The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  Therefore, I asked Angela about it. I said, “What is this place?”

  “Daddy used to have a stamp collection,” she said. “Very valuable stamp collection. He kept it in display cases in here.”

  “Then he gave it up?”

  “No. One time when Tyrone was little, he took all the stamps and stamp books and burned them up in one of the fireplaces.”

  “That’s my Tyrone,” I said. “What happened to the display cases?”

  “They’re downstairs,” she said. “He keeps his peace awards in there now.”

  “Oh.” (Due to some natural irony implicit in our world, munitions manufacturers seem to receive more peace awards than practically anybody except professional boxers. But maybe I’m just bitter because pacifists never get them at all.)

  Angela said, “What are we going to do now, Gene?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “No matter which side wins out there, we’re still in trouble. Sun can’t let us leave here alive any more than your brother can.”

  “Won’t Sun win?” she asked. “He’s got so many men with him.”

  “About a dozen. And on the other side it’s just Tyrone and Lobo.” I shrugged and said, “Sounds like even money to me.”

  She said, “What were you and Sun talking about there, about cutting and pitching and all?”

  “He’s a double agent,” I said. I explained to her what had made me think so, and added, “He and Tyrone must have set up the frame together, except Sun thought he’d be a survivor.”

  “Well, who’s he really working for?”

  “I don’t know. Himself, I suppose. It’s tough to think of Chiang Kai-shek having followers, but maybe Sun’s hipped on Nationalist China. Whether he’s doing it on his own or for somebody else, the point is he’s made the Eurasian Relief Corps operate in a way to make Red China look even worse than she does here anyway. That’s why Red China disavowed them, I suppose.”

  Somewhere along the line she must have stopped listening to me, because as soon as I finished talking she said, “Gene, what’s going to happen to Daddy? And Murray?”

  “The same as what’s going to happen to us.”

  “I mean now. What’s happening to them now.”

  “Nothing. Everybody’ll be too busy to worry about sleepers.”

  I went over and tried the door, and discovered that Marcellus Ten Eyck had paid top dollar when this room was built. The door was solid oak. The lock was a Yale, impossible for me either to pick or get at. Since the door opened outward, I couldn’t get at the hinges either. I rattled the knob, the way you do when you’re stuck for something sensible to do, and Sun’s boys had gone and locked it. The cheats.

  If only we could get through that door, it seemed to me we’d have a pretty good chance. There was no guard outside here, because Sun was bringing all his forces with him when he braced Tyrone Ten Eyck.

  A bracing that apparently had just come to order, for I heard very faintly the sound of gunfire from elsewhere in the house.

  In a way, Angela and I at the moment were in very nearly the safest place there was. (Unlike her father and Murray, who were lying unconscious and exposed in the middle of the equivalent of no man’s land, a fact I had thought it best to keep from Angela.) We were locked away, but outside this door there was a battleground. On one side, Sun and his dozen sunlets. On the other side, Tyrone Ten Eyck and Lobo. Skirmishing, attacking, retreating. Sun using the advantage of greater numbers, Tyrone Ten Eyck using the advantage of a natural cunning vicious enough to make a fox blanch. The middle of that brushfire war was no place for a pair of dewy young pacifists.

  Still, to wait here was to wait, merely, for our turn to be bloodied.

  Behind me, Angela said, “Gene?”

  I turned away from the door. “What?”

  “I’m sorry about the watch,” she said.

  “Let’s not talk about it,” I said.

  “I thought it was fixed all right,” she said.

  “I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “I have to take my pills,” she said.

  “Pills shmills,” I riposted.

  “Don’t say that, Gene,” she said. “You don’t want me to get fat and pimply and pregnant, do you?”

  Cruelly, I said, “Why not? Then I’d have an excuse to go to Majorca.”

  “Oh, Gene,” she said.

  As I knew she intended now to cry—one thing Angela always had was perfect timing—I turned back to the door and rattled the knob again, just for something masculine to do. It was still locked.

  Behind me, Angela sniffled. Somewhere the other side of this door, a tommy gun rattled, a pistol replied, a male scream was abruptly cut off.

