The Spy in the Ointment Read online

  R, abruptly wary, glanced from me to P and back again. “What sort of speech?” he asked.

  “I’m not backing out,” I assured him, “but once and for all I want to get straight with you people just what a pacifist is, or at least what this particular pacifist is, so you can maybe get over being astonished. The way I see it, a pacifist is someone who believes that the ultimate weapón in any and all disputes, from the personal to the international, is reason. Thought, negotiation, good will, and compromise are all words that sound nasty and probably Communist to the tough guys who want another war because their lives are too banal to be borne in peacetime, but these are the words we use and the concepts we believe in. We don’t believe in taking up arms and killing people, and this is an extension of our basic initial belief in the power of reason. You can’t reason with a dead man, which is why we would prefer to keep our enemies alive, and devote ourselves to peaceful attempts to resolve the differences between us. By a further extension of the same series of ideas, we feel very strongly about being ourselves killed, because we can’t reason when we’re dead either. A perversion of this aspect has been popularized as better Red than dead, which I would agree with only if there were no other alternatives. But there is a strong philosophic gulf between the passive resistance of a Mahatma Gandhi and the suicide of a Buddhist monk. I can’t think of any circumstances under which I’d set fire to myself, including this one. I was given the choice of assisting in an investigation of lawbreakers or of being abandoned to be gunned down by them, and better Fed than dead is what I chose. With the understanding that I won’t kill any of them any more than I will willingly be killed myself, I’m your man for the duration.”

  R had been listening to this with the disgruntled face of a Lee J. Cobb, and when I was done, he said, “In other words, you’ll be sensible for a little while.”

  “No. I’m always sensible, that’s the part you people won’t understand. My friends and I think it’s more sensible to talk with people than shoot them, which means we don’t think war is sensible. You do think war is sensible. That, in essence, is our only difference of opinion.”

  R said, “One thing I’ll say for you, you can talk it too. You sound just like one of your pamphlets.”

  “You’ve read my pamphlets?”

  “Every one.”

  “And they’ve had no effect on you?”

  R chuckled, a sound like forest thunder. “I’m not ready to join up,” he said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s very depressing,” I said.

  P said, gently, “It’s getting a little late.”

  “Right,” said R, suddenly firming up, putting his palms flat on the desk, being very businesslike. “All right, Raxford,” he said, “here’s the situation. We’ve been aware for some time that Tyrone Ten Eyck was on the move again, that he was probably on his way to this country. We want to know what his plans are, who his confederates are, which country he’s working for. The little you heard from him last week, China and Congress and the Supreme Court and the UN, doesn’t really help us much. What we want to know are his specific plans, and how all these elements work together.” He looked at the others. “Gentlemen?”

  S said, “And the timetable, Chief.”

  Well, well. P had been the Chief the last time, and if R was P’s Chief, as seemed likely, I was well up among the muckamucks here.

  R said, “Right. We not only need to know what they plan to do, but when. Also, if possible, the locations of any arms caches, information on Ten Eyck’s method of entering the country, and so on. You getting this, Raxford?”

  “You want to know what he’s doing,” I said.

  “In essence,” he admitted. “What we’re trying to get across is that we want it in as much detail as possible.”

  I nodded. This, I assumed, was what was normally called a briefing, and so far it could have been a hell of a lot briefer, if you ask me. R hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.

  But now, at R’s instruction, T took over, saying, “In order to operate at optimum efficiency, Raxford, you should know as much as possible about the people with whom you will be dealing. Tyrone Ten Eyck, I believe you already know something about.”

  “He’s my girl’s brother,” I said. “According to her, he was something of a sadist when they were kids. Also, he’s about eight years older than her, and ten years ago he deserted from the Army in Korea and went over to the Communist Chinese.”

  T nodded, saying, “So much is fairly common knowledge, or at least obtainable from newspaper files. Also the fact that Ten Eyck has a genius IQ, was with the Psychological Warfare section of the Army, and has changed his national allegiance several times in the last decade.”

