The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  I saw that he was right. I said, “And you’ll leave them Sun Kut Fu.”

  “Sun and his entire organization.” He smiled. “And, of course, the murdered kidnap victim.” His smile broadened. “You can guess who that is, can’t you?”

  So I’m stupid. I didn’t guess, and I admitted as much.

  “My dear Raxford,” he cried, “think a minute! Now that you’ve done away with my dear sister Angela, I am the sole heir to the Ten Eyck millions. The prominent American who is to be kidnapped and, most regrettably, not to be returned is my own blessed father, Marcellus Ten Eyck.” The voice grated over his father’s name. “The old bastard’s at the Tarrytown estate now,” he said. “That’s where we’re going.”

  Angela!

  24

  “With my reputation,” he said, “I never dared finish them off myself. But now you’ve done for Angela, and the old man’s about to be killed by Sun Kut Fu. Nice?”

  What a word. I echoed it, in some fashion or other: “Nice.”

  Apparently there was something wrong with the way I said it (and why wouldn’t there be?), because he glanced sharply at me and said, “There’s something wrong? What is it?”

  “Uh,” I said, trying to think coherently, and then found something to say. “How do you collect?” I asked him. “You said yourself, your reputation. You couldn’t show your face.”

  He smiled, glinting and glistening, pleased with himself. Some kind of arrogant emotion had started in him at dinner, as he spoke of his family and childhood, and it was still building now; he was very nearly throwing off sparks. “You ask good questions,” he told me, out of his pleasure and pride and arrogance. “But I have good answers.”

  “I’d like to hear them,” I said.

  “Of course.” Smiling, watching the road, driving fast but well, he said, “I am living in Mongolia at the present time—at this exact moment, in fact—at Ulan Bator, in a pleasant house beside the Tola. When the news of the twin tragedy reaches me there, I shall return at once to my native land, heedless of my own safety, stunned by what the Reds and radicals have done to my dear sister and beloved father. I shall freely and publicly confess my past sins”—he laughed and gave me a low-voiced aside—“falsely accusing along the way several individuals to whom I owe a reckoning”—he snapped his fingers, to show his enemies being snuffed out—“and I shall co-operate fully with any and all authorities, swearing new and undying allegiance to the country of my birth, land of the free and home of the brave, the greatest little old nation on earth. I shall hire the best legal talent in the country, I shall wait out the inevitable storm of controversy, squelch the old charges, and at last I shall retire, a rich and safe and happy man.”

  He glanced at me again. “Well? Is it beautiful?”

  It was beautiful the way some snakes are beautiful. But could it really all go as simply as he described? He would have a lot of money to spend on it, and money does grease the ways, but …

  But that wasn’t the point. He thought it would work, rightly or wrongly, and because of that belief he was on his way to Tarrytown to discover Angela and unmask me. Was there any way to talk him out of it?

  I said, “What if someone finds out you were here in the States all along?”

  “No one will,” he said. “A few individuals have seen my face, but none of them will survive past next Tuesday. Except yourself, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ll be out of the country,” he said, “and unlikely to want to make trouble for me. Perhaps,” he added thoughtfully, considering the possibilities, “I’ll send you to my current employers.”

  “The ones who want the UN Building blown up,” I said.

  “More or less.” He glanced at me again, approvingly, and said, “I’m sure they’ll be pleased with you.”

  We had once again skittered past the fact that sooner or later Ten Eyck intended to kill me, and that his current employers were unlikely ever so much as to hear of me, but I didn’t have time to think of that now. What I needed was something that would convince Ten Eyck not to kidnap his father, and so I was grasping at every straw that floated by. “These employers,” I said. “They know you’re here. Are you sure you can trust them?”

  “Trust them?” The idea seemed to astonish him. “Of course not,” he said, then looked thoughtful for a minute. “I hadn’t intended,” he said slowly, “to do anything about them; at least, not right away. But perhaps you’re right.”

  Within me, hope soared like a bird.

