Дональд Уэстлейк - The Spy in the Ointment

Well, it was possible .

Suddenly we slowed, I had no idea why. We were on the hilly two-lane road north of Tarrytown which led to the Ten Eyck estate, but the turn-off was still a mile or so ahead of us. Yet Ten Eyck was slowing, he was steering off the road, he was stopping.

I had my hand on the door handle, and then I saw the truck, and the group of men standing beside it. We were making our rendezvous with the Eurasian Relief Corps.

As soon as we stopped, Ten Eyck switched off the lights. A few seconds later Sun was at my window, talking past me to Ten Eyck, saying, “Everything’s set.”

Ten Eyck said, “Good. Remember to cut the phone lines when you go in.”

“Right. Are you sure about those armed guards? There’s nobody at the gate.”

“He’s a paranoid,” Ten Eyck said. “He’ll have guards, he always does, but they’ll be in the house, close to him. Half a dozen, maybe more.”

“We’ll take them,” Sun said.

“Good. Flash me when it’s done.”

“Right. See you.”

We started away, lights still off, and I could just make out the Corps members climbing up into the back of the truck. It was a large closed tractor trailer. They could have anything in there, they could almost have a tank in there.

No. They wouldn’t need a tank.

Ten Eyck switched the headlights on as soon as we were on the road again. We drove on in silence — tension now emanated from him like radio signals — and after about half a mile we took a steep and slanting side road uphill to the left. We jounced upward for what seemed quite a while, finally emerging on a barren hilltop or ridge where the road deteriorated to a meandering dirt track. Ten Eyck stopped the car there, switched off the lights, and said, “Come take a look.” His voice was flat, mechanical.

Lobo, apparently, had no interest in what was about to happen. He stayed in the car (I’d practically forgotten him, hulking back there) as Ten Eyck and I walked over to the cliff edge (it wasn’t really a cliff, but a very sharp-angled downward slope, dotted here and there with precarious trees) and he pointed out to me the salient features below. “There’s the Hudson,” he said, in that odd new impersonal voice, “and there’s the house. See the lights?”

“Yes. I see them.”

Far down to our left the Ten Eyck estate was laid out for us like part of a model railroad display. The winding road in from the highway, the winding river on the far side, and the manor — lights in every window — waiting between the two. Along the road crept the headlights of the truck.

Beside me, Tyrone Ten Eyck stood unmoving, stone-still. His eyes glistened like black ice, and that electric tension still hummed within him, but he was like a dynamo on minimum power; he had shut down, closed in, narrowed his attention. Nothing existed for him but that tiny stage setting down there, the house and the truck.

The headlights came closer, close enough to blend with the light spilling from the house, and now I could make out the truck in its entirety, cab and trailer. Several men leaped from the rear of the trailer, were met by two tiny figures emerging from the front door of the house, and there was the faint sound of gunfire. The two tiny figures fell over.

Men swarmed from the truck, deployed left and right, surrounding the house. A few — that must have been Sun himself at their head — dashed in through the front door.

They would find Angela. They wouldn’t kill her, not here, no more than they would kill the old man here, but they would find her, and hold her, and show her to Ten Eyck. And Ten Eyck would cut me down like the sapling I was.

(How near the edge he stood! And his concentration was so complete that surely he had no idea where I stood or what I was doing. It would be so easy, so easy. For one of the few times in his life, Tyrone Ten Eyck was completely off-guard. To stand behind him, to give him a sudden push...)

More gunfire from down below. A shattering of glass; someone had leaped or been thrown from a second-story window, through the glass. He landed atop the trailer, rolled, came up on his feet on the trailer roof. From the flashes, he had a gun in his hand, was shooting toward the window he’d just left. There must have been answering gunfire; he abruptly flipped backward off the trailer top as though swept aside by an invisible hand.

(Not only easy, not merely easy, but also necessary. Destruction moved with Tyrone Ten Eyck, spread out from him in ever-widening circles. As there are people who are carriers of contagious disease, so Tyrone Ten Eyck was a carrier of destruction. He had to be stopped. [The flash of the Bodkin house blowing up suddenly appeared before my mind’s eye.] Now was the chance. Just a push, a small push, an infinitesimal push...)

The gunfire seemed to have ended. Two or three lights had gone out within the house, but otherwise it appeared unchanged. A kind of wounded silence had fallen on it now.

(After the push: I could evade Lobo in the dark, in the woods. He was big and strong, but he was also stupid. I merely had to start. I merely had to put my hands out, palms forward, and step behind him, and push...)

A figure came out the front door, lifted its arm, and light flashed in our direction. A flashlight; on off, on off, on off.

Ten Eyck, a small sheen of perspiration gleaming on his forehead, turned and said, “Now we go down.” His voice was husky, as though he’d run all the way uphill.

I stood there, blinking, suddenly back to reality, paralyzed by what I’d been thinking. Good God! Was it contagious, had I caught it from him? I was a pacifist, a pacifist, and I’d been standing here thinking of murder.

What other word is there for it? None. None.

Ten Eyck, having started toward the car, looked back at me and said, “Raxford? You coming?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

As we turned in at the gate, Ten Eyck laughed and said, “Home at last!” He was becoming his old self again.

I wasn’t yet, so I had nothing to say. He didn’t seem to notice.

We arrived at the manor — which had the shocked, open, stupid look of an assault victim — and Ten Eyck stopped beside the truck. All three of us got out and entered the house.

Inside, there was wreckage everywhere. Drapes had been pulled down from the tall windows, chairs and tables had been overturned, carpets bunched against walls, lamps smashed on floors, two legs of the grand piano buckled. One of Sun’s Eurasians lay sprawled head-downward in a swastika shape on the staircase.

Sun himself appeared from a room on the right. He seemed about to salute Ten Eyck, but restrained himself. Instead, he said, “All secure, Mr. Eyck. Had to kill all the guards and two of the servants, but everybody else is still alive.” He had a smear of something on his left sleeve.

I stood there, listening and watching, wondering about Angela, and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t managed to escape sometime, somewhere, somehow before coming here. The fly was in the spider’s parlor now for sure.

Ten Eyck said, “Where’s my — where’s Ten Eyck?”

(It was hard for me to keep in mind that Ten Eyck was known to all the others by a different name, and that none of them knew his relationship with the owner of this house. Here in the heat of it all it was apparently getting just as hard for Ten Eyck to remember.)

But Sun didn’t notice the near-slip; I suppose he too was distracted by battle. Starting off, he said, “We’ve got him back here.”

Ten Eyck hesitated. “You gave him the injection?”

“Of course,” said Sun. “He’s sleeping like a baby.”

“Good.”

“They both are,” Sun added, and my stomach closed up like a hole in the sand.