Rex Stout_Nero Wolfe 46 Read Free Page A

Six, possibly seven. I refuse to hurry the night routine. I had got my pajamas from the closet, set the alarm, put things from my pockets on the dresser, turned the bedcovers down, turned the telephone and other two switches on, hung up my jacket and necktie, taken my shoes and socks off, and was unbuckling my belt, when the earthquake came and the house shook. Including the floor I was standing on. I have since tried to decide what the sound was like and couldn’t. It wasn’t like thunder or any kind of gun or any other sound I had ever heard. It wasn’t a thud or a bang or a boom; it was just a loud noise. Of course there were doors and walls between it and me.
    I jumped to the door and opened it and turned the hall light on. The door to the South Room was shut. I ran to it and turned the knob. No. He had bolted it. I ran down one flight, saw that the door to Wolfe’s room was intact, and went and knocked on it. My usual three, a little spaced. I really did, and his voice came.
    “Archie?”
    I opened the door and entered and flipped the light switch. I don’t know why he looks bigger in those yellow pajamas than in clothes. Not fatter, just bigger. He had pushed back the yellow electric blanket and black sheet and was sitting up.
    “Well?” he demanded.
    “I don’t know,” I said, and I hope my voice didn’t squeak from the pleasure of seeing him. “I put a man in the South Room. The door’s bolted. I’m going to see.”
    Of the three windows in the south wall, the two end ones are always open at night about five inches, and the middle one is shut and locked and draped. I went and pulled the drape, slid the catch, opened it, and climbed through. The fire escape is only a foot wider than the window. I have tried to remember if my bare feet felt the cold of the iron grating as I went up but can’t. Of course they didn’t when I got high enough to see that most of the glass in the window was gone. I put my hand in between the jagged edges and slipped the catch and pushed the window up, what was left of it, and stuck my head in.
    He was on his back with his head toward me and his feet toward the closet door in the right wall. I shoved some glass slivers off the windowsill, climbed through, saw no pieces of glass on the rug, and crossed to him. He had no face left. I had never seen anything like it. It was about what you would get if you pressed a thick slab of pie dough on a man’s face and then squirted blood on the lower half. Of course he was dead, but I was squatting to make sure when something hit the door three hard knocks, and I went and slid the bolt and opened it and there was Wolfe. He keeps one of his canes in the stand in the downstairs hall and the other four on a rack in his room, and he was gripping the biggest and toughest onewith a knob the size of my fist, which he says is Montenegrin applewood.
    I said, “You won’t need that,” and sidestepped to give him room.
    He crossed the sill, stood, and sent his eyes around.
    I said, “Pierre Ducos, Rusterman’s. He came just after I got home and said a man was going to kill him and he had to tell you. I said if it was urgent he could tell me or he could come and tell you at eleven o’clock. He said a car had tried to run him down and—”
    “I want no details.”
    “There aren’t any. He wanted to wait for you there on the couch, and of course that wouldn’t do, so I brought him up here and told him to stay put and went to my room, and in a few minutes I felt it and heard it and went. He had bolted the door, and—”
    “Is he dead?”
    “Yes. The windows blew out, to the outside, so it was a bomb. I’ll take a look before I call for help. If you—”
    I stopped because he was moving. He crossed to Pierre, bent over, and looked. Then he straightened and looked around, at the closet door, which had been standing open and had hit the wall and was split, at the ceiling plaster on the floor, at the table wrong side up and the pieces of