Fritz met us just inside the front door.  He was dressed in his robe and slippers, his face was unshaven, and he was cradling the ancient shotgun that he usually keeps hung up just below the head of the wild boar he shot in the Vosges.

He looked relieved.  "Mr. Wolfe, Archie.  When I discovered that you were not in your bedrooms, I feared that It had a companion."

I didn't bother with stupid questions.  I followed my nose down the stairs, instead.  This time it was a perfume made up of rancid periwinkles and gunpowder.  In the basement, one of the walls of Fritz's den was now pockmarked with shot. I walked slowly up to the wall, reached out and touched the chewed-up wood, then picked a little silver shot free and rolled it between two fingers.  Fritz would have to replace all of the books on those shelves.  I'd given him the ruined copy of Recipes of All Nations myself.  My hand was shaking slightly, so I put the shot away in my pocket before I dropped it.

"Archie!"  That was Wolfe, from upstairs.  He didn't sound worried, only mad, but even so I took the stairs two at a time. 

Fritz wasn't there, but I'd be willing to bet my savings that he was in the kitchen, making something.  He had left the shotgun in the umbrella rack in the hall.  I grimaced at it, and followed Wolfe into the office.

When we got in there, he sat. "Do you grasp the significance of this attack?"

"Yeah, I'm going to have to kill somebody who's probably invulnerable."  I held up a hand before he could interrupt. "Okay, I got it. The hunters aren't well aimed, or it would have attacked you when you were unprotected and out in the open, and not gone after Fritz. What does that mean, though?"

His eyes narrowed.  "It implies either that our enemy is a fool, or that we are meant to be lulled into such a belief.  These creatures are ridiculous, pathetically weak and vulnerable for their kind."  His eyes flew open wide.  "You are right, and I am a witling.  They are not met to seek individuals here at all.  They are too simple for that. They are merely responding to the presence of some object, attracted like sharks to blood.  We will have to search the house in the morning."  His voice quieted.  "Can you find out if anything unusual was discovered in Miss Tremayne's office?  It might also be useful to have the name of her last appointment,"

"There's a desk sergeant on that side of town who owes me a favor.  I'll call him."

"Good.  As to the other matter," there was an almost imperceptible pause, "do you think it can be deferred without compounding our difficulties?"

He was asking me as the specialist, so I didn't bother to twist the knife.  "Sure, if we both admit where we're going and we don't take too long getting there.  I take it, you want to try for some sleep tonight?"

His tone was desert dry.  "I may have reason to thank my hand before I slumber, but yes, that is my intent."

I grimaced.  "We'd better make it soon, though.  That first bit was thought-provoking, which is pretty appalling."

Fritz came in with beer, milk, crusty bread, and his home-made potted cheese.  Since he had been the one attacked, he got to make the rules, and Wolfe and I ate and drank with no comments except for thanks.

As was our custom, when we left for the night I took the stairs and Wolfe took the elevator, an arrangement that would probably bemuse a stranger since our bedrooms are both on the second floor with the guest rooms on the floor above.  Yes, I know I've claimed otherwise in my later case reports, but I didn't want to have to disrupt any more dinner parties when some brainless clown made another stupid joke about the true living arrangement in the brownstone.  In reality, there was no chance that Wolfe would ever sleep on the same floor as a stranger in his own house.  It hadn't mattered before this case.  There had never been a problem, but I'd already done the office chores before I went to bed the first time, and it had thrown our usual timing off.  I came up the stairs just as he was exiting the elevator.  We both stopped dead.

Wolfe recovered first. "Once again, good night, Archie."

"Good night, sir.  If someone knocks, don't answer."

The corners of his lips turned up slightly and he nodded his head, once.  I grinned.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.  By holding on to that thought, I was able to calm my mind enough to get some sleep.  It still wasn't enough sleep, or so my body told me.

I'm not even going to discuss waking up the next morning, and I'm sure not going to discuss the joys of getting my daily ration of finger-painting when Wolfe wanted to be in the next room.  Some memories are too painful to be lingered over.  I will say that my pal in blue came through for me, and I found out that there was nothing interesting at the scene of Fay's death except for a weirdly mutilated body and a smart-ass P.I.  Also, the name of her last client had been Smith, John Smith, which I somehow could not view as helpful.  I hung up and looked at the clock.  It was still only nine, and I couldn't really do a decent job of searching the house until Wolfe gave me a better idea of what we would be looking for.  I sighed and reached for the pile of index cards from the plant roomt.  I'd gotten about a quarter of the way through them when the phone rang.

I picked up the receiver.  "Nero Wolfe's office.  Archie Goodwin speaking."

"Goodwin?  I need to see you."  I almost recognized the voice, although it wasn't very familiar.

"Tut, tut. That's a little preemptory.  However, if you'd like to try something unique, like telling me why and who you are, it might be arranged."