  Angela’s sniffling and the war sounds died down at approximately the same time, a few minutes later. Standing at the door, I listened to two kinds of silence, neither of which I liked very much, and I wondered what would happen next. When nothing at all did for half a minute, I turned and looked at Angela, and she was now—as I’d known she would be—coldly furious.

  “Don’t speak to me,” she said.

  “Right,” I said. Rich bitch, I thought irrelevantly, a thought which suddenly catapulted that Diner’s Club card into the forefront of my mind. “Hot damn!” I shouted, and snapped my fingers.

  Angela, not knowing the subject had been changed, blinked at me in some confusion. “What?” she said. “What?”

  I dragged out my wallet, removed the Diner’s Club card from it, tucked the wallet back in my pocket, and said, “Watch this, that’s all. Just watch this.”

  Since I no longer had my magic shoes, of course I didn’t have the special shoelace fuse either, but maybe a regular shoelace would work instead. I slipped one out, tied it around the card, left the end trailing, and set it down on the floor by the door, where it looked like a polliwog.

  There was no cover in this room, so I could only hope the explosion wouldn’t be overly enthusiastic. “Get into the corner,” I told Angela, “and stay there.”

  Angela said, “What are you doing with that card, Gene? Are you crazy? Do you feel all right, Gene?”

  “Oh, shut up and get in the corner,” I said, “you mechanical masked marvel.”

  She went in the corner and pouted.

  I lit the end of the shoelace and it went out. I lit it again and it went out again. Every time I lit it I half-turned to dash away, and then it would go out, and I’d come back and light it again.

  I did that half a dozen times, and finally gave up on the idiotic thing. With teeth, fingernails, and brute determination, I ripped off a length of my shirt tail, twisted it into a kind of long thick rope, tied that around the Diner’s Club card—you could barely see the card in there—and lit the end of it.

  The shirt burned like mad. Flames came poof, and went scampering across the material toward the card.

  This time, of course, I hadn’t started to dash away until I should see how the shirt was burning. When I saw, I said, “Whoops!” and ran like hell for Angela’s corner.

  I got there, pushed her down, cowered in front of her—the protective male, who would much rather have put her in front of him—and behind me something went THOPPP.

  I was pushed, it seemed, midway through Angela, who must have been pushed midway through the wall. When the last echoes of the explosion died down, I pushed myself away from the wall and Angela and said, “Well.”

  Angela stared at me as though she was afraid we were both crazy. “What was that?” she whispered.

  “My credit card,” I said. “That shows how bad my credit is.”

  (And my jokes.)

  I turned around and looked at the door, and it wasn’t there any more. The frame was twisted and sprung, and the door was entirely gone. I went over—I felt very stiff all of a sudden—and the door was lying on the floor in the next room, a kind of study or den or library, lined with bookcases, furnished in mahogany and leather.

  “There,” I said. “So muc
h for that.” I turned to Angela, who hadn’t left the corner. “Come on,” I said. “We better hurry.”

  She finally did move, blinking and dazed and unbelieving. She came out, looked at the dead door, looked at me, reached out bemusedly and took my hand, and we started for the door across the way.

  We got halfway there when it was pushed open and Tyrone Ten Eyck came in, in his hand the Luger I’d seen once before. “Well, well,” he said. “There you are. I was afraid I’d lost you.”

  Angela said, “Tyrone, you’re bad!”

  “The same sweet simpleton,” Tyrone said pleasantly.

  I said, “Where’s Sun?”

  “Dead,” he said. “As are his followers. As will you be. As will everyone be, sooner or later.”

  “You don’t destroy for money,” I said. “That’s just the excuse. You destroy for its own sake.”

  “You mean I’m a nihilist?” His smile glistened like bayonets. “Well,” he said, “it’s better than having no philosophy at all. Wouldn’t you say?”

  I said, for no reason other than to try and spread confusion, “Lobo’s been working with me. He’ll be here in a minute to put the cuffs on you.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Lobo’s dead. Sun killed him.”

  Angela cried, “Daddy!”

