The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  A broad heavy metal firedoor barred our path at the end of the hall. This my guide pushed, with much stern-faced heaving and with labored grating sounds from the door, until it was entirely open, when he motioned me through to another hallway exactly like the first. “You go down there,” he said, pointing, and strained the firedoor shut again, with himself on the other side of it.

  Now I was alone. I said, experimentally, “Hello?” and put the watch to my ear. It ticked at me, the moron. I was alone.

  There was nothing for it but to press on. I walked down to the end of the hallway, discovered that it turned left and led to a flight of stone stairs going downward. The lighting now was from infrequent bare light bulbs strung along a wire at head-height on the right side, and the walls deteriorated to rough masonry. A slightly bitter, slighty salty scent was in the air, vaguely reminiscent of the ocean.

  At the bottom of the stairs a curving corridor led away to the right, crowded between hunching walk of stone. Somewhere, water dripped. The light bulbs were at such a distance from each other now, that some small segments of this bending corridor were totally unlit.

  At last another flight of stairs, this of wood and going upward. No more electricity; burning brands in wall-holders lit my way and filled the air with a smell like tar.

  At the head of the wooden stairs an arched doorway led to a narrow metal catwalk extending out into and over echoing blackness. At the far end of the catwalk, there was another lit doorway. Cautiously, I moved across the catwalk.

  Rusted railings flanked me on both sides. The metal underfoot was slick and damp. I had the impression of a great drop beneath me, but nothing showed in the total darkness down there. A similar impression of a high—arched? domed?—empty expanse above me was equally incapable of being proved.

  The next doorway led me into a soft and furry room all enclosed in thick drapery and tapestries of various strong dark colors, and thick rugs scattered about the floor two and three deep. The ceiling was painted black. Small tables, on which candles burned, were the only furnishings and the candles the only light. Large orange and red cushions, pillows, were scattered about.

  A multicolored shadow moved, separating itself from its background, and became a voluptuous and beautiful Oriental girl in some sort of complex and all-encompassing traditional garb. She bowed to me, as candlelight glinted in her raven hair and her almond eyes, and motioned silently for me to follow her.

  Oh, Lord, would I follow her? With her and Angela, I’d have the complete set …

  She led me down a long broad nicely carpeted hall, well lined by doors, all of them closed, some of them releasing various sounds of pleasure: music, laughter, etc., etc. At last she stopped at a door on the left, knocked discreetly, bowed to me, and went back the way she had come.

  I looked after her, lusting for her, until the door opened and yet another Oriental face showed itself to me. But this one I immediately remembered; he’d been one of the people at the meeting! I hadn’t remembered him to tell the Feds about, but now that I saw him he came back into my mind at once; some sort of splinter-group Communist organization he led, it seemed to me, but both his name and that of his group were lost.

  He promptly supplied both. “I’m Sun Kut Fu,” he said. “Eurasian Relief Corps. Remember me?”

  “Of course,” I said politely. “You were at the meeting.”

  “Right. Come on in.”

  I went in, to an ordinary Occidental office, complete with gray metal desk, gray metal filing cabinet, gray metal wastebasket, and green Kemtone walls. Sun Kut Fu said, “Sit down anywhere. What do you think of the front?”

  “Very nice,” I said, and sat down on the brown leather sofa. Except for the swivel chair behind the desk, it was the only place I could sit; so much for his anywhere.

  “You can’t beat a religious front,” he said, very pleased with himself, so much so that I guessed he’d thought up the religious front himself. “You can do all sorts of kooky things and the cops never turn a hair.”

  “Somehow,” I said, “you don’t sound very Oriental.”

  He laughed and said, “You kidding? I was born in Astoria, just over the bridge. My old man ran a laundry. Still does.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, because he was still smiling. “About my shoes,” I said.

  “That’s the best part of it,” he said beaming away. “Even if the cops are tailing you, it stops back at the temple. As long as your shoes are there, it figures you’re there. You can go all over the world, safe and sound.”

