The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  L and M and N and O all chuckled at one another when I said that, and shifted around where they sat, as though I’d asked them if they didn’t belong to the Boy Scouts. P, his world-weary smile showing some world-weary amusement, said, “No, Mr. Raxford, not the CIA either. I very much doubt you would have heard of us.” He cocked an eye at the other four. “Would he, boys?”

  “Ho ho,” they said, and “Certainly,” and “Oh, sure.”

  They didn’t know it, those guys, but they were Boy Scouts. I could see them now, horsing around the campfire and tying knots. They went to Midwestern colleges, too. And graduated.

  “Well,” said P, sobering again, “back to business. The final mark in your favor is this Odd Fellows’ Hall. The place was empty by the time we got there, of course, but it had been rented for tonight by some group calling itself the South Side Social Club, and no such group appears to exist. Also, they paid the rental fee in cash. In addition, some small stains were found in the cloakroom, possibly blood, we should have the lab report on that by morning.”

  One of the others—M, I think—said, “And the tails, Chief.”

  “Oh, of course,” said P. “Eli Zlott and Mrs. Elly Baba are both under full surveillance these days, and both managed to evade their shadows shortly before midnight tonight.” He smiled somewhat bleakly and said, “Of course, so did you.”

  “The hell we did,” I said.

  Angela said, “We waited for them. They lost us.”

  P scrunched his cheeks up and said, “What?”

  “Going through Columbus Circle,” I said. “Somehow or other they lost us. There were two of them, in a blue Chevy. We stopped as soon as we saw they weren’t with us anymore, and waited about five minutes, but they never showed up.”

  “We couldn’t wait anymore,” Angela explained. “We didn’t want to be late for the meeting.”

  L and M and N and O were all chuckling and shifting again. P, a twinkle in his eye, glanced at them, and said, “Maybe we just better not mention that to the boys over at the Square, eh, fellas?”

  “Ho ho,” they said, and “Yuk yuk,” and “Oh, sure.” Rover boys.

  I said, “I wanted the FBI around tonight. You think I wanted to go to that meeting alone?”

  “I won’t argue with you,” P said, still feeling humorous. “Now,” he said, turning the twinkle off, “about your presence at that meeting in the first place, we’ve talked with this lawyer friend of yours, Murray Kesselberg, and he—”

  “Murray? You woke him up?”

  “Not exactly.” Twinkle on again, P said to O, “He wasn’t exactly asleep, was he?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” said O, twinkling right back. “Not exactly asleep. In bed, all right, but not what you’d call asleep.”

  “Murray,” I said, “will kill me.”

  Angela reached out and took my hand. “It isn’t your fault, Gene,” she said softly. “Murray will understand.”

  “Ho ho,” I said, and “Certainly,” and “Oh, sure.”

  P said, “At any rate, Kesselberg verifies your motive in attending the meeting. As I understand it, from what both of you say, you were afraid Eustaly and the others might come to silence you if you did not attend, but that you could possibly get proof of the organization’s existence to turn over to the FBI if you did go.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Angela said, contritely, “I’m sorry about my notes.”

  P smiled at her in a more or less fatherly fashion, saying, “That’s perfectly all right, Miss Ten Eyck. Very few people would be able to take legible shorthand notes under such trying circumstances.” He glanced at the notebook in question, sitting, on his desk, containing several pages of op art. “Perhaps,” he said doubtfully, “a shorthand expert will be able to read at least a part of it.”

  “Nobody can ever read my shorthand,” Angela said mournfully. “Not ever.”

  I looked at her. “You never told me that before,” I said.

  “Well, I try,” she insisted. “I try and try and try, and it just never comes out right.”

  I looked at P, and P looked at me, and for one blinding instant that must have been equally startling to both of us, there was a perfect bond of understanding and sympathy between us. Then he cleared his throat, and rattled some papers, and looked down at his desk, and said, “Well, it hasn’t been totally in vain.” He picked up a piece of paper, saying, “You have given us the names of some of the people present, and something of the affiliations of one or two of the others whose names you didn’t remember.” He looked at the list and shook his head. “I must say this shapes up as a rather unusual grouping.”

