Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

Ryder opened a drawer of his desk, put the grenade in it, and closed the drawer. General Fife went to a chair and twirled it around and sat on it assbackwards, crossing his arms along the top of the chair’s back. The understanding was that he had formed that habit after seeing a picture of Eisenhower sitting like that, which I record without prejudice. He was the only professional soldier in the bunch there present. Colonel Ryder had been a lawyer out in Cleveland. Colonel Tinkham, who looked like a collection of undersized features put together at random in order to have somewhere to stick a little brown mustache, had had some kind of a gumshoe job for a big New York bank. Lieutenant Lawson had just come up from Washington two weeks before and was still possibly mysterious personally, but not ancestrally. He was Kenneth Lawson, Junior; Senior being the Eastern Products Corporation tycoon who had served his country in its hour of need by lopping one hundred thousand dollars off his own salary. All I really knew about Junior was that I had heard him trying to date Sergeant Bruce his second day in the office and getting turned down.

The only chair left was over by the steel cabinets, occupied by a small pigskin suitcase. Trying to make just the right amount of noise and commotion for a major under the circumstances, I deposited the suitcase on the floor and sat down.

Meanwhile General Fife was speaking. “Where have you got to? Where’s the public? Where’s the press? No photographers?”

Lieutenant Lawson started to grin, caught Colonel Ryder’s eye, and composed his handsome features. Colonel Tinkham moved the tip of his forefinger along the grain of his mustache, right and left alternately, which was his number-one gesture for conveying the impression that he was quite unperturbed.

“We haven’t got anywhere, sir,” Ryder said. “We haven’t started. Wolfe just got here. Your other questions-”

“Not for you,” Fife said curtly. He was looking, conspicuously, at John Bell Shattuck. “Public servant, and no public? No microphones? No newsreel cameras? How are the people to be informed?”

Shattuck didn’t even blink, let alone try to return the punch. “Now look here,” he said reproachfully, “we’re not as bad as that. We try to do our duty, and so do you. Sometimes I think it might be a good plan for us to take over the armed forces for a period, say a month-”

“Good God.”