“I read it.” He sounded puzzled. “Are you calling clear from Washington to make a joke?”
“I am not. I don’t feel like joking. The Army won’t let me go anywhere. They turned me down. As you read the ad, who did it make you think of?”
“Well — it entered my mind that it was just about a good description of Mr. Wolfe.”
“Yeah, it entered mine too. If whoever wrote that wasn’t thinking of Nero Wolfe, I’ll eat it. First thing in the morning, show it to him. Tell him it looks to me — no, just show it to him. It would annoy him to be told how it looks to me. Anyhow, it will look to him the same way. How’s everything?”
“All right.”
“The bolts and the gong and so forth?”
“Yes. With you away—”
“I’ll be back tomorrow— I hope. Probably late afternoon.”
Getting ready for bed, I tried to figure out in what manner, if I were making preparations to kill Nero Wolfe, I could make use of an assistant, hired on a temporary basis at a hundred bucks a day, who was a physical counterpart of Wolfe. The two schemes I devised weren’t very satisfactory, and the one I hit on after I got my head on the pillow was even worse, so I flipped the switch on the nervous system and let the muscles quit.
In the morning I went to the Pentagon Building and started conferring again, but it was a lot of hooey. There wasn’t anything they really needed me for, and I didn’t pretend, even to be polite, that I needed them. Still it went on. By three in the afternoon they seemed to be taking me for granted, as if I belonged there. A feeling that I was doomed began to ooze into me. The Pentagon had got me and would never turn me loose. I was on my way down its throat, and once it got me into its stomach and the machinery began to churn me and squirt dissolving juice over me...