by Philip Wylie
The garage was as close to the Kalan as law permitted, with room for three cars and three electric doors. It could be entered from the house by way of the street or the bridge. Grove had added concealed staircases and a tunnel as a third means of passage between his residence and his vehicles.
All other changes were as well-hidden as the accesses to his tunnel. Some alterations had been expensive and were novel. Of them, several had been devised and installed by Grove. They were not what Eaper might have dreamed up; but Grove was, after all, a master of theatrical illusions—who could make live girls in gilded costumes vanish—or saw them in half—and materialize them, too, from thin air.
The grounds were beautifully planted and tended by a distant relative of his daytime housekeeper-cook, Jenny. A wall surrounded the property. It had a street-side gate. Local people understood the barrier—as protection against a rising tide of teen-age vandalism. Inward-slanting wires topped its cement blocks. The high wall concealed the property from anybody—save men on power lines, or people discourteous enough to bring up and mount ladders and, of course, any people who climbed on the steep pali, across the Kalan—a thing very few considered; the dark, step pyramid rises were of a crumbly consistency.
Certain of Grove’s possessions had arrived at night in small boats that made blacked-out trips from very large ones. The customs authorities were unaware of such imports. A few technicians had helped in the final phases of reconstruction—and returned to their widely scattered mainland homes, well paid by an obviously eccentric yet very amiable employer.
But Grove’s home and his grounds were thought, in Waimanalo, to be the most open and accessible of any among the “cottages” of wealthy haoles—luxury mansionettes built on this windward side of Oahu for summer migration to the cool trades which the mountains blocked from Honolulu residents, rich or poor. The idea that Grove’s ménage might be sinister would have been laughed at. And, once the work was done and the furnishing complete, Grove reinforced that concept by acts he thoroughly enjoyed. He became, in effect, the neighborhood uncle.
Scores of youngsters found that Grove not only liked kids but that he operated a part-time playground where you could learn a thousand things, such as how to walk on your hands, or juggle plates, or how to make like an acrobat—both on outdoor equipment and, when it rained, in a real gym.
He also lent fascinating books to everybody and didn’t complain if they came back battered, or even if they never came back. He could tell wonderful stories, too; stories about wild animals and ghost stories that never left children actually scared, as well as true stories about people you still saw on TV, like Shirley Temple, long since grown up, and W. C. Fields, who was dead. But there were some kinds of stories he didn’t tell.
Once Allan Mitsua, who had the features and skin color of a Japanese boy but red hair and blue eyes, asked Mr. Grove if he knew any spy stories. He said he didn’t. And he told no war stories, either.
There were other things, too—kind things—that Mr. Grove did or was believed to have done, in Waimanalo and nearby. Things like the money that came by mail to the mother of a boy in his “gang”—a poor family who lived in the Hawaiian Homelands and didn’t have a father. Mr. Grove never admitted doing such things; but they hadn’t happened till he came to Hawaii.
There were a few special rules, however, and they were dutifully obeyed. Kids could come on any Monday, Wednesday or Friday, after school; and all morning Saturday—except when he was away, which he’d usually tell them about well ahead, and the other times when he ran up a blue pennant on his flagpole, under the American flag. That meant he wasn’t to be disturbed. But it happened rarely.
Adults, too, found Grove a community asset, his suspected fiscal benefactions aside. He was willing, half the time and on short notice, to baby-sit. He got several boys out of trouble with the cops. He was a miraculous swimming teacher. He could even teach babies under three to swim. And at parties he often performed magic tricks. Even with ordinary playing cards, he could read minds. He taught many of his tricks to his gang, too.
And Mr. Grove took lessons himself—in Hawaiian and in Japanese. He studied Hawaiian with Miss Noe—Noe Roberts who taught history at Punaho and was a very pretty blonde; he studied Japanese with Mrs. Josephine Okuma, a widow who had been Miss Hawaii before she was married. The two ladies seemed slightly jealous of each other; but only slightly, Hawaii being Hawaii.
It was, then, a kindly and popular man who, at the moment, had fallen asleep in a chair, in a house on the beach where he’d lived for more than a year. And he was, in fact, precisely as generous and affectionate as he … deadly.
