“None.” He gazed, frowning, at the sheets he had taken from his pocket. “First paragraph:
“At eight o’clock in the evening of August 19, 1948, twenty men were gathered in a living room on the ninth floor of an apartment house on East 84th Street, Manhattan. All of them were high in the councils of the American Communist party, and this meeting was one of a series to decide strategy and tactics for controlling the election campaign of the Progressive party and its candidate for President of the United States, Henry Wallace. One of them, a tall lanky man with a clipped brown mustache, was saying: “‘We must never forget that we can’t trust Wallace. We can’t trust either his character or his intelligence. We can count on his vanity, that’s all right, but while we’re playing him up we must remember that any minute he might pull something that will bring an order from Policy to let go of him.’ “‘Policy’ is the word the top American Communists use when they mean Moscow or the Kremlin. It may be a precaution, though it’s hard to see why they need one when they are in secret session, or it may be merely their habit of calling nothing by its right name. “Another of them, a beefy man with a bald head and a pudgy face, spoke up.”
Wolfe, referring frequently to the sheets he had taken from his pocket, kept on until I had filled thirty-two pages of my notebook, then stopped, sat a while with his lips puckered, and told me to type it. I did so, double spacing as instructed. As I finished a page I handed it over to him and he went to work on it with a pencil. He rarely made changes in anything he had dictated and I had typed, but apparently he regarded this as something extra special. I fully agreed with him. That stuff, getting warmer as it went along, contained dozens of details that nobody lower than a Deputy Commissar had any right to know about — provided they were true. That was a point I would have liked to ask Wolfe about, but if the job was supposed to be finished when Lon Cohen arrived there was no time to spare, so I postponed it.
I had the last page out of the typewriter, but Wolfe was still fussing with it, when the bell rang and I went to the front and let Lon in.
Lon had been rank and file, or maybe only rank, when I first met him, but was now second in command at the Gazette ’s city desk. As far as I knew his elevation had gone to his head only in one little way: he kept a hairbrush in his desk, and every night when he was through, before making a dash for the refreshment counter he favored, he brushed his hair good. Except for that there wasn’t a thing wrong with him.
He shook hands with Wolfe and turned on me.
“You crook, you told me if I didn’t stop — oh, here it is. Hello, Fritz. You’re the only one here I can trust.” He lifted the highball from the tray, nodded at Wolfe, swallowed a third of it, and sat in the red leather chair.
“I brought the stationery,” he announced. “Three sheets. You can have it and welcome if you’ll give me a first on how someone named Sperling willfully and deliberately did one Louis Rony to death.”
“That,” Wolfe said, “is precisely what I have to offer.”
Lon’s head jerked up. “Someone named Sperling?” he snapped.