The Spy in the Ointment

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.