“I will,” I promised, and past her shoulder I could see Ten Eyck watching it all, smiling to himself. Ten Eyck was a man interested in control, in how it is obtained and how it is lost. In this relatively unimportant situation, the matter of the hunting jacket, I had lost control of the outcome—I was wearing a jacket I obviously didn’t want to wear—and Ten Eyck took a rather clinical enjoyment in watching the process by which I’d been unhorsed and jacketed. (Also, I think, he had a cautious respect for me, thinking me another such as himself, and it pleased him to see me fail in a situation, no matter how unimportant, in which he would not have failed.)
Still promising faithfully to wear the jacket, I’d wear it, I’d wear it, I got into the back seat of the Mercury, which, oddly enough, was the same combination of red and black exterior as the jacket, except that on the car the red was perhaps softer and closer to orange. Eustaly was in the passenger seat up front, and Armstrong was to take the first turn at driving.
The Bodkin driveway connected, near the trees, with a dirt road that went through the trees and led to a blacktop county road on the other side. The county road in turn led to a highway, which led to the Garden State Parkway, which led to the New York State Thruway, which led north.
The three of us were silent as Armstrong steered the car around the house and down the driveway and along the dirt road. As we turned onto the county road, however, Eustaly cautioned him, “Don’t break any traffic laws. We don’t want to get stopped in this car, it’s stolen.”
I closed my eyes.
20
We made good time, all things considered, arriving at the rendezvous point, on Route 9 above Chazy, eight miles from the Canadian border, just as dawn was coming up on our right across Lake Champlain. I had taken the second turn at driving, mostly the Thruway, and Eustaly did the last hundred-odd miles. He got cold and I didn’t, so when we stopped to switch driving chores from me to him I gave him the hunting jacket as well. “Just give it back before we get to the house again,” I said. “I wouldn’t want Mrs. Bodkin to think I’d taken it off.”
“That old crow,” Eustaly said ungraciously, and struggled into the hunting jacket over his pearl-gray suit. On him, even the hunting jacket came close to looking suave; some people have that particular quality, and some others don’t.
Armstrong kept threatening to go to sleep during that final leg, but I’d have none of it. I wanted Eustaly to know he had two wide-awake opponents to contend with, in case he was thinking of starting something. So while Armstrong stretched drowsy and irritable across the back seat, I sat up front next to Eustaly and talked to the two of them—but mostly to Armstrong—about anything that came into my head. It was sheer luck I didn’t at any point drift into a speech on pacifism.
But if Eustaly had made any tentative plans for making away with the suitcases full of money, he gave no sign of it. He devoted his attention to his driving, chuckled politely whenever, in the course of my yammer, I told a joke, and was, all things considered, good as gold.
The rendezvous was a defunct fruit stand on the east side of Route 9, an establishment that had withered away when the former flood of Montreal-bound tourists on this road had been diverted to the new Highway 87, a multi-lane road that by-passed everything in sight.
We arrived at the fruit stand first, pulled the car around behind it, and got out to stretch our legs. “Be sure to wipe fingerprints off,” Eustaly told us, scrubbing away at the steering wheel with a handkerchief. “We’re going to leave this here.” So we wiped our fingerprints off.
The truck arrived about fifteen minutes later, followed closely by a tiny dusty black Sunbeam. The truck looked old and tired and topheavy, one of those wheezing monsters John Garfield and Richard Conte used to drive during the Depression, except those had California plates and this one bore plates from the province of Ontario. (Another small difference; those old trucks usually carried tomatoes, while this one carried enough explosive to take Highway 87 back off the map again.)
A bearded man in a mackinaw got out of the truck, and a weasely man in a black raincoat got out of the Sunbeam. They walked over to us and the weasely man said, “Where is it?”
Armstrong said, “In the trunk. I’ll get it.” He brought the two suitcases over and the bearded man took them, carried them as easily as Armstrong had, and put them into the Sunbeam.
“That’s it,” said the weasely man. “The truck’ll be picked up tonight. You’ve got your jam, we’ve got paid for both jobs.”
