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I was in the army now. It's why Nero Wolfe and I ended up trespassing.
Pearl Harbor had disrupted most of my routines, chiefly the trivial ones. It didn't take me long to learn the way I had run my private life was not trivial. It still got disrupted, turning a complex situation tough.
Between my published case accounts, Manhattan's gossip columnists, and Wolfe being the East Coast's fattest and smartest detective, people had been recognizing me. This growing fame for Mr. Goodwin meant random members of the public were watching my steps, so I had gotten wary about where I took off my shoes. Military life made matters worse.
If I had been assigned to the infantry, I could have spent my leaves working down my usual, careful dance card of fast footwork at fancy nightclubs followed by exotic moves behind bedroom doors. That option vanished when they made me a Captain and handed me over to Army Intelligence down in Washington. Like most part-time soldiers, I soon realized the Pentagon pays close attention, of the hostile variety, to any creative socialization by its minions.
By the time I was done cleaning up a black market mess in Georgia, got promoted, and was assigned to help Wolfe rather than transferred to the combat command I had requested, my nerves were wound up tight. Even when I found some company, it didn't help. Military sex turned out to be like military chow: technically nourishing, not very inspiring, and frustrating as hell in the long run.
All of this is an explanation, not an excuse. There's usually no good excuse for Wolfe's behavior, and this time there was none for mine, either. Still, Wolfe was the one who started it.
"Confound it. I'm bleeding," he said, wringing all the annoyance out of the words he could, and that was a lot.
I wanted to jab a finger at him as I spoke but was too busy restraining strands of barbed wire. So I settled for observing pleasantly, "Just what did you expect? I told you to let me check the place by myself."
"Nonsense," Wolfe snapped. "We both agreed this was our best opportunity to speak with Staff Sergeant Czekanski again without being observed, as well as to independently assess his claims about the security here." He was in a peachy mood. The countryside offends him on general principles, and getting damaged annoys him specifically.
Even when Wolfe is on the warpath, I still have a job to do. "How badly are you hurt?"
"Only slightly."
"You're sure?"
"Not of all the details, but of enough not to worry." That was the end of reason's inning at bat. "Although my hands seem sticky. I'm sure I've stained my cuffs. I suppose I will need a tetanus shot."
"Uh-huh. A nurse is standing by in Baltimore, waiting for us to finish. It's a very big needle, so you'll have to drop your trousers. Do you think she'll be impressed by the yellow-striped drawers?"
Maybe the last part was a little ripe, but I was feeling sore. Since Wolfe was willing to walk out his front door for the sake of the war effort, and the military was now choosing his cases for him, we were running into rough stuff in the wide world beyond the brownstone on Thirty-fifth Street. That left me negotiating tricky situations while stuck with an eccentric hippopotamus by my side instead of the neatly stacked blonde most P.I.s seemed to employ in pulp magazines. There should have been a special campaign ribbon awarded for the effort.
Wolfe ignored me in favor of more playtime with barbed wire. After a few seconds of breathing through his nose, he said, "I'm through. This suit is probably ruined."
To distract him, I asked, "On a fieldtrip scale of one to ten, where three was that bull in Pratt's pasture, six was those gun-runners in Connecticut, and nine was Dora Chapin conning you into a taxi, would you call this a--"
"Enough." His eyes were narrowed at me. "Which way is the car?"
I shrugged and pointed.
"Uphill," Wolfe said. He sighed.
Once we were back past the security perimeter of the experimental site, we could make all the noise we wanted. But the wrong person recognizing us might still be a problem, so we did have to keep moving. Besides, we were losing the light. I decided to postpone first aid and my additional observations about his field techniques until we were back at the hotel. Instead we hiked through the woods to where I had parked the battered Ford sedan that we had been assigned by the motor pool.
Within twenty minutes, I had us on the highway and heading south toward Baltimore, where we had agreed to overnight before reporting in Washington D.C. the next day. The evening traffic was thin, what with gas rationing. Instead of protesting the existence of other motorists, Wolfe could stick to bracing himself in the back seat and glaring at the sun setting over the hills and dales of Northern Maryland as if it was being pretty and pastoral only to spite him.
Quiet trip or not, I was happy to leave the sedan keys with the bellboy at the Sir Cecil Hotel. Our day had started early and kept going through the trip to Baltimore and investigating a rat's nest that we would now have to break open for the brass tomorrow. At least the Sir Cecil employed a chef who even Wolfe deemed adequate. By then I was hungry enough that my mind was halfway to the dining room when we walked past the elevator attendant and turned around to face front in the car. The mob of women who followed us in achieved tactical surprise.
