The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  I looked at him, and looked at his bloody Chief, and looked at Angela, and looked at the airshaft, and looked at my left shoe, and gradually got myself used to the idea that I was in a bind. My brave talk about leaving New York, hiding out till this had all blown over, was so much bushwah, and I knew it just as much as they did. Through no fault of my own I was in this mess up to my neck, and no matter how much I disliked P and his cohorts personally, professionally, and philosophically, it remained true that I was more likely to survive with them than without them.

  But I wasn’t prepared to give in quite that easily. “Maybe we can talk,” I said. “Maybe we can make a deal.”

  P snorted, but N said, “What sort of deal?”

  “Your Chief there said something about pulling the FBI surveillance off me,” I reminded him.

  Quickly P said, “We’re not the FBI.”

  “But you could arrange it,” I said. “Couldn’t you?”

  P and N looked at each other, and then N said to me, “On what basis? Give us a reason we can use.”

  “You scratch my back,” I said, “I scratch yours.”

  N smiled briefly and frostily. “That wouldn’t look good in a memo.”

  Angela said, “If Gene helps the government now, doesn’t that prove he isn’t subversive?”

  N considered her, smiled a bit more warmly, and said, “That just might do it.” He turned to P, saying, “Eh, Chief? By volunteering his assistance in an emergency, J. Whatchamacallit Raxford demonstrated his—”

  “Eugene,” I said.

  “Wha? Oh, right. J. Eugene Raxford—I keep thinking it’s J. Edgar—J. Eugene Raxford demonstrated his loyalty beyond question, and we therefore recommend all surveillance of him and his organization cease as of date. What do you think?”

  P looked doubtful. “You know how stiff-necked they can be.”

  “They’ll go along, Chief,” N assured him.

  P looked sternly at me and said, “I guarantee nothing. I’ll do my very best, that’s all I can say.”

  “Then it’s on,” I said. “I’m yours. Do your worst.”

  N beamed at me, patted my shoulder, and said, “Good man. You won’t regret this.”

  “That’s what you think. I’m regretting it already.” I said to P, “What do you want me to do?”

  “In a word,” he said, “infiltrate.”

  “Infiltrate? What kind of word is that? What do you mean, infiltrate?”

  P leaned forward over the desk, so intent it was obvious he had to be the one who’d thought this caper up, and said, “You’re going to be part of the League for New Beginnings, in a position to watch them from the inside and report their activities to us.”

  I said, “Don’t look now, but your brains just fell out.”

  He smiled thinly—a man with superior knowledge again. “Does there appear to you to be an insoluble problem, Mr. Raxford?”

  “You betcha,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the fact they already know I’m a ringer, so how do I infiltrate?”

  He shook his head. “No, Mr. Raxford, that’s where you’re wrong. They do not know you are a ringer. They only know Miss Ten Eyck is a ringer, and at the moment they assume you are one as well.”

  “Pretty good assumption, if you ask me,” I said.

  “But,” said P, raising a hortatory finger, “what if you were to murder Miss Ten Eyck?”

  “I’d get the chair.”

  “Please, Mr. Raxford, this is serious.”

  “You bet it is,” I said.

  He said, “Listen to me, now. The afternoon papers tomorrow will report that Miss Ten Eyck has disappeared, and was last seen in the company of the notorious terrorist and subversive, J. Eugene Raxford of the Citizens’ Independence Union. For the next five days the newspapers will continue to report on the exhaustive search being undertaken for both of you, with constant references to your past history as a terrorist, culminating in the report of the discovery of Miss Ten Eyck’s murdered body. Shortly after which, you will contact Eustaly, pre—”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Through one of the others at the meeting. The Whelps, for instance, or Mrs. Bodkin. Several of these people live quite openly, very easy to find.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then what?”

  “You explain to Eustaly,” he told me, “that when you ran from the room you were not running away from the group but after Miss Ten Eyck. That you subsequently caught her and murdered her, since it had become obvious she was a spy of some sort of your organization, and have been hiding out ever since.” P spread his hands and said, “Eustaly will have no choice but to believe you.”