Eustaly said, “Both jobs?”
“Right,” said the weasely man. “His nibs called us after you left, said there was some extra in there for a little piece of work he wanted from us.” He grinned, in a weasely way, and took a pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired it at Eustaly three times.
Armstrong and I froze in our tracks. I know I expected to be next, and I’m pretty sure Armstrong had the same pessimistic outlook. My throat became very dry, my fingers began to stretch away from one another as though I were growing webs between them, and for some idiot reason my lower lip got extremely heavy.
But there was no more shooting. Eustaly fell onto the gravel beside the fruit stand, the weasely man put his pistol away again, and the bearded man came over to say to his friend, “Just bravado, that. One would have done it.”
“I felt like a little noise,” said the weasely man, and grinned again.
The bearded man picked Eustaly up and carried him over to the Mercury and propped him behind the wheel. The weasely man, cheerful as a bird in the morning, explained to us, “He’s wanted, see, and the car’s wanted, so there’ll be no questions. The cops around here are a dumb lot anyway.”
The two of them got into their Sunbeam and drove away.
For the first time I noticed Armstrong. He looked very white, almost blue-white, particularly around the eyes. The skin seemed stretched over his face, his eyes seemed larger than usual, and he stood as though balancing an egg on his head.
That may be what helped me get my own balance back, seeing how badly Armstrong was taking it. And when he said, “I think I’m—” and staggered away behind the fruit stand to be sick, I knew I was going to be all right.
I had a chance now to make a getaway. In the truck or without it, either way. Get to the nearest town, even to the nearest phone. There’d be trouble at first, because officially I was wanted for the murder of Angela, but that would be explained away in time, and I could tell P and the others what I’d learned.
But what had I learned? Ten Eyck planned to blow up the UN Building, that’s all I knew for sure. I didn’t know when, I didn’t know why, I didn’t know who had hired him, and I didn’t even know how he planned to do it. Also, there was the business of the bomb in the U.S. Senate. He’d abandoned that idea for another one, but I didn’t know what. I could tell P practically nothing. In fact, since P already knew about Ten Eyck’s discussing, at the organizational meeting, both explosives and the United Nations, even the news about blowing up the UN wouldn’t be entirely fresh and unexpected.
If only I could sneak away long enough to make a quick phone call, and then come back. But with Armstrong around, that was impossible, and I didn’t see any way to get rid of Armstrong temporarily without exciting somebody’s suspicions. Either I had to give up the whole scheme now, or carry it on awhile longer.
Of course, if I left now, Ten Eyck would suddenly learn a lot of things. That Angela wasn’t dead, for instance. That I was a double agent. That his presence here in the United States was known to the authorities. All in all, it seemed to me the only one I could help by taking off now was Tyrone Ten Eyck.
Except me, of course. I was likely to live longer if I left now.
Or was I? With Tyrone Ten Eyck still on the loose? The Feds would never get to the Bodkin place before Ten Eyck had flown the coop, not a chance of it. So Ten Eyck would be free, would know everything, and would be looking for revenge, both on me and on Angela. And the Feds would learn nothing. And I would h
ave done nothing.
I stood there with a pistol weighing down my pants pocket, making my trousers droop on that side, and while my Nazi friend upchucked on the fruit stand, I came to the slow, reluctant, painful but inevitable conclusion that this little fly was going to have to go back into the spider’s parlor.
Armstrong returned, looking paler and yet more alive. “I’m all right now,” he croaked, which was true only relatively speaking.
I said, “Do you want to drive? Or sleep?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, shocked. “I couldn’t drive either, look at my hands.” He held them out and let me see them shake. They shook.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll drive. You just sit there.”
“I’m not used to this,” he said, apologetically now. “I’m sorry, but I’m not used to it yet, like the rest of you. But I’ll be okay.”
“Sure you will,” I told him, from the height of my greater experience.
