There were no city employees standing around and no reporters or photographers climbing in at the windows, so I concluded that Skinner and Cramer still hadn’t blown the horn for the busy intersection. The butler who opened the door had distinguished ancestry oozing from every pore. I said:
“Good morning, Jeeves. I’m Lord Goodwin. If Mr. Nero Wolfe got here alive, he’s expecting me. A big fat man. Is he here?”
“Yes, sir.” He permitted me to slide through. “Your hat, sir? This way if you please, sir.” He moved across the large entrance hall to a doorway and stood aside for me. “I shall inform Mr. Dunn and Mr. Wolfe that you are here.” I sauntered by him with a nod and he went off.
So that was why Wolfe was zooming around like a wren building a nest. It would have been more pat to our purpose if it had been the secretary of the treasury instead of the secretary of state, but you can’t have a silver lining without a cloud. I shrugged it off and glanced around. With all its size and elegant and successful effort to live up to the butler, the room was not what I would live in if my rich uncle died. There were too many chairs that looked as if they had been made to have their pictures taken instead of to sit on. The only thing I saw that I liked was a marble statue over in a corner of a woman reaching for a bath towel — at least she had an arm stretched as if she was reaching for something, and she was ready for a towel. I strolled across to appreciate it, and, as I stood doing so, got a certain feeling in the back of my neck, though I hadn’t heard a sound. I whirled on my heel, and saw what had caused it. Mrs. Noel Hawthorne was there at the other end of the room, facing me. That is, she would have been facing me if she had had a face. She had on a long gray dress that reached to her ankles, and the veil was the same gray. She just stood there.
I was certainly allergic to that damn veil. There was something about it that was bad for my nerves. I wanted to say, “Good morning, Mrs. Hawthorne,” with my customary suavity, but had the feeling it would come out a yell, so I said nothing. Neither did she. After she had stood there an hour, which I suppose was actually nine seconds, she turned and, noiselessly on the thick carpet, disappeared the other side of some draperies. I strode across the room as if I was going to do something; I suppose if I had had my sword handy I would have lunged through the drapery with it like Hamlet in the third act. Before I got there a voice from the rear stopped me:
“Hullo!”
I jerked around like Gary Cooper surrounded by cutthroats, saw who it was and felt like a fool, and blurted savagely, “Hullo yourself.”
Sara Dunn, the professional fiend, approached. “I forget your name. I suppose you’re going to sit in with Nero Wolfe and my dad?”
“I guess I am if I live long enough.”
She was in front of me, looking up at me with her mother’s fighting bird eyes. “Will you do something for me? Tell Nero Wolfe I want to see him before he leaves here. As soon as possible. Tell him so my dad can’t hear.”