The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  (I try to be nice to people from the FBI in the hope that sooner or later they’ll decide to leave me alone again, though I fear the hope is probably vain. The CIU was under surveillance in the middle fifties because that’s what life was like in the middle fifties, but along toward the end of that witch-hunting decade the Feds began to leave me pretty much alone. Then I made my mistake.

  (My mistake [We’re continuing the parenthesis, you notice] was in assuming that an organization called Students for Non-Violence and Disarmament was probably a pacifist group. When the secretary of SFNAD called me and asked if our group would march with hers in a protest demonstration against the British Embassy, I naturally agreed; we small groups very frequently band together to give a more impressive appearance.

  (Well [The same parenthesis marches on and on], it turned out SFNAD was an excessively left-wing Communist front having something to do with the violent overthrow of a North African nation which was just in the process of no longer being a British colony or protectorate or some such thing. [Are you following this? I never did.] When the dust settled, SFNAD was down on the FBI’s list of Dangerous Organizations We Better Keep an Eye On, and so—guilt by association—was the poor little CIU. The FBI and I had been on rather close terms ever since. [End parenthesis.])

  Anyway, new Feds assigned to me had a habit of treating me like I was James Cagney, and these two were no exception. They came in, snicked the door shut, and one of them said severely, “You are J. Eugene Raxford?”

  “J. Eugene Raxford,” I said. “Right. Just a minute.”

  I started away to get the coffee, but the other one stepped quickly in front of me, saying, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  (FBI men never tell you their names, so I’ll have to identify these two simply as A and B. A had asked my name, and B was now standing in front of me, blocking my path.)

  To B, I said, “I’m going to the kitchen, get the coffee.”

  “What coffee?”

  “The coffee I put on for you people.”

  B looked at A and made a head motion. A promptly left the room, apparently to search the kitchen, and B turned his attention back to me, giving me the gimlet eye. “How’d you know we were coming?”

  “You always do,” I said.

  He said, “Who called you?”

  I looked at him, astonished. Didn’t he know my phone was tapped? I said, “What? Called me? Nobody called me.”

  A came back from the kitchen and shook his head. B grimaced and said to me, “Don’t give me that. You couldn’t have known unless somebody tipped you.”

  “Then,” I said, “why don’t you pick up the phone and ask your man in the basement to play you the tape of the call? Maybe you’ll recognize the voice.”

  A and B looked at one another. B said, “There’s something wrong with the security here.”

  “No, there isn’t,” I said. “You people have me under constant surveillance. Frankly, I think you’re doing a first-rate job.”

  A said to B, “We better get on with it.”

  “There’s a security leak here,” B answered him. “We ought to find out what’s what.”

  “The thing for us to do is report it, and let HQ decide,” A insisted. “Our job is identification.” He turned to me. “Where’s the bedroom?”

  “Through the door there,” I said.

  They never say thank you. A merely went away to the bedroom, while B pulled a glossy photograph from his jacket pocket, pushed it in front of my face, and barked, “Who is that man?”

  I squinted at it. The picture was a blurred and murky series of grays, an unfocused attempt with a telephoto lens. It appeared to be a street scene, and possibly that long dark blob in the middle was a man, though it could just as easily have been a telephone pole.

  “Well?” B snapped. “Who is it?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” I said.

  “Don’t give me that! You know who he is, and if you’re smart you’ll tell us now and save yourself a trip downtown.”

  A came back from the bedroom and shook his head. He had ink on the back of his left hand. (The mimeograph is in the bedroom; I sleep on the sofabed in the living room.)

  “Uptown,” I said. “Or maybe crosstown.”

  They both stared at me. B said, “What?”

  “Foley Square,” I told him, “is both uptown and crosstown from here.”

  Squinting like a seagoing parrot, B said, slowly and dangerously, “Foley—Square?—What—about—Foley—Square?”

