The Spy in the Ointment Read online

  What he sounded like, though, was something else again. His voice was as big as his body was small. It boomed out, sharp and rasping and irritating, as though coming to us through a really bad public address system.

  “Six million dead!” cried this voice. “That’s what we can thank the goyim for! And what do they do about it? A few Eichmanns they give us, and that’s supposed to make us happy? No! Total destruction of the German race, that is the answer, the only answer, the final solution! That German embassies should exist in New York City, in Washington, D.C., here in the heart of democracy, the greatest nation ever known, that we should get down on our knees and thank God every night, no! A thousand times no! Blow them up, burn them out, every man and woman and child of them, make the world safe for democracy! Is this—”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Zlott,” said Eustaly to this manic head of hair, taking the floor back.

  But Zlott wasn’t done. “As to this Mrs. Bodkin, this—”

  Zip! Mrs. Bodkin was on her feet again, shaking her fist, shouting this and that. Zlott replied in kind, and here came Mrs. Elly Baba, siding with Mrs. Bodkin against Mr. Zlott. But Mrs. Bodkin would have none of that, and made one or two suggestions to Mrs. Baba, who replied with immediate ferocity.

  Others were popping to their feet now, and with every sentence, every curse, every insult, the battle lines were drawn and redrawn and redrawn again, the alliances shifting back and forth like a tennis ball over a net, and above it all stood Eustaly, his expression pained, his hands out in a gesture imploring peace, his mouth working as he tried once again to butter the mob to tractability.

  I looked at Angela, but she was staring in fascination, enthralled, like a child watching heavy traffic. I knew there was no point trying to attract her attention now, so I had no one to whom to communicate my growing conviction that our presence at this synod of addlepates was a waste of time, energy, and adrenalin. I was slumming in a boobery, nothing more. This bag of mixed nuts was unlikely to stick together long enough to finish introducing themselves, much less go out in unison to kill innocent bystanders like me.

  When I thought how shaken I’d been all evening, how completely I’d accepted Murray’s notion that these goobers might be dangerous enough to kill me, I didn’t know whether to be sheepish or sore. But one thing was certain: at the first opportunity, I’d give Angela the high sign and we’d tiptoe back to what I was almost ready to consider the sane world.

  In the meantime, Eustaly was still at work up there on the platform, and I had to admit the man was good. Slowly but inexorably he was calming the birds once more, getting them to sit down, to be quiet, to listen.

  Eventually there was silence. The group itself seemed somewhat abashed at the violence it had tapped, and above them Eustaly withdrew a snowy handkerchief, patted his cheeks and forehead, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, really, I am surprised at you.”

  No one answered him. They were, I think, surprised at themselves.

  “This is not to our best advantage,” Eustaly went on. “We all desire, I know, to run this meeting in as orderly and efficient a manner as possible, so as not to take too much time from our busy schedules. I am sure, then, that you will all approve any attempt to keep order here.”

  He looked around, face by face, and got the nods of agreement he was requesting.

  “Fine,” he said, and smiled in gratitude. “Excellent. I knew I could count on your good sense.” He raised his head and called, “Lobo!”

  Lobo? I turned my head, and here came the monster. Stolid, heavy, implacable, he tromped past us and up onto the platform, where he stood behind Eustaly, facing us, and folded his arms.

  Smiling like a tax assessor, Eustaly told us, “Lobo will help us all keep our tempers.” Then he picked up his sheet of paper again and said, “Next, Mr. Sun Kut Fu of the Eurasian Relief Corps, ERC.”

  Mr. Sun Kut Fu was in the row directly in front of us. He stood up, a thin young dapper intense Oriental, and bowed briefly and contemptuously at us. He looked like an Ivy League college student, of the brilliant but argumentative type professors hate so much. “ERC,” he said, in a voice that sounded like a pair of scissors, “is the wave of the future. The day of the European is gone, the day of the American is ending, the day of the Asiatic is just beginning, our sun has just risen. Under the glorious leader Mao Tse-tung, having eliminated the Stalinist, Khrushchevist, Cominternist revisionists, the backsliding bourgeois of Russia and Eastern Europe, the world will know such peace and prosperity as has never existed before. Pax China! And where is the enemy? Not the slothful, overfed American, not the decadent European, not the deluded masses of the emerging nations, no. The true enemy is he who uses our ideals to subvert our goals. The so-called Communist Party! Yes, here in New York City there remains a nest of these Kerenskyites, oh, I don’t care what they call themselves, these one-worlders, these—”

  “Thank you,” Eustaly said, somewhat forcefully. “Thank you very much. We must move on.”