"Funny Guy."  Got it: the good-guy detective, Gigle, or whatever his real name was.

"If you want another visit, you'll need some kind of official appointment, like a warrant."

"This isn't official; it's just something you should know about. Look, I'm wasting time I don't have.  If you want to hear what I have to say, meet me at Dave's Diner, over by Third and Forty-Fifth, in half an hour.  If you don't show, I'll know you're not interested."  He hung up.

I looked at the telephone and raised my eyebrows.  Then I made sure I had Wolfe's gun loaded and holstered, left a note on his desk, got my hat and coat, and scooted.

When I entered the diner, the cook looked up at me from the grill long enough to nod his head towards the rear.  I went to the back and, sure enough, wedged behind the short table next to the telephone booth, was my man, working methodically through a hamburger.

"Detective."  I kept it neutral.

"Sit down, Goodwin.  This won't take long."

I sat, and kept my hands on the table top.

"You know, I'm breaking the blue code here, but there are some times that doesn't really matter."

He was heading someplace interesting.  I tilted my head in inquiry.  He put down his burger on his plate and his gaze searched my face, looking for something.  Coming to a decision, he wiped his hands on a paper napkin and reached for a package sitting on the bench next to him.  "I went by Fradkin's office yesterday, when he was in with the Captain and spotted this on his desk."  He untied the complex bow in the string and pulled it loose from around the oil skin wrappings.  "I'm not any good at it, but I'm still a Catholic, and we don't hold with this kind of bull."  He pulled back the oil skin and there was a wadded handkerchief inside of it. Inside the handkerchief were three black feathers, a bone with marks scratched on it, and a tiny, dead, black puppy.  Jesus.  It was all tied together with a scrap of auburn hair.  "The hair is yours, right?"

"Yeah, it looks like."  I reached out but hesitated as a warning heat flared down my arm.

"Hey, don't touch.  My Nonna said to take it and burn it, with salt, on the fire, while saying a rosary.  She did the rest. Maybe you better try some Our Fathers instead of the rosary, though."  He wrapped the package back up and re-tied the string.  It was blue, I noticed.

He offered it to me and I stretched out a reluctant hand, but there was no warning.  I took it and set it down next to me on the bench.

"Thanks.  You didn't have to do that. You can play on my team anytime, Detective."

Gigle flushed.  "Just shut up and go away, Goodwin.  I know we're on the same fuckin' team, but I'm in enough trouble that way already, and you got your own friends to play leapfrog with, anyhow."

It was pretty easy to translate what he was implying.  I felt my mouth fall open slightly, so, to disguise it, I asked, "Are you going to have problems with Fradkin?"

"Fuck him.  I'm done.  I joined the Marines, and I'm shipping out to Parris Island."

Well, he already had the vocabulary down.  I paid him the compliment of looking him over.  He obviously hadn't spent too many rainy nights in taverns, bending his elbow and eating the peanuts, back when he'd been a beat cop.  "That'll be fun for you."

"Yeah."  The smile was reluctant, but it was there.  "Real fun.  I just love having spit screamed into my face from two inches away."

"Don't worry about it. In a year, you'll be the one doing the screaming.  Be good, Detective.  And, if you can't be good---"

"I won't be calling you, Goodwin.  Get lost."

I grinned, got up, and got lost.

I still hadn't learned to know when my new avocation meant I had to watch my mouth, so I'll always have to regret those last words to him.  His real name was Gilberto Gleason.  In a year, he went out with the First Marine Division to Guadalcanal, and he never came back from Henderson Field.

When I was reporting it to Wolfe after he'd come down from the orchids, I finished and he asked, "Comments?"

"Someone's throwing us a bone.  So to speak."

"Agreed.  While this," he nodded to Fradkin's mess on his desk, "would be harmful under certain circumstances, it could in no way imperil any member of this household.  It might, if uncontained, serve to attract something that could."

"So, second comment, someone taught Fradkin how to do this kind of thing.  It's not part of a policeman's normal training, or both you and I would have been collapsing under the weight of all the curses years ago."

"I concur."  Wolfe frowned and his eyes narrowed.  "Describe Lieutenant Fradkin to me."  Only Wolfe could be enemies with a man he'd never met in person, such was the effect he tended to have on a certain type of authority figure.

I started to work through a detail by detail description and about half way through spotted what Wolfe had been after.  "-and more than anyone else I've seen in Manhattan, he resembles a De Blieu."

Wolfe grunted.  "I find I am growing very tired of the omnipresent De Blieu clan."

"Do you think one or more of them are our opponents?"

"No, they are in no way powerful enough for such a central role in this Grand Guignol."  He fell silent for a moment and then suddenly asked, "Apropos of Grand Guignol, do you enjoy frightening entertainments, Archie?"

