The Spy in the Ointment Read online

  The table had toppled me off my own chair onto the damp concrete floor. I struggled upward, peered over the table—now lying on its side—and saw in the doorway a terrified and shaking Sun Kut Fu, his hands high in the air. “D-don’t shoot,” he stammered. “It’s me.”

  “You idiot.” Ten Eyck’s voice rasped; at what a price had he learned his survival techniques. He called, “Lobo!”

  Lobo appeared in the doorway, and that banana-cluster face managed to look sheepish. “He run past me,” he mumbled.

  Sun Kut Fu, his hands still high, said, “I had to tell you, Mr. Eyck, I had to tell you. Federal agents! They raided the temple!”

  Oh, for Pete’s sake! Not seeing me for a couple of hours, not hearing from me, P and his boys had gone running to the rescue. And I wasn’t even there any more!

  Ten Eyck had already slipped his Luger away again. “We’ll go the other way,” he said. “Come on, Raxford.”

  “My shoes!”

  “You’ll get another pair,” he said. “Come along.”

  18

  “Put these magic red shoes on,” Billie Burke told me, smiling ever so sweetly, “and no harm can come to you. You will be able to run like the wind, dance the ballet, the jitterbug, the lindy and the frug, walk through air, over water, and past coals of fire. Your toes will never grow weary or painful, and you’ll be able to dance till dawn. But whatever you do, be sure you don’t remove the shoes, and do not let them fall into the hands of Wicked Witch Tyrone.”

  “Aw, come on, Billie,” I said. “Do you really believe all that jazz?”

  Shocked, her face turned to that of Tyrone Ten Eyck, all metal glitter and glisten. Smiling, he said, “Not for a minute, my friend. I’ll get you no matter what shoes you wear.”

  That was enough to wake me up. I sat bolt upright, startled out of uneasy sleep, to find myself sitting in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. But a room ordinary enough: a plain bedroom with double bed, mirrored dresser, night tables with lamps, a chair on which my clothing was more or less neatly hung. A sun-warmed shade was drawn over the sole window, giving the room that orange aquarium look found exclusively in bedrooms in which one has just taken an afternoon nap.

  But I’d had much more than a nap. I’d been asleep since … Since when?

  I cast back to what I remembered. It had been about four-thirty in the morning when Ten Eyck and I fled that small dank room beneath the city, and dashed away through twisting turning tunnels, sudden rooms, corridors, echoing empty dusty forgotten halls. Ten Eyck went first, all in black, his cloak flapping as he darted forward. I followed, hampered by my slippers—oh, damn slippers!—and Lobo brought up the rear, hulking, thumping, rumbling along in our wake. Sun Kut Fu had scurried in a different direction, to a different destination.

  And where had we three gone? We’d emerged at last, incredibly enough, on a subway platform, but dark and grimy with disuse; some aged spurline superseded by later planning. A dirty green door which appeared to be locked was not; we went through, and up concrete stairs, very narrow, and through another door into an alley. At last, in the open again.

  An automobile was parked here in the alley, either the Cadillac I had been driven in from Queens or another very like it. We climbed aboard, Ten Eyck took the wheel, and we sliced through a great many mean streets I didn’t recognize before abruptly bursting out onto Canal Street, a mean street I did recognize. Across this we drove, Ten Eyck and I in front, Lobo hulking in back, and into the Holland Tunnel, and through it to New Jersey. (This was a different Cadillac, by the way, no side curtains.)

  Something very like dawn edged up on our right as we drove northward through Jersey. The monotony of driving, coupled with the length of time I’d been awake—very nearly twenty-four consecutive hours by now—combined to leave me dopy, somnolent, not entirely aware of my surroundings. I vaguely remembered our stopping—somewhere—and Ten Eyck saying something or other to me in a jovial yet warning tone, and then someone ushered me to this bedroom.

  At about six? That seemed a sensible estimate.

  And my watch—just a watch now, a speaker alas no more—told me the current time was ten minutes past four. Surrounded by assassins, lunatics, and destroyers, I had slept like a gosling for ten hours!

