The Spy in the Ointment

23

Mrs. Bodkin and Zlott, absorbed in their game, never saw us leave. We went out the front way and down the dirt road to the trees, where we found parked a black Cadillac — new or a repeat I couldn’t say — into which we climbed, to find Ten Eyck at the wheel and Lobo in back. Sun rode in back, I joined Ten Eyck up front.

Ten Eyck, low and curt, said, “Time.”

Sun’s watch must have had a luminous dial. “Five after nine,” he said. “No, about seven after.”

“Three minutes. Good.”

The car moved forward, sliding through the night without lights. The road was vaguely paler than the heavy black of the surrounding trees. Lights shone from the Bodkin house behind us, and small pinpoints of light from the development homes were visible through the trees, but we ourselves moved through a broad groove of blackness in the earth.

Ten Eyck switched the headlights on when we reached the county road. He turned right, and at last I said, “Why the change of plans?”

“No change,” he said casually. “Those little people were of no further use to us.”

From the back seat Sun said, “Did you explain the situation to the other two? Armstrong and Labotski?”

“They gave no trouble,” Ten Eyck told him. “They have no conception of actual death. Murder is still an abstract to them.”

All at once I understood why Sun had been down cellar. The League for New Beginnings was having another weeding-out. Or bombing-out.

Why had I been spared this time? Ten Eyck had tried to kill me once, by proxy, but since that failure, had seemed to accept me without question. Also, though Ten Eyck had apparently prepared Armstrong and Labotski for this purging of Zlott and Mrs. Bodkin — and Mulligan before them, and Mrs. Baba and Hyman Meyerberg and the Whelps before him — he’d apparently seen no need to prepare me similarly.

I could think of only one explanation: Ten Eyck had accepted me on an equal footing, considered me a panther like himself, and assumed my actions and responses would invariably be — as they invariably were in him — dictated by cold and all-encompassing self-interest. Better than a fish, better even than a specialist, I was an expendable version of himself! Oh, he’d be keeping me around for quite a while.

Until, that is, judging me by himself, he decided I was ready to be dangerous to him.

I mulled this theory as Ten Eyck drove us through the Jersey outback. After perhaps half an hour we came into Jersey City, where Ten Eyck stopped to let Sun off. “At midnight,” Ten Eyck said in farewell. Sun nodded, and hurried away.

Now that we were to all intents and purposes alone in the car — it was practically impossible to think of Lobo as a person — Ten Eyck grew relaxed and expansive, full of good humor. As we drove northward, he made idle chatter — how incredible it sounded, coming from him! — giving me anecdotes and reminiscences of his childhood, most of it spent either in New York City or at the manor in Tarrytown. (Where Angela now was hidden, until Tyrone should be safely put away.) These reminiscences were full of his cruelty, full of his hatred for his father and contempt for his sister. He mentioned his mother — who separated early from her husband, and of whose recent whereabouts I knew nothing (nor, I think, did Angela) — only once, in regard to a childhood visit he’d been forced to make to her in Switzerland. The several “practical jokes” he had perpetrated there, one of which had broken a maid’s leg, had cut the visit short and assured it would never be repeated, being the two results he’d had in mind from the outset.

We crossed into New York State at Suffern, and shortly beyond that town we stopped at a rural restaurant — one of those expensive country places which usually call themselves The Something Coach or The Coach Something — and all during dinner the childhood reminiscences continued. We sat across from one another, and I made all the right responses to his brutal little tales, and to my left Lobo sat like an articulated mannequin in a store-window display, feeding itself with one repetitive unending up-and-down movement of its right arm.

Toward the end of dinner, this stream of recollection and anecdote began to slow. He had had two whiskeys and soda before dinner, a half bottle of Moselle wine with dinner, and a brandy afterward, but I don’t believe he was getting drunk, or even high. The rush of memory that had been set off in him had merely come to the inevitable souring; he began to speak of his father and Angela in harsher and harsher tones, spoke of all his childhood scenes with hatred and controlled fury: the New York City apartment, the Tarrytown estate, the various boarding schools which had failed to mold him in their image.

Dinner had been leisurely, or at least slow-paced. We were the last diners, and in the background our waitress hovered anxiously, obviously desirous of going home. At ten past eleven, after a low-voiced but vicious description of his father’s one unsuccessful entry into active politics, he suddenly looked at his watch, became immediately brisk and businesslike, said, “Well. Time to be off,” and waved for the check.

Back in the car, I said, “I take it wherever we’re going has something to do with the new plan. The one instead of blowing up the Senate.”

Now he was expansive again, pleased with himself, the glinting smile once more lighting his face. “Something to do,” he echoed, and laughed, and said, “My dear Raxford, it has everything to do, everything!” He glanced at me, his sable eyes full of good humor, and then looked back at the road. “You want me to tell you about it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s time you knew,” he agreed, not knowing that from my point of view it was well past time. At any rate, he said, “We’ll begin with the global and progress to the particular.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Every year,” he said, declaiming, “some one or another of the Eastern Bloc nations puts up Communist China for entry to the United Nations. Every year that entry is blocked, primarily through the efforts of the United States, which has its own useless brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek, in the job. This annual minuet is returning to the UN agenda in a very few weeks. Interesting?”

“Not so far,” I said.

He laughed again; he loved me most when I was blunt and irritable. He said, “It will be. This year there’s going to be a difference. This year the Communist Chinese, through their American agent Sun Kut Fu and his Eurasian Relief Corps, are going to kidnap a prominent American and hold him for ransom. That is, they will threaten to kill him unless the United States this year permits the entry of Red China into the United Nations.” His smile struck pale fire. “We can both visualize,” he said, “the sort of Assembly meeting that will cause.”

I said, “No one would believe the Communist Chinese would pull a stunt like that.”

“Of course not. No one but the Americans. Have you ever read the New York Daily News?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Can any regular reader of that newspaper, and I understand there are millions of them, fail to believe the dirty Chinese Commies would kidnap a prominent American for just that purpose?”

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!