Some occidental jackass, he said, had made it shish instead of seekh, and it would serve him right if the only seekh kebab he ever got was old tough donkey instead of lamb. He was still commenting on people who garble foreign words when we finished the raspberries, stirred into a mixture, made by Fritz in a double boiler, of cream and sugar and egg yolks and sherry and almond extract, and went across to the office, where he got at his desk with the mail, and I got at mine with the plant records to enter the items he had talked Lewis Hewitt out of.

At four o'clock, when he took the elevator to the roof for his regular two-hour afternoon session with Theodore and the orchids, I took the stairs for the two flights to my room to do some little personal chores, like inspecting socks and changing the ribbon on my personal typewriter. Those operations always take longer than you expect, and when I heard the doorbell, which has a connection to my room, and glanced at my wrist, I was surprised to see that it was twenty to six. I left it to Fritz, who goes when I am not downstairs, but in a couple of minutes the house phone buzzed, and when I got it Fritz said that a young woman who said her name was Denovo wanted to see me, and I asked him to put her in the front room.

When, after mounting the stoop of the old brownstone, you enter, the second door down the hall on your left is the office. The first is to what we call the front room, which isn't used much, mostly for parking people who aren't wanted in the office. Its furniture is nothing much,

not like the office or the kitchen, because Wolfe is seldom in it and doesn't give a damn. When I entered, Amy Denovo was on a chair by a window. She stood up and said, "Well, here I am."

"So I see." I crossed to her. "It's nice to see you and I don't want to be rude, but I thought I made it clear yesterday."