  “I’d prefer it in writing from him,” I said. “All right, never mind that. In real life, such as it is, where will I be for the next five days?”

  “At a site of ours,” he told me, “being prepared for the infiltration. Believe me, Mr. Raxford, we have no more desire to see harm come to you than you have. We will take every possible precaution, including a crash training program for you that will leave you equipped to handle almost any situation that may arise.”

  I turned to Angela and said, “See? I carry my own net.”

  She smiled encouragingly at me, squeezed my arm, and said, “You’re doing the right thing, Gene. I can feel it.”

  “Wonderful.” To P, I said, “What about Angela? Where’s she going to be during all this?”

  “We’ll hide her out at one of our sites till it’s all over,” he said.

  “Make it the same site as me,” I said.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “You two aren’t married, are you?”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, “we’ll sign the register Mr. and Mrs.”

  He said, “I’m not sure we could get approval for that sort of thing.”

  I turned to N, who seemed to be the nearest thing to a sane human being in the room, and said, “Tell him.”

  N understood at once. He nodded at me and said, “Chief, I think in this case we can afford to look the other way. We show Mr. Raxford our willingness to co-operate with him, and then I’m sure he’ll be happy to cooperate with us.”

  P considered, pursing his lips, brooding at his desk top, but sooner or later all of us compromise with our morals, allow the end to justify the means, permit our actions to fall short of our ideals, and P was no exception. “Very well,” he said grumpily. “But,” he said, giving me the gimlet eye, “I ask you to be discreet. I don’t want you contaminating my men.”

  “Well!” said Angela. “I like that!”

  “He meant morally,” I told her.

  P cleared his throat, rather noisily, and said, “All right, that seems to be about all. You’ll be taken to the site now, by auto.” He nodded at L and N, who nodded back and got to their feet. P stood also, and put a good face on it as he said, “Allow me to express my appreciation, Mr. Raxford, for your offer of co-operation. Anything that can be done to make your task easier will, I assure you, be done.”

  “Thank you,” I said. The occasion seemed to call for it, so I got to my feet, and we faced one another across the desk. P extended his hand, and very solemnly I took it. It was the kind of handshake that follows the awarding of a medal, and P seemed perilously close to kissing me on both cheeks.

  Instead, he said, “For the duration of this operation, your code name will be Q. All correspondence concerning you will employ that designation, and the men at the site will know you only by that name. Understood?”

  I said, “I’m Q?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked around. L. M. N. O. P. “Of course,” I said. “I’m Q! Who else?”

  P said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing,” Q told him. “It’s a private joke.”

  10

  Picture, if you will, a rolling countryside green with verdant spring. A small dark-watered lake fills the center of a cupped valley, surrounded by wooded hills, forested with pine and oak and maple.
On the eastern shore of the lake there are the only signs of human occupancy: a pier, a small beach, a float, a boathouse. A smooth, undulant, green lawn sweeps up-slope from these to a large sprawling house of gray fieldstone; this could be a private manor, or a rest home, or a small and exclusive resort. There are stables, occupied by real horses, to one side of this building, and a long garage, occupied by real automobiles, to the other. A narrow blacktop road continues up the face of the ridge beyond this building, into the woods, over the top, and down the other side through thick forest to a small state highway not quite three miles away. The country-side all around the lake is beautiful, wild, lush, crisscrossed by narrow trails and enclosed by electrified fencing.

  The time is six-forty A.M. Because the month is April, a slow, gentle, chilling drizzle is leaking interminably from heaven, and the temperature is hovering around fifty. Through this beautiful, bleak, half-lit predawn landscape two men in gray sweatsuits are running. They are trotting end-lessly along a path that circles the lake. They are running around the lake, and around the lake, and around the lake. They must be idiots.

