The Spy in the Ointment Read online

  The cop in charge said, “You did what you had to do, Rooney.”

  “Well,” said Rooney, with the reasonableness of lunacy, “he come too fast for me to point out to him that I was armed.”

  “It’s all right, Rooney,” his leader assured him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well,” said Rooney, “he was on me before I knowed it, so I had to shoot him.”

  The cop in charge said to one of the other cops, “Take Rooney out to the car.” Then he looked around and said, “We’ll all go out to the car. We’ll straighten this mess out in the morning.”

  Angela then demanded something be done about her father, who was still out and didn’t know how lucky he was, and the cop assured her he’d have an ambulance take the old man to the hospital right away. As for the rest of us, it was town for us, and the county jail.

  When we got there, I discovered my rights had gone off duty for the night. “Even Benedict Arnold,” I told the phlegmatic desk sergeant, “would get a phone call, one phone call.”

  “In the morning,” he said stolidly.

  “Wait till the Supreme Court hears about this,” I muttered.

  “Who do you want to wake at this time of night?” he asked me.

  “The FBI,” I said.

  He was unmoved. “Seems to me you’ve got police enough already,” he said.

  “I need the FBI,” I told him, “to complete my collection.”

  Then they put us all in separate cells, and Murray—the rat—went back to sleep.

  32

  The rest is fade-out. Federal agents (six of them: U, V, W, X, Y and Z) showed up Sunday morning, explained things to the local cops, and took me aside for a question period that lasted till late Sunday afternoon. When I finally emerged, Murray and Angela were waiting to take me back to the city in a nice new red Ford he’d rented for the occasion. (True New Yorkers like Murray never own automobiles, no matter how rich and decadent they become.)

  Later, mostly through newspaper accounts, I learned some more odds and ends. Such as that Tyrone Ten Eyck’s Cadillac had been searched, and in the trunk there was a hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in cash; what was left of the bank robbery loot. Also, that Jack Armstrong and Louis Labotski were picked up Sunday afternoon, and that the truck-bomb was found and rendered harmless.

  (In the newspapers, by the way, a fellow named J. Eugene Raxford emerged as a shadowy, baffling, ambivalent, and mysterious figure. No one seemed to know exactly who or what I was, except that I appeared to be some sort of brilliant secret agent, leading a double or perhaps a triple life, the sort of shadow figure one thinks of in terms of Foreign Intrigue, trench coats, silencers, the back alleys of Budapest. One newspaper, in fact, wanted me to write a series on my adventures as a counterspy, and a paperback publisher offered me an astounding amount of money if I would agree to write a series of novels—based on my true-life experiences, of course—about a master spy and double agent. I offered them some of my pamphlets instead—What is the CIU?, Pacifism’s Army, The Gandhi Way to World Revolution—but they weren’t interested.)

  P showed up at my apartment Monday afternoon. (You remember P. The one who recruited me to be a spy in the first place.) He had with him two new ones who I guess I’ll have to call A Prime and B Prime. P identified them as representatives of the FBI. All three of them spent a while congratulating me for the good work I’d done, and regretting the fact that we would probably never know the identities of either Tyrone’s employers or his intended victims, and then A Prime assured me the FBI would leave me totally alone in the future, not tap my phone or read my mail or bug my apartment or empty my wastebasket or any of that stuff, because by George, I had proved myself to be a loyal citizen and a true.

  “I guess,” A Prime said, “from what you’ve been up to lately, all this old nonsense of yours is out of your system now.”

  “I guess so,” I said. It was an out-and-out lie, but there was no point starting an argument. I knew the FBI would be back on the job with me by the end of the week. (And so they were, shaking their heads and assuring one another I was an incorrigible nut.)

  The fact of the matter is, my activities before all this mess were pale and half-hearted attempts by comparison with my pacifist work thereafter. Since that night with Tyrone Ten Eyck outside Tarrytown, I’ve had something to live down, to pay penance for, to equalize.

  It’s only the fool who, because he’s fallen once from grace, believes he should never have tried to be in the state of grace to begin with. I fell, when sorely tempted by Tyrone Ten Eyck, but I stand again, and I hope eventually to have made up for that slip.

  And Angela helps me. We discuss it from time to time, as she fixes the mimeograph machine or we drive together in her convertible to peace rallies, and she has admitted to me that when I attacked her brother she was glad, she stood there delighted, urging me on with shouts of encouragement that in the excitement of the moment I never even heard. So we are both struggling back.

  Man’s nature is violent, because man is partly animal. But we’ve come into an era in which that violence must be quelled, and if it must be it can be.

  Ah, well. Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock the UN Building did not blow up; the truck-bomb was not there. But I was, and so was Angela. The two of us marched back and forth in front of the main entrance, carrying our signs, until the cops came along, took the signs away from us, hustled us into the back of a prowl car, and took us to the precinct for booking on a charge of picketing without a permit.

  Our signs? You know what they said.

  They said:

  About the Author

  Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) was one of the most prolific and talented authors of American crime fiction. He began his career in the late 1950s, churning out novels for pulp houses—often writing as many as four novels a year under various pseudonyms—but soon began publishing under his own name. His most well-known characters were John Dortmunder, an unlucky thief, and a ruthless criminal named Parker. His writing earned him three Edgars and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

  Westlake’s cinematic prose and brisk dialogue made his novels attractive to Hollywood, and several motion pictures were made from his books, with stars such as Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson. Westlake wrote several screenplays himself, receiving an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of The Grifters, Jim Thompson’s noir classic.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1966 by Donald E. Westlake

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5161-3

  This 2018 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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