Wolfe had told me the same, so I took five twenties from the expense wallet and forked it over.
“I must say,” he commented, folding the bills neatly and stuffing them in his waistband pocket, “this is a large return for a small effort. I am aware that I may earn it— ah, suddenly and unexpectedly.” He leaned toward me. “Though I may tell you confidentially, Archie, that I expect nothing to happen. I am sanguine by nature.”
“Yeah,” I told him, “me too.” I opened the drawer of my desk, the middle one on the right, where I kept armament, got out the shoulder holster and put it on, and selected the gun that was my property — the other two belonged to Wolfe. There were only three cartridges in it, so I pulled the drawer open farther to get to the ammunition compartment and filled the cylinder.
As I shoved the gun into the holster I happened to glance at Hackett and saw that he had a new face. The line of his lips was tight, and his eyes looked startled, wary, and concentrated.
“It hadn’t occurred to me before,” he said, and his voice had changed too. “This Mr. Wolfe is quite an article, and you’re his man. I am doing this with the understanding that someone may mistake me for Mr. Wolfe and try to kill me, but I have only his word for it that that is actually the situation. If it’s more complicated than that, and the intention is for you to shoot me yourself, I want to say emphatically that that would not be fair.”
I grinned at him sympathetically, trying to make up for my blunder, realizing that I should not have dressed for the occasion in his presence. The sight of the gun, a real gun and real cartridges, had scared him stiff. If he ran out on us now and we had to advertise again to find a new one — my God, I had just handed him a hundred bucks!
“Listen,” I told him earnestly, “you said a minute ago that you expect nothing to happen. You may be right. I’m inclined to agree with you. But in case somebody does undertake to perform, I am wearing this little number” — I patted under my arm where the gun was — “for two purposes: first, to keep you from getting hurt; and second, if you do get hurt, to hurt him worse.”
It seemed to satisfy him, for his eyes got less concentrated, but he didn’t resume with the ginger snaps. At least I had accomplished that much. Using a matter-of-fact tone, which I thought would reassure him, I explained that he was to go to Wolfe’s room at eleven-thirty for instructions, which would include our afternoon outing.
To tell the truth, by the time the afternoon was over and I had him back in the house again, a little after five-thirty, I had to maintain a firm hold on such details as ginger snaps and his calling me Archie to keep from admiring him. During that extended expedition we made stops at Brooks Brothers, Rusterman’s, the Churchill, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens, and three or four others. He occupied the rear seat, of course, because Wolfe always did, and the mirror showed me that he sat back comfortably, taking in the sights, a lot more imperturbable than Wolfe himself would have been, since Wolfe disliked motion, detested bumps, and had a settled notion that all the other cars had turned out for the express purpose of colliding with his.
When we made one of our stops and Hackett got out to cross the sidewalk, he was okay. He didn’t hurry or dodge or jerk or weave, but just walked. In Wolfe’s hat and coat and stick, he might even have fooled me. I had to hand it to him, in spite of the fact that the whole show struck me as the biggest bust Wolfe had ever concocted. At night it might be different, but here in broad daylight, and with no discernible evidence that anyone was on our trail, I felt foolish, futile, and fatuous, and still I had to keep alert, covering all directions, with the gun in my hand resting on the seat.