The Spy in the Ointment

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.

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, slightly 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.