“No.” Wolfe looked at me. “Alex, it is suggested that Comrade Zov shall go to America, and we shall provide for his necessities and also help him with the preparations to kill a man named Nero Wolfe. I am willing to undertake it if you are.”
I looked serious. I would have given eight thousand cents to be able to reply that I had been wanting to kill a man named Nero Wolfe for years, but I wasn’t sure that Stritar and Zov understood no English. I had to skip it. I said earnestly, “I am willing, Father, to help with anything you approve of.”
He looked at Stritar. “My son says he is willing. We want to leave here as soon as possible. Can you get us to Bari tonight?”
“Yes. But Zov will have to go by another route.” Stritar looked at his watch. “There is much to arrange.” He raised his voice to call, “Jin!”
The door opened, and one of the clerks came in. Stritar spoke to him. “Find Trumbic and Levstik and get them here. I’ll be busy for an hour or more. No interruptions unless it’s urgent.”
Zov had his Luger out, rubbing it with his palm.
XV
We got arrested for having no papers after all, and it damn near bollixed everything.
Not in Montenegro. Stritar took no chances on our changing our minds and deciding to go to Belgrade, where we would probably mention the eight thousand dollars and the promise of more to come. He fed us there in his office, on meat and cheese and bread and raisins that he had brought in, and a little after dark took us down to the street himself and put us in a 1953 Ford, a different color from Jubé Bilic’s. Our destination was Budva, a coast village which Wolfe said was five miles north of the spot where we had been landed by Guido Battista two nights before. During the hour and a half that it took to cover the thirty miles, the driver had no more than a dozen words for Wolfe, and none at all for me. As he delivered us at the edge of a slip and exchanged noises with a man waiting there, it started to rain.
It rained all the way across the Adriatic, but the boat was a few centuries newer than Guido’s, with a cabin where I could lie down. Wolfe tried it too, but the bench was so narrow he had to grip a bracket to keep from rolling off, and finally he gave up and stretched out on the floor. The boat, with a crew of two besides the skipper, was fast, noisy, was rated 500 v.p.m., which means vibrations per minute, and was a steeplechaser. It loved to jump waves. No wonder it beat Guido’s time by nearly three hours. It was still raining, and dark as pitch, when it anchored in choppy water and we were herded into a dinghy some bigger than Guido’s. The skipper rowed us into the wall of night until he hit bottom, dumped us on the beach, shoved the nose of the dinghy off, hopped in, and was gone.