Before Midnight

Rex Stout

Before Midnight

Chapter 1

Not that our small talk that Tuesday evening in April had any important bearing on the matter, but it will do for an overture, and it will help to explain a couple of reactions Nero Wolfe had later. After a dinner that was featured by one of Fritz's best dishes, squabs with sausage and sauerkraut, in the dining room of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, I followed Wolfe across the hall to the office, and, as he got some magazines from the table near the big globe and went to his chair behind his desk, asked if there were any chores. That was insurance. I had notified him that I intended to take Thursday afternoon off for the opening of the baseball season at the Polo Grounds, and when Thursday came I didn't want any beefing about my letting things pile up.

He said no, no chores, got all his vast bulk adjusted in the chair, the only chair on earth he approved of, and opened a magazine. He allotted around twenty minutes a week for looking at advertisements. I went to my desk, sat, and reached for the phone, then changed my mind, deciding a little more insurance wouldn't hurt. Swiveling and seeing that he was scowling at the open magazine, I got up and circled around near enough to see what he was focused on. It was a full-page ad, black and white, that I and many millions of my fellow citizens knew by heart- though it didn't require much study, since there were only six words in it, not counting repetitions. At the center near the top was a distinguished-looking small bottle, labeled in fancy script Pour Amour, with the Amour beneath the Pour. Right below it were two more of the same, also centered, and below them three more, and then four more, and so on down the page. At the bottom seven bottles stretched clear across, making the base of a twenty-eight bottle pyramid. In the space at the top left was the statement:

Pour Amour

means

For Love

and at top right it said:

Pour Amour

is

For Love

"There are two things about that ad," I said.

Wolfe grunted and turned a page.