The Spy in the Ointment Read online

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “Come on, we’ll be late.”

  We walked around the corner to Broadway. I was wearing my suit, out of habit—I always wear my suit when I attend meetings—and over it my scuffy old black raincoat with the ripped pockets. My head was bare, and getting wet.

  Angela had insisted on stopping off at home to change, while I waited outside in the car. (Her father had a tendency toward heart seizures at the sight, or even the mention, of me.) She looked now, of course, like something that had immediately to be taken somewhere warm and dry and soft and private, so her clothing could be ripped off in comfort. Her stretch pants were white this time, and her shiny boots were red. She was wearing a kind of car coat, dark green, with a fur-lined hood. She walked along with her face framed by the hood, her hands tucked into high pockets in the coat, and her legs flashing white and red with every step, and obviously the only sensible thing for us to do was find a hayloft immediately.

  Instead of which, we went around the corner to the Odd Fellows’ Hall.

  The corner itself was occupied by a kosher delicatessen, with a liquor store next to it, and squeezed between these two was a windowed door, and on the glass of this door curving letters that read: ODD FELLOWS. Angela and I entered here, and found ahead of us a long steep flight of stairs leading straight up through semi-darkness to an inadequately lit landing at the top. We went up, and I counted twenty-seven steps.

  At the top there was a maroon metal door, bearing two Scotch-taped notices. One said: Thursday Night, South Side Social Club, Members Only. The other said: Knock.

  Angela looked at these and said, “But today’s Thursday, Gene.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you sure this is the right place? It says South Side Social Club.”

  “What did you think it was going to say, South Side Terrorists’ Club? This isn’t even the south side, it’s the west side.”

  Angela looked at me, her eyes glistening in the light from the fifteen-watt bulb above our heads. “Gene,” she whispered, “I think I’m scared.”

  “It’s a fine time to think of it,” I said, and knocked on the door.

  It was opened at once, by the Abominable Snowman in a dark blue suit. He must have been six foot eight, and had a face like a bunch of bananas. In a voice as deep as a lost mine he said, “Yuh?”

  “Hello, there,” I said. “I’ve come to the meeting.”

  He didn’t move, didn’t speak. Slowly, ponderously, he blinked at me. His mouth hung slightly open, and he blocked the doorway the way boulders block entrances to caves.

  Angela leaned past my elbow and whispered at him, “You know, the meeting. Mr. Eustaly.”

  He raised a huge hand—it looked like a bunch of bananas, too—and waved it back and forth, saying, “Nuh. Wrong.” Then he shut the door.

  Angela looked at me. “Gene? Gene, is it a joke? After all this, is it a joke?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, and knocked on the door again. When it opened, I said to the monster, “I’m Raxford, of the CIU. You go ask Eustaly, he’ll tell you I’m okay.”

  “Nuh,” he said, and shut the door again.

  Angela said, “Gene, if this is something you and Murray cooked up, I’ll never—”

  “Damn!” I shouted. “The password! I forgot the bloody password!” I knocked on the door yet a third time.

  This time the monster looked very threatening. He showed me one of his hands, and he said, “Go away.”

  “Greensleeves,” I told him. “Okay? Greensleeves.”

  It was as though I’d pressed a button on his control panel. The hand dropped, he took two cumbersome paces backward, and he gestured like a steam shovel for me to come in.

  We entered a small square windowless room devoid of furniture. Heavy maroon drapes on the right indicated where another door might be, and on the left the door to a small cloakroom stood open.

  The monster shut the entrance door behind us and rumbled, “Weapons in there. On the table.”

  “In there” meant the cloakroom. I glanced in, and saw a table covered with objects of violence and impetuousness. Pistols, knives, brass knuckles, blackjacks, lengths of pipe, strips of rawhide, loops of wire, bottles containing murky liquids, all lined up in rows, each with its own neat little numbered piece of cardboard next to it.

  I swallowed, to be sure my voice would work right, and said, “I don’t have any weapons. We didn’t bring any weapons.”