  “It’s your Headquarters. You said I could save myself a trip downtown, but there’s nothing downtown from here except the Manhattan Bridge. You meant I could save myself a trip crosstown, or maybe a trip uptown. But not a trip downtown.”

  FBI men tend to look at one another a lot. These two did it again now, and then B whirled on me and snapped, “All right, quit stalling. You won’t identify the man in the photo?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Who is he?”

  A said, “You’re supposed to tell us.”

  B waved the photo under my nose. “Take a good look,” he ordered. “Take a good look.”

  “How am I going to take a good look,” I asked him, beginning despite myself to get irritated, “unless you people take a good picture?”

  B looked at the photo himself, suspiciously, and said, “It looks all right to me.”

  A suddenly said, “Do you deny that individual was in this apartment today?”

  I said, “Eustaly? Was that Eustaly? Let’s see that again.”

  But they wouldn’t; they were both suddenly scrambling for notebooks. B insisted I spell Eustaly, which I did, and then A said, “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “That picture,” I said (it was now back in B’s pocket), “threw me off. I knew you were coming up here to ask me about Eustaly, but that picture—” I shook my head, unable to go on.

  “You knew?” B demanded, leaning in toward me.

  A said to him, “Let’s not get off on that again. We’ll just report it to HQ, that’s all.”

  “I’ve never seen such a security leak,” B muttered.

  A abruptly turned and waggled his fingers in my face. I stepped back, offended, and A said, “Well?”

  “Well what? Don’t do that!”

  He did it again, waggle-waggle. “I suppose,” he said, looking knowing, “you don’t know what that means.”

  I suspected it meant he was dangerously insane, but that’s nothing to tell an FBI man, so I said, “That’s right. I don’t know what that means.”

  “That’s sign language,” A told me. “As if you didn’t know. Deaf-and-dumb sign language.”

  “Is it?” I was interested. Ever since Johnny Belinda, I’ve had a hankering to learn sign language, but somehow or other there’s never been time for it. “Do some more,” I said.

  “That’s how you communicate!” A said triumphantly, pointing a finger at me, which I guess wasn’t sign language but was just pointing a finger. “You never speak in here, you or any of your friends, and that’s how you do it. Sign language!” He turned to B and said, proudly, “I worked that out myself.”

  Oh, I thought. These people were under the impression their microphones were still working. Since they never picked up anything, it meant I was doing my communicating with visitors some other way. That must be why they kept sneaking in all the time and emptying my wastebaskets, looking for notes.

  Well, I didn’t like this sign-language theory of A’s a bit. If the whole FBI went along with it, they’d stop emptying my wastebaskets. I haven’t emptied a wastebasket in nearly three years, and I’d hate to have to start all over again.

  So, knowing something of the FBI mentality, I said, “Sign language, eh? Huh.” And looked even more knowing than A.

  A, as I’d guessed, was stricken. His confidence in his theory was shattered, never—I hoped—to be reassembled. (An outright denial, of course, would simply have confirmed A in his convictions. But
the sly suggestion of superior knowledge, which is the FBI man’s own major tool of his trade, is also the weapon to which he is the most vulnerable. With one “Huh” I had puffed sign language right out of A’s head into oblivion.)

  Gruffly, B took over then, saying, “Let’s get back to this man Eustaly. What did he want?”

  “He came here by mistake,” I said.

  Which gave them the upper hand again. They both looked knowing in the extreme, and B said, “Oh, yeah? Tell us about it.”

  “He really did come here by mistake. What he wanted was terrorist organizations.”

  B nearly closed his eyes, he was squinting so hard. “He wanted what?”

  “Terrorist organizations. He thought the CIU was a terrorist organization, and he wanted to tell me about some meeting he was setting up with a lot of them, you know, terrorist organizations, and he wanted me to go.”

  A said, “I thought your crowd was pacifists, conscientious objectors.”

  “That’s right. Eustaly made a mistake.”

  “You mean he wanted the World Citizens’ Independence Union?”

  I said, “The what?”

