At five o’clock I called up all my reserves and told a colonel, “Looky. Don’t you think, sir, I’ve done all I can here? Would it not be advisable for me to return to my post in New York?”
“Well.” He lifted his chin to consider. “I’ll ask Major Zabreskie. He will of course have to consult Colonel Shawn. It will have to go through — when did you get here?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Whom did you see first on arrival?”
“General Carpenter.”
“Oh. The devil.” He looked worried. “Then it will have to go to him, and he’s tied up. I’ll tell you what we’d better do.”
He told me what we’d better do. I listened attentively, but it didn’t register. Doomed was no word for it. I was sunk for the duration, possibly for life. I told him there was no great rush, it could wait till morning. I would ask Major Zabreskie myself, and managed to break away from him. I got into a corridor, made it to the ground floor, used all my faculties, and succeeded in breaking through to the open air. My trained mind and years of experience as a detective got me onto the right bus. Five minutes at the hotel were enough to get my bag and pay my bill, and I shared a taxi to the airport and bought a ticket to New York. Eating could wait.
But it didn’t. I did. There was no room on either the six-thirty or the seven-thirty, so, with both appetite and time, I tried four kinds of sandwiches and found them all edible. Finally I got a seat on the eight-thirty plane, and when it landed at La Guardia Field an hour and a half later I began to feel safe. Surely I could elude them in the throngs of the great metropolis. Actually I was offering ten to one that by morning everybody at the Pentagon would have forgotten that I had been there.
Arriving at Wolfe’s house on Thirty-fifth Street a little before eleven, I didn’t get out my key because I knew the door would be bolted and I would need help. I gave the button three short pushes as usual, and in a moment there were footsteps, and the curtain was pulled aside, and Fritz was peering at me through the glass panel. Satisfied, he let me in and greeted me with a tone and expression indicating that he was pleased to see me. I saw Wolfe was in the office, since the door to it was open and the light shining through, so I breezed down the hall and on in.
“I am a fug—” I began, and stopped. Wolfe’s chair behind his desk, his own chair and no one else’s under any circumstances, was occupied by the appropriate mass of matter in comparatively human shape, in other words by a big fat man, but it wasn’t Nero Wolfe. I had never seen him before.