The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  (I was imagining the cold fury of Tyrone Ten Eyck, hidden away upstairs, surely watching the backyard from a second floor window. [He never showed himself to the rank and file, only to the leaders who’d attended the first meeting of the League for New Beginnings; he was limiting the number of people who had seen his face and who would therefore have to be dispatched. I’m not sure if that was the result of thought-fulness or merely the desire to avoid an overbusy schedule.] At any rate, he was not particularly humorous, and his reactions to the puppy Nazis must have been something to see. Something I’m glad I didn’t see.)

  When the truck was empty, the Fascists and Sons worked together to refill it, this time with explosives, working under the fussy direction of our demolition experts, Eli Zlott and his assistant for the occasion Sun Kut Fu. Before they were done, darkness had fallen, and since there was no light in the barn, it was determined to finish the job the next day.

  Once or twice during this time I suggested contacting my own membership and telling them to come join us (the dozen undercover federal agents, remember?), but it had been decided that would be too dangerous; the police, in their continuing search for me, would surely, be watching the members of my organization. Besides, as Mrs. Bodkin accurately pointed out, there were already more people here than could possibly be needed. And I had to admit it was true. The yard between house and barn was crawling with terrorists; at times it looked like the staging area for a bonus march.

  Friday evening Mrs. Bodkin and Eli Zlott played Russian Bank at the dining-room table, Tyrone Ten Eyck continued to leaf through Mrs. Bodkin’s library of book-club art books, Sun Kut Fu closeted himself with a lot of wires and miniature electrical components—something or other to do with bombs—which made him seem somehow Japanese rather than Chinese, and I prowled around like a man with a strong case of itchy foot, which was true.

  Not just itchy foot, also itchy quarter. From time to time I would take from my pocket the quarter Duff had given me, the one which, when placed in water, would beam a directional signal to bring the federal agents ascurrying, and I would wonder, Should I? But I still knew nothing of value, really. It was true the Feds stood a good chance of arriving here unobserved and thus capturing the whole crew, explosives and all. But on the other hand, there was no assurance that Ten Eyck himself would be caught; his career was rich in narrow escapes, and it seemed to me if anyone would manage to slip through the net, he’d be the one. Each time I held the magic quarter in my hand, therefore, I finally decided to wait yet a while, yet a while.

  Saturday, Eli Zlott and Sun closed themselves in the barn and went to work in earnest on turning the truck into one huge traveling bomb. The hordes of terrorists were all gone now, nobody left but us Captains, and Tyrone Ten Eyck moved about freely, puffing one of his tiny twisty cigars, favoring everyone with doses of aromatic blue smoke and that glinting self-confident smile.

  Zlott and Sun emerged toward sundown, just in time for dinner. Mrs. Bodkin cooked as though we were an army and had a lot of traveling to do: a huge roast for this particular meal, and corn on the cob, peas, mashed potatoes, hot rolls, and the sort of rich brown gravy which is the Anglo-Saxons one true contribution to the world’s cuisine. Zlott and Sun and Ten Eyck and I were the participants; Mrs. Bodkin maintained the good old American tradition by being in constant fussy flux between dining-room table and kitchen, sitting down at her place only rarely and then merely to pass a bowl to somebody.

  There was little talk at the table, until Ten Eyck began to ask our demolition men if everything was in order at the truck. He mentioned something about a “timer,” and Zlott answered in a sudden burst of irritation, “I never got near that. Fu here wanted to do it all himself, wouldn’t let me help a bit.”

  “Sun,” said Sun quietly.

  “I’ll call you by your first name when I know you better,” Zlott snapped. To Ten Eyck he said, “If that timer’s wrong, don’t blame me. I never got near it.”

  “I’m sure everything will work perfectly,” said Ten Eyck, spreading a bit of oil, “just as I’m sure you’re being modest about your own contribution.”

  But Zlott was impervious to oil. “Fu wanted to do it all himself,” he insisted, “so I let him. He wants to do the whole thing, go ahead, I don’t care.”