  Ten Eyck promptly shot it down. “Perhaps,” he said, “it would be best to take care of them at once, when they pay me.”

  I said, “Isn’t it a country that hired you? A government?”

  “Ah, no,” he said, smiling. “Have I given that impression? No, there are two individuals …” He tapped his fingernails on the steering wheel. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps.”

  “Maybe you should tie up all the loose ends,” I suggested, making one last try, “before you kill your father.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head. “An opportunity like this won’t come twice. I’ll have time for the rest later.”

  So it was hopeless. Which meant, since I couldn’t dissuade Ten Eyck, I’d have to get away from him, sound the alarm. We were on a highway at the moment, driving along at better than fifty miles an hour, far too fast for me to make a leap for it, but sooner or later we’d have to go through a town, be stopped at a traffic light or some such thing, and then I’d be off like the rabbit I was.

  In the meantime, there was still one thing more I might accomplish. We were at last talking about Ten Eyck’s employers; maybe I could find out who they were and why they wanted the destruction of the UN Building. I cleared my throat, licked my lips, did a Humphrey Bogart twitch with my right cheek, and said, “One thing I don’t understand. Why do two individuals want to blow up the UN Building?”

  “They don’t,” he said. He smiled at me and said, “That was my own idea.”

  “But you said—”

  “You want to know?” He shrugged. “It can do no harm,” he said. (I knew what he meant by that: snick. I also knew I’d chosen just the right time to ask him questions. He was usually reticent, too damn reticent, but starting at dinner tonight this tension, arrogance, emotion, high nervousness had been building and building in him, and he seemed to use talk to ease the pressure. Why else the anecdotes, this willingness to answer questions? The coming showdown with his father was straining his control.)

  “My employers,” he said, “wish the elimination of seven men, but do not dare attract suspicion toward themselves. The seven must either appear to die of natural causes, or to have been murdered for reasons totally unconnected with either my employers or their goals. Seven such natural deaths would, perhaps, be stretching coincidence beyond its tolerance, so murder must be the answer. Murder with misdirected motive.”

  “Not easy,” I said, encouraging him.

  His smile phosphoresced. “Everything is easy,” he told me, “once the proper method has been found. These seven men have one thing in common: all, from time to time, are to be found at the UN. If the UN Building is demolished, killing several hundred, including men of much more global significance than any of my targets, the death of the particular seven will go almost unnoticed.”

  It’s good the interior of the car was dark, because I’m sure my true feelings showed themselves at least briefly on my face. In order to kill seven men cleverly—for pay!—Tyrone Ten Eyck thought nothing of killing several hundred men and women who meant nothing to him for good or ill, for profit or loss, but who were merely extras on the set of his scheming.

  He filled my silence, luckily, with more words of his own, saying, “If, besides that, the explosion is obviously the work of a coalition of American lunatic-fringe organizations, suspicion cannot possibly touch my employers.” He smiled in my direction, proud of himself, saying, “Do you like it?”

  “It’s—imag
inative.”

  “Imagination is the key to everything,” he told me, and I could hear the tension buzzing in his voice.

  I said, “But you told me you wanted the UN Building full, that’s why you were going to blow up the Senate, why we’re kidnaping your father.”

  “Ah, well,” he said. “The problem is, three of my seven targets are not regularly to be found at the UN. Special circumstances are required to bring them there.” He nodded in satisfaction. “We’ll provide the special circumstances,” he said.

  I began to chew my knuckles.

  25

  We went through Tarrytown without being stopped once; there was practically no traffic, and every light turned green in front of us as though a local ordinance had been passed in our favor. How often does something like that happen?

  Outside town again, I sat moodily in my corner and chewed myself. If I couldn’t get out of the car—and at even thirty or forty miles an hour, I couldn’t—what was there to do? All I could think of was to hope that Angela wasn’t there any more. I knew how fluttery she was, and how little she got along with her father (not as little as Tyrone, of course), and it seemed to me at least possible that she might be hiding somewhere else by now.

  Well, it was possible.

