The Spy in the Ointment

by Donald E. Westlake

  The other one, the putative black-sheep son, also unconscious, was dumped in the corner like a bag of dirty laundry. I went over, wondering who it could be, if it might be someone I knew—though Marcellus Ten Eyck and I hardly had many friends in common—and I looked down at the peacefully sleeping face of Murray Kesselberg, boy attorney.

  Now what the hell was he doing here? So far as I knew, he’d never even met Marcellus Ten Eyck.

  Then Sun said it: “There was a woman here, too. In the bedroom upstairs.” Said it slyly, with a grin, a knowing eye. “A real nice piece.”

  Amusement and surprise showed in Ten Eyck’s face, and for an instant he seemed on the verge of saying why-the-old-rascal, but instead of that he said, “Was there? Show her to me.”

  “Right,” said Sun, and came perilously close to saluting again.

  “Is she asleep?” Ten Eyck asked him.

  “No. We only had two shots. I’ve got her outside here. I’ll be right back.”

  Sun left. Ten Eyck, gazing at his unconscious father with the fondness of a carnivore looking at meat, said reflectively, “Eight casualties. That leaves fourteen. Our work is cut out for us, Raxford.”

  I said, “It is?”

  “We have fourteen to dispose of,” he said. “Not here, of course. Later on, at the hideout.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He glanced at me, gave me a crooked grin; it looked like a scythe. “We’ll make a good partnership, Raxford,” he said. “A pair of predators.”

  “That’s us,” I said, and looked tough.

  Then Sun came back, followed by two of his Eurasians, holding between them the girl they’d found here. Let it not be Angela, I prayed.

  It was Angela.

  Brother and sister stared at one another, both stunned beyond belief. Then Ten Eyck turned, his eyes drilled me, he said, “Raxford?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Raxford,” he said. “What are you?”

  I opened my mouth.

  I closed my mouth.

  I ran.

  27

  I would like to be able to say that I ran into Angela deliberately, that deliberately I clutched her hand and pulled her with me out of the room, down the hall, up the stairs, over the dead swastika, through half a dozen rooms, into the closet …

  … but I can’t. I know the truth about myself, and you might as well know it too. From the time Ten Eyck asked me what I was till the time I came to a stop in that closet, I wasn’t even conscious. Instinct, the subconscious, self-preservation, call it what you will—I was on automatic pilot. When, in that closet I turned my head and saw Angela panting there beside me, I was as astonished as Ten Eyck had been to see her downstairs.

  Her surprise was apparently equal to mine. She gaped at me and said, “Gene! You’re supposed to be dead!”

  “I am not supposed to be dead,” I said indignantly. “Whose side are you on?”

  “You were blown up,” she insisted. “That government man just called a little while ago. He said everybody was blown up at that Mrs. Bodkin’s house.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He said you finally set your directional beam going, whatever that means, and it was cut off before they could get there. But they found the place, and it was that Mrs. Bodkin’s house, and it was blown up.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  She nodded vigorously. “That’s what I said. It blew up, and you were in it.”

  “Angela,” I said. “I’m here.”

  She looked troubled, doubtful, confused; her lovely logic had foundered on a rock of fact.

  I said, “Just take my word for it, don’t try to figure it out.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, Gene,” she admitted.

  I said, “What about Murray, that’s what I want to know? What’s he doing here?”

  “I asked him to come up.”

  “You did what?”

  “I know,” she said mournfully. “That government man was mad, too. He made Murray swear oaths and everything.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t have anybody to talk to or anything,” she said, pouting. “Except Daddy, and he gets to be terrible after a while.”

  I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything a new voice intruded, from somewhere outside our little dark closet, saying, “They came up here. Find them!”

  I whispered, “They’re looking for us.”

  “I hear them,” she whispered.

  “We’ve got to hide,” I whispered.

  “We are hiding,” she whispered back.

  “Not here, they’ll find us right away. Someplace better, someplace they won’t think to look. Come on, Angela, you grew up in this house, where’s a good hiding place?”

