The Spy in the Ointment

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 possibility 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.”