  I promptly jumped out of bed—I was wearing my shorts and T-shirt—hurried to the chair containing the rest of my clothing, and quickly dressed. The only footwear in the room was those same blasted slippers, placed neatly under the foot of the bed. I scuffed into them, checked my pockets for my arsenal, found it intact, and left the room.

  I was now in that anomaly of American residential architecture, the thing at the head of the stairs. It is too square to be a hall and too small to be a room, it usually contains either no furniture at all or at most an odd table stuck here instead of being thrown away, and it is surrounded on all sides by doors; every second-floor room opens off this space. The thing at the head of the stairs could be called a hub, I suppose, or a core, but so far as I know it’s never called anything but what I call it: the thing at the head of the stairs.

  And here I stood. More than anything else at the moment, I wanted to wash my face and brush my teeth. Feeling like the hero of The Lady or the Tiger, I studied this roulette wheel of doors, trying to guess which one would lead me to the bathroom.

  My first guess was unfortunate. In a nearly barren room containing nothing but two tables and several chairs, six Orientals in dark clothing were assembling machine guns from a large wooden crate on the floor. They looked at me as I stood in the doorway. “Heh,” I chuckled weakly, backtracking. “My mistake. Heh.” And shut the door again on all those faces.

  My second guess was better. I washed up, brushed my teeth with my finger, left the bathroom, passed through the thing at the head of the stairs with no urge to see what lay behind the rest of those doors, and went downstairs to find Ten Eyck sitting at his ease in the living room, leafing through a large and expensive volume of French Impressionist reproductions. The colors reflected from the pages onto his face, playing there as though a devil’s carnival were under way on the inside. He smiled on seeing me and said, “Ah. The sleeper wakes.”

  “First good sleep I’ve had in a week,” I said, trying to sound bitter, gearing myself back into the role of the hunted killer, the clever madman, the desperate adventurer.

  “Of course,” he said, his smile glistening with plastic sympathy. “If you’ll go to the kitchen,” he suggested, “I believe the lady of the house will find you something to eat.”

  “Good.”

  “We’ll talk later,” he said, as I went by. “Got a job for you.”

  I may have blanched, I’m not sure, but I managed to make my voice hearty enough as I said, “That’s fine. I hate doing nothing.”

  “My sentiments exactly.” He flipped a page; it ripped; he said something guttural and harsh, not in English.

  I went out to the kitchen, where the lady of the house turned out to be Mrs. Selma Bodkin, looking pleased as Marjorie Main to have the house full of guests. She suggested pancakes, I nodded dumbly, she had me sit down at the kitchen table, poured me orange juice and coffee for starters, and began producing pancakes.

  She made, amazingly enough, excellent pancakes. She also talked, non-stop. I heard only parts now and then of what she was saying, since I spent a lot of my time and attention worrying about what sort of devilish job Ten Eyck had in mind for me to do. Whatever it was, I thought it unlikely I’d be capable of doing it; and what then?

  Mrs. Bodkin’s chatter was mostly autobiographical, concerning both herself and this house. It was an old place, a farmhouse which had lost its farm. All around us, screened from view by defiant tall trees, were the developments with the cemetery names: Fair Oaks, Green Hills, Far Vista. Mrs. Bodkin had been brought here as a bride—impossible to imagine!—and had stayed on after the departure of her children and the death of her husband. Meetings of the Gentile Mothers for Peace were often held here, and a B
rownie Pack met once a month in the cellar playroom. The house was comfortably, if not stylishly, furnished, and was extremely clean.

  I was starting my second stack of pancakes—which Mrs. Bodkin had insisted I accept—when the back door burst open and five burly men in leather jackets thundered in, puffing and swearing, dropping revolvers and money sacks on the table at which till now I had been eating. The reek of hot blood and foul deeds, it seemed to me, blew into the room with them. One of them was P. J. Mulligan, guiding spirit of the Sons of Erin Expeditionary Force, and his four companions could hardly be anything but an Erinesque quartet.

  “How was it, boys?” Mrs. Bodkin asked them, as Ten Eyck came in from the living room. “Any trouble?”