  “That’s really wonderful,” I said. “But I’d like them back.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody’ll cop them. They’ll be right there where you left them no matter how long, even a week.”

  “But—” I said.

  He waved a cheerful but brisk hand and said, “Somebody’ll be by to pick you up. I got other things to do. Nice seeing you again.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Good work with that rich bitch,” he said. “That’s the kind I can’t stand, you know? They enter the battle even though they got no stake. What the hell, man, this world is theirs!” He shook his head, grinned at me, walked out, and shut the door.

  I sat there a long time—longer than I’d waited at the diner—until all at once a section of the wall opened and there, framed by blackness, hulked Lobo. He shambled in, moving like a bear, and rumbled, “Frisk.”

  “Right,” I said. I got to my feet and spread my arms out.

  Thoroughly, slowly, painstakingly, Lobo frisked me. He found my necktie, my handkerchief, my pen, my mechanical pencil, the wallet containing my credit card, my belt, and my quarter. He gave everything back to me, walked back over to the new black hole in the wall, turned, raised one of those monstrous hands, and beckoned to me.

  I was off again.

  16

  Four A.M. in a small dank windowless black-walled room beneath the city, I stood at last face to face with Tyrone Ten Eyck. Above us swayed a glaring light bulb suspended on a black wire from the dim ceiling. In the middle of the room stood an old wooden table and two unpainted wooden chairs.

  I had been led by the silent Lobo through yet another tortuous series of corridors, staircases, empty rooms, and earthen tunnels, ending at last in this room, empty when I arrived. I had entered, seen it was a dead end, and behind me Lobo shut the door and went away.

  After a few jittery minutes of waiting, during which I thought of eighty-three separate things that could have gone wrong with our plans, the door opened once again and in strode Tyrone Ten Eyck. (Face to face with him it was impossible to think of him under his pseudonym. “Leon Eyck” was nothing this man could possibly be called. He was what the young Orson Welles had always wanted to be.)

  “Greetings, my dear Raxford,” he said, with a glinting smile. “I owe you my thanks for your prompt work upon the former Miss Ten Eyck.”

  I cleared my throat. “Thank you,” I said, struggling for his kind of equanimity. “It was nothing.”

  “It was, perhaps, more than you know,” he said, with a keen look at me. He had a resonant melodic voice, with something strange in it: the sound of the crushing of baby’s bones. The glinting smile still on his lips, he motioned at the table and chairs. “Be seated. We’ll talk.”

  But why that keen look? Why had he said that the murder of Angela was perhaps more than I knew? Something, it seemed to me, was expected of me—but what? (I felt all at once like a man forced into a chess game with a grand master and given a ten-second time limit for each move. How could I possibly work out what my opponent was thinking?)

  But then—barely within the time limit—I saw what he was fishing for. Angela and I had been together for some time between our departure from the meeting and my “murder” of her. Had she, in that time, told me who Leon Eyck really was?

  Well, why not? I had an explainable justification for knowing Ten Eyck’s real name, why not use it? At the very least it would avoid the possib
ility of a disastrous slip of the tongue later on.

  There was time for no more thought. “Thank you,” I therefore said, “Mr. Ten Eyck.” And reached for the chair.

  Everything in the room became suddenly silent. The scrape of the chair as I moved it over the concrete floor was terrifyingly loud, and in the tense silence after it Ten Eyck spoke in a voice I hadn’t heard before, the sound of flint scraped across the beak of a hawk, as he said to me, “What name was that? What name did you call me?”

  Had I made a mistake? Had I made the mistake? There was no time to think; I could only carry through. A little hoarsely, I said, “Ten Eyck. I called you Ten Eyck. Aren’t you Tyrone Ten Eyck, that girl Angela’s brother?”

  It was the right thing to say. The speckled smile flashed again, the smoother voice returned, and he said, “She told you. I should have anticipated as much.”

  “I hope,” I said carefully, “that creates no problems for you.”

