Over My Dead Body

"And what," he demanded resentfully, "would you suggest that we do with her?"

"Search me. It was you that wanted her."

"I don't want her like that."

"Send her home." I added emphatically, "In a taxi."

"We can't send her home. The police are looking for her, and one will be posted at her door, and I want to talk to her first."

"Go ahead and talk to her."

"I want to ask her some questions. Is she capable of coherence?"

"Capable, yes. But I doubt if she'll cohere, with ice or without. Go on and try it."

He looked at her. "Madame Zorka, I am Nero Wolfe. I would like to discuss something with you. When were you last in Yugoslavia?"

With her face covered with her hands, she shook her head, moaned, and muttered something not even as intelligible as gibblezook.

"But, madame," Wolfe said patiently, "I'm sorry you don't feel well, but that is a very simple question." Then he spouted some lingo at her, a couple of sentences, that may have been words, but not to me. She didn't even shake her head.

"Don't you understand Serbo-Croat?" he demanded.

"No," she muttered. "Zat I do not onderstand."

He kept at it for a solid hour. When he wanted to be, he could be as patient as he was big, and apparently on that occasion he wanted to be. I took it all down in my notebook, and I never filled as many pages with less dependable information. There was no telling, when he got through, whether she had ever been in Yugoslavia, how and when she had acquired the name Zorka, or whether she had actually ever been born or not. It seemed to be tentatively established that she had once resided in a hotel in Paris, at least for one night, that the couturiиre enterprise had been installed within the year on the street floor of the Churchill with the help of outside capital, that her native tongue was not Serbo-Croat, that she was not on intimate terms with Neya Tormic or Carla Lovchen, that she had known Percy Ludlow only slightly, and that she had taken up fencing to keep her weight down, and was not an expert. Wolfe did succeed in extorting an admission that she had made the phone call to our office, but it was an empty triumph: she couldn't remember what she had said! She just simply couldn't remember.

At twenty minutes past four Wolfe arose from his chair with a sigh and said to me, "Put her to bed in the south room, above mine, and lock the door."

She arose too, steadying herself with her hand on the edge of his desk, and declared, "I want to go home."