The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  This was a respectable neighborhood, lower-middle-class white workingman, and at one A.M. it was quite respectably and with self-satisfaction asleep. Fairly large trees growing at intervals in the strip of earth between sidewalk and curb minimized illumination from the widely spaced streetlights, leaving great patches of mid-block in almost absolute darkness, but it was a wholesome darkness, a darkness without terrors. None of the evils that hover in city darkness menaced these sidewalks; this was a neighborhood, too gentle, too mild-mannered, too nice for such goings-on.

  The address I wanted, world headquarters of the National Fascist Reclamation Commission, was a small one-and-a-half-story yellow clapboard house on a corner plot, flanked on its left by the cross street and on the right by its own blacktop driveway leading to a narrow neat garage. The garage, while hardly bigger than a doghouse, took up most of the backyard. A white sign with rustically serrated edges and reflector letters was mounted on the lawn between a slate walk and this driveway, and read The Armstrongs. The first-floor porch had been enclosed, puffy bushes lined the front of the house, and a rusted basketball ring with weathered backboard was mounted over the garage doors.

  I walked on by the house, stopped at the corner, looked in all directions while trying to decide what to. do next, and then noticed faint light at one of the basement windows. I moved down the cross street, angled over the rise of lawn at the side of the house, edged along the wall, squatted down next to the window, and peeked in.

  It was a basement like any basement. The cement floor had been painted the dark red favored by owners of clapboard houses, the vertical metal pipes supporting the main I-beam had been painted in barber-pole stripes of red and white, and off to the left a small bar bristling with gadgets, gewgaws, signs, statuary, whatnots, light fixtures, thingummys and colored glasses had been built and promptly abandoned; stacks of old newspapers atop the bar were mute and foolish indicators of the abandonment.

  Almost directly below the window through which I was peeking was Jack Armstrong himself. At least, I assumed it was he, because he was wearing the right uniform and had the right terrifying build. But his back was to me as he worked, moving steadily and rhythmically.

  How sad: for him, for me, for all of us. He was turning the crank of a mimeograph machine.

  For one wild, hopeful, childish, irretrievable second, as I watched him turn and turn, watched the sheets of paper slide one after the other into the tray, it seemed to me that all the dreams, all the ideals, all the perfections I had hoped for and dedicated my life to all these years were all attainable, and quite simply so. What a wealth of common humanity there was between this boy and me! The familiar futile motion of the mimeograph crank was the bond between us, the symbol of our common dedication and our common foolishness. Surely all I had to do was show him, explain to him, point out to him …

  On the far wall, beyond Jack Armstrong’s moving back, a large color portrait of Adolf Hitler—head and mustache and shoulders only—glowered at me with the gloomy suspicion that nihilism is self-defeating. Flanking this portrait, tacked flat to the wall, was a pair of very large Nazi flags, the well-remembered red, the white circle within, the innermost black swastika.

  Show him? Explain to him? Point out to him?

  Reality, the death of all symbol, closed in on me with a crunch. This was hardly the time, hardly the place, hardly the cast with which to make the sudden leap to millennium. So he and I shared an experience: both of us operated mimeograph machines. But I ran a mimeograph because I couldn’t get a printing press, whereas Armstrong no doubt ran a mimeograph because he couldn’t get a submachine gun. A subtle difference, perhaps, but decisive.

  All right; back to the plan. Feeling very reluctant, but at the same time in a perverse hurry to have the whole damn thing over with, I closed my left hand into a fist, extended the knuckle of the middle finger, licked that knuckle for luck, and rapped that knuckle against the window.

  Armstrong practically climbed into his machine. He was so patently startled out of his wits that I immediately and forever lost all terror of him. He might be the most violent disciple Adolf Hitler ever had, but it made no difference. Everyone else in the group Eustaly and Tyr—Leon Eyck (Leon Eyck, Leon Eyck, Leon Eyck, I must remember that!), everyone else in that group might continue to terrify me, and probably would, but not Jack Armstrong; so far as I was concerned, his fangs had just been pulled.