  His smile shimmered. “I think it will not. Do be seated, Mr. Raxford, we have more than ever to talk about.”

  We sat facing one another across the old table. He withdrew from an inner pocket a small, dark, gnarled little Italian cigar, of the kind that looks most like a miniature shillelagh. I got out a cigarette for myself, which I badly needed, and he lit both our smokes from a delicate gold lighter with a gas flame. His cigar smoke, pungent, rich, foreign, soon filled our small room, making the surroundings seem less harsh but no less dangerous.

  Watching me with eyes that sparked like live wires, he said, “What else do you know about me, Mr. Raxford?”

  “Nothing, really,” I assured him.

  A quizzical smile now. “Nothing? My dear departed little sister never told you a thing?”

  “Oh,” I said, hurriedly picking over what I knew about him, “that you’d left the country a long time ago. That you were a Communist.”

  “A Communist!” He laughed aloud; he seemed to find the suggestion absurdly comical. “That would be her level of comprehension,” he said. “A Communist!”

  I said, “You aren’t a Communist?” Oh, if only I had my shoes on, if only P and the others were at this very moment clustered around a receiving set somewhere less than two miles away, hearing all this choice and vital information! Damn Sun Kut Fu and his religious cover!

  Tyrone Ten Eyck withdrew the little cigar from the corner of his mouth and said, “I am nothing you can describe from a political Roget, Mr. Raxford. Nor, I suspect, are you.”

  Another lightning move, and again I had to make a lightning response. How did I want Ten Eyck to see me—as a crackpot like most of the others at that meeting, or as a clever opportunist like himself? A crackpot he might consider useless, but another rogue male he might consider dangerous.

  It was probably egotism more than sense that made me choose the way I did. Whatever prompted it, I replied, “I suppose each of us is most concerned with number one. The only difference is, my number one is spelled Raxford.”

  Flint struck steel within his smile. “Naturally,” he said. “Except that the murder of my sister would seem, perhaps, inconsistent.”

  Of course it seemed inconsistent! Busily manufacturing as I went, afraid to look either back or down, I said, “I get emotional at times. And that situation was never really in my control.”

  He nodded, acceding the point. “True. Also,” and he smiled the knowing smile of insiders confiding in one another, “the Raxford name is perhaps a disposable identity.”

  “Possibly,” I said, and tried to smile the way he did it.

  He puffed thoughtfully at his cigar, studying the scarred table top. “Now,” he said at last, “we come to the present. You have sought us out. You are here. Why?”

  “We can help one another,” I told him. “For a while.”

  “Can we?” he said, and glinted humorously at me. “For instance,” he said, “how can I be of help to you?”

  “I’m a hunted man now. You have contacts in foreign countries, you can get me out of the States, line me up with people who can use me, pay me for what I can do.”

  He nodded agreeably. “I could,” he said. “And how, in return, do you propose to be of help to me?”

  “I assumed,” I said, “that was what you came here to tell me.”

  “Hah! Well said, Mr. Raxford! We will get on!”

  I practiced the glinty smile again. “I had hoped so,” I said.

  He suddenly looked more serious, leaned forward, lowered his voice. “One point,” he said, “I wish to make clear. You are one of only three men in the world who know that Tyrone Ten Eyck is anywhere near the United States. I want it kept that way.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’d expect you to do the same for me.”

  The briefest of silences fell. We met one another’s eyes, both unblinking, both urbane, both well aware of at least one set of hidden truths. Ten Eyck had use of me, for the moment, but the time would come when he would surely try to kill me, if only because I knew his real name. I knew this, and he knew I knew it, and I knew he knew I knew it, and so on through an infinity of facing mirrors, each of us aware of the receding levels of the other’s knowledge, neither of us with any intention of voicing that knowledge aloud.

  If I were actually the man Ten Eyck thought me, what would I do now? It seemed to me I would smile and appear to believe everything he had said, and plan to watch him, get what I could from him, and kill him myself as soon as I knew nothing more could be gained from him. And he of course, must even now be thinking that that was what I would plan.

  What a nerve-racking way to live! If I’d never found any other reason to advocate pacifism, this would be it; it is so much easier on the nerves not to perpetually be circling your fellow man, hand warily on the hilt of your knife.

  Ten Eyck now leaned back, relaxed, puffed at his twisted little cigar. “Eustaly’s net,” he said, with easy contempt, “dragged in mostly fish. They call themselves terrorists!”

  Something cynical was required of me. I shrugged and said, “Every army needs its privates.”

  “Of course. But specialists even more. It is for specialists that I had Eustaly cast his net. He produced a few, but in the main they are, or were, as you call them, privates.”

  “I take it,” I said, “you have a specific goal in mind.”

  “Oh, definitely. The United Nations Building.”

  “Yes?”

  “We are going to make it full,” he said, smiling slightly. “More than usually full. Full to bursting. And then … we shall blow it up.”

  17

  I said, “Why?” It wasn’t a clever thing to ask, it wasn’t a question in character, it wasn’t a question I should have expected an answer to; the word merely popped out of me, like a cat out of a bag.

  But Ten Eyck didn’t seem to notice that my mask had slipped. He was, for the moment at least, too caught up in the pleasure of thinking about his own schemes to notice a false nuance from his audience. His smile phosphoresced and he said, “Each of us has his own reasons, Mr. Raxford. For some, an ideal. For others, more practical considerations. In your own case, you will be taking part in expectation of the assistance I will be able to give you later on.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Naturally.” Thinking back to the meeting, I said, “That’s why you started discussing the United Nations and plastic bombs.”

  “Certainly. It is my intention to bring the two together.”

  He had made a joke, ha ha. We smiled at one another like brother cobras in a pit. Little did he know he was smiling at a cobra suit worn by a rabbit! The rabbit, settling his cobra suit more securely around himself, said, “There were other things you talked about at the meeting, too. China, and Congress, and the Supreme Court.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “As to Congress, the Supreme Court, all that, I had originally intended to set a prior bomb in Washington, probably in the Senate, leaving evidence pointing to the Communist Chinese. The United States, it seemed to me, would
surely call an extraordinary session of the General Assembly in order to accuse China, filling the UN Building to the brim. Remember, I want it full.”

  He was completely out of his skull, of course, but in quite the wrong way. If only he’d chosen to go catatonic, to sit unmoving and unresponsive, staring at a wall, how much simpler life would have been for everybody. But no, not him; Tyrone Ten Eyck had to be actively insane.

  I said, “But could you make a frame like that stick?”

  Smiling, glimmering, he said, “I have the excellent but expendable Sun Kut Fu for that purpose, he and his Eurasian Relief Corps.”

  “Are they Chinese Communists?”

  “They think so. The Red Chinese themselves have more sense than to be connected with such lunatic-fringe organizations. Mao and his government severed all relations with the Eurasian Relief Corps over a decade ago, but that won’t make any difference. Let the American Senate be destroyed, let Sun and his friends be found—fuses in hand—amid the wreckage, and the conclusion in the American mind will be inevitable. The dirty Red Chinese did it! Hotheads will demand instant retaliation, atomic attack on Peking, which by the way could use it, if only for slum clearance purposes. A filthy city. However, more rational Americans will urge restraint, will recommend a formal complaint to the United Nations. And so on.” He waved his hand carelessly. “But of course all that’s changed now.”

  “You have a new plan,” I suggested.

  “A definite improvement,” he said, “from every point of view.” He tapped white ash from his gnarled cigar. Smiling, glinting, he said, “And all because of you. Isn’t that odd?”

  “Because of—”

  Behind me, the door burst open. Ten Eyck all at once was on his feet, dumping the table in my lap, flinging his chair side-arm at the doorway, leaping to the side wall and producing from within his black cloak a black Luger; all in a second, less than a second. He had lived this nerve-racking life, it seemed, for a long while, and had learned its lessons well.