Plot It Yourself

When I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz that lunch would be at one o’clock sharp because we were leaving at two for an appointment, he had a question. For Wolfe he was going to make a special omelet which he had just invented in his head, and would that do for me or should he broil some ham? I asked what would be in the omelet, and he said four eggs, salt, pepper, one tablespoon tarragon butter, two tablespoons cream, two tablespoons dry white wine, one-half teaspoon minced shallots, one-third cup whole almonds, and twenty fresh mushrooms. I thought that would do for two, but he said my God, no, that would be for Mr Wolfe, and did I want one like it? I did. He warned me that he might decide at the last minute to fold some apricot jam in, and I said I would risk it.

Chapter 15

At two-thirty-five p.m. Wolfe and I, both of us well fueled with omelet, stepped out of a wobbly old elevator on the third floor of the Clover Club, which is in the Sixties just of Fifth Avenue. The hall was spacious and high-ceilinged and looked its age, but not much the worse for it. There was no one in sight. We glanced around, heard voices beyond a closed door, crossed to it, opened it, and entered.

Some three dozen people, all but six of them men, were seated around a long rectangular table covered with a white cloth. There were coffee cups, water glasses, ashtrays, pads of paper, and pencils. We stood, Wolfe with his hat in one hand and his cane in the other. Three or four of them were talking at once, and no one paid any attention to us. At the right end of the table were three of the committee members: Amy Wynn, Philip Harvey, and Mortimer Oshin. At the other end was Cora Ballard, and next to her was the president of the NAAD, Jerome Tabb. His picture had been on the jacket of his book I had read. Next to Tabb was the vice-president, a man who, according to an article I had read recently, averaged a million dollars a year from the musicals for which he had written the books and lyrics. I had recognized some other faces-four novelists, three dramatists, and a biographer or something-by the time Harvey got up and came over to us. The talk stopped, and heads were turned our way.

“Nero Wolfe,” Harvey told them. “Archie Goodwin.”

He took Wolfe’s hat and cane. An author or dramatist went and got two chairs and moved them near the table. If I had been the president or the executive secretary the chairs would have been in place; after all, we were expected.