  Mr. Sun Kut Fu seemed to hesitate on the brink of rebellion, but behind Eustaly loomed the impressive figure of Lobo, and after a second Mr. Sun Kut Fu sat down.

  Eustaly next introduced Mrs. Elly Baba, who repeated for the edification of the group pretty much what she’d already told me personally, and after that it was my turn.

  I heard my name, my organization, my organization’s initials, and I didn’t quite know what to do. I stood up, gazed down at such faces as Gothic cathedrals are decorated with, and for just an instant I was bursting with the desire to tell these people who I really was, and then to tell them who they really were, and then to turn around and march contemptuously out on them.

  If it had just been the Bodkins and the Babas, I think I would have done it, but there were also the two on the stage to consider, and the two on the stage were something else again. Eustaly, no matter what odd groups he took it into his head to assemble, did not himself give the appearance of being a harmless nut. As to Lobo, he probably wasn’t the brightest guy in all the world, but on the other hand, brains aren’t everything.

  It was for the benefit of Eustaly and Lobo, therefore—not to mention my own benefit—that I said, fast and loud, hoping it would have the ring of sincerity to it, “We of the CIU believe there shouldn’t be any more borders. Unrestricted travel, that’s what we say, and we say if they put up a border we ought to knock it down. So that’s what we do. I thank you.” And I sat down.

  Eustaly beamed on me with real pleasure. “Admirably brief, Mr. Raxford,” he said. “Admirable. Let us hope that those who follow you will profit from your example.” He consulted his list and said, “Next is Mr. Hyman Meyerberg of the Progressive Proletarian Party, PPP.”

  Hyman Meyerberg, when he stood up, was tall and somewhat heavy, the man of good physique who’s allowed himself to go to seed, so that now he looks as though he’s covered with a layer of dumpling. He also looked like a cabdriver, and had thinning hair, balding badly above the forehead. You could tell he usually wore one of those caps. He said, with heavy sarcasm, “I agree with Mr. Sun Kut Fu, who spoke earlier, about the Communist cause being endangered by revisionists, but what he and his kind don’t seem to realize is he’s just as much a revisionist as the bureaucrats in Moscow. Stalin was the man, developing the doctrines of Lenin, building the true Marxist state, and all these Trotskyite Maoists with their primitive chauvinism have to be wiped—”

  Meyerberg was cut off abruptly by a sudden growl, low and menacing, the sort of sound a hibernating bear might make if you poked it with a stick. We all looked at Lobo, who had unfolded his arms and allowed them to hang at his sides, and who was staring fixedly at Meyerberg. Meyerberg cleared his throat, scratched his nose, hitched his trousers, and sat down.

  Eustaly, employing the delicate fiction that Meyerberg had sat down of his own accord, said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Meyerberg, I’m glad to see you maintaining the tradition of brevity begun by Mr. Raxford. Now, next we have Mr. Louis Lab
otski of the American Sons’ Militia, ASM.”

  All right. Meyerberg had looked like the guy who drove the cab by day, and now Labotski was the one who drove it by night. Shorter, thinner, sharp-faced, discontented-looking, the kind of man who has a transistor radio in the cab with him and plays nothing but rock ’n’ roll, full volume, hoping he’ll irritate the fares.

  He said, “ASM goes along in part with Mrs. Selma Bodkin of Gentile Mothers for Peace, a lady with who I have met at occasions of picket lines and suchlike in the past. We of ASM also believe that mongrelization of the races is the big danger facing the world today, as well as the problem of favored job referral treatment for niggers and forcing them into unions where their smaller brain cavities makes it impossible for them to learn the required skills, and all throwing honest American-born white workingmen out on the streets, what with families to support. All these NAACP and CORE niggers and their sympathizers has got to be shot down, is what, to show them you can’t take the bread out of the mouths of the little children of honest hard-working American workingmen. I thank you.”