  She frowned in concentration, then all at once brightened and cried, “The fort!”

  “Sssshhhh!” When I was sure no one had heard her little cry, I whispered, “The what?”

  “It’s up in the attic. I used to hide there when I was a little girl and Tyrone was being mean. He never did find me there.”

  “That’s what we want, then,” I said. “You lead the way.”

  “Okay.”

  She reached for the door, but I grabbed her hand. “Wait! Let me check, see if the coast is clear.”

  “You said I should lead the way.”

  “Patience, Angela.”

  I opened the door a crack, misjudged my distance and bumped my nose against the door frame in peeking one-eyed through the crack, and saw that the room was at the moment empty. I motioned to Angela to follow me on tippy-toe, and together we did a little ballet rush across the room. I peeked this time around the edge of the hall door, and that too was empty at the moment.

  I whispered, “Which way?”

  “Down that way,” she whispered, leaning out to point. “All the way to the end, and through the door on the left there, and up the stairs.”

  “Right,” I said, and was just about to step out to the hall when three Eurasians toting tommy guns came striding out of one room, across the hall, and into another room. I waited, cleared my throat, hitched my trousers, blinked a few times, took Angela’s hand, and started off again.

  It all went well enough, but I wouldn’t like to do that every day. We skipped as light and quick down the hall as three hundred pounds of autumn leaves, flitting past the open-doored room in which the trio was poking its tommy guns into closets and under beds, successfully reached the door to the attic stairs, and went on up. (No matter how we grimaced, how we lifted our knees, how we thought silent, those damned stairs had to crack and creak like a jolly bonfire.)

  At the top, Angela motioned the way we were to go. The floor of this unfinished attic was just rough planks, but at least they were quiet. All around us were the trunks, the wardrobes, the stacks of magazines, the cardboard cartons, the mounds of old drapes, all the things endemic to attics in big old houses. There were also the odd corners and crannies and convolutions which, on the outside, gave the house its rooftop look of nineteenth-century New England Grim.

  Behind us, the door at the foot of the stairs suddenly slammed open, and a voice cried, “Here’s the attic!”

  “Take a look,” shouted another voice. “They might of went on up.”

  “Where?” I begged Angela in a desperate whisper. “Where where where?”

  “Right over here.”

  Over where? There was nothing over there. Beyond an old wooden trunk with metalwork on it there was a curving rough wall, just a corner of the roof, unfinished and naked, with a projecting dormer window to its right. There was no place there to hide.

  Still—maddened by fear, I thought at the time—Angela made straight for this barren corner, rushed into the dormer space as though to fling herself out the window, flung herself to the left instead, and disappeared from sight.

  I stopped. I opened my mouth. I stopped breathing. (Way across the attic, boots could be
heard clumping up the stairs.)

  An arm appeared, fingers groping for me. I reached out and took the hand, and was drawn into a crazy triangle of space behind the wall. To the left of the dormer, accessible through it and between two upright two-by-fours, was a narrow area between that curved corner wall and the exterior slant of roof. What architectural nicety this all meant on the outside I couldn’t tell, but on the inside it meant one small area of attic in which the roof had two shells, an outer and an inner, with space enough between them for Angela and me—with luck—to evade Tyrone Ten Eyck and his assassins.

  This refuge was small and cramped and damp—the back half contained a brackish puddle, indicating a leak in the roof—but it should be safe. I squatted down next to Angela, who was standing bent over like lumbago sufferers in comic strips—the place was less than five feet high—and I whispered, “This is perfect. Now all we have to do is wait for them to leave.”

  “I could stand up in here when I was little,” she said.

  I looked at her. “Is that right?” I said.

  After that we were quiet, because the sound of searching had come close. The attic seemed to be full of searchers, and they were doing a slow and thorough job of it, opening all the trunks and wardrobes, looking behind the stacks of cartons, looking anywhere and everywhere that even a small and skinny human being might hide himself.