  But B interrupted saying, “You don’t expect us to believe that, do you?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “But on the other hand, what would you believe?”

  “We’ll ask the questions,” B snapped.

  “Ah,” I said, “but I’ll ask the rhetorical questions.”

  “Don’t be a wiseguy,” A advised me, meaning he hadn’t understood the word “rhetorical.”

  B said, “What did you tell this guy Eustaly?”

  “I told him he was making a mistake. He wouldn’t believe me either, he thought I was just being careful.”

  B said, “So what did he—” and was interrupted by the doorbell. Immediately he tensed up, and his right hand ducked under his coat tail toward his hip.

  “Relax,” I said. “It’s probably a pacifist.”

  I went to the door and opened it, while A and B watched me like goldfish eying a new cat, and I’d been right: it was a pacifist. A pacifist near and dear to me, in fact, the pacifist who lately does my laundry and loses my socks, washes my dishes and brings me pastrami sandwiches from the deli, changes my sheets and then helps me use them, my Beatrice, my Thisbe, this year’s love—Angela Ten Eyck.

  How beautiful Angela is, and how gorgeously dressed, and how sweet-smelling, and how clean! She is possibly the only girl south of 14th Street who smells primarily of soap, but on the other hand she doesn’t live south of 14th Street, she only visits from time to time. She lives, to be exact, on Central Park South.

  Angela is the daughter of Marcellus Ten Eyck, the industrialist and munitions maker best known for his contribution in World War II of the Ten Eyck 10-10 Tank, sometimes called the Triple Ten or the Triple Tee, the tank about which there was a muddled, inconclusive, and abruptly halted Congressional inquiry in 1948. As any psychoanalyst could have told the father, both of his children grew up to oppose him. The son, Tyrone Ten Eyck, disappeared behind the Bamboo Curtain in North Korea in 1954 and, except for an occasional scurrilous radio broadcast, hasn’t been heard from since. The daughter, Angela, had no sooner finished being a debutante, four years ago, than she’d turned her back on affluence and influence—symbolically, at least—and had come downtown to be a pacifist. (There was a widespread belief—perhaps not entirely unfounded—that of the two betrayals, the old man minded that of his daughter the more. Tyrone, at least, wasn’t trying to throw his own father out of work. In fact, one might even say he was out drumming up business.)

  Angela always wears clothing such as to make me want to rip it to shreds, the quicker to get it all off her, and this time was no exception. On her feet were boots, black, narrow, high-heeled; they made me think of Marlene Dietrich. Above, black stretch pants, taut and tapering, made me think of ski lodges. Still further above, a bulky fuzzy wool sweater of the brightest canary-yellow in the world made me think of hayrides. And down inside there, I knew, she would smell of this morning’s shower.

  The head, with Angela, is always the last to be considered. Not that it isn’t a lovely head, for it is, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful head indeed. Natural blond hair frames a face of smooth symmetry, flawless complexion, just enough cheekbone, and a jawline as delicate as an artist’s brush stroke. Her eyes are blue and amiable and very large, her nose is slightly Irish, her mouth is generous and usually smiling. But, alas, this charming head is hollow. Inside, the winds blow back and forth from ear to ear uninterrupted by more than the smallest nodule of brain. My Angela, though she is rich and beautiful, though she possesses a yellow Mercedes Benz convertible and a license to drive it, though she is a graduate of an exclusive New England girls’ college, though she pays part of my rent and I love her dearly, still I must say it—this Angela is a nitwit.

  For instance. In she came, smiling, kissed my inky cheek, looked at the FBI men, and said, “Oh! Company! How nice!” Angela—and only Angela—had failed to see that these were Feds.

  B came lumbering forward, notebook at the ready. “What’s your name?”

  “Angela,” she said, beaming. “What’s yours?”

  “Honey,” I said. “These are—”

  “You close your mouth,” A told me.

  B said to Angela, “What do you know about a”—he consulted his notebook—“a Mortimer Eustaly?”

