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“Okay. Coming. Keep your shirt on.” I hung up and told Wolfe, “Imhof. Something is biting him, he wouldn’t say what, and he wants me quick. Our responsibility?”

Wolfe grunted. “Confound these interruptions.” We were in the middle of a letter to Lewis Hewitt, describing the results of a cross of C. gaskelliana alba with C. mossiae wageneri. “Very well. Go.”

I did so. At that time of day taxis are apt to crawl slightly faster on Eighth Avenue than on Tenth, so I headed east. We finally made it to Fifty-second and Sixth Avenue, and when we turned right and I saw that the whole block was choked I paid the hackie and quit him. The Victory Press address, on Madison in the Fifties, was one of the new concrete and glass boxes, with a green marble lobby and four banks of elevators. As I entered the suite on the thirty-second floor I half expected to find the place in an uproar, from the way Imhof had sounded on the phone, but all was serene. The two people on chairs in the reception room, one of them with a bulging briefcase on his lap, merely looked patient, and the bright-eyed receptionist at the desk merely lifted her brows as I approached. However, when I told her my name she said Mr Imhof was expecting me and used the phone, and in a moment an attractive young woman entered through an arch and asked me to follow her, please; and being, as I have said, a trained observer, naturally I noticed that she had restless hips.

Reuben Imhofs room was an ideal setting for discussing the terms of a book contract with a member of the NAAD. Surely an author wouldn’t be fussy about little things with a man who had a desk like that, and such fine comfortable chairs, and four windows on two sides, and genuine oil paintings on the walls, and real old Persian rugs. Having taken that in with a quick glance around, I crossed to the desk. Imhof, behind it, kept his seat and his hands. From his look he was in no mood to shake hands with William Shakespeare or Mark Twain if one of them had suddenly entered. He didn’t greet me at all. Instead, he spoke to the young woman who had ushered me in. “Don’t go, Judith. Sit down. Look at this, Goodwin.”