  “His death,” Tyrone Ten Eyck told her savagely, his control beginning once again to slip, “will be the second most enjoyable moment of my life. Your death, sweet sister, will be the first.” He extended his right arm at shoulder-height, the Luger in his fist pointing directly at Angela’s face.

  And, once again, I ran.

  30

  In a way, this book is a kind of confession. I am describing the events leading up to the moment when I violated all my principles, negated all my beliefs, disobeyed every doctrine I’d ever defined in my pamphlets, and generally speaking made a lie of my entire life.

  I would like to be able to say that this second time I ran (the first being when I’d inadvertently dragged Angela away from Ten Eyck and the rest) was as blind and unpremeditated and unknowing as the first, but it was not. I knew exactly what I was doing every step of the way.

  I ran toward Tyrone Ten Eyck, and I knew I was doing it, and in my heart of hearts I approved my intentions. I ran to him, and I took the Luger out of his amazed fingers, and I threw it away. Then, knowingly and deliberately, I laid violent hands upon him.

  (Please excuse me if I don’t describe what I did. I remember it all—only too vividly—but I’d rather not say any of it.)

  A long time later, as I was kneeling astraddle Tyrone Ten Eyck, Angela began to pluck at my shoulder and cry, ‘‘Stop it, Gene! Stop it!”

  Reluctantly (I’m ashamed to say), I stopped it. I looked at what I’d done, and in that moment I felt nothing, only emptiness, as though a cargo I had carried patiently for a long long time had finally been delivered.

  I got up and went out of the room, out to the hall. The air reeked of gunpowder. I stood there and devoted myself to formulating the question I may spend the rest of my life answering:

  If I’ve been right all my life about who I was, how came I to be where I was?

  A minute or so later Angela came out and said, in a hushed voice, “He’s breathing.”

  “That’s good,” I said, but only because it was the response I knew was expected of me.

  “That was a terrible thing for a pacifist to do, Gene,” she said solemnly.

  I said, “Uh huh.” I licked my skinned knuckles.

  “We better call the police,” she said.

  “Phone lines were cut.”

  “Then we better go get them.”

  “Right.”

  We tied Tyrone up, then went downstairs and almost as far as the front door when I stopped and said, “Hold on a minute, I just remembered something.”

  “What?”

  “I’m wanted for murder,” I said.

  “For murdering me, Gene. It’ll be all right, I’ll be right there with you.”

  I could hear the explanation as Angela would do it, and it wound up with me in the electric chair before they got it all straightened out. “I don’t see any police,” I said, “without my lawyer.” I turned and headed toward where I’d last seen Murray.

  31

  They were both still asleep, Murray smiling and Papa Ten Eyck snoring. Angela rushed to her father and there was a joyful reunion; perhaps a bit livelier on one side than the other. I let it go until she began to pat the old walrus on the cheek and tell him to wake up, and then I said, “Not him. He can sleep till Christmas for all of me. It’s Murray I want. My mouthpiece, my solicitor, my shyster.”

  “Shylock,” she said.

  “Nonono, that’s a moneylender. Lawyers never lend money, it’s part of their Hippocratic Oath.”

  “Are you sure, Gene?”

  “Take Murray’s ankles,” I said.

  We carried Murray to the kitchen, thumping him into lots of door jambs on the way, and propped him into a more or less sitting position at the kitchen table, and spent a while trying to wake him up. Splashing water in his face, pulling his hair, dribbling coffee into his mouth (and down his chin), slapping his cheeks. He snorted every once in a while, but that was all.

  Next we carried him to a bathroom and stripped his outer clothing off, leaving him in his shorts and undershirt. (A clean, neat suit is the lawyer’s basic tool, the way chalk is to a teacher or an airplane to a pilot. Lawyers can’t do a thing unless they’re dressed right, and I figured I’d want Murray to do lots of things for me before this night was over, so I was a lot more careful with his suit than I was with him.) Next we dumped him into the shower stall, turned on the cold water, and five minutes later he was pretty nearly awake. He could even hold a coffee cup, and blink his eyes, and say, “Whuzza? Whuzza?”

