“Go ahead.”
Silence. I crossed my legs. He surrendered. “Very well. If I hadn’t let you grow into a habit I could have done this without you. Come on.”
I retrieved the Marley and put it where it belonged, and we departed. Fritz and Theodore escorted us to the sidewalk and the curb, where Saul sat at the wheel of the sedan. The luggage was in the trunk, leaving all the back seat for Wolfe. From the woebegone look on Fritz’s and Theodore’s faces we might have been off for the wars, and in fact they didn’t know. Only Saul and Parker had been shown the program.
At Idlewild we got through the formalities and into our seats on the plane without a hitch. Thinking it wouldn’t hurt Wolfe to have a little comic relief to take his mind off the perils of the takeoff, I told him of an amusing remark I had overheard from someone behind us as we had ascended the gangway. “My God,” a voice had said, “they soak me thirty dollars for overweight baggage, and look at him.” Seeing it didn’t produce the desired effect, I fastened my seat belt and left him to his misery.
I admit he didn’t make a show of it. For the first couple of hours I hardly saw his face as he sat staring through the window at the ocean horizon or the clouds. We voted to have our meal on trays, and when it came, fricassee and salad with trimmings, he did all right with it, and no snide remarks or even looks. Afterward I brought him two bottles of beer and was properly thanked, which was darned plucky of him, considering that he held that all moving parts of all machinery are subject to unpredictable whim, and if the wrong whim had seized our propellers we would have dropped smack into the middle of the big drink in the dead of night.
On that thought I went to sleep, sound. When I woke up my watch said half-past two, but it was broad daylight and I smelled fried bacon, and Wolfe’s voice was muttering at my ear, “I’m hungry. We’re ahead of time, and we’ll be there in an hour.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Some. I want breakfast.”
He ate four eggs, ten slices of bacon, three rolls, and three cups of coffee.
I still haven’t seen London, because the airport is not in London and Geoffrey Hitchcock was there at the gate waiting for us. We hadn’t seen him since he had last been in New York, three years before, and he greeted us cordially for an Englishman and took us to a corner table in a restaurant, and ordered muffins and marmalade and tea. I was going to pass, but then I thought what the hell, I might as well start here as anywhere getting used to strange foreign food, and accepted my share.