Donald E. Westlake
The Spy in the Ointment
To Phil and Nedra
I don’t want to offend nobody.
Folk Saying
1
I was trying to fix the damn mimeograph machine when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t the crank this time — usually it’s the crank, falling off or disengaging or whatever — but something in the inking process. (Oh! Did you think I meant the man at the door wasn’t a crank? No no, I meant the machine. People at doors are always cranks. In fact, people everywhere are always cranks, one way and another, if you stop to think about it. Aren’t they?) At any rate, the machine wouldn’t ink. I’d crank and crank, and into the chute would slide an endless stream of blank paper. (Of course, for all the effect I’ve had over the years, I might as well have been rolling out blank paper from the beginning.)
But never mind that, that’s neither here nor there. (The main obstacle to my effectiveness, I’ve always felt, has been this uncontrollable tendency of mine to go off on tangents, stray from the subject, lose — as Christopher Fry puts it — eternity in the passing moment. [Minute? Moment? (There! See what I mean?)]) The point here is the doorbell, and who rang it.
I left my labors on the machine with a kind of angry gratitude, and stomped through the apartment to the front door, which I flung open with no premonition of surprise. My potential visitors were few: a Member, a process server or bill collector, a man from the FBI (or some other government agency), or a cop.
None of which this caller appeared to be. He wasn’t a Member; there are only seventeen of us now, and I know each of my fellow conspirators very well. Nor was he a process server or bill collector, as he lacked the weasel-face endemic to those professions. He was neither as lean as an FBI man nor as flabby as a cop, nor as tall as either. Which made him something altogether different and new.
I gave him the attention that something altogether different and new deserves. I observed that he was of middle age and medium height, quite stocky in a well-fed yet physically fit way, and that he was by far the best-dressed person to have entered this apartment building in half a century. He was, in fact, just a trifle too well dressed; his topcoat was tailored and tapered, and sported a velvet collar. His black shoes gleamed like wet asphalt and featured toes as pointed as the pamphlet I’d been trying to run off. A white silk scarf covered his collar and tie, leaving me for the moment to wonder whether the collar could possibly be anything but wing. In his left hand — from the third finger of which winked at me a large faceted ruby — he held a pair of black suède gloves.
The face above all this Edwardian elegance did not fail to live up to the goods. Round and somewhat fleshy, it bore a glow of sunlight and good health. A neat, discreet, narrow black goatee set off the dark lips, creased now in a somewhat ironic smile which displayed beautifully white teeth. His deep, black, Italianate eyes, set beneath arched black brows and above an aquiline and extremely aristocratic nose, glinted with an intelligence and a humor that even then I sensed to be diabolic. (At least, I think I remember sensing that, and if I didn’t I should have.)
My visitor said to me, in a rich, controlled, radio announcer’s voice, “Mr. Raxford? Mr. J. Eugene Raxford?”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Ah! You yourself!” Surprise and delight animated his features.
“Me myself,” I said. The mimeograph had made me somewhat surly.
“Allow me,” he said ingratiatingly, not at all put off by my manner, and handed me a small white card. I took it, immediately getting ink all over it. (The damnable machine inked me just fine; it was only paper it refused to touch.)
Well. Back. The card read:
I said, “By appointment of who? Whom.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I showed him the card, which could still be more or less read through the fresh ink. “It says,” I said, “by appointment.” By whose appointment?”
His deep frown was all at once replaced by a deep laugh, full of apparently honest enjoyment. “Oh, I seel You mean, ‘By appointment, purveyors of this and that to His Majesty Thusandso, or Her Serene Highness Hows your uncle.’ But that’s not what that means at all. I’m not a jar of marmalade!”
In a way, that’s exactly what he was, with his velvet collar and pointy shoes and all, but I bit my tongue.
“It means,” Eustaly meantime went on, “quite simply, it means I see my customers by appointment.”
“Oh.” I looked at the card again and said, “But there’s no address or phone number. How do people make appointments?”
“My dear young man,” he said inaccurately, “I really can’t explain in the hall.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, come on in. Excuse the mess.” And I stepped back with an inky flourish and bowed him in.
He gave my living room the glassy smile it deserved, but made no comment. Instead, once I’d closed the door, he returned promptly to the subject. (I wish I could be like that.) “Customers,” he said, “don’t make appointments. The whole thing is—” Then he looked around, as though made wary by a sudden thought, and asked, “Is it safe to talk here?”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“The place isn’t... bugged?”
“Well, we have an exterminator come once a month, but in a neighborhood like this you can’t expect—”
“No no! I mean microphones, listening devices.”
“Oh, those! Oh, sure, we’ve got lots of those. In the light switches, mostly, and here and there. But they don’t work any more.”
“Are you sure? You’ve deactivated every one?”
“Well, most of them, rats ate the wiring. The one in the toilet tank rusted — I think they must have used the wrong kind or something — and I spilled evaporated milk on the one in the refrigerator. Then I used to have two table lamps there, on either side of the couch, and the FBI switched them for two others that looked like them only with microphones inside, and one of the times I was burgled they went, so for about a year and a half now I haven’t been listened to at all. Except on the phone, of course. Why?”
“What I have to say,” he said, “is private, confidential, secret. For your ears only.” He leaned closer to me. “There is no address on that card,” he said, “nor is there a telephone number thereon, because there are no customers. The whole operation is a front, a cover.”
“What whole operation?”
“Those cards.”
“Aaaahhhhhh. A front for what?”
“Mr. Raxford,” he said, “the answer to that is the explanation for my presence here. If you—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I never asked you to sit down. Do sit down, please. No, not on the sofa; it sheds. This chair’s about the best I have. Would you like a can of beer?”
“No. Thank you.” He seemed just slightly irritated at the interruption. “If,” he said, “we could get on...”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I’ll pay attention now.” I pulled an old kitchen chair over and sat facing the cane basket chair in which I’d placed Mr. Eustaly. “Now,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, apparently mollified. Then, in deeper tones, he said, “I am speaking to you now not as J. Eugene Raxford, bachelor, thirty-two years of age, average annual income since you were ejected from City College two thousand three hundred twelve dollars per annum, solitary individual in” — he glanced eloquently around the room — “in somewhat reduced circumstances. No! That J. Eugene Raxford has no importance, is nothing and less than nothing.”