Wolfe isn't always being difficult when he reacts to crowding in public, only most of the time. Even I thought this gaggle was tough going. As we came through the hotel lobby, they had been disdainfully arguing about when Daddy was going to arrive, which was rich because all of them were over the age of majority but none of them seemed able to write down a day and time yet, let alone find something more lofty to call the male parent than Daddy.
I had shifted between Wolfe and the elevator door when I spotted them charging the breech. They still managed to jostle me back into him. Tightening my belly muscles, I braced against the railings. His hands went out and grabbed me to halt my movement even as he grunted his annoyance. He was strong enough to stop me but I still had to crowd him into the corner. Southern families seemed to come in size large, and we were shoved together for the trip.
The girls all chattered at full volume the whole way. The youngest, not bad looking in white linen and displaying beautiful calves, was the one pressed against me. It would have been more fun if she hadn't also shared her pre-war perfume with us, heavy on the honeysuckle. Wolfe switched to breathing audibly through his mouth, and I couldn't blame him.
When we reached our floor, I made a mental note to tip the elevator attendant two bits the next time we summoned the car since he had kept the door open and sung out our floor number so I could tell where we were. I took a deep breath and dug an escape tunnel through the feminine charms. The fact that my effort was more interesting than it should have been was just one more annoyance I could chalk up to the social limitations of military life.
As soon as we were back in our room, Wolfe removed his coat and vest, and started work on his tie. I headed for the suitcase where I kept a first aid kit packed for the little joys that went along with these recent trips. After I'd turned on a light, I pulled the kit free from beneath my spare uniform trousers, which gave me my first good look at my right hand since the elevator. Wolfe had left a smear of red-brown, drying blood across the back of it.
For a few seconds, all I could do was stare at the blood marking me while my pulse broke into double-time. There was a heated twisting deep in my gut, crazy under the circumstances but not a surprise. I swallowed hard before wheeling to Wolfe.
He had paused in undoing a cufflink with a frown on his face. Looking up, he said, "As I thought, this shirt is ruined."
"Be glad it's not one of your hand-tailored yellow numbers. I doubt you have the ration coupons to replace those. Aren't you glad you decided on a disguise? Wearing a plain white shirt, there must be two or three Senators around this region who you resemble."
"Preposterous." His lips twitched. "I would never descend to wearing a string tie. Or filibustering."
He had a point. Two points. I realized I was stroking my thumb across the mark on the back of my other hand, and stopped it to say, "Fine. Let's see the damage." Opening up the first aid kit gave me something to do to keep my hands busy.
Most times, injuries to Nero Wolfe are almost all or almost nothing. Either he has been stabbed or shot, or his ironclad rules about keeping to the brownstone has limited harm to paper cuts. While he can get a lot of mileage out of a paper cut, it was rare to see him with a wound serious enough to count but light enough not to require defending or a doctor.
This time, Wolfe had several scratches on either arm. Mostly they were faint traces of red, but in a few places the barbs had made it through his summer weight suit coat and light shirt to dig into his flesh. The scratches went deeper on the heels of his hands, where a couple of gouges had bled a lot. Sure enough, three of his fingertips were smeared with dried blood.
Strangling an urge to cuss at him, I got out the antiseptic and cotton before starting the cleaning job. He kept his big paw still in my grasp as I dabbed at him, his palm turned upward, skin warm and smooth beneath my fingertips. One of the gouges was deep enough that it was still bleeding a little. It was probably the one that had left traces of his grip on me. Wolfe kept his eyes on his hands, watching me work. My mouth had gone dry, and I had to work my tongue before I spoke.
I said offensively, "Oh, look. Baby's first purple heart."
He didn't even bother to point out he wasn't in uniform. Without moving his head or his eyes, he said, "We'll telephone for room service. I'll need you to take dictation for our report to General Groves once we are done eating."
"Given this mess, good thing you have me around to do the typing. Gosh, I sure am glad that sparing you from the possible horror of a WAC secretary is more vital to the war effort than my keeping a couple of dozen Nazis busy over in Europe."
That was a mistake. There is a rhythm to the chatter between Wolfe and I, and I had gone off tempo.
Over the past few months, we had hashed out my losing the transfer I had wanted, at length. Without exactly saying the words, he had agreed not to use his own combat experience to disabuse me about my unique tactical usefulness. I had agreed not to suggest that he had maneuvered me into being stuck on the home front for any reasons other than military intelligence's needs and Nero Wolfe's convenience. When our treaties were this fragile, we kept far away from violating them during the opening maneuvers of random skirmishes about other matters. Except I hadn't.