  “I didn’t know about that,” I said. “About his switching allegiances.”

  “I consulted a notebook, said, “In 1957 he first left China, lived for several months in Tibet, joined and eventually took charge of a small bandit force operating along the China-Tibet border, and finally betrayed this group into the hands of the Red Chinese for a cash payment. He then entered India, associated himself with the construction of a dam being built with Russian assistance, and in 1959 moved to Russia. Later the same year the Russians ousted him as a Chinese spy, though of course both he and the Chinese denied everything. He then went to Egypt, opened a training school for terrorists who were to be smuggled into Israel, and shortly thereafter blew up both the school and its largest graduating class, possibly as a result of an Israeli bribe. Denials all around once again. After a short stop in Jordan, another brief stay in India, an even briefer stay in Cambodia, and six months running arms to Indonesia from a base in New Zealand, Ten Eyck returned to China, stayed there two years, disappeared entirely from view for a while, and popped up in Algeria in 1963, where he organized and commanded a white terrorist anti-Arab group, much more virulent than the OAS, somewhat similar to our own Ku Klux Klan. Various betrayals within the organization—apparently not from Ten Eyck this time—decimated the group, and Ten Eyck barely got out with a whole skin. In fact, there was widespread belief for some time that he was dead. But now he’s turned up again, in New York City.”

  “And that’s the guy you want me to spy on,” I said, remembering Tyrone Ten Eyck’s looks, his air of evil and assurance and power back there in the Odd Fellows’ Hall.

  T said, calmly, “That’s one of them. As for Mortimer Eustaly, we believe he is the same man we have in our files under the name of Dimitrios Rembla, a general smuggler and gun-runner with no particular political ties. A businessman type, for sale to anyone, and not normally a killer, though he will kill when cornered.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “I ought to know all this.”

  R said, “One of the most vital parts of any defense is a full knowledge of the enemy.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “The man called Lobo,” T went on, “would appear to be one Soldo Campione, for seventeen years the personal bodyguard of a Latin American dictator who was successfully assassinated in 1961. The dictator’s family, blaming Campione—or Lobo, as you know him—kidnaped him, spirited him away, and tortured him for five months. By the time he was rescued, there had been permanent brain damage, both physical and psychological. For the last few years he has been a general muscleman-for-hire in the Caribbean area and Central America. He obeys orders implicitly, has the intelligence of a three-year-old child, and should under no circumstances be challenged to physical combat.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

  “You have already been briefed on the backgrounds of the others present,” T said, “with the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp. Would you prefer the other backgrounds to be repeated, to refresh your memory?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but no thanks.”

  “Very well.” Flip, flip: the notebook pages. “Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp. Until you mentioned them, they were virtually unknown to us. It is entirely possible that several boxe
s of poisoned candy mailed to the Governor’s Mansion in Albany came from the Whelps; at least, we don’t know who else might have done it. Recent investigation discloses that Mr. Whelp worked for twenty-seven years in a factory on Long Island which has recently gone almost completely over to automation. In accordance with labor-management agreements, Mr. Whelp was laid off three years ago, has been receiving eighty percent pay ever since, and will continue to receive eighty percent pay until the age of sixty, at which time he will switch to the company retirement pension plan, which is sixty percent pay. Mr. Whelp is fifty-one, healthy, with all his faculties and all his limbs, and appears to have absolutely nothing to do with himself, which leads us to believe he is probably capable of doing almost anything.”

  T flipped his notebook shut and said to R, “That’s it.”

  R nodded. “Good. Thank you.” He turned to me. “All right, Raxford,” he said, “very soon now you’ll be on your own. One or another of us—or possibly some other agents—will be in contact with you at all times. Should an emergency arise, or should your cover be broken, just let us know, and we’ll move in at once and get you out of there.”