Three simultaneous events woke Grove.
The sun had cleared the Pacific, staggered into a ragged array of low clouds, climbed free and reached the point at which its rays, tropic-bright and very hot, pierced the oddly thick glass that protected his lanai, the local word for porch, and blazed on Grove’s eyelids.
Smoke was rising from a slowly smoldering carpet at his feet—after an hour’s endeavor by the red rim of combustion to do something really big with the fire-resistant material. It managed only to make a fume concentration thick enough to bother a sleeping, middle-aged man.
And chimes of a certain sort and sequence announced that somebody was outside the main gate, wanting in.
Grove woke and slowly gathered the nature of that trio of small torments. A fire extinguisher, fetched from the kitchen, did for the ambitious embers—and did nothing for the rug.
Merely getting up had solved the sun-smiting.
Grove opened the doors to the lanai after turning up the air conditioner. That promised to remove the smoke.
“I must,” he said to himself, in a not unusual way, “get a better-smelling type of carpet.”
Next he crossed the room and blew in the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned speaking tube, waited, blew again and finally got a startled but firm reaction. “Oddie, FBI,” a voice announced.
“Five minutes,” Grove called back.
“This is official, Mr. Grove.”
“You alone?”
“I am. Do I need guards?”
“No. But I need to finish my—ah—morning’s morning.”
“Oh. Then make it snappy as you can.” The voice seemed amused. “Morning’s morning!” Oddie’s grandfather had used that one.
Grove stretched and went to a bathroom off a short hall. “Typical,” he muttered, seeing his face in the cabinet mirror. He opened a window, washed, flushed the toilet and went to the floor below where he arranged a few things. He came upstairs calmly in three minutes and flushed the toilet again. He pocketed two toilet accessories.
Nothing in the present situation surprised him. He often fell asleep when very tired, in a chair, sometimes, and with a lighted cigar, occasionally. The results had, on several occasions, come almost as near to costing him his life as any other experience. Nothing to do about that, he had learned.
Grove possessed no faculty for setting a hypothetical alarm clock in his brain that would awaken him on the prearranged dot. He never woke up with an instant, ready-for-anything vitality. Following sleep, he would be somewhat feeble, a bit dull, not very ready to think about anything and probably not up to doing much, even under the greatest pressure. He could not, however, think of Oddie as a great pressure. He had taken pains to look over the local FBI head, long ago, and he had the man’s measure, he felt.
Oddie was the embodied ideal of the Founder—a J. Edgar Hoover dream boy: nice, courteous and Christian; a YMCA athlete and religious service leader; a scoutmaster and an accountant. He was also a lawyer and handsome, in the square, empty, regular-profiled manner of male shirt models. He was top, or near it, in amateur squash. (Was there a professional sort of squash? Grove had marveled at the blank.) An A-one man, further, with a teacup, or a bridge hand, a vaulting pole (college, that was), gun, knife and whatever fast-draw dinguses were used in the FBI, currently. And dedicated. To the excessive degree of not being
, so far, anyhow, married; dedicated over and above duty’s call. Grove was a hard man to amaze; Oddie had come close.
At one period during Grove’s covert watch, Oddie, disguised as a tourist, spent eleven successive nights at the Frisbie Tahitian show.
One of the Frisbie dancers, a girl named Maunamauna, aged sixteen, had become very much attracted to the mustached, fez-wearing Shriner from Valley City, North Dakota. The girl picked him, night after night, as her partner in the hula “lesson,” an audience-participation event which broke up the spectators. The Dakota delegate (whose cheeks weren’t really as fleshy as they seemed or abdomen as Masonic) studiously tried to be as inept as the other aging, overweight victims. But he improved—at first, perhaps, to maintain his role. Later, however, the lovely lass and her innate lasciviousness affected Oddie. His “hula”—and Maunamauna’s—became wilder and very intimate: she had a banner-bright thing for him and he began to catch it.