  “You’ve done fine work, Mr. Zlott,” Ten Eyck assured him, remaining bland and genial. “I’m sure we’re all grateful for what you’ve done.”

  Mrs. Bodkin, coming from the kitchen just then with more rolls, said, “Well, of course we are, Eli, you know that.” Zlott seemed somewhat appeased and went back to work on his roast beef after that, though this expression of sympathy for the head of the True Zion Rescue Mission from the president of the Gentile Mothers for Peace left me a little baffled. In any case, dinner continued peacefully from then on, ending with mince pie and vanilla ice cream and coffee, after which we all staggered into the living room to sit down and enjoy the process of digestion.

  Jack Armstrong reappeared about eight-thirty, and was promptly taken into a corner by Ten Eyck for a final briefing. I joined them, uninvited but unchallenged, and stood around trying to look like a man who isn’t hearing anything particularly interesting but who has nothing better to do.

  “You keep the truck hidden,” Ten Eyck told Armstrong, “until Tuesday. We’ve got the new plates on it, so it should be safe to travel, but I don’t want it parked out on the street for three days.”

  “I’ve got the perfect place for it,” said Armstrong eagerly. “One of my member’s fathers—”

  “Just so it’s out of sight,” said Ten Eyck. “Now, remember, timing is all-important here. Labotski will be there at two o’clock on the dot, and that’s when you should be there.”

  “Right,” said Armstrong. He was nodding and nodding. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  “Trucks aren’t permitted on the Drive,” Ten Eyck told him, “so you’ve got to move fast. There’s an entrance just south of the building; you take that onto the northbound side, drive it under the building, stop it in the right lane, and Labotski will pull in directly in front of you. There’s a new switch on the dashboard, you’ll see it, just to the left of the speedometer. You push that to on, and then you’ve got five minutes, so move fast. Out of the truck, into the car with Labotski, and away from there.”

  Armstrong had been nodding and nodding all along, but now he held his head still at last and said, “What if the cops come? They’ll haul it away.”

  “No. That same switch activates a small charge that’ll break the front axle. They won’t get it out of there in under five minutes. One more thing, don’t try opening the rear doors, we’ve got them rigged. If the police break the lock and open them, the truck blows up right away.”

  Armstrong was nodding again. “Okay,” he said. “I got it.”

  Ten Eyck clapped him on the shoulder, saying, with just the sort of male heartiness a Jack Armstrong would understand best, “Good man. We’re counting on you.”

  I drifted away at that point, passed through the dining room (where Zlott and Mrs. Bodkin had the cards out again and were back into their Russian Bank tourney), and went into the kitchen in search of privacy and more mince pie. While I stood there, leaning against the drainboard, chewing pie and chewing over what I’d learned, Sun came up from the cellar, gave me a conspiratorial wink I failed to understand, and went away toward the living room.

  I spent the next minute or two puzzling over that wink, and then was distracted by the sound of a truck engine starting up. I looked out the kitchen window and saw the truck come out of the barn and drive briskly away, Armstrong at the wheel. (It seemed to me he took the bumps in the dirt road a little too briskly, considering his cargo, but I suppose as a man, with an exploding credit card in his hip pocket, I was in no position to cast the first stone.)

  It was by now nine o’clock. An air of lethargy had come over the house, as of any headquarters when the planning is done, the die is cast, and the outcome is in t
he lap of the gods. Simulating the same lethargy as best I could, I licked mince pie from my fingers, determined that I was unobserved, and headed for the stairs.

  It seemed to me I finally knew enough to justify dunking my quarter. I didn’t, it is true, know either why or for whom Tyrone Ten Eyck was planning to blow up the UN Building, but at least I now knew when and how. FDR Drive, the high-speed elevated highway which runs north and south along the eastern shore of Manhattan Island (and which is sometimes [by Republicans, I suppose] called East Side Drive), runs under the UN Building. A whole truckload of high explosive detonated under there could very well break the building’s foundation—chop it off at the ankles, as it were—and cause the whole structure to crumble ignominiously into the East River, all at a time when, according to Ten Eyck, it would be more than usually full.

