Silver Spire

Начало книги

With two baritone belches of the horn, the Samuel I. Newhouse eased from its slip at South Ferry, and we were on the briny. It being the middle of the day, only a couple of dozen people or so were scattered throughout the big boat, most of them either reading or dozing or trying to wriggle into comfortable positions on the molded, one-size-fits-all blue plastic seats.

The interior of the ferry had all the charm of a warehouse, and after five minutes of trying to get comfortable myself, I went out onto the small deck at the bow and let the May breeze blow across my face. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, New York’s newest tourist attraction, were off to the right — make that the starboard, mate — and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge arched gracefully to port, while dead ahead through the haze of New York Harbor, the low green hills of Staten Island began to take form.

That morning as I sat in the kitchen of Nero Wolfe’s brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street devouring wheatcakes and the Times, I recalled the last time I had been on Staten Island, which most New Yorkers don’t even think of as part of the city — when they think of it at all. That was almost ten years ago, when Wolfe took a case involving an arrogant old art collector on the island whose prized Cézanne had been filched from his house and replaced with a good but not great copy.

Читать дальше →