Duty compelled Pilford Oddie to bear up. The FBI was close to a loss of face provoked by a lovely, licentious and plainly delinquent juvenile when, on the eleventh night, Oddie arrested sixth most wanted man, “Croke” Davis. He never again visited that night club or got in touch with the briefly bereft damsel. Grove had asked the lass.
Such was the devotion of the man now at the gate. Grove pondered the phenomenon with disapproval as he began undoing locks. He crossed the wooden bridge without glancing down, used another key and opened the gate—on Oddie, and two added but unannounced FBI associates, both Christian types.
“Well,” Grove said, “come in.”
Oddie had meant to. “I was just pushing your bell when my friends happened by.” He smiled vigorously.
Grove merely nodded and led them toward the house. They didn’t even realize they were crossing a bridge; all three were closely watching their host. “Been asleep,” Grove said as he reached the first of his double front doors and sorted keys. “Glad to have you aboard. You’re Oddie, local head, I believe? But—the other two?”
The Bureau chief held up the group to introduce them. “Porter Hollis and Dexter Mult.” Both extra G-men (as Grove thought of them) looked their part: shaved, neat, eyes not quite blue enough, smiles like pasties, handshakes fierce—and both, ten pounds underweight for innocent citizens of their height. They were also professionally inconspicuous, even anti-conspicuous-looking, as if they had attained their job limit, in banking, say: tellers, whose computerized appraisal warranted no further promotion but whose rut-status elicited from others not so much sympathy as hazed vexation.
Grove, smiling happily, repeated, “Come in! Come in!” and swung the outer door.
“Lead the way, sir!” Oddie invited.
That was expected but Grove seemed not to know it. (If possible, you keep your enemy out front.) The three men followed, tensing a bit as Grove reached into a pocket—relaxing when he produced a small round mirror and a comb. He halted, trying to organize the tangle of his thickish, wavy hair. He could see by the stratagem that all three gave long, hard scrutiny to his many locks. And afterward, all three traded what were smiles and presumed private: the locks would be pie, if a time came.
As they entered the living room Hollis muttered, “Smoke in here, Chief.”
Grove now employed the ruse of a stage magician whose illusion seems to have failed: an assumed embarrassment. The audience accepts it as an acknowledgment of blunder. Then the real trick is done—with doubled impact. He pointed at the yard-wide, sodden hole in his carpet. “Fell asleep. Dropped my cigar. Woke me up—the fire. Just moments before you gentlemen—”
“—barged in,” Oddie finished. “Sorry.”
“You’d like some coffee? I haven’t had breakfast—”
The two subordinates eyed Oddie with the anxiety of people offered wine by a Borgia. Grove waved them toward chairs and indicated a door. “Kitchen, in there.”
Oddie’s mind went pocketa-pocketa. “See here, Grove,” he said pleasantly. “Why not let Mult do the coffee bit while we get on with our talk? Though I take it you have a servant?”
“Not here. Day off.” Grove looked uncomfortable. “I’ll gladly make the java; kitchen’s a bit of a mess. And I usually have cornflakes—” A wistful note, there.
Two and a half jaws dropped, Oddie having made the superior showing. Here sat a rumpled, ordinary man of middle age in a dirty, torn sports shirt, wrinkled slacks, and no socks, one who had red-rimmed eyes and needed a shave, but was trying to be hospitable—in spite of everything. This foggily genial character owned a quite large house on expensive property that was protected by a system of locks that a clumsy burglar ought to be able to pick with a bobby pin. He’d combed his semi-silver hair with a mirror about a half century out of date and a comb that lacked several teeth. A man just wakened, who had found a murder victim hours before, wanted cornflakes, for God’s sake, and was, Oddie had been informed …
Ringling Wallenda Grove. Not R.K., as his mailbox said. The legendary Grove!