  “That sounds fine,” I said.

  “I hope,” he said, “your philosophy, religion, whatever-it-is, won’t keep you from using the self-defense devices you’ve been given.”

  “Not a bit of it. Smokescreens and directional beams and red signal flares sound perfectly sensible to me, and even though you refuse to believe it I’ll say it once more: I am a sensible man.”

  “Raxford,” R said, “spare me the commercial. The point is, we’ll do everything in our power to keep you safe, and we expect you to co-operate. We don’t like losing operatives, it’s messy and wasteful, bad for morale and gives the Other Side a swelled head. So be careful.”

  “That’s a very good idea,” I said. “Be careful. I’ll try that. Thank you very much.”

  R looked at P. “He’s all yours,” he said wearily.

  P said, “Right, Chief,” and got to his feet, saying, “Come on along, Raxford.”

  Outside in the hallway, he said, “What was the point of being a smart aleck with the Chief?”

  “He told me to be careful,” I said. “Stupidity makes my hackles rise.”

  “I guess the Chief didn’t realize you had the corner on brains around here,” P said. “You ready to leave now?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to say goodbye to Angela. At great length.”

  “You’ll have about four hours,” he told me. “She’s coming with us as far as Tarrytown.”

  13

  High on a hill north of Tarrytown, overlooking the majestic Hudson, Marcellus Ten Eyck owns a turreted and gabled country estate of the kind occupied these days mostly by Franciscan monks and Episcopalian girls’ schools. Ten Eyck’s estate was one of the last of the privately owned fiefdoms, and Ten Eyck one of the last of the patroons. At this manse, along about midnight, we left Angela, amid a flurry of kisses from me, while her choleric, grumpy, and altogether constipated old man, cross-armed, looked on.

  This had been the ultimate compromise deal between Angela’s father and the Feds. He would keep the secret of Angela’s continued existence, and they would allow him to keep her hidden in his own house upstate. Where, no doubt, he could attempt to fill her head full of vile misstatements about me.

  Well, bad cess to him. My Angela was not about to be dissuaded by the sort of crotchety old man who existed in Boccaccio exclusively to be horned. I parted from her at the manor house with a heavy heart, but not because I was afraid for her fidelity. It was my own immediate future that weighed the old pumper down.

  P and I were alone in the car now. Once back on the highway, P said, “Now then. Let’s get the story straight.”

  “Let’s,” I said.

  He said, “Miss Ten Eyck managed to infiltrate your organization without your ever suspecting she might be a spy. In fact, it wasn’t until she ran away from the meeting that you realized she’d tricked you. So you ran after her, followed her, caught up with her, convinced her you wanted to help, took her over to New Jersey, and murdered her.”

  “Out of rage,” I suggested.

  “Partly,” he said. “Also, your pride was hurt. And, more important, the security of the group Eustaly and Ten Eyck were setting up was endangered as long as she was alive.”

  I nodded. “Right. That’s good.”

  “After the murder,” he said, “you hid out in New Jersey for five days, afraid to risk entering the city until tonight. But finally you couldn’t wait any more, you returned to New York, and decided your best move was to contact the organization again.”

  I said, “You know, the thought occurs to me they might consider me more of a liability than an asset. Wanted by the law and all.”

  He shook his head. “You’re the first member of the group, other than its organizers, to have committed a murder for the sake of the group. It would be bad politics and bad for morale if the group rejected you. Ten Eyck and Eustaly will welcome you with open arms and praise you to the skies in front of the other members, just wait and see.”

  “I can wait,” I said.

  “Once you’ve re-established contact,” he said, “you’ll pretty much have to play it by ear. Whatever details they may ask you for, make up something that sounds sensible. We’ll be listening, and we’ll cover whatever you say, just so it isn’t too implausible.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  “And remember,” he said, “you don’t know Tyrone Ten Eyck under his own name. You know him as Leon Eyck.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten that. Leon Eyck. Leon Eyck. Leon Eyck. I’ll try to remember.”

