The Missing Chapter

“Saul, this is Nero Wolfe. Can you join Archie and me for dinner? We’re having breast of veal, with a stuffing that Fritz developed. It has been called incomparable by no less than the owner of the most-renowned restaurant in Lyon — and probably in all of France. He had the exceedingly good fortune to dine with us two years ago.”

“I know the dish, and the stuffing, that you’re talking about, because I enjoyed it at your place once, too. And it is incomparable,” Saul said. “I had an engagement tonight, but I just this instant decided to cancel it. Shall I be there at seven?”

The time was agreed on, and we hung up. Invitations to meals in the brownstone get issued about as often as Mets pitchers toss back-to-back shutouts, so I was surprised about Saul’s invite, but only for a few seconds, before I figured out what was up.

At dinner, Wolfe directed the conversation as he always does. Maybe as therapy for his current miseries, he chose to elaborate on the history of the elevator, starting back in the third century B.C: “Tradition has it that the Greek mathematician Archimedes invented a rope-and-pulley device that was capable of lifting one person.” When he got to the development of elevator safety devices by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century, Saul jumped in.

“How’s this for a weird elevator story? I was in a six-story, block-square warehouse over in Long Island City about ten, maybe twelve years back. It was actually unoccupied at the time — which was the problem. The owners had hired me to try to stop whoever was hauling away their building piece by bloody piece. The thieves were getting in at night and stripping the building of the fluorescent light fixtures, the plumbing, even the doorknobs. Anyway, I holed up in a damp, dark little room in the basement for close to twenty-four hours, with sandwiches and iced tea which wasn’t iced by the time I was done.

“At first I didn’t think they were going to show up, but finally, just after dawn, they came — turns out they were sneaking in through a three-block-long tunnel that the owners didn’t even know existed. It had been built at the turn of the century to bring coal from the East River into the basement in little mine-type railroad cars and to haul trash out the same way, but it had been boarded up God knows how many years ago. Somehow, though, these thieves knew about it.

“There were three of them dismantling the place,” Saul continued. “And by God, they were even taking the freight elevator apart, piece by piece, for whatever the parts were worth as scrap metal. Well, I snuck out of my hiding place and was just about to blow the whistle on them when one guy fell four floors, probably sixty feet, down the elevator shaft. The idiot had unbolted a section of the floor from the walls — while he was in the thing!”

“Of course that finished him,” I put in.

Saul shook his head. “Incredibly, not even a broken bone. Some poor homeless creature had found his way into the building weeks earlier and had hauled three old mattresses in with him. He’d piled them at the bottom of the shaft and had been sleeping on them until he apparently found himself a better place to bunk. He left the mattresses behind, though, and this other guy fell, screaming all the way, onto the pile. He bounced a couple of times and ended up with a bunch of bruises and a burglary charge. If there’s a moral, it got by me.

Wolfe damn near chuckled, although not quite. He both likes Saul Panzer and esteems him. A comment here about Saul: You wouldn’t grade him high on looks; he’s not much bigger than a jockey, and his face is mostly nose, and what isn’t nose is ears. He always needs a shave, regardless of the time of day. His clothes never seem to fit quite right, and the closest thing he makes to a fashion statement is a flat wool cap that he wears except when the mercury goes above seventy Fahrenheit. All that might make you take Saul lightly, which would be a big mistake.

He is a free-lance operative, the best in New York — possibly in the world — at a number of things, including tailing people who don’t want to be tailed and finding people who don’t want to be found. Saul charges top dollar and gets far more business than he can handle, although he almost never says no to Wolfe, who has been throwing work his way for years without complaints.

I knew why Wolfe wanted to sign Saul on this time, of course. The three of us were in the office with coffee after dinner, and I had also poured generous snifters of Remisier brandy for Saul and me. Wolfe sipped from his Wedgwood cup and set it deliberately in its saucer. “We need to locate an individual,” he told Saul. “A woman. She is said to be in the New York area, but as Archie discovered this afternoon, she has no telephone listing. This problem may be too mundane for you, especially given your crowded docket. If so, I understand completely.”