  “Had to plug a couple customers,” P. J. Mulligan remarked, stripping off his leather jacket, then pulling a Halloween mask from his pocket—a Neanderthal man, it was—and tossing it on the table beside my plate of pancakes. “Killed ’em, I think.”

  “Bad,” said Ten Eyck. “I told you to avoid bloodshed.”

  “No choice,” Mulligan told him laconically.

  “’S right,” agreed another Son of Erin. “They jumped us. Thought they were heroes.”

  “Bloody veterans, I think,” said a third. “Tried judo chops and like that.”

  “It was plug them,” Mulligan finished, “or not get away.”

  “If you had to,” Ten Eyck said doubtfully.

  “We had to.” Mulligan glanced at me. “Raxford, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Good work with the spy,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “One thing,” said another Son to Ten Eyck. “We got the cash.”

  “Bring it upstairs,” Ten Eyck told them. “Put it in with the rest. Then take it easy awhile, you’d better not leave here till after nightfall.”

  They grabbed up their guns, their masks, their loot, and trooped on out of the kitchen. Ten Eyck watched them go, then sat down across the table from me and said, “Too bad about that.”

  “Just one of those things,” I said, trying for the casual touch.

  “Right.” Thoughtful, he added, “Have to make it seem like an accident somehow. Plant a little of the money on them. Making their getaway they drove too fast, had a fatal accident. Pity.”

  “A shame,” I croaked, with belated understanding.

  “It’ll keep the police quiet anyway,” he said.

  Mrs. Bodkin said to Ten Eyck, “You want a cup of coffee, Leon?”

  “No thank you, Selma.” To me he said, “Still, it lasted long enough. We’ve got plenty of cash now.”

  I said, “They’ve been robbing banks to finance the group.”

  “Naturally.” He smiled. “One of our specialists.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll have to talk to Zlott about fixing their car,” he said.

  I said, “Zlott? The little man who hates Germans? He’s a specialist too?”

  “Eli Zlott,” Ten Eyck told me, “is one of the most brilliant manufacturers and inventors of explosive devices the world has ever seen. You tell him when you want the explosion, where you want it, how big you want it, what sort of remote control or time mechanism or whatever sort of trigger you want, you give him the materials, and he does the job. Quickly, imaginatively, and with guaranteed success.” Ten Eyck offered his crooked, glinting smile. “I know nations,” he said, “which would pay Eli Zlott a quarter of a million a year merely to be on call. If he weren’t a madman, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “The group produced a number of specialists,” he said, with satisfaction. “Take Selma here.” (She beamed with pleasure [she was slicing carrots on the drainboard] at the sound of her name.) “She affords us a headquarters, a respectable cover, a hideout, and some of the finest meals I’ve ever eaten. That’s her specialty.”

  Most of this last had been directed more at Mrs. Bodkin than at me, and she practically squirmed with joy at hearing Ten Eyck carry on that way. I hadn’t realized this man, who had always appeared to me to be black undiluted menace, could turn out such easy balderdash, but of course charm had inevitably to be one of the weapons in his arsenal. Blarney charm for someone like Mrs. Bodkin; a more Scotch-and-water charm, I’d imagine, for a younger and more attractive woman.

  “What about some of the others?” I said. “What specialty did Mrs. Baba turn out to have, for instance?”

  His face closed. “A few of the original members,” he said, speaking more carefully now, “failed to seem to the rest of us useful or productive. Mrs. Baba, for instance.”

  I said, “And the Whelps?”

  “Yes. And Hyman Meyerberg.”

  “Who was he?”

  “The Stalinist.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. They’re not with us any more?”

  “No.” Then he gestured quickly toward Mrs. Bodkin’s back, and I understood immediately what he was trying to say: I shouldn’t talk any more on this subject, because Hyman Meyerberg and Mrs. Baba and the Whelps were no longer alive, and Mrs. Bodkin didn’t know it. They were no longer alive because on the one hand they were useless and on the other hand they knew too much. And Mrs. Bodkin didn’t know it because sooner or later she too would become useless.

  So I changed the subject. “You had work for me, you said.”

  “Yes. Mortimer will be—Eustaly, you know. He’ll be coming along a little after dark. You and he and Armstrong will take a little trip up north.”

  “We will?”

