I tried one more stab. “My motive is selfish. If while I am sitting talking to Carpenter in the morning word comes that you have been killed or even temporarily disabled he’ll blame me and I won’t stand a chance. So for purely selfish reasons—”
“Confound it,” he barked. “You’ll miss that train! I have no intention of getting killed. Get out of here!”
I faded, mounted another flight to my room, got into my uniform, and tossed some things into a bag. Boy, was he carrying the banner high! My hero. I caught the train with two minutes to spare.
IV
After the war I intend to run for Congress and put through laws about generals. I have a theory that generals should be rubbed liberally with neat’s-foot oil before being taken out and shot. Though I doubt if I would have bothered with the oil in the case of General Carpenter that morning if I had had a free hand.
I was a major. So I sat and said yessir, yessir, yessir, while he told me that he had given me the appointment only because he thought I wanted to discuss something of importance, and that I would stay where I was put, and that the question of my going overseas had been decided long ago and I would shut my trap about it. I never found out whether Wolfe had phoned him or not. He didn’t phone Wolfe. He didn’t even pat me on the head and tell me there, there, be a good soldier. He merely said, in effect, nuts. Then he observed that since I was in Washington I might as well confer with the staff on various cases, finished and unfinished, and would I report immediately to Colonel Dickey.
I doubt if I made a good impression, considering my state of mind. They kept me around, conferring, all day Thursday and most of Friday. I phoned Wolfe that I was detained. By explaining the situation on Thirty-fifth Street I could have got permission to beat it back to New York, but I wasn’t going to give that collection of brass headgear an excuse to giggle around that Nero Wolfe didn’t have brains enough to arrange to keep on breathing, in his own house, without me there to look after him. Besides, I knew that Carpenter would have phoned Wolfe, out of courtesy as well as concern, and Wolfe’s reaction to that when I got back would be apt to displease me.
But I was tempted to hop a plane when, late Thursday evening, I saw the ad in the Star. I had been too busy all day, and at dinner with a bunch of them and after, to take a look at a New York paper. I was alone in my hotel room when it caught my eye, bordered and spaced to make a spot:
I read it through four times, stared at it disapprovingly for an additional two minutes, and then reached for the phone and put in a New York call. It was going on midnight, but Wolfe never went to bed early. But when the connection was made, after a short wait, it wasn’t his voice that I heard. It was Fritz Brenner’s.