He looked up. “Philip Harvey?”

“Right.”

“What does he want?”

“He says he’ll tell you. Probably to ask you what page you’re on.”

He closed the book on a finger to keep his place and took his phone. “Yes, Mr Harvey?”

“Is this Nero Wolfe?”

“Yes.”

“You may possibly have heard my name.”

“Yes.”

“I want to make an appointment to consult you. I am chairman of the Joint Committee on Plagiarism of the National Association of Authors and Dramatists and the Book Publishers of America. How about tomorrow morning?”

“I know nothing about plagiarism, Mr Harvey.”

“We’ll tell you about it. We have a problem we want you to handle. There’ll be six or seven of us, members of the committee. How about tomorrow morning?”

“I’m not a lawyer. I’m a detective.”

“I know you are. How about ten o’clock?”

Of course that wouldn’t do, since it would take more than an author, even of a book that rated an A, to break into Wolfe’s two morning hours with the orchids, from nine to eleven. Harvey finally settled for a quarter past eleven. When we hung up I asked Wolfe if I should check, and he nodded and went back to his book. I rang Lon Cohen at the Gazette and learned that the National Association of Authors and Dramatists was it. All the dramatists anyone had ever heard of were members, and most of the authors, the chief exceptions being some scattered specimens who hadn’t decided if they cared to associate with the human race-or had decided that they didn’t. The Book Publishers of America was also it, a national organization of all the major firms and many of the minor ones. I passed the information along to Wolfe, but I wasn’t sure he listened. He was reading.