  “It might be better,” he said, “if we were to call him by that name from now on ourselves.”

  “Right,” I said. “Leon Eyck. Leon Eyck.”

  “I think that’s about it,” he said.

  I said, “Listen. I’m supposed to be the head of a terrorist organization. What if Ten—what if Leon Eyck and Eustaly want to see the membership? I can’t show them a bunch of pacifists.”

  “Your organization,” he told me, “can be reached in New York City at CHelsea 2-2598. We have twelve men detailed to be your membership if need be.”

  I repeated, the phone number to myself several times, and then said, “All right, fine. I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “You’ll do fine,” he said, but it sounded just a trifle hollow to me.

  We rode along in silence for a few minutes, and then it occurred to me to ask, “Which one do I get in touch with?”

  “Jack Armstrong,” he said.

  I said, “What? The Nazi?”

  “They’re none of them peaches,” he said.

  “But,” I said, “the Nazi. He’s about the craziest one there. What if I look Jewish to him?”

  “He’s the best of the ones you remembered,” P assured me. “He’s in the Queens phone book, so there’s no problem explaining how you found him. Also, he’s not under normal full surveillance, as some of the others are, and I imagine Eustaly and Ten Eyck are aware of that, so he’ll be more likely to have direct access to them.”

  “What about Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp? You don’t watch them, do you? And they must be in the phone book.”

  “I’m sure they are,” he agreed. “But the Whelps are second-string material, from the point of view of Eustaly and—and Leon Eyck, but Jack Armstrong is plainly varsity, and so is sure to be closer to them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess you must be right.”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “Oh, there’s one thing I ought to mention. The regular police, city and state, really are looking for you. You are wanted for murder.”

  I stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “One thing you ought to mention! For Pete’s sake!”

  “I wasn’t sure whether you understood that or not. Obviously, you didn’t.”

&n
bsp; “Understood what? Call them off, will you, I’ve got troubles enough!”

  He said, patiently, “We can’t do it, Raxford, I’m sorry. If you tell sixty or seventy thousand men and women that it’s all a trap, your security is going to go all to hell. People always tell their wives, or their husbands, or their sweethearts, or their mothers, or somebody. Everyone with a secret tells that secret to one person, that’s one of the least encouraging rules of international intrigue. Besides, we have no guarantee that there isn’t at least one cop who belongs to one of these organizations off-duty. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.”

  “The cops are after me,” I said.

  “Only until it’s over,” he said. “Try to relax.”

  “Sure. The cops are after me, I’m on my way to join an organization of lunatics and bombers, I’m wired for sound, my necktie turns into a smokescreen, my handkerchief will make you throw up, my Diner’s Club card explodes, I’m the leader of a subversive terrorist organization composed entirely of undercover federal agents, newspapers all over the country are saying I killed my girl, and I’m on my way to meet a twenty-five-year-old Nazi built like Bronco Nagurski. If relaxed means limp, don’t worry about it. I’m relaxed. I’m relaxed all over.”

  14

  Jack Armstrong was not in the Queens directory as such; but under N there was a listing for the National Fascist Reclamation Commission, with an address on 67th Drive. I took a subway from Grand Central, where P had let me off, and found Armstrong’s home at a little after one in the morning.

  This block, in fact this whole neighborhood, was composed of neat, smallish, compact houses, mostly frame, here and there brick, and very occasionally stone. They were two stories high, most of them, and though some had begun life with porches, in almost every case family expansion or some such reason had later forced the enclosure of the porch, leaving odd-looking houses with a lot of windows across their fronts downstairs. The lawns before these houses were invariably small, and almost invariably made even smaller with hedges, bushes, and small trees, plus lawn statuary, rustic signs bearing reflector numerals, other rustic signs saying The Lombardis or The Brenners, and now and again carriage lamps on black poles.