  He sat down, but immediately popped up again to say, “But it’s just the niggers. Insofar as Jews and Catholics and Italians and Polish and the other minorities, these are all good honest hard-working American workingmen that deserve to be protected from the economic treatment they been getting. I thank you.”

  I looked at Angela, struck by a sudden thought, and whispered, “Are you writing this down?”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Oh, golly, I forgot all about it!” She scrabbled in her coat pocket for pen and pad.

  I thought of telling her never mind, this League for New Blockheads was hardly anything to get excited about or keep notes on, but then I thought again of Eustaly and Lobo, and I remembered the FBI somewhere in the outer brightness, and I decided to let it go.

  Meanwhile, Eustaly was introducing the next one, Mr. Lionel R. Stonewright of the Brotherhood of Christ Defense Fund, BOCDF. Lionel R. Stonewright, when he got to his feet, looked exactly like the movies’ idea of a banker: Louis Calhern.

  “Mr. Chairman,” said Lionel R. Stonewright formally, “ladies and gentlemen. I do confess some astonishment at having been invited to attend a meeting which appears to be composed primarily, if not entirely, of trade unionists. As president of the Brotherhood of Christ Defense Fund, the oldest continuously existent organization in the United States devoted exclusively to the supplying of strike breakers to industry, I assure you I take some small consolation from the thought that men I have hired have surely given most or all of you a taste of the club or the whip at some time in the past, or will do so at some time in the future.”

  Lobo growled, deep in his throat, but Stonewright ignored him, continuing, “Our chairman, Mr. Eustaly, suggested to me that it might be to my advantage, or to the advantage of the Brotherhood of Christ Defense Fund, were I to attend this meeting. How any such advantage could accrue from an alliance with Reds and subversives I cannot possibly imagine, nor do I see any reason why I should remain here another instant.”

  Eustaly, when faced with adversity, only smiled the harder. Now he smiled the hardest I’d yet seen from him, and said, “As I have mentioned several times, dear Mr. Stonewright, we in this room represent a broad spectrum of belief. It is not in the furtherance of any specific one of these beliefs that we have thus assembled, but in the hope that together we may increase the efficiency of our communal method.”

  “The Brotherhood of Christ Defense Fund,” Stonewright said icily, “doesn’t need any help.” He gave the rest of us a withering sneer. “Particularly,” he said, “from Wobblies.”

  “Wobblies!!”

  There was a general shouting and commotion once more, as Mrs. Baba, Mr. Zlott, Mrs. Bodkin, and both Whelps all leaped up, demanding to know how Mr. Stonewright could possibly call them Wobblies. I saw Eustaly turn and nod to Lobo, and then step back with a gentle look of understanding and of pity on his face.

  Lobo came down off the platform like a gorilla dropping out of a tree. He stepped in front of each of the shouters in turn, placed his huge palm atop the shouter’s head, and pushed downward until he or she had stopped shouting and started sitting. In less than half a minute he was done; there was absolute silence, and only Mr. Stonewright was still on his feet. Lobo looked around, nodded his satisfaction, and returned to the platform.

  Stonewright waited till Lobo was safely behind Eustaly again, and then said, “As is usual with leftists of the lower classes, nothing will keep you people in line but brute strength. I would not, let me assure you, consider contaminating my organization through association for even a minute with any one of you.”

  Eustaly, smiling and smiling, said, “Such a decision is regrettable, Mr. Stone—”

  “And final,” Stonewright snapped, cutting him off. “I would also like to warn you,” he added, “of my intention to inform the proper authorities concerning this subversive and no doubt Communist-inspired plot immediately upon leaving this hall.”

  Eustaly’s smile turned pensive as he said, “I would hope you don’t mean that, Mr. Stonewright.”

  “I assure you,” Stonewright told him, “that I mean every word of it.”

  “Ahh,” said Eustaly. “Too bad.” Smiling sorrowfully and patiently, he sighed and said, “Lobo.”

  “Close your eyes,” I whispered to Angela, and promptly closed mine. What was about to happen was, I knew, nothing for a pacifist to watch.