For a moment Oddie believed this fuzzy-looking codger had to be an imposter. The idea crashed across his mind so forcefully that he compelled himself to compare, mentally, the photographs of the famous agent with this older face. The wide-apart eyes checked. Here was the high forehead, the slightly snubbed but not stubby nose, the broad mouth, usually smiling, and the deep and delighted voice, all noted in the records. Exceedingly powerful but not large hands—Oddie could not be sure of the power element. Nor, so far, of a tendency to use them with great dexterity. Breadth of shoulder and thickness of body giving illusion of shorter person than an actual five-ten and three quarters. That, too, applied. Oddie, however, was still unable to believe the man now slumped in a leather chair had ever heard a shot fired in anger, not to mention broken into the Kremlin and committed robbery … among other things related by old-timers after a beer or two.
Mult went toward the kitchen, with instructions from Grove, who then smiled at the chief. “How’d you learn, so fast?”
Oddie, still on the verge of certainty he had made some sort of damaging blunder, gulped in relief. He answered, “Prints. Satellite.”
Grove laughed heartily. “Be damned! Where’d you take ’em?”
“Handle and thumb latch of your gate. Ten minutes after you got home last night. Bounced them over this morning.” He gave that restricted information out of grateful relaxation.
At that same moment, Grove’s brain began to work properly. This dream boat was too perfect; nobody could be that near to ideal FBI type. But a good actor could, even probably would, overplay this role owing to his experience of public expectations. He was amazed he hadn’t thought of it before; Oddie was an our-side double agent; a federal hermaphrodite; a trained impersonator; a much more informed person than Grove had hitherto assumed, among his additional qualifications. It took very little more time for Grove to contrive a test of his hunch.
“Satellite! For heaven’s sake!” He seemed awe-stricken. “But—why? I was the first to find that body—whoever it is. Was. Ohhh! The throw? That set you off? Coy annoyed me, but I shouldn’t have reacted. Out of practice.”
Oddie was nodding. “The toss you gave Coy. Incidentally, Coy’s ready to apologize. He lost his temper. Disgrace to the Bureau! He’ll be back in Records for a year, at the least!”
“I’m the one who should apologize. I baited your man. And he had no idea of—my—well—past—”
“Very decent of you to take that attitude.”
“What other? I’ll write a note to that effect to your Top.” Oddie again nodded with appreciation and Hollis almost beamed. Coy was his best friend.
Grove went on, brushing their thanks away in order to express a childish fascination. “Am I right, now? You got my prints and rushed them to Honolulu? Sent them via satellite to Washington—and got back the answer so fast you could be at my door in—”
Oddie wished he hadn’t mentioned the print-sender even by inference. “Things are very swift—mechanized—nowadays.”
“I know.” Grove was humble. But he asked, absently and soon, “Which plant sent back the dope?”
“Eh?” Oddie wasn’t sure what Grove meant.
“High or low?”
Grove seemed not to watch the FBI man. His eyes went out toward the brilliant morning. But he still saw what he had evoked: not so much a change in Oddie’s color or in his facial expression as that less conspicuous thing—a subcutaneous effort to prevent surface alteration—a passage of spark-fast near nothing, as if Oddie’s skull had gripped the muscles and capillaries that covered bone, to stop any shift in the external flesh. Only one who had learned the same control could discern it—a sort of non-effect.
Oddie was quite good at it—and quick, afterward. “I’m afraid I don’t get you.” Tone also correct, Grove noted. Score one for me, he thought, before proceeding with his own, equally demanding charade.
“Hell, man! My obsolescence is showing! In the old days the OSS often worked with the FBI. Delivering messages, for instance—a poor analogue for the satellite bit, I must say. We called both outfits shops, plants, factories, what not. The Bureau was ‘high’; we were ‘low’—being ‘underground.’”
He thought Oddie might check that—and get lost because it was almost true. And he did not want the other man to realize he had found him out: Oddie was FBI and CIA-wherefore more CIA than FBI. What a cover! Chitchat, he felt, was now in order: a quasi-official sort, related to the body in the Reef Tank. Grove began making not quite bright queries and Oddie fenced—in a patronizing way.
Mult came in with the coffee and served it before bringing another tray—of cornflakes: the box, cream in its waxed container, bowl, spoon, and a cup of sugar. The G-man set the second tray on the table beside Grove with a stare of revolted incredulity. He would have had the same expression if he’d been ordered to prepare and serve stewed toads.