  Angela by now had gone back to see what she could do with her father. I walked Murray slowly and gingerly back to the kitchen, sat him down at the table again, sat across from him, and kept telling him to drink his coffee. Every time I told him, he raised the cup and took a slurp; he kept reminding me of Lobo.

  All at once the dull film over his eyes was replaced by a bright glaze and he said to me, “Gene.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He put the cup down. He pressed his palms together, as though helping something inside himself snap back into place, and then he turned abruptly brisk and insane. “Well,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m glad you came to me.”

  “Murray—”

  “You don’t have to tell me you didn’t kill her, Gene. I’m sure you didn’t. But the point is—”

  “Murray,” I said.

  “Don’t interrupt,” he said. “The point is, they’ll be holding you for first degree murder, which means no bail can be set, even if you do give yourself up, so the prospect—”

  “Murray,” I said.

  “Let me finish. I believe the claim is you killed her in New York and transported the body to New Jersey, so the trial would be held—”

  “Murray,” I said. “If you don’t shut up I’ll put you back to sleep and hire your father.”

  He said, “For a man charged with murdering a socially prominent young lady, you—”

  “Look around you, Murray.”

  “What?”

  “Look around,” I told him. “Where are you?”

  He looked around. The glaze began to crackle. “Well,” he said. “It seems—I don’t—Of course, if you—On the other hand—”

  Angela came in, then, and said, “I can’t get him to wake up, Gene.”

  “You’re lucky. This one did and look at him.”

  Murray stared open-mouthed at Angela. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “My God, you’re alive!”

  “Murray, will you either wake up or go back to sleep? You’re driving me crazy. Of course she’s alive. You’re in her house, you idiot, you already knew she was alive.”

  The glaze crackled even more, and then fell off his eyes e
ntirely, leaving them bloodshot and somewhat confused. He looked at me and said, “Gene? What happened? A lot of Chinamen came in, and—”

  “That about sums it up,” I told him.

  For the next half hour we drank coffee and filled one another in on recent events, while waiting for Murray to feel well enough to perform. When he pronounced himself ready, Angela drove down into town and got the police and brought them back to the house.

  So the first thing they did upon arrival was arrest me for the murder of Angela Ten Eyck.

  Then, when Angela tried to help me by pointing out that she was Angela Ten Eyck, they arrested her, too, as accessory after the fact.

  I guess a lawyer needs more than just a suit. Maybe a briefcase is necessary, too; Murray didn’t have his with him. And Murray was arrest number three, also accessory, for claiming the other accessory was who she said she was.

  Then the police wanted to know who all these other bodies were, and it was kind of tough to explain it all in a rush. We were all milling around in the front hall, near the big staircase, when a sudden bellow from above froze us in our confusion. We looked up, and there was Tyrone Ten Eyck, looming and leaning and tottering at the head of the stairs. He’d managed to untie himself, and from somewhere he’d found a new weapon, a huge rusty old sword, which he waved above his head now as he came charging down the stairs at us.

  What was it I’d been told at the training site by Rowe, my fencing instructor? “If they come at you with swords you’ll die, that’s all.”

  Uh.

  The assassin came down like the wolf on the fold … and kept on going. Wild-eyed, roaring, swinging that sword around his head, he charged down onto us and right on through us without so much as slowing down—I don’t believe he even knew we were there—and swooped on out the front door, leaving half a dozen cops and their three prisoners blinking and open-mouthed in his wake.

  Abruptly, from outside, we heard a spatter of shooting. Bang bang. Bangity. And then silence.

  Angela said, as though someone had been trying to pull her leg, “You can’t shoot a sword.”

  We all looked at her, until the front door opened and in came one of the cops who’d stayed outside. He carried a pistol in his right hand and he looked as startled and bewildered as the rest of us. “Well,” he said, as though he’d been talking already for a few sentences, “this big fella came at me all of a sudden with a sword. Well, I didn’t have time to tell him to stop or anything. Well, I had to shoot him. Well, he kept running so I had to keep shooting. Well, he’s laying out there and I guess he must be dead.”