“Oh, come off of it, Ruth,” he said wearily. He finished his drink and got to his feet disgustedly to go for another one. “For one thing, we own this house. So it’s rent free. If we had to pay rent these days, particularly in a prestige part of town, it’d cost so much that your budget would be half what it is now. What did you pay for those clothes you’re wearing?”
“We could sell this old monstrosity of a house and buy an apartment!”
He came back with his fresh drink. “No, we couldn’t. By the terms of the will, we have to live in it, or it reverts to the trust. This house was built by my great-grandfather back in Civil War days. Our family has lived in it ever since. When you and I die, it goes to our children, if any, or reverts to the trust to be assigned to some other family branch. But it remains in the family. I’m not allowed to sell it.”
“Good heavens, what the hell kind of a will is that? What you’re saying is we don’t really own this ramshackle joint.”
“The kind of will my great-grandfather set up,” he said dryly. “At any rate, there’ll be no moving to Baltimore because it’s the latest thing to do.”
“We’ll be ostrasized,” she said coldly.
“Sorry. Anything on for tonight? I’m going to have to get to the office early in the morning.” He wanted to get off the subject before the whine came into her voice.
She said, “Yes. We’ve been invited to the Calahan’s, Bess and Fred, to join their swap club.”
“Swap club?” he said. “What’s a swap club?”
“It’s becoming all the rage. You simply have to belong to at least one swap club or you’re nobody.”
“I’m sure it’s all the rage, or you wouldn’t want to join one. Frankly, I’ve never heard of them.”
“They’ve just been introduced from Common Europe. Everybody who is anybody belongs to one on the Continent.”
“But what do you do in a swap club?”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Isn’t it obvious? You swap.”
“Swap what ?”
“Husbands and wives. You trade bed companions. Each week, you swap with somebody else. Just for one night, of course.”
“Great Gods! And you want us to join something like that?”
“I told you. It’s a must these days. Just everybody belongs to at least one swap club. Bess and Fred have been kind enough to invite us to join theirs, in spite of the fact that we’re hasbeens, living in this neighborhood.”
XI
Before he had gone to bed the night before, Larry Woolford had ordered a seat on the shuttle jet for Jacksonville and a hover-cab there to take him to Astor, on the St. Johns River. And he’d requested to be wakened in ample time to get to the shuttle-port.
But it wasn’t the saccharine pleasant face of the Personal Service operator which confronted him when he grumpily answered the phone in the morning. In fact, the screen remained blank.
Larry decided that sweet long drinks were fine but that anyone who took several of them in a row needed to be candled. His mouth felt as though he had been eating dirty dish cloths, and he suspected he was bleeding to death through the eyes.
He grumbled into the phone, “All right. Who is it?”
A Teutonic voice chuckled and said, “You are going to have to decide whether or not you are on vacation, my friend. At this time of day, why aren’t you at work?”
Larry Woolford was waking up. He said, “What can I do for you, Distelmayer?” The German merchant of espionage wasn’t the type to make personal calls.
“Have you forgotten so soon, my friend?” the other chuckled. “It was I who was going to do you a favor.” He hesitated momentarily before adding, “In possible return for future favors on your part.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Larry said. He was fully awake now. “So the favor you’re doing me?”
The German said slowly, “You asked if any of your friends from, ah, abroad were newly in the country. Ilya Simonov has recently appeared on the scene.”
Simonov! In various respects, Larry Woolford’s counterpart. Chief hatchetman for the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya; right hand man of Minister Blagonravov. Woolford had met him on occasion when they had both been present at international summit meetings, busily working at counter-espionage for their respective superiors. Blandly shaking hands with each other, blandly smiling, blandly drinking toasts to peace and international coexistence, blandly sizing each other up and wondering if it’d ever come to the point where one would blandly treat the other to a hole in the head, possibly in some dark alley in Havana or Singapore, Leopoldville or Saigon.
Larry said sharply, “Where is he? How did he get into the country?”
“My friend, my friend,” the German grunted in heavy good humor. “You know better than to ask me the first question. As for the second, Ilya’s command of American-English is at least as good as your own. Do you think his Komissiya less capable than your own department and unable to do him up suitable papers so that he could be, perhaps, a ‘returning tourist’ from Europe?”
Larry Woolford was impatient with himself for having asked. He said now, “It’s not important. If we want to locate Ilya and pick him up, we’ll probably not have too much trouble doing it. We’ve caught him before.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” the other said humorously. “Since 1919, when they were first organized, the so-called Communists in this country from the lowest to the highest echelons, have been so riddled with police agents that a federal judge in New England once refused to prosecute a case against them on the grounds that the party was a United States government agency.”
Larry was in no frame of mind for the other’s heavy humor. “Look, Hans,” he said, “what I want to know is what Ilya is over here for.”
“Of course you do,” Hans Distelmayer said, unable evidently to keep a note of puzzlement from his voice. “Larry,” he said, “I assume your people know of the new American underground.”
“What underground?” Larry snapped.
The professional spy chief said, his voice strange, “The Soviets seem to have picked up an idea somewhere, possibly through their membership in this country, that something is abrewing in the States, that a change is being engineered.”
Larry stared at the blank phone screen.
“What kind of a change?” he said finally. “You mean a change to the Soviet system, to what they call communism, but which obviously isn’t?” Surely not even the self-deluding Russkies could think it possible to overthrow the American socioeconomic system in favor of the Soviet brand.
“No, no, no,” the German chuckled. “Of course not. It’s not of their working at all.”
“Then what’s Ilya Simonov’s interest, if they aren’t engineering it?”
Distelmayer rumbled his characteristic chuckle which held nothing in common with humor. “My dear friend, don’t be so naive. Anything that happens in America is of interest to the Soviets. There is delicate peace between you now that they have changed their direction and are occupying themselves largely with the economic and agricultural development of Asia and such portions of the world as have come under their hegemony while you put all efforts into modernizing the more backward countries among your satellites.”
Larry said automatically, “Our allies aren’t satellites.”
The spy-master went on without contesting the statement. “There is immediate peace but surely governmental officials on both sides keep careful watch on the internal developments of the other. True, the current heads of the Soviet Complex would like to see the governments of all the Western powers changed—but only if they are changed in the direction of communism. They are hardly interested in seeing changes made which would strengthen the West in the, ah, Battle for Men’s Minds.”