  Suddenly we slowed, I had no idea why. We were on the hilly two-lane road north of Tarrytown which led to the Ten Eyck estate, but the turn-off was still a mile or so ahead of us. Yet Ten Eyck was slowing, he was steering off the road, he was stopping.

  I had my hand on the door handle, and then I saw the truck, and the group of men standing beside it. We were making our rendezvous with the Eurasian Relief Corps.

  As soon as we stopped, Ten Eyck switched off the lights. A few seconds later Sun was at my window, talking past me to Ten Eyck, saying, “Everything’s set.”

  Ten Eyck said, “Good. Remember to cut the phone lines when you go in.”

  “Right. Are you sure about those armed guards? There’s nobody at the gate.”

  “He’s a paranoid,” Ten Eyck said. “He’ll have guards, he always does, but they’ll be in the house, close to him. Half a dozen, maybe more.”

  “We’ll take them,” Sun said.

  “Good. Flash me when it’s done.”

  “Right. See you.”

  We started away, lights still off, and I could just make out the Corps members climbing up into the back of the truck. It was a large closed tractor trailer. They could have anything in there, they could almost have a tank in there.

  No. They wouldn’t need a tank.

  Ten Eyck switched the headlights on as soon as we were on the road again. We drove on in silence—tension now emanated from him like radio signals—and after about half a mile we took a steep and slanting side road uphill to the left. We jounced upward for what seemed quite a while, finally emerging on a barren hilltop or ridge where the road deteriorated to a meandering dirt track. Ten Eyck stopped the car there, switched off the lights, and said, “Come take a look.” His voice was flat, mechanical.

  Lobo, apparently, had no interest in what was about to happen. He stayed in the car (I’d practically forgotten him, hulking back there) as Ten Eyck and I walked over to the cliff edge (it wasn’t really a cliff, but a very sharp-angled downward slope, dotted here and there with precarious trees) and he pointed out to me the salient features below. “There’s the Hudson,” he said, in that odd new impersonal voice, “and there’s the house. See the lights?”

  “Yes. I see them.”

  Far down to our left the Ten Eyck estate was laid out for us like part of a model railroad display. The winding road in from the highway, the winding river on the far side, and the manor—lights in every window—waiting between the two. Along the road crept the headlights of the truck.

  Beside me, Tyrone Ten Eyck stood unmoving, stone-still. His eyes glistened like black ice, and that electric tension still hummed within him, but he was like a dynamo on minimum power; he had shut down, closed in, narrowed his attention. Nothing existed for him but that tiny stage setting down there, the house and the truck.

  The headlights came closer, close enough to blend with the light spilling from the house, and now I could make out the truck in its entirety, cab and trailer. Several men leaped from the rear of the trailer, were met by two tiny figures emerging from the front door of the house, and there was the faint sound of gunfire. The two tiny figures fell over.

  Men swarmed from the truck, deployed left and right, surrounding the house. A few—that must have been Sun himself at their head—dashed in through the front door.

  They would find Angela. They wouldn’t kill her, not here, no more than they would kill the old man here, but they would find her, and hold her, and show her to Ten Eyck. And Ten Eyck would cut me down like the sapling I was.

  (How near the edge he stood! And his concentration was so complete that surely he had no idea where I stood or what I was doing. It would be so easy, so easy. For one of the few times in his life, Tyrone Ten Eyck was completely off-guard. To stand behind him, to give him a sudden push …)

  More gunfire from down below. A shattering of glass; someone had leaped or been thrown from a second-story window, through the glass. He landed atop the trailer, rolled, came up on his feet on the trailer roof. From the flashes, he had a gun in his hand, was shooting toward the window he’d just left. There must have been answering gunfire; he abruptly flipped backward off the trailer top as though swept aside by an invisible hand.

