Over My Dead Body

She nodded. "I thought you might feel-"

"I carry this fat to insulate my feelings. They got too strong for me once or twice and I had that idea. If I had stayed lean and kept moving around I would have been dead long ago. You are aware that I have no proof that you are my daughter. You sent Miss Lovchen here with that record of adoption bearing my signature. Another paper. Did you steal that too?"

Carla ejaculated something indignant. Neya was on her feet, with her eyes flashing. "If you think I did that, there's no use-"

"I don't think you did that. I just don't know. I asked you to stop jumping up. Please sit down, Miss Tormic. Thank you. I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I've got it in hand. I thought it romantic, when I was a boy, twenty-five years ago, to be a secret agent of the Austrian Government. My progress towards maturity got interrupted by the World War and my experience with it. War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread. Pfui! After the war I was still lean and I moved around. In Montenegro I assumed responsibility for the sustenance and mental and physical thrift of a three-year-old orphan girl by adopting her. I did something else there, too, which advanced my maturity, but that has nothing to do with you. I saw that girl's ribs. The something else I did finished Montenegro for me, and I left the girl, I thought, in good hands, and returned to America."

Wolfe leaned back and let his lids down a little. "You go on from there, please."

Neya said, "You left me in Zagreb with Pero Brovnik and his wife."

"That's right. Your name?"

"My name was Anna. When I was eight years old they were arrested as revolutionaries and shot. I don't remember that very well, but I know all about it."

"Yes." Wolfe looked grim. "And for three years the money I continued to send to Zagreb was appropriated by someone in Brovnik's name, and when I got suspicious and went over there, in spite of the fact that I was no longer lean, I got nowhere. I couldn't find the girl. I got no satisfaction about the money. I got put in jail, and the American Consul got me out and I was given ten hours to leave the country." He made a face. "I have not been in Europe, or in jail, since. Where were you?"

"I was eleven years old then."

"Yes. I can add. Where were you?"

She looked at him a while before she spoke. "I can't tell you that."