Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31 Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t believe I would look younger if I hadn’t had two babies. Do you?”
    I was on a spot. I had accepted the invitation with my eyes and ears open. I had told my hostess that I was acquainted with the nature and significance of the affair and she could count on me. I had on my shoulders the responsibility of the moral and social position of the community, some of it anyhow, and here this cheerful unmarried mother was resting the whole problem on the single question, had it aged her any? If I merely said no, it hadn’t, which would have been both true and tactful, it would imply that I agreed that the one objection to her career was a phony. To say no and then proceed to list other objections that were not phonies would have been fine if I had been ordained, but I hadn’t, and anyway she had certainly heard of them and hadn’t been impressed. I worked it out in three seconds, on the basis that while it was none of my business if she kept on having babies, Iabsolutely wasn’t going to encourage her. So I lied to her.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “What?” She was indignant. “You do?”
    I was firm. “I do. You admitted that I took you for twenty-six and deducted five years to be polite. If you had had only one baby I might have taken you for twenty-three, and if you had had none I might have taken you for twenty. I can’t prove it, but I might. We’d better get on with the pudding. Some of them have finished.”
    She turned to it, cheerfully.
    Apparently the guests of honor had been briefed on procedure, for when Hackett, on signal, pulled back Mrs. Robilotti’s chair as she arose, and we chevaliers did likewise for our partners, they joined the hostess as she headed for the door. When they were out we sat down again.
    Cecil Grantham blew a breath, a noisy gust, and said, “The last two hours are the hardest.”
    Robilotti said, “Brandy, Hackett.”
    Hackett stopped pouring coffee to look at him. “The cabinet is locked, sir.”
    “I know it is, but you have a key.”
    “No, sir, Mrs. Robilotti has it.”
    It seemed to me that that called for an embarrassed silence, but Cecil Grantham laughed and said, “Get a hatchet.”
    Hackett poured coffee.
    Beverly Kent, the one with a long narrow face and big ears, cleared his throat. “A little deprivation will be good for us, Mr. Robilotti. After all, we understood the protocol when we accepted the invitation.”
    “Not protocol,” Paul Schuster objected. “That’snot what protocol means. I’m surprised at you, Bev. You’ll never be an ambassador if you don’t know what protocol is.”
    “I never will anyway,” Kent declared. “I’m thirty years old, eight years out of college, and what am I? An errand boy in the Mission to the United Nations. So I’m a diplomat? But I ought to know what protocol is better than a promising young corporation lawyer. What do you know about it?”
    “Not much.” Schuster was sipping coffee. “Not much
about
it, but I know what it is, and you used it wrong. And you’re wrong about me being a promising young corporation lawyer. Lawyers never promise anything. That’s about as far as I’ve got, but I’m a year younger than you, so there’s hope.”
    “Hope for who?” Cecil Grantham demanded. “You or the corporations?”
    “About that word ‘protocol,’” Edwin Laidlaw said, “I can settle that for you. Now that I’m a publisher I’m the last word on words. It comes from two Greek words,
protos
, meaning ‘first,’ and
kolla
, meaning ‘glue.’ Now why glue? Because in ancient Greece a
protokollon
was the first leaf, containing an account of the manuscript, glued to a roll of papyrus. Today a protocol may be any one of various kinds of documents—an original draft of something, or an account of some proceeding, or a record of an agreement. That seems to support you, Paul, but Bev has a point, because a protocol can also be a set of rules of etiquette. So you’re both right. This affair this evening does