I cocked my head at the change of subject, but said, "No, sir.  After you've seen what one jealous husband can do with a knife and how the kids react to it, most horror movies seem kind of feeble."

Wolfe's eyes narrowed.  "I have not bothered in the last few decades with the play of shadows that most men mistake for the supernatural, but I do not remember it being such a theater of blood in recent times past. Terror and peril have always been a part of the numinous experience, but there was an artificial quality to many parts of your initiation vision that I attributed to your immersion within a shifting popular culture.  However, other patterns could have been chosen.  Something has changed in the lower world."

"That might sound profound, sir, if I had any idea of what the hell you were talking about."

"You are correct to tax me.  This situation is now so exasperating that I am resorting to maundering monologues in front of an ignorant audience."  He sighed.  "If we are to finish searching the house before lunch, we had best begin now."  I started to get up, but he held out one hand.  "No, there is a more efficient method than using a physical search, one more appropriate to this prey.  Look at me, Archie.  Look and concentrate."

I did.  He appeared the same as always: massive, oval-faced, his features almost immobile.  His brown eyes were opened wide, which usually meant that he was bored.  His gaze caught and held my own.

Down somewhere deep was a speck of light, a flame, a fire.  It swept out and scooped me from myself like corn being shucked from its husk.  I was standing in the office still, but next to the red leather chair.  All the familiar furnishings had a tinge of colors around them, and Wolfe's desk positively shone, aside from a black splotch on the desktop.  Wolfe glowed faintly.  I didn't look to my left, at my own desk.

I cleared what should have been my throat. Okay, now what?

You can gaze through the walls, Archie.  Let yourself relax and contemplate what you desi-want to discover.

The struggle was too much.  I lost it, and I grinned at him.

Don't drift. The words were peevish.

Yes, sir. I slowly rotated.  The walls around me seemed to thin out to mist. In the middle distance, I saw a brilliant green glow in the direction of the kitchen.  There's a portside lamp in the kitchen.  Fritz?

Yes.  You seek something dark in appearance, much like smoke.

I tried the floor.  There were green specks, smaller and dimmer, towards Fritz's room in the basement. Then I looked up.  About where Wolfe's bedroom was, I spotted several faint glows of different colors; no surprise there.  There was nothing close above that, but up on the roof I saw a thin smear of color, probably the orchids, given their locations.  Something past them caught my eye.  Off at the very edge of the mist was a darker patch, like the first smudge from a forest fire, with a black splotch at its core.  Got it. It's on the roof, probably in the storage room or Theodore's bedroom.

Look at me once more, Archie.

I did, again.  He seemed somehow brighter.

Step backwards.

I reached back with my foot and---coughed.  "Why does that always make a guy choke up?"

"I am not sure.  It may be psychosomatic.  Do you need a drink?"

"I need to get upstairs and see what the heck is going on.  Are you coming?"

"Yes.  Wait for me at the top of the stairs."  His voice was grim.  I'd give three to one he was thinking the same thing I was.  By the time the elevator door opened, I'd raised the odds to ten to one.  I'd reconnoitered, and Theodore, who'd normally be checking the orchids at this hour, was nowhere in sight.

We went past all the ten thousand orchids like they weren't even there.  I didn't say a word to Wolfe, but my hand was buried in my jacket pocket, on the butt of the revolver, during the whole hike through the cool, warm, and tropical rooms.  Theodore wasn't in any of them.  He wasn't in the potting room, the storage room, or the fumigation room.  I exchanged looks with Wolfe, and he nodded.  I knocked on the door to Theodore's bedroom. No one answered.  I tried the door, but it was locked.

Theodore has his own apartment uptown, but he needs a place to sleep on nights when he's fumigating or doting over some sickly-looking seedlings and cursing at the possibility of fungus.  He also needs a place to eat when he's feeling too grumpy to share the kitchen with Fritz, which is most of the time.  It's Wolfe's house, though, and I have all the keys.  I waved Wolfe back.  He frowned but complied.  Sliding the key in, I moved over to the hinge side of the door, turned the key and knob, then quickly threw the door open, hard.

For a wonder, Wolfe didn't comment as the door crashed against the wall.  I saw his nostrils flare very slightly, though, before I went in and checked the bedroom and bathroom to make sure they were empty.

"He's gone," I said.

"It is still here."  He marched his one-seventh of a ton into Theodore's bedroom and opened a drawer.  I thought about cursing at him but got the gun out and shifted to one side for a clear line of fire, instead.

It stank.  I don't know what was in the cloth bundle, but it smelled to high heaven.  Wolfe picked it up with both hands, his lips pressed so tightly together that they had thinned and whitened, took it into the potting room, and dumped it into one of the sinks. 