  He stood in front of me. “Frisk you,” he said, and patted me all over, thump, thump, thump, thump. He seemed both surprised and disappointed to find me carrying nothing more lethal than a nail clipper; he considered impounding it, just as a sort of token, and then shrugged and gave it back to me.

  When he turned to Angela, I said, “Hold it.”

  “Frisk,” he said, like far-off thunder.

  Although there was certainly no indication, either in his face or voice, that he anticipated taking any pleasure in the frisking of Angela, I knew I dared not permit him to do so. If I were to stand quietly by while Angela was being thump-thump-thumped, it would be all up with us forever, of that I was certain. And who would fix the mimeograph then? Who would pay the rent? (Not to mention Chinese-red bras.)

  I said, “Wait. Hold it a second. Angela, take off your coat.”

  She did so, and stood there holding it, wearing now her dark blue sweater and white stretch pants. I said to the monster. “She doesn’t have any weapons. Where’s she going to hide weapons?” To Angela, I said, “Give him the coat, let him check the pockets.”

  “Okay,” she said. She was looking a little pale around the cheeks. She handed him the coat, and he went ponderously through the pockets, like an elephant looking for a peanut. He came across the ballpoint pen and the steno pad, but seemed unimpressed by them.

  Finding no weapons, he looked at Angela again, thought about things for a few seconds, and then said, “Okay,” and handed her back her coat. He motioned at the maroon drapes and said, “Go in.”

  We looked at one another, Angela and I. She reached out and took my hand, and held it tight. I inhaled, held my breath, stepped forward, pushed aside the maroon drapes, and went in.

  7

  Before us stretched a long room, old-looking but brightly lit by fluorescent ceiling fixtures that must have been a very recent addition. The room was filled with rows of wooden folding chairs, all facing a raised speaker’s platform at the far end. An old wooden desk stood on this platform, and a row of folding chairs lined the wall behind it. An American flag sagged on a pole to the right of the platform, and some sort of yellow and brown flag created symmetry on the other side. The walls were lined with framed and glassed and dusty photographs of groups of people in unlikely uniforms; they looked like so many pictures of the Bolivian Navy.

  Although there were seats available for about a hundred people, scarcely a dozen men and women were in the room, all clustered near the platform up front. Hand in hand, Angela and I walked down the central aisle between the folding chairs, and the closer we got the less cheerful looked the people we were moving toward. A certain electric frenzy seemed to cackle bluely in the air around each and every one of them, as though we had inadvertently come upon the organizational meeting of the Mad Scientists’ Geophysical Year, which in a way is exactly what we had.

  Mortimer Eustaly popped from this group as we approached it, coming toward us with his most Levantine smile, his well-manicured hand extended as he said, “Raxford, Raxford!, So glad you could come. And this very charming lady?” If looks could impregnate, the one Eustaly turned on Angela now would have fought the pill to a draw.

  “My secretary,” I said. “Miss Angela Ten—” Whoops! Cursing myself for an idiot, I managed a fairly convincing coughing spell, and said, “Sorry. The rain. Miss Angela Tenn.” To Angela, I added, “This is Mr. Eustaly.”

  “Miss Tenn,” he purred, and held her hand in a way he should have been arrested for.

  Angela’s sm
ile seemed to me a little forced, and her voice unusually faint, as she said, “How do you do?” And tugged her hand out of his grasp.

  Eustaly, with some reluctance, turned his attention back to me. “We’re just waiting for one or two others,” he said, “and then we’ll get right to business.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  A short, thin, vicious-looking Negro woman, in a black dress and a black hat with rhinestones and a long black feather angling upward, joined us at that moment, plucking Eustaly by the sleeve and saying, “Eustaly, you didn’t tell me they was going to be kikes here.” Her voice sounded like a subway with the brakes on, and she herself looked like the mean relation of a character by Dr. Seuss.

  Eustaly smiled upon her like an encyclopedia salesman, said, “Oh, we’ll cover that, Mrs. Baba, in the course of the meeting. Now, here’s some people you can have a nice chat with, J. Eugene Raxford and Miss Angela Tenn of the Citizens’ Independence Union.” Turning to us, he said, “May I present Mrs. Elly Baba of the Pan-Arabian World Freedom Society? A charming lady.” To the charming lady he said, “I leave you in good hands,” and slid out of our grasp like mercury, leaving the three of us together.