  It is, however, impossible to close one’s ears. I heard someone—Stonewright, I suppose—say, “Ulp!” Then I heard feet running; they went right past me, and in fact something brushed my left arm. Then, from behind me, there was a very odd sound: thok.

  Followed by: bakumple.

  Then: chup-chup-chup.

  Finally, after a brief but loud silence, Eustaly’s voice came from the front of the room, saying with fruity solemnity, “So unfortunate, that. I’d rather hoped we could avoid such things.”

  I opened my eyes, and looked at Angela, and she was staring at something behind us. I whispered, “Didn’t you close your eyes?”

  She swallowed, loudly, and looked at me, and whispered, “Gee whiz, noooo. You should have seen it, Gene!” She was really impressed.

  Up front, Eustaly was saying, “Lobo, put him in the checkroom, we’ll take care of him later. Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the disturbance, but of course none of us wanted that man going to the authorities.” He smiled kindly on us. “He knew our names,” he pointed out, “and our organizations. He could have created a good deal of trouble for everyone in this room.”

  About half of the audience was facing Eustaly, and the other half was all twisted around, studying something at the rear of the room. I looked at their faces, the ones who were turned this way, and I saw nothing in any of them but serious interest. An event had occurred which related to their specialty, and they took a natural interest in how the matter was handled. Not a one of them seemed surprised, horrified, shaken, or frightened by what had taken place.

  Well, and why should they be? They weren’t the spies in their midst. I was.

  I glanced at Angela, to see how she was taking it, but she was bent over her notepad, staring at her shorthand notes in a baffled and defeated way, and not at all with the rest of us. I turned all the way around and looked toward the rear of the room, but Lobo had already dragged the late Mr. Stonewright out of sight.

  Eustaly had paused to give us all a chance to reorganize ourselves, and now he said, “Next on my list I have Mr. P. J. Mulligan of the Sons of Erin Expeditionary Force, SOEEF. Mr. Mulligan.”

  Mr. Mulligan popped up like a jack-in-the-box, a scrawny, scrappy, sprightly fifty-year-old with graying hair, flashing blue eyes, and a bulbous red nose. He also had the most incredible set of gleaming white false teeth, several sizes too big for him, that made him look like the front of an automobile when he talked. (This, of course, was the by-stander who would immediately get into the brawl after a minor s
treet-corner collision between the cabs driven by Hyman Meyerberg and Louis Labotski.)

  “The one thing I’d like to say,” Mr. Mulligan began in a piping voice, flashing his teeth, employing the worst brogue ever heard off a stage, “is I’m impressed by the way you handled that Englishman, Stonewright. To tell ye the truth, I’d begun to think this was a namby-pamby organization, full of school-boys and milkmaids. If ye’ll all help us give the bloody English what they deserve, the Sons of Erin’ll guarantee to stand by your side through thick and thin. Now, the English—”

  But there I lost track, as an inner volcano suddenly erupted within my head.

  Really violent occurrences don’t affect us immediately, you know. They need time to sink in, to be understood and fully comprehended, time for a reaction to develop. My reaction to the dispatching of Lionel R. Stonewright was only just hitting me now.

  There but for the grace of God thokked I. How close I’d come to telling these people off, exposing myself as a spy in their midst, and defying Eustaly and Lobo exactly as the former Mr. Stonewright had done!

  Not that I’d changed my opinion of the League for New Beginnings. I was still unprepared to believe that the League itself, with such members as Mrs. Selma Bodkin, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp, Mr. Hyman Meyerberg, and the currently-spouting Mr. P. J. Mulligan, would ever be a danger to me or anybody else. Could Mrs. Elly Baba strike terror in the heart of anyone over the age of six? Could any organization—the League for New Beginnings or anybody else—send Mr. Eli Zlott out into the world on a terroristic mission in the expectation that he would actually do it and get it done right? Nonsense. They were a bunch of reject villains from Dick Tracy.

  Ah, but Eustaly was something else again. He too was probably a nut—as indicated by his associating with these other nuts by his own choice—but he was hardly harmless. Murray had been very nearly right after all; the League for New Beginnings would be unlikely to have come hunting me down had I neglected to appear here tonight, but Eustaly (or, more likely, Lobo) would definitely have done so, at once, to shut me up just as he’d shut Stonewright.