Some Buried Caesar

"It was quite a whim. I'd like to get it on record what happened, since I've been driving your cars nine years and this is the first time I've ever stopped before I was ready to. That was a good tire, so they must have run it over glass at the garage where I left it last night, or maybe I did myself, though I don't think so. Anyway, I was going 55 when the tire blew out. She left the road, but I didn't lose the wheel, and I was braking and had her headed up and would have made it if it hadn't been for that damn tree. Now the fender is smashed into the rubber and a knuckle is busted and the radiator's ripped open."

"How long will it take you to fix it?"

"I can't fix it. If I had a nail I wouldn't even bother to bite it, I'd swallow it whole."

"Who can fix it?"

"Men with tools in a garage."

"It isn't in a garage."

"Right."

He closed his eyes and sat. Pretty soon he opened them again and sighed. "Where are we?"

"Two hundred and thirty-seven miles northeast of Times Square. Eighteen miles southwest of Crowfield, where the North Atlantic Exposition is held every year, beginning on the second Monday in September and lasting-"

"Archie." His eyes were narrowed at me. "Please save the jocularity. What are we going to do?"

I admit I was touched. Nero Wolfe asking me what to do! "I don't know about you," I said, "but I'm going to kill myself. I was reading in the paper the other day how a Jap always commits suicide when he fails his emperor, and no Jap has anything on me. They call it seppuku. Maybe you think they call it hara-kiri, but they don't or at least rarely. They call it seppuku."

He merely repeated, "What are we going to do?"

"We're going to flag a car and get a lift. Preferably to Crowfield, where we have reservations at a hotel."

"Would you drive it?"

"Drive what?"

"The car we flag."

"I don't imagine he would let me after he sees what I've done to this one."

Wolfe compressed his lips. "I won't ride with a strange driver."

"I'll go to Crowfield alone and rent a car and come back for you."

"That would take two hours. No."

I shrugged, "We passed a house about a mile back. I'll bum a ride there or walk, and phone to Crowfield for a car."

"While I sit here, waiting, helplessly, in this disabled demon."

"Right."

He shook his head. "No."

"You won't do that?"

"No."