  Mrs. Baba looked at us suspiciously, checking us, I suppose, for Semitic characteristics, and said, “What kind of bunch are you?”

  “What’s that? Beg pardon?”

  “What’s your pitch?” she explained. “What are you for?”

  “Oh. We’re anti-border,” I said. “Unlimited travel, that’s us.” I turned to Angela. “Or is it unrestricted travel?”

  “Stinking idealists,” Mrs. Baba commented bitterly. “It’s your kind causes all the trouble, diverts the masses from the real problem.”

  I said, “Oh? Is that right?”

  “Damn well told,” she said. “Now us, the PAWF, we’re a practical organization, we got a program, we got a solution.”

  Once again I said, “Oh? Is that right?” Then I said, “What is the solution?”

  “We want,” she said fiercely, “we want Nasser and all the Ay-rabs to throw the kikes out of Israel and turn the country over to the so-called American Negro. It’s the least they can do for us,” she muttered passionately, “the stinking slave traders.”

  “The Jews?” I asked. I was interested despite myself.

  “No, not the Jews,” she snapped. “The Ay-rabs. They’re the ones ran the slave trade. Don’t you know anything?”

  “Very little,” I admitted.

  “Idealists,” she cursed, and curled her lip.

  Something made a repeated gavel sound—kat kat kat—and Eustaly’s voice rose above the hum of conversation, saying, “People! Be seated, please. We’d like to begin now.”

  Mrs. Baba swung on her heel and marched away from us without a goodbye. I looked at Angela, who was looking at me, and we moved closer together for a bit of warmth and sanity.

  All around us the mad scientists were settling into the folding chairs, most of them in the first two rows. By common consent, Angela and I chose row number four, on the aisle.

  When everyone was seated, Eustaly, standing at the front of the platform and smiling like a sly professor about to spring a surprise examination, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening, and welcome to the organizational meeting of the League for New Beginnings.”

  He paused, and beamed at us, and said, “I hope you’ll approve the name I’ve chosen. New beginnings are the ultimate goal of all of us, are they not? New beginnings which cannot come to their ascendancy until the old has been done away with.” Something dangerous gleamed in his face and voice when he said that, and when he added, “We are all of us in this room, I believe, vitally concerned with the doing away of the old.”

  That got him a rumble of agreement that made me think of feeding time at the zoo. He stood smiling above us, apparently unafraid of being eaten, and when the rumble died away, he said, “Now, I believe we should introduce ourselves.” He took a piece of paper from the desk. “As I mention your name,” he said, “please rise and tell us a little about the group you represent.” His smile dripping geniality, he added, “No speeches, please, we are a bit pressed for time. Just one or two brief sentences. Now, let’s see.” He consulted his list. “First, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp, Householders’ Separatist Movement, HSM. Mr. and Mrs. Whelp?”

  Two kindly-looking middle-aged overweight people in the front row got to their feet and faced us. If you have ever watched daytime television, you have seen Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp. The master of ceremonies carries a microphone up the aisle while the audience laughs at the sight of itself on the monitor screens, and Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp have the aisle seats about midway up on the left. The announcer, knowing these two will never say anything off-color, stops and asks, “And how long have you folks been married?” “Eighteen years,” says Mrs. Whelp, and blushes and smiles. Mr. Whelp smiles, too, and looks very proud.

  What was a couple like this doing at an organizational meeting of terrorists? After the monster at the door, and the cloakroom full of weapons, I’d expected an assembly of Boris Karloffs at the very least, not a couple of Saturday Evening Post subscribers. (With the paranoia inherent in every one of us, I suddenly began to suspect it was a gag after all, with me the butt, and so I looked around suspiciously, hoping to find somebody giggling behind his hand. But sober reflection for about an eighth of a second convinced me I was hardly likely to be the butt of a practical joke involving the active assistance of Angela, Murray, the FBI, and about fifteen total strangers. One way or the other, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp had to be legitimate terrorists.)