  Angela said, “They kept wanting to fight one another all the time.”

  P nodded at her. “I should think so.”

  “I’m surprised the meeting lasted as long as it did,” I said.

  “Are you?” P shook his head. “We’re not. In fact, Mr. Raxford,” he said, “we’re very concerned about this League for New Beginnings.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “I know you people like to play foreign intrigue, but that crowd? They’re a bunch of cocoanuts.”

  P looked at me, flat-eyed, and said, flat-voiced, “Do you think so, Mr. Raxford?”

  “Not Eustaly,” I said. “Not Ten Eyck. I’ll grant you those two are probably dangerous. And Lobo, if somebody with brains tells him what to do. But all those other wacks kept reminding me of the kind of guy sits down next to you on a crowded subway and starts talking to little green men.”

  P said, “You don’t take them seriously.”

  “Not for a minute,” I said.

  P motioned to O. “Give Mr. Raxford the essentials,” he said.

  O got up from his perch on the radiator, said, “Right, Chief,” and went over to open the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

  P said to me, “These are just on the names you remembered. The others present will more than likely be cut from the same cloth.”

  “Crazy quilt,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” said P, and gestured for O to begin.

  O had taken a manila folder from the drawer, shut the drawer, and opened the folder atop the cabinet. He riffled through sheets of paper in the folder, selected one, and said, “Mrs. Elly Baba. Very religious woman. She was a Baptist until 1952, when, while serving a jail sentence for having stabbed her third husband, she was converted by the Black Muslims. The Muslims apparently tapped deep anti-white feelings that her Baptist religion had kept submerged, but didn’t really permit her any specific outlet for those feelings. Between 1954 and 1960 she belonged to a succession of rightist Negro organizations, each of a more violent type than the last, ultimately entering the Pan-Arabian World Freedom Society in 1961, and becoming the group’s leader in 1964. Its present membership is estimated at approximately forty-five. Mrs. Baba is generally considered by students on the subject to be the most violent woman in Harlem, and possibly in the world.”

  He chose another sheet of paper. “Patrick Joseph Mulligan,” he said. “Native-born, so we can’t very well deport him. He’s served one term in a federal penitentiary for bank robbery. The Sons of Erin Expeditionary Force has been active for the last thirty-seven years in this country, primarily as an unacknowledged collector of moneys for Irish independence groups both in Ireland and the British Isles. Bank robbery was a favorite fund-raising technique of the IRA in its heyday, which seems to be where the Sons of Erin got the idea. For the last few years they seem to have been relatively inactive, though they have created street disturbances in front of the British Embassy and so on. Mulligan has led the organization for seven years.”

  Another sheet. “Eli Zlott,” he said, “is something else again. He apparently wants to be a cold-blooded killer, in fact, a mass murderer, but he always changes his mind at the last minute. He has several times been successful in placing large and extremely dangerous explosive devices in German embassies, hotel suites occupied by visiting German dignitaries, and so on, but invariably, shortly bef
ore the bomb is to go off, he telephones, warns whoever answers that a bomb has been planted, and urges everyone to clear the area. In every case so far, a quick search has been made, the bomb has been found, and no explosion has occurred. It is believed that Zlott’s wife, Esther Zlott, has always been the softening influence who has convinced Zlott to make his phone calls. Esther Zlott died three months ago, run down by a hit-and-run driver in a Volkswagen.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Angela.

  “We believe,” O said quietly, “that Zlott will perhaps be more dangerous now.” He reached for a new sheet.

  “Jack Armstrong,” he read, “appears to have been pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi all his life, even though he was only four years old in 1945, when the Third Reich came to an end. The National Fascist Reclamation Commission is a group he started personally while in high school, with a membership of his close friends, fluctuating between seven and twenty-two members. The group does a lot of swastika-painting, pickets civil rights pickets, and may be behind some rifle sniping and synagogue vandalism, though there’s never been convictable proof. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Armstrong is psychotic and at least potentially homicidal.”

