Spy Runner

by Eugene Yelchin

  “What started, sir?”

  Mr. Hirsch smiled weakly. “Never mind, McCauley. You run back to your class, yes? And don’t miss the Pledge of Allegiance tomorrow, you promise?”

  19

  By the time the bell exploded for recess and the classroom doors burst open, resounding through the hallways like cannon fire, Jake was speeding away from the school on his roadster. To go back to the classroom was out of the question. Not after the interrogation by the G-men, and not after the beating by his classmates, and above all, not after that A-bomb movie. The hatred in his classmates’ eyes watching him leave the room on his way to the principal astonished him. It was as if he, Jake McCauley, had dropped the A-bomb on New York and not those Commies in the stolen American bomber.

  And then there was Mr. Hirsch. What did he mean when he said, That’s how it all started in Germany? In Germany, the Nazis had tattooed a number on his forearm and threw him behind the death camp’s barbwire. Such a horrible thing could never happen in America. Or could it?

  In moments like these, Jake missed his father terribly. His dad, who had fought the Nazis in Germany, would have explained to him what Mr. Hirsch was talking about.

  Maybe Jake should have asked the G-men to help him find his dad. He could have told them about the radio program he heard, and about his dad being imprisoned by the Russians, and about the letter Jake wrote that went unanswered. But would those G-men, with their faces carved out of a rock and their X-ray eyes, believe him? And suddenly the story about his dad in the Russian mines seemed unbelievable even to Jake. Why was he lying to himself? He made that story up just to keep hoping his dad was alive. The thought stunned him. His heart was racing, and something happened to his vision. The mountains, the desert, and the blacktop began to throb in time with his violently beating heart. The same nagging feeling he felt in the morning that the worst was yet to come overwhelmed him, and before he even looked over his shoulder, he knew that the black Buick was following him again.

  He glimpsed two dark shapes behind the dusty windshield. Who they might be or why they were tailing him, he was too scared to think about. He rode faster, knowing the Buick would speed up, too. It did. The distance between them did not change, about a hundred yards apart.

  The cards that the G-men gave him were in the right front pocket of his jeans. He felt the cards fold and unfold as his foot pushed on the pedal, then rose with it. At least, he should have told the G-men about the Buick. Report, they said, anything suspicious. If he could take a closer look at the Buick’s license plate and try to memorize it, he could telephone the G-men’s number on the card and report the vehicle. Whatever Mr. Hirsch might have said to him, Jake lived in America, not Nazi Germany. It was the G-men’s duty to protect him.

  Abruptly, he wrenched the bars to the side and skidded to a halt to face the Buick. Squealing brakes, the Buick fishtailed, blue smoke billowing from under the tires. Someone ducked out of sight behind the side glass, and when the Buick sped away in reverse, Jake’s eyes shot to the front of the bumper.

  The license plate was missing.

  At about a hundred yards away, the Buick came to a stop with its engine running and the sun blasting at its windshield. Jake leaned over the bars, dry spat at the scorched asphalt, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. In the distance, the mountains shimmered in the heated air, and in the sky above the shimmer, a tiny bomber shone so far away Jake could not hear the sound of its engines.

  He rode home slowly, not looking over his shoulder even once. The Buick growled steadily behind him. When at last Jake saw his house, the garage door was open, but his mother’s car was not inside. Afraid that the Buick might follow him into the driveway, he shot up the buckled concrete, turned the house corner, and leapt off the bike without braking. The roadster fell on its side, sliding through the dusty weeds. When its wheels whacked into the fence, Jake was already in the house. He locked the kitchen door, flew through the hallway, and locked the front door, ramming the chain guard inside the keeper. He dashed to the window and, panting, peered in between the lowered slats. The street was empty.

  20

  Jake found the trunk with his father’s things that his mother and Shubin had removed from the attic under an old canvas tarp behind the garage. The trunk was heavy, but he decided to haul it upstairs instead of carrying a few pieces at a time, worried that he might drop and damage the precious things. It took hard work to drag the trunk into the house, and through the hallway, and up the steps into the attic, but he did it in record time and he felt proud of himself.

  The door to his father’s study was wide open the way Jake had left it. He heaved the trunk over the threshold into the empty room, opened the lid and took out his father’s books, his maps, his jacket, and his glass globe with the light inside, and carefully placed every object exactly where it used to stand. He swiveled the desk calendar to the day his dad went to war and one day before Jake’s first birthday and set it on the chair by the cot where it had always stood. He dragged the trunk out onto the landing, went back inside the room, and stood, looking around with a sense of great accomplishment until he saw a pair of Shubin’s shoes peeking from below the cot that he must have missed in the morning. Jake’s sense of great accomplishment instantly vanished. The shoes looked suspicious, huddled together with their scuffed toes pointed inward. Jake thought of Major Armbruster’s oxfords cut from American mirror-like leather, squeaky clean and honest, while Shubin’s shoes looked as if they had something to hide. No wonder the Commies had to steal American-made bombers. They could not even put together a decent pair of shoes. He was about to kick Shubin’s nasty pair out of the door and down the steps when he remembered what Duane said: Check the heels of his shoes for secret compartments.

  The shoes reeked of sweaty socks and something else Jake decided was the smell of melted Russian snow. The heel of the first shoe was scraped and well worn, and no matter how hard Jake yanked at it, the heel stayed attached. He dropped the shoe, picked up the other, and turned it over. A clump of chewing gum was stuck to its sole. When he pulled at the heel, his fingers slipped and broke through the hardened shell of the chewing gum, which was still soft inside. The gooey stuff packed under his fingernails, and he yanked his hand out in disgust. The strand of gum sagged between his fingers and the shoe. He shook his hand to toss the gum aside, but the strand only stretched thinner and, making a loop in the air, stuck to the side of his jeans. Angered, Jake flung the shoe to the floor. It clomped against the floorboards, bounced off, and vanished.

  He kneeled on the floor and looked under the cot. The shoe was not there, but he saw a long, narrow gap at the edge of the flooring he had not remembered ever seeing before. One board was missing. He wondered if the shoe fell in below the floor. He moved the cot away from the wall and crouched beside the gap. He could not see into the opening because the angle where the ceiling joists met the rafters was too steep, but if he stretched flat on the floor, he could stick his arm in up to his elbow.

  “Easy now, McCauley,” he said aloud. “Don’t get bit by a black widow.”

  He moved his hand in slowly, wary of webs and exposed nails. He felt around for a while but could not feel the shoe. He rose to his knees, grasped the edge of the board beside the gap, and yanked. The board buckled, groaned, and, slipping off the rusted nails, splintered in his hands. He tossed aside the pieces, sharp as arrows, and grabbed the second board. The dried-up timber cracked and splintered.

  The opening was wide enough for him to fall through now. He cautiously leaned into the murky space between the attic floor and the ceiling of his room below. He saw the shoe at once stuck behind a tangle of electric wires. Carefully, he lifted up the shoe, wrapped in threads of spiderweb dotted with mouse droppings. He wiped it clean against the leg of his jeans and tried to detach the heel again, but it was firmly attached to the shoe. He should have known better than to listen to that traitor Duane Armbruster. Neither the Russian’s suitcase nor his filthy shoes had
any secret compartments.

  He tossed the shoe to the floor and lifted the cot to move it back over the gaping hole. But then he stopped. He stood with his knees bent and his back in a curve, holding one end of the cot off the floor, thinking. Then he set the cot down, squatted at the edge of the hole, and looked in again. A satchel, the kind doctors use for house calls, was wedged in deep behind the rafter. He had almost missed it while fishing out the shoe because the satchel was made of dull black leather nearly invisible in the murk. But he saw it. He paid attention. The G-men had told him to quit playing the detective. They had said that he was not cut out for the job. Well, he would show them.

  Jake leaned into the gap, pulled the satchel out, and drew it into the light. The leather was scuffed at the edges and along the strap, and there was a brass clasp below it that locked with a key. The clasp had something engraved on it in blocky letters that were probably Russian. The satchel could not have belonged to his dad, so it must have been Shubin’s. He thought the clasp would be locked, but it was not, and when he clicked it open and looked inside, he could not believe what he saw. He turned the satchel over and dumped what was in it on top of the cot.

  He stared at about a dozen cameras. A few looked like anyone could buy them in the store, but most were smaller than a deck of cards, some smaller than a matchbox. There were also black cylinders with glass tops and bottoms, no bigger than a pinky, and he wondered if those were special kinds of lenses. There were dozens of film cartridges, some with twin chambers. There were other things in there, too, but he could not tell what they were for. He leaned in close and cautiously lifted one of the cameras, the whole thing no thicker than his two fingers pressed together. He held it in the palm of his hand, studying the tiny glass eye, the tiny knob, and two tiny dials on the tiny body in silver finish. He knew he had seen it before, but where? Then he remembered the spy in the movie he watched at Duane’s house taking pictures of the top secret pages.

  “The Minox,” Jake said aloud.

  The instant he named the thing, a string of grainy pictures from the movie flickered before his eyes. He saw the spy leaning over the pages stamped TOP SECRET. He saw the spy’s face lit by the desk lamp from below. He saw a line of beaded sweat glistening above his upper lip, and on his bristly chin he saw each tiny hair casting an upward shadow. He saw the spy holding in his black-gloved hands a tiny camera. The tiny glass eye, the tiny knob, two tiny dials. The camera exactly like the one Jake now held in the palm of his hand.

  The grainy images appearing before his eyes brought forth the movie’s jittery music. The screech of high-strung violins surging through his ears hushed all other sounds: his mother’s Chevy turning up the driveway, doors slamming, his mother’s voice, her laughter, footfalls in the hallway, footfalls up the steps. Then suddenly—

  “Well, well, well. What do we have here?” came Shubin’s voice. “A burglar in the house?”

  Startled, Jake dropped the camera and wheeled around. Shubin was coming at him from the doorway. Jake backed away from him. Shubin kept coming. Jake stepped around the cot. Shubin followed, closer, looming over, reaching out to him. Jake took another backward step, knowing ahead of time that there would be no floor below his foot. He fell into the gap.

  Something slammed against his back and pitched him forward. He brushed against a web of wires, and crackling, they fired sparks. The fall must have taken a quarter of a second, but out of time, the fall was endless. Jake’s mind was reeling. He tried to recall the position of the bed in his room below. If he fell through the ceiling, would the mattress break his fall or would he miss it and strike his head against the dresser? He saw himself crashing through the ceiling in the shower of dust, splinters, and plaster, tangled in the fishing line that used to hold his model bomber to where now gaped a jagged hole.

  But Shubin did not let him crash. He snatched Jake before he broke through the ceiling, yanked him upward, and held his body dangling over the hole. Jake peered in horror at Shubin. His face was so close that he could see a line of beaded sweat glistening above his upper lip, and on his bristly chin he saw tiny hairs casting upward shadows.

  “You ought to be more careful when you go through other people’s stuff, kid,” Shubin rasped. “You might get hurt.”

  Jake’s heart clamored so loud that when his mother’s voice called to them from below, it seemed to reach him from a million miles away: “Mr. Shubin? Jake? What are you two doing up there? Come help unload the groceries.”

  21

  Jake scrambled down into the garage and saw his mother smiling at him over the raised trunk of her Chevy.

  “Hello, sweetie pie. Look what Santa brought us.”

  Two paper bags full of groceries crowded the spare tire inside the Chevy’s trunk. When he lifted the bags out of the trunk and turned to go, his mother’s hand fell on his shoulder. “Wait a minute, mister. How did you get so dirty?”

  Jake looked at her, surprised. What a question. How was he supposed to stay clean after what had happened to him today? First, a truck nearly ran him over and then the bus, he flew off his bike into the ditch and lost his tooth, half of his class gave him a thorough thrashing, and just now he nearly crashed to his death through the hole in the floor. He knew it was unfair to blame his mother for having no idea of all the horrors he went through—how could she know?—but still he felt upset with her.

  He wriggled from under her hand, hurried out of the garage, hauled the bags into the kitchen, and set them down on the counter. The bags held expensive things. His mother would only splurge like that for holidays, Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, which meant that Shubin must have given her the money. Lifting the groceries out of the bags, Jake tried to memorize each item, so as not to eat anything Shubin had paid for. He took a brick of cheese out of the bag, and then another, and another, each with a different smell, and set them down on the counter.

  Shubin scared Jake as no one had ever scared him before, but also left Jake utterly confused. In the attic, when Shubin swung Jake away from the hole to set him down on the floor, he noticed that Jake’s dad’s things replaced all of his ugly belongings and, glancing back at Jake hanging limply in his arms, Shubin burst into a peal of merry laughter.

  Obviously his laughter made no sense, so Jake guessed right away it was spy cover. He knew from the comics that spies were trained to pretend. Most likely, he would not even tell Mrs. McCauley what Jake had found in the attic because that would be as good as confessing that he was a spy. What Shubin would do instead was to keep Jake silent, but how he would go about it Jake was too afraid to even think about.

  He heaved a hefty chunk of meat wrapped in butcher paper from the bottom of the bag and turned to put it in the icebox. Shubin stood right behind him. Jake gasped and dropped the package. Shubin caught the package in midair and held it, squinting at Jake through his spectacles. Jake gazed up at him, openmouthed, shocked that he did not hear Shubin’s footsteps. Instinctively, he glanced down at Shubin’s feet. No shoes. His hat was gone and his coat, also. His necktie loosened. His gray crumpled shirt was wet under the arms. He reeked of tobacco. He held the package wrapped in the butcher paper, blood-soaked from the freshly cut meat, blood oozing brightly through his knobby fingers. Jake felt light-headed, staggered, and grabbed the edge of the counter to keep from falling.

  “What’s wrong, kid?” Shubin said. “Are you all right?”

  Jake could not speak.

  Shubin’s lips stretched into a mocking grin. He walked away and said, cramming the meat inside the icebox, “What do you say we give your mom a little hand with all these goodies?”

  When he returned to the counter, Jake scrambled out of his way.

  “Take it easy, kid,” Shubin said, smirking. “I won’t bite you.”

  Shaking his head, Shubin went on putting away the groceries. Everything went to the wrong place, of course, not where Jake’s mother would have wanted it. Sorting out groceries was Jake’s chore, one in the million his mother made
him do and maybe the most boring, but watching Shubin taking over his job, Jake’s terrible fear of him began to fade a little. He could not stand the fact that the Russian spy was meddling in his business. Handling groceries was Jake’s duty, and Shubin had no right to do it.

  Jake took a deep breath, detached himself from the counter, and, pretending that Shubin was not even in the kitchen, began taking foodstuffs from where he had put them and instead put them where they belonged. Shubin did not say a word but went on, smirking and shaking his head and doing the job all wrong. In this way, not speaking, not looking at each other, the two of them kept shuttling between the counter, the icebox, and the cupboard, Jake giving Shubin plenty of room as he passed.

  Jake felt proud of himself for his defiance of the enemy, but ever since he had crashed into that dusty hole in the attic, his throat felt itchy and dry. He desperately needed a drink of water. For a long time he refused to pause, worried that his mother might come into the kitchen at any moment and see Shubin doing Jake’s chore by himself. Finally Jake began to choke. He darted to the sink, spun the faucet open, and stuck his mouth under the gushing water.

  His mother walked in.

  “Good job, Shubin,” she said cheerfully. “Ain’t nothing like having a man in the house.”

  She laughed and threw her purse on the counter and tossed her keys in. She missed. The key ring clanged to the floor. Jake made a move to fetch it, but Shubin beat him to it. He swiped the keys off the floor and dangled them in front of Mrs. McCauley. She tried to snatch the keys away from him, but he withdrew them.

  “Come, Shubin, don’t be a fool,” she said, laughing. “Give me the keys.”

  Shubin grinned and jingled the keys. She lunged at them and missed again. Jake dashed in from behind and yanked the keys out of Shubin’s hand. Mrs. McCauley blushed and glanced at Shubin. Jake dropped the keys into her purse.