The man who saved New York

Of course, as you know, I didn’t figure in the excitement over the Green Giant. The newspapers and the radio boys never mentioned me, or Lisbeth, or Baldy or even Porky Jenks. Why would they? We have kept strictly silent about the whole affair. Not from shyness; none of us are against a little wholesome publicity. But it never does one any good to be billed as a first class candidate for the nut-house. So that Green Giant who waded around in the ocean off Sandy Hook will remain a mystery. Not that I can actually explain him. I can’t. He’s as much a mystery to me as to anybody else. But, as it happened, there probably never would have been any Green Giant at all if it hadn’t been for me. I don’t mind telling the real facts, but I think it’s quite a bit safer for them just to go as fiction. You can take them or leave them, so to speak. And there’s another angle to the thing. The war actually would have been won by now—if Lisbeth hadn’t queered it. Hitler would have been smashed and everything would have been just swell. I had it all planned—and then Lisbeth put the jinx on it. I’m sorry about that. But you’ll realize there’s not a thing I could have done. The queer affair began last Spring—a warmish afternoon when I was sitting in my study trying to figure out a plot. Porky Jenks came in to see me. I used to know Porky quite well, but hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. He was a likeable young fellow, always with a ready laugh which is what made him so fat, I suppose. But this was a different Porky. He wedged himself down, collapsing in my only armchair. His clothes were rumpled as though he’d slept in them; his collar was wilted, hanging soggily on his bulging throat. His thin sandy hair was plastered on his sweating forehead; he pulled out a big blue handkerchief and mopped his face and just stared at me with pale blue eyes that looked haunted. “Well, well, Porky, glad to see you,” I said. “How are you?” “I’m awful,” he declared. Just out of habit, I suppose, he tried to laugh, but it was only a wan, sickly grin. “There’s—something the