  Angela looked as alert as a bird on a branch. She said, “Who?”

  “Mortimer,” B said slowly, enunciating, “Eustaly.”

  Angela continued to look alert. “Eustaly,” she said. She turned her bright smile toward me, saying, “Honey, do I know anybody named Eustaly?”

  “Playing dumb,” commented A.

  “We’ll see about that,” said B. Poising his notebook threateningly, he said to Angela, “What’s your full name?”

  “Angela,” she said, “Eulalia Lydia Ten Eyck.”

  “All right, you, don’t be—Did you say Ten Eyck?”

  “Well, of course,” said Angela prettily. “That’s my name.”

  A and B looked at one another again, and this time I knew why. The FBI had specific instructions about Miss Angela Ten Eyck, though I’m sure they’d never have admitted it. But it’s one thing to practice your counterspy techniques on a bunch of uninfluential pacifists, and it’s quite another thing to get tough with the daughter of Marcellus Ten Eyck.

  Angela’s timely arrival, therefore, had considerably short-ened what had looked to be a long and tedious interview. (Having told A and B the truth at the outset, I would have had increasingly less to say to them as time went on.) As it was, they looked at one another, apparently decided their best bet was to check with Headquarters before doing anything else, and made preparations to leave. That is, B warned me to stick around in case I should be wanted for further questioning, A gave me the unnecessary information that I would be watched, and, with a rather stiff attempt at a polite nod to Angela, they trooped out.

  Angela turned her bright smile on me and said, “They’re cute. Who are they, honey? New members?”

  3

  Over coffee, I told her the whole story. She listened, saying ooohh and wow and golly at the ends of all the sentences, and despite her, I struggled on until my tale was done. (I have shared my bed and board, such as they are, with bright girls and with rich girls over the years, but never simultaneously, and if there is a God I’d like to ask Him why that should be so. Why can’t I have a bright rich girl—or even a rich bright girl—for a change? If she were both rich and bright, I’d even give up good looks, despite my aesthetic nature.)

  Well. When I was finished, Angela said one more golly, and then added, “What are you going to do, Gene?”

  “Do? Why should I do anything?”

  “Well, this Mr. Eustaly’s going to do something terrible, isn’t he? Maybe blow up the UN Building or something like that.”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  “Well, that’s te
rrible!”

  “Granted.”

  “Then you ought to do something!”

  I said, “What?”

  She looked around the kitchen helplessly. “I don’t know, tell somebody, do something, stop him.”

  “I told the FBI.” I said.

  “You did?”

  “I already told you that,” I said. “Remember?”

  She looked a little glassy. “You did?”

  “Those two guys. The cute ones. We were just talking about that.”

  “Oh, them!”

  “Them. I told them.”

  She said, “Then, what are they going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing.”

  “Nothing! Good heavens, why?”

  “Because I don’t think they believed me.”

  At that, she got more excited than ever. “Well—well—well—” she sputtered, “—well—well—you’ve got to make them believe you!”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I have trouble enough with the FBI as it is. I’m not going to make them believe I have traffic with a lot of terrorist organizations. If they come around and ask me questions I’ll tell them the absolute truth, just the same as always. If they don’t believe me, that’s their tough luck, not mine.”

  “Gene,” she said, “do you know what that is? Do you know what you’re saying, Gene? That’s non-involvement, Gene, do you realize that?”

  (You must understand, being accused of non-involvement in my circle is just a little worse than an accusation of non-conformity uptown, or Uncle-Toming in Harlem, or child-molesting in the suburbs. Non-involvement is not necessarily the only sin we know, but it’s the only mortal sin. If a man had accused me of it, only my determined pacifism would have saved him from a punch on the nose.)

  As it was, I blanched, I spilled coffee, I said loudly, “Now, just a damn minute here!”

  But loud words wouldn’t stop her. “That’s exactly what it is, Gene,” she said, “and you know it. Don’t you?”