Only split seconds later we realized that it seemed that way because it was. Our laughter died abruptly as Sy’s neck was yanked down and the teeth of the blade bit into it. Before we’d completely realized what was happening, the furnished cellar was being splattered with pantomimist plasma and small chunks of minced mime flesh.
Roger Roundheels was the first one to come to his senses enough to take any action. He leaped across the room to the wall at a right angle to the power saw and pulled a cut-off switch. It was too late. We could all see that.
The mime was dead!
Chapter Three
Death by dicing! It jolted me into remembering why I was at the party. It reminded me that I was a spy, that it was always open season on spies and so I was vulnerable. It made me aware that there was danger bubbling under the jolly surface of the Pine Glen Drama Group.
Not that the surface was so very jolly after the life was sliced from Sy Lenzio. On the contrary, it sort of threw a pall over the festivities. What with the police coming and people answering questions and photographers snapping bulbs at the messy mime corpse, there was no doubt that Sy’s finale pooped the party. Like the others, I was glad when I was able to go home.
It was late when I got there, but the questions bouncing around my mind like bits of silly putty dropped by Alice in Wonderland kept me from sleep. Was Sy’s violent demise the accident it seemed, or was there more to it? Had somebody unobtrusively flicked the wall-switch activating the buzzsaw to deliberately murder him? Or was he simply an inadvertent victim of the do-it-yourself craze? And, most important as I lay awake in my bed and stared at the ceiling, was there any connection between Sy Lenzio and Arch Fink?
Archer Corliss Fink was the name of the dead CIA agent who’d handled—-or mishandled -- the funds for Democratic Philanthropies, Inc. Senator Hawthorne had provided me with a complete dossier on him. I’d read it thoroughly, and now I went over it in my mind, hoping to stumble on some hint of a Lenzio-Fink link.
At the time of his death, Arch Fink was forty years old. He’d been with the CIA about three years. Up until his final assignment, his duties had been routine and he’d performed them well. That last task represented something of a promotion for him.
Fink was made for the counterespionage game. Conspiracy and counter-conspiracy came naturally to him. In his earlier days, just after his graduation from college, he’d been a member of a Communist cell. After a year he betrayed his comrades to the FBI.
Thus he launched a career which successfully rode the coattails of the McCarthy era. As a professional anti-Commie turncoat he testified before all sorts of government committees. However, after McCarthy, Fink’s testimony proved a bit too imaginative to be swallowed and his usefulness petered out. He took a job with a small right-wing magazine as an associate editor and sank into obscurity. He gave up the position when he joined the CIA.
It was no secret that they were recruiting agents and Fink was quick to offer his services. Appended to the dossier Senator Hawthorne had given me on Fink was the transcription of a tape recording secretly made at the time of Fink’s interview with the CIA recruiter. Still unable to go to sleep, I now took out the transcription and idly re-read it.
The interview had taken place in an office of one of the administrative buildings of a New York college. Applicants didn’t know that the office was bugged -- although someone with Fink’s background might have guessed it. The transcription went as follows:
CIA RECRUITER: Show in Archer Corliss Fink.
SECRETARY: They’re just finishing with him in the infirmary, sir.
CIA RECRUITER: The infirmary? Why—?
SECRETARY: He tripped over one of the students sitting in the hallway and sprained his ankle.
RECRUITER: Damn Commie kids! Where were the cops when this happened?
SECRETARY: They were there, sir. They arrested the student responsible and charged him with felonious assault.
RECRUIT ER: Good. It’s tough enough trying to sell these wiseacre kids on the opportunities of a career with the CIA -- damn tough, let me tell you, What with having to compete with General Motors and General Electric and U.S. Steel, not to mention the FBI and Pinkerton with their spiel for private enterprise over government service and their damn puffed-up pension plan—yes, tough enough without those leftist bastards planting their asses all over the hallways, blocking the doors with their guitars, cluttering up the corridors with beard dandruff, singing “We Shall Overcome” through their noses, and off key too, and chanting their pinko slogans. If they don’t want to go to classes, why the hell don’t they get out and go to work. How can they afford these sit-ins anyway? Even if they are Commie front organizations, I can’t believe the Party has enough dough to finance them. Can it really be that individual contributions keep them going?
SECRETARY: Excuse me, sir. But the group that’s sitting in today, Students to Abolish the CIA, I believe they’re still operating on a grant we arranged for them to receive anonymously last year.
RECRUITER: We arranged it? Why’d we ever do a damn-fool thing like that?
SECRETARY: It was your recommendation, sir.
RECRUITER: It was? Hmm. Oh, yes, I remember. We set them up so anti-CIA feeling on campus could have an outlet. But the idea was to infiltrate them, to let them let offf steam, to bog them down in dialectics short of any real action. What happened to that plan? Why haven’t they been infiltrated?
SECRETARY: They were, sir. One of our agents joined the group, worked his way up and became president of it. I believe he’s the one with the red beard leading the demonstration outside.
RECRUITER: He is? But why? Is there some new policy they’re keeping from me? Damn bureaucracy! Those bigwigs never let me know what’s going on. How can we be expected to carry out policy when they change it every day and then don’t even tell us?
SECRETARY: That isn’t it, sir. What happened is that our infiltrator defected.
RECRUITER: Not so long ago he would have been shot. Yeah, those were the days. The Bay of Pigs, the Dominican fracas—nobody questioned orders then. You just did what you were told without getting bogged down in a lot of high-faluting morality. Nobody went around getting stomach cramps over the means in those days. Ends was what counted. We stuck to the nitty-gritty. The ends always justified the means . . . Uh! I mean—! that is—-—! Is that damn tape on?
SECRETARY: Yes sir.
RECRUITER: Oh. Heh-heh. Well, when I talk about means and ends, I mean it in a completely democratic sense. I mean it in a completely opposite context from the way the Bolshie Marxists use the words. Well, you know what I mean. Damn this semantic confusion anyway!
SECRETARY (coldly): Where would we be without it, sir? It's one of our most potent weapons.
RECRUITER: Yes-yes. Of course. I didn’t mean to imply-— Hasn’t that man Fink come up from the infirmary yet?
SECRETARY: I’ll see if he’s waiting outside, sir.
SIT-IN STUDENTS (chanting):
CIA GO AWAY!
DON’T COME BACK ANOTHER DAY!
DROWN YOURSELVES IN SOME NEW BAY!