“You’re the gentleman from the city?”
“Yeah. I lost your chauffeur somewhere back on the road.”
“Lord bless you,” she said amiably, “that’s all right.”
A thin man with thin dark hair plastered down above a thin, worried face came past her to take my bags when I had lifted them out of the car. He carried them indoors.
The woman stood aside for me to enter, saying:
“Now I suppose you’ll want to wash up a little bit before you go in to dinner, and they won’t mind waiting for you the few minutes you’ll take if you hurry.”
I said, “Yeah, thanks,” waited for her to get ahead of me again, and followed her up a curving flight of stairs that climbed along the inside of one of the cones that made up the building.
She took me to a second-story bedroom where the thin man was unpacking my bags.
“Martin will get you anything you need,” she assured me from the doorway, “and when you’re ready, just come on downstairs.”
I said I would, and she went away. The thin man had finished unpacking by the time I had got out of coat, vest, collar and shirt. I told him there wasn’t anything else I needed, washed up in the adjoining bathroom, put on a fresh shirt and collar, my vest and coat, and went downstairs.
The wide hall was empty. Voices came through an open doorway to the left.
One voice was a nasal whine. It complained: