Spy Runner

by Eugene Yelchin

  He waited for the telephone to stop, but its urgent shrills continued to resound throughout the house. At last, he heard footfalls in the hallway. The ringing ceased abruptly. He had expected his mother to answer the phone, but it was Shubin’s voice he heard. Jake tossed the pillow aside and bolted up in bed, listening intently. He could not understand a word. Shubin was speaking in Russian, or whatever those growling noises were, but one thing was clear: the caller made Shubin terribly angry. His voice trembled with rage.

  Careful not to make any noise, Jake climbed out of bed, tiptoed to the door, listened for a moment, then cracked the door open. At the far end of the hallway, Shubin stood with his back to him, framed in the doorway of the moonlit kitchen. His angular shadow stretched down the length of the entire hallway, brushing against Jake’s bare toes at the threshold of his room. Instinctively, Jake stepped back to avoid the shadow touching his skin.

  Shubin slammed down the handset. Jake ducked back into his room. He waited by the door for Shubin to stomp up the steps to the attic, but the staircase remained quiet. Cautiously, Jake peeked out again. Shubin was stooped over the telephone, unscrewing the mouthpiece from the handset. He took the receiver cap off and felt with his fingers inside the handset, then turned it around and unscrewed the transmitter cap. He put both caps in his trousers pocket, let the handset drop, and, stepping silently on his gray-socked feet, disappeared into the kitchen.

  The handset swung off the cord along the wall, catching a blue glint each time it rose toward the kitchen. It swung five times back and forth before Shubin silently returned. Something flashed in his hand. When Jake saw the knife, he ducked back into his room. He stood, listening with his ear pressed against the door. The hallway was quiet. When he peeked out again, the telephone box had been taken off the wall and was lodged between Shubin’s knees. With the knife he had brought from the kitchen Shubin was prying the backing off the box.

  Jake closed the door and crept back to his bed. How could his mother be so blind? Obviously Shubin was a Communist spy. Hiding all those cameras under the floor, criticizing America, talking to someone in Russian in the middle of the night, and now taking their telephone apart, no doubt looking for a listening bug the G-men who watched their house must have planted.

  A coyote barked outside, very close, a sharp urgent yap. Several others responded in a frenzied chorus. Jake tiptoed to the window and peered out, but could not see the coyotes. He looked over the hackberry hedge at the Armbrusters’ house looming dark against the darker mountains. The brilliant moonlight mirrored in its windows made the house look spooky. The invisible coyotes went on yapping, but nothing else stirred under the cold, harsh light, not a leaf on a tree, not a blade of grass. He inhaled a breath of chilled air, and it seemed to him that among the scents of hackberry and creosote and sweetbush, the same sick-sweet smell rose faintly from somewhere near him. The face of the man with gold teeth shaped itself in Jake’s memory, and a shiver of dread ran through his body.

  The coyotes’ chorus ceased abruptly, and in the ringing silence, Jake heard a growl of an engine. A motorcar with its headlamps off was slowly coming down the street, creeping like an alligator through a moonlit swamp. The reflection of the moon slid across its windshield when the vehicle drifted past the Armbrusters’ house.

  Jake stepped to the side, concealing himself behind the opened windowpane, and watched the approaching motorcar through the angled glass. For a moment, the motorcar vanished behind the hackberry, and when it showed up again, passing their driveway, Jake saw that it was that very same two-door black Buick.

  Jake dropped to the floor, crouching below the windowsill. His heart was pounding. He waited until the hum of the engine faded in the distance, then cautiously rose to peek into the driveway. A set of gold teeth glinted inches away. Jake pulled back in horror. The man with gold teeth was standing right outside his window, so close that Jake gagged on the stench of his sick-sweet aftershave.

  Jake wheeled around and ran straight into the door, banging hard against it. His hand, trembling wildly, groped for the doorknob but could not find it. He gulped for air in half sobs, shaking with fright, deafened by the clamor of his heart. At last, the doorknob was there. He spun it, forgetting which way it had to be turned. When the door finally came open, he shot into the hallway and slammed it behind him. He pushed with all his strength against the door, expecting the man with gold teeth to ram into it from the inside of the room. He did not, but Jake held the door for a long time, chilled from the cold sweat streaking in between his shoulder blades. When at last he gathered his will to dislodge himself from the door, the floorboards creaking underfoot spooked him. He switched to tiptoeing on his quivering legs, creeping silently along the hallway, as if he were the intruder in his own home and not those others: Shubin in the attic, the man with gold teeth outside his window, and the thugs in the Buick.

  Expecting the telephone to be gutted, he was surprised to see the box hanging on the wall intact. It confused him, but also eased his panic a little. Now his mother could put a call through to the police or to the G-men or both. He felt enormous relief when he saw a bar of soft yellow light below the door to her bedroom. His mother was awake, probably reading. All at once, he remembered what he could not remember last night, remembered coming into his mother’s bedroom as a little boy and watching her sleep, while the imagined airplane outside his window was waiting to take them both to Russia to look for his dad.

  He took a deep breath and cautiously opened the door, just the narrowest chink so as not to frighten his mother. A lamp under a yellow shade glowed on the low table beside her vacant bed. A large pearly-winged moth fluttered beside the lampshade, tapping it repeatedly with short hollow taps. A shadow slid across the wall, and suddenly she was there, leaning over the lampshade with her hands cupped over the moth.

  “Open the window,” she whispered softly.

  Surprised that she knew he was watching her, Jake almost stepped into the room, but another shadow crossed the wall, and it was Shubin—Shubin was in her room!—who passed silently toward the window and silently returned.

  Jake watched, astonished, as Shubin and his mother, bent side by side over the glowing lampshade, tried to shoo the moth toward the open window. The moth kept escaping and returning to the shade. In passing, Shubin’s hands brushed against Mrs. McCauley’s, and the two exchanged quick little smiles.

  Jake couldn’t bear looking at them smiling at each other. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, where their shadows swayed together as if dancing in time to the sound of the soft hollow tapping of the moth and of his heart beating hard against his rib cage and wanting to explode.

  26

  By the time the sun had finally begun to rise at the east end of Congress Street, Jake had been cruising downtown for hours. The squeaking of his bike’s rusted chain echoed between the walls of the locked-up shops and the empty office buildings. Dry desert wind swept loose newspaper sheets along the sidewalks. When Jake’s bike printed a black thread across yesterday’s front page, he circled back to read the headline, THE RUSSIANS TEST A NEW ATOMIC BOMB! On a grainy picture below the headline, a boiling ball of flame and smoke was swelling to a giant mushroom, and remembering the movie he saw in Mr. Vargas’s class, Jake imagined himself the sole survivor of the atomic blast, destined to ride the desolate streets of his town forever and ever and ever.

  He turned off Pennington to Arizona, riding past the east-facing buildings blushing in the rising sun. Returning to Congress again, he saw the first delivery van and then another. Soon the trucks appeared. The buses began their morning runs. A B-29 droned past the fading moon still visible above the rose-colored clouds. Somewhere a wireless was tuned to a bouncy Mexican ranchera, and in a second-story open window someone said, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! The Commies test a new atomic bomb!”

  Jake’s legs were sore from the all-night riding, and comforted by the sounds of the waking city, he climbed off his bike for the first time since he s
ped away from his house. It had been hard fleeing his home in the middle of the night with that gold-toothed fellow lurking outside and that Buick patrolling the streets, but it would have been harder staying home after the horrible thing he had witnessed in his mother’s bedroom.

  Jake propped his roadster on the kickstand beside the J. C. Penney entrance and, leaning against the streetlight post, sat on the sidewalk to rest his legs. Behind the glass of the storefront window, three dummies—a man, a woman, and a boy—stood facing one another. The man, his hand strangely cocked at the elbow, supported a two-tone Schwinn Phantom, the same bike Duane had. The man and the woman were supposed to be smiling at the boy, but their heads were turned oddly, birdlike, with their painted eyes looking not at him but elsewhere, just over his shiny head.

  Jake studied the dummies for a while, certain that they were meant to show a happy American family. It was the boy’s birthday and his dad was giving him the Schwinn as a present. Jake stared at the dummies, but the longer he stared at them, standing together but also somehow apart, he began feeling terribly sorry for himself. Would he ever get to see his own father, let alone get a Schwinn from him for his birthday?

  Jake heard a bus rumbling to a stop across the street and looked up at the plate of glass, dark over the dummies’ heads. There, in the clear reflection, he saw the downtown bus lurching away to reveal Shubin standing on the sidewalk.

  Jake leapt up and spun around in panic, looking for a place to hide. A mailbox squatted at the corner ten paces to his left. Jake dashed behind it. He crouched, clinging to the cool blue metal, hoping that Shubin did not see him. He listened to the bus wheezing away, other vehicles passing, then cautiously peeked out around the edge of the mailbox. He could not see Shubin, and he rose to his feet, craning his neck up and down the street. The sidewalks were busy with people hurrying in all directions. He felt relieved that Shubin had vanished, but then he spied his hat above the crowd flowing west on Congress. The hat, dirty gray like every stitch of Shubin’s clothes, bopped cheerfully above the other hats. Jake stood watching it until in a brief gap between the briskly moving bodies he spied what he had missed before—the secret satchel clutched in Shubin’s hand.

  27

  Pedaling eastward, in the opposite direction from which Shubin was heading, Jake thought about life. In general, life was unfair. Take Shubin, for example. A foreigner, a Communist, a spy, Shubin was walking American streets in broad daylight as if he owned them, while he, Jake McCauley, the honest American who pledged allegiance to the flag and to liberty and to justice for all, had to hide behind the mailboxes with no place to go. He could neither go back home to his two-faced mother, nor could he return to school, where his best friend betrayed him.

  In the meantime the sun, oblivious to Jake’s tragic mood, kept climbing merrily, and soon was in his eyes. He could hardly see where he was riding. Having no particular direction to follow, Jake made a loop in the middle of the street, pedaled westward, and before he knew it, found himself within a short distance of Shubin’s nasty hat, bouncing above the moving crowd.

  Worried that Shubin might spot him, Jake hunched low over the bars and rode against the traffic, close to the motorcars lining the curb. The trouble was the doors kept opening, the people kept getting in and out of their vehicles, and close to his right, other motorcars kept speeding by in the opposite direction.

  Abruptly, the driver’s door of a parked sedan was flung open in the path of Jake’s roadster, forcing him to swerve into the moving traffic. A horn blared. A delivery van thundered past, blasting him with heated air. Jake swung back toward the sidewalk. Turning into a narrow gap between two parked vehicles, he yanked on the bars and hopped over the curb. A group of office clerks scattered, cussing him. Jake whirred away and, to avoid colliding with a woman pushing a stroller, nearly rode through the swinging doors of the Valley National Bank.

  “Hey! You there!” A thick reddish hand of a policeman reached for the bars of Jake’s bike. He spun the bars away and smashed into a waste can. The can flipped over, spilling, and Jake sped off the sidewalk back into the traffic.

  “Watch out!” someone shouted. Jake looked up quickly, but there was no time to swerve. A truck was bearing down on him. The bugged-out headlamps and the toothlike grille were so close, the stench of gasoline stung Jake’s nose. A woman screamed somewhere. The policeman blew his whistle. The truck veered off, screeching brakes. The tires whined on rubbed-out treads. Blaring its horn, the truck barreled by within a foot of Jake. The empty flatbed bounced past, expelling a cloud of exhaust. Jake stood up on the pedals and, catching an opening in the constant flow of traffic, darted to the opposite side of the street.

  On the corner of Congress and Pennington, he saw a break in the wall of the buildings, hopped off, and walked the bike into the narrow sunless space between two brick walls. A Davis & Son Hardware trash bin stood crammed with sawdust and sawed-off lumber. He heaved the trash bin away from the wall. A scrawny cat hissed and scampered down the alley. Jake pushed the bike deep into the cranny and moved the trash bin back into place. He stood for a moment, squinting into the darkness between the wall and the bin. He could not see the bike. He turned and ran out into the street.

  Keeping close to the walls and pausing now and then to take cover, Jake tailed Shubin. Because that was what he was doing, tailing him. He realized it now. In spy language that Jake had learned from the comics, he was in command of the target, which meant that Shubin, the target of the observation, was under Jake’s surveillance. In other words, Jake was undercover, following the Russian spy. And what else was there to do but to get Shubin arrested and charged and imprisoned, so he would never step into anyone’s mother’s bedroom again!

  Ignorant of Jake’s secret plan, Shubin strolled leisurely, as if he had no care in the world, turning his head this way and that, and swinging his satchel and even, it seemed—though at such distance Jake could not be certain—whistling a silly and cheerful tune. Jake tried to stay focused, but Shubin’s obnoxious way of walking was so irritating that soon Jake made a mistake.

  At the corner of Congress and Church, he nearly bumped into Shubin. When he lost sight of him behind a newsstand, Jake stepped away from the wall to look around the stall. He stepped out too far. Shubin was loitering not five feet away, leafing through a magazine. Jake gasped and ducked behind the stall. He crouched under the sidewall hung with the overlapping rows of freshly printed comics. Above Jake’s head, tough, square-jawed, trench-coated men, brandishing tommy guns and pistols, eyeballed him from the covers of the latest issues: Deadly Intrigue! Daring Action! Spy Runner Smashes the Communist Spy Ring!

  Spy Runner was Jake’s favorite action hero. In every issue, he defended American democracy from gun-toting Commie thugs, often with his bare knuckles. The only trouble was, Jake never had money to buy Spy Runner comics and had to borrow them from Duane. Since Duane turned out to be a dirty traitor, Jake could never ask him for comics again, and for an instant, he had the bizarre idea of asking Shubin to buy him a couple. That was crazy, he knew it, and he closed his eyes to concentrate on what was important. With Shubin around, who needed comics anyhow? Jake’s life now could match any Spy Runner adventure and more.

  “Somebody call his mother,” a scratchy voice came from above. “The child has been found.”

  Shubin loomed over him with the satchel in his hand and a rolled-up magazine under his arm.

  “Your mother was worried sick when she couldn’t find you this morning. What are you up to, kid? I’ve been watching you since I got off the bus. Still playing detective?”

  Jake felt his whole face go hot and then, instantly, cold. Shubin had been watching him, while it was Shubin who was supposed to be under his surveillance!

  “Don’t sweat it, bud,” Shubin said. “I won’t tell her. It’ll be our little secret. You seem to like secrets, huh?”

  Jake looked up at Shubin, whose face was in complete shadow save for the sunlight igniting the outside curves
of his spectacles. Jake could not be sure, but it seemed that Shubin was laughing at him.

  “Why don’t you walk me to work?” he said. “It’s nearby. On Stone.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what? I’m giving you a chance to solve a mystery.”

  “No, thanks. I got to get my bike.”

  “Get it later. Come along.”

  28

  On the corner of Congress and Stone, a troop of mounted policemen blocked the traffic, escorting a red Ford semitruck piled high with folded flags and canvas banners. On both sides of Congress Street, men in hats and overalls stood high on ladders, stringing lines festooned with Stars and Stripes between the lampposts. The intersection vibrated with red, white, and blue: flags were everywhere, hanging in between the buildings, off the storefront awnings, and out of the open windows.

  “What’s this?” Shubin said, looking around. “Why all the flags?”

  “Don’t you have parades in Russia?” Jake snapped.

  “What are you so sore about?” Shubin said, thrusting the satchel at him. “Hold this a minute.”

  Jake’s eyes flickered over Shubin’s face and narrowed at the satchel. “You want me to hold it?”

  “Yeah,” Shubin said, grinning. “You can hold it. Sure.”

  While Jake held the satchel by the strap, Shubin snapped it open and took out a camera—not his spy Minox, of course; he wasn’t that stupid—but a regular camera anyone could buy at the J. C. Penney. He stepped off the sidewalk and, squinting at the sun for a moment, clicked the camera dials and swiveled the lens with quick, confident fingers. Next, he began snapping pictures of the flags, the men on the ladders, the mounted policemen, and the banner unfurling right over his head: EVERY COMMUNIST IS A MOSCOW SPY!