  I rapped at the window again, not to torture the poor boy, but simply because there wasn’t anything else to do. Sooner or later, if I repeated the sound often enough, he would come out of his panic sufficiently to recognize it for what it was, at which point he would look toward this window, I would show him my face, and possibly we could begin to communicate.

  Well, rap number two didn’t do it. It goosed him out of the mimeograph again, and off into a dim corner behind the furnace, where I could just see his eyes gleaming.

  (I think now that this was yet another example of the fact that everyone is most susceptible to his own favorite weapon. The FBI man, for example—A, I think it was—whose sign-language theory was scuttled by a knowing look. The reports we’ve all seen of advertising men who turn out to be the biggest suckers for advertising gimmicks. And here, a terrorist terrorized by something that went rap in the night.)

  I had to find some better way to attract his attention, before I frightened him out of the cellar entirely. I thought about it a few seconds, and then decided to rap out the familiiar rhythm, shave-and-a-haircut—two-bits. That, it seemed to me, would have to strike Armstrong as the work of a friendly rapper.

  And so it did. Out from behind the furnace he came, in response to it, still wary but no longer paralyzed. He moved cautiously toward the window, in which I was now showing myself as best I could, and finally unlatched the window and lifted it open just slightly, enough for me to hear him whisper, “Who are you? What you want?”

  “Greensleeves,” I said. It had been the password back at the organizational meeting, and maybe it would spur his recollection of me.

  It didn’t. He said, more strongly, “What you talking about? Are you drunk?”

  “No,” I whispered. “I’m Raxford.”

  His eyes widened, and his whisper got shrill: “What are you doin’ here? Are you crazy?”

  “I want to get in touch with Eustaly and—Leon Eyck,” I told him. “I want you to send me to them.”

  “Why me?”

  “You were in the phone book.”

  “Listen,” he whispered, “I have enough trouble with my folks as it is. They’re upstairs asleep, and if they find out you been around here—”

  “They won’t find out,” I promised. “You just get in touch with Eustaly and Eyck, let them know I’m here.” Then, being a little harsher, I said, “Are you a member of this group or aren’t you?”

  “Well, sure I am. Naturally I am.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Just so my old man doesn’t find out,” he pled. “He’s always threatening to throw all this stuff out anyway. If he found out I was hanging around with guys wanted for murder—”

  “I been quiet for five days,” I said, trying to sound menacing. “I know how to be quiet, don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay,” he whispered, still reluctant but resigned. “Come on around to the side door, I’ll let you in. And for Christ’s sake be quiet.”

  “Right.”

  Being very quiet, I walked around the house to the other side, up the blacktop driveway to the inevitable side door, which inevitably squeaked when Armstrong opened it. Wincing in time to the squeak, he whispered, “Go down cellar.”

  I went down cellar, where the Hitler portrait looked me over and decided I might as well be liquidated, and Armstrong, nervously aclatter, came after me.

  “Just sit down someplace,” he said, still whispering. “I’ll call Eustaly.”

  “Good.”

  Beside the mimeograph machine was an old desk, and on it a telephone. This,
I assumed, was the one listed in the phone book for the NFRC. Upstairs would be Armstrong’s old man’s phone, on which seditious calls were presumably not to be made.

  While Armstrong made his low-voiced phone call—a call that took quite a long time—I wandered around the basement, looking at things. I glanced at the sheet he’d been running off in the mimeograph, and it was hardly anything I might have been cranking out, which was so much for what Armstrong and I had in common. I glanced at a small tag on one of the Nazi flags and noted it had been made by a firm in Savannah, Georgia. I sat on a bar stool, glanced casually over the top of the bar, and on the floor behind it was an open-topped wooden box not entirely full of hand grenades.

  All at once, I felt very unhappy.

