Дональд Уэстлейк - The Spy in the Ointment

“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.

In a way, this book is a kind of confession. I am describing the events leading up to the moment when I violated all my principles, negated all my beliefs, disobeyed every doctrine I’d ever defined in my pamphlets, and generally speaking made a lie of my entire life.

I would like to be able to say that this second time I ran (the first being when I’d inadvertently dragged Angela away from Ten Eyck and the rest) was as blind and unpremeditated and unknowing as the first, but it was not. I knew exactly what I was doing every step of the way.

I ran toward Tyrone Ten Eyck, and I knew I was doing it, and in my heart of hearts I approved my intentions. I ran to him, and I took the Luger out of his amazed fingers, and I threw it away. Then, knowingly and deliberately, I laid violent hands upon him.

(Please excuse me if I don’t describe what I did. I remember it all — only too vividly — but I’d rather not say any of it.)

A long time later, as I was kneeling astraddle Tyrone Ten Eyck, Angela began to pluck at my shoulder and cry, “Stop it, Gene! Stop it!”

Reluctantly (I’m ashamed to say), I stopped it. I looked at what I’d done, and in that moment I felt nothing, only emptiness, as though a cargo I had carried patiently for a long long time had finally been delivered.

I got up and went out of the room, out to the hall. The air reeked of gunpowder. I stood there and devoted myself to formulating the question I may spend the rest of my life answering:

If I’ve been right all my life about who I was, how came I to be where I was?

A minute or so later Angela came out and said, in a hushed voice, “He’s breathing.”

“That’s good,” I said, but only because it was the response I knew was expected of me.

“That was a terrible thing for a pacifist to do, Gene,” she said solemnly.

I said, “Uh huh.” I licked my skinned knuckles.

“We better call the police,” she said.

“Phone lines were cut.”

“Then we better go get them.”

“Right.”

We tied Tyrone up, then went downstairs and almost as far as the front door when I stopped and said, “Hold on a minute, I just remembered something.”