  (Not only easy, not merely easy, but also necessary. Destruction moved with Tyrone Ten Eyck, spread out from him in ever-widening circles. As there are people who are carriers of contagious disease, so Tyrone Ten Eyck was a carrier of destruction. He had to be stopped. [The flash of the Bodkin house blowing up suddenly appeared before my mind’s eye.] Now was the chance. Just a push, a small push, an infinitesimal push …)

  The gunfire seemed to have ended. Two or three lights had gone out within the house, but otherwise it appeared unchanged. A kind of wounded silence had fallen on it now.

  (After the push: I could evade Lobo in the dark, in the woods. He was big and strong, but he was also stupid. I merely had to start. I merely had to put my hands out, palms forward, and step behind him, and push …)

  A figure came out the front door, lifted its arm, and light flashed in our direction. A flashlight; on off, on off, on off.

  Ten Eyck, a small sheen of perspiration gleaming on his forehead, turned and said, “Now we go down.” His voice was husky, as though he’d run all the way uphill.

  I stood there, blinking, suddenly back to reality, paralyzed by what I’d been thinking. Good God! Was it contagious, had I caught it from him? I was a pacifist, a pacifist, and I’d been standing here thinking of murder.

  What other word is there for it? None. None.

  Ten Eyck, having started toward the car, looked back at me and said, “Raxford? You coming?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  26

  As we turned in at the gate, Ten Eyck laughed and said, “Home at last!” He was becoming his old self again.

  I wasn’t yet, so I had nothing to say. He didn’t seem to notice.

  We arrived at the manor—which had the shocked, open, stupid look of an assault victim—and Ten Eyck stopped beside the truck. All three of us got out and entered the house.

  Inside, there was wreckage everywhere. Drapes had been pulled down from the tall windows, chairs and tables had been overturned, carpets bunched against walls, lamps smashed on floors, two legs of the grand piano buckled. One of Sun’s Eurasians lay sprawled head-downward in a swastika shape on the staircase.

  Sun himself appeared from a room on the right. He seemed about to salute Ten Eyck, but restrained himself. Instead, he said, “All secure, Mr. Eyck. Had to kill all the guards and two of the servants, but everybody else is still alive.” He had a smear of something on his left sleeve.

  I stood there, listening and watching, wondering about Angela, and I
couldn’t understand why I hadn’t managed to escape sometime, somewhere, somehow before coming here. The fly was in the spider’s parlor now for sure.

  Ten Eyck said, “Where’s my—where’s Ten Eyck?”

  (It was hard for me to keep in mind that Ten Eyck was known to all the others by a different name, and that none of them knew his relationship with the owner of this house. Here in the heat of it all it was apparently getting just as hard for Ten Eyck to remember.)

  But Sun didn’t notice the near-slip; I suppose he too was distracted by battle. Starting off, he said, “We’ve got him back here.”

  Ten Eyck hesitated. “You gave him the injection?”

  “Of course,” said Sun. “He’s sleeping like a baby.”

  “Good.”

  “They both are,” Sun added, and my stomach closed up like a hole in the sand.

  Ten Eyck said it for me: “Both?”

  “There was another guy with him,” Sun said. (My stomach opened up again.) “Younger one.” He laughed, saying, “Suppose it’s that black-sheep son of his?”

  “That would be amusing,” said Ten Eyck, and we all smiled, each for a different reason.

  “Well, come on,” said Sun, and started off again.

  Ten Eyck followed Sun, I followed Ten Eyck, and Lobo followed me. (I’d tried to motion Lobo ahead of me, hoping I might be able yet to duck away, but Lobo’s stolid insistence on being last thwarted me.)

  As we walked, Ten Eyck said, “What were our casualties?”

  Sun shrugged apologetically. “Eight,” he said. “Three killed, five wounded.”

  Ten Eyck said, “We can’t take wounded. You know that.”

  “Of course. They’ve been taken care of.”

  “Good.”

  We found Marcellus Ten Eyck in a smallish room that badly showed the scars of the recent battle. Only one piece of furniture was still upright and unscratched, a pink chaise longue with golden legs. On this, like a parody of Charles Laughton, old man Ten Eyck sprawled unconscious.