  Next. “Mrs. Selma Bodkin, widow, fifty-seven years of age. She has been a member of the Gentile Mothers for Peace since its founding in 1947, and its president since 1958. She was jailed just once, for assault. In that case, she had attended a wrestling show at St. Nick’s Arena, in which the main event was between a white wrestler called Captain America and a Negro wrestler called Violent Virgil. When Violent Virgil won the final fall by what Mrs. Bodkin considered unethical methods, she left her seat, climbed into the ring, and beat Violent Virgil with a rolled-up newspaper concealing a length of lead pipe. She was given a suspended sentence, and there was never sufficient proof to indict her for the subsequent bombing of Violent Virgil’s house in St. Albans, Queens. She and her group may have been involved in other bombings, though we can’t be sure, but we do know they’ve made a habit of attacking civil rights pickets with the lead pipes in rolled-up newspapers, they’ve descended en masse on lovers’ lanes in the area, and caused a great deal of damage to a Long Island drive-in theater which refused to turn away automobiles containing inter-racial groupings. Whether Mrs. Bodkin has personally killed anyone yet or not, we don’t know. We do know she wants to.”

  O put the papers back in the folder, the folder back in the drawer, and himself back on the radiator.

  P said to me, “Well?”

  I said, “Well what?”

  He said, “Do you still believe these people harmless?”

  “Not a bit of it,” I said. “I never thought they were harmless. They’re crazy, and crazy people sometimes do damage. But what you were talking about was this League for New Beginnings, and that’s something else again. You can’t get a bunch of yoyos like that together and get them to do anything. Believe me, I’ve seen these people, this exact same kind of people, and they’re never any good for anything.”

  P said, “You’ve seen people like this before?”

  “Not violent,” I admitted. “But the same, just the same.”

  “I wish you’d explain that,” he said.

  I said, “You get a big peace rally, one of the really big ones on something in the headlines, where all the peace groups join in, and you get this kind of nut. All passion and excitement, no brains. You want an orderly march in front of the White House, these kooks want to run in and have a sit-in on the President’s desk. They’ve got no discipline, no head for plans, nothing like that. All they want to do is run, jump, holler, wave signs, make a big noise. These people tonight are the same thing, except they want to hit people, too. But that type is almost impossible to get into any kind of orderly group or plan or anything.”

  P said, “Almost impossible, Mr. Raxford?”

  “Keeping that kind in line,” I said, “is no picnic, believe me.”

  “For Eustaly?” he asked me. “And Ten Eyck? Not to mention Lobo.”

  I just shook my head.

  P said, “Ten Eyck and Eustaly are no fools, Mr. Raxford, please take my word for that. I will take your word that they have brought together an assembly of fools, but they themselves are anything but foolish. Whatever the membership of the League for New Beginnings may be or think, those who organized it have done so for a specific and logical and realizable purpose.”

  “If they can hold that bunch together,” I said.

  “Exactly. If they can weld this group into a functioning organization, they’ll have one of the most frightening internal weapons of subversion and sabotage the world has ever seen.”

  “If,” I said.

  “Will you accept the possibility?” he asked me.

  Grudgingly, I nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. “Not probable, but possible.”

  He looked hard at me, but hard. “We must stop them, you know,” he said.

  I said, “What?” Belatedly, it was occurring to me to wonder why he’d worked so hard to convince me the League might be a menace after all, and now that the horse was gone, I began to look around for a quick way to lock the barn.

  “In time of emergency,” he said, still looking at me hard, “it is the duty of every citizen to do his part.”

  “I’m a pacifist,” I said. “Let’s not lose sight of that.”

  “Under normal circumstances,” he said, “I would have no objection to you or anyone else pursuing the course of the conscientious objector. But this—”

  “I’m not a conscientious objector,” I said, “I’m a pacifist There’s a difference. We’re big-endians and they’re little-endians.”

