“As you please.” Wolfe shrugged. “I shan’t try to persuade you.”
“I know. You know you don’t have to. You know I can’t help myself, I’m in a corner. But it must not be written down.”
“On that I’ll concede something.” Wolfe had got himself patient again. “Mr. Goodwin can record it, and then, if it is so decided, it can be destroyed.”
McNair had abandoned his clutch on the desk. He looked from Wolfe to me and back again and, seeing the look in his eyes, if it hadn’t been during business hours — Nero Wolfe’s business hours — I would have felt sorry for him. He certainly was in no condition to put over a bargain with Nero Wolfe. He slid back on his seat and clasped his hands together, then after a moment separated them and took hold of the arms of the chair. He looked back and forth at us again.
He said abruptly, “You’ll have to know about me or you wouldn’t believe what I did. I was born in 1885 in Camfirth, Scotland. My folks had a little money. I wasn’t much in school and was never very healthy, nothing really wrong, just craichy. I thought I could draw, and when I was twenty-two I went to Paris to study art. I loved it and worked at it, but never really did anything, just enough to keep me in Paris wasting the little money my parents had. When they died a little later my sister and I had nothing, but I’ll come to that.” He stopped and put his hands up to his temples and pressed and rubbed. “My head’s going to bust.”
“Take it easy,” Wolfe murmured. “You’ll feel better pretty soon. You’re probably telling me something you should have told somebody years ago.”
“No,” McNair said bitterly. “Something that should never have happened. And I can’t tell it now, not all of it, but I can tell enough. Maybe I’m really crazy, maybe I’ve lost my balance, maybe I’m just destroying all that I’ve safeguarded for so many years of suffering, I don’t know. Anyhow, I can’t help it, I’ve got to leave you the red box, and you would know then.
“Of course I knew lots of people in Paris. One I knew was an American girl named Anne Crandall, and I married her in 1913 and we had a baby girl. I lost both of them. My wife died the day the baby was born, April second, 1915, and I lost my daughter two years later.” McNair stopped, looking at Wolfe, and demanded fiercely, “Did you ever have a baby daughter?”
Wolfe merely shook his head. McNair went on, “Some other people I knew were two wealthy American brothers, the Frosts, Edwin and Dudley. They were around Paris most of the time. There was also a girl there I had known all my life, in Scotland, named Calida Buchan. She was after art too, and got about as much of it as I did. Edwin Frost married her a few months after I married Anne, though it looked for a while as if his older brother Dudley was going to get her. I think he would have, if he hadn’t been off drinking one night.”
McNair halted and pressed at his temples again. I asked him, “Phenacetin?”