  15

  Two-twenty A.M. I sat in a booth in an all-night diner on Queens Boulevard, a dozen blocks from Jack Armstrong’s world headquarters, and watched the empty street. Out there, a battery of traffic lights, eight of them at various heights across the boulevard, went through their snail-paced close-order drill: all green, and then in unison both green and red, and then red alone, and finally finishing in perfect symmetry back once more at green, like an incredibly slow-paced Rockettes routine. Very dull.

  Inside, employees and customers were tied, two each. One employee, in clothing of dirty white, commanded the counter, behind which he stood now, face contorted as he worked the inside of his mouth with a toothpick. The other employee, much filthier than the first, appeared to be an alcoholic five days from his last drink, and his job was to daub ammonia on the floor around the customers. Customer number one was a stocky fortyish guy in a leather jacket who sat at the counter with coffee and doughnuts, noisily dunking the latter in the former and then more noisily eating both. The other customer, sitting at a booth with yesterday’s coffee and last week’s Danish pastry, was me.

  My left wrist tingled. I stared with mingled surprise and irritation at the watch I was wearing there, then put it to my ear and heard a tiny voice say, “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing’s happening,” I said, disgusted. The alcoholic with the mop looked at me and blinked several times. I coughed artificially, put my arm down, gazed out the window, and pretended I hadn’t said a word.

  What’s happening? they’d wanted to know. What did they suppose was happening? As per the instructions Jack Armstrong had received on the phone and passed on to me, I’d walked the dozen blocks here from his house, positioned myself in this diner booth by two o’clock—a few minutes before two, in fact—and here I’d been sitting ever since. What’s happening indeed!

  I was just promising myself that if no one showed up by two-thirty I’d quit and the hell with everybody, when a black General Motors car—as I’d told Angela, they all look alike—pulled to the curb in front of the diner and switched its lights off; on; off; on; off; on. The signal.

  I swallowed something lumpier than the Danish pastry. Now that they were here, I was suddenly more than willing to wait. Take your time, take your time, I’m in no hurry.

  Nothing for it. Mine not to reason why, etc. I got up from the booth, leaving most of my coffee and Danish, walked through the wet ammonia to the exit, and in the small space between the inner and outer doors, alone except for the cigarette machine, I paused and muttered, “They’re here. I’m going out to the car now.”

  Outside, I saw by the grille and the length that the car was a Cadillac, and that it was equipped with black side curtains. The driver was a featureless mound inside there; I made out his movements as he reached over and back, opening the rear door on the curb side. No interior light went on as the door opened.

  I slid into the blackness within the car, shut the door behind me, and we moved off at once, making a U-turn beneath the octet of traffic lights and heading down Queens Boulevard toward Manhattan.

  I sat forward on the edge of the seat, trying unsuccessfully to get some glimpse of my driver’s features—he was bundled up in hat and topcoat, with upturned collar—and finally I said, “Are you anybody I know?”

  There was no answer.

  “Don’t you talk?”

  Apparently not.

  Rebuffed, I sat back in the seat, folded my arms, and waited to see what would happen next.

  This was the first time I had ever traveled in a car with curtains over all the windows except at the front, and the sensation was an odd one. Except for the jouncing—Cadillac has a fine suspension system, but Queens Boulevard is shameful—it was not like being in motion at all, but instead as though I sat in a small confined dark room and watched a Cinemascope movie of a wide and empty nighttime street. Or, perhaps, since my own motion was apparent, it was more like hurtling down that nighttime street in an open-ended box. Whatever it was like, we were traveling well above the legal speed limit and I considered pointing out to the driver the extra reasons why I didn’t want us stopped by the police, but kept my thoughts to myself.

  We traveled Queens Boulevard to the end, crossed the Queensboro Bridge on the outside lane, circled onto FDR Drive southbound, passed beneath the UN Building, exited far downtown at Houston Street (pronounced, by the way, house-ton, not heus-ton like the place in Texas), turned briefly this way and that, and slowed as we entered a block of the most decrepit tenements, ramshackle festering slum properties, amid which rose up an impressive broad vaguely churchlike building in pink brick with a gilded roof. Before this building we slid silently to a stop; now I could see Asiatic lettering across its façade, above its gilded double doors, and on a large sign mounted on the wall before the broad entrance steps.