  We both began to get stiff and cramped in there, but at the worst, pain is a proof of continued existence—the dead don’t ache (you might want to write that down someplace, or alert Bartlett)—and we suffered our aches in thankful silence.

  Until, all at once, something began to tinkle. Ding ding ding ding, in a faint yet somehow pervasive tone, and it kept right on doing it: Ding ding ding ding ding …

  It was very close. It was, in fact, right in here with us.

  I looked at Angela, and Angela looked at me, both of us wide-eyed and ashen-faced, and then Angela raised her left arm and looked at the watch on her wrist.

  It was pill time!

  “I fixed it,” whispered my idiot, my imbecile, my mechanical marvel, my mistress of machinery. “I fixed it.”

  “You fixed it,” I said. “Oh, boy, you just bet you fixed it.”

  That watch hadn’t been working—or at least not dinging—the last time I saw Angela, if you recall. But leave it to her to fix the damn thing. And fix us along with it.

  Outside, an instant of electric silence had been followed by a sudden blur of noise: shouts, shoves, scrapes. They were coming for us. They’d find us now, no question.

  And just to make sure they would, the watch now wouldn’t turn off. Angela poked it, pried at it, took it off and hit it against the floor, and it just kept dinging away like an after-dinner speaker.

  “All right,” I said, having had enough. “All right.”

  I took out my handkerchief, sopped it thoroughly in the puddle—it would now, if Duff had known what he was talking about, release a nausea-inducing gas—and flung it around the corner into the attic proper.

  I removed my necktie, struck a match to it—smokescreen—and threw that after the handkerchief.

  I reached out to the dormer window, put my fist through one of the glass panes, stuck the mechanical pencil out there, pressed the button on its side, and sent a red flare shooting back down through the window and into the floor at my feet.

  I took out the ballpoint pen, couldn’t remember in the confusion what it was for, pushed the button anyway, and took my picture.

  Then, photographed, blinded by the red flare, nauseated, coughing from the smoke, having loosed my bolt, expended my arsenal, and shot my wad, I staggered out to the waiting arms of Sun Kut Fu and the Eurasian Relief Corps.

  28

  “Sun! I cried. “Listen to me, Sun!” And all the while hacking, coughing, burping, eyes watering, feet stumbling along as two of Sun’s tong war trainees hustled me across the attic toward the stairs. “Listen to me!” I cried, but in vain.

  Angela, being hustled along behind me, was clogging the airwaves with a lot of useless helps and let-me-gos. My throat smarting, my eyes burning, my stomach spinning, I did my best to shout above her: “Sun! Listen to me or you’ll be next!”

  That stopped him, right at the head of the stairs. He turned a cold eye on me and said, “Next? What do you mean, next?”

  “Everybody’s dead,” I gasped. “From that meeting, everybody’s either dead or set up to die. Bodkin, Baba, Mulligan, the Whelps—There’s two more going up with the UN Building.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You set that timer yourself, you wouldn’t let Zlott near it. When Armstrong pushes that switch Tuesday, there won’t be any five-minute wait and you know it.”

  He brushed it aside. “Armstrong and Labotski are amateurs. One job and they’re used up.”

  “You, too,” I said. “You’re next.”

  “I am no amateur,” he said stiffly; I think his pride was hurt. “Besides, Eyck has no reason to kill me.”

  “He’s got two. You’ve seen his face. And your dead body is the evidence, the frameup on Red China.”

  Something odd crossed his face then, and he said, “What was that?”

  “I didn’t think he’d told you the Red China story,” I said. “Or why he picked Marcellus Ten Eyck to kidnap.”

  “We’re kidnaping him for the ransom,” he said, but somehow there was something wrong with the way he said it. And he was glaring at me in a funny way I didn’t understand. “That’s enough now,” he said, and to his henchmen added, “Bring them along.” He turned away.

  “Wait! Sun! He’s Tyrone Ten Eyck!”

