Before I Die

That Monday afternoon in October, life indoors was getting to be more than I cared to take. Meaning, by indoors, the office of Nero Wolfe, where I worked, on the ground floor of the house he owned on West Thirty-fifth Street not far from North River. Relief was due soon, since he spent two hours every afternoon, from four to six, with the orchids up in the plant rooms on the roof, but it was still thirty minutes short of four o’clock and I had had all of him I could stand for a while.
I wasn’t blaming him; I was merely fed up with him. It was smack in the middle of the Great Meat Shortage, when millions of pigs and steers, much to the regret of the growers and slaughterers, had sneaked off and hid in order to sell their lives dear, and to Nero Wolfe a meal without meat was an insult. His temper had got so bad that I had offered to let him eat me, and it would be best to skip his retort. By that Monday afternoon he had got so desperate that he had started taking long walks, as, for instance, back and forth between his chair and the bookshelves, and sometimes even through the door into the front room, which faced on Thirty-fifth Street.
So at three-thirty I told him I was going out for an errand down the street, and he was sunk so far in misery and malice that he didn’t even demand to know what the errand was. Then, just as I was reaching for my hat on the rack in the hall, the doorbell rang. I let the hat wait, stepped to the door and opened it, and what I saw jerked my mind loose from the fastenings where it had got glued onto Wolfe’s huff. Standing there on the stoop was one of the most obvious articles I had ever looked at. Though the sun had been shining all day and still was, he had on a raincoat, belted tight. His hat, a glossy black felt number, was too small for him, and it looked out of place for the lids of his light gray eyes to be open because his face was embalmed — or, at least, after he had breathed his last and had been embalmed, his face would look exactly the way it looked now.