Over My Dead Body

She turned off the smile and went and sat down with the book, and appeared to be absorbed in it a few minutes later when, the checking finished, I jiggled the handful of cards neatly together and departed with them, and mounted the two flights of carpeted stairs to the top floor and the steeper flight to the roof level, where the entire space was glassed-in for the orchids except the potting-room and the corner where Horstmann slept. Passing through the first two rooms, down the aisles with silver staging and concrete benches and thousands of pots holding everything from baby seedlings to odontoglossums and dendrobiums in full bloom, I found Nero Wolfe in the warm room, standing with his thumbs on his hips, frowning at Horstmann, who in turn was scowling reproachfully at an enormous coelogyne blossom with white petals and orange keels. Wolfe was muttering:

"A full two weeks. At the very least, twelve days. As Per Hansa says, I don't know what God expects to accomplish by such management. If it were only a question of forcing… Well, Archie?"

I handed Horstmann the cards. "For that batch of miltonias and lycastes. The germination dates are already in where you had them. There's a female immigrant downstairs who wants to borrow a book. She is twenty-two years old and has fine legs. Her face is sullen but well arranged and her eyes are dark and beautiful and worried. She has a nice voice, but she talks like Lynn Fontanne in Idiot's Delight. Her name is Carla Lovchen."

Wolfe had taken the cards from Horstmann to flip through them, but he stopped to send me a sharp glance. "What's that?" he demanded. "Her name?"

"Lovchen." I spelled it, and grinned. "Yeah, I know, it struck me too. You may remember I read The Native's Return. She seems to be named after a mountain. The Black Mountain. Mount Lovchen. Tsernagora. Montenegro, which is the Venetian variant of Monte Nero, and your name is Nero. It may be only a coincidence, but it's natural for a trained detective-"

"What does she want?"

"She says she wants to see you, but I think she came to borrow a book. She took that United Yugoslavia, by Henderson, from the shelf and asked if you've read it, and do you stoody it, and am I reading it and so on. She's down there with her pretty nose in it. But, as I say, her eyes look worried. I had a notion to tell her that because of the healthy condition of the bank account…"