The barker said, “How’s about your life?”
Grofield looked at him without moving his head. “You want me to kill myself? No deal.”
It was the seated one who answered, saying, “What we want you to do will maybe risk your life. We can’t know ahead of time.”
Grofield looked at the two faces, then at the door the captain of police had come so obsequiously through just a minute ago, and said, “I’m getting a glimmering. It’s secret agent time, espionage, all that Technicolor jazz. You birds are CIA.”
The seated one made a pouting face, and the barker said, “Sometimes I can’t stand it. CIA, CIA, CIA. Don’t people realize their government has some secret intelligence organizations?”
The seated one told him, “I had an uncle in the Treasury. People had him down for an FBI man so damn much he took an early retirement.”
Grofield said, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“That’s all right,” the seated one said. “The general public likes things clear-cut, that’s all, just a few simple organizations. Like remember how happy everybody was when the Cosa Nostra first came out?”
“Like chlorophyll,” the barker said. “The public loves brand names.”
“And you people,” Grofield said, “are brand X, is that it?”
“A perfect description,” the seated one said cheerfully. “We’re brand X, that’s it to the life.” He turned to the barker, saying, “Huh, Charlie? Is that nice?”
“Our friend has a way with words,” the barker said.
The seated one smiled at Grofield, pleased with him, then grew serious again. “All right,” he said. “The point is, brand X wants you to work for them. It may be dangerous, it may not, we don’t know. If you agree, and if you do the job, this little jam you’re in now is over and forgotten. If you refuse, or if you agree and then try to run out on us, we’ll drop you back into the frying pan.”
“In other words, you’re offering me the fire.”
“Maybe. We don’t know for sure.”
“What are the details?”
The seated one shook his head, smiling sadly. “Sorry. You can’t open this package till after you accept delivery.”
“Because,” Grofield said unhappily, “if I refuse, you don’t want me to know too much. Is that it?”
“Right on the money.”
“And how long do I have to make up my mind?”
“Take a full minute, if you want.”
“You’re a sport,” Grofield said. “What about Laufman, does he get the same deal?”
“No. Just you.”
“He might make unhappy noises at his trial, if I’m not there.”
“He isn’t expected to live.” At Grofield’s look, he went on, “His doing, not ours. He punctured a lung, among other things.”
The barker — Charlie — said, “Better make up your mind, Grofield, I hear our friends getting impatient in the hall.”
“You didn’t ask me if I was a patriot,” Grofield reminded him.
The seated one said, “It didn’t seem a relevant question. Yes or no?”
“You know it’s yes, damn it. If you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t have asked.”
The seated one smiled and stood. “We’ll see you when the doctors say you’re healthy,” he said. “Do they call you Al or Alan?”
“Alan.”
“I’m Ken, that’s Charlie. See you soon.”
“The minutes will seem like hours,” Grofield said.
They were moving toward the door, but Ken turned back to say, “There is a certain amount of urgency involved. If you aren’t ready to go in time for us to use you, naturally the deal is off.” He smiled cheerily. “Get well soon,” he said.
Three
Grofield walked out of the hospital into a snowstorm and the arms of Charlie and Ken. Ken said brightly, “Give you a lift?”
“No, thanks,” Grofield said. “I thought I’d take the bus.”
“Our car is over here,” Ken said. Their hands were gently closed around Grofield’s upper arms.
“You’re too good to me,” Grofield said, and walked with them to an unmarked Chevrolet. Not that it had to be marked; no private citizen has owned a black Chevrolet since 1939. All three got into the back seat, Grofield in the middle, and the chunky, spectacled man in the fur hat behind the wheel started them out of the parking lot.
It had been three days since Grofield’s conversation with these two, plenty of time for him to get over the sense of unreality they brought with them. Counterspy stuff didn’t really exist, it was invented for the convenience of novelists and screenwriters, like Atlantis and the timeless West and hippies. But Grofield had understood quickly enough that he had to start thinking of these guys and their world as real because they were likely to have some very real effects on his life, one way or another. So there are secret agents on the planet Earth, and two of them had invited Grofield to play on their team, and it was a game whose rules probably didn’t entirely coincide with the fictional version he knew in the movies and on television. They had gotten him out of the frying pan, as promised, and now it was up to him to get himself out of the fire.
As the car entered the slow-moving, snow-clogged stream of traffic, Grofield said, “Do I get to open the package now?”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Ken said. “The other day you invited us to ask if you were patriotic. We declined, but now I’ll ask you something similar. How political are you?”
“I agree with that famous man, Whatzisname, who said, ‘My country; may I never have to think about her.’”
Charlie, on Grofield’s other side, barked and said, “I’m afraid you’re one of the great unwashed, Alan.”
“You betcha.”
Ken said, “Are you political enough to know the phrase Third World?”
“Are we back to the Cosa Nostra?”
“Not exactly,” Ken said. Outside, the snow was so bad you could barely see the storefronts they were passing. Ken said, “The Third World is the all-purpose journalists’ term for all those nations neither in our sphere of influence nor in the Communist sphere of influence. Much of Africa, some of Latin America, a little of Asia. The filler at the United Nations.”
“Poor countries, most of them,” Charlie said. “Unimportant, generally.”
“I suppose you don’t know this,” Ken said, “since most people don’t, but a few years ago there was a meeting in California of one hundred of the Western world’s finest brains, gathered together to discuss the probable future, and their conclusion was that the key to the future lay in the Third World. They believed that the nations of the Third World would tend more and more to military dictatorships, rule by colonel and general, and that these military men would have more in common with one another than with any of their own people or anyone at all from the United States or Russia. They suggested that these military rulers would tend more and more frequently to make short-term alliances with one another against both the Western and Eastern blocs, forcing us to become ever more militarily oriented, until within a century there would be no nonmilitary government left anywhere on Earth.
“A charming prospect,” Grofield said.
“The prophecy,” Ken said, “or warning, whatever you want to call it, didn’t get much play in the press. It’s easy to tell people they have to worry about a big country like the Soviet Union, or Red China, but it’s tough to get the general public to take seriously the threat of Guatemala, say, or Syria, or the Congo.”
“What it adds up to,” Charlie said, “we’re putting in burglar alarms when our real problem is termites.”
“I’ve got the idea,” Grofield said.
Ken said, “Good. What do you think of it?”