The Spy in the Ointment

29

They locked us in a small, barren, windowless room on the second floor, and went away to discuss the situation with Tyrone Ten Eyck.

This was some room. Two fluorescent light fixtures set into the ceiling gave even soft light, which illuminated practically nothing. The walls were covered in a smooth expensive fabric of dark opulent green, the ceiling was a muted cream color, and the floor was a high-gloss dark parquet. But there was no furniture, no closet, no window, no apparent reason for the room to exist at all.

Therefore, I asked Angela about it. I said, “What is this place?”

“Daddy used to have a stamp collection,” she said. “Very valuable stamp collection. He kept it in display cases in here.”

“Then he gave it up?”

“No. One time when Tyrone was little, he took all the stamps and stamp books and burned them up in one of the fireplaces.”

“That’s my Tyrone,” I said. “What happened to the display cases?”

“They’re downstairs,” she said. “He keeps his peace awards in there now.”

“Oh.” (Due to some natural irony implicit in our world, munitions manufacturers seem to receive more peace awards than practically anybody except professional boxers. But maybe I’m just bitter because pacifists never get them at all.)

Angela said, “What are we going to do now, Gene?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “No matter which side wins out there, we’re still in trouble. Sun can’t let us leave here alive any more than your brother can.”

“Won’t Sun win?” she asked. “He’s got so many men with him.”

“About a dozen. And on the other side it’s just Tyrone and Lobo.” I shrugged and said, “Sounds like even money to me.”

She said, “What were you and Sun talking about there, about cutting and pitching and all?”

“He’s a double agent,” I said. I explained to her what had made me think so, and added, “He and Tyrone must have set up the frame together, except Sun thought he’d be a survivor.”

“Well, who’s he really working for?”

“I don’t know. Himself, I suppose. It’s tough to think of Chiang Kai-shek having followers, but maybe Sun’s hipped on Nationalist China. Whether he’s doing it on his own or for somebody else, the point is he’s made the Eurasian Relief Corps operate in a way to make Red China look even worse than she does here anyway. That’s why Red China disavowed them, I suppose.”

Somewhere along the line she must have stopped listening to me, because as soon as I finished talking she said, “Gene, what’s going to happen to Daddy? And Murray?”

“The same as what’s going to happen to us.”

“I mean now. What’s happening to them now.”

“Nothing. Everybody’ll be too busy to worry about sleepers.”

I went over and tried the door, and discovered that Marcellus Ten Eyck had paid top dollar when this room was built. The door was solid oak. The lock was a Yale, impossible for me either to pick or get at. Since the door opened outward, I couldn’t get at the hinges either. I rattled the knob, the way you do when you’re stuck for something sensible to do, and Sun’s boys had gone and locked it. The cheats.

If only we could get through that door, it seemed to me we’d have a pretty good chance. There was no guard outside here, because Sun was bringing all his forces with him when he braced Tyrone Ten Eyck.

A bracing that apparently had just come to order, for I heard very faintly the sound of gunfire from elsewhere in the house.

In a way, Angela and I at the moment were in very nearly the safest place there was. (Unlike her father and Murray, who were lying unconscious and exposed in the middle of the equivalent of no man’s land, a fact I had thought it best to keep from Angela.) We were locked away, but outside this door there was a battleground. On one side, Sun and his dozen sunlets. On the other side, Tyrone Ten Eyck and Lobo. Skirmishing, attacking, retreating. Sun using the advantage of greater numbers, Tyrone Ten Eyck using the advantage of a natural cunning vicious enough to make a fox blanch. The middle of that brushfire war was no place for a pair of dewy young pacifists.

Still, to wait here was to wait, merely, for our turn to be bloodied.

Behind me, Angela said, “Gene?”

I turned away from the door. “What?”

“I’m sorry about the watch,” she said.

“Let’s not talk about it,” I said.

“I thought it was fixed all right,” she said.

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“I have to take my pills,” she said.

“Pills shmills,” I riposted.

“Don’t say that, Gene,” she said. “You don’t want me to get fat and pimply and pregnant, do you?”

Cruelly, I said, “Why not? Then I’d have an excuse to go to Majorca.”

“Oh, Gene,” she said.

As I knew she intended now to cry — one thing Angela always had was perfect timing — I turned back to the door and rattled the knob again, just for something masculine to do. It was still locked.