  They were. “I’m Fred Whelp,” Fred Whelp told us in a reedy voice, “and this is the missus. Now, what we of HSM believe is that the whole trouble in the world is because of the big nations like the United States and Russia. Things were better back when all the countries were small, so nobody could figure he could whip the whole world. Now, what we want is for all the states in the United States and all the states in Russia to separate from one another and be separate countries like in Europe and Africa. Now, the first step is for New York City and Long Island to secede from the United States and start our own country, and call it Roosevelt. New York City’s been robbed by those people up in Albany too long, and it’s time somebody did something about it.”

  Mrs. Whelp then said, in a voice like blueberry pie on the window sill in June, “We’ll help everyone here any way we can, and what we’d like you all to do to help us is help us blow up the Governor’s Mansion in Albany and maybe the United Nations Building later on, we’re not sure.”

  “To publicize our cause,” explained Mr. Whelp. “We know damn well public opinion would be on our side, but the damn newspapers—”

  “Thank you, Mr. Whelp,” Eustaly said, smoothly breaking into Fred Whelp’s developing harangue. “Thank you, Mrs. Whelp. And now I’d like you all to meet Mrs. Selma Bodkin of the Gentile Mothers for Peace, GMFP. Mrs. Bodkin?”

  Reluctantly, as Mrs. Selma Bodkin got up, the Whelps sat down.

  Mrs. Bodkin would also have been in that daytime television audience, but no announcer would be stopping to ask any questions of her. He’d pass right on by, knowing just from looking at her that she was (1) a widow, and (2) opinionated. A hefty woman packed into a black dress, she carried a shiny black purse hanging from her forearm, and her graying hair was in a severe permanent—home-induced—but a little disarrayed.

  She told us, without preamble and in a raucous voice, “This country today suffers from its enemies both within and without, and most of these enemies within are Commie-inspired. Don’t you think for a minute there’s anybody but the Communist Party behind the attempted mongrelization of our good old American blood lines. The Commies know their only chance to beat us for world domination is to sap our strength with a lot of inbreeding with inferior races like Catholics and Jews and Negroes. Mongrelization is the—”

  But she was drowned out by a sudden rash of shouts and calls from others prese
nt, who seemed for some reason to have taken offense at something Mrs. Bodkin had said. Over their cries Mrs. Bodkin could still be heard, roaring something about “… American boys and girls in the back seats of automobiles with …” And so on.

  Angela leaned close to me and whispered, “They’re crazy, Gene. They’re all crazy.”

  “I know,” I whispered back.

  “Catholics aren’t a race,” she whispered.

  I looked at her, and I didn’t say anything.

  Up front, Eustaly was making that gavel sound again—since nearly everyone was standing now, I couldn’t see whether he actually had a gavel or not—and he was calling for order, which he very gradually obtained. Silence eventually settled on the hall, a silence that quivered like a tuning fork. Nearly everyone was glaring at someone else.

  Eustaly, just the slightest bit ruffled, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please. As I said when I first approached each of you, among you there are wide divergences of opinion, opposing points of view. None of us will get anywhere if we allow ourselves to become emotionally involved in ideological disputes. Let us simply accept the fact that while we do have certain methods in common, otherwise we have nothing in common at all, and let us attempt for the general good to maintain at least a state of truce during the course of our association together in the League for New Beginnings.”

  These buttery sentences served to ease the tension in the air, permitting the combatants to relax a bit. When Eustaly paused to see if there was going to be any more trouble, the silence that met him was complete and unchallenging. He smiled, encompassing us all in his good feeling, and said, “Excellent. I knew I could count on your sense and discretion.” He consulted his list and said, “Next, Mr. Eli Zlott of True Zion Rescue Mission, TZRM. Mr. Zlott.”

  At first. it seemed that no one had stood up, but then I saw a head moving up there near the platform, and realized that Mr. Eli Zlott must be something under five feet tall. Except that he had a wild and wiry mass of gray-black hair atop his head, I had no idea what he looked like.