Дональд Уэстлейк - The Spy in the Ointment

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.

“Sun! I cried. “Listen to me, Sun!” And all the while hacking, coughing, burping, eyes watering, feet stumbling along as two of Sun’s tong war trainees hustled me across the attic toward the stairs. “Listen to me!” I cried, but in vain.

Angela, being hustled along behind me, was clogging the airwaves with a lot of useless helps and let-me-gos. My throat smarting, my eyes burning, my stomach spinning, I did my best to shout above her: “Sun! Listen to me or you’ll be next! ”

That stopped him, right at the head of the stairs. He turned a cold eye on me and said, “Next? What do you mean, next?”

“Everybody’s dead,” I gasped. “From that meeting, everybody’s either dead or set up to die. Bodkin, Baba, Mulligan, the Whelps— There’s two more going up with the UN Building.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You set that timer yourself, you wouldn’t let Zlott near it. When Armstrong pushes that switch Tuesday, there won’t be any five-minute wait and you know it.”

He brushed it aside. “Armstrong and Labotski are amateurs. One job and they’re used up.”

“You, too,” I said. “You’re next.”

“I am no amateur,” he said stiffly; I think his pride was hurt. “Besides, Eyck has no reason to kill me.”

“He’s got two. You’ve seen his face. And your dead body is the evidence, the frameup on Red China.”

Something odd crossed his face then, and he said, “What was that?”

“I didn’t think he’d told you the Red China story,” I said. “Or why he picked Marcellus Ten Eyck to kidnap.”

“We’re kidnaping him for the ransom,” he said, but somehow there was something wrong with the way he said it. And he was glaring at me in a funny way I didn’t understand. “That’s enough now,” he said, and to his henchmen added, “Bring them along.” He turned away.

“Wait! Sun! He’s Tyrone Ten Eyck!”

That stopped him again. He looked back, frowned at me as though seeing me for the first time. “Ridiculous,” he said, but in a thoughtful tone of voice, as though he meant to say “interesting.”

Sun himself must have realized Leon Eyck was an assumed name, but he hadn’t cared. It was enough that Eyck and Eustaly were setting up an organization to do more efficiently and on a grander scale the things Sun wanted to do anyway. (That he’d been willing to overlook the presence in the group of the Stalinist, Meyerberg, was proof enough of his single-mindedness.)

But now, with so much having happened, with a dead girl and an arch-conspirator (that’s me, I mean) suddenly an enemy of some sort (though he couldn’t have any clear understanding why he was looking for me), Sun’s single-mindedness was beginning to crack.