“Any time you say. Tomorrow. I’ve got a good assistant and he can take over here.”
Wolfe did not whoop with glee. Instead, he compressed his lips and breathed deep through his nose. In a moment he spoke. “Confound it, may I come in? I want to sit down.”
II
Wolfe’s reaction was perfectly natural. True, he had just got wonderful news, but also he had just learned that if he had stayed home he would have got it just the same in tomorrow morning’s mail, and that was hard to take standing up. He hates going outdoors and rarely does, and he would rather trust himself in a room alone with three or four mortal enemies than in a piece of machinery on wheels.
But he had been driven to the wall. Four people live in the old brownstone house on West 35th Street. First, him. Second, me, assistant everything from detective to doorbell answerer. Third, Fritz Brenner, cook and house manager. And fourth, Theodore Horstmann, tender and defender of the ten thousand orchids in the plant rooms on the roof. But that was the trouble: there was no longer a fourth. A telegram had come from Illinois that Theodore’s mother was critically ill and he must come at once, and he had taken the first train. Wolfe, instead of spending a pleasant four hours a day in the plant rooms pretending he was hard at it, had had to dig in and work like a dog. Fritz and I could help some, but we weren’t experts. Appeals were broadcast in every direction, especially after word came from Theodore that he couldn’t tell whether he would be back in six days or six months, and there were candidates for the job, but no one that Wolfe would trust with his rare and precious hybrids. He had already heard of this Andrew Krasicki, who had successfully crossed an Odontoglossum cirrhosum with an O. nobile veitchianum, and when he learned from Lewis Hewitt that Krasicki had worked for him for three years and was as good as they come, that settled it. He had to have Krasicki. He had written him; no answer. He had phoned, and had been brushed off. He had phoned again, and got no further. So, that wet December morning, tired and peevish and desperate, he had sent me to the garage for the car, and when I rolled up in front of the house there he was on the sidewalk, in his hat and overcoat and cane, grim and resolute, ready to do or die. Stanley making for Livingstone in the African jungle was nothing compared to Wolfe making for Krasicki in Westchester.
And here was Krasicki saying he had already written he would come! It was an awful anticlimax.
“I want to sit down,” Wolfe repeated firmly.
But he didn’t get to, not yet. Krasicki said sure, go on in and make himself at home, but he had just been starting for the greenhouse when we arrived and he would have to go. I put in to remark that maybe we’d better get back to town, to our own greenhouse, and start the day’s work. That reminded Wolfe that I was there, and he gave Krasicki and me each other’s names, and we shook hands. Then Krasicki said he had a Phalaenopsis Aphrodite in flower we might like to see.
Wolfe grunted. “Species? I have eight.”
“Oh, no.” It was easy to tell from Krasicki’s tone of horticultural snobbery, by no means new to me, that he really belonged. “Not species and not dayana. Sanderiana. Nineteen sprays.”