  As to that corollary scheme, a depredation of one sort or another which would cause the UN Building to be full on Tuesday afternoon, I still knew absolutely nothing except the outmoded plan to set off a bomb in the U.S. Senate. But whatever it was, it surely had to happen before Tuesday, which meant we were very nearly fresh out of time. I didn’t dare hang around in hopes of finding out what that annex scheme was; the time to call in the Feds was now.

  Accordingly, I sauntered casually upstairs, went into the bathroom, filled the toothbrush glass about halfway with water, and carried that into my bedroom.

  Ah, but what to do with it now? I couldn’t just leave a glass half full of water, with a quarter at the bottom, sitting in plain sight on the dresser. If someone came in, the sight might strike him as odd. I looked around, opened the closet door, and decided the best place to hide it was up on the shelf, tucked away behind the wide-brimmed fedoras. I got out the quarter—still shiny and new—plunked it in the glass, put it up on the shelf out of sight, shut the closet door, turned away, and the hall door opened.

  It was Sun. He stepped quickly inside and shut the door.

  I’m sure I must have looked as guilty as a kid hiding a pack of illegitimate cigarettes, but Sun had other things on his mind and didn’t notice. “Come on,” he whispered urgently. “Time for us to get out of here.”

  I said, “What? Why? Where we going?”

  “Away.” He looked at his watch and his urgency redoubled. “Come on, Raxford,” he said. “Now.”

  There was nothing I could do. Without a backward glance at the closet—within which the shiny quarter was surely by now sending out its useless directional beam—I followed Sun out of the room.

  23

  Mrs. Bodkin and Zlott, absorbed in their game, never saw us leave. We went out the front way and down the dirt road to the trees, where we found parked a black Cadillac—new or a repeat I couldn’t say—into which we climbed, to find Ten Eyck at the wheel and Lobo in back. Sun rode in back, I joined Ten Eyck up front.

  Ten Eyck, low and curt, said, “Time.”

  Sun’s watch must have had a luminous dial. “Five after nine,” he said. “No, about seven after.”

  “Three minutes. Good.”

  The car moved forward, sliding through the night without lights. The road was vaguely paler than the heavy black of the surrounding trees. Lights shone from the Bodkin house behind us, and small pinpoints of light from the development homes were visible through the trees, but we ourselves moved through a broad groove of blackness in the earth.

  Ten Eyck switched the headlights on when we reached the county road. He turned right, and at last I said, “Why the change of plans?”

  “No change,” he said casually. “Those little people were of no further use to us.”

  From the back seat Sun said, “Did you explain the situation to the other two? Armstrong and Labotski?”

  “They gave no trouble,” Ten Eyck told him. “They have no conception of actual death. Murder is still an abstract to them.”

  All at once I understood why Sun had been down cellar. The League for New Beginnings was having another weeding-out. Or bombing-out.

  Why had I been spared this time? Ten Eyck had tried to kill me once, by proxy, but since that failure, had seemed to accept me without question. Also, though Ten Eyck had apparently prepared Armstrong and Labotski for this purging of Zlott and Mrs. Bodkin—and Mulligan before them, and Mrs. Baba and Hyman Meyerberg and the Whelps before him—he’d apparently seen no need to prepare me similarly.

  I could think of only one explanation: Ten Eyck had accepted me on an equal footing, considered me a panther like himself, and assumed my actions and responses would invariably be—as they invariably were in him—dictated by cold and all-encompassing self-interest. Better than a fish, better even than a specialist, I was an expendable version of himself! Oh, he’d be keeping me around for quite a while.

  Until, that is, judging me by himself, he decided I was ready to be dangerous to him.