  “We’re buying explosives from some Canadian friends of mine. They’ll get it across the border, but then we have to bring it the rest of the way down.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Actually,” he said, “it doesn’t need more than one man to drive the truck down from the border. We’ll want three of you mostly to keep guard on the money going up. It’s a large amount. A man alone might be hijacked, or might decide to go south instead of north. With two, one might overpower the other. So we need three.”

  (Ten Eyck, you understand, judged others by himself. Knowing the baseness of his own motives, he had a deep and abiding suspicion of everyone else. This plan of his and the reasoning behind it were typical of him.)

  I said, “Let me get it straight. I’m going with Eustaly and Armstrong, to guard a large shipment of money going to Canada and travel with a large shipment of explosives coming back.”

  “Right. Remind me to get you a pistol before you leave.” He got to his feet, saying, “I’d better talk to Zlott now, I don’t know how much time he’ll need on the car.” He tossed a pleasantry at Mrs. Bodkin, who turned all pink, and left.

  I sat there, playing the conversation back, listening to it without joy.

  “Eat up,” Mrs. Bodkin said to me. “You’re not eating.”

  19

  So that’s what my specialty was, in Ten Eyck’s eyes; I was a gunman. Maybe the only pacifist gunman in the history of the world.

  Eustaly arrived not long after dark; just a few minutes, in fact, after P. J. Mulligan and his merry men drove away toward oblivion. I saw Eli Zlott peeking after them out the living-room window, watching his handiwork go away to happen someplace. I suppose the way he figured it, Celts, Teutons, what’s the difference?

  Armstrong was already in the house, and it turned out at least one of his specialties was brawn; when Eustaly drove his two-year-old Mercury around to the back of the house, Armstrong came downstairs lugging two black suitcases neither of which I could do much more than lift and put right back down again. Armstrong stowed the suitcases in the trunk, Eustaly and Ten Eyck had a brief conference in a corner of the living room, Eustaly turned down with thanks Mrs. Bodkin’s offer of mince pie and coffee, and Ten Eyck motioned me to follow him upstairs to the second floor.

  We got to the thing at the head of the stairs, turned left, and went into the room where the Orientals had been assembling their machine guns. The assemblers were gone, but their choppers were still th
ere, piled up on a table, lying on their sides, most of them pointing at me.

  Ten Eyck slipped a pistol into my hand and said, quietly, “On the way up, don’t worry about Armstrong, he’s a moron and dedicated. But keep an eye on Eustaly. I wouldn’t trust Mortimer any further than I could throw him.”

  Pistols are heavier than I’d thought. (Need I say this was the first time in my life I’d ever held one?) The gun sagged from my hand, which sagged from my wrist. I nodded and said, “I’ll watch him. Right” All the while wondering what I’d do if Eustaly did try something.

  “It’s just on the way up you’ve got to be careful,” Ten Eyck went on. “When you’re carrying the cash. Plastic explosive isn’t that easy to pawn, so I doubt Mortimer’ll try anything on the way back.”

  “Good,” I said. “What about Armstrong? Is he armed?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then killed my burgeoning hope by adding, “But don’t count on him, he’s never been in a deal like this before.”

  “It’s up to me, then.”

  “You’re my right hand in this, Raxford.” He glinted at me, smiling to show his teeth. “We’re the same breed,” he said, patting my shoulder. “We understand each other.”

  With that inaccurate thought in mind, I followed him back downstairs, where Mrs. Bodkin approached me with a red-and-black-check hunting jacket, a residue of the late Mr. Bodkin’s, which she insisted I wear. “The nights are still chilly,” she said, “and you don’t have a topcoat.”

  Neither had Eustaly, who was stout and dapper in a pearl-gray suit that appeared to reflect the light, but she didn’t push any old horse blankets on him. For some reason she’d taken a liking to me and a dislike to Eustaly; maybe because I ate her pancakes and he wouldn’t eat her mince pie.

  In any case, it was impossible for me to refuse the damn coat, so I finally put it on, thanked her for the thought, and went lumbering outside like a combination checkerboard and Smokey the Bear. From the kitchen doorway she called, “You be sure and keep that on, now.”