both resulted in more snarl-ups.
Reports that should have been sent in weeks before arrived too late;
reports meant for the eyes of only one man were turned out in
triplicate and passed all over the offices of Congress.

Each snarl-up was a little one. But, together, they added up to
inefficiency of a kind and extent that hadn't been seen, Malone told
himself with some wonder, since the Harding administration fifty years
before.

And there didn't seem to be anyone to blame anything on.

Malone thought hopefully of sabotage, infiltration and mass treason,
but it didn't make him feel much better. He puffed out some more smoke
and frowned at nothing.

There was a knock at the door of his office.

Speedily and guiltily, he swung his feet off the desk and snatched the
cigar out of his mouth. He jammed it into a deep ashtray and put the
ashtray back into his desk drawer. He locked the drawer, waved
ineffectively at the clouds of smoke that surrounded him, and said in
a resigned voice: "Come in."

The door opened. A tall, solidly-built man stood there, wearing a
fringe of beard and a cheerful expression. The man had an enormous
amount of muscle distributed more or less evenly over his chunky body,
and a pot-belly that looked as if he had swallowed a globe of the
world. In addition, he was smoking a cigarette and letting out little
puffs of smoke, rather like a toy locomotive.

"Well, well," Malone said, brushing feebly at the smoke that still
wreathed him faintly. "If it isn't Thomas Boyd, the FBI's answer to
Nero Wolfe."

"And if the physique holds true, you're Sherlock Holmes, I suppose,"
Boyd said.

Malone shook his head, thinking sadly of his father and the cigar.
"Not exactly," he said. "Not ex--" And then it came to him. It wasn't
that he was ashamed of smoking cigars like his father, exactly, but
cigars just weren't right for a fearless, dedicated FBI agent. And he
had just thought of a way to keep Boyd from knowing what he'd been
doing. "That's a hell of a cigarette you're smoking, by the way," he
said.

Boyd looked at it. "It is?" he said.

"Sure is," Malone said, hoping he sounded sufficiently innocent.
"Smells like a cigar or something."

Boyd sniffed the air for a second, his face wrinkled. Then he looked
down at his cigarette again. "By God," he said, "you're right, Ken. It
_does_ smell like a cigar." He came over to Malone's desk, looked
around for an ashtray and didn't find one, and finally wen