She was speaking. “I beg your pardon, Major Goodwin. I am obeying the regulations—”
“Okay.” I waved it aside. “This is Mr. Nero Wolfe. Sergeant Dorothy Bruce of the United States Army.”
They acknowledged each other. Stepping to a door at the other end, I opened it, let Wolfe go through, then followed him and shut the door.
It was a roomy corner office with windows on two sides and the space of the other two walls filled with locked steel cabinets reaching two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, except for a spot occupied by another door which gave access to the hall without going through the anteroom.
There was no humor in there either. The four men on chairs were about as chipper as a bunch of Dodger fans after watching dem bums drop a double-header. Seeing that the atmosphere didn’t call for military etiquette, I let the arm hang. The two colonels and the lieutenant we knew, and though we had never met the civilian we knew who he was, having been told about him; and besides, almost any good citizen would have recognized John Bell Shattuck. He was shorter than I would have expected, and maybe a little bulkier, but there was no mistaking his manner as he got up to shake hands with us and look us in the eye. True, we were residents of New York, but an elected person can never be sure you aren’t going to move to his own state and be a constituent with a vote.
“Meeting Nero Wolfe is a real occasion,” he said, in a voice that sounded as if it was pitched lower than God intended it to be. I had run across that before. Half the statesmen in Washington have been trying to sound like Winston Churchill ever since he made that speech to Congress.
Wolfe was polite to him and then turned back to Ryder. “This is my first opportunity, Colonel, to offer my condolences. Your son. Your only son.”
Ryder’s jaw was set. It had been for nearly a week, since the news came. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Had he killed any Germans?”
“He had shot down four German planes. Presumably he killed Germans. I hope he did.”