  That stopped him again. He looked back, frowned at me as though seeing me for the first time. “Ridiculous,” he said, but in a thoughtful tone of voice, as though he meant to say “interesting.”

  Sun himself must have realized Leon Eyck was an assumed name, but he hadn’t cared. It was enough that Eyck and Eustaly were setting up an organization to do more efficiently and on a grander scale the things Sun wanted to do anyway. (That he’d been willing to overlook the presence in the group of the Stalinist, Meyerberg, was proof enough of his single-mindedness.)

  But now, with so much having happened, with a dead girl and an arch-conspirator (that’s me, I mean) suddenly an enemy of some sort (though he couldn’t have any clear understanding why he was looking for me), Sun’s single-mindedness was beginning to crack.

  Did he even know who Angela was? There was a chance he didn’t, so I said, “Do you recognize the girl?”

  It broke into his thoughts. He said, irritably, “What?” Then glanced at her and away again. “No.”

  “Look again,” I said. “You saw her with me once before.”

  “I did?” This time he looked more closely, and I saw it hit him. “The meeting!”

  “She’s Angela Ten Eyck.”

  He stared at both of us. “You killed her,” he said.

  “Ask her,” I said. “Ask her who Leon Eyck is.”

  Angela volunteered without being asked. “He’s my brother,” she said. “My brother Tyrone.”

  Sun started to shake his head, like a man bedeviled by a million little flies.

  I said, “He identified her at the meeting.”

  “He had seen her before,” Sun said, obviously repeating what Ten Eyck had told him, “knew she was a CIA agent.”

  “Are you kidding? She’s Marcellus Ten Eyck’s daughter!”

  “That only makes it worse,” he said, but without complete conviction.

  “Why did he want Marcellus Ten Eyck doped before he went in,” I asked, and answered my own question: “Because the old man would have taken one look at him and shouted Tyrone!”

  “He’s my brother,” said Angela.

  “With me dead,” I said, “and with Armstrong and Labotski already set to kill themselves, you’re the last one alive from that meeting. You and your boys are the only ones who’ve seen Leon Eyck’s face. So he’s got two
reasons to kill you. To protect himself, and to set up the frame on—”

  “That’s enough of that!”

  “I just—”

  “Shut up!”

  Sun looked around, like a man with too many decisions to make all at once. And then I got it.

  Every time I tried to talk about Red China he shut me up, but anything else I wanted to talk about he was willing to hear. But the head of the Eurasian Relief Corps ought to be interested most of all in an accusation about somebody trying to frame Red China.

  As though we didn’t have confusion enough, Sun was a double agent!

  He had to be, it was the only way that made sense. The ransom story might keep the rank and file satisfied, but Sun knew too much about the financing and timing of everything else. He had to know why we were here, or at least that particular reason.

  To check out my theory I said, quietly, “How many ways do you cut, Sun,”

  “What was that?”

  “I won’t spoil the pitch,” I said. “Just remember, Tyrone Ten Eyck thought his sister was dead. All he has to do is frame you for killing the old man, and Tyrone inherits free and clear. But only if there’s nobody around to prove he’s been in the States the last few days.”

  He said, “I must talk to him about this.” Then he frowned at me and said, “I’m not sure I understood you before.”

  “You understood me,” I said. “And I understand you.” He smiled thinly, saying, “I wonder if you do.” To his troops he said, “We’ll put these two somewhere safe, then we’ll go talk to Mister … Eyck.”

  “All together,” I suggested.

  “All together,” he agreed.

  29

  They locked us in a small, barren, windowless room on the second floor, and went away to discuss the situation with Tyrone Ten Eyck.

  This was some room. Two fluorescent light fixtures set into the ceiling gave even soft light, which illuminated practically nothing. The walls were covered in a smooth expensive fabric of dark opulent green, the ceiling was a muted cream color, and the floor was a high-gloss dark parquet. But there was no furniture, no closet, no window, no apparent reason for the room to exist at all.