Eustaly had paused to give us all a chance to reorganize ourselves, and now he said, “Next on my list I have Mr. P. J. Mulligan of the Sons of Erin Expeditionary Force, SOEEF. Mr. Mulligan.”
Mr. Mulligan popped up like a jack-in-the-box, a scrawny, scrappy, sprightly fifty-year-old with graying hair, flashing blue eyes, and a bulbous red nose. He also had the most incredible set of gleaming white false teeth, several sizes too big for him, that made him look like the front of an automobile when he talked. (This, of course, was the by-stander who would immediately get into the brawl after a minor street-corner collision between the cabs driven by Hyman Meyerberg and Louis Labotski.)
“The one thing I’d like to say,” Mr. Mulligan began in a piping voice, flashing his teeth, employing the worst brogue ever heard off a stage, “is I’m impressed by the way you handled that Englishman, Stonewright. To tell ye the truth, I’d begun to think this was a namby-pamby organization, full of school-boys and milkmaids. If ye’ll all help us give the bloody English what they deserve, the Sons of Erin’ll guarantee to stand by your side through thick and thin. Now, the English—”
But there I lost track, as an inner volcano suddenly erupted within my head.
Really violent occurrences don’t affect us immediately, you know. They need time to sink in, to be understood and fully comprehended, time for a reaction to develop. My reaction to the dispatching of Lionel R. Stonewright was only just hitting me now.
There but for the grace of God thokked I. How close I’d come to telling these people off, exposing myself as a spy in their midst, and defying Eustaly and Lobo exactly as the former Mr. Stonewright had done!
Not that I’d changed my opinion of the League for New Beginnings. I was still unprepared to believe that the League itself, with such members as Mrs. Selma Bodkin, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Whelp, Mr. Hyman Meyerberg, and the currently-spouting Mr. P. J. Mulligan, would ever be a danger to me or anybody else. Could Mrs. Elly Baba strike terror in the heart of anyone over the age of six? Could any organization — the League for New Beginnings or anybody else — send Mr. Eli Zlott out into the world on a terroristic mission in the expectation that he would actually do it and get it done right? Nonsense. They were a bunch of reject villains from Dick Tracy.
Ah, but Eustaly was something else again. He too was probably a nut — as indicated by his associating with these other nuts by his own choice — but he was hardly harmless. Murray had been very nearly right after all; the League for New Beginnings would be unlikely to have come hunting me down had I neglected to appear here tonight, but Eustaly (or, more likely, Lobo) would definitely have done so, at once, to shut me up just as he’d shut Stonewright.
And would he have succeeded, guarded as I would have been by Murray Kesselberg and Angela Ten Eyck and a dozen non-dues-paying pacifists?
I shudder to think.
I also shuddered when Lobo thudded by me, pounding phlegmatically back from the cloakroom, returning to his place on the platform. He gave one heavy side-glance to Mulligan, still yapping away about the English, who abruptly shut his mouth and popped down out of sight, as though attached to his chair by a spring.
“Thank you, Mr. Mulligan,” Eustaly purred, “for both your brevity and your vote of confidence. And now, last but surely not least, we have Mr. Jack Armstrong of the National Fascist Reclamation Commission, NFRC. Mr. Armstrong.”
Jack Armstrong was, at the most, twenty-three years of age. He was about six foot four, built like a champion swimmer or a running halfback, with the close-cropped blond hair, bull neck and retarded child’s face of the recruits in Marine Corps posters. “We,” he began, in a piping, effeminate, ridiculous voice, “who believe that history will show just how important a contribution to civilization was made by the late great Adolf Hitler, we who believe that the truth of this great man’s crusade has been distorted and maligned by the hired mercenaries of International Jewry, we who believe—”
“Now really! Enough is enough!” shouted a voice, and I saw bobbing up front again the well-known head of hair that was all I’d ever seen of Eli Zlott. “After all the indignity,” he shouted, “all the atrocities we’ve suffered at the hands of—”
“Lobo,” said Eustaly quietly.
It was enough. The voice of Eli Zlott switched immediately off, and the mass of hair submerged.
Eustaly smiled upon Jack Armstrong, who was standing there with his feet spread and his hands on his hips, ready to burst into the Horst Wessel Song as soon as his comrades came back from skiing, and Eustaly said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Armstrong. I believe we all have an adequate picture of your organization now.”
“Heil!” shouted Armstrong, snapped out a Nazi salute that bounced off the walls, and sat down as though he’d been shot.
Even Eustaly seemed a bit taken aback, but he recovered almost immediately, and said, “Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for having chosen to join us this evening. I think you can see that you all do have much in common, and that you will be able most productively to work together for the better efficiency of all.” He smiled upon us like a proud father, and went on, “And now I would like to present to you a friend of mine, a brilliant tactician, one of the most versatile and knowledgeable experts in the area of civil disturbance the world has ever known, a man who will explain to you just what we hope to accomplish as a group, and how we intend to make this hope a reality. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Leon Eyck.” And he gestured dramatically toward a door off to the right of the platform.
There was a second of expectancy, and then that door opened and Mr. Leon Eyck stepped out.
All at once, Eustaly himself seemed small and insignificant, and all the rest of us were so many children. Leon Eyck — what an unlikely name for him, and not, of course, his name at all — was tall as an eagle is tall, lean as a wolf is lean, quick as a cheetah is quick. Lupine, saturnine, sure of himself and contemptuous of everything around him, he was dressed, inevitably, in flowing black, as black as his hair, as black as his eyes. His face, sallow and cruel and sardonically handsome, glinted like an evil thought. He strode with the grace of a dancer and the silence of an assassin, and when he stood on the platform and surveyed us, his eyes glittered with knowledge, black humor, and contempt.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, in a voice like torn silk. “Good evening.”
Suddenly Angela was clutching my arm. I turned and frowned at her and saw her, wide-eyed and ashen-faced, cowering low in the seat. I leaned close to her, and when I asked her what was wrong, she whispered, shrill with terror, “It’s Tyrone! It’s my brother, it’s him, it’s Tyrone!”
8
Tyrone ten eyck! Angela’s black-sheep brother, the one who had disappeared behind the Bamboo Curtain into Communist China over a decade ago, who had been given up for dead or worse, whom no one had ever expected to see again anywhere in the Western world. And yet here he was, standing tall in a long low room at Broadway and 88th Street, New York City, United States of America, while his sister cowered in the audience in front of him, hidden behind an unreconstructed Stalinist named Hyman Meyerberg.
I picked Angela’s rigid fingers off my arm one by one, leaned next to her ear, and whispered, “He can’t see you, he won’t notice you, relax. Put your coat on, put your hood up. And take down what he says. Whatever you do, take down what he says.”
“Oh, Gene,” she whispered back, while up front her brother was thanking us for having attended tonight’s meeting, “you don’t know him, you just don’t know! He used to stick pins in me, and set fire to cats, and try to knock the servants downstairs.”