At the threshold he paused. "Archie."
"Yes, sir."
"Phone Murger's to send over at once a copy of Devil Take the Hindmost, by Paul Chapin."
"Maybe they won't. It's suppressed pending the court decision."
"Nonsense. Speak to Murger or Ballard. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?"
He went on towards the elevator, and I sat down at my desk and reached for the telephone.
2
After breakfast the next morning, Saturday, I fooled with the plant records a while and then went to the kitchen to annoy Fritz.
Wolfe, of course, wouldn't be down until eleven o'clock. The roof of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street where he had lived for twenty years, and me with him for the last seven of them, was glassed in and partitioned into rooms where varying conditions of temperature and humidity were maintained – by the vigilance of Theodore Horstmann – for the ten thousand orchids that lined the benches and shelves.
Wolfe had once remarked to me that the orchids were his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic and temperamental.
He brought them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the limits of their perfection, and then gave them away; he had never sold one. His patience and ingenuity, supported by Horstmann's fidelity, had produced remarkable results and gained for the roof a reputation in quite different circles from those whose interest centered in the downstairs office.