  “Little Indians?”

  “Oh, never mind,” I said. “The point is, whatever you want me to do I have strong moral, ethical, and personal objections to doing it.”

  Beside me, Angela stuck her jaw out and said, “That’s right, Gene. And me, too, that goes for me, too.”

  P smiled bleakly. “Mr. Raxford,” he said, “perhaps you haven’t thought this situation through as yet, perhaps there are one or two factors you don’t have a clear sight of.”

  “If you think you can force me—”

  “Mr. Raxford, co-operation cannot be forced. And even if it could be, I assure you I would not even be tempted to try it.” P’s smile got bleaker and bleaker. “Out there, Mr. Raxford,” he said, with a dramatic gesture toward the airshaft, “is your friend Mortimer Eustaly. Tyrone Ten Eyck is out there, too, Mr. Raxford, and so is Lobo.” He paused for effect, then said, blandly, “And do you know, Mr. Raxford, who they are thinking about right now?”

  I said, “Wha? Wha?”

  “They’re thinking about you, Mr. Raxford.”

  “Now, wait,” I said.

  “And do you know,” he continued, despite me, “what they are thinking about you?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  P smiled with crocodile sadness, shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “Thank you for chatting with us, Mr. Raxford,” he said. “If you have no wish to help us, you may leave now. You’re completely free to go. You won’t be bothered—by us—any more. In fact, the surveillance the FBI has maintained on you will even be lifted. Isn’t that nice?”

  “Now, look,” I said.

  L came forward, saying, “Any place I can drop you folks?”

  I said to P, “You can’t do this, you can’t just send me out there. Eustaly and Ten Eyck, they’ll try to kill me.”

  “Mr. Raxford,” he said, “if you think you can force us to protect you …” And he gave me the most obnoxiously smug smile I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Angela,” I said, “cover your ears.”

  She touched my arm, saying, “Gene, wait a minute.”

  “Cover your ears!”

  “No, listen to me. You don’t even know what they want, Gene. Find out what they want first.”

  I told her, with barely controlled impatience, “If they wanted anything I’d be willing to go along with, they’d just ask. Do
ing it this way, it’s got to be something really terrible.”

  P said, ‘‘Not at all, Mr. Raxford, not at all. We would give you every protection, I assure you.”

  I said to Angela, “Hear that? Every protection. You know what that means? They want me to jump off a cliff and carry my own net.”

  P said, “We don’t want you to do anything at all. The choice is yours.”

  “Some choice,” I said.

  “Actually,” he said, “it is a choice. You can choose to meet Eustaly and Ten Eyck again all by yourself, or with us. It’s as simple as that.”

  “The question is,” I said, “am I as simple as that.”

  P ostentatiously moved papers around on his desk. “I do have other work to get to tonight, Mr. Raxford.”

  “I could always hide out,” I said. “Leave New York, disappear until it’s all over.”

  “Bon voyage,” he said.

  I said to him, “Will you please stop making it so hard for me? Will you just once stop being so smug and happy about yourself, and ask me? You want my help; will you stop black-mailing me for a second and just ask me to help you?”

  But he couldn’t do it. A man who’s divided the world into duties and privileges can’t possibly comprehend favors. “In time of emergency,” he started again, “every citizen—”

  “What are you?” I asked him. “A recording?”

  N came over at that point, leaned on the desk between us, and said to P, “Chief, let me talk to Raxford a second.”

  P gestured as though he’d given me up. “Go right ahead.”

  N looked at me. “We could use your help, Mr. Raxford,” he said. “The Chief has a lot on his mind, you know; Eustaly and Ten Eyck aren’t the only subversives we’re trying to neutralize. In their case, you could do more to help than anyone else, and you can’t blame the Chief if he doesn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to help, can you?”

  “I don’t want to help,” I said, “because I don’t want to be killed. Does that make it any clearer?”

  “Then you want our help, too,” N pointed out. “Each of us needs the other, Mr. Raxford. Frankly, I think the Chief understands that more than you do.”