You can do anything if you don’t think about it. I was wanted for murder, with all-points bulletins out on me and everything. I was on my way back to a house full of madmen and fiends. I had just seen a man shot down right beside me. I was driving a truck full of high explosives. But I just didn’t think about it. I thought about the scenery, and the nice road, and how surprisingly good the truck’s engine was, and how unsurprisingly bad the truck’s springs were, and how nice it would be not to have the FBI snooping around me all the time, but on the other hand how not nice it would be to have to empty my own wastebaskets again …
… and how those three bullets had been meant for me.
South I drove, along a nice new highway I had mostly to myself. Beside me, Jack Armstrong slumped against the door, asleep after all, his forehead clunking the window from time to time. And I thought about how the weasely man had shot three bullets into the man wearing the red-and-black-check hunting jacket.
Ten Eyck had called after we’d left, the weasely man had said so. He’d told the weasely man there was extra money in the suitcases, for which he was supposed to shoot one of the men coming up to meet him. A man who was wanted by the police. A man who wore a red-and-black-check hunting jacket.
The weasely man hadn’t asked anybody’s names. Neither he nor Eustaly had given any impression of knowing one another from before. The weasely man had had nothing to go by but that jacket, that damn jacket!
Was that why Mrs. Bodkin had insisted I wear it?
No, she wouldn’t be a part of it. Even Eustaly hadn’t been told Ten Eyck’s plan for me. That was Ten Eyck’s way, tell everyone as little as possible. So he’d told the weasely man to kill the one wearing the red and black jacket, and if no one was wearing a red and black jacket, I’d be wearing, etc., telling him the suit I was wearing underneath. It hadn’t occurred to him either of the others might end up wearing that jacket, of course; Armstrong would be too much the physical-culture type, and Eustaly too fastidious.
Well, Eustaly had gotten cold.
Not as cold as he was now, of course.
South I drove, along the nice new highway. I knew Ten Eyck had tried to have me killed. I knew why: because I knew who he really was. What I didn’t know, not yet, was what I was going to do about it.
Except that I was going back there. Oh, you bet. I wouldn’t miss his face for a million dollars.
21
He carried it off well. We arrived in early evening, the return by truck having taken longer than the trip up by automobile, and as I braked to a stop behind the house Ten Eyck came out the back door, glinting a smile of welcome which hardly faltered a bit as I climbed down from the cab. He watched Jack Armstrong get out on the other side, watched us both stretch and move around a little the way you will after a long cramped trip, and then he said, casually, “Where’s Mortimer?”
“Dead,” I said. “Up near the border. In the Mercury. Wearing the Bodkin jacket.”
“Really. I hadn’t thought he’d consider that suitable.”
“He got cold.”
“Ah.” Ten Eyck made a minuscule shrug. “One never knows,” he said.
Armstrong, coming past us, said groggily, “I’m so tired I could drop dead myself.” He stopped in front of Ten Eyck and said, “Raxford said you knew about Eustaly going to be killed. You should of told us. Scared me out of my wits.”
“Next time,” Ten Eyck told him, smiling as one smiles at a retarded child, “I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Good,” said Armstrong, and went cumbersomely on into the house.
Ten Eyck looked at me with wary interest. (He couldn’t know, of course, that exhaustion had anesthetized me as much as Armstrong. I’d driven slightly more than half the return trip, the first long stretch and then the final brief leg, with uneasy napping in the middle period. I was too doped from lack of sleep myself to be actively afraid of Ten Eyck, or even worried about him, an apparent assured coolness that [I later realized] impressed him very much, and which also made it more possible for me to maintain the manner I’d decided would be best in the circumstances. I’d thought of practically nothing else all the way south but this meeting with Ten Eyck, and what I should say, and how I should behave. Rehearsed and anesthetized to a fare-thee-well, I was prepared to bluff Tyrone Ten Eyck to a draw.)
Now he said, conversationally, “Why did you come back, Raxford?”
“You made a mistake,” I told him. “Anybody can make one mistake. We’ll just forget it happened.”
He arched an eyebrow and said, “What was the mistake, exactly?”
“Thinking I was dangerous to you. I wasn’t. I’m still not. But don’t keep making mistakes.”
He studied me with narrowed eyes. “How do I know you don’t plan to be dangerous to me?”
