The Doorbell Rang (The Rex Stout Library)

I felt fine. The strain was over. It could have been spoiled a hundred different ways, by either bad handling or bad luck, but here we were, all set, with nothing to do but wait. Either they had decided to do a bag job or they hadn't, and that was their strain, not mine. I didn't know what their score was on bag jobs, no outsider does, but I knew of four in New York the past year, definitely, and I had heard talk of several more.

It depended on whether Wragg believed that a G-man had killed Althaus. If he did, ten to one they would come. If he didn't, if he had somehow been satisfied that his men were clean on the murder, they wouldn't come. Whether the bait was good enough depended on him, not on us. I felt fine.

When I decided half an hour had passed I went to the door to look at my watch by the light coming through the one-way glass, and when I saw 6:22 I felt a little less fine. Wrong by eight minutes. I am supposed to be good at judging time, so evidently I wasn't as unstrained as I thought I was. Instead of sitting, I walked down the hall to the office door and felt still less fine when I rubbed against the wall twice. That was inexcusable. Of course going back to the front, toward the rectangle of light, was simple, but damn it, I should be able to go straight down the center of the hall I knew so well into the pitch dark. I did, three times, and then went to the chair and sat.

I can't give the precise time that they came because I was determined not to look again until seven o'clock, but it was close to seven. Suddenly the dim light at the door was even dimmer and there they were. Two of them. A third was probably down on the sidewalk. One of them bent over to look at the lock, and the other stood at the top of the first step, his back to the door, facing the street.

Of course they had known the lock was a Rabson and had brought the right items, but no matter how good he was he wouldn't get a Rabson at the first stab, so there was no hurry. The door from the hall to the front room, open, was right there, four feet from the chair. I stepped to it, stuck my head in, let a low hiss through my teeth, and got one back. I walked to the dining room door, not touching the wall, did another hiss, and it was returned. Then I went and stood just outside the office door. They wouldn't flash a light the instant they made it in; they would stand and listen.