Behind me, Angela sniffled. Somewhere the other side of this door, a tommy gun rattled, a pistol replied, a male scream was abruptly cut off.

Angela’s sniffling and the war sounds died down at approximately the same time, a few minutes later. Standing at the door, I listened to two kinds of silence, neither of which I liked very much, and I wondered what would happen next. When nothing at all did for half a minute, I turned and looked at Angela, and she was now — as I’d known she would be — coldly furious.

“Don’t speak to me,” she said.

“Right,” I said. Rich bitch, I thought irrelevantly, a thought which suddenly catapulted that Diner’s Club card into the forefront of my mind. “Hot damn!” I shouted, and snapped my fingers.

Angela, not knowing the subject had been changed, blinked at me in some confusion. “What?” she said. “What?”

I dragged out my wallet, removed the Diner’s Club card from it, tucked the wallet back in my pocket, and said, “Watch this, that’s all. Just watch this.”

Since I no longer had my magic shoes, of course I didn’t have the special shoelace fuse either, but maybe a regular shoelace would work instead. I slipped one out, tied it around the card, left the end trailing, and set it down on the floor by the door, where it looked like a polliwog.

There was no cover in this room, so I could only hope the explosion wouldn’t be overly enthusiastic. “Get into the corner,” I told Angela, “and stay there.”

Angela said, “What are you doing with that card, Gene? Are you crazy? Do you feel all right, Gene?”

“Oh, shut up and get in the corner,” I said, “you mechanical masked marvel.”

She went in the corner and pouted.

I lit the end of the shoelace and it went out. I lit it again and it went out again. Every time I lit it I half-turned to dash away, and then it would go out, and I’d come back and light it again.

I did that half a dozen times, and finally gave up on the idiotic thing. With teeth, fingernails, and brute determination, I ripped off a length of my shirt tail, twisted it into a kind of long thick rope, tied that around the Diner’s Club card — you could barely see the card in there — and lit the end of it.

The shirt burned like mad. Flames came poof, and went scampering across the material toward the card.

This time, of course, I hadn’t started to dash away until I should see how the shirt was burning. When I saw, I said, “Whoops!” and ran like hell for Angela’s corner.

I got there, pushed her down, cowered in front of her — the protective male, who would much rather have put her in front of him — and behind me something went THOPPP.

I was pushed, it seemed, midway through Angela, who must have been pushed midway through the wall. When the last echoes of the explosion died down, I pushed myself away from the wall and Angela and said, “Well.”

Angela stared at me as though she was afraid we were both crazy. “What was that?” she whispered.

“My credit card,” I said. “That shows how bad my credit is.”

(And my jokes.)

I turned around and looked at the door, and it wasn’t there any more. The frame was twisted and sprung, and the door was entirely gone. I went over — I felt very stiff all of a sudden — and the door was lying on the floor in the next room, a kind of study or den or library, lined with bookcases, furnished in mahogany and leather.

“There,” I said. “So much for that.” I turned to Angela, who hadn’t left the corner. “Come on,” I said. “We better hurry.”

She finally did move, blinking and dazed and unbelieving. She came out, looked at the dead door, looked at me, reached out bemusedly and took my hand, and we started for the door across the way.

We got halfway there when it was pushed open and Tyrone Ten Eyck came in, in his hand the Luger I’d seen once before. “Well, well,” he said. “There you are. I was afraid I’d lost you.”

Angela said, “Tyrone, you’re bad!”

“The same sweet simpleton,” Tyrone said pleasantly.

I said, “Where’s Sun?”

“Dead,” he said. “As are his followers. As will you be. As will everyone be, sooner or later.”

“You don’t destroy for money,” I said. “That’s just the excuse. You destroy for its own sake.”

“You mean I’m a nihilist?” His smile glistened like bayonets. “Well,” he said, “it’s better than having no philosophy at all. Wouldn’t you say?”

I said, for no reason other than to try and spread confusion, “Lobo’s been working with me. He’ll be here in a minute to put the cuffs on you.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “Lobo’s dead. Sun killed him.”

Angela cried, “Daddy!”

“His death,” Tyrone Ten Eyck told her savagely, his control beginning once again to slip, “will be the second most enjoyable moment of my life. Your death, sweet sister, will be the first.” He extended his right arm at shoulder-height, the Luger in his fist pointing directly at Angela’s face.

And, once again, I ran.