  I looked from this building to the driver and said, “Is this it? Do I get out here?”

  Nothing. He didn’t even move his head.

  For the benefit of the microphone in my stomach, I said, “This Chinese church here, or whatever it is, with the gilded doors, this is where I’m supposed to go?”

  I still got no answer from the driver, but an answer did arrive from a different source. The gilded doors I’d mentioned now opened, and a flashlight flicked on and off three times.

  “Thanks,” I said to the driver, not sure whether I was being sarcastic or not. I climbed out of the car, shut the door, and it immediately drove away and around the corner.

  This neighborhood was as different from Jack Armstrong’s as Jack the Ripper from Peter Rabbit. Every battered garbage pail seemed to teem with rats, every under-stairs recess with junkies, every rooftop with rapists, every entranceway with perverts, every shadow with thugs and murderers. I entered this Asiatic church, temple, mosque, whatever it was, because frankly it looked like the least dangerous place on the block.

  The entrance steps were slate. No light at all shown within the open gilded doors. I passed through, and the doors shut behind me, and the darkness was complete.

  A hand, thin-fingered, spidery, closed on my right wrist. A sibilant whisper, as of Peter Lorre at his most exultantly manic, sounded at my side: “Pleasss, thissss way.” The spidery hand tugged at my wrist.

  I followed, crossing a floor that echoed like stone. I was taken forward, and then to the right, and then stopped. The hand left me, and I surreptitiously covered several of what I considered my vital places, and stood blinking in the dark.

  A thin crack of light, directly ahead of me, thickened, broadened, became light spilling through an opening doorway. A small thin silhouette, apparently male, motioned me to step through this doorway into the light. I did so, and my guide followed me and shut the door. We were in a small Oriental-looking room with tapestries on the walls and a mosaic figure in the floor. My guide, a small thin Oriental of no particular age, dressed in a loose black tunic and black trousers, barefoot, turned to me and said, “Take off your shoes.”

  I said, “What?”

  “It is necessary,” he said, and there aren’t s’s enough in the world to record the way he said “necessary.” “This is,” he hissed on, “a holy place.”

  “A holy place,” I echoed, while the watch on my
left wrist tingled and tingled. Distracted, I raised the offending member to my ear and heard the tiny tinny voice saying, over and over, “Don’t take off your shoes. Don’t take off your shoes. Don’t take off your shoes.”

  “Idiots,” I said savagely.

  My inscrutable companion, thinking I meant him, bristled scrutably and said, “The shoes must be removed. Forcibly, if necessary. I shall call for assistance.” Spraying s’s like a Flit gun.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll get them back, won’t I?”

  “Of course. In the meantime, you may wear these slippers.”

  The slippers he extended toward me were straw, cane, wicker; you know the kind of thing I mean. They’re sold at beaches in the summertime.

  I exchanged my wonderful electronic shoes for a pair of lousy straw slippers, and saw my new friend put the shoes very carefully and neatly on the floor in a corner of the room, where, he assured me, they would be perfectly safe until my return.

  The watch had stopped tingling.

  “This way,” my guide told me, opening another door on the far side of the room, and, shuffling in my new slippers, I followed him.

  (Did you ever notice how important shoes are in stories of magic? Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz, for instance, is relatively safe from the Wicked Witch so long as she keeps the red shoes given her by the Good Witch, and similar elements are to be found in children’s stories from all over the world. Much wisdom lies in children’s folk tales, as any scholar will portentously tell you, and I spent the next few minutes considering the warnings of this folk wisdom as relates to magic and/or protective shoes, and the dire results attendant upon not having the good shoes any more.)

  But that’s an aside, a tangent, one of the things I’m trying to avoid from now on. Back, back.

  My guide, as I said, led me through another door. Beyond it was a long narrow hallway done all in beige and devoid of side doors. After a considerable distance this hall made a right turn, and so did we. Small dim ceiling lights at intervals illuminated our way.