“Jail.”
“But my God, aren’t we in Bari?”
“Entering it, yes.”
“Then tell him to take us to that house and we’ll show him the damn papers.”
“No. At the risk of having it get across the Adriatic tomorrow that I am here? Impossible.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I wish to see the American consul. Naturally he refuses to disturb him at this hour.”
I am thinking of starting a movement to push for a law requiring two consuls in every city, a day consul and a night consul, and you would join it if you had ever spent a night, or part of one, in the hoosegow at Bari. We were questioned — or Wolfe was — first by a handsome baritone in a slick unifrom and then by a fat animal in a soiled seersucket. Our guns and knives didn’t make them any more cordial. Then we were locked in a cell with two cots which were already occupied by fifty thousand others. Twenty thousand of the others were fleas, and another twenty thousand were bedbugs, but I never found out what the other ten thousand were. After a night in a haystack and one in a deep-freeze cave, it would have been reasonable to suppose that anything different would be an improvement, but it wasn’t. I got a lot of walking done, back and forth the full length of the cell, a good ten feet, being careful not to step on Wolfe, who was sitting on the concrete floor. All I will say about the breakfast is that we didn’t eat it. The chocolate, what was left of it, was in the knapsacks, and they had been taken.
Another section of that law will provide that day consuls will get to work at eight o’clock. It was after ten when the door of the cell opened and a man appeared and said something. Wolfe told me to come, and we were conducted down a corridor and some stairs and into a sunny room where two men sat talking. One of them spoke; and then the other, a lanky, tired-looking specimen with ears as big as saucers, said in American, “I’m Thomas Arnold, the American consul. I’m told you want to see me.”
“I have to see you” — Wolfe glanced at the other man — “in private.”