  I mulled this theory as Ten Eyck drove us through the Jersey outback. After perhaps half an hour we came into Jersey City, where Ten Eyck stopped to let Sun off. “At midnight,” Ten Eyck said in farewell. Sun nodded, and hurried away.

  Now that we were to all intents and purposes alone in the car—it was practically impossible to think of Lobo as a person—Ten Eyck grew relaxed and expansive, full of good humor. As we drove northward, he made idle chatter—how incredible it sounded, coming from him!—giving me anecdotes and reminiscences of his childhood, most of it spent either in New York City or at the manor in Tarrytown. (Where Angela now was hidden, until Tyrone should be safely put away.) These reminiscences were full of his cruelty, full of his hatred for his father and contempt for his sister. He mentioned his mother—who separated early from her husband, and of whose recent whereabouts I knew nothing (nor, I think, did Angela)—only once, in regard to a childhood visit he’d been forced to make to her in Switzerland. The several “practical jokes” he had perpetrated there, one of which had broken a maid’s leg, had cut the visit short and assured it would never be repeated, being the two results he’d had in mind from the outset.

  We crossed into New York State at Suffern, and shortly beyond that town we stopped at a rural restaurant—one of those expensive country places which usually call themselves The Something Coach or The Coach Something—and all during dinner the childhood reminiscences continued. We sat across from one another, and I made all the right responses to his brutal little tales, and to my left Lobo sat like an articulated mannequin in a store-window display, feeding itself with one repetitive unending up-and-down movement of its right arm.

  Toward the end of dinner, this stream of recollection and anecdote began to slow. He had had two whiskeys and soda before dinner, a half bottle of Moselle wine with dinner, and a brandy afterward, but I don’t believe he was getting drunk, or even high. The rush of memory that had been set off in him had merely come to the inevitable souring; he began to speak of his father and Angela in harsher and harsher tones, spoke of all his childhood scenes with hatred and controlled fury: the New York City apartment, the Tarrytown estate, the various boarding schools which had failed to mold him in their image.

  Dinner had been leisurely, or at least slow-paced. We were the last diners, and in the background our waitress hovered anxiously, obviously desirous of going home. At ten past eleven, after a low-voiced but vicious description of his father’s one unsuccessful entry into active politics, he suddenly looked at his watch, became immediately brisk and businesslike, said, “Well. Time to be off,” and waved for the check.

  Back in the car, I said, “I take it wherever we’re going has something to do with the new plan. The one instead of blowing up the Senate.”

  Now he was expansive again, pleased with himself, the glinting smile once more lighting his face. “Something to do,” he echoed, and laughed, and said, “My dear Raxford, it has everything to do, everything!” He glanced at me, his sable eyes full of good humor, and then looked back at the road. “You want me to tell you about it,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time you knew,”
he agreed, not knowing that from my point of view it was well past time. At any rate, he said, “We’ll begin with the global and progress to the particular.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Every year,” he said, declaiming, “some one or another of the Eastern Bloc nations puts up Communist China for entry to the United Nations. Every year that entry is blocked, primarily through the efforts of the United States, which has its own useless brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek, in the job. This annual minuet is returning to the UN agenda in a very few weeks. Interesting?”

  “Not so far,” I said.

  He laughed again; he loved me most when I was blunt and irritable. He said, “It will be. This year there’s going to be a difference. This year the Communist Chinese, through their American agent Sun Kut Fu and his Eurasian Relief Corps, are going to kidnap a prominent American and hold him for ransom. That is, they will threaten to kill him unless the United States this year permits the entry of Red China into the United Nations.” His smile struck pale fire. “We can both visualize,” he said, “the sort of Assembly meeting that will cause.”

  I said, “No one would believe the Communist Chinese would pull a stunt like that.”

  “Of course not. No one but the Americans. Have you ever read the New York Daily News?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Can any regular reader of that newspaper, and I understand there are millions of them, fail to believe the dirty Chinese Commies would kidnap a prominent American for just that purpose?”