Wolfe's lips compressed. He opened them to demand, "What's the matter? Are you ill?"
"No, I'm not. Nothing's the matter."
"Archie, it won't do. Even in these exigent circumstances, I am not so easily diverted."
"Okay. Let me back up the convoy. Nothing's the matter that's not my personal business. Ignore me."
Fine, I admit the last sentence isn't one that passes my lips a lot. But another of our unspoken treaties states that both of us will pretend not to know certain facts about each other. The problem with being a genius detective, or even the third best P.I. in Manhattan, is the way private lives don't stay private after over a decade of working together, without willed ignorance. Wolfe knows more details about my special tastes than he would ever admit to anyone, including me. And the knife slices both ways.
There was a break in the proceedings while I could sense him examining me, and then, "Ah," he said. "That again."
"No, not that again. Forget that. Any unusual pain from the antiseptic?"
"They sting. Will there be scars?"
Even a quick dose of his unlimited conceit wasn't working on me right now. "I wouldn't know, not being Doc Vollmer. I doubt it since I can tell they didn't hurt much and the structural damage was trivial." Getting another piece of cotton ready, I said, "It's the byproduct of your afternoon that caught my attention, not the manufacturing process or the factory. So, not that. Not entirely. I was already wound up."
"Were those pullulating females responsible?"
"Given the airs and graces, not to mention the honeysuckle? Nope. Try long hours instead. Intelligence work is hell on the social life. Not that I give a damn since I have my pride. When I take a job, I do it without worrying about overtime. Just now I'm antsy, is all. I'll be fine by bedtime."
"Indeed." Wolfe waggled the forefinger of his free hand at me. "Perturbed or not, your self-respect is not in danger. As we have learned, accidents will inevitably occur between close associates after years of dealings." He would brush lightly across my sensitive spots, he meant. Or I would brush across his. "I did not intend to imply any sort of reproof. It would neither be just nor justified, as well as being an unwarranted intrusion on my part."
I could tell he meant what he was saying. Too bad for the sake of his sudden outbreak of graciousness that there was another, fresher bloodstain on the very tip of his finger. Riveted, I stared as he gestured. By the time I noticed my hands had stilled and my lips had parted, it was too late. I had stopped operations only to touch the back of my other hand again, right where I should have cleaned off the blood he had left on me earlier, and hadn't.
"Your--" I said, and gritted my teeth on the rest of it.
The one word was where my tight-strung nerves truly betrayed me. Blood alone didn't pack much of a punch, any more than breasts putting strain on the summer-weight bodices of random debs in elevators did. His blood, Nero Wolfe's blood, had hit home in a way that made me sore.
"I see."
I'd bet he did, I thought bitterly.
"Archie..." Wolfe hesitated, which was rare. Then he went on. "If your situation is becoming perilous, difficult enough that you..." He ran out of words, which was even rarer. He hesitated once more. He moved.
The next couple of seconds felt like minutes. Even the air seemed to thicken as he shifted. Giving me all the time in the world to duck, he clenched his large hand, opened it, and reached out to run a firm, deliberate thumb tip across my right cheekbone, leaving the last of his still liquid blood in its wake.
Fat bastard, was my one clear thought. Other than that, there was too much of an expressway jam to sort out everything I was feeling even if I was willing to type it all out, which I am not.
I closed my eyes. I opened them again. After a couple of deep breaths, I said, "Thanks," which I meant, and "But you're not my fire extinguisher," which you can take any way you want.
Wolfe took it fine. A pause, and he murmured, "The crab cakes at this establishment are worthy of our consideration."
"Sounds good. I'll want two. If you can deal with the sticking plaster and the telephone call to room service, I'm going to get cleaned up."
To give credit where it's due, Wolfe, who avoids making his own phone calls whenever he can sucker someone else into doing the job, only grunted and reached for the first aid kit.
My cleaning up involved a good, long hot shower, but it wasn't something worth talking about. Anyway, we were too busy discussing the wonders of Chesapeake Bay over dinner, and then finishing our report for our military masters afterward, for trivial conversations.
When we got back to Manhattan, Lily Rowan had returned from the extended trip meant to help her shake off an unwilling spate of possessiveness triggered by my going into uniform, so that was all right. Wolfe and I returned to obnoxiousness and detection, which was also just as well.
I don't think I would have refused if he had offered again.