The Spy in the Ointment

21

He carried it off well. We arrived in early evening, the return by truck having taken longer than the trip up by automobile, and as I braked to a stop behind the house Ten Eyck came out the back door, glinting a smile of welcome which hardly faltered a bit as I climbed down from the cab. He watched Jack Armstrong get out on the other side, watched us both stretch and move around a little the way you will after a long cramped trip, and then he said, casually, “Where’s Mortimer?”

“Dead,” I said. “Up near the border. In the Mercury. Wearing the Bodkin jacket.”

“Really. I hadn’t thought he’d consider that suitable.”

“He got cold.”

“Ah.” Ten Eyck made a minuscule shrug. “One never knows,” he said.

Armstrong, coming past us, said groggily, “I’m so tired I could drop dead myself.” He stopped in front of Ten Eyck and said, “Raxford said you knew about Eustaly going to be killed. You should of told us. Scared me out of my wits.”

“Next time,” Ten Eyck told him, smiling as one smiles at a retarded child, “I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“Good,” said Armstrong, and went cumbersomely on into the house.

Ten Eyck looked at me with wary interest. (He couldn’t know, of course, that exhaustion had anesthetized me as much as Armstrong. I’d driven slightly more than half the return trip, the first long stretch and then the final brief leg, with uneasy napping in the middle period. I was too doped from lack of sleep myself to be actively afraid of Ten Eyck, or even worried about him, an apparent assured coolness that [I later realized] impressed him very much, and which also made it more possible for me to maintain the manner I’d decided would be best in the circumstances. I’d thought of practically nothing else all the way south but this meeting with Ten Eyck, and what I should say, and how I should behave. Rehearsed and anesthetized to a fare-thee-well, I was prepared to bluff Tyrone Ten Eyck to a draw.)

Now he said, conversationally, “Why did you come back, Raxford?”

“You made a mistake,” I told him. “Anybody can make one mistake. We’ll just forget it happened.”

He arched an eyebrow and said, “What was the mistake, exactly?”

“Thinking I was dangerous to you. I wasn’t. I’m still not. But don’t keep making mistakes.”

He studied me with narrowed eyes. “How do I know you don’t plan to be dangerous to me?”

I gestured at the truck cab, saying, “I could have dropped you from there, when you came out. You were framed in the doorway.”

He turned and looked at the doorway, then back at me. “All right. What about later on?”

“I will have helped you. You will help me. We’ll be even.”

Small lights flared behind his eyes, like artillery fire beyond the night horizon. “But you know my name,” he said. He was being blunt and open with me now; there was no reason for him to be otherwise.

“A small risk,” I told him. “It would be risky to make another mistake with me, too. You’ll have to decide for yourself which risk is greater.”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Yes, I will.”

I took the pistol from my pocket, which startled him unnecessarily at first, until I handed it to him, saying, “I don’t need this any more.”

He looked at the pistol in his hand, and then at me. “You amaze me, Mr. Raxford,” he said.

“I prefer reason to violence,” I told him. Which was the absolute truth; in my groggy state, my true and false personalities had found a basis for merger. (If I had come to Ten Eyck under my true colors and advocated pacifism to him, he might have murdered me merely in rebuttal. But coming to him now in the guise of another panther like himself, advocating the identical pacifism, I seemed to him a dangerous and capable man, an awesome opponent, and he embraced my ideal [in this limited and local application] with pleasure and relief.)

“Reason,” he said, his glinting smile touching me and the pistol in turn, “is always preferable to violence.”

“Certainly,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me...”

“Of course.”

I went inside, where Mrs. Bodkin tried to urge spaghetti on me. When I promised her I would eat six breakfasts in the morning, she reluctantly let me go.

Upstairs, I found my bedroom on the first try. There was a key in the lock on the inside, and when I shut the door I studied the key thoughtfully for a minute, then decided no, it would be more in character to leave the door unlocked, as though challenging the world to catch me off-guard.

When I awoke the next morning, still in one piece, my blood still all in its accustomed veins and arteries, no spare lead or steel in any part of me, that entire homecoming scene from the night before left me shaken in retrospect, but nothing else shook me quite so much as the sight of that unlocked door.

Never underestimate the power of a sleepy idiot.