  One of the two is a burly blocky blond-haired bloke named—or so he says—Lynch. The other, known to Lynch and everyone else around here—you can’t see them; they’re asleep—as Q, is yours truly, J. Eugene Raxford, your correspondent. Lynch, red-faced, as healthy as a moose, is trotting along like a well-oiled wind-up toy. Beside him, I am wheezing, I am puffing, I am panting, I am flailing my arms around and no longer making any attempt to keep my knees as high as Lynch likes them.

  This was the morning of my fifth day at this place, which was what P had referred to as “our site.” Judging from the nighttime automobile trip Angela and I had taken here from P’s office, we were somewhere in upstate New York, or possibly in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Although it might also have been in Rhode Island, Vermont, or New Hampshire. Wherever it was, its name was Hell.

  In the last five days I had learned something I’d never known before: pacifism makes one flabby. You might think walking on picket lines, marching in demonstrations, cranking mimeograph machines, and running away from mounted policemen are activities that would keep one in relatively good physical shape, but apparently they do not. At any rate, Lynch and his confreres—no letters for these people, they all had names, one monosyllabic name each—were convinced that I was in terrible physical shape, and after they’d run me around the lake a few hundred times, my tendency was to believe them.

  The first day had been the worst. It had been after dawn before we’d finally arrived here, and when Angela and I were shown our connecting rooms and left alone, we were both so tired that neither of us so much as checked to see if the linking door was locked. (It was, we later learned, not.) I was awakened at noon, over my strident protests, chivvied downstairs for a breakfast of orange juice, steak, scrambled eggs, milk, coffee, toast and orange marmalade, and introduced to a beefy bunch termed, blithely, “your instructors.” The one who called them that began the introductions by introducing himself: “Karp. I handle the administrative end at the site here.”

  And the others: “This is Lynch, who’ll be seeing to your physical condition. Walsh, here, is your code man. And here’s Hanks, your judo instructor. And—”

  “I’m a pacifist,” I said. “Maybe they didn’t tell you.”

  He looked at me with the expressionless eyes of a philanthropist doing a good deed among the lower orders. “Hanks,” he said, “will instruct you in some of the principles of self-defense.” He looked away, and continued the introductions: “This is Morse, your swimming instructor. Here’s Rowe, fencing and gymnastics—”

  I said, “More self-defense?”

  Another blank look, and he said, “Quite. And finally. Duff here, your electronics technician.” Turning to me full-face now, he said, “As I understand it, you are a special case, Q, not one of our normal recruits. We have been given just five days to turn you into something with at least a minimum of survival potential, and if we are to get anywhere at all we shall require your full and unstinting co-operation. We shall not, I promise you, waste any of these five days instructing you in anything useless or abstract, so please do not waste time objecting to elements of the course. I take it you would prefer to survive.”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I said, “I’d appreciate it very much.”

  “It won’t be too much trouble,” he told me. “Walsh, will you take Q along now?”

  Walsh was my code man. He took me away for an hour to a small room where he filled me full of codes, passwords, signals, counteractants, emergency over-rides, and I don’t know what all. ‘‘Don’t worry if it isn’t all sinking in,” he said at one point. “We’ll have several sessions.”

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  Lynch had me next. Down to the locker room we went, changed into sweatsuits, and off for the first but not the last time around that bloody lake. For an hour I ran, I did calisthenics, I climbed ropes, I jumped up and down, and I did a lot of loud breathing through my mouth. When at last the hour was done, Lynch looked at me and said, sourly, “They expect miracles, don’t they?”

  Duff, my electronics technician, was next. We met in a long low-ceilinged room full of electronic equipment, at which Duff generally waved, saying, “Here is some of the equipment you may be called upon to use. Our purpose is to familiarize you with it.”

  Sure.

  Next was Rowe, fencing and gymnastics. Rowe handed me a blunt épée, attacked me à la Douglas Fairbanks a few times, and said, “Well, the hell with that. If they come at you with swords you’ll die, that’s all. Let’s go to gymnastics.”