I gestured at the truck cab, saying, “I could have dropped you from there, when you came out. You were framed in the doorway.”
He turned and looked at the doorway, then back at me. “All right. What about later on?”
“I will have helped you. You will help me. We’ll be even.”
Small lights flared behind his eyes, like artillery fire beyond the night horizon. “But you know my name,” he said. He was being blunt and open with me now; there was no reason for him to be otherwise.
“A small risk,” I told him. “It would be risky to make another mistake with me, too. You’ll have to decide for yourself which risk is greater.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Yes, I will.”
I took the pistol from my pocket, which startled him unnecessarily at first, until I handed it to him, saying, “I don’t need this any more.”
He looked at the pistol in his hand, and then at me. “You amaze me, Mr. Raxford,” he said.
“I prefer reason to violence,” I told him. Which was the absolute truth; in my groggy state, my true and false personalities had found a basis for merger. (If I had come to Ten Eyck under my true colors and advocated pacifism to him, he might have murdered me merely in rebuttal. But coming to him now in the guise of another panther like himself, advocating the identical pacifism, I seemed to him a dangerous and capable man, an awesome opponent, and he embraced my ideal [in this limited and local application] with pleasure and relief.)
“Reason,” he said, his glinting smile touching me and the pistol in turn, “is always preferable to violence.”
“Certainly,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me …”
“Of course.”
I went inside, where Mrs. Bodkin tried to urge spaghetti on me. When I promised her I would eat six breakfasts in the morning, she reluctantly let me go.
Upstairs, I found my bedroom on the first try. There was a key in the lock on the inside, and when I shut the door I studied the key thoughtfully for a minute, then decided no, it would be more in character to leave the door unlocked, as though challenging the world to catch me off-guard.
When I awoke the next morning, still in one piece, my blood still all in its accustomed veins and arteries, no spare lead or ste
el in any part of me, that entire homecoming scene from the night before left me shaken in retrospect, but nothing else shook me quite so much as the sight of that unlocked door.
Never underestimate the power of a sleepy idiot.
22
Two days now passed, and the word for their passing—after the rash of activity just preceding—is elephantine. I spent all my time indoors (everyone assured me, each time I tried to go out “for a walk,” that inasmuch as I was a hunted man, it was far too dangerous for me to go outside, though no one had minded me going along on the trip to get the explosives), and not once was I securely and safely and usefully alone. I didn’t dare use the telephone; the house was full of violent people, most of them prowling around. There was just no way to contact the Feds.
Still, I appeared to be in no immediate danger. It was a kind of vacation; I had a bedroom to myself, good food, and nothing to do. Ten Eyck nodded cordially whenever we met, but had nothing further to say to me, and I had nothing at all to say to him. Once I was rested and in full control of my senses, I was incapable of the kind of bland effrontery I’d used so successfully on Ten Eyck immediately after the trip.
Friday afternoon a rested Armstrong and a few of his bully boys drove up in a rent-a-truck truck, which they cheerfully announced they’d stolen on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn that morning. The truck from Canada was long gone, having been picked up while I was asleep Thursday night, the load of explosives now being stored in the sagging barn out behind the house. The stolen truck was now stashed in there, was inspected, and proved to be full of huge cardboard cartons of toilet paper. For the next half hour, as I watched from the kitchen window, the boys of the National Fascist Reclamation Commission unloaded cartons of toilet paper, carried them from the barn to the cellar stairs behind the house, and there turned them over to several white American-born workingman members of the American Sons’ Militia, Louis Labotski’s group. The American Sons stowed the cartons in the no-longer-used coalbin. Mrs. Bodkin was delighted. Toward the end, though, some of the Fascists began to get skittish, laughing and running around the backyard, throwing rolls of toilet paper at one another, the rolls unrolling as they flew like streamers through the air or bounced in lengthening white ribbons across the yard. Mrs. Bodkin had to go out and tell them to stop it; it was unseemly. Chastened, they quieted down, cleaned up, and finished their work in a more sober mood.
The Spy in the Ointment Page 15