The Golden Spiders Read Free Page B

has many levels and many faces. Take one. Shadowing a man around New York without losing him is an extremely difficult task. When the police undertake it seriously they use three men, and even so they are often hoodwinked. There is a man who often works for me, Saul Panzer, who is a genius at it, working alone. I have discussed it with him and have concluded that he himself does not know the secret of his superlative knack. It is not a conscious and controlled operation of his brain, though he has a good one; it is something hidden somewhere in his nervous system-possibly, of course, in his skull. He says that he seems somehow to know, barely in the nick of time, what the man he is following is about to do-not what he has done or is doing, but what he intends. That’s why Mr. Panzer might teach you everything he knows, and still you would never be his equal. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn all you can. Learning will never hurt you. Only the man who knows too little knows too much. It is only when you undertake to use what you have learned that you discover whether you can transform knowledge into performance.”
    Wolfe aimed a thumb at me. “Take Mr. Goodwin. It would be difficult for me to function effectively without him. He is irreplaceable. Yet his actions are largely governed by impulse and caprice, and that would of course incapacitate him for any important task if it were not that he has somewhere concealed in him-possibly in his brain, though I doubt it-a powerful and subtle governor. For instance, the sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster, doubtless occasionally on the very brink. It works similarly with the majority of his impulses and whims, but now and then it fails to intervene in time, and he suffers mishap, as this evening when he was impelled to badger me when a certain opportunity offered. It has already cost him-what time is it, Archie?”
    I looked. “Eighteen minutes to nine.”
    “Hey!” Pete leaped from his chair. “I gotta run! My mother-I gotta be home by a quarter to! See you tomorrow!”
    He was on his way. By the time I was up and in the hall he had reached the front door and pulled it open, and was gone. I stepped to the threshold of the dining room and told Wolfe, “Damn it, I was hoping he would stay till midnight so you could finish. After that a billiard match will be pretty dull, but I might as well go.”
    I went.

Chapter 2
    Next day, Wednesday, I was fairly busy. A hardware manufacturer from Youngstown, Ohio, had come to New York to try to locate a son who had cut his lines of communication, and had wired Wolfe to help, and we had Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather out scouting around. That kept me close to my desk and the phone, getting reports and relaying instructions.
    A little after four in the afternoon Pete Drossos showed up and wanted to see Wolfe. His attitude indicated that while he was aware that I too had a license as a private detective and he had nothing serious against me, he preferred to deal with the boss. I explained that Nero Wolfe spent four hours every day-from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to six in the afternoon-up in the plant rooms on the roof, with his ten thousand orchids, bossing Theodore Horstmann instead of me, and that during those hours he was unavailable. Pete let me know that he thought that was a hell of a way for a private eye to spend his time, and I didn’t argue the point. By the time I finally got him eased out to the stoop and the door closed, I was ready to concede that maybe my governor needed oiling. Pete was