Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

At Sam’s Place, at the corner, I went first to the phone booth and called Colonel Ryder at Governor’s Island to tell him I was on the job, and then settled myself at a table with a plate of beef stew and two glasses of milk.

As I ate the stew I considered the situation. It was not only tough, it was probably impossible. What had happened was quite plain: Wolfe had simply put his brains away in a drawer for the duration. He wasn’t going to do any thinking, because that was just work, whereas dieting and going outdoors every day and walking fast, getting ready to shoot some Germans-that was heroic. And he had already gone so far with it, and he was so damn bullheaded, that it looked hopeless. After mulling it over, I would have crossed it off and got my bags and headed for Governor’s Island, but for two things: first, I had told the general I knew how to handle him; and second, it looked as if he was going to kill himself if I didn’t stop him. If even one cell of his brain had been working-but it wasn’t.

I thought of appealing for help, to Marko Vukcic or Raymond Plehn or Lewis Hewitt, or even Inspector Cramer, but of course that was no good. Any kind of appeal or argument would only make him stubborner, since he was refusing to think. The only thing that would turn the trick was to manage somehow to get his brain going. I knew from experience what a job that was, and he had never been in a condition to compare with the one he was in now. Furthermore I was handicapped by having been away for two months and not knowing who had called at the office or tried to, or whether there had been any current events.

That, I thought, was one possibility, so after I had paid my check I went to the phone booth and called Inspector Cramer. He said he thought I was in the Army, and I said I thought so too, and then I asked him: “You got any good crimes on hand? Murders or robberies or even missing persons?”

That didn’t get me anywhere. Either he had nothing promising or he wasn’t telling me. I went out to the sidewalk and stood there scowling at a taxi driver. It was cold, darned cold for the middle of March, and flurries of snow were scooting around, and I had no overcoat. As a forlorn hope, because there was nothing else to do, I climbed in the taxi and told the driver to take me to 316 Barnum Street. It wasn’t actually a hope at all, just a stab in the dark because there wasn’t any light.