I was starting my second stack of pancakes — which Mrs. Bodkin had insisted I accept — when the back door burst open and five burly men in leather jackets thundered in, puffing and swearing, dropping revolvers and money sacks on the table at which till now I had been eating. The reek of hot blood and foul deeds, it seemed to me, blew into the room with them. One of them was P. J. Mulligan, guiding spirit of the Sons of Erin Expeditionary Force, and his four companions could hardly be anything but an Erinesque quartet.
“How was it, boys?” Mrs. Bodkin asked them, as Ten Eyck came in from the living room. “Any trouble?”
“Had to plug a couple customers,” P. J. Mulligan remarked, stripping off his leather jacket, then pulling a Halloween mask from his pocket — a Neanderthal man, it was — and tossing it on the table beside my plate of pancakes. “Killed ’em, I think.”
“Bad,” said Ten Eyck. “I told you to avoid bloodshed.”
“No choice,” Mulligan told him laconically.
“’S right,” agreed another Son of Erin. “They jumped us. Thought they were heroes.”
“Bloody veterans, I think,” said a third. “Tried judo chops and like that.”
“It was plug them,” Mulligan finished, “or not get away.”
“If you had to,” Ten Eyck said doubtfully.
“We had to.” Mulligan glanced at me. “Raxford, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Good work with the spy,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“One thing,” said another Son to Ten Eyck. “We got the cash.”
“Bring it upstairs,” Ten Eyck told them. “Put it in with the rest. Then take it easy awhile, you’d better not leave here till after nightfall.”
They grabbed up their guns, their masks, their loot, and trooped on out of the kitchen. Ten Eyck watched them go, then sat down across the table from me and said, “Too bad about that.”
“Just one of those things,” I said, trying for the casual touch.
“Right.” Thoughtful, he added, “Have to make it seem like an accident somehow. Plant a little of the money on them. Making their getaway they drove too fast, had a fatal accident. Pity.”
“A shame,” I croaked, with belated understanding.
“It’ll keep the police quiet anyway,” he said.
Mrs. Bodkin said to Ten Eyck, “You want a cup of coffee, Leon?”
“No thank you, Selma.” To me he said, “Still, it lasted long enough. We’ve got plenty of cash now.”
I said, “They’ve been robbing banks to finance the group.”
“Naturally.” He smiled. “One of our specialists.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll have to talk to Zlott about fixing their car,” he said.
I said, “Zlott? The little man who hates Germans? He’s a specialist too?”
“Eli Zlott,” Ten Eyck told me, “is one of the most brilliant manufacturers and inventors of explosive devices the world has ever seen. You tell him when you want the explosion, where you want it, how big you want it, what sort of remote control or time mechanism or whatever sort of trigger you want, you give him the materials, and he does the job. Quickly, imaginatively, and with guaranteed success.” Ten Eyck offered his crooked, glinting smile. “I know nations,” he said, “which would pay Eli Zlott a quarter of a million a year merely to be on call. If he weren’t a madman, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
“The group produced a number of specialists,” he said, with satisfaction. “Take Selma here.” (She beamed with pleasure [she was slicing carrots on the drainboard] at the sound of her name.) “She affords us a headquarters, a respectable cover, a hideout, and some of the finest meals I’ve ever eaten. That’s her specialty.”
Most of this last had been directed more at Mrs. Bodkin than at me, and she practically squirmed with joy at hearing Ten Eyck carry on that way. I hadn’t realized this man, who had always appeared to me to be black undiluted menace, could turn out such easy balderdash, but of course charm had inevitably to be one of the weapons in his arsenal. Blarney charm for someone like Mrs. Bodkin; a more Scotch-and-water charm, I’d imagine, for a younger and more attractive woman.
“What about some of the others?” I said. “What specialty did Mrs. Baba turn out to have, for instance?”
His face closed. “A few of the original members,” he said, speaking more carefully now, “failed to seem to the rest of us useful or productive. Mrs. Baba, for instance.”
I said, “And the Whelps?”
“Yes. And Hyman Meyerberg.”
“Who was he?”
“The Stalinist.”
“Oh, yes, I remember. They’re not with us any more?”
“No.” Then he gestured quickly toward Mrs. Bodkin’s back, and I understood immediately what he was trying to say: I shouldn’t talk any more on this subject, because Hyman Meyerberg and Mrs. Baba and the Whelps were no longer alive, and Mrs. Bodkin didn’t know it. They were no longer alive because on the one hand they were useless and on the other hand they knew too much. And Mrs. Bodkin didn’t know it because sooner or later she too would become useless.
So I changed the subject. “You had work for me, you said.”
“Yes. Mortimer will be — Eustaly, you know. He’ll be coming along a little after dark. You and he and Armstrong will take a little trip up north.”
“We will?”
“We’re buying explosives from some Canadian friends of mine. They’ll get it across the border, but then we have to bring it the rest of the way down.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Actually,” he said, “it doesn’t need more than one man to drive the truck down from the border. We’ll want three of you mostly to keep guard on the money going up. It’s a large amount. A man alone might be hijacked, or might decide to go south instead of north. With two, one might overpower the other. So we need three.”
(Ten Eyck, you understand, judged others by himself. Knowing the baseness of his own motives, he had a deep and abiding suspicion of everyone else. This plan of his and the reasoning behind it were typical of him.)
I said, “Let me get it straight. I’m going with Eustaly and Armstrong, to guard a large shipment of money going to Canada and travel with a large shipment of explosives coming back.”
“Right. Remind me to get you a pistol before you leave.” He got to his feet, saying, “I’d better talk to Zlott now, I don’t know how much time he’ll need on the car.” He tossed a pleasantry at Mrs. Bodkin, who turned all pink, and left.
I sat there, playing the conversation back, listening to it without joy.
“Eat up,” Mrs. Bodkin said to me. “You’re not eating.”
19
So that’s what my specialty was, in Ten Eyck’s eyes; I was a gunman. Maybe the only pacifist gunman in the history of the world.
Eustaly arrived not long after dark; just a few minutes, in fact, after P. J. Mulligan and his merry men drove away toward oblivion. I saw Eli Zlott peeking after them out the living-room window, watching his handiwork go away to happen someplace. I suppose the way he figured it, Celts, Teutons, what’s the difference?
Armstrong was already in the house, and it turned out at least one of his specialties was brawn; when Eustaly drove his two-year-old Mercury around to the back of the house, Armstrong came downstairs lugging two black suitcases neither of which I could do much more than lift and put right back down again. Armstrong stowed the suitcases in the trunk, Eustaly and Ten Eyck had a brief conference in a corner of the living room, Eustaly turned down with thanks Mrs. Bodkin’s offer of mince pie and coffee, and Ten Eyck motioned me to follow him upstairs to the second floor.