend is –” Indignation choked it off.
“It’s final,” I said brusquely. “He won’t touch it. Sometimes I can change his mind for him, but there are limits. What does ‘Hvala Bogu’ mean?”
She stared. “It means ‘Thank God.’ If I see him, tell him –”
“You shouldn’t have said it. It gives him the willies to hear a Montenegrin female voice talk Montenegrin. It’s a kind of allergy. I’m sorry, Miss Lovchen, but there’s not a chance. I know him from A to P, which is as far as he goes. P is for pigheaded.”
“But he – I must see him, tell him –”
She was stubborn enough herself so that it took five minutes to persuade her out, and since the only prejudice I had acquired against Montenegrin females up to that point was based merely on pronunciation, which is not after all vital, I didn’t want to get rough. Finally I closed the front door behind her and went to the kitchen and announced sarcastically:
“I think it’s safe now. Stay close behind me and if I holler run like hell.”
Wolfe’s inarticulate growl, as I wheeled and headed for the office, warned me that there was barbed wire in that neighborhood, so when he came in a few minutes later and got re-established in his chair I made no effort to explain my viewpoint any further. He drank beer and fiddled around with a pile of catalogues, while I checked over a couple of invoices from Hoehn’s and did some miscellaneous chores. When a little later he asked me to please open the window a crack, I knew the tension was relaxing toward normal.
But if either or both of us had any idea that we were through with the Balkans for that day, it wasn’t long before we had it jostled out of us. It was customary for Fritz to answer the doorbell from eleven on, when I was in the office with Wolfe. Around twelve thirty he came in, advanced the usual three paces, stood formally, and announced a caller named Stahl who would not declare his business but stated that he was an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I let out a low whistle and ejaculated cautiously “Aha!” Wolfe opened his eyes a trifle and nodded, and Fritz went for the caller.
We hadn’t bumped into a G-man before in the course of business, and when he entered I did him the honor of swiveling clear around for a look. He was all right, medium-sized, with good shoulders and good eyes, a little skimpy in the jaw, and he needed a shoeshine. He told us his name again and shook hands with both of us, and took from his pocket a little leather case which he flipped open and exhibited to Wolfe with a reserved but friendly smile.
“My credentials,” he explained in an educated voice. He certainly had fine manners, something on the order of a high-class insurance salesman.
Wolfe glanced at the exhibit, nodded, and indicated a chair. “Well, sir?”
The G-man looked politely apologetic. “We’re sorry to bother you, Mr. Wolfe, but it’s our job. I’d like to ask whether you are acquainted with the Federal statute which recently went into effect, requiring persons who are agents in this country of foreign principals to register with the Department of State.”
“Not intimately. I read newspapers. I read about that some time ago.”
“Then you know of that law?”
“I do.”
“Have you registered?”
“No. I am not an agent of a foreign principal.”
The G-man threw one knee over the other. “The law applies to agents of foreign firms, individuals or organizations, as well as to foreign governments.”
“So I understand.”
“It also applies, here, both to aliens and to citizens. Are you a citizen of the United States?”
“I am. I was born in this country.”
“You were at one time an agent of the Austrian government?”
“Briefly, as a boy. Not here, abroad. I quit.”
“And joined the Montenegrin army?”
“Later, but still a boy. I then believed that all misguided or cruel people should be shot, and I shot some. I starved to death in 1916.”
The G-man looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said I starved to death. When the Austrians came and we fought machine guns with fingernails. Logically I was dead; a man can’t live on dry grass.
Actually I went on breathing. When the United States entered the war and I walked six hundred miles to join the A. E. F., I ate again. When it ended I returned to the Balkans, shed another illusion, and came back to America.”
“Hvala Bogu,” I put in brightly.
Stahl, startled again, shot me a glance. “I beg your pardon? Are you a Montenegrin?”
“Nope. Pure Ohio. The ejaculation was involuntary.”
Wolfe, ignoring me, went on, “I would like to say, Mr. Stahl, that my temperament would incline me to resent and resist an attempt by any individual to inquire into my personal history or affairs, but I do not regard you as an individual. Naturally. You represent the Federal government. You are, in effect, America itself sitting in my office wanting to know something about me, and I am so acutely grateful to my native country for the decencies it still manages to preserve … by the way, would you care for a glass of American beer?”