"Archie.  Your pocketknife."  That had been a recent gift from one of our female clients and even I thought the gold was a bit much, but he took it without so much as a twitch of his eyebrows.  Instead he pried open one of the blades and then, instead of cutting open the package like I was expecting, sliced it across his forefinger.

That time, I did swear at him.

He said "Shut up," and put his hand over the sink. When he squeezed the finger, a few drops of blood dripped onto the package.  It screamed.

It was a high throated shriek, the kind made by a dog hit by a car.  I was so startled that I nearly drilled a bullet hole into the sink.  Good thing I didn't since I never would have heard the last word about it. Wolfe stood watching, his fat features still, as the shriek turned to a moan, a rattle, and died away.  Only then did he turn to me and offer my pocketknife back.  He hadn't cleaned it, of course.

Like usual, he didn't have a handkerchief in his breast pocket. I pulled out the spare that I carry for him and used that hand to grab his mitt. His finger was still bleeding a little as I staunched it. At least, I intended to staunch it, but when I took his hand I got some of his blood on me.

Vaguely, I heard myself groan.  The pocketknife dropped to the floor and the handkerchief went after it. He caught me before I fell and held me as I sagged.  The small part of my brain that wasn't whiting out with pleasure was furious.  I needed to call Fritz on the house phone and see if Theodore had gone out by the kitchen door.  I had to give Wolfe hell for not sterilizing the blade before he performed amateur surgery.  Instead, my left hand was pawing at Wolfe's shirt and coat as I saw---

---Theodore, coming through the door from the tropical room behind Wolfe, with spade upraised.  The gun, which had somehow clung to my right hand through my first aid and seizure, came up under Wolfe's arm and I pulled the trigger.

Theodore went back with the force of the bullet, then froze in mid fall.  His elbows and knees went out at a weird angle as if he was a marionette on strings.  The spade clattered as it hit the concrete.  Wolfe was turning, taking me with him, when Theodore's arms yanked above his head and he went straight up through the glass and out into the midday sky.

Wolfe's big hand pushed my head into his shoulder as he twisted away from the shards of glass cascading down into the tropical room.  His momentum took us into the sinks and I clutched at the edge of one and managed to haul myself away from him.  It cleared my head like smelling salts.  I said, "Did any of that get you?"

"No!"  he bellowed, before he caught himself and added, "I assume that the person that you shot at was Theodore."

"What, you couldn't see him?"

"Archie, my back was turned.  You are the sha---"

"I got that already, thank you, sir.  Yeah, it was Theodore, coming after you with a spade.  When I shot him he froze and then went up through the roof."

"Confound it!"  Wolfe marched out into the tropical room and glared around with the air of a storekeeper showing up after a three-alarm fire.  It wasn't as bad as all that. Most of the glass had gone straight down into the aisle and only one row of orchids looked badly hurt. However, I knew Wolfe would be enumerating each and every one of those casualties for months.  I got the gun holstered and followed him.

There wasn't any blood, and I didn't see a bullet hole in any of the panes.  I nudged the spade with the toe of my shoe.  It seemed normal enough.  I looked up.  There was nothing in the blue sky above us but a few disturbed pigeons, fluttering wildly above the new exit in the greenhouse roof.  I looked at Wolfe, who was visibly considering plucking glass from an Oncidium with his bare fingers.  "Is there any danger left, aside from that of your chopping yourself into hamburger?"

For a moment, Wolfe looked like a baited bull.  His head actually swung slightly from side to side, between me and the orchids, before he pulled himself together.  "No.  Apparently, whoever has taken charge of Theodore has decided to remove him from the brownstone, probably so that we could not question him and discover who has subverted his person."

"The character could have just killed him."

"Archie."  Wolfe's tone was annoyed, which was fair because I was annoyed with myself a second later when my brain caught up with my mouth.

"Shaman, psychopomp, one who guides and can speak with the dead, okay."  I'd looked it up in the Webster's dictionary in the office on my late night research expedition.  At least I thought I had the rest of what had happened clear in my mind.  "He was somehow hidden when we checked?"

"That is my assumption.  He probably heard you on the stairs."

I snorted, "Or, more likely, he heard the elevator and knew what it meant, given the way you hold to your schedule.  Then, when you got rid of the package, it popped him back in and he decided to use force.  Let me guess.  Your protections don't lock any of us out of the house or block whatever tricks we keep up our sleeves."

"No, they do not. We were open and vulnerable to whatever actions Theodore could have been manipulated into."  Wolfe's eyes narrowed.  "We would have been fumigating tomorrow and he would have stayed over night."  He grimaced.  "I do not know what I shall do about the orchids.  Can you call for repairmen?  We shall need to try and retrieve Theodore, as well."

I was opening up my mouth to say a few words about priorities when the house phone rang.  It was Fritz, wanting to remind us that it was time for lunch.