Swing Street

As I’ve often said, I am a devoted fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, of which there could never be enough. So I thought I would share, below, the first chapter of an otherwise lost Stout novel called Swing Street, set in the Year of Our Lord 1939. Regarding some of the places and characters here: IYKYK.

Anyone treated to one of Fritz Brenner’s dinners wants to savor it for as long as possible, but I had work to do. After coffee — in Nero Wolfe’s house, coffee after dinner is not optional — I trotted upstairs to change clothes. Once I had the old frame suitably draped I trotted back down to the office and ducked in to give my regards to the boss. Wolfe was sitting at his desk with a several maps laid out before him, at which he stared angrily.

“I’m off,” I said. “And for the record, this shirt isn’t purple, it’s mauve.” Wolfe hates the color purple, which I think is pretty rich, considering his fondness for bright yellow shirts and pajamas.

“Pedantry doesn’t suit you, Archie,” he said. “and in any case today is not the day for it.”

I couldn’t disagree with him there. I turned and went out the front door, and standing there on the stoop I decided that I wouldn’t get the roadster after all. It was a good evening for a walk: not fall yet by any means, but the the edge of the heat had been sanded down, and in my lightweight suit I was unlikely to sweat. Not that it mattered, since where I was going if I sweated I’d be just one of the party.

I headed uptown. It was going to be a musical evening.

I’m a Flamingo Club guy myself. The big band dance music suits me fine, especially when I’m gliding around the dance floor with a suitable companion. Lily Rowan, for instance. But other people like other kinds of music, and I was going to be spending the evening with them. I needed to talk to one among their number.

I was headed for Swing Street — 52nd Street, as the maps call it — and one of its many jazz clubs. The problem was, I wasn’t sure which one. It was a jazzman I needed to talk to, or a man involved somehow with the jazz scene, and those guys floated from club to club like fireflies.

It was Friday night, and I knew that Swing Street would be jumping, and that not one person on the whole street would be thinking about the fact that Germany had invaded Poland today. Wolfe was thinking about it, of course; that’s why he had those maps on his desk. He had fought against the Germans in the previous European war; it wasn’t easy to figure who he had been fighting for, but more than once I had heard him say that he wished he had killed more Germans when he had the chance. How many he did kill, and how many would have been enough, I’ve never figured out. Anyway, as he looked at those maps he was thinking about what he personally could do to damage Germans, that I was sure of.

What it all might mean for me, and for other Americans, I couldn’t guess. That didn’t stop me from guessing as I walked. It took me less than half an hour, because I walk fast.

When I got to 52nd Street I heaved a big sigh, because I could see more jazz clubs than I could count. I could be hunting for hours. I stood for a minute outside a place called Dizzy’s Club — I had heard that one of the hot new jazz musicians was named Dizzy. This place looked like it needed a thorough hosing-down, but didn’t they all, more or less?

As I was deciding whether to duck in, a man passed me heading for the door. Tallish fellow with blond hair in a suit so wrinkled and speckled with cigarette ash that I couldn’t stop myself from tsk-tsking, though because I was raised to be polite I did did my tsking quietly. He looked something like a Viking, if Vikings had had librarians. Or maybe he was a poet. The Vikings had a few of those, as I recall.

His hair needed combing and his shoelaces needed tying, and with a cigarette in one hand and a bundle of books and a notebook tucked under his other arm, he was hard-pressed to find a way to open the door. So I opened it for him. He thanked me in a pretty fancy British accent, which he probably wasn’t faking, and went in.

He found a seat in a corner and started spreading out his papers. He looked to be preparing for a lengthy stay, which I was not. The room was very full and very hot and very loud, and there wasn’t a dame in the place, just sailors and guys who dressed like sailors and guys who looked like they would be very interested in sailors. I was definitely not dressed for the environment, though I did get some approving looks I didn’t want, and since there was no live music — the noise came from a jukebox — I quickly decided that this wasn’t the joint for me and backed slowly out the door. I caught a slight grin from the Viking librarian on my way out and tipped my fedora to him.

There’s never a great deal of fresh air on Swing Street, but it smelled like springtime in the Catskills in comparison to the hothouse of Dizzy’s. But I had to keep trying until I found the right club.

The person I wanted wasn’t in the Three Deuces, but I found myself wishing that that had been the place for me because they had a guy playing piano there like nothing I’ve ever heard. He was a hefty guy — not quite Wolfe-sized but not far from it — who appeared to be blind or at least hard of seeing, and he was doing things to those ivories that I can’t even describe. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, or so I would’ve said before I heard it. On the way out I asked one of the waiters and he said the guy was a regular, played there several times a week. His name was Tatum. I made a note of it. Wolfe gives me the occaional off-night and I’m not afraid to use it to try something new. I felt a long way from the Flamingo Club, though, I don’t mind admitting.

A few stops down the street I finally found what I was looking for, though not without geeting a little more musical distraction that I hadn’t been expecting. On stage at a place called the Famous Door a small combo were doing their thing, and I had to listen to for a few minutes before getting back to work. The singer was a fair-skinned colored girl who had a lousy voice — reedy and thin — but you couldn’t not listen to her. She just had a way. I can’t explain it better than that, which I guess means that I can’t explain it. She seemed to have a particular connection with the tenor saxophone player, a big guy in a pork-pie hat, and man, he could play that sax something beautiful. Again I was hearing something that wasn’t my thing, wasn’t my thing at all, but could somehow become my thing if I didn’t watch out. Swing Street was starting to make sense to me.

Behind the bar a tall thin man was whispering in the ear of the bartender, a slight colored guy with alert eyes who seemed to be mixing three or four drinks at once but was also paying close attention to the message. The whisperer looked Italian, which from my perspective was a good thing because the man I was looking for was named Mariano. He had on a suit that cost about five times as much as mine and cut to specifications. He lifted his hand to shield his mouth and his diamond cufflinks came out like the sunrise. As I approached the bar he looked up, saw me coming, and slipped into a back room as smoothly and as quickly as humanly possible, or maybe a little more so.

The colored girl kept singing in that strangely fascinating way as I thought about whether to chase Mister Cufflinks to find out if his name was Mariano. The bartender finished making his drinks, put them on a tray for a waiter, turned to me, gave me a winning smile, and said, “What can I make for you, Mister Goodwin? And whatever you want, it’s on the house. Any friend of Nero Wolfe’s is a friend of ours.”