  I said, “They don’t come at people with swords very much any more, do they?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Not often. Swing on those rings over there.”

  After Rowe came Morse, my swimming instructor, who said, “Can you swim at all?”

  “I can swim very well,” I told him.

  “Thank God for small favors,” he said. “I am now going to teach you to swim silently. Get in the water.”

  I said, “Do you know it’s cold out here?”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. “Now, in order to swim silently—”

  Then came lunch, a welcome respite, and the first time I’d seen Angela that day. The people here didn’t know her name either, but they didn’t call her by a letter, they just called her Miss. She said, “How are you doing?” and I said, “They’re trying to kill me. Nothing to worry about.”

  After lunch I saw Duff again, and had another go at the electronic equipment. He also took some of my measurements, for various electronic things he intended to attach to me one way and another, and I went away from there, somewhat bemused, to be thrown around a padded floor for an hour by Hanks, my judo instructor, who couldn’t care less about my pacifism; whether or not I ever used what he taught me was not his concern. Then Walsh the code man again, and some more silent swimming with Morse, and another go at the gymnasium with Rowe, on and on, ultimately ending at ten o’clock at night with an incredible massage from Lynch. “One thing we don’t want,” Lynch said, pummeling me, “is for them muscles to tighten up.”

  They wouldn’t have dared.

  Dinner was relaxing, though brief, and afterward I was sent to my room with several volumes on applied psychology, with marked chapters concerning police interrogation methods, psychological manipulation of co-workers, and similar villainies. When Angela, all rested and randy, came scratching at my door a little after midnight the best I could give her was a smile, and even that was weak.

  And so it had gone, for the next four days. It was a crash program, in which I was the crash, and incredibly enough it seemed to have some effect. My physical tone improved amazingly, much of what I’d been told about codes and electronics and psychology appeared to. stick with reasonable permanence in my memory, I learned to swim as silent as a gliding lily pad, and I even got pretty good on the parallel bars.

  Not
that there was a lot of improvement, because there wasn’t. But considering the length of time we’d all been given, the fact of any improvement was pretty astonishing.

  By the third night I’d even been able to show Angela a spark of life, which pleased her exceedingly, until twenty to six the next morning when Lynch came striding in, found us both in the same bed, looked down on us with disapproval, and said, “Breaking training. No good for you.”

  “Really!” cried Angela, turning red all over.

  “Yes, really,” said Lynch, turned on his heel, walked out, and twenty minutes later had me running around the lake as though we were trying to get somewhere.

  This was the daily routine; up at five-forty, exercise from six to seven, then breakfast and session after session for the rest of the day and halfway into the night.

  Now it was the fifth and last day, opening all cold and drizzly, with Lynch pacing me as usual around the lake. At ten to seven we stopped running and switched to a cross section of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups, various kinds of jumps, etc., etc., and at seven I staggered into the main building, took my first shower of the day, and went ravenously to breakfast.

  We had a guest this morning: P, all citified and sissy in his suit. I flexed a new muscle at him, drank my orange juice, reached for my steak, and said, “Well, Coach, you just bring on da champ. I’ll knock him outa da ring.”

  P smiled bleakly. “I’m glad you feel that way, Q,” he said. “Tonight you re-establish contact.”

  The orange juice turned to a cold solid in my stomach. I put down a forkful of steak and said, “We’re ready?”

  He tossed a pile of newspapers on the table beside me. “Take a look.”

  The top paper was Friday’s Daily News, and the applicable item was on page 4. Beneath a headline reading SOCIETY GIRL VANISHES, the story announced that industrialist Marcellus Ten Eyck had reported to police that morning the disappearance of his daughter, Angela, who had not returned home the night before. Police had information that Miss Ten Eyck had last been seen in the company of one Joseph Rakford (sic), a known extremist termed by the FBI “erratic and dangerous.” Foul play was not ruled out. Accompanying this absurd story was a